Follow

• 

  Colonial Fiction

  Richard Ruppel

  An encyclopedia entry about colonial fiction, defined as "fiction set in what was once the colonial world, the world that European powers colonized in the 'Age of Discovery'… In this fiction, typically, white, male protagonists leave Europe as explorers, adventurers, soldiers, traders, administrators, or, occasionally, exiled criminals to encounter a foreign world of jungles, deserts, illnesses, and, especially, peoples and cultures."

• 

  Uranium : War, Energy, And The Rock That Shaped The World

  Tom Zoellner

  Uranium is a common element in the earth's crust, and the only naturally occurring mineral with the power to end all life on the planet. After World War II, it reshaped the global order. Marie Curie gave us hope that uranium would be a miracle panacea, but the Manhattan Project gave us reason to believe that civilization would end with apocalypse. Slave labor camps in Africa and Eastern Europe were built around mine shafts, and America would knowingly send more than 600 uranium miners to their graves in the name of national security. Fortunes have been made from this yellow dirt; massive energy grids have been run from it. Fear of it panicked the American people into supporting a questionable war with Iraq and its specter threatens to create another conflict in Iran. Now, some are hoping it can help avoid a global warming catastrophe.

• 

  A Thought on the Prudishness of Marianne Moore

  Brian Glaser

  Marianne Moore's prudishness is of a particular kind. While Moore was sensitive and averse to sexual innuendo, she was fascinated by animality and pointed out traits both humans and animals shared in that regard. She was "careful to prevent the theme of human sexuality from obscuring glimpses of the larger but less obvious theme of human animality".

• 

  Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love Between the Lines

  Richard Ruppel

  This book analyzes the representations of homosexuality in Conrad’s fiction, beginning with Conrad’s life and letters to show that Conrad himself was, at least imaginatively, bisexual. Conrad’s recurrent bouts of neurasthenia, his difficult courtships, late marriage, and frequent expressions of misogyny can all be attributed to the fact that Conrad was emotionally, temperamentally, and, perhaps, even erotically more comfortable with men than women. Subsequent chapters trace Conrad’s fictional representations of homosexuality. Through his analysis, Ruppel reveals that homoeroticism is endemic to the adventure genre and how Conrad’s bachelor-narrators interest in younger men is homoerotic. Conrad scholars and those interested in homosexuality and constructions of masculinity should all be interested in this work.

• 

  'Intestine War' and 'The Smell of Mortal Change': Troping the Digestive Tract in Milton's Paradise Lost

  Kent Lehnhof

  "Kent Lehnhof's essay 'Intestine War' and 'The Smell of Mortal Change': Troping the Digestive Tract in Milton's Paradise Lost… expands discussions of the nature of sacred space in Milton's epic. For Lehnhof, Milton's rejection of the body reflects a similar rejection of Roman Catholicism, a further example of how the religious controversies that have defined the early-modern period in England have reached their culmination in Milton. Again, the Catholic/Protestant controversy lies very much behind the period's redefinitions of the relationship between the sacred and the profane. In considering the tendency of readers of Milton to note Milton's detachment in his poetry from the body, even in his discussions of Christ, Lehnhof suggests that it has become impossible by the mid-seventeenth century to speak of the relationship between the sacred and the profane outside the context of not only the Catholic/Protestant debate, but also of the Anglican/Puritan debate that had taken its place by the time of the English Civil War. Although some of the terms are the same as we saw in earlier discussions of Donne and Herbert, the emphasis and tenor of these comments have shifted. As Lehnhof illustrates, the description of the physical in Paradise Lost is tied most unpleasantly to the descriptions, actions, smells, and behaviors of Satan and his cohort of fallen angels. This is an unappealing description of the profane that is very much in contrast to Milton's descriptions of heaven and paradise. Milton's depictions suggest a true dichotomy between the sacred and profane, rather than an absorption and transformation of the profane into the sacred that we have seen described in other essays in this collection. But, this difference is only apparent and only seen when the description involves the divine and the hellish. When the description involves Adam and Eve, the world of man in which sacred and profane must inevitably be joined, then the picture begins to look like that in our earlier essays." --Mary A. Papazian, ed.

• 

  Performing Woman: Female Theatricality in All's Well, That Ends Well

  Kent Lehnhof

  Lehnhof considers the character of Helena, the traveling "Doctor She" of Shakespeare's "All's Well, That Ends Well", in light of the ciarlatani, or female performers in early mountebank medicine shows that traveled Europe peddling cures and folk remedies.

• 

  An Ordinary Man : An Autobiography

  Paul Rusesabagina and Tom Zoellner

  The life story of Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose heroism inspired the film Hotel Rwanda. As his country was torn apart by violence during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, hotel manager Rusesabagina--the "Oskar Schindler of Africa"--refused to bow to the madness that surrounded him. Confronting killers with a combination of diplomacy, flattery, and deception, he offered shelter to more than 12,000 members of the Tutsi clan and Hutu moderates, while homicidal mobs raged outside. This book explores what the film could not: the inner life of the man who became the most prominent public face of that terrible conflict. Rusesabagina tells his full story--the son of a rural farmer, the child of a mixed marriage, the career path which led him to become the first Rwandan manager of the Belgian-owned hotel--all of which contributed to his heroic actions in the face of horror.

• 

  The Heartless Stone : A Journey Through The World Of Diamonds, Deceit, And Desire

  Tom Zoellner

  When he proposed to his girlfriend, Tom Zoellner gave what every American man is supposed to give at such a time, a diamond engagement ring. But when the relationship broke apart a few months before the wedding, he was left with a used diamond ring that began to haunt him. Zoellner looked harder at the stone, and the consequent fascination sent him around the world. Across fourteen nations and six continents, the empty mythology of the diamond drew him into a world in which a piece of carbon is made to breathe with the profound intimacies of our own histories.

• 

  Uncertainty and the 'Sociable Spirit': Raphael's Role in Paradise Lost

  Kent Lehnhof

  Lehnhof considers the role of Raphael in Milton's Paradise Lost. Though he seems be visiting Eden as a "sinless agent" doing the work of God, he makes many mistakes, contradicts himself numerous times, and misunderstands human love. Lehnhof argues that Paradise Lost represents Raphael in a sinister, perhaps even satanic, way, and that the angel may have precipitated the Fall.

• 

  "Girl! What? Did I Mention a Girl?": The Economy of Desire in Heart of Darkness

  Richard Ruppel

  "Through Conrad's working life, the homosexual 'species' came under increasing scrutiny, definition, and censure; same-sex desire was an increasingly contested issue within popular, legal, and medical discourses. Conrad's fiction traces this interest, though most often in subterranean ways."

• 

  Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory

  Ian Barnard

  One of the first extended and theoretically informed investigations of queer theory’s racial inscription, Queer Race understands race as inextricably sexualized, as sexuality is always racially marked. The book critically and playfully explores intellectual and political deployments of the term «queer», gay pornographic videos about South Africa, contemporary literary representations of interracial gay desire, the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, and Jeffrey Dahmer’s criminal trial. Through these explorations, Queer Race charts a framework for understanding the «race» of queer theory that both tests queer theory’s limits and suggests its future inter-relations with anti-racist work.

• 

  'Rather say I play the man I am': Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Elizabethan Anti-theatricality

  Kent Lehnhof

  In the second act of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, the hero is informed that his acceptance as a Roman consul is dependent upon donning the robe of humility and petitioning the common people in the market-place for their ratifying vote. Coriolanus recoils from the custom, outraged at the idea of acting a part—complete with costume, dialogue, and stage directions— that does not correspond with his inner truth. At this moment and others, Coriolanus echoes the anti-theatricalist rhetoric of Elizabethan pamphleteers like the popular and prolific Stephen Gosson. In many ways, Coriolanus serves as a stand-in for the anti-theatrical ideology of Gosson and his Elizabethan contemporaries, allowing Shakespeare's play to explore the arguments of those opposing dramatic representation.

• 

  The Racialization of Sexuality: The Queer Case of Jeffrey Dahmer

  Ian Barnard

  "In this article I read media and subcultural representations of Jeffrey Dahmer, the white male U.S. serial killer who gained notoriety in the late 1980s for having sex with and then murdering and dismembering men of color in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My aim is to show the extent to which the degree of Dahmer's homosexualization in a particular representation determines Dahmer' s thinking and actions in the sphere of race, and to suggest how spiraling efforts to separate race from sexuality in the Dahmer case only further intricate the two analytic axes."

• 

  Aladdin's Problem [Aladins Problem]

  Mark Axelrod

  The Babel Guide to fiction in translation reviews and lists novels and short stories available in English. This chapter discusses Ernst Jünger's Aladdin's Problem.

• 

  Casanova's Homecoming [Casanovas Heimkehr]

  Mark Axelrod

  The Babel Guide to fiction in translation reviews and lists novels and short stories available in English. This chapter discusses Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Homecoming.

• 

  Concrete [Beton]

  Mark Axelrod

  The Babel Guide to fiction in translation reviews and lists novels and short stories available in English. This chapter discusses Thomas Bernhardt's Concrete.

• 

  Man in the Holocene [Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän]

  Mark Axelrod

  The Babel Guide to fiction in translation reviews and lists novels and short stories available in English. This chapter discusses Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene.