FRANCISCO COLLADO-RODRIGUEZ, “Trauma and Storytelling in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road”
ABSTRACT: Cormac McCarthy has been gradually understood as a writer of universal themes. This essay aims at linking notions frequently studied by Trauma Studies to McCarthy’s use of storytelling as an ambiguous response to the traumatized conditions experienced by his protagonists in No Country for Old Men and The Road. The mistrust of storytelling, the ethical ambivalence existing between passive melancholic protagonists and active violent ones, and the understanding of life as a traumatic experience link the two books in a sole literary project that warns readers about the human capacity to generate violence and questions the role of storytelling to soothe traumatic pain while demanding also the reader’s ethical positioning.
JONATHAN A. COOK, “Poe and the Apocalyptic Sublime: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’”
ABSTRACT: Among critical approaches to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” commentators have discounted or overlooked the pervasive influence of the Burkean sublime; yet an informed reading of the tale reveals a dramatic enactment of the “apocalyptic sublime”—a critical category melding biblical apocalyptic motifs with Burkean ideas of sublime terror. The House of Usher is accordingly a virtual showcase of sublime effects, as is the representation of its disturbed occupant Roderick, an archetypal Romantic artist figure; moreover, the resurrection-like return of Madeline Usher after her premature burial precipitates an apocalyptic chain of events, culminating in the collapse of the house in a parody of divine retribution. While Roderick Usher dies of the unmediated terror of the Burkean sublime, the reader can enjoy the quasi-supernatural events of the story with more vicarious “delight,” including the apocalyptic doom surrounding the destruction of the Usher house and line.MARIE NELSON, “‘Why Gost Thu in White?’: A Non-Question Reconsidered as a Genuine Request for Information”
ABSTRACT: When the Archbishop of York asked Margery Kempe why she travelled dressed in white he was not sincerely requesting information, a requirement for questions John R. Searle established in Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language; and his following query about her maidenhood status was just as clearly a non-question. This essay, however, gives attention to the archbishop's queries as if they were genuine questions and finds answers in Margery Kempe’s story of her life.MARK ZUNAC, “‘The Dear-Bought Lessons of Experience’: Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice and the Empiricist Revision of Burke’s Reflections”
ABSTRACT: Scholarship surrounding British literary responses to the French Revolution has tended to reinforce the notion that the British reform movement throughout the 1790s remained inexorably tethered to the revolutionary left, neatly and diametrically opposed only by a conservative counterrevolution invested in a rigid, retrograde defense of the status quo. This essay revisits the work of the feminist Mary Hays, whose novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799) demonstrates the inadequacy of the right/left dichotomy and reflects the author’s attempt to fictionalize through metaphor the importance of enacting reform without resorting to the corrosive and self-defeating violence of revolution. In this novel, Hays appropriates the historical empiricism of the counterrevolution, specifically Edmund Burke, to promote reforms that had been hindered by the application of Enlightenment principles in France. Moreover, the author investigates the practical impact of the radical philosophy on British citizens, seeking a rapprochement between genuine reform and constitutionally afforded right.