(Dis)placements

She looked loathingly at the spoon. It was a metal spoon, dark, with a small engraving on its handle – a sharp taste. “Open your mouth, slowly, eaaaasy, like a little birdie in its nest,” he said, bringing the spoon to her mouth. He hated spoons; they had seemed despicable little things since he was small. Why did he now find himself having to wield it, full of soup, having to usher it now into this young child’s mouth, as his parents had done to him, as surely as his parents’ parents had also done? If they even had spoons then, if some fool had already invented them. He had to find himself an encyclopedia and figure out when the first spoon had been forged; he had to get his hands on an encyclopedia, a source of infinite knowledge by which he might survive. Spoon: A piece of silverware with a concave scoop at its end; typically used for carrying liquids to the mouth.

This paper offers an analysis of two characters, Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, in William Faulkner’s Light in August. The characters are analyzed through R.D. Laing’s concept of ontological insecurity. In the search for the roots of ontological insecurity, special attention is given to the childhood years of these characters, and to the race-related trauma originating in that period. The aim is to show that both these characters exhibit schizoid personality traits as a consequence of that trauma, and also as a result of the society they live in. Namely, Joe and Joanna never work through their initial trauma because it is actually reinforced by their society.Key words: William Faulkner, Light in August, R. D. Laing, ontological insecurityAn articulate critic of the South, Lillian Smith in her Killers of the Dream presents southern culture as a rigid society that controls its citizens through ruthless socialization. Drawing primarily from her own experience, she describes southern cul...

The boy was playing alone on a dusty road, not far from the big door of the courtyard of his house. On a day other than a market day or a holiday, the road would be peaceful, almost deserted, but the boy would always harbor a hidden hope that the road might produce something new, rare, and exciting. On that day the road brought nothing for quite a long time. At one moment the boy raised his eyes. High overhead he saw someone coming down the hill.The slopes of that unusually steep hill rose above the town almost perpendicularly, evoking in the boy’s mind the image of a school blackboard. The precipitous surface of the hill was streaked by a dusty white road that disappeared behind low, rocky and sparsely vegetated mounds with a well-trodden shortcut the color of clay stretching between them. High above on the hill the traveller emerged as a tiny figure whose clothes or age could not yet be discerned. The boy saw him disappear behind the rocky mounds and then appear again, coming out of ...

This paper examines the influence of Aristotle’s theory of place (topos) on the conceptualization of cultural universality. Its main focus is in reinvesting the thought of Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson surrounding the fossilized spatial boundaries that limit understanding in order to scrutinize both the virtual and figurative processes inherent to the sketching of a universal human plane outside of local custom in certain literary works. This investigation yields a concept of “figurative agency” that is then delineated in the Tao Te Ching and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in order to demonstrate how the concept might serve as a bridge between the extended space of a national culture and the virtual plane invested by world literature.Keywords: world literature, Henri Bergson, Spinoza, figurative agency, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tao Te-Ching, literary epistemology

Gwen Pharis Ringwood (1910–1984) is one of the most eminent Canadian playwrights of the 20th century. In her drama Drum Song: An Indian Trilogy which consists of three parts: Maya (Lament for Harmonica, 1959), The Stranger (1971) and The Furies (1981) the author implements her knowledge of First Nations’ traditions and customs. Moreover, it is “in the lives of the Indian tribes [that] Gwen Ringwood had found an elemental struggle for survival that has produced conflicts comparable with those of Greek tragedy” (Perkyns 330). Such conflicts and elements characteristic of Greek tragedy find their place in this trilogy as well. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to analyse those elements, examine their function, the way and form in which they are presented in the trilogy. Keywords: Canada, drama, First Nations, Gwen Ringwood, tradition, tragedy, trilogy

Transgressivity, in a broad sense, denotes a state of movement from one distinct position, mode, or territory to another, be it spatial, geographical, mental, spiritual, or even narrative. Transgression occurs when one crosses boundaries, in other words, limes of different entities. Geocritical transgressivity, which is a multifaceted concept, may lead to a variety of interpretations at many different strata. Transgressivity finds echoes in Caryl Phillips’s narratives, at times in geographical forms, where a deterritorialized character crosses borders without ever gaining reterritorialization, at other times, in his fragmented narration where the reader stands at a threshold. Our paper uses Phillips’s A New World Order (2001) in particular as a key text through this geocritical lens of transgressivity to see to what extent it functions as the author’s map legend that presents a cartographic pattern of his writing in general. Our discussion also focuses on Phillips’s distinct analyses i...