"Shadowy Objects in Test Tubes": The Ethics of Grievance in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me GoSchwetman, John David
2017 Interdisciplinary Literary Studies
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<p>abstract:</p><p>Every community demands sacrifices from individuals within it, and sometimes such sacrifices can be extreme. To experience harm related to this sort of sacrifice is to be in a state of grievance. Kazuo Ishiguro's <i>2005</i> novel <i>Never Let Me Go</i> offers readers a compelling fictional account of severe grievance experienced by its narrator-protagonist and other clones destined to die young when donating their organs to non-clone, or "normal," members of their community. By presenting radically aggrieved clones as visibly indistinguishable from the "normals," Ishiguro dramatically challenges traditional understandings of the state of grievance and compels readers to re-examine their own reactions when confronting the spectacle of grievance.</p>
Hunting the Stag in Harry Potter's GamesSeymour, Jessica
2017 Interdisciplinary Literary Studies
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<p>abstract:</p><p>This paper uses Game Theory as a theoretical framework to analyse the war strategies of Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter during the <i>Harry Potter</i> series (Rowling 1997â2007). Over the course of the series, Dumbledore's Prisoner's Dilemma creates a zero-sum Game that relies on the ignorance of the people his Game is built around; namely, Harry Potter. Harry's knowledge of himself is deliberately limited by Dumbledore, which establishes Harry as the embodiment of Dumbledore's equilibria rather than as an active player with agency. Harry Potter reclaims his agency and personhood after his death and subsequent return to life, and he does this by adopting a Stag Hunt Game strategy, which empowers both himself and his opponent, Lord Voldemort. This paper argues that the <i>Harry Potter</i> series constructs the limitation of agency and the ignorance of young characters negatively, regardless of the potential good it could serve society. By contrast, Harry Potter's cooperative Game strategy is empowering both to society and to other people because it provides them with the means to make informed decisions and exercise productive agency.</p>
Love Earthbound and Love Evanescent: An Analysis of Love in Ovid's Characterizations of Alcyone, Orpheus, and the Songs of OrpheusLendvay, Gregory Charles
2017 Interdisciplinary Literary Studies
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<p>abstract:</p><p>This article illustrates processes of sympathetic understanding through contrasting the myths of Alcyone and Orpheus that are told in the <i>Metamorphoses</i>. Ovid's narrative technique, his particular manner of using poetic images to evoke sympathetic responses that are concurrent inner recognitions, offers a valuable and enduring contribution to a psychology of myth. Ovid's story of Alcyone creates a climate within which the mingling of physical sensual details and imaginal perceptions becomes a poetry of events at hand, where nature and the human being interpenetrate. Orpheus's love, on the other hand, illustrates the power to captivate the psyche in a spiritual longing for another world and union that is found only in the underworld. Unlike Orpheus's love, that celebrates love's evanescence, Alcyone's love defies that kind of Orphic spiritualizing and removal from the world.</p>
The Work of the Literary Critic in the Age of Big DataAquilina, Mario
2017 Interdisciplinary Literary Studies
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<p>abstract:</p><p>I argue that seven major claims arise from a consideration of the emergence of "the age of big data [that] is coming of age" in literary studies and that is "making it suddenly possible to see more and learn faster" (Lohr 2013:3). These claims are presented, often provocatively, under the following headings: (1) Big and distant are better than small and close; (2) Burn the canon; (3) The future of literary studies is information not evaluation; (4) Machine reading extends human reading; (5) Let's be scientific, above all else; (6) What matters is form; (7) The beauty is in the analysis. Each of these seven claims is critically assessed, with the work of Franco Moretti and Matthew L. Jockers providing the key points of focus in a discussion that seeks to engage with the foundational theoretical assumptions underpinning such approaches. Big data literary studies do not simply promise to do better than what was done before by literary criticism but to radically challenge its key assumptions and objectives, especially in terms of the relation between the literary scholar and his object of study, literature. The implications of this shift for our study of literature are discussed in detail.</p>
The Travesty of Egoism: Same-Gender Passion and Homosocial Desire in a Dutch Seventeenth-Century Morality PlayVergeer, Tim; Haven, Cornelis Van Der
2017 Interdisciplinary Literary Studies
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<p>abstract:</p><p>In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, drama and politics were interwoven with one another. This was also the case with the controversial morality play <i>Tieranny van Eigenbaat</i> (Tyranny of Egoism, 1679), which opposed the House of Orange, and especially William III, Stadtholder of the Netherlands and King of England (who was, according to the writers of the play, a true example of uncontrolled egoism). Although the main character Eigenbaat (Egoism) disguises himself as a warrior woman (an Amazon) to seize power, his cross-dressing has not been discussed in relation to rumors surrounding William's alleged sexual preferences. By "reading against the grain," this article discusses the so-called faultlines, where the characters display same-gender passions for each other. The article focusses on two examples of such relationships: Egoism, who seduces Lady Will, while in female disguise, and the intimate nature of Egoism's relationship with his male servant and slave, Vice. As such, the article offers an elaboration on the thesis that <i>Tieranny van Eigenbaat</i> was used by the republican authorities of Amsterdam as a propaganda play to discredit William III for rule, as well as his offspring.</p>