Shirley Jackson writes, and consistently invites people to read, with bifurcated vision, or with an attention divided between the amusing details of what children do or say and the looming ...possibility that the "savage" and the "demonic" are something other than clever metaphors. Jackson's domestic writing, then, is more than obliquely continuous with her early fictional exploration of multiple personality disorder or her final Gothic masterpieces that delineate the toxicity of family life. In Lacanian terms, all of her work, including the family sketches, seeks to demonstrate that the traumatic Real -- that place where the subject collapses into non-meaning, or is transformed into the abject -- is not a distant something that is "out there," but rather is proximate and inside the workings of the normative Symbolic Order.
In America as in Britain, the rise of the Gothic represented the other-the fearful shadows cast upon Enlightenment philosophies of common sense, democratic positivism, and optimistic futurity. Many ...critics have recognized the centrality of these shadows to American culture and self-identification.American Gothic,however, remaps the field by offering a series of revisionist essays associated with a common theme: the range and variety of Gothic manifestations in high and popular art from the roots of American culture to the present.
The thirteen essayists approach the persistence of the Gothic in American culture by providing a composite of interventions that focus on specific issues-the histories of gender and race, the cultures of cities and scandals and sensations-in order to advance distinct theoretical paradigms. Each essay sustains a connection between a particular theoretical field and a central problem in the Gothic tradition.
Drawing widely on contemporary theory-particularly revisionist views of Freud such as those offered by Lacan and Kristeva-this volume ranges from the well-known Gothic horrors of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to the popular fantasies of Stephen King and the postmodern visions of Kathy Acker. Special attention is paid to the issues of slavery and race in both black and white texts, including those by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner. In the view of the editors and contributors, the Gothic is not so much a historical category as a mode of thought haunted by history, a part of suburban life and the lifeblood of films such asThe ExorcistandFatal Attraction.
Twenty-five years ago, Robert K. Martin published an important essay that explored the gendered anxiety of authorship that left its traces throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne’s career. Given that ...novel-writing was understood in mid-nineteenth-century America as an essentially feminine occupation, did Hawthorne perceive himself as emasculated? Savoy supplements Martin’s argument by taking up the “fiction” of authorship, specifically the personage of “Nathaniel Hawthorne” that is constructed in “The Custom-House.” Previously, Savoy focused on Hawthorne’s gothic poetics as the figurative matrix within which the “author” accepts the exhortation of Surveyor Pue to fulfill his “filial duty” by delivering to the public the historical romance of Hester Prynne. This new article explores the “psychic economy” of what Jacques Derrida conceptualizes as the event of the archive—that is, the performative ways in which subjects are constituted precisely as subjects, in conformity with the regulatory ideals of nation, religious tradition, and gender. If there is no subject without a subtending and largely mythical archive of cultural practice, then “The Custom-House” is a spectacular mise-en-scène—rhetorically rich and charged with affect—of the ritualistic protocols of assujettissement.
As part of our goal in "rethinking" what Shirley Jackson scholarship looks like, Robert Lloyd, Joan Passy, and Eric Savoy each re-read Hattenhauer and wrote a new review of the work, looking at it ...from this moment of Jackson Revival. What is it that this work offers us? What is worth keeping? What needs rethinking? These reviews were then exchanged, and each person responded the other two, teasing out potential avenues of further inquiry, thinking, or research. Where do we go from here? What might rethinking get us?
Schooled Savoy, Eric
English studies in Canada,
09/2011, Letnik:
37, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Savoy shares his regret of not studying languages more seriously when he was younger. When he began teaching in the Department of Comparative Literature, his French was inadequate, and he began to ...work closely with a monitrice who began their sessions by informing him that literature professors are the worst language learners because they cannot loosen the grip of perfectionism. He argues that the rite of passage toward otherness ought to begin very early in a literary education with real second (and third) language requirements. Such an initiative would, quite literally, embody difference and render it less conceptual, and it would obviate a certain ground of regret that many academics feel when looking back on their formative years. It would make their students' grasp of literary language, of poetics, far more adept. And in Canada, it would respond to the responsibilities of citizenship.
Given Robert's great love of Montréal-he was fond of pointing out that this bilingual, culturally rich and diverse, old and new, entirely liberal city is the only place in Canada where Canada really ...exists-it was perhaps inevitable that he would take up in 1990 the direction of the Département d'études anglaises at l'Université de Montréal, where he developed an impressive graduate program almost from scratch, fostered the department's research profile, and cultivated its implication in a French institution. First with The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979) and then with Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (1986), and in about sixty essays that ranged from Hawthorne to Forster, Robert started something. First of all, Robert could never quite decide whether it was outrageous or hilarious that generations of scholars were able to sustain such wilful blindness, such active inattention, to a pervasive literary homoerotics that was there for everybody to see.
