Gary Snyder has described his book-length poem Mountains and Rivers without End (1996) as a “mythic narrative of the female Buddha Tārā.” Snyder’s poem “An Offering for Tārā,” like several other poems in his corpus, describes a sensual, forgiving feminine divinity of the sort that many literary scholars now find problematic. By considering two poems from the Sixties alongside one from the mid-Nineties, we can see the developments within Snyder’s own myths and texts, but we also see how the images and ideas woven into discourses such as “Orientalism” or “the divine feminine” can undergo dramatic changes within the career of a single writer. Examining Snyder’s early poems “For a Far-out Friend,” and “Hymn to the Goddess San Francisco in Paradise” alongside Joanne Kyger’s “Tapestry,” the essay closely examines instances of divine femininity in Beat writing before returning to Snyder’s mature work, “An Offering for Tārā,” to show how Snyder fashions a postmodern American mode of tantric poetics that is politically progressive. His poetic approach has not been to repress the afflictive desires identified by feminist and anti-Orientalist critics but rather, in the manner of tantric Buddhist practice, to mindfully embrace and re-organize them.

An obituary for Gershon Shaked (1929—2006), a major authority in Israeli Literary studies and the author of the master-narrative of secular Hebrew literature. The article points to a disparity between Shaked’s recognized status in the country and his view of himself as a subversive, balloon-puncturing eiron, critical of the exalted Apollonian stance in literature as well as in criticism.

The paper considers Heart of Darkness as an example of rhetorical counter-terrorism. Conrad’s language partly relies of that of the Gothic discourse of horror, especially when horror manifests itself as an entity with teeth -- a zone of contact between the individual and the horror which can consume, absorb the individual. In Gothic horror fiction the sites where “terror” and “horror” reached their climax were frequently related to the practice of cannibalism. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s Marlow points out that the so-called cannibals, identified as such by their fanged teeth, are neither terrifying nor horrifying. The real cannibal, in the figurative sense, is Kurtz, perpetrator and victim of the Belgian colonial terror, whose image, complete with a toothless but voracious mouth, is associated with human heads on posts surrounding his bungalow – a psychological substitute for the severed hands collected by the basketful by Belgian agents.  By translating “hands” into “heads,” by using the motifs from the well-known discourse of cannibalism to represent the Belgian terror tactic, Conrad provided his readers with an already valorized  language, a semiotics for comprehending this particular horror, and a stimulus for a response to it.

Reading some well-known childhood poems by Blake and Wordsworth, the article challenges the accepted opinion that the Puritan and Romantic concepts of the child at the turn of the nineteenth century functioned as opposites. Instead, the article offers a reading that unravels the residues of Puritan and catechetical thinking in texts by two of the earliest advocates of the child’s perspective as a valuable human and poetic quality. Though denouncing authoritarian and catechetical modes of interaction in which the child’s speech is silenced, Blake and Wordsworth, writing at a moment of cultural transition, construct the child in a way that indicates a failure of their own declared purpose of redeeming the child’s perspective and voice as valuably distinct from those of the adult. Although formally and grammatically the voice of Blake’s poetic child is sometimes restored to him, the child is made a spokesman of a sophisticated and emphatically adult discourse of political radicalism. Similarly in Wordsworth, the construction of the child as a necessary layer in the uncovering of the poetic and autobiographical Self denies the child its valuable difference through an adult voice’s ongoing narcissistic ventriloquism. The adult speaker’s idealization of the child’s freedom is ambiguated by the implicit association of freedom with parental neglect, which involves a disregard of the child’s perspective. Thus, in contrast to the declared agenda of the poems, they also imply a desire that the child be less liberated and more regulated by the adult world.

Galia Benziman is Associate Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and specializes in British literature of the long nineteenth century. Her research focuses on the work of Victorian authors, especially Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, on the history of childhood, and on the English elegy. Her first book, Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture, was published in 2012 (Palgrave Macmillan). Her second book, Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Poetry and Prose: Codes of Bereavement, came out in 2018 (Palgrave Macmillan). Her essays appeared in Partial Answers, Dickens Quarterly, Dickens Studies Annual, Studies in the Novel, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and other journals.    

Updated in March 2019

This paper sets out to analyse the concept of what I shall term an “insider Whiteness,” at once African and inevitably always already out of Africa. Specifically I explore life writing narratives by White Africans as a rich setting for an analysis of how White people both relate to the continent as a physical and imaginary space and negotiate their ability to call Africa “home.” Through detailed textual analysis of Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart (1990) and reference to a number of works by J. M. Coetzee, Gillian Slovo, Breyten Breytenbach and Doris Lessing, the paper proposes that the continuing debates about identity and race in post-Apartheid South Africa show that it takes a great deal of work for the White person truly to belong in Africa.

The paper starts from Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the phrase “reason of state” that Paul Valéry applies to Charles Baudelaire’s poetry.  After exploring how this phrase points to the interconnections between poetry and politics in Benjamin's writings on lyric, from the early essay on Hölderlin to the later commentaries on Baudelaire, it goes on to explicate Baudelaire’s reading of a book on the concept of reason of state by the Italian philosopher and historian Giuseppe Ferrari.  The connections between Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory of la modernité and Ferrari’s politico-historical theory of reason of state are analyzed as a basis for reading a set of prose poems composed by Baudelaire during the period when he read Ferrari.  Special attention is given to the poem from the Petits poëmes en prose entitled “Les Veuves” (“The Widows”).

In W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants the oblique relationship between narrative and image --  despite their interplay they are not synthesized – is associated with the workings of postmemory.  In the fourth section of the novel the pictures of a German Jewish family that has emigrated to England and whose experience of the holocaust the narrator seeks to reconstruct are juxtaposed to the landscape which represses that history, generating a reiteration of that repression. The haunting presence of the images is paralleled by the paintings of a descendant of this family. The painter intentionally creates pentimento effects in his work: layers of paint hide and reveal the layers below. The methods of both painter and narrator involve a demonstration of the continued presence of loss.  And when the narrator finally reaches the Lanzburg family gravesite he finds three empty gravestones and the only occupied grave, that of the painter’s mother who committed suicide. This becomes the thematic center of the novel whose narrator is left “no knowing what he should think.” His inability to turn self-reflection into resolution is contrasted with a Turkish woman’s observation of Germany that the country is characterized by a refusal to reflect. The experience of disturbed self-reflection extends to the reader who must not only bear witness to the inconclusiveness of the narrator’s discourse but take part in it, thus revealing the traces of the destruction and murder that the landscape through which he is traveling has tried to erase.

With the “cultural turn” English philology has changed in many places into a kind of super-discipline by taking over, at least in part, the work of sociology, history, psychology, and philosophy. The article argues that in order to avoid dilettantism, the excellent qualification for a semiotic or signifying approach to all aspects of culture should be made use of, especially since this approach goes well together with the more recent view of culture as an immaterial construct in terms of an ensemble, or rather a specific hierarchy, of values. In order to discuss the role of literature in and for the wider domain of culture it seems necessary to first delimit this textual corpus, and for that reason a number of recent attempts to define “literature” or “the literary” are considered -- including one of my own that sees its specificity in a validational modesty resulting from a focusing on the particular and the suspension of reference. Due to this modest confinement to the presentation of merely possible worlds, literature is granted a “free space” in culture where it can even intimate the limits of the culture of its origin. For this reason it deserves special attention even at a time when the study of culture and media studies are in vogue.