Forthcoming in PLL

BELINDA BRUNER, "A Recipe for Modernism and the Somatic Intellect in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons"

ABSTRACT: "A Recipe for Modernism and the Somatic Intellect in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons" presents the argument that, though Alice Toklas was certainly upstaged by her partner Gertrude Stein, the writing Toklas did after Stein's death (particularly the narrative cookbook containing the immortal marijuana brownie recipe) is of literary significance. The concerns of this paper range from the development of Modernism and theories of narrativity to the gastric preoccupations of the Modern expatriates. In addition to spotlighting Toklas's work, the essay compares The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book to Stein's Tender Buttons and suggests an alternative concept of the pair's literary relationship while exploring issues of coauthorship, influence, and lesbian domesticity. Toklas is credited with inspiring Stein's use of the somatic intellect through a seduction that resulted in the heightening of Stein's desire to overthrow conventions of linguistic representation.

ABSTRACT: This essay proposes to read the "anagram" of Barthes's erotic body as encoded in the textual body of S/Z. It explores how Barthes achieves his textual pleasure/jouissance through breaking apart and reassembling the various bodies of signs he finds in Sarrasine. Thus in S/Z, corporeality is transcribed into textuality, which is articulated upon sexuality, which is inscribed on corporeality. Barthes activates heterogeneous sign systems to bring Balzac's narrative into the polymorphous textual terrain of signifiance, in which multiple sign systems are perpetually transformed into each other. In this process of textual transformation, different body parts circulate, exchange, and transgress upon each other. What is more, the multiple transformations of textuality and confusing clash of body parts are conducted in a cacophony of sexualities. The shifting interrelations of corporealty, textuality, and sexuality thus weave into the erotic body of S/Z and bring forth jouissance for the readers of S/Z.

ABSTRACT: This paper demonstrates the hermeneutic basis of Nietzsche's perspectives on the philosophical origins of tragedy through a new interpretation of his largely-ignored fragment, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873). In Nietzsche's posthumously-published essay, he undertakes an analysis of the philosophical worldview of the pre-Socratic spirit by examining the relationship between the genesis of tragic philosophy and the thinking of the pre-Socratic philosophers. This study posits that the acknowledgement of Nietzsche's admiration of the above-mentioned pre-Socratic ideals, as evidenced in his 1873 essay, provides a more concrete basis for the understanding of his ideas regarding the philosophical and ideological nature of tragedy, rather than the customary reliance upon the underdeveloped, overtly Wagnerian themes presented in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

ABSTRACT: This essay examines a common threat looming over each of the aforementioned plays: a monstrously intemperate overindulgence, shadowing an England that preys upon itself (R2 2.1.39). The criminals in Richard II and 1 and 2 Henry IV possess hearty and very literal appetites, and the justice sought against them is a reaction to and against an intemperate, immoderate participation in the physical world. But more often than not, Shakespeare's royals exercise poor judgment because of their very assumptions about the vileness of participation, and it is when they are most eager to remove themselves, and their England, from the taint of a despoiled social order that they reveal their own relations to it most undeniably.

ABSTRACT: Jorge Semprun has spoken of his books as "des chapitres dune autobiographie interminable" ("chapters in a never-ending autobiography") and in them he endeavors to understand his identity as an intellectual and a writer. Jean Am‚ry has shown how such an identity was imperiled by the experiences of torture and internment in concentration camps, which he and Semprun both endured. As prisoners, they were surrounded by death, and it continued to exert its influence on their lives and their works. Semprun believes that his past in Buchenwald, where he was imprisoned, has, along with its horrors, become the foundation of a new identity. It shares this privileged place with books and the literary culture that Semprun inherited from his family. Literature made possible humane encounters with others in the camp and gave Semprun hope for a future with his identity as an intellectual intact.

In the Connecticut Yankee, Mark Twain exposes the dark side of the American Dream by creating, in the protagonist, Hank Morgan, a Yankee embodying features of Nietzschean heroism as we most often find them in Will to Power. In the novel, Twain projects and analyzes the archetypal shadow in his culture's fantasy of redemption by comparing and contrasting Morgan's consciously un-Nietzschean but unconsciously Nietzschean yearnings. Nietzsche is direct and brutal in his demands for the elimination of a Christian cultural superego that must, he believes, be replaced with a pagan id. Nineteenth-century America, by contrast, approached its demands for a cultural revolution through a more conservative and measured means, confining and concealing its demonic ego drives behind masks of Puritan inhibition. This paper will discuss the complex relationship among the American Emersonian Dream, the Nietzschean Dream, and Twain's own variation of both that appears in the Connecticut Yankee.

ABSTRACT: In her lifelong experimentation with the graphic potential of written texts, May Swenson created a significant body of shaped poems, many characterized by exceptional ingenuity and intricacy. "The DNA Molecule" is a particularly compelling instance of her iconographic imagination at work: its shape reflects the recognition that constitutes its central topic, namely, that Duchamp's famous painting of a Nude Descending a Staircase resembles the double-helix formation of a DNA molecule. Exploring this resemblance in the body of her poem, Swenson finds intriguing congruence between emerging principles in aesthetic design, on the one hand, and new discoveries in the biological sciences, on the other. She shows that twentieth-century artists and scientists identify similar patterns of transformation and reproduction, and that both demand a paradigmatic approach to the most ancient and primal of human concerns: genesis. An interdisciplinary tour de force, her poem prods readers to confront modernism in the largest sense: the habits of mind it cultivates and the interpretations of reality it fosters.