Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Dead Men, Walking: Actors, Networks, And Actualized Metaphors In Mrs. Dalloway And Raymond, Elizabeth Outka
Dead Men, Walking: Actors, Networks, And Actualized Metaphors In Mrs. Dalloway And Raymond, Elizabeth Outka
English Faculty Publications
This article takes up Rita Felski’s recent call to modernists to explore how Bruno Latour’s latest work on actor-network theory might be adapted for literary studies. It examines two accounts of World War I soldiers who (allegedly) return from the dead in material form: Virginia Woolf’s fictional account of Septimus Smith, who is convinced his friend Evans has come back from the dead, and Oliver Lodge’s best-selling memoir, Raymond, or Life and Death, which recounts in detail how Lodge believed his dead son sent messages to the family to assure them of his continued material existence. That these moments …
Trauma And Temporal Hybridity In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things, Elizabeth Outka
Trauma And Temporal Hybridity In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things, Elizabeth Outka
English Faculty Publications
Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, presents an often bewildering mix of different times: images, stories, and sensations from the past blend together with present moments and even future experiences. Critics have noted this temporal blending and have cited this feature as reflecting the novel’s magical realism, or postcolonialism, or postmodernism, which are all associated with various forms of time play.1 Indeed, as writers from Joyce to Woolf to Rushdie remind us, time is always to some extent a mixture, as the present must be understood as a complex amalgamation and negotiation of past moments. Roy’s …
Buying Time: Howards End And Commodified Nostalgia, Elizabeth Outka
Buying Time: Howards End And Commodified Nostalgia, Elizabeth Outka
English Faculty Publications
Midway through E. M. Forster’s Howards End, the newly married Margaret Schlegel Wilcox returns to the titular country house to find it the recipient of an unexpected makeover. Closed since the death of the first Mrs. Wilcox and for months used as a warehouse for the Schlegels’ possessions, the house has been unpacked and reconstituted by the housekeeper, Miss Avery, who creates a new interior built from moments of Margaret’s own history. As Margaret moves through the house in surprise, she takes a virtual tour of her past: her umbrella-stand greets her in the entrance way, the infamous sword …
Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner
Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner
English Faculty Publications
The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses. When Fanny protests, “Indeed, I cannot act,” we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous. Gwendolen Harleth’s aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from the Princess Halm-Eberstein, the mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an …