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"Envy Fiction."
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I wish I were a--
A meerkat wishes he were as silly, strong, and mighty as the other animals, but when trouble arrives it is the chimpanzee, the bear, and the lion who envy the meerkat.
Book
Lectures to Specters: Ozick's Genealogies
Cynthia Ozick is often considered one of the few writers willing to identify herself specifically as a Jewish writer. Yet this characterization of Ozick obscures more than it illuminates. By attending to the understudied themes of genealogy and sexuality in Ozick's work, a more complicated picture of her relation to Jewish identity emerges. This article shows how Ozick figures the ambivalent relation of Jewish identity and literature through deviant sexualities and genealogical breakdown, through a reading of her novella \"Envy; or Yiddish in America\" (1969). Drawing on studies of the biological imagination in Jewish literature, post-vernacular Yiddish histories, and recent critical scholarship on identity in Jewish literary study, I read Ozick as a theorist of the entanglement, tense but generative, of literature and desire. My reading seeks not only to revise our scholarly relation to this canonical figure, but also to use genealogy to ask how literature complicates normative models of identity in Jewish studies.
Journal Article
Ball & Balloon
Ball wishes he could fly like Balloon, but when a boy arrives and sends Ball rolling, bouncing, and even soaring into the air, Balloon feels deflated.
Book
“The Sea Spits Out Corpses”: Peripherality, Genre, and Affect in the Cosmopolitan Mediterranean
This essay brings together two genres—Mediterranean noir and the novel of clandestine migration—to suggest an alternative reading of both that considers the specific aesthetics of emotions that radically dissimilar subject positions across the Mediterranean might necessitate in a literary text. As the number of people desperate to cross the sea increases by the day as a result of ongoing conflicts in so many of the states on its Southern shores, the inequities that prevail between the various countries of the Mediterranean have perhaps never been more visible even if they are hardly new. This essay addresses how this unequal social, political, and economic reality has been textually transposed through a register of negative minor affect that marries the political to the aesthetic at the core of the Arabic novels written in those countries that line the Mediterranean's Southern coast. The article focuses on Youssef Fadel's novel Hashish (Yūsuf Fāḍil's Ḥashīsh), published in Arabic in 2001, but Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy reappears throughout as a counterpoint, a reminder of the disparate representations the Mediterranean yields depending on the author's field of vision. Seen from the North, the sea's ports offer cosmopolitan urban spaces with their own distinct brand of utopianism and nostalgia; from the South, we find an urban environment suffused with disgust, envy, paranoia, and abjection.
Journal Article
Oliver : the second-largest living thing on Earth
Oliver wishes he were as popular and important as Sherman, the largest giant sequoia tree, until he discovers it is enough to be part of something big.
Book
«Ma bella più di tutte l’Isola Non-Trovata» . Montalbano, Falcó e Adamsberg: personaggi seriali a confronto nella narrativa di Camilleri, Pérez-Reverte e Vargas
Molti personaggi letterari si potrebbero paragonare metaforicamente a isole inaccessibili, su cui tanti si sforzano, senza successo, di esercitare una forma di possesso. Questo lavoro si focalizza su tre personaggi, l’italiano Montalbano, il francese Adamsberg, lo spagnolo Falcó, tra i quali ho cercato di dimostrare che sussistano numerose ed evidenti analogie, riguardo alla loro personalità e ai loro rapporti con i colleghi di lavoro, con la famiglia, gli amici, gli amori. Si tratta di individui straordinari dalle caratteristiche eccezionali che, spinti dall’esigenza di autonomia, tendono a seguire il loro istinto e spesso a violare le regole; hanno logica, intuito, capacità di reazione insoliti, tali da farli primeggiare rispetto a chi li circonda. La loro superiorità innegabile può essere invidiata o sminuita, ma inevitabilmente li porta a evitare i legami e a scegliere la solitudine volontaria come stile di vita, come condizione necessaria per il funzionamento della loro mente privilegiata e presupposto indispensabile per il mestiere che hanno deciso di svolgere.
Journal Article
I wish I was sick, too!
A young cat envies her brother the pampered treatment he gets when he is sick in bed until she gets sick too.
Book
The Institution of Polygamy in the Chinese Imperial Palace
This study examines Chinese imperial polygamy under two aspects, as institution and actual practice. Institution refers to its existence as a set of rules and expectations, practice to the actual ways in which imperial people carried out polygamy as recorded in both historical and fictional sources. The key to the institutionalization of polygamy had to do with the idea that a ruler did not engage in polygamy because he wanted to, but because he had to in order to fulfill his role as Son of Heaven. He was obligated to extend the patriline and was as if following a hallowed directive. Practice had to do with what rules and expectations could not control or predict, including how a man justified his role as polygamist, his polygamous transgressions, and how he dealt with the main challenge to polygamous harmony, women's jealousy and rivalry.
Journal Article
Inside paradise lost
Inside \"Paradise Lost\"opens up new readings and ways of reading Milton's epic poem by mapping out the intricacies of its narrative and symbolic designs and by revealing and exploring the deeply allusive texture of its verse. David Quint's comprehensive study demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion and keywords give structure and coherence both to individual books ofParadise Lostand to the overarching relationship among its books and episodes. Looking at poems within the poem, Quint provides new interpretations as he takes readers through the major subjects ofParadise Lost-its relationship to epic tradition and the Bible, its cosmology and politics, and its dramas of human choice.
Quint shows how Milton radically revises the epic tradition and the Genesis story itself by arguing that it is better to create than destroy, by telling the reader to make love, not war, and by appearing to ratify Adam's decision to fall and die with his wife. The Milton of thisParadise Lostis a Christian humanist who believes in the power and freedom of human moral agency. As this indispensable guide and reference takes us inside the poetry of Milton's masterpiece,Paradise Lostreveals itself in new formal configurations and unsuspected levels of meaning and design.
eBook
Enigmas of identity
\"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going,\" Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation.
eBook