Paging All Bookworms! discussion
PAGE COUNT TRACKING - 2019
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JamesFoster 2019 Challenge
Jackson, MacDonald P., "Vocabulary, Chronology, and the First Quarto (1603) of Hamlet" (Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 31, 2018) 26 pages -- Demonstrates by several statistical texts that the passages which are closely similar between the First Quarto and the Second Quarto and Folio were written at about the time of the Second Quarto, and therefore could not be "vestiges" of an early (mid-1580's) first version of the play; since it is unlikely that Shakespeare would have revised an earlier play incompletely at the same time as he was writing the "new" play, and there are passages of "nonsense" in Q1 which make sense in Q2/F, the First Quarto is approximately contemporary with the Second and probably an abridged and corrupted version of it rather than a separate play as some recent critics contend. The author does not explicitly argue for the older "memorial reconstruction" view of Q1, but it seems the most congruent to his results.Iliev, Krste1; Zarieva, Natalija Pop; and Donev, Dragan, "Some Common Traits Shared by English Renaissance Revenge Tragedies" (Yearbook - Faculty of Philology (“Goce Delcev” University, Stip), 9, 12, 2018) 8 pages -- A very simple overview of Revenge tragedies focusing on The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, obviously written for (high school?) students who have no familiarity with Shakespeare or English literature.
del Mar Rodríguez Zárate, María, "¿Ser o no ser Ofelia? : El rol feminino en Hamlet desde su desenvolvimiento dramático y social" (Alpha: Revista de Artes, Letras y Filosofía, 46, jul 2018) 11 pages -- A feminist analysis of Ophelia and her role in the play. Good but not especially deep or original.
Beauregard, David, ""Great Command O'Ersways the Order": Purgatory, Revenge, and Maimed Rites in Hamlet" (Religion & the Arts, 11, 1, Mar 2007) 29 pages -- Accidentally skipped over this one in chronological order. Argues that the play is written from a Catholic perspective. He begins by discussing Shakepeare's connections with Catholics; I've always been skeptical of claims that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic, but there seems to be increasing evidence that he was at least connected by family and friends with "recusants". He discusses the ghost's connection with purgatory and the references to Catholic sacraments of confession and extreme unction. He also argues that Claudius is portrayed as an "Erastian", that is a supporter of secular jurisdiction over religious rituals, which was of course a feature of the Church of England at the time. He interprets the "hugger-mugger" burial of Polonius and the "maimed rites" of Ophelia as referring to the Elizabethan reduction of traditional (Catholic) funeral services. He discusses the Catholic "virtue morality" as opposed to the supposed legalism of Protestant ethics and the idea of obedience to the law as the prime virtue, especially in connection with the legitimacy of vengeance and opposition to the monarch. On the other hand, he does admit that other Protestants did not accept the idea of absolute obedience to the sovereign and differed with the Church of England on many of the points he interprets as Catholic. The main problem I think is that he never explains why Shakespeare puts such an emphasis on the connection of Hamlet and Horatio with the University of Wittenberg, which after all was the birthplace of Protestantism, if he intended a connection of them with Catholicism.
July 2658. Min Jin Lee, Pachinko [2017] 490 pages
Unlike the other books I have been reading for the World Literature group on Goodreads, this novel was written in English by a Korean-American, and so is perhaps somewhat more accessible than the works which I have read in translation. In addition to being a read for the group, it was also recommended by one of my coworkers at the Library. The setting is primarily in Japan, although it begins in Korea. The book is a historical novel about the Korean community in Japan, told through the story of four generations of a single family. The chapter headings are all places and dates, beginning (after a first chapter of background) with November, 1932 and ending with Yokohama, 1989. The main character in the novel is Sunja, the daughter of the partially disabled Hoonie and his wife Yangjin, who run a boardinghouse on Yeongdo, an island on the coast of Korea, near Busan; Hoonie has died at the beginning (in the first chapter); Yangjin lives almost to the end of the novel. Sunja gets pregnant by a rich "businessman" (actually a yakuza, or gangster), Koh Hansu, thinking he will marry her, but he reveals he is married with three daughters in Osaka, Japan. She refuses to become his mistress, and decides to have nothing to do with him, but he loves her and wants to help her and the child, especially when he finds out it is a son. This causes many of the developments later on. Sunja marries a Christian minister named Isaak Baek and moves with him to Osaka, where they live with his brother Yacob and his wife Kyungjee, and raise the boy Noa (and eventually his half-brother Mozasu). This is the basic set-up for the novel, in the first five or six chapters; to reveal any more in detail would involve spoilers, but it is necessary to say that Mozasu ends up running pachinko (pinball) parlors, and that the novel continues through his son, Solomon.
The main theme of the novel is the community of Koreans who for one reason or another live in Japan and cannot or will not return to Korea for various reasons -- World War II, the postwar dictatorships in both the North and South, the Korean War, and at the end the fact that many of them are second and third generations away from Korea. The Koreans are treated about like Hispanics are in the United States, or perhaps worse, since Japan unlike the United States is essentially a country of one homogeneous ethnic group. Koreans are still considered "foreigners" even if they were born in Japan, and they cannot travel without getting passports from one of the two Koreas, even if neither they nor their parents have ever lived in Korea. They are not allowed to rent apartments outside the "ghetto" and are discriminated against in employment and all the ways that we are familiar with here. The novel shows the complex feelings they have about Japan and the Japanese, and also has both positive and negative Japanese characters, with all shades of attitudes about the Koreans. The novel in passing shows the depression, World War II, and the rise of the "new" Japan.
The personal side of the novel reveals the conservative views about women and "honor"; much of the development of the novel is concerned with Sunja's shame at her "mistake" and her pride and resistance to accepting help from Hansu. Although Isaak seems to be very non-judgmental, his brother and the son Noa are very rigid in their ideas. This theme is also worked out in the story of Mozasu's second wife Etsuko and her daughter Hana. One thing that bothered me about the book was the variations on "male rescue fantasies" in so many of the relationships in the novel. All in all, this was a very rich novel and one I would recommend.
July 2759. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead [1967] 126 pages
I watched the film on DVD a couple weeks ago and decided to re-read the play, which I read fifty years ago in high school when it first came out. It is an absurd comedy, based on the characters from Hamlet, and very funny; it also makes a certain point about the way people are thrust into a situation in life without knowing the script. Of course it's very "sixties" and influenced by Beckett, etc. Although Stoppard denies it was "existentialist", I couldn't help but think of the catchphrase "Geworfenheit ins Dasein". I'm going to read a few of Stoppard's other plays from the library and from my garage this month.
July 2860. Tom Stoppard, Jumpers [1972] 89 pages
Jumpers is ostensibly a murder mystery, but ignoring the conventions of the genre, we never find out "whodunnit", nor do we really care. That's not the point. More importantly, this is a comic play which presents, and parodies, the British academic philosophy of the time, and as such reminded me very much of Beckett's novel Watt. When the play was written, I was a philosophy major in a department (Columbia) which emphasized this tradition. Where Beckett never actually mentions Wittgenstein (the object of the novel's parody) by name, however, Stoppard's play refers directly to many of the philosophers I studied at the time, such as Russell, Wittgenstein, and Moore. The humor of the play would be best appreciated by those who are familiar with, but have no great investment in, this type of philosophy. After fifty years, these are no longer the names to conjure with, and I suspect even most philosophy majors today, to say nothing about the playgoing and playreading public, would find it a bit esoteric, which may be why, unlike many of Stoppard's other plays, there were no college or amateur productions of the play that I could find on Youtube. (This might also be due to the fact that according to the stage-directions, the main female character is nude through much of the play (remember when it was written), but it wouldn't really affect anything if she were wearing a nightgown and I doubt whether it was generally performed that way.)
The two central characters are a Professor of Moral Philosophy, George Moore ("many of the students are under the impression that [he is] the author of Principia Ethica", whom he is of course intended to parody), and his wife Dorothy, a retired actress of musical comedy with a tendency to speak in quotations from Shakespeare (primarily Macbeth). The play opens with a post-election victory party for the "Radical-Liberal Party" at the home of the Moores, which features among other entertainments a troop of mediocre amateur acrobats, the "jumpers" of the title, composed of philosophers and other academics. During the course of the entertainment, one of the acrobats (who turns out to be Moore's main academic rival, McFee) is shot be an unknown person for unknown reasons. As in Stoppard's earlier play, "The Real Inspector Hound", the body is in plain sight but somehow the characters never seem to be looking in the right direction to notice it. Meanwhile, George is preparing a lecture on God and morality, which we hear in installments throughout the play.
July 3061. Tom Stoppard, Travesties [1975] 71 pages + 12 page sec article
This is a comedy. As with all Stoppard's plays I have read, the minimal plot is an excuse for the dialogue about ideas; the play is set during World War I in Zurich, and the main characters are Tristan Tzara, a founder of Dada, James Joyce, in the process of writing Ulysses, and Lenin, in the process of writing Imperialism, as well as Henry Carr, a real person whose unreliable memories the play is based on, Lenin's wife Krupskaya, and two imaginary characters, Carr's sister Gwendolyn (Lenin's secretary, a disciple of Joyce, and Tzara's love interest), and the "librarianess" Cecily (Joyce's secretary, a disciple of Lenin, and Carr's love interest). Joyce and Carr are preparing a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (which they in fact did at the time) and according to a secondary article (see below) the structure of Stoppard's play is based on Wilde's (I saw it performed fifty years ago, so I can't judge.)
The dialogue is about the nature of World War I, and the nature and purposes of modern art, and apart from some witty repartee is mainly taken from the characters' own writings (very out of context, of course). According to the same secondary article, Stoppard has said that he intended the audience/readers to sympathize with Joyce, but to me Tzara had all the best lines. Many of the lines are actually taken from Stoppard's previous (radio) play, "Artist Descending a Staircase", which also deals with modern art.
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Orlich, Ileana Alexandra, "Tom Stoppard's Travesties and the Politics of Earnestness" (East European Quarterly, 38, 3, Fall 2004) 12 pages -- Discusses the relationship of Stoppard's play to Wilde's; otherwise a rather tendentious political interpretation of the play.
July 3162. Han Kang, The Vegetarian [2007; tr. 2018] 185 pages
A very different novel from the author's later Human Acts, which I read last month, but also quite good. This novel is about dysfunctional families and mental illness; the protagonist suddenly clears out all the meat in her refrigerator and announces that she will no longer eat meat, and her family reacts violently. For the rest of the novel, she is in and out of mental hospitals; her sister is the caretaker, and struggles with her own mental health at times. In the middle, there ia another element in the sister's husband. It's really a difficult book to review, and I'm looking forward to the discussion in the group I read it for.
August 263. Articles on Macbeth [1975-2009] 353 pages
Eighteen articles from Academic Search Premier about the play; the remainder of the articles (from the last ten years) I will read in a week or so, which will finish my study of Shakespeare until next summer, assuming I go to the Utah Shakespeare Festival as usual on my vacation next year. Almost all these articles stuck to the play itself; although there were two that gave Freudian analyses there was no Lacan or Derrida. The individual articles are reviewed in my Challenge thread here.
Biggins, Dennis, "Sexuality, Witchcraft, and Violence in Macbeth" (Shakespeare Studies, 8, 1975) 23 pages -- Points out the sexual language in the play (expecially in the witch scenes) and argues that the witches are succubi/incubi, and that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are displacing normal sexuality into a perverted kind of quasi-sexual violence by murdering Duncan, which is described with sexual metaphors as a kind of rape. Connects this with the many images of infertility in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
Breuer, Horst, "Disintegration of Time in Macbeth's Soliloquy 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow'" (Modern Language Review, 71, 2, Apr 1976) 16 pages -- Analyzes the soliloquy by comparison with the plays of Samuel Beckett and their view of time as an accumulation of moments without any ordering principle. Then turns to a discussion of whether Shakespeare criticism should try to recover the Elizabethan meanings of the plays or rather try to discover meanings for the present, as argued by Jan Kott; this is the real point of the article rather than the analysis of the soliloquy.
Fox, Alice, "Obstetrics and Gynecology in Macbeth" (Shakespeare Studies, 12, 1979) 15 pages -- Discusses the play's use of terms taken from contemporary medicine, and particularly references to infertility and miscarriages, and argues that Lady Macbeth has lost all her children to miscarraiges or in infancy. Considers the possibility that her frustrated desire for children is the source of her desire for political power as a compensation. Points out the many images of infertility throughout the play. Interprets the doctor's question in the sleepwalking scene about where she got the candle as evidence that at the end Lady Macbeth is pregnant (the smell of candles was considered a cause of miscarriages at the time) and suggests that she dies of a final miscarriage. The "tomorrow" soliloquy is then Macbeth's realization that he is permanently deprived of the possibility of an heir.
Kozikowski, Stanley J., "The Gowrie Conspiracy Against James VI: A New Source for Shakespeare's Macbeth" (Shakespeare Studies, 13, 1980) 16 pages -- Demonstrates the resemblances of Macbeth's murder of Duncan, which departs in important respects from Holinshed, Buchanan and Leslie (the chroniclers who are probably the sources for the majority of the play), to the unsuccessful attmept against James VI/I by the Earl of Gowrie at Gowrie's castle, and suggests that the play may have used the account of the Gowrie conspiracy as a source; points out that Shakespeare's company had prepared a play on the subject of the Gowrie conspiracy which was not accepted for performance.
Asp, Carolyn, "'Be bloody, bold and resolute': Tragic Action and Sexual Stereotyping in Macbeth" (Studies in Philology, 78, 2, Spring 1981) 17 pages -- Discusses the gender stereotypes in the play, and interprets the character of Macbeth as carrying the male stereotype of force and control to an extreme of trying to control the supernatural as well as the natural realm, denying his own human limitations, which is finally beyond his power. Argues that Lady Macbeth tries to adopt a masculine role to be an equal partner with Macbeth but that as soon as she succeeds in making him fully masculine he no longer needs her as a partner and treats her as a stereotype woman; her tragedy is due to the loss of power over her husband through her own success.
Diehl, Huston, "Horrid Image, Sorry Sight, Fatal Vision: The Visual Rhetoric of Macbeth" (Shakespeare Studies, 16, 1983), 13 pages -- Discusses the visions in the play as images which have ethical meanings Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do not see.
Doran, Madeleine, "The Macbeth Music" (Shakespeare Studies, 16, 1983) 21 pages -- Discusses the language of the play; doesn't really come to any conclusions.
Calderwood, James L., "Macbeth: Counter--Hamlet" (Shakespeare Studies, 18, 1985) 14 pages -- Discusses the opposition between the structure of Hamlet and the structure of Macbeth: Hamlet looks back to the past, to an idealized time when his father was on the throne, his mother was faithful to his father, and he was in love with Ophelia, and resists the motion toward the future and his revenge, the action which comes at the end of the play; while Macbeth begins with action, is always considering the future, and tries to deny the past. Hamlet is confronted with a world that has become corrupted and which it is his misfortune to set right; Macbeth is confronted with an orderly world and corrupts it by his own actions. And other similar differences. The article is interesting, but contrasts Hamlet with Macbeth; it seems to me that the "negative image" of Hamlet in Macbeth which he describes could be explained better by considering the latter play as being essentially Hamlet from the perspective of Claudius rather than Hamlet.
Guj, Luisa, "Macbeth and the Seeds of Time" (Shakespeare Studies, 18, 1986) 14 pages -- Begins with a description of Macrobius' image of time as a three-headed monster, and its echoes in Renaissance art and iconography; suggests that the play is influenced by that conception, and that the three witches and the three-headed Hecate, and the reiteration of triple images and words refer to this conception of time. The information about iconography was interesting. Suggests also that Macbeth, by trying both to erase the past and prevent the future (Banquo's offspring) is trying to create a permanent present, that is to usurp God's prerogative of eternity; that with the failure of all his actions, he comes to realize that time cannot be stopped, but that "tomorrow and tommorrow and tomorrow" come creeping without stop.
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Stachniewski, John, "Calvinist Psychology in Macbeth" (Shakespeare Studies, 20, 1988) 21 pages -- Argues that the play uses Calvin's description of the "reprobate" psychology to describe the degeneration of Macbeth, which was inevitable from the beginning. I'm not convinced that Shakespeare was writing Calvinist theology (even if, as the author claims, Calvinism was not limited to the Puritans but was part of the Anglican mainstream before the time of Charles I), but there is a lot of interesting discussion of Macbeth's character and a close reading of the play. Of course Shakespeare could have used the Calvinist description of the stages of sin without considering it predestined.
Trubowitz, Rachel, "`The single state of man': Androgyny in Macbeth and Paradise Lost" (Papers on Language & Literature, 26, 3, Summer 1990) 29 pages -- Discusses "androgyny" in the sense of one person having behavioral characteristics of both male and female; distinguishes two forms, males having female characteristics of compassion, etc. (which is seen by the Renaissance authors as a good thing) and females having male characteristics of courage, assertiveness, self-reliance and so forth (which is seen as negative.) The artticle is primarily about Paradise Lost; Macbeth is treated only incidentally as a "source" which Milton reacts against.
O'Rourke, James L., "The subversive metaphysics of Macbeth" (Shakespeare Studies, 21, 1993) 15 pages -- Primarily concerned with attacking A.C. Bradley, the article argues that the play is about "wyrd" vs. "word", and presents a world seen from the perspective of eternity in which causality does not exist and in the end, nothing has changed, and there is no moral order to be restored; the world is "a tale told be an idiot . . . signifying nothing."
Tufts, Carol Strongin, "Shakespeare's Conception of Moral Order in Macbeth" (Renascence, 50, 3/4, Spring1998/Summer 1998) 15 pages -- Analyzes Macbeth's character in terms of Aquinas' discussion of evil as privation.
Hibbs, Stacey, and Hibbs, Thomas, "Virtue, Natural Law, and Supernatural Solicitation: A Thomistic Reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth" (Religion & the Arts, 5, 3, Sept 2001) 24 pages -- Similar to the article by Tufts but perhaps with a better understanding of Aquinas' position.
Favila, Marina, ""Mortal Thoughts" and Magical Thinking in Macbeth" (Modern Philology, 99, 1, Aug 2001) 25 pages -- A Freudian analysis of the play, which sees Macbeth regressing to infancy in a reversal of Freud's stages of development, in particular returning to the pleasure principle of "magical thinking".
Kranz, David L., "The Sounds of Supernatural Soliciting in Macbeth" (Studies in Philology, 100, 3, Summer 2003) 38 pages -- A discussion of the sounds and prosody of the play, more detailed than the article by Doran. Focuses especially on the dialogue of the three witches, and their echoes in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Argues that the anti-Macbeth forces at the end adopt the same style and that this suggests that the witches are part of a larger plan.
Bell, Millicent, "Macbeth and Dismemberment" (Raritan, 25, 3, Winter 2006) 17 pages -- Ostensibly about the images of dismemberment in Macbeth, but actually an impressionistic reading of the whole play.
Gleyzon, François-Xavier, "Under the Eye of Gorgo: Apotropaic Acts in Macbeth and King Lear" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 7, 2007) 20 pages -- Discusses severed heads and other images of horror in the two plays in connection with Freud's reading of the Gorgon mythology as symbolic of the female genitalia and fear of castration.
Aug 364. Han Kang, The White Book [2016; tr. 2017] 148 pages
A very different book from both Human Acts and The Vegetarian, The White Book is written in short, poetic chapters (including some actual verse) meditating on white things. The two themes which tie the various chapters together are the narrator's older sister who died two hours after a premature birth, and the reconstruction of the "white city" (presumably Warsaw, though unnamed) after its virtual destruction by the Nazis in World War II. The narrator is a writer from another country (one might assume Korea, although it is also not named) who has recently arrived to live in this foreign city. I think the connection between the different themes is the creation or re-creation of identities after a personal or historical crisis. The book is divided into three parts, I, She, and All Whiteness. The first part is in the first person, and is mainly about the narrator and her sister, and the city. The second part is in the third person; it begins with the mention of a girl named Snow-flower, the daughter of a famous writer (the only names in the book), and is concerned largely with images of snow and ice and other natural things (the moon, birds, trees, the Milky Way). It is unclear whether the chapters are about Snow-flower or the narrator, and the two seem to blend. In the third part, the narrator also seems to merge with the sister and imagines a world in which the sister lived and the narrator was never born.
65. Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays [1993] 211 pages + 17 page sec art
This is actually the same book as Plays one, the first volume of the collected plays. It contains four, five or six plays, depending on how you divide them (New Found-Land is embedded in Dirty Linen, and Dogg's Hamlet and Cahoot's Macbeth are so interconnected that they could hardly be performed separately.) All are comedies with (intentionally) absurd plots. The Real Inspector Hound, like Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, collapses the distinction between the play and the observer. After Magritte recounts the aftermath of a visit to an exhibition of Magritte's art, and is filled with in-jokes about surrealist art; the plot is based on various perspectives on the same "event" which may not actually be an event at all. Dirty Linen is a farce about the sexual habits of members of Parliament (it would work as well, with a little re-writing, for Congress) and the sensationalism of the press (I get the impression that the line between the "respectable" press and the tabloids is more permeable in Britain than here). New Found-Land is embedded between the beginning and end of Dirty Linen, and is essentially a monologue of clichés about the United States. Dogg's Hamlet consists of a fifteen minute version of Hamlet performed ostensibly by a student group, which speaks a language that consists of English words used with different meanings than in English (based on one of the language "games" in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations); Cahoot's Macbeth is an homage to the Czech playwright Pavel Kahout, who performed an abridged version of Macbeth clandestinely during the period of "normalization" following the Prague Spring. It consists of a brief version of Shakespeare similar to the Hamlet of the first play, interrupted by the police and by one of the characters from that play, which then reinterprets the linguistic theme in terms of the resistance to totalitarianism. Stoppard is a playwright of ideas, and much of the fun in his comedies is in recognizing ideas and allusions under the absurdist disguise.
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Carlo Vareschi, "Fear and Loathing in Prague: Tom Stoppard's Cahoot's Macbeth" (Comparative Drama, 52, 1/2, Spring/Summer 2018) 17 pages -- An interpretation of the play.
Aug 666. Hwang Sok-yong, At Dusk [2015; tr. 2018] 188 pages
Hwang Sok-yong's newest novel, At Dusk begins with an architect in his sixties, Park Minwoo, receiving a message from an old girlfriend and then visiting a dying childhood friend in his hometown. The second chapter turns to a twenty-nine year old woman, Jung Woohee, who directs plays while earning a living working night shift in a convenience store. Their life stories are presented in flashbacks, in alternating chapters, but it is not clear until the end what connection there is between the two. Park Minwoo grew up in a slum, but managed to get an education and become successful, turning his back on his earlier life. The novel is basically about his feeling that he has made bad choices and that his life has been a failure after all. There was some background about the economic development of the country and the conditions of the working class. While not a bad novel it did not really grip me like his earlier books, perhaps because the characters (especially Park Minwoo) did not seem that interesting.
Aug 967. Arthur Schnitzler, Das weite Land [1911] 174 pages [in German, Kindle] + 15 page sec. article
A complex play set in the bourgeois and professional layers of Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, dealing with deceit, hypocrisy and self-delusion as an older traditional morality is incompletely replaced by newer and more liberal mores. On the one hand nearly everyone in the play is having an affair, or has just finished having an affair, or is trying to have an affair, and everyone privately claims to be liberated and free from any sort of philistine moral hangups, that love affairs are just a "game"; but at the same time, they all pretend in public that they are all conventionally respectable, and in fact below the surface are all the emotions, envies and jealousies that they pretend to be free from. The private emotional scenes take place within a matrix of public social posturing; they are continually interrupted by others wandering in and out chattering about tennis or the weather. Much of the dialogue is comic, although never so unrealistic as to be farce; but the contradictions between the private and public moralities lead to tragedy in the end.
Swales, Martin1, "Schnitzler's Tragi-comedy: A Reading of "Das weite Land"" (Modern Austrian Literature 10, 3/4, 1977) 15 pages -- A general summary and interpretation of the play.
Aug 1268. Johann Nestroy, Einen Jux will er sich machen [1842] 103 pages [in German]
"Das ist klassisch!" Nestroy's best known work outside Austria, this is a farce of mistaken identity set in Vienna, about two employees who decide to have an adventure while their boss is away. Of course he shows up, and they disguise themselves and run into the shop of the boss's fiancée. Meanwhile, the boss's ward has eloped with a young man, and they all are mistaken for one another. Somewhat hard reading due to the nineteenth century Viennese dialect and the many puns and local and topical jokes; the play has been adapted many times in English, including by Tom Stoppard (On the Razzle) and twice by Thornton Wilder (the second time as The Matchmaker, which in turn was adapted as the musical Hello Dolly!).
Aug 1769. Arthur Schnitzler, Liebelei [1895] 110 pages [in German, Kindle] + 16 page sec art
Another play by Schnitzler about love, real and unreal, in turn of the century Vienna. Fritz is having an affair with a seemingly disturbed married woman (who never appears in the play); his friend Theodor sets him up with Christine, the friend of his own girlfriend Mitzi, as a distraction. He likes her, but isn't really serious; she on the other hand falls in love with him, but neither he nor the others realize that she is serious. Of course it ends tragically, as with Das weite Land and many of Schnitzler's other plays.
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Michael Ossar, "Individual and Type in Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei" (Modern Austrian Literature, 30, 2, 1997) 16 pages -- A different interpretation of the play, which sees Fritz as knowing that Christine is serious about him and trying to make it possible for her to leave him. Connects the play with Kierkegaard. Interesting.
Aug 1870. Tom Stoppard, Plays Two [1990] 283 pages
The second volume of Stoppard's Collected Plays, originally published as The Plays for Radio 1964-1991. There are eight radio plays in the volume. The first five are early, short works, somewhat witty but not particularly significant, which remind me of Monty Python skits: The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, a slight farce about a man who is trying to get money to pay a cab, and keeps running the meter up to absurd amounts; M is for Moon Among Other Things, a short play about a married couple who no longer communicate; If You're Glad I'll be Frank, about an operator who tells the time on the phone; Albert's Bridge, aabout a man who paints a bridge; and Where Are They Now?, a satire of the British public (what we call private prep) school alumni who remember things in comically inaccurate ways. The last three are somewhat more interesting, and are related to his stage plays: Artist Descending a Staircase, which is about modern art and foreshadows After Magritte and Travesties; The Dog It Was That Died, a double agent spy story with some resemblances to Hapgood; and
In the Native State, which was expanded into Indian Ink.
Aug 2171. Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise: Poems [2019] 116 pages
The newest collection of poems by the recently appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo. The book reminded me very much of another poetry book by another Native American writer, N. Scott Momaday's Return to Rainy Mountain. Both books use a literal "return" (in the case of Harjo, a visit to the original homeland of the Creek nation in the Southeast) as a starting point for returning in time to both personal and family history and the history of their people. Both books also mix poetry with poetic prose passages and short historical comments. A highlight was Harjo's elegy on her mother, a restaurant worker.
Aug. 2672. Tom Stoppard, Plays Five [1999] 593 pages + 15 sec. articles (225 pages)
The fifth volume of Stoppard's Collected Plays, this contains five of his best stage plays: Arcadia (1993), The Real Thing (1982), Night and Day (1978), Indian Ink (1995), and Hapgood (1988).
Arcadia is probably his best play; it alternates between scenes set in the nineteenth century (1809 and 1812) and scenes set in the present. Partly, it is a satire on academic literary detective work -- Bernard Nightingale is a pompous and egotistic critic with a wrong theory about Byron that he convinces himself he has proven, but the nineteenth century scenes show that he is wrong (one of Stoppard's previous plays was apparently trashed by a critic named Benedict Nightingale) -- which also reflects on epistemological issues of history writing; partly it is about chaos theory, which also provides the unusual structure of the play, with the nineteenth century and twentieth century scenes approaching each other with variations; and it also deals with the history of landscape gardening, and of course sex. It is also one of his funniest plays.
The Real Thing is a domestic comedy about a playwright and his relationships (Stoppard to some extent is parodying himself); it wasn't one of my favorites. Night and Day is a satire on the press; Indian Ink is concerned with colonial and post-colonial India and the fall of the British Empire, and Hapgood is a parody of a Cold War spy novel which also has scientific metaphors, though not as well integrated as in Arcadia. They were all worthwhile and I would like to see some of them in performance some time.
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The secondary articles I read on the plays:
On Arcadia:
Hynes, Joseph, "Tom Stoppard's Lighted March" (Virginia Quarterly Review, 71, 4, Autumn 1995) 14 pages -- a comparison of Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead with Arcadia/
Kramer, Prapassaree and Kramer, Jeffrey, "Stoppard's Arcadia: Research, time, loss" (Modern Drama, 40, 1, Spring 1997) 10 pages -- A good general description of the play, emphasizing the "decline" from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period and from that to the present.
Melbourne, Lucy, "`Plotting the apple of knowledge': Tom Stoppard's Arcadia as iterated theatrical algorithm" (Modern Drama, 41, 4, Winter 1998) 16 pages -- Another good general account of the play and its structure.
Vees-Gulani, Susanne, "Hidden order in the `Stoppard Set': Chaos theory in the content and structure of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia" (Modern Drama, 42, 3, Fall 1999) 16 pages -- Emphasizes the use of chaos theory as a structural device in the play.
Alwes, Derek B., "'Oh, Phooey to Death!': Boethian Consolation in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia" (Papers on Language & Literature, 36, 4, Fall 2000) 13 pages -- Discusses the relationship set up between the audience and the play.
Sternlieb, Lisa and Selleck, Nancy, ""What Is Carnal Embrace?" Learning to Converse in Stoppard's Arcadia" (Modern Drama, 46, 3, Fall 2003) 21 pages -- Interprets the play as about conversation and the lack of it.
Scolnicov, Hanna, ""Before" and "After" in Stoppard's Arcadia" (Modern Drama, 47, 3, Fall 2004) 20 pages -- Discusses the use of Repton's device (attributed to Noakes in the play) of superposing the before and after pictures of the garden as a model for the structure of the play itself.
Demastes, William W., "Portrait of an Artist as Proto-Chaotician: Tom Stoppard Working His Way to Arcadia" (Narrative, 19, 2, May 2011) 12 pages -- Considers Stoppard's earlier works as approaches to the theme of Arcadia.
Gobert, R. Darren, "The Field of Modern Drama, or Arcadia" (Modern Drama, 58, 3, Fall 2015) 17 pages -- Uses the play as a springboard for discussing trends in theater studies; refers to particular productions of the play.
Zapkin, Phillip, "Compromised Epistemologies: The Ethics of Historiographic Metatheatre in Tom Stoppard's Travesties and Arcadia" (Modern Drama, 59, 3, Fall 2016) 21 pages -- Discusses the epistemological themes of the play in relation to postmodernist historiography; the most abstract of the articles I read.
On The Real Thing:
Arndt, Susanne, "`We're all free to do as we're told': Gender and Ideology in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing" (Modern Drama, 40, 4, Winter 1997) 13 pages -- A feminist attack on the play; actually explains much of what Stoppard is saying but considers it as a criticism because it assumes that the playwright in the play is intended to be a porte-parole for Stoppard, when in fact he is the target of the satire.
On Indian Ink:
Russell, Richard Rankin, ""It will make us friends": Cultural Reconciliation in Tom Stoppard's "Indian Ink."" (Journal of Modern Literature, 27, 3, Winter 2004) 18 pages -- Sees the play as about eliminating borders and nationalism.
Kaplan, Laurie, "In the Native State/Indian Ink: Footnoting the footnotes on empire" (Modern Drama, 41, 3, Fall 1998) 10 pages -- Sees the play as a satire on academic idiocy, with Pike being similar to Bernard Nightingale in Arcadia; discusses how the Pike character is emphasized in the stage play relatively to the radio version.
Bhatia, Nandi, "Reinventing India through "A quite witty pastiche": Reading Tom Stoppard's "Indian Ink."" (Modern Drama, 52, 2, Summer 2009) 18 pages -- Academic and sectarian criticism of the play for not being about what the author thinks it should have been about (which would have been a thousand page academic monograph instead of a play). Obviously takes Stoppard's satire of academics personally. I have a problem with academics who talk about "subaltern subjects" to avoid saying "workers and peasants".
On Hapgood:
Abel, Corey, "The Drama of Politics and Science: Stoppard's Hapgood" (Perspectives on Political Science, 35, 3, Summer 2006) 6 pages -- A brief but interesting description of what the play is about.
Aug. 2974. Park Wan-Suh, Lonesome You [1998, tr. 2013] 265 pages [Kindle]
Park Wan-Suh, who died in 2011, was one of the best known women writers in Korea; this is a collection of ten of her short stories, which I read for the World Literature group on Goodreads. To be honest they were all rather depressing; they nearly all concerned people, mostly older women, who had deprived themselves of any happiness in life largely through their own pride or stubbornness, although social conditions played a role in some of them. The stories were good in terms of characterization and structure, although I wasn't impressed by the actual writing -- which of course may be the fault of the translation. I don't know whether the author or the translator is responsible for the "deep navy . . . aquamarine", which put me off from the third sentence of the book.
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[Spoilers from here]
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The first story, "Withered Flower", concerns a woman in her sixties, who forms a relationship with a man (who wears a dark blue aquamarine set in a platinum ring!) but ultimately breaks up because she considers herself too old for love; the second story, "Psychedelic Butterfly" (I'm not sure what the title is supposed to suggest) is about an elderly woman suffering from dementia who wanders off and ends up as a sort of Buddhist nun; "An Unbearable Secret" is about a woman who abandons her family because she considers herself a bearer of doom; "Long Boring Movie" is about a woman who is a caretaker for her elderly parents; the title story, "Lonesome You", is about a woman who resents her husband and just about her whole family; "That Girl's House" is about a couple of young lovers separated by World War II and the division of Korea; "Thorn Inside Petals" is about a woman obsessed with burial clothes; "A Ball-laying Woman" is about an illegitimate daughter; "J=1 Visa" is about a Korean writer trying to get a visa to attend a seminar in the United States; and "An Anecdote: The Bane of My Existence" is about an older woman writer's problems with a "senile" computer.
Aug. 3175. Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love [1997] 102 pages + 8 page sec. article
The Invention of Love basically is a play about the life and work of A.E. Housman, the textual critic and poet, with particular, though not exclusive, emphasis on his unrequited love for his straight friend Moses Jackson. It takes the form of a dream the night before Housman's death, although this isn't immediately obvious (the beginning of the play would lead one to believe that it is set in an afterworld following his death, and it is rather confusing until the reader/spectator figures that out), in which he meets his earlier self as well as seeing various colleagues and friends from different periods of his life. In addition to the emotional aspect of the plot with Jackson and discussions about homosexuality by various figures in the play (Oscar Wilde is mentioned many times and makes an appearance in the last scene), there is also much discussion of the nature and importance of textual criticism as opposed to other forms of classical study, which somewhat dovetails with the epistemological concerns of his earlier plays such as Arcadia. (Ruskin and Jowett are characters.) As with many of his plays, there is some fun at the expense of pompous academics, and more serious satire of journalists. Although I found the play interesting (perhaps because I studied Greek and Latin in college) it did seem more confusing even than the usual Stoppard play.
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Ryan, Carrie, "Translating The Invention of Love: The Journey From Page to Stage For Tom Stoppard's Latest Play" (Journal of Modern Literature, 24, 2, Winter 2000/2001) 8 pages -- An account of a production of the play at the Wilma theater in Philadelphia by the dramaturg of that production. Two points of interest: the director found it necessary to use the design of the stage to make it clearer that the play is a dream; and that the structure of parts of the play is based on Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (which I did not pick up on, not having read that particular book -- Jerome makes an appearance near the end of the book.)
Sept 2 76. Articles on Macbeth [1998-2018] 454 pages
The last 26 articles I read from Academic Search Premier about Macbeth, which finishes my secondary readings on Shakespeare until next summer. The comments on individual articles are in my challenge thread.
Hassel Jr., R. Chris, "'No boasting like a fool'? Macbeath and Herod" (Studies in Philology, 98, 2, Spring 2001) 20 pages -- Echoes of the mystery play Herod in Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Chamberlain, Stephanie, "Fantasizing Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England" (College Literature, 32, 3, Summer 2005) 20 pages -- Discusses Lady Macbeth's image of infanticide and other passages in the play in relation to Elizabethan writings on infanticide, wet-nursing, etc. to present the play as about the maternal threat to patrilineal succession. Some interesting information.
Vince, Máté, "The Accursed Tongue" (Anachronist, 12, 2006) 25 pages -- Considers the importance of performative language in the play.
Flachmann, Michael, "Acting Shakespeare: A Roundtable Discussion with Artists from the Utah Shakespearean Festival's 2010 Production of Macbeth" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 10, 2010) 13 pages -- Decisions made by the director of one production.
MacDonald, Julia, "Demonic Time in Macbeth" (Ben Jonson Journal, 17, 1, 2010) 21 pages -- Discusses the use of time in the play.
Riccomini, Donald R., "Governance and the Warrior Ethic in Macbeth and Henry V" (Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal, 30, 2011) 25 pages -- Considers the plays to be about the the transition from warrior society to "statism"; some interesting points but superficial history and I doubt if it's anything Shakespeare had in mind.
Cohen, Derek, "Macbeth's Rites of Violence" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 23, 2011) 9 pages -- The role of violence in the play.
Mentz, Steve, "Shakespeare's Beach House, or The Green and the Blue in Macbeth" (Shakespeare Studies, 39, 2011) 10 pages -- An "ecological" reading of the play; metaphors of "green" life and of the sea as disorder.
Lupton, Julia Reinhard, "Macbeth's Martlets: Shakespearean Phenomenologies of Hospitality" (Criticism, 54, 3, Summer 2012) 12 pages -- Discusses the martlets as a metaphor for hospitality, and how Macbeth recieves Duncan.
Langis, Unhae, "Shakespeare and Prudential Psychology: Ambition and Akrasia in Macbeth" (Shakespeare Studies, 40, 2012) 9 pages -- Macbeth's tragedy is that his will is subordinated to his passions: "From a psycho-prudential perspective, we can clearly see the Macbeth did not act at the best time, in the best way, and for the best end." No kidding.
Wilson, Luke, "Macbeth and the Contingency of Future Persons" (Shakespeare Studies, 40, 2012) 10 pages -- Discusses Macbeth's lack of an heir. Makes the interesting observation that the witches never say that his heirs will not inherit the throne, only that Banquo's will, which doesn't necessarily imply that Macbeth will not have an heir who succeeds him -- Banquo's descendants could well become kings by marrying into Macbeth's line, as the "histories" claim they did by marrying into Malcolm's line. He simply makes a false deduction, as he does throughout the play.
Curran, Kevin, "Feeling Criminal in Macbeth" (Criticism, 54, 3, Summer 2012) 11 pages -- Macbeth's intention to commit crimes as a component of the phenomenology of crime.
Cox, John D., "Religion and Suffering in "Macbeth"" (Christianity & Literature, 62, 2, Winter 2013) 16 pages -- Macbeth is a tragic figure because he suffers from remorse but cannot bring himself to repent.
Roychoudhury, Suparna, "Melancholy, Ecstasy, Phantasma: The Pathologies of Macbeth" (Modern Philology, 111, 2, Nov 2013) 26 pages -- Discusses Elizabethan descriptions of melancholia and its relationship to the imagination; argues that Macbeth's imagination is actually a form of pathology.
Clark, Seth, ""Confusion Now Hath Made His Masterpiece": (Re)Considering the Maddening of Macbeth" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 13, 2013) 12 pages -- Macbeth's tragedy is due to confusion; his contradictory desires and ideas.
Landiss, Claire, "A Reidian Reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth: Exploring the Moral Faculty through Philosophy and Drama" (Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 11, 2, Sep 2013) 22 pages -- Discusses the play in terms of Reid's views on ethics.
Butler, Guy, "Macbeth: "The great doom's image"" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 26, 2014) 33 pages -- Images of the Last Judgement in the play compared to the morality plays and motifs in art.
Abdalla, Laila, "Birthing Death: A Reconsideration of the Roles of Power, Politics and the Domestic in Macbeth" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 14/15, 2014/2015) 20 pages -- The play is about politics or political ambitions usurping the place of domestic relations.
Herman, Peter C., "“A deed without a name”: Macbeth, the Gunpowder Plot, and terrorism" (Journal for Cultural Research, 18, 2, Apr 2014) 18 pages -- Argues that the play is full of topical allusions to the Gunpowder Plot.
Uhr, John, "Investigating Public Integrity in Macbeth" (Public Integrity, 17, 3, Summer 2015) 12 pages -- Uses the play as a springboard for discussing the reactions of subordinates to the ethical failings of superiors.
Cauchi, Francesca, ""Compunctious Visitings": Conscience as Unequivocal Witness in Macbeth" (Philological Quarterly, 94, 4, Fall 2015) 17 pages -- The role of conscience in Macbeth.
Curtis, Carl C., "The Art of Political Healing in Macbeth" (Modern Age 57, 4, Fall 2015) 7 pages -- A traditional approach to the play as about the healing of Scotland after Macbeth.
Markidou, Vassiliki, "William Shakespeare's Macbeth as a Spatial Palimpsest" (Critical Survey, 28, 1, Spring 2016) 16 pages -- The spatial relationship of the three castles and the heath as symbolic.
Williamson, Kevin D., "Give sorrow words" (New Criterion, 34, 8, Apr 2016) 4 pages -- Discusses several performances of Macbeth, and particularly how they present the witches, and how this affects the interpretation.
Wofford, Susanne L., "Origin Stories of Fear and Tyranny: Blood and Dismemberment in Macbeth (with a Glance at the Oresteia)" (Comparative Drama, 51, 4, Winter 2017) 22 pages -- Compares Macbeth to Aeschylus' Oresteia as origin stories of Scottish feudalism and the Greek city-state.
Companion, Helen, ""Not of Woman Born": Lady Macbeth's Cesarean Section" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 16/17, 2018) 14 pages -- Argues that Lady Macbeth had a C-section and gave birth to a dead infant. Unconvincing; the mother usually was already dead in the case of a Cesarean section at that time, which was performed to save the baby after the mother had died in childbirth, and the passage about Lady Macbeth's child assumes that it lived long enough to nurse. Also, if Lady Macbeth had had a C-section, Macbeth would have thought of the possibility when hearing the prophecy.
Bigliazzi, Silvia, "Linguistic Taboos and the "Unscene" of Fear in Macbeth" (Comparative Drama, 52, 1/2, Spring/Summer 2018) 30 pages -- Discusses the way the murder of Duncan is referred to as "the deed" and other euphemisms; considers this as an example of taboo.
Sept 5
77. Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside: Stories [2019] 223 pages
Seven stories by Danticat, one of my favorite writers, about Haitian-Americans, some taking place in the United States and others involving trips back to Haiti. All are powerful, basically tragic but humane and offering some hope.
Sept 7
78. A.E. Housman, The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman [1965] 254 pages
Having just read Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, a play based on the life of A.E. Housman, I decided to read his poems. The most famous collection, of course, is A Shropshire Lad; the other parts are titled, imaginatively, Last Poems, More Poems and Additional Poems. I have to admit, Housman will not ever be my favorite poet. The poems are all rather the same, short poems about young men who died, some as soldiers, some by suicide, some hanged, etc. and are lying about under the ground being dead and reciting poems about it. They all have simple rhyme schemes, ABAB CDCD or AABB CCDD, and many of them seem to have the sentence order inverted or all twisted about to get the rhyme words at the end of the lines. There are a few memorable lines, and some of the poems have classical allusions -- Housman was really more of a scholar than a poet, but I was not impressed in general.
Sept 9
79. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men In a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) [1889] 211 pages [Kindle]
A humorous travelogue about three young men and a fox terrier on a rowing trip up the Thames from London to Oxford, by the nineteenth century British equivalent of Dave Barry. The humor (unlike the descriptions of places) hasn't really lost much with time; it's not hilariously funny, but it has its entertaining moments.
Sept 1580. Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia: A Trilogy [2002] 347 pages + 4 secondary articles (83 pages)
A trilogy of stageplays, Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, about the lives of nineteenth century Russian exiles, primarily Alexander Herzen but also treating the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the radical critic Vissarion Belinski, and the author Ivan Turgenev, among others, these are frankly not among Stoppard's best plays, although they might be better perfformed than in print. Various German, French, and Polish radicals such as the poet George Herwegh also appear in small roles. Marx is present in one or two dream scenes, and every mention of him attributes to him ideas he never held (as I've learned to expect.)
The plays, especially the second and third, contain a lot of political discussion, mainly taken from actual writings of the people involved, but it's too fragmented to really make sense, and the characters' ideas are not taken seriously enough, or discussed in enough depth, even if that was Stoppard's intent. The radical characters frequently seem like unserious charlatans, which for all their errors none of them were; Bakunin in particular is caricatured. (Apparently he is following Berlin here.)
If there is any real theme to be taken from the plays, it is that Utopian thought is necessary to humanity but usually ends in disaster. Much of the action in the plays actually seems like domestic drama modelled after Chekhov -- Stoppard wrote the first play at the same time he was writing his translation of The Seagull, and says somewhere that it was originally an attempt to write in Chekhov's style; if one didn't know who Bakunin was, one would think the first play was about his sisters and their love affairs, with Mikhail making short appearances to confuse things. If the plays are about politics, they're far too domestic, while if they're about domestic relations they're far too filled with political speeches. There is not enough humor to balance the rhetoric, unlike many of his other plays.
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Nadel, Ira B., "Tom Stoppard: In the Russian Court" (Modern Drama, 47, 3, Fall 2004) 25 pages -- A good general article about the trilogy, which explains why Stoppard wrote it and what he intended by it, and gives the sources he used in writing it. Apparently it was partly modelled on Gorky's Summerfolk, which of course I have added to my TBR list; E.H. Carr and Isaiah Berlin were also important sources.
Barker, Roberta, "The Circle Game: Gender, Time, and "Revolution" in Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia"" (Modern Drama, 48, 4, Winter 2005) 20 pages -- Discusses linear historical time vs. cyclical, repetitive time; refers to Kristeva's claim that cyclical time is feminine and linear time is masculine; argues that both times are associated in the play with both genders, but that the women are more trapped in the repetitions. Well-argued with examples from the play.
Tucker, Herbert F., "History Played Back: In Defense of Stoppard's Coast of Utopia" (Raritan, 24, 1, Spring 2005) 21 pages -- Defends the play against negative criticism; discusses the structure and how the play works in performance.
Bell, James, "The Grand Illusion: Finding Utopias in Stoppard's Epic The Coast of Utopia" (Interdisciplinary Humanities, 27, 2, Fall 2010) 17 pages -- Discusses the various forms of utopia in the trilogy, and interprets the domestic scenes as parallel utopias with the political ones.
Sept 1781. Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir [2012] 169 pages
Like her poetry books, this memoir by the new Poet Laureate combines relatively straightforward narrative with poetry, stories and visions. She recounts her life from her childhood in the 1950's through her beginning to write poetry in I assume the early 1970's (there aren't many dates in the book.) She tells of her life with an alcoholic, philandering father, her sadistic stepfather, and her two alcoholic husbands; but also her (mainly positive) experiences at a fine arts boarding school for Indians, her interest in art, and her early poetry. There is a strong strain of native spirituality here, but also a portrait of the realities of growing up as an Indian girl in a white and male-dominated society.
Sept 1982. Tom Stoppard, Rock 'n' Roll [2006] 119 pages
This play by Tom Stoppard is about Czechoslovakia between the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the "Velvet Revolution". The title refers mainly to the case of a Czech rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe, which was arrested during that time. (Stoppard researched this, and talks about it in the introduction to the book.) There are also references to Western rock, particularly Syd Barrett (after Pink Floyd) and the Velvet Underground. The play ends with a concert of the Rolling Stones, and in performance there are excerpts from rock music played between scenes. One of the main characters, Jan, is a rock fan and friend of the Plastic People, who grew up partly in England before returning to Prague, and initially rejects the dissident cause (represented by his friend Ferdinand) as "moral posturing", claiming that people don't care about politics and just want to do their own thing, but he comes to realize that even a rock band which "has nothing to do with dissidents" is in fact considered as a threat by the government.
The other major characters are living in Cambridge, though some visit Prague during the course of the play. Max, the most interesting, is a "tankie", that is to say a die-hard member of the British Communist Party who defends the Soviet invasion. We also see his wife Eleanor, a teacher of classical literature with a particular interest in Sappho, her student Lenka, Max and Eleanor's daughter Esme, and eventually Esme's husband Nigel and her daughter Alice. The dialogue presents various approaches to politics from Stalinism through liberalism; much of the dissident position is based on the writings of Havel, who became President after the collapse of Stalinism. While I don't agree with Stoppard's rather conservative opinions, I enjoy literature which takes the political questions here seriously (although Stoppard's understanding of Marxism has definite limits) no matter what the implied conclusions. It's one of his best later plays, that is from the twenty-first century, although like most of them it is less comic than his earlier plays. (I also enjoyed listening to Plastic People of the Universe on Spotify while I was reading it, although of course I didn't understand the lyrics.)
Sept 2083. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules & Men [1935, 1978] 291 pages
The one book of Hurston's which I hadn't already read, this is her collection of rural Southern Black folklore and "conjure" stories which she gathered in the 1920's, mainly from Florida and Louisiana. The folktales ("lies") especially are very interesting and worth reading. It's a popularly written rather than an academic collection, but more accurate than what had passed for Black folklore up until then. The edition I read has the original preface by Franz Boas and a lengthy new introduction by Robert Hemenway.
Sept 2284. Michael Billington, Stoppard: The Playwright [1987] 188 pages
When I picked this book up, I thought it was a biography; actually, it's analyses of all of his plays up through Dalliance in chronological order. The author is a theater critic and these are essentially long reviews. They are interesting in that they discuss the relationships between the plays, and of course discuss the ones I haven't read or seen (including his novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon); the author also takes the ideas seriously enough to argue with them. The book ends with the hesitant hope that Stoppard would write more at a time when British drama was apparently past its peak; actually his best plays (such as Arcadia) were yet to be written.
Sept 2885. Ann Sung-Hi Lee, Yi Kwang-Su and Modern Korean Literature: Mujŏng [1917; tr. 2005] 375 pages
A translation of Yi Kwang-Su's novel Mujŏng, "The Heartless", with a lengthy introduction and bibliography (about 20% of the total pages) by the translator Ann Lee. Yi's novel is an essential "classic" for anyone interested in modern Korean literature, because of its historical influence; it was the first novel written in modern vernacular Korean (although that isn't obvious in translation) and one of the first modern Korean novels to take on serious themes -- modernization (or westernization) vs. neo-Confucian traditionalism, arranged marriages, female slavery and concubinage, the position of women in general, ideas about education, and so forth. The subjects are relevant and important, the plot is interesting, the structure (as Lee points out) is based partly on Tolstoy's Resurrection.
Unfortunately, the actual writing style is rather hard to plow through; it is very didactic, with the omniscient narrator constantly explaining what the characters (and modern Koreans) ought to do and arguing against the traditional ideas. Even worse, the style is very repetitive, with basically the same sentence repeated three, four, or five times with minor variations. Let this paragraph (p.309-310) serve as a typical example of the writing, with both problems:
"However, this love was a sympathy like that of someone who jumps into the water to save someone who is drowning. It was effective for a moment, but would not last long. The love between husband and wife should not be like that. It should be such that one could only live if the other lived. One could only be happy if the other was happy. One became one body with the other. Sŏn-hyŏng's love for Hyŏng-sik was like sympathty for a drowning person."
Another form of repetition is the summarizing of things which we saw happening a few chapters before; this is undoubtedly because the novel, like most early Korean novels, was originally published in serial form in a newspaper, but it seems much more intrusive than in other serialized novels I have read from the period (or from earlier in the West, e.g. the novels of Dickens.)
The main characters in the novel are Pak Yŏng-ch'ae, the daughter of a pioneering schoolteacher called "Scholar Pak", and Hyŏng-sik, a poor, dedicated, modernizing middle school English teacher, who was once as an orphan child taken in as a student and protegé of Scholar Pak. They believe that Pak intended for them to marry each other when Yŏng-ch'ae was old enough. When Scholar Pak and his two sons are arrested and sent to prison because of a theft committed by one of his students, the school breaks up and Yŏng-ch'ae sets out disguised as a boy to try to see her father in prison. She sells herself as a kisaeng to raise money to buy her father's freedom but the money is stolen by the go-between, and her father and brothers die in prison shortly afterwards. To understand the novel, it is necessary to understand that a kisaeng is a sort of slave who entertains clients with singing, music, dancing and other arts, often but not necessarily including sex, similar to a Japanese geisha or an ancient Greek hetaira. It should not be confused with a prostitute in the Western sense who provides only sex. In fact, for eight years Yŏng-ch'ae refuses to have sex with clients, while hoping to find and marry the only person she thinks she can trust, Hyŏng-sik. He, on the other hand, also occasionally thinks of her and imagines that he may meet her and marry her, but it is less of an obsession with him given his different life. Eventually of course they meet and the novel carries on from there, but diverging from the expected clichés of the usual novels of the period.
Hyŏng-sik is apparently intended to represent the champion of modernization, but this is not always credible, for example when he spends several boring chapters moping around obsessing over whether or not Yŏng-ch'ae is a virgin. He also seems to always make bad choices. Lee considers this to be deliberate irony. In any case the "lessons" of the novel are expressed at greatest length and very explicitly by the narrator. (The character who seems the most modern is actually Yŏng-ch'ae's friend Pyŏng-uk, a student who is studying in Tokyo.)
Lee's very academic introduction, which should probably be read after the novel (I make this a regular practice now with fiction, because of spoilers), gives a history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature putting Mujŏng in context, explaining how the language it is written in differs from earlier novels which were written in an archaic style or a hybrid Chinese-Korean, and something about the popular genres that Yi is expanding into more serious literature. It describes a little about Yi's life and earlier writings, and gives an analysis of the novel and Yi's political and aesthetic ideals. Unfortunately there is also some postmodernist-feminist psychobabble about "abjection", which she takes from Nina Cornyetz rather than directly from Kristeva. Much of the introduction, however, is concerned with what other scholars have written about Yi -- a standard "survey of the literature" which suggests to me that the translation was probably her dissertation.
Oct. 286. Katherine E. Kelly, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard [2001] 244 pages + 2 arts (32 pages)
The last book of my mini-project on Tom Stoppard, this collection contains fourteen articles. As with most of the Cambridge Companions, they are fairly useful and focused on the author and his works with a minimum of "literary theory". After the editors introduction, it conta ins a biographical article by Paul Delaney, an article on In the Native State and Indian Ink by Josephine Lee, an article on Stoppard's only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, which I haven't read, by Peter Rabinowitz, one on the radio and television plays by Elissa Guralnick, one on Stoppard and film by Ira Nadel, one on the early stage plays by Neil Sammells, one on the three "middle" plays, Travesties, Night and Day and The Real Thing, by Toby Zinman, one on Stoppard's politics by John Bull, one on his use of Shakespeare by Jill Levenson, one on science in Hapgood and Arcadia, one on his treatment of love themes by Hersh Zeifman, one on his use of/relation to other writers by Enoch Brater, one on his ambiguous relationship to postmodernism by Michael Vanden Heuvel (which says that Stoppard appreciates postmodernism in the arts but dislikes it in philosophy and the social sciences -- which is about my own view), and a bibliographical article by Melissa Miller.
I also am adding in two other secondary articles I read which were too general to place under one of the plays: Moonyoung Chung, "Stage as Hyperspace: Theatricality of Stoppard" (Modern Drama, 48, 4, Winter 2005) 17 pages, interpreting Stoppard, and particularly Arcadia, in terms of the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, which I might have actually understood if I had ever gotten around to reading their work; and more interestingly, Christopher Innes, "Allegories from the Past: Stoppard's Uses of History" (Modern Drama, 49, 2, Summer 2006) 15 pages, which points out that his plays are almost all set in the past and deal with the nature of history.
Oct 687. Yi Kwang-Su, The Best Short Stories of Yi Kwang-Su [2016] 216 pages
Having just read Mujŏng, I decided to read this collection of short stories by the same author (but a different translator). It was a mistake; while the novel was somewhat hard to get through this was a real chore. The translator Chang-Wuk Kang is obviously not at all fluent in English; he does not know how the definite and indefinite articles are used in English, omits or misuses prepositions, confuses homonyms, mixes tenses at random in the same sentence, and constantly uses "as such" when he obviously means "thus" or "therefore". He should at least have had an English speaker copyread the text and render it in grammatical English. In addition, the Kindle edition which I read is not properly formatted for the device; words are broken up with hard hyphens when there should have been a soft hyphen, the text frequently ends in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a page (evidently hard page returns were also used), the numbers for the Endnotes are not actual links, there is no table of contents and the bookmark locations does not work so there is no way to go to the Endnotes and return to the story without writing down the location and using GoTo. All of which makes it hard to review the actual stories fairly, but I'll make an attempt.
There were two stories which seem as though they would have been worthwhile if properly translated; the first story, written in 1917 at the same time approximately as Mujŏng, deals with the same theme of arranged marriage, though in a more obvious, propagandistic manner, and one later story in the first person about a group of prisoners. Toward the end, there was also a collection of vignettes about a farm and various anthropomorphized birds and animals, which might appeal to those who like that sort of thing. Most of the "stories", however, seem to be basically sermons or vague disjointed essays about the evils of the world (in very general terms) and a sort of Buddhist-Christian syncretic spiritualism. It's hard to tell given the problems with the translation, but it seemed to me that the stories written during and after World War II represent a definite falling off in both thought and writing ability compared to the earlier stories and Mujŏng.
I'm going to begin The Soil, written in 1932 and translated by a team of one Korean and one American; hopefully it will be better but at over 500 pages I may drop it if it isn't.
Oct 1088. Chen Qiufan, Waste Tide [2013, tr. 2019] 347 pages
I've been waiting for this Chinese sf novel to come out in translation since I read some of Chen's short stories for a Goodreads group last year. The premise of the novel is similar to Hwang Sok-yong's Familiar Things -- a community of low-wage workers built around processing waste, although Hwang's novel was magical realiism set in more or less the present while this is science fiction set in the near future. It wasn't a bad novel, but I was rather disappointed in it.
On the positive side, it was a very good extrapolation of how the capitalist class would "solve" the ecological crises at the expense of the working class, especially of workers in less developed countries, which is an important question now that "moderate" conservatives (known in the United States as "liberal Democrats") are looking to "green" corporations for solutions to these problems. It also avoids the trap of seeing the ecological or environmental problems solely through the lens of "climate change", which is not dealt with here; it highlights the problems of waste and pollution instead. Another theme, as in most good sf, is the misuse of technology for its own sake (and of course for profit) in a consumerist economy, and the way differential access to advanced technology augments the effects of class stratification. Whether it's due to the heritage of post-capitalist China during the Maoist period, or simply to the realities of the Chinese economy since then, there is far more awareness of economic class than one would find in American sf authors, who seem to ignore the question altogether (and this is true not only of Chen but of much of the little Chinese sf I have read.) This is not to say that it is "socialist realism" or even written from a specificly Marxist perspective, which it is not.
The novel avoids a simplistic heroes and villains dichotomy; all the major characters, whether they play positive or negative roles, are seen as intending to act for the social good as they understand it, as well as their own interests; the problems are structural to society and the characters are all constrained by their social and economic positions to identify their own interests with society. Perhaps I could express this by saying that Chen (and many other Chinese sf writers) are within a realist tradition, while most American sf is within a romantic tradition (there are exceptions, of course, which are usually the ones worth reading.)
Why, then, did I find the book somewhat disappointing? Chen is very definitely influenced by the writing of Liu Cixin, who is the best known recent Chinese sf author (both within China and abroad); he tries to use the same style of unexpected events and hidden motives which are ultimately revealed -- but he doesn't quite bring it off. While Liu's plots in the end form coherent logical patterrns, much of the motivation here remains unclear and characters' actions seem to be for no better reason than to produce an exciting plot. (Even the technological background doesn't seem quite coherent, or able to explain the way the plot develops. I can't go into detail without spoilers.) The plot is indeed exciting and fast-paced but in the end not quite believable. Another implausible feature (which he shares with Liu) is that the background of the novel goes back to the 1950s, and is based on events which one cannot quite believe happened then -- technological advances which never existed, historical events which never occured, etc. Perhaps, since the events in question are located in the United States (and many of them are supposedly top secret), Chen simply assumes that his Chinese audience will not know they are unrealistic, just as an American writer could say almost anything about China during the same period without putting off most American readers. (In fact, Chen seems to know about and refer to much more American pop culture than any American writer would know, or could get away with alluding to, about Chinese pop culture.)
In short -- better than the average formula science fiction, but not quite what I had hoped for.
Oct 1289. Robert Payne, The Fortress [1967] 628 pages
After reading The Coast of Utopia I was looking for a book that would give me more information about the early nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary figures who played important roles in the play, such as Bakunin, Ogaryev, and Nechayev; most of what I found on Amazon was out of print or beyond my budget, and this was a free read on Kindle Unlimited, so I downloaded it. I didn't expect much, having read Payne's unreliable and inaccurate attack biography of Lenin over fifty years ago in high school, and it was as bad as I expected. The most negative aspect of the book was the frequent gratuitous, irrelevant and inaccurate comments about Lenin and the Bolsheviks which are sprinkled throughout; Payne obviously has no idea of their actual politics. To give a general characterization, the book is written in the style of "popular" history which is modeled after historical fiction, with sunlight glinting on the walls, moonlight reflecting in the rivers, snowflakes drifting down and so forth; I have to admit that it was very vivid in the details, although there is not much about the political ideas involved. It does, however, give generous quotations from the writings of the various revolutionaries themselves, which is the one redeeming feature of the book.
The Fortress, as its title indicates, is ostensibly organized around the common thread of people who were at some time or another imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, but by the middle of the book that criterion was obviously abandoned. After a first chapter giving the history and description of the prison itself, the book begins with the revolt of the Decembrists. It then has parts, made up of one or more chapters each, on the circles around Petrashevsky, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky and Zaichnevsky, and the beginnings of terrorism with Karakozov's attempted assassination of the Tsar. The next part on Nechayev is the center of the book both literally and in terms of the narrative, and is by far the longest, consisting of six chapters. Payne seems fascinated with Nechayev's nihilist beliefs, which he claims (absurdly) were the inspiration and model for Lenin (I recall that he included the whole of the Revolutionary Catechism in his Lenin biography; it is included (more relevantly) here as well.) There are then parts on Zhelyabov, Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Alexander II; Sazonov, the Socialist Revolutionary Party "Terrorist Brigade" and the assassination of Plehve; Kaliayev and the assassination of Grand Duke Sergey, and other terrorist attempts. He even has a chapter on Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin's older brother, which is apparently included only so he can contrast Alexander as the perfect student, filial son, etc. with his brother as lazy, sullen, dishonest and rude to his parents. An indication of Payne's obsession with terrorism is that he devotes all of two paragraphs to the 1905 Revolution and the first Soviet, as compared to four entire chapters on the assassination of Plehve.
He ends up with a chapter on Kerensky, the great revolutionary, heroically striving to keep Russia in the war, who could have accomplished all of the ideals of the revolutionary tradition if he hadn't been tragically overthrown by the Bolshevik "coup d'état". If that seems a little far-fetched, it appears from the bibliography that it is based entirely on Kerensky's own recollections.
As bad as the book is, there are a few things which it makes very obvious. Firstly, as much as the author sympathizes with the terrorists, their strategy was totally ineffective; even in the rare instances when their assassination attempts succeeded, they were basically counterproductive, only resulting in greater repression and the destruction of their own organizations. Secondly, the police themselves, by their random mass arrests and arbitrary sentences, essentially turned people who were far from radical into terrorists. Finally, it demonstrates just how backwards and repressive the Tsarist regime actually was.
Oct. 1890. Yi Kwang-su, The Soil [1933; tr 2013] 529 pages
Another novel by Yi Kwang-su, written fifteen years later, this is obviously less important historically than Mujŏng, which was the first in vernacular Korean, but also seems to be better written, although it's hard to be sure given that they were translated by different translators. The repetitions are mostly gone, and although it is certainly didactic the didactic passages are handled in dialogue and given to appropriate characters rather than being intrusive monologues by the narrator. Some aspects of the plot are similar -- the weak protagonist who lets himself be convinced to marry the wrong, rich woman rather than his original love, the good kisaeng (spelled gisaeng in this book), the girl who goes to Tokyo and becomes a concert musician, and so forth. The emphasis on serving Korea is even more central, although education here is subordinated to economic concerns of the peasantry and setting up of a cooperative in the countryside.
The protagonist, Heo Sung, is a law student in Seoul, originally from the village of Salyeoul; he abandons the village girl he loves, Yu Sun, to marry Yu Jeong-seon, the daughter of a wealthy patron who pays for him to get his law degree. The marriage is unhappy, and Sung returns to Salyeoul to work for the peasants. The former gisaeng, Baek Seon-hi, meets him on the train and ends up accompanying him to the village where she becomes a kindergarten teacher. The novel then focuses on the countryside and its problems, as well as the relationship issues between Sung, Sun, Jeong-seon and Seon-hi. I don't want to go too much into the plot, but it involves slander, murder, prison, and a much darker overall feeling than Mujŏng, despite a not entirely convincing optimistic ending.
This is more of a propaganda novel than great literature, but still worth reading for the historical background.
Oct 2391. Lee Mun-yol, Hail to the Emperor! [1986] 490 pages
Another novel by the author of Son of Man, Yi Mun-yol (Yi and Lee are variant spellings of the same name, which also plays a role in the book itself), this is a very original and interesting (and comic) novel which is (like Yi Kwang-su's stories, which I reviewed earlier this month) unfortunately spoiled somewhat by a very wretched, ungrammatical translation. (I don't understand why Korean translators don't at least have a native speaker edit their translations for idiomatic, or at the minimum grammatical, English.) In the frame story, set in 1978, the narrator, a reporter for a small magazine, visits the area of Mt. Kyeryong to write a human interest story about a "heretical sect". He runs across a man named Wu Bal-San making offerings at a gravesite, and from him learns the story of the "Emperor Paik" and reads the True Record of his "reign", which he then turns into the present novel. (The translator in his introduction in my opinion totally misunderstands the novel by not realizing that it is told by a very unreliable narrator, or even that it is intended comically.)
The book struck me as essentially a Korean version of Don Quixote. The protagonist is convinced by his father from birth on that he has been chosen by Heaven to replace the decaying Yi dynasty with a new 800-year dynasty of Chong. He spends his early life reading the Chinese and Korean classics and esoteric old books of prophesies, which have the same effect on him that the novels of chivalry have on Don Quixote. Throughout the book he misinterprets the modern reality in terms of precedents from old Confucian and Taoist texts; in one very "quixotic" episode early on, he mistakes a train for a dragon. He collects various disciples from time to time whom he appoints as generals and ministers; one of the first, and the one who stays with him to the end, is Wu Bal-San, a peasant who more or less plays the role of Sancho Panza. At one point the Emperor comes to rule over a small village, which the Western reader will recognize from Cervantes' novel. The book does not follow Don Quixote all that closely, however.
I read somewhere that Yi Mun-yol is one of the Korean novelists who is most accessible to Western readers -- with the exception of this book. It is true that throughout it alludes to or quotes traditional historical and literary figures in the Confucian and Taoist traditions, but I would say that the Western reader no more needs to be familiar with these traditions than the reader of Don Quixote needs to be with the mediaeval romances. The comedy is in the misapplication of these historical precedents to the situation of a handful of deluded individuals in a modern context of WWII and the Korean War. (The Emperor comes to believe that he and his followers drove the Japanese out of China and Korea.) One thing I think the book does is satirize both North and South Korea by presenting them in the distorted mirror of the True Record. There is really a lot here in terms of historiographical satire and a humanist understanding of history, politics and so forth; if this were a bit shorter and a lot better translated it would have been a good choice for a book club discussion.
Oct 2592. Maryse Condé, Moi, Tituba. Sorciere [1986] 242 pages [in French, Kindle]
The imagined life of Tituba, the "witch" from Barbados who apparently was responsible for the Salem witchcraft scare, told in the first person. A well-written novel, which is compatible with the known history but goes beyond it in both directions, describing her life as a slave in Barbados and her return to Barbados after the Salem events. The book accepts the reality of her supernatural powers, so I can't really consider it as a pure historical novel, but the setting in both Barbados and Salem seems to be well depicted. Some of the dialogue seems a bit anachronistic, but since the dead with whom Tituba is in communication know the future I suppose it could work in the context of the book.
Oct 2693. Yi Mun-yol, Our Twisted Hero [1994] 134 pages [Kindle]
One of Yi's best known books, this was a very quick read -- less than two hours. Ostensibly, it is a forty year old man's recollection of a conflict in fifth grade, but actually it is a metaphor for the Korean dictatorship. The story concerns a class monitor who is able to wield extreme power over all the students because they are afraid of him; the narrator resists and is ostracized by the other students. More of a long short story than a novel, it is concise and almost perfect in its genre. Highly recommended, five stars and a favorite.
Oct. 27
94. Yi Mun-yol, The Poet [1992, tr 1995] 207 pages
A novel about the life of the early nineteenth century poet Kim Pyong-yon, told as the speculations of a present day narrator. The poet was the grandson of a "traitor", Kim Ik-son, who was executed for his support of a rebellion against the dynasty, and as a result was ostracized and excluded from the scholarly career he might have expected. He ultimately rejected the conventions of society and became a wandering poet. The novel is based on the facts of his life and his poetry, but at the same time it has a symbolic dimension, given the similar ostracism of many South Koreans (including Yi Mun-yol himself) whose relatives supported the North Koreans in the Korean War. While the novel was interesting with the discussion of the functions of poetry, the fact that I don't know Korean and have never read any of Kim Pyong-yon's work meant that much of it was not really meaningful to me. I was particularly disappointed in the ending when it veers into mysticism.
Oct 3195. Choi In-hun, The Square [1960, tr. 2013] 158 pages
The November read for the World Literature group on Goodreads, this short novel written in 1960 was among the first modernist novels in Korean. The translation is not perfectly idiomatic, but much better than many of the ones I have read lately. (This is the only book by Choi that I have found in English, but there are a couple in Spanish translation that I may read next month.) The novel begins with the protagonist, Lee Myong-jun, on board a ship of former POWs from the Korean War, en route to resettlement in India. We then follow his previous life through (possibly distorted) memories, first in South Korea, where he was persecuted because his father was a Communist who chose to live in the North, then as a "defector" himself in the North, where he becomes disillusioned with the Stalinist regime that he describes well as "an imitation of a revolution." (I'm always impressed by authors who realize the problem with these regimes is not that they are "communist dictatorships" but that they are bureaucratic parodies of communism, although oddly Choi -- or perhaps only Myong-jon -- doesn't seem to realize that that was true of the original Stalinist regime as well.) He joins the military during the Korean War, is captured by the Americans, spends some time in a POW camp and at the end of the war chooses to go to a "neutral country" rather than either South or North Korea.
The central theme of the book is contrasting "The Square" (always capitalized), the public, objective sphere of life, with the "room" or "private chamber" which represents the subjective private life of the individual, and arguing that The Square in both Koreas has been so corrupted that Koreans have retreated entirely into private life. (This is one of those "sixties" ideas on the borderline between phenomenology and Marxism; my philosophy-student subconscious kept suggesting vague and possiblly irrelevant memories of Habermas.) There is of course much about his loves and his mental life and growth. I enjoyed the novel. Unfortunately, as with so many novels that start out well, he can't seem to end it without introducing a rather mystical conclusion.
Nov 496. Maryse Condé, La vie scélerate [1987] 348 pages [in French, OpenLibrary facsimile]
The title, literally means "the wicked life" but I would translate it as "Life is a bitch"; that more or less expresses what the book is about. Like Segou, this is a historical epic following the various branches of a single family through four generations; in this case, rather than pre-colonial Africa, it traces the history of the African diaspora in the twentieth century Caribbean.
It begins with Albert Louis, a cane worker in Guadalupe, who leaves to work on the Panama Canal. After a stint in San Francisco, he returns to Guadalupe wealthy with American dollars and establishes a business. The story then alternates between his sons Albert (Bert), Jacob, Serge and Jean, his grandchildren, particularly Thecla, and his great-grandchildren, one of whom is the narrator.
There is much about politics, especially the influence of Marcus Garvey, and much of the plot turns on attitudes toward racially mixed marriages. The novel moves between various parts of Guadalupe, as well as New York, Paris and Jamaica. All the characters seem unpleasant and abusive, victims of their parents who reproduce the same dysfunctional attitudes from generation to generation, although this may be due to the narrator's experiences. The strengths and weaknesses of the novel are similar to the earlier book; the chronology is occasionally confusing, there are too many characters who are insufficiently developed and recur long after the reader (or at least this reader) has forgotten who they are, and spirits play a major role as in her earlier novels.
Interesting in parts, but I've read better novels about the region.
Nov 697. Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks [2010] 369 pages
Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 of cancer; cells removed from her cervix were cultured and became the HeLa line of "immortal" cells, which were the first to continue to reproduce without limit, and became one of the major tools for cell research. In this book, the author alternates three stories: the story of Henrietta; the story of the research on her cells; and the story of her family and their interacttion with the author. The book deals with the ethical questions raised by the use of cells, obtained without consent, for commercial research which made millions of dollars for the biotech companies while Lacks' family could not afford basic medical care, as well as explaining something about the scientific and medical benefits of the research (I would like to have seen more of the science, but it was not the main focus of the book). The facts about segregated medicine were horrifying, although the author also points out that to a large extent the problems of the Lacks' family were a question of class more than race. Unfortunately, the capitalist nature of medical care and research is taken for granted, and the questions are all considered within that limit, which means that there are no really satisfactory solutions. The book became a best seller, with more than a million and a quarter copies sold, and was made into a movie in 2017; apparently not much has changed in the meantime. This is the November book for our library's book club.
Nov 998. Choi In-hun, Tres Obras de Theatro Coreano [2007] 132 pages [in Spanish, Kindle, Google Play]
Three plays by Choi In-hun, in Spanish translation (I couldn't find anything by this author in English translation except The Square, and of course I don't read Korean). The description at the end, presumably from the back cover of the print book and by the publisher, calls them "realismo fantastico", which I assume means the same as "magical realism", but they really seem to be more the equivalent of fairy tales, though I don't know whether or not they are based on traditional stories or are original. There is a certain amount of realistic background, e.g. poor and oppressed peasants, but that is the background of most fairy tales even if it isn't generally emphasized.
[Possible slight spoilers]
The first play, En tiempos lejanos, is about the birth of a "messenger of heaven" in a small farming village, and the attempt of the government to find and kill him (similar to the Biblical legend of Herod). Perhaps this would have made more sense to me if I knew the background legends, but the messenger doesn't seem to bring any sort of message, and at the end I just felt like, this is all there is?
The second play, Cuando la primavera llega a la montaña y a los valles is the story of a peasant girl who is in love with a boy from the same village, but is wanted as a concubine by the local nobleman. There are no magical elements apart perhaps from the unnatural behavior of the animals at the end, although there is a magical fairy tale which is alluded to by the main character at one point. There is a twist at the end which made it interesting.
The third play, Dónde nos volvaremos a encontrar is the most magical and the most complex; it is the story of an exiled princess who marries a hunter from the mountains, but the situation is not what she thinks it is. This is the only one that seemed to possibly have any of the metaphysical meanings that the publisher's description ascribes to all three, but I'm not sure what that meaning was. It was an entertaining story but again it might require more knowledge of the traditional culture to really understand.
Nov 14100. Maryse Condé, En attendant le bonheur [1988] 243 pages [in French, Kindle] + 5 sec. arts. (72 pages)
En attendant le bonheur is a revised edition of Condé's first (1976) novel, Heremakhonon (a Malinke word meaning "waiting for happiness", which she translated into French for the later novel -- by the way, this novel has no connection with the film of the same name.) The original novel was extremely controversial and was not commercially successful; she has a preface here explaining that it was misunderstood and outlining the changes she made to make it clearer what she intended. In my review of Ségou: les murailles de terre I suggested that the political dimension of the book should be considered in the context of the debates over négritude and Pan-Africanism, and her last book I read, La vie scélerate also deals with many of the same ideas (Garveyism, and the class divisions in Guadeloupean society). In this preface, she makes it explicit that many of her works are a critique of négritude and Pan-Africanism, emphasizing the diversity of African and diaspora cultures and the importance of class divisions within Caribbean and African nations.
The novel is the story of a bourgeois Guadelupean woman, Véronica Mercier, who, after nine years in Paris, comes to an unnamed West African country (modeled on the Guinea of Sekou Touré, in the early 1960's) seeking a Black past which was not based on slavery. She takes a job teaching philosophy in a local school. The book is told in stream-of-conciousness, beginning with her arrival in the country and then flashing back to fragmentary memories of Guadaloupe and Paris; the chronology of the memories is not in order, so it is rather confusing at first, especially as her two lovers are named Jean-Marie and Jean-Michel. In the present of the novel she ends up in a relationship with a government offical, Ibrahima Sory, who is a descendant of a family which once ruled much of the area. Initially apolitical and refusing to see what is happening in the country, she eventually is forced to realize that she is allied with the oppressors.
Because this was Condé's first novel, and she was also from a Guadaloupean bourgeois family, studied in Paris, and moved to Guinea about the time the novel is set in, critics were quick to consider it as autobiographical and criticize the author for the narcissistic behavior and naive ideas of the protagonist; she says in the preface that Véronica was an "anti-moi" whose ideas and behavior was very different from her own. In an interview quoted in one of the secondary articles I read, she says that only the early life of the protagonist in Guadaloupe was based on her own life but that everything in Africa was quite different; while Véronica, considering herself a victim of colonialism and racism, never realized her own class position and identified with elites in both Paris and Africa, Condé rebelled against her class upbringing and was a political activist. She also remained in Africa for over a decade rather than the three months that the character in the novel stayed. Understanding that Véronica is not Condé, it becomes obvious that she is not intended to be a sympathetic heroine and that the book is critical of the idea that Africa is a "homeland" for the people of the Caribbean.
Today, critics consider the novel to have marked a significant development in Caribbean literature. This is obvious from the five secondary articles I read after finishing the book. (See my thread for details.)
===========================================
Daniel R. Morris, "A "Tragic Mistake?": Véronica's Identity Quest in Maryse Condé's Hérémakhonon" (Cincinnati Romance Review, XVI, 1997) 7 pages -- a good general account of Véronica's failed quest for identity.
Eva Sansavior, "Just a Case of Mistaken Ancestors? Dramatizing Modernisms in Maryse Condé's Heremakhonon" (Paragraph, 37, 2, 2014) 14 pages -- discusses the relationship to/use of Césaire and Fanon in the novel.
Rogers Asompasah and Mousse Traore, "The fragile 'absolute': Heremakhonon and the crisis of representation and historical consciousness" (IOSR Journal of Humanities And Social Sciences, 19, 1, 2014) 10 pages -- despite the Deleuzian theory, this has a good discussion of how the novel calls into question the Afrocentric and Eurocentric representations of modern Africa.
Irina Dzero, "Maryse Condé's Heremakhonon As a Noir Novel" (Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 39, 1, Jan 2015) 18 pages -- Compares the structure of the novel to a noire detective novel, with Véronica as a typical noir detective influenced by the perpetrators, and ending by exposing the corruption of societal institutions. I learned a lot about the theory of noir literature.
Sanyu Mulira, "A Life Lived Between Autobiography, Fiction, and History: Maryse Condé" (Ufahama: A Journal of African Studies, 39, 2, 2016) 23 pages -- Contrasts the life and character of Véronica and Condé.
out of orderNov 9
99. Kim Young-ha, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself [2000, tr. 2007] 131 pages [Kindle]
This is a bizarre but interesting short postmodernist novel by the author of Your Republic is Calling You. It is difficult to review at any length without spoilers, but I will try to give a sense of what it is about. The narrator is someone with a very unusual occupation, which we gradually learn more about. After a short introductory chapter in the first person, we get a third person novel about two of his clients and two other persons who connect the two stories, although the narrator occasionally intrudes with more information about himself and his writing of the novel. In the end, I was not sure whether in fact the narrator was supposed to be accepted at face value as the person he claims to be, or was simply a novelist creating tha t narrator as a character; that is, whether there was a third narrator between the actual author and the supposed narrator. The novel is about alienated characters who are on the margins of real life, without real relationships or interests.
101. Kim Young-ha, Photo Shop Murder [1999, tr. 2003] 90 pages Two short stories, "Photo Shop Murder" and "Whatever Happened to the Guy in the Elevator?" Frankly, I expected something more; they are entertaining stories, but that's all.
The first story is sort of a murder mystery, or perhaps a parody of a murder mystery, because the solution has nothing to do with the interrogation or the detective work, but just gets revealed out of the blue at the end. I had thought from the title that it would have something to do with the program Photoshop, but I should have looked at the date: the victim is the owner of a photo shop, that is a place that develops people's film and takes ID pictures and so forth. I suppose it could be considered "noire" but it doesn't exactly fit that genre either.
The second story is about a day that goes wrong, from the razor that snaps half way through shaving in the morning, to the man stuck in the elevator in the apartment, and so on through the day. The people don't care about each other, which is probably the point, and it is somewhat comic in a slapstick comedy sort of way.
Nov 21 102. Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times [1992, tr. 2010] 248 pages
Tokarczuk, the belated winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, has apparently long been considered one of the most important contemporary Polish authors, although I hadn't heard of her (I really didn't know any recent Polish writers except for the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem). Primeval and Other Times was her third novel and the first to win recognition in translation. It is frequently compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Cien Años de Soledad, and I think the comparison is apt; it reminded me strongly of that novel -- Primeval, like Macondo, is both an isolated, symbolic community identified with the creation of the world and yet subject to invasion from the outside world (in the case of Primeval, the two world wars and the Stalinist regime.) The "magical realist" style is quite similar in both novels, and both feature a central mystery (the undecipherable book in Cien Años and "The Game" in Primeval) which in both books is given to the patriarchal character by a mysterious Jewish sage.
Primeval is divided into many short two or three page chapters called "The Time of _____" which are from the different perspectives, not only of all the human characters, but also God, the Virgin Mary, angels, a ghost, animals, plants, houses, "The Game" and even a coffee grinder. The book opens with a man called Michal being conscripted to fight in World War I, and, although there are no dates given after about 1949, I would say it continues until at least the late sixties or early seventies -- the characters born near the beginning are dying of old age by the end. Not a really political novel, but it shows the history of the country and the character of its people in a symbolic way through individual but not always realistic experiences.
There is a lot of religious description, but the book is hardly orthodox in its version of Christianity -- God is a mysterious but imperfect character on a level with all the other characters, and doesn't seem interested or able to intervene in the affairs of the human and other populations. The novel is violent in some parts (especially the German occupation), and has some sex, so (like Cien Años) I wouldn't recomment it to less mature readers, who probably wouldn't understand it either. The bottom line is that if you liked Cien Años, you will probably like Primeval, and if you didn't you probably won't.
Nov 24103. Kim Young-ha, Black Flower [2003, tr. 2012] 320 pages
In 1905, 1033 Koreans left Korea on a British ship to work in the haciendas of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Later, a small number joined the guerrillas fighting the Cabrera regime in Guatemala, where they founded a short-lived government of New Korea in the jungle before being wiped out by the government forces. This historical novel tells their story. The main characters are Kim Ijeong and Yi Yeonsu, respectively a poor orphan boy and a daughter of the ruling family, who fall in love aboard the ship. The personal stories of these two and the other emigrants are told against the background of Korean and Mexican history. The historical elements are interesting; Kim Young-ha obviously knows Korean history and has researched the Mexican and Guatemalan history, although he seems to have a rather abysmal knowledge of world history in general -- for example, he has "Trotskyites from Germany" fighting in Pancho Villa's army in 1915. The personal stories have some interesting twists, but also a lot of clichéd situations. In all, an exciting but somewhat uneven novel.
Nov 29104. Kim Su-Young, Shin Kyong-Nin, Lee Si-Young, Variations: Three Korean Poets [2001] 303 pages
A bilingual anthology of poems by three Korean poets from different generations, Kim Su-Young from the fifties and sixties, Shin Kyong-Nin from the seventies and eighties, and Lee Si-Young from the late seventies into the nineties when this translation was made. I'm not really good at reviewing modern poetry, but some of these poems were very evocative, at least as far as I could tell from the translation. They were mostly short, from a few lines to a couple pages, many featured landscapes and natural phenomena, some were about the ordinary farmers' and workers' lives, and there were also some which were political, about the failed democratic revolutions in South Korea and the sense of sadness and despair over the conditions of the country.
Dec 1105. Kim Young-Ha, I Hear Your Voice [2012, tr. 2017] 259 pages
A postmodernist novel with some "magical realist" elements, this has a similar bleak feel to I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. The book is set mainly in Seoul, and deals with economically and social marginal characters, mostly runaway teenagers, who alternate between part-time minimum wage jobs and homelessness and prostitution. The central character is an orphan, Jae, born in a bus station restroom to a teenage mother, rescued by and then later abandoned by a low-paid working woman who becomes unemployed and addicted to meth, escapes from an orphanage and lives on the street or with small groups of other runaway teens, and ultimately becomes the charismatic leader of a teen motorcycle gang which is in conflict with the police. The first person (and as we ultimately learn, very unreliable) narrator for most of the book is his childhood friend Donggyu, the emotionally disturbed son of a policeman, who initially suffers from aphonia and later runs away himself. Near the end the narrative shifts to a novelist who is researching the story for the novel and we see some of the events from other perspectives, making it uncertain how much of the earlier narrative is true. Jae has (or believes he has) certain paranormal abilities.
Dec 7106. Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night [1988, tr. 2002] 293 pages
The second novel I have read by Tokarczuk; like Primeval it is divided into short chapters which are about different characters, and could be regarded as essentially a "novel in stories". The first person narrator, who is never named, and her husband, referred to only as "R." (who plays almost no role in the book), have just moved into a house in Nowa Ruda, in Silesia but within sight of the Czech border. She meets her elderly neighbor, Martha, and presumably Martha is the source for many of the stories. The setting is in the present, as of when the novel was written, although many of the stories begin earlier (and one story in several parts is set at the time of the Reformation). The historical background is that at the end of World War II, Silesia, previously part of Germany, became part of Poland while parts of eastern Poland became part of the USSR; the German inhabitants of Nowa Ruda (previously called Neurode) were deported and replaced by Poles from farther east. The house that the narrator and R. occupy formerly belonged to a German couple called the Frosts, and one story is about them.
The story from the Reformation is a life of Saint Kummerniss, a not-yet canonized virgin martyr whose face is miraculously replaced by the face and beard of Jesus to save her from a forced marriage, written by a monk whose one desire is to become a woman; the monk later becomes connected with a bizarre sect called the Cutlers, whose main industry is making knives. (I assumed that this was all invented, but in fact there is a real legend of St. Kummerniss which is found in Grimm's Märchen and elsewhere, based on the "real" St. Wilgefordis. The Monk and the Cutlers are apparently made up by Tokarczuk.) There is another story where a husband and wife each have an affair with a young person named Agni; there is a suggestion (but not made explicitly) that the two Agnis are male and female versions of the same person.
The narrator has an interest in dreams, which she collects from the Internet, and many are included in the stories. While many of the stories in this book are similar to those in Primeval, this is less "magical realism" since the non-realistic elements can mostly be explained as dreams or legends, or are ambiguous, rather than being vouched for by the narrator. It is definitely not a realistic novel, though, so it will appeal mainly to readers who enjoy experimental modernist fiction.
Dec 9107. Kim Young-ha, Diary of a Murderer and other stories [2013, tr. 2019] 200 pages
The journal of a retired serial killer with advanced Alzheimer's -- descriptions that come to mind are emotionally intense, bleak, noir, confusing, and extremely well-written, not to mention bizarre. In short, what one would expect from a novella by the author of I Have the Right to Destroy Myself and I Hear Your Voice. The title novella takes up about half this short book, and is followed by three stories, "The Origin of Life" about a man who meets his childhood girlfriend, with unfortunate results, "Missing Child" about the aftermath of a kidnapping, and "The Writer" about a novelist with writer's block. All are in a similar style. Kim's writings aren't especially profound or enlightening, but his strange, original plots and characters tend to make a long-lasting impression.
Dec 10108. Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples [1994, tr. 2014] 47 pages [Kindle]
Bae Suah is one of the best known contemporary women authors from South Korea; her book Recitations is the January reading for the group I am in on Goodreads. Highway with Green Apples is one of her first works, a short story which is available free as a "Kindle Single." The narrator and her friends are young women who are lonely and alienated, and looking for emotional support in various failed or failing relationships with boyfriends. The author is obviously a good writer but I am looking forward to reading something more substantial by her.
Dec 12
109. Choi In-hun, El Hombre Gris [2016, tr. 2016] 306 pages [in Spanish, Google Play ebook]
The Spanish translation of a Korean novel, the English translation of which is unavailable. Choi is best known as the author of The Square, which I read last month for a Goodreads group. El Hombre Gris is an experimental novel about a young man, Dok Jun, who was born in North Korea and moved South to Seoul during the Korean War; he is a college student, who aspires to be a novelist.
The book opens with a visit to Dok Jun from his friend, the political science major and activist Kim Hak. Both under the influence of alcohol, they have a long rambling conversation about politics and literature. The novel then flashes back to Dok Jun's childhood and adolescence up to the time he finishes military service and returns to school in Seoul. The novel continues to alternate between his life and long dialogues (really monologues) about politics and art. As the short epilog about the book explains, the structure of the novel is basically essays with no real connection to the plot. While I usually like novels which are experimental and focused more on ideas than plot, in this case the long rambling self-contradictory and repetitive monologues which sound more like set speeches (or perhaps more accurately student "bull sessions") than actual conversations or thoughts, just become very boring. I have to admit that this may be partly because I didn't really find much agreement with the author's or the characters' theories about literature, art, religion, history and politics; and perhaps I should also make allowance for the fact that I was reading it in a third language which is neither the author's or my own.
There were a few interesting points, including a unique "take" on vampire stories.
The ebook had a lot of typos and some formatting issues.
Dec 14110. Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found [1998, tr. 2015] 109 pages [Kindle]
Another short work by Bae Suah with the same basic feel as Highway with Green Apples. The narrator (never named) is a young woman from an impoverished and dysfunctional family; the father is a former minor bureaucrat who is in prison for corruption, the mother an alcoholic, and the older brother uneducated and unemployed. She has very low self-esteem and seems incapable of having real feelings for other people or forming real relationships. The story goes back and forth in time, and is confused in her consciousness, with some obviously unique events seemingly taking place at more than one time and place, just as in the earlier story. Bae Suah seems to have a very unusual and personal style of writing, to judge by these two stories; the only analogy I cam think of is Anais Nin's Cities of the Interior>.
Dec 18111. Olga Tokarczuk, Flights [2007, tr. 2017] 403 pages
Flights is really less a novel than a collection of very short essays and meditations, mainly about travel and the preservation of anatomical samples interspersed with short stories. The connections are always indirect but if one thinks about them they are there. The longest story is about a woman and child lost on an island, which reminded me of the film L'Avventura. Many of the essays are quite interesting and made me think about travel in a different way; they also reminded me of a book of contemporary essays I read a year or so ago. The book is very different from the two earlier novels-in-stories I read by Tokarczuk, but also cast some light on what she was trying to do in the earlier books. This doesn't really fit into any classification but was definitely worth reading. It won the Man Booker International Prize last year.
Dec 25112. Bae Suah, A Greater Music [2003, tr. 2016] 146 pages [Kindle]
The longest book I've read so far by Bae Suah; the structure seemed as though she wasn't quite adept yet at arranging a longer story. You do want to build up to a climax with more interesting material as you go along, but in this case the beginning is just too boring to really get into, and I almost gave up before I got through the first 40%. The early parts focus on the unnamed narrator's (never well-defined) relationship with her boyfriend(?) Joachim and his uninteresting family -- frankly, they didn't seem to even like each other very much, but that wasn't really a surprise given the failed relationships in the two other books I've read by Bae. Nothing really interested me, not even the somewhat obscurely written part near the beginning where she falls into the river through the ice and thinks she is going to die. About 40% in however, her memories turn to her childhood -- a very interesting account of how schools turn off the most intelligent students, so that they sometimes turn out to be the least well-educated by the end -- and then toward her homoerotic relationship (although there are no sex scenes, or even real love scenes) with M., which are far better done. The last 60% of the book was a relatively good novel.
One of the recurrent themes of the book is that the order of past, present, future is purely in the senses, and that there really is no present; thus the narrative moves from time to time and place to place without really establishing what is the present time of the novel; an interesting enough technique in itself, but somewhat disorienting here. The majority of the action takes place at two times in Berlin, the first time as an exchange student who is trying to learn German (M. is giving her private lessons) and the second time when she returns (from a trip back to Korea) to dog-sit for Joachim's dog Benny, which is the situation she is in at the beginning of the book. Her early days and a short intermediate period are set in Seoul. There were many interesting passages about music and literature, which were the basis of her relationship with M., but they weren't really well-integrated with the narrative.
Bae is often credited with continuing an earlier focus of Korean literature on working-class people which has been superceded recently with novels about the "middle class" and the rich (like most American novels); so I was very disappointed that this novel stereotypes the working-class Joachim (a metalworker) as anti-intellectual and concerned only with making money, while the upper-class M. (the narrator defends her against Joachim's claims that she is rich, but she doesn't work a normal job) is the sensitive, artistic/literary role model.
In short, if this had left out Joachim and just focused on the narrator and M. I would have rated it much more highly.
Interestingly, the novel ends with a quotation from Peter Handke, whom I have just begun reading this week.
57. Articles on Hamlet [2010-present] 589 pages
The last group of articles on Hamlet from Academic Search Premier, thirty one articles from the past ten years. A few are worthwhile. Specific articles reviewed in my Challenge thread.
Smith, Emma, ""To buy, or not to buy": Hamlet and Consumer Culture" (Shakespeare Studies, 39, 2011) 21 pages -- Argues that the prolifereration of editions of Hamlet and of Shakespeare's other plays and collected plays is driven by consumerism and profit rather than new scholarship. It needs not a ghost come from the grave to tell us that . . .
Poole, Kristen, "When Hell Freezes Over: Mount Hecla and Hamlet's Infernal Geography" (Shakespeare Studies 39, 2011) 36 pages -- Argues that the ghost is in Purgatory under Mount Hecla in Iceland, and that this is somehow important to understand the play. I wasn't convinced on either count. It did have some interesting information on the traditions locating the entrance to Purgatory there, though.
Collington, Philip D., ""Sallets in the Lines to Make the Matter Savoury": Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in "Hamlet" 2.2" (Texas Studies in Literature & Language, 53, 3, Fall 2011) 36 pages -- Uses Bakhtin's theory of the "dialogic" to consider the use of "inserts" in different forms and styles within the play. The analysis of the "inserts" was somewhat useful, but just common sense -- why use jargon and quote Bakhtin? I get tired of pretentious academics who take a kernel of common sense and enfold it in jargon as a "critical method" or "literary theory". I suppose that's what makes Literature Departments seem like they're doing something advanced and profound. Although better Bakhtin than Lacan at least.
Pollard, Tanya, "What's Hecuba to Shakespeare?" (Renaissance Quarterly, 65, 4, Winter 2012) 34 pages -- Discusses the knowledge of Euripides' Hecuba in the late Renaissance and tries to show that Shakespeare's mentions of Hecuba, especially in the Player scene of Hamlet, were based on Euripides as well as on Latin sources such as Ovid. Hecuba was the most frequently translated and adapted of Greek plays in the sixteenth century; Iphigeneia in Aulis, another play which focused on the sacrifice of a daughter, was a distant second. Hecuba was a model for the "revenge tragedies". Discusses the importance of Hecuba in the play.
O'Neill, William, "Doing and Performing in "Hamlet"" (Midwest Quarterly, 53, 2, Winter 2012) 11 pages -- Analyzes the play as about the downfall of Hamlet's Wittenberg Protestant idealism when confronted with the Machiavellian reality of Elsinore. Good interpretation but not especially new.
Evans, Meredith, "Eros tyrannos" (Shakespeare Studies, 40, 2012) 10 pages -- A very subjective article about (I think) love in the play; I didn't understand it at all.
McCollum, Cayla, "Mirrors: Shakespeare's Use of Mythology in Hamlet" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 12, 2012) 6 pages -- Argues that Shakespeare uses images from Greek mythology to "mirror" the characters. Another article labeled "Undergraduate paper", so intended not so much to offer new insights into the play (it doesn't) as to demonstrate the student's ability to understand the reading and argue a thesis. It does that fairly well, although if the author is an "advanced undergraduate" (i.e. a senior) I would criticize it for a somewhat superficial understanding of the play, and especially of the mythology -- the citations are all to elementary internet sites. The article sticks to the play with no "literary theory" or jargon -- so unfortunately the author probably won't have as successful an academic career as the one who wrote about Derrida and "trauma theory."
Foley, Andrew, "Heaven or Havoc? The End of Hamlet" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 24, 2012) 12 pages -- Takes issue with the idea that the play ends with some sort of resolution or providential plan. "With the end of Hamlet, and the end of Hamlet, there is only a weary feeling of loss, and a bleak sense ofthe almost inevitable futility of human action in an empty and uncaring universe." Certainly a possible reading, since Hamlet, Gertrude and Laertes die along with Claudius and Fortinbras is a military leader, but not how it affects me.
Bristol, Michael D., "The Customary and the Ethical: Understanding Hamlet's Bad Habits" (Shakespeare Studies, 40, 2012) 7 pages -- Discusses customary ethics vs. morality in the play.
Venema, Jeremy, "'Shortly They Will Play Me in What Forms They List upon the Stage': Hamlet, Conscience, and the Earl of Essex" (Religion & the Arts, 16, 3, March 2012) 26 pages -- Argues that Hamlet is partly based on the Earl of Essex. Interesting discussion of the historical parallels.
Goth, Maik, ""Killing, Hewing, Stabbing, Dagger-drawing, Fighting, Butchery": Skin Penetration in Renaissance Tragedy and Its Bearing on Dramatic Theory" (Comparative Drama 46, 2, Summer 2012) 24 pages -- Metaphors from surgery in Renaissance drama.
Freiberger, Erich, "Reason and the Death of Fathers: The Tragic Structure of Representation in Hamlet" (Interdisciplinary Humanities, 29, 2, Summer 2012) 16 pages -- The play as an allegory of Platonic philosophy. Didn't make a lot of sense.
Vanhoutte, Jacqueline, "Denmark's Rotting Reconsidered" (Philological Quarterly, 91, 3, Summer 2012) 26 pages -- Discusses leprosy and the disease metaphors in Hamlet
Parris, Benjamin, ""The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body": Sovereign Sleep in Hamlet and Macbeth" (Shakespeare Studies, 40, 2012) 42 pages -- Discusses the King's Two Bodies (Renaissance political theory) in connection with sleep in the plays (Hamlet I and Duncan killed in their sleep, "Macbeth has murdered sleep", Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, etc.) to suggest that Shakespeare is concerned with the connection of the body politic and the "bare life" of the king when he is asleep rather than watchful. I might have understood this better if I had read Giorgio Agamben who seems to be the inspiration for the article.
Engle, Lars, "Moral Agency in Hamlet" (Shakespeare Studies, 40, 2012} 11 pages -- Discusses the idea of agency with respect to the play. Interesting but mainly deals with secondary works.
Lewis, Rhodri, "Hamlet, Metaphor, and Memory" (Studies in Philology, 109, 5, Fall 2012) 33 pages -- Notes the oddness of Hamlet's second soliloquy, which focuses on remembrance rather than revenge and seems to assume that Hamlet can control what he remembers or forgets; discusses Aristotelian-scholastic theories of memory and mnemotechniques as context for the play and argues that Hamlet delays because he simply doesn't have a passionate desire to revenge, though he thinks he should have.
Titlestad, Peter, "Hamlet the Populist Politician" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 25, 2013) 7 pages -- Argues that Hamlet's soliloquies are spoken not to himself but to the audience, who represent the populace and whom Hamlet is trying to win over to his cause. Makes suggestions for how to play the soliloquies.
Chamberlain, Stephanie, "Fatal Indulgences: Gertrude and the Perils of Excess in Early Modern England" (Journal of the Wooden O Symposium, 13, 2013) 9 pages -- Discusses Elizabethan theories of the humors and the relation of drinking to lechery; almost presents the play as a temperance tract.
Murphy, Brett E., "Sulphurous and Tormenting Flames: Understanding the Ghost in Hamlet" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 26, 2014) 6 pages -- Discusses the question of whether the ghost comes from Hell or Purgatory, finds the evidence ambiguous and argues that it is more useful to read the ghost scenes in connection with their probable source.
Young, Sandra, "Recognising Hamlet" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 26, 2014) 14 pages -- An interesting discussion of various recent stage interpretations of the play which depart from the "Oedipal" interpretation, especially those which interpret it more politically.
Voss, Tony, "The Myth of the Multitude: "The displeased commons of the citie"" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 36, 2014) 8 pages == Begins from the paper by Titlestad above and extends it to several other plays where the populace plays a role in the action.
Freeman, John, "Re-Proofing the "Zero Part of Speech" in Hamlet" (Comparative Drama 49, 3, Fall 2015) 24 pages -- Discusses the difference between "O" and "oh", and uses "discourse analysis" to try to decide which particle Shakespeare actually intended in various lines of the play. Analyzes the relative frequency of the two statistically in Shakespeare and in other playwrights of the time.
Northway, Kara, ""Bid the players make haste": Speed-Making and Motion Sickness in Hamlet" (Shakespeare Studies, 44, 2016) 28 pages -- References to speed and haste in Elizabethan culture, and their use in Hamlet; argues that the play uses accelerated and decelerated motion and contradictions between motion on stage and in the dialogue to create disorientation in the spectators.
Kiefer, Frederick, ""Accidental Judgments" and "Casual Slaughters" in Hamlet: Horatio's Eyewitness Account" (Shakespeare Studies, 45, 2017) 19 pages -- Similar to the article by Foley above, it considers the ending and particularly Horatio's last speech to argue that the play is about chance and meaninglessness rather than any sort of providential plan. Compares the play to Preston's Gorboduc and Marlowe's Edward II.
Voss, Tony, ""The Subject of the Land": Marcellus in Hamlet" (Shakespeare in Southern Africa 29, 2017) 9 pages -- Discusses the minor character Marcellus as a representative of the common people and the "continuity" of life in Denmark below the level of the nobles.
Campana, Andrea, "Identified: Locale where Hamlet was Written, Plus Marlovian Resonances in Shakespeare's Canon" (Heythrop Journal, 59,1, Jan 2018) 19 pages -- A perfect example of the logic of a crank theory. Argues that Hamlet was about the Jesuits and has a connection with Raglan Castle. The arguments: 1. The Gravedigger scene has the line about "my lady ... if she paint herself an inch thick", and a letter circulated among the Jesuits mentions that Queen Elizabeth has "paint a half inch thick"; therefore the play must have been written after the letter that it is "quoting". This is the principal "evidence". 2. Yorick has been "in the ground" for 23 years; Edmund Campion the Jesuit missionary was martyred in the 23rd year of Elizabeth's reign; therefore Yorick alludes to Campion. Also Yorick poured a flagon of wine on the Gravedigger's head, which is an "obvious" reference to a priest performing baptism, and Campion was a priest. 3. The Gravedigger scene has a dozen or so (common) words like "infinite", "laugh", "jest", "lady" etc. which also appear in a Jesuit theology book (in totally different contexts); thus again Shakespeare must have been "quoting" (these individual words). 4. Shakespeare mentions the word sheep; sheep are used to crop the grass on bowling greens; Raglan Castle had a bowling green; therefore there is a connection of the play with the castle. . . The article also has a lot of facts about Jesuits in England and pages of genealogies of many noblemen who were believed to be Catholic; none of which has any connection with her argument or Shakespeare, but is designed to make the article seem to be scholarly. Velikovsky, move over.
Elliot, Natalie, "Shakespeare's Worlds of Science" (New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, 54, Winter 2018) 21 pages -- Discusses Shakespeare's references to the new scientific theories of the time in Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth.
I hit the character limit!! Part 2 follows.