PERKIN, J. RUSSELL, Saint Mary’s University, “Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley as a Novel of Religious Controversy”

Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley has always presented readers and critics with the problem of its lack of unity.  The critical tradition has focussed on its treatment of the industrial revolution and of gender issues, and scholars have acknowledged that it is an amalgam of several different types of novel.  Some of its more baffling aspects can be accounted for by reading it in terms of another fictional type which is not much discussed at present, in spite of the renewed interest in religion in literary study, namely the novel of religious controversy.  Viewed in this way, Shirley is a critique of the ideals of the Oxford Movement, especially of the high value it placed on celibacy.  Brontë implicitly endorses a broad-church position, though the radicalism of her treatment of the “woman question” gives Shirley some affinities with the Victorian novel of doubt.

 

COLEMAN, DAWN, University of Tennessee, “Daniel Deronda and the Limits of Sermonic Voice.”

By the time George Eliot wrote Daniel Deronda, she had lost her sympathy for Christian preaching yet was still drawn to the idea, so powerful in Victorian culture, that passionate voices of conviction could provide moral leadership. This essay argues that Daniel Deronda shows Eliot exploring new, non-Christian forms of sermonic voice in Mordecai and Deronda but that the novel undercuts these characters’ speeches much more than critics have realized. Although Mordecai has often been called a “prophet,” his poeticized declamations lack the bite of biblical prophecy. They are thoroughly secularized, carry no confrontational message for English readers, are delivered to limited audiences, and disappear with Mordecai’s passing. Similarly, despite stepping in as Mordecai’s “more-executive self,” Deronda never achieves Mordecai’s rhetorical power, hedging when he explains his new mission to others and declining to speak his liberal vision with moral fervor. Even his exhortations to Gwendolen prove ineffective. In hollowing out the speeches of Mordecai and Deronda, the novel not only reveals George Eliot’s characteristic political caution but also suggests a loss of faith in the idea that bold, idealistic speech can—or, in some cases, should—effect change in the world.

 

FREE, MELISSA, University of Illinois, “Relegation and Rebellion: The Queer, the Grotesque, and the Silent in the Fiction of Carson McCullers.” 

The visual and the aural are often linked in Carson McCullers’s fiction, producing a synesthesia that registers and rejects both queer silencing and the socially constructed correlation between the queer and the grotesque. As employed by McCullers, the grotesque, in other words, is metonymic rather than metaphoric: it evinces not the queer, but, rather, the distortions produced by its relegation to silence. Using Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Member of the Wedding as examples, “Relegation and Rebellion” demonstrates how, unspeakable but present, the queer makes itself known in visible susurrations, grotesque articulations of the heavy cost of silencing queer identification and desire.

 

DIMOVTIZ, SCOTT A., Regis University, “Portraits in Absentia: Repetition, Compulsion, and the Postmodern Uncanny in Paul Auster’s Leviathan.” 

This essay explores the use of Freud’s concepts of repetition compulsion and the uncanny in Paul Auster’s Leviathan. Tracing the ideas’ influence on Auster as far back as The Invention of Solitude, it argues that Leviathan uses Freudian theory to critique both premodern confidence that identity can be wholly unified and, at the opposite extreme, the postmodern contention that identity is radically decentered. The essay focuses first on Maria Turner’s projects, her portraits in absentia, which symbolize the limits of the ideology of identity as subjectivity--an intersection of discourses uncontrolled by the individual. It also sees in Sachs’s climactic transformational fall a subtle rhetorical linking of key Auster concepts: falling, accidents, chance, repetition, and the uncanny. The essay suggests that the real problem Auster’s work confronts lies in creating a mimetic reflection of a metaphysics that attempts to revivify Providence without God, synchronicity without significance, and chance without chaos.

 

MELLARD, JAMES M., Presidential Teaching Professor, Emeritus, in English at Northern Illinois University, “Zizekian Reading: Sex, Politics, and Traversing (the) Fantasy in Toni Morrison=s Paradise.”     

In analyzing fiction, the concept of >fantasy,= and the related concept >traversing the fantasy,= may reveal hidden aspects of sex and sexuality, politics and political ideology, and narrative form. Thus, an analysis of Toni Morrison=s Paradise demonstrates that Slavoj Zizek=s claims regarding fantasy show how fantasy reveals political ideology infusing details of objective cultural life, how fantasy exhibits sexuality and its psychoanalytic implications in objects, events, and details of subjective personal lives, how one character plumbs subjective depths and traverses what Lacanians call >the fundamental fantasy= to alter his approach to life and his relation to others. Finally, traversing fantasy also serves as Morrison=s mode of closure to a novel difficult of theme and narrative. Thus, as introduced by Freud, expanded by Lacan, and extrapolated by Zizek, fantasy integrates objective and subjective, exterior and interior, and must become extremely useful to today=s literary critics.