Units - Humanities and Letters

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Open Access
Adam Smith's problems: sympathy in the national tale
(University of St. Thomas Center for Irish Studies, 2013) Bartoszynska, K.
It is a critical commonplace to read Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809) as national tales that use allegories of marriage to model a successful reconciliation between England and Ireland in the aftermath of the Act of Union. The national tale was a clearly political mode, one with the primary goal of representing Ireland anew to a class of English readers who saw the Irish as hopelessly backward and savage, and thereby articulating a model for the Union on the level of sentiment. This aim was hardly covert: it is openly declared, for example, on the title page of The Wild Irish Girl, which quotes Fazio Delli Uberti’s Travels Though Ireland in the 14th Century: “This race of men, tho’ savage they may seem / The country, too, with many a mountain rough, / Yet are they sweet to him who tries and tastes them. Copyright © 2008 The University of St. Thomas.
Open Access
Anthony trollope on akrasia, self-deception, and ethical confusion
(Indiana University, 2014) Fessenbecker, P.
This essay takes as its point of departure Anthony Trollope’s tendency to reuse a version of the romantic triangle, one where a protagonist is committed to one character, becomes attracted to another, and hence delays fulfillment of the first relationship. This formal feature makes the philosophical problem of akrasia central, as the novels return repeatedly to agents who act against their own best judgment. Trollope’s novels reveal a complex array of irrationality, considering how our desires can lead to self-deception and how even judgment unbiased by desire may fail to move an agent. Perhaps most interestingly, Trollope challenges standard assumptions about rational behavior in depicting states of “ethical confusion,” where characters act irrationally precisely by acting on their best judgment. © 2014, Indiana University Press. All rights reserved.
Open Access
Antigone in (post-modern) Palestine
(Hecate Press, 2003) Festic, F.
Embargo
Antonio’s sad flesh
(British Shakespeare Association, 2022-08-18) Lenthe, Victor
This article examines different meanings attached to the adjective ‘sad’ in the 1590s in order to reinterpret the sexual politics of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The play’s title character Antonio famously proclaims that he performs ‘a sad [part]’ on the world’s ‘stage’. Critics have related this apparent declaration of melancholy to Antonio’s love for Bassanio and the heartbreak he may experience when the latter marries Portia. However, by examining the word's largely forgotten physiological meanings, I show that ‘sad’ was also a non-judgmental term for a man who lacks interest in procreation. Antonio’s embrace of this label has implications both for the play’s sexual politics and for its representation of putatively non-generative market economics.
Open Access
The Arab conquestin Byzantine historical memory: The long view
(Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2022-04-12) Kennedy, Scott
In recent decades, historians of the Arab conquest have increasingly turned away from positivist reconstructions of the events of the Arab conquest. Through thematic analysis of conquest narratives, scholars have illustrated how the early Islamic community articulated its identity. Byzantine narratives of the Arab conquest have generally not been considered from this perspective. This paper takes the long view of the Arab conquest illustrating how centuries of Byzantine writers and chroniclers articulated and rearticulated this memory, as their identity shifted along with their political and diplomatic relationships.
Open Access
Aristocracy and modernism: signs of aristocracy in Marcel Proust's-À la Recherche du temps perdu
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) Chesney, D. M.
Open Access
Art entices us upon unknown and deadly paths: an interview with bulgarian writer Kalin Terziyski
(Susquehanna University, 2015) Harper, M.
"Bulgarian literature is exotic, crafted in an exotic language, and in this sense it is somewhat inaccessible to global communities, unified by world languages such as English, French, German, Russian," writes Antoaneta Alpieva in her overview of ways in which critics survey contemporary Bulgarian literature.1 "This kind of trait [i.e., inaccessibility]," she continues, "is compounded by not entirely caring institutions that, undermined by domestic squabbles, do not secure an equivalent export for current production, do not have a long-term vision for a storefront' of our literary contemporaneity, do not seriously prepare external translators who are motivated to care for, that is, to earn their sustenance from contemporary Bulgarian authors."2 Alpievas assessment is substantiated by the much greater familiarity of international audiences with Bulgarians writing in foreign languages outside of Bulgaria, the most prominent of them being Julia Kristeva and Tsvetan Todorov, though this is also true for a younger generation of writers, including Iliya Troyanov (in German), Rouja Lazarova (in French), and Miroslav Penkov (in English). The position that Alpieva presents is also corroborated by a sentiment with a nostalgic underpinning, expressed by older generations of readers in Bulgaria, for the "great" or classical Bulgarian literature associated with the names of Elin Pelin, Yordan Yovkov, and Blaga Dimitrova, as well as Nobel Prize.
Open Access
Artaxerxes in Constantinople: Basil I’s genealogy and Byzantine historical memory of the Achaemenid Persians
(Duke University Libraries, 2020) Leidholm, Nathan
Open Access
Autonomy, divinity, and the common good: Selflessness as a source of freedom in thomas hill green and mary augusta ward
(Routledge, 2018) Fessenbecker, Patrick; Berges, Sandrine; Siani, A. L.
An often-mentioned marker of the influence of British Idealism at the end of the 19th century is the best-selling novel of 1888, Mrs Humphry (Mary Augusta) Ward’s Robert Elsmere, which draws heavily on Idealist themes and is usually understood as a popularization of T. H. Green’s view. Yet Ward deserves credit as a thinker in her own right, particularly for her creativity in explicating one of the most difficult components of Green’s view: the idea that we can only realize ourselves through certain kinds of relationships with each other. In Robert Elsmere, Ward tells the story of a disaffected clergyman who finds a new outlet for his religious energy in the thought of “Mr. Grey,” a philosopher who helps Robert to see each individual religion as a step in the progression in the realization of the Divine Spirit. But the novel pairs this trajectory with the story of two women: Robert’s wife Catherine and Catherine’s sister Rose, both of whom struggle with the role of religion in their lives and with Robert’s newfound mission. Through her portrayal of their psychological struggles, Ward questions whether the consensus about the good Green’s theory requires for autonomy is in fact actually attainable.
Open Access
Bessarion's date of birth: A new assessment of the evidence
(De Gruyter, 2018) Kennedy, Scott
The cardinal Bessarion was a foremost figure of the Italian Renaissance and late Byzantium. However, some of the details of his life are not yet securely established, especially his date of birth. Over the last century, scholars have proposed dates ranging from 1400 to 1408. In this study, I critically interrogate the two most commonly accepted dates (1400 and 1408). In the past, scholars have relied on the age requirements of canon law or the testimony of Italian observers to determine Bessarion's age. By critically examining the validity of these two assumptions, I reprioritize the evidence, approximating the cardinal's year of birth as 1403.
Open Access
Book review: unite proletarian brothers! radicalism and revolution in the Spanish Second Republic by Matthew Kerry
(SAGE Publications, 2023-01) Chamberlin, Foster
Open Access
Breaking up, down and out: Anomie in Georgi Gospodinov's Natural Novel
(Modern Humanities Research Association, 2015) Harper, M. P.
This article argues that Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov's Estestven Roman (Natural Novel, 1999) exposes the simultaneous precariousness of anomie, a condition associated with post-Communism, and the vital significance of its productive activity. Fluid memory fragments augment the interpenetrating hi/stories of narrators, both conflate chronological sequentiality enabling the text to resist and subvert orthodox classifications, be they dialectical, moral, deductive or causal. Through its deployment of dispullulations — multiplicitous, paradoxical complexities of peculiar (inter- and intra-) textual events — Natural Novel, I propose, forges a critical ontology with implications for the individual, Bulgarian culture, and even the contemporary moment globally.
Open Access
Cameades
(Ashgate Publishing, 2005) Bowe, Geoff S.; O'Grady, P. F.
Open Access
Changing French orientalism: Tarare (1790) and the question of slavery
(University of Nebraska Press, 2011) Hodson, D.
Open Access
Chaos as a mode of living in Samuel Beckett's the unnamable
(Indiana University Press, 2012) Harper, M. P.
In this article, I examine the deployment of chaos as a textual practice in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. My contention is that, in its endeavor to wrest chaos from the appropriative gestures of order and make room for newness, the text breaks with grammatical frames and conceptual systems that organize subjectivity. The Unnamable “squirms” involuntarily and willfully at the same time, in-between paradoxical turns, multiplying “I”-s, and stream-of-consciousness eruptions. Its squirming undermines stability, identity, and order, inviting into them the unborn, the unthought, chaos. Every proposition that the speaking voice utters subverts the premises upon which subjectivity is constructed and, thus, endeavors to turn the self into a site of chaos. Through its syntactic and semantic movements, The Unnamable inhabits the impossibility of “pure silence” as pure chaos and locates in it an impetus for self-transformation.
Open Access
Claroscuros: el Mestizaje Cromático, Telúrico, y Racial en " Chambacú: Corral de Negros "
(Vanderbilt University, 2001) Porto, L. E.
Open Access
A classic dethroned: the decline and fall of thucydides in middle byzantium
(Duke University, 2018) Kennedy, Scott
During the eighth to thirteenth centuries Thucydides lost his prominence in literary culture, as rhetorical schools and historiography rendered him rhetorically, politically, and culturally problematic.
Open Access
Comparative spaces and seeing seduction and horror in bataille
(Purdue University Press, 2000) Komins, B. J.
In his article, "Comparative Spaces and Seeing Seduction and Horror in Bataille," Benton Jay Komins explores Bataille's preoccupation with "seeing": The eye holds a preeminently ambiguous position in Georges Bataille's universe of enucleated priests and scatological window scenes. Komins' comparative examination presents several aspects of Bataille's eyes: Existing between fascination and revulsion, this most Bataillean organ moves between subjective vision and objective blindness. The eye both captures and is captured in episodes of seductive horror. Through the denigration of vision, Bataille's dethroned eye exceeds the confines of visuality. Bataille develops an extraordinary notion of ocularity -- as a metaphor, action, and traumatic fixation - in his novels, autobiographical notes, and critical writing. His compelling eyes surface between written genres and lived experience, that is to say, in the comparative space between the phantasmatic and the social, inviting psychological and historical analysis.
Open Access
Conscience after Darwin
(Cambridge University Press, 2022-12-01) Fessenbecker, Patrick; Nottelmann, N.; Griffiths, D.; Kreisel, D.
Open Access
The convoluted logic of creolization the New Orleans way
(University of North Carolina Press, 2000) Komins, B. J.
1. In an earlier essay ("Succulent Tomatoes"), I discuss the derisive cultural, racial, and historical definitions of New Orleans' "original" settlers, from the political contests of the late nineteenth century to the parodic sensibilities of today. Like other phenomena on this "inland island," the meanings of Creole have developed in ways that respond to conflict and isolation. 2. I would like to thank Professor Michael Picone of the University of Alabama for his valuable comments and suggestions, particularly concerning New Orleans' meandering classifications and labels. 3. Professor Roach's book elegantly describes the various products and consequences of Creole "reciprocal acculturation" from the city's burial code through the political events and fanfare of carnival. Through both conversations and his text, Roach's provocative New Orleans work informs many of my ideas in this essay. 4. "Arrival at New Orleans. Forest of ships. Mississippi three-hundred feet deep. External appearance of the city. Beautiful houses. Huts. Muddy streets without pavements. Spanish architecture: flat roofs; English: bricks, small doors; French: massive portes cocheres. Population also mixed. Faces with every nuance of color. Language French, English, Spanish, Creole. General French look, however posters and commercial announcements mostly in English" (Translation mine). 5. "The evening at the theater . . . Strange sight presented in the auditorium: first loge, white; second, gray. Women of color, very pretty . . . Third loge black" (Translation mine). 6. For examples of these "ethnic works," see Vujnovich, Shofner and Ellsworth, and Reinecke. 7. I received Mrs. Stern's unpublished account of the German experience in New Orleans from Professor Richard Beavers of the University of New Orleans. 8. 8 This report is cited in John Duffy's Sword of Pestilence: The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853. 9. Alan Lomax's Mister Jelly Roll consists of oral history, interviews, and second-hand reporting; the comments that I cite come from Jelly Roll's initial interview with Lomax at the Library of Congress. 10. There are several recorded versions of "Hyena Stomp" now available on compact disk, from early jazz anthologies to Jelly Roll Morton collections. My comments follow the 1992 redigitized recording referenced in the Works Cited.