Category: 2017 Blog Posts

 

In the book Nazi Propaganda by Z.A.B. Zeman there is a photo that was taken in Nurnberg Germany, 1935. Nurnberg is located within the southern half of Germany. Looking at this photo (Zeman, 98) I see three German party rally officers walking on the street. Up ahead of them is a trolley and to the left of these three German men are Der Sturmer posters. Der Sturmer was a Nazi propaganda newspaper that ridiculed, mocked, and was anti-Semitic towards Jews. The founder of the Der Sturmer was Julius Streicher who was a member of the Nazi party and did not like the Jews. The Der Sturmer newspaper was up in Germany until the end of the war but at one point the Der Strumer had to be taken down during the 1936 olympics, “All such notices as ‘Jews not admitted’ were taken away from the entrances to hotels and restaurants; Streicher’s newspaper Sturmer could not be bought in the streets” (Zeman, 109). The Der Sturmer was taken down early in the war as they did not want other countries to see the Nazi’s beliefs about other foreign countries.

Moving back to the photo, what makes this picture unique is that these three German officers were just walking by these anti-semitic/offensive posters and for these three men it just seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. This newspaper dehumanized Jews and made Germans perceive them as being inferior to their culture. When viewing this image it is evidently clear to see that anti-semitism and having a hatred towards the Jews was just the cultural norm of Germany during World War 2 (Zeman, 99). The poster itself has two faces on it, one face looks like a skull and in front of the skull face is a man with a serious expression. He also has the same mustache that Hitler had and underneath them is a photo of the newspaper that is written all in German. Additionally, on this newspaper there was a symbol of the Swastika on the poster. The swastika before World War 2 was known as being a symbol of peace but during this war the Nazi’s used the swastika as a symbol of violence and hatred towards other inferior races which specifically targeted the Jews. The swastika became a symbol of Nazi territory so wherever the swastika was located or was in sight, it gave Jews a sense of fear and an unacceptance throughout all of Europe other than Great Britain. While the swastika may have been Hitler and the Nazi’s parties symbol of pride, throughout Europe wherever Jews went to go hide the symbol of the swastika meant Jews should be fearful for their lives.

Not only did this newspaper not like the Jews to begin with, but they also tried to get the German people and the Nazi’s to have more of a hatred towards the Jewish race.  Whenever there was a bunch of interesting or disturbing news that was related to the Jews in the Der Sturmer, this pro-Nazi newspaper would publish it and then send it out to their readers. The Der Sturmer had some, “scandoulous gossip about the Jews also rated high on the priority list-this form of journalism had been introduced by Julius Streicher in Der Sturmer. ‘Ritual murder’, for instance, was hardly perennial; it combined anti-semitism, violence, and sex in equal proportions” (Zeman, 25). Through the Der Sturmer the Nazi’s wanted to brain-wash the German people into believing that all Jews were bad and that murdering other people was just a common and daily habit for the Jewish race.

 

Zeman, Z.A.B. Nazi Propaganda. London; New York : Published in association with the Wiener Library [by] Oxford University Press, 1964., 1964.

 

Lisciotto, Carmelo. “Der Stürmer.” Holocaust Research Project.Org, Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team, 2009.

 

“History of the Swastika.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 

Similar to my blog post last week, I’ve decided to focus back in on John Okada’s No-No Boy and a particular archival document that relates directly to the text itself and the main characters presented by Okada. Like mentioned before, the main protagonist in the story, Ichiro, has just recently returned to Seattle from being held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese during WWII, after being forced into fighting on the side of the United States while his family suffered in an internment camp. Ichiro, much like many other Japanese-American men during this time, were physically forced into participating in the war against their own country, mainly for two reasons: 1) to help America win the war through increased manpower and 2) for xenophobic fears surrounding the Japanese people residing in the US at the time. Fighting in the war served as an outlet for these xenophobic feelings that allowed a constant monitoring of these men, and an assurance of their allegiance to the US, and not Japan.

In order to unite these men, and all men who were fighting for the US during WWII, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an announcement that called for a “Brotherhood Week”, extending from February 19^th-February 28^th,, 1943. This Brotherhood Week, pictured above, called on these men to fight as one united front to maintain the freedoms that are made possible because of the longstanding fight the US has put up against the enemy.

FDR starts off by stating that “we are fighting for the right of men to live together as members of one family rather than as masters and slaves”, which seems contradictory from the start. Not only are people, like Ichiro in Okada’s novel, excluded from this resounding “we” (which happens to be repeated three times throughout the announcement), but they are essentially positioned as the slaves forced to work – or in this case, fight – for the masters who lead this country. In the novel, Ichiro would contest the fact that he is a part of this “family” of the United States for a variety of reasons, such as that his family is being held in an interment camp while he is forced against his will to fight in a war – seemingly contradictory meanings to the word “family”, as FDR denotes.

This statement goes on to call upon “the spirit of brotherhood” that these men are fighting for, and ends with a seemingly empty promise to “extend brotherhood earth-wide which gives hope to all the world”. Again, the spirit of brotherhood that FDR talks about is contradicted directly by the troubles that Ichiro faces throughout the novel, the biggest being identity and belonging. Ichiro feels as though he doesn’t belong as an American because of the terms of living he and his family are given by the government, but he also doesn’t feel as though he belongs as a Japanese man because he fought against them (again, unwillingly) and he no longer physically resides there. Because of that, the way FDR ends his announcement with a call to action for brotherhood earth-wide crumbles underneath itself, for there isn’t even a true brotherhood visible within the United States, as Ichiro would argue.

 

One of the guiding questions of my research has been, what role or purpose do the Norse gods serve within the context of the ancient Norse society? Since they are apparently not morally perfect, or even good, it would appear that they are not meant to guide their believers in that way, differing drastically from the functions of the gods or messiah figures in most religions. For example, most theologians would agree that it would be good to live your life as similarly to Jesus as possible (WWJD). However, what if the Norse gods are not meant to guide people, but are just reflections, albeit extreme dramatizations, of the current society in which the believers already live? This idea is supported by their conception of what the universe looks like. They conceptualized a giant ash tree, called Yggdrasil, as the center of the earth. In the center of the tree is Asgard, the home of the gods, who represent order. Traveling away from the center is Midgard, home of the humans. Around the atmosphere of the tree is Utgard, the home of the “ice-giants”, who represent chaos. This conception of the world reflects the real situations of the ancient Northmen and how they live. A typical Viking settlement would have the home in the center, representative of order (Asgard), then the farm surrounding the house, tame but not necessarily as “orderly” as the house (Midgard), and beyond that, the forest, which would be vast and wild, unchartered territory (Utgard).

The gods of Asgard and the giants of Utgard are perpetually at war. This war will eventually end in the doom of the gods, called Ragnarok. This constant war is not presented as a battle between good and evil, but between order and chaos. Therefore, I believe they serve to reflect the Norse/Viking society, which did not necessarily value “goodness” in a moral sense, but did value order, because it was necessary to the continued survival of the clan(s).  The gods did not instruct their believers in a didactic way, but upheld already existing conventions. Georges Dumėzil’s “Tripartite Structure”, as applied to this pantheon, supports that argument. Some questions that spring off of this idea of perpetual war that I can use to guide further research are, what implications does it have that the gods do not even win the war? And is it significant that we know at the start of the sagas that the gods are in fact already dead? Or will die? What purpose does linear time serve to this idea of perpetual war? Are the gods both alive and already dead to the characters in the sagas, similar to how the Christian god is both always present and has already died as Jesus?

Georges Dumėzil studied a range of Indo-European tales and identified a deistic organization that many cultures share. “Dumėzil has sought to demonstrate that the earliest I-E speaking societies of India, Europe, and elsewhere shared a common set of such ‘collective representations’. Most if not all of these early I-E societies, he asserts, were characterized, at least in their earliest known periods, by a hierarchically ordered, tripartite social organization, each stratum of which was collectively represented in myth and epic by an appropriate set of gods and heroes” (Littleton, 148). Dumezil makes the argument that these societies, including the Vikings, possessed a “tripartite ideology” that was able to travel and spread geographically. This ideology refers to a tendency to divide phenomena in general into three related categories. This notion reminded me of the Christian Holy Trinity. For the Indo-European societies that Dumezil studied, (not Christianity) he came up with three overarching categories: the priestly stratum, the warrior stratum, and the herder-cultivator stratum (in descending order of importance). This hierarchy applies in general to all the early I-E societies, but I believe in the pre-Christian Icelandic society, it holds with a few tweaks. For example, the “priestly” function is expanded to include the King or clan leader, represented by the gods Odin and Tyr. It is expanded, not altogether changed, because some sagas will still show the importance of the mystic or the shaman, although the “priest” is usually a “priestess” (called a Völva…) The Vikings add a judicial as well as a mystic quality to the first function. Additionally, the third function, the herder-cultivator, is expanded to include a female fertility function, represented by the goddess Freyja.  That leaves the warrior function, fulfilled by Thor. I believe this tripartite structure serves to uphold the order of the Viking clans, because it makes specific categories for the leaders, the warriors, and the peasants. I will use examples from specific sagas, such as Sigurdr’s Saga, where this structure is particularly evident, to further this argument.

Citation:

Littleton, C. Scott. “The Comparative Indo-European Mythology of Georges Dumézil”. Journal of the Folklore Institute. Vol 1, No. 3. Dec. 1964, pp.147-166. JSTOR

photo source

When I first spotted all six volumes of A Cultural of History of Food on a neglected library shelf, I foolishly thought, “I’m set!” I expected to rely heavily on the volumes to inform the trajectory of my research (i.e. which period(s) I would select for my thesis) and to provide me with the most complete, deep research on its advertised focus, “a cultural history of food.” But I am disappointed in these volumes. Here I focus on volume six, A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age, a period the editors define as 1920-2000. The chapter titles are promising: “Food Production,” “Food Security, Safety, and Crises,” “Kitchen Work,” and “Family and Domesticity” all relate to the work I am doing on home cooking and cookbooks in periods of infrastructural crisis: the Victorian era (industrializing food production), the Turn of the Century (further industrialization and overwhelming immigration and population influx (Pilcher 27)), WWI, and WWII (both of which experienced crippling rationing and food shortages).

Since this volume’s parameters are 1920-2000, I knew its only overlap with my periods was WWII. But on WWII this volume’s information is meager. “Food Security, Safety, and Crises” and “Family and Domesticity” proved the most fruitful chapters, but even their research related tangentially to mine. They provided context and a broad scope rather than detailed information on wartime interactions with food. In “Family and Domesticity,” Alice Julier sweeps over the crux of food in WWII with statements like, “reformers and government agents promoted [added vitamins to widely distributed foods] after World War I because they worried about the supply of healthy potential soldiers” (150), and the helpful (in that it confirms my own conclusions from examining wartime cookbooks) but boring (because it lends nothing to my research, pushes on no facet of wartime cooking) statement, “As the market was unreliable, canning, preserving, and growing food…were still common place practices, reinvigorated by national propaganda campaigns in World War II…” (154). But this is obvious from any wartime poster; of course citizens relied on their home kitchens during wartime, when embargoes and hostile national relations interfered with trade. I am picking on Julier’s chapter, but all the chapters I read in volume six shared this problem of sweeping over the exciting, probing questions of why citizens ate this way, what the challenges on the home front were with daily eating and providing for families, what health problems emerged from this malnutrition? This volume fails to address the questions its research provokes.

When I read volume five (which I read before volume six), I was bored and frustrated for the same reasons listed above: the research did not provide me with any conclusions about wartime attitudes to food that I could not glean from examining a few wartime posters; it did not challenge my initial assumptions that cookbooks would provide evidence of the frugal, anxious attitudes towards food in WWI and WWII. Volume five, which focused on the “Age of Empire” (about 1800-1920), attended to French and Italian schools of cooking, and Middle-Eastern and Asian countries’ food production modernizing, but very little on Victorian industrialization affecting British food production, which I figured was a notable change in this period. And while volume five focused overtly on non -American and -British countries, which frustrated me because I sought information on Britain, volume six infuriated me for its unrelenting focus on American food, when the collection’s title implies a world-view.

So my sense of these volumes has completely altered since I first encountered them. I originally looked on them as research Bibles, the answers to my wonderment of what the heck I would write a food thesis on. But now that I have specified the periods and nations (mostly British, some American) I am focusing on, I see that much of the volumes are useless to me. Granted, they do provide, as I have said, broad contextualization; they present a starting point. But even anthologies that are designed to cover most “bases” and introduce readers to a subject ensure that they satisfy the questions more probing readers will have. The Cultural History of Food collection fails to do this: the research is too general, then too preoccupied with one nation’s experience; the chapters mention a major focal point (WWII) and then provide surface-level research on it; and the research is so sweeping and all-encompassing that it is rendered minimally valuable.

 

Works Cited:

Bentley, Amy, ed. A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Bruegel, Martin, ed. A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire. Bloomsbury, 2016.

 

 

 

Having chosen to narrow the focus of my thesis to the ways that the concept of monstrosity in 18^th and 19^th century Gothic novels drew upon British imperialism, colonialism, and contemporary xenophobic fear, it has become necessary for me to develop a deeper understanding of Britain’s history in order to engage in effective racial readings of my primary texts. For this reason, much of my research has been dedicated to discerning how to draw parallels between the fictional, monstrous figures of novels and the racial stereotypes that spurned fear and loathing from the British public during this time period. In trying to identify the ways in which monstrous characters reflect the societal notion of the threatening “Other,” therefore, I have utilized my key search terms, such as “imperial gothic” and “monstrosity” in order to discover sources that will provide me with the information I am seeking. Choosing to tackle the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein first due to its lack of more obvious connections to racism and imperialism, I stumbled upon H. L. Malchow’s article “Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” This article has not only enhanced my understanding of the various overlaps that exist between British imperialism, racism, and Shelley’s fiction, but, when read in tandem with Shelley’s novel itself, has enabled me to have a new outlook on The Modern Prometheus and its interaction with racism.

I am particularly fond of Malchow’s article because it sets up clear connections between British imperialism and the country’s attitude towards those of other races and ethnicities in the 19^th century. Because British imperialism and Britain’s construction/conception of racial identity and racial hierarchy are fairly expansive topics, I have found it challenging to narrow down my historical research or pick out which works will be most valuable to my thesis. By reading Malchow’s article, however, I have not only gained a more focused understanding of the “Napolenic Era” and Britain’s century-long development of the concept of the “Other,” but have also been introduced to the events and literature that filled Mary Shelley’s world with “both positive and negative representations of the black man…[particularly] in Africa and the West Indies” (99). Furthermore, this article also introduced me to other resources, such as Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 and Douglas Lorimer’s Colour, Class, and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, that center on the idea of savagery and monstrosity that shaped public opinion and societal conventions in Britain.

In addition, I was also enticed by this article due to its overall structure and its primary topics of focus. In each section, Malchow emphasizes how the portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster drew on either Britain’s attitudes towards foreigners, the fears and hopes of abolition of slavery in the West Indies, components of the Enlightenment, or “the expansion of the power of British empire over non-white populations in Asia and Africa.” This enables the article to draw straightforward connections between the text of Frankenstein and the development of the racist, Eurocentric perspective (93). For example, Malchow notes that Frankenstein’s hesitation to create a mate for his monster because he fears he will spawn a “race of devils” directly corresponds with the way in which Britain feared having “blacks free from the discipline of the white master [in which they could] …breed like animals unrestrained by decency or prudence” (Shelley 210;Malchow 113). In this way, Malchow’s article not only expanded my historical knowledge, but also gave me the opportunity to understand how to incorporate this knowledge into a textual analysis of Frankenstein.

When I first read this article, I possessed a general knowledge of British imperialism, but had never dedicated a significant amount of time linking the country’s imperialist actions to its impact on British culture and racial perceptions. While I admit that my first reading took a significant amount of time due to the fact that I had to research figures and topics with which I was not familiar, my subsequent readings allowed me to understand how Frankenstein’s monster not only exists as a representation of the racial “Other” in the novel, but serves as embodiment of the racial stigmas associated specifically with blacks by the British public. Frankenstein’s monster, like the stereotyped black of 19^th-century Britain, is portrayed as “wild and dangerous, unpredictable and childlike” with a “dark and sinister appearance” and a lack of parental connections (Malchow 105, 102, 115). In this way, this article has enabled me to uncover how Frankenstein portrays the inevitable inferiority and assumed villainy of non-whites in 19^th-century Britain; Despite the fact that the monster begins with an innocent desire for knowledge, freedom, and acceptance, he, like blacks of this time period, is trapped in a role of subordination and exclusion due to Britain’s patriarchal, color-prejudiced society.

Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote Plum Bun in 1929 after many years acting within the Harlem Renaissance movement as an editor and member of the literary elite, resisting the movement and publishers’ interest in promoting “elevated primitivism.” As Deborah McDowell points out in her introduction to Plum Bun, McDowell says Fauset did not achieve notoriety for the same reason as Nella Larson, Zora Neale Hurston, and so many other women in the movement—their works were dismissed as literal, their nuanced societal critiques overlooked. Unlike Hurston, though, Fauset has still not been fully recognized, and McDowell recounts that when she mentions the author, people ask, “’Who is he?’” Some of Fauset’s criticism of black society is evident in the first two chapters of the novel, and the things its main character, Angela, perceives as her true wants, reveal the effects of socialization on women’s desires and lives. A correlation exists between acceptance of norms as evolutionary impulse that shape the content of lives and the canon’s reflection of the judgements made about black women’s writing.

Colorism shows up almost immediately in Plum Bun when the narrator describes how the light-skinned mother, Mattie, and Angela travel separately from the other daughter and father, who are both dark-skinned. Framed as an effort to move more efficiently, the family effectively segregates itself, and this has a normalizing effect on the daughters. It is impossible to imagine that they and especially Angela would assume segregation is morally acceptable when their parents not only do not decry it, but also practice it within their family.

Not only will this shape the girls’ approach to perceived racial difference, Fauset also uses it to emphasize assumptions about skin tone within the African American population. It is no accident that the darker skinned daughter is paired with the father, suggesting she is more masculine, and prefers Saturday to Sunday, the holy day. Angela is with her light-skinned mother and enjoys doing stereotypically feminine tasks and displaying herself in what she considers glamorous settings.

Another scene is the Sunday routine outlined in Chapter two. Again, segregation acts here when Angela and her sister Virginia split Saturday and Sunday as their individual days. Angela’s day as Sunday, and the narrator says, “She was only twelve at this time, yet she had already developed a singular aptitude and liking for the care of the home, and this her mother gratefully fostered” (Fauset 20). Angela seems to assume that her affinity for the tasks she goes on to describe are natural and genuinely her inclinations. I would challenge that and assert that socialization of gender norms is in action at least within this family. Angela’s mother has a key role in Angela’s adoption of this routine when she “fostered” it.

Angela’s mother, Mattie, is not only the person supporting Angela’s domesticity, but also the little girls model for the way she practices these activities. Fauset writes, “She set the muffins in the oven, pursing her lips and frowning a little just as she had seen her mother do; then she went to the fort of the narrow, enclosed staircase and called “hoo-hoo” with a soft rising inflection,— ‘last call to dinner,’ her father termed it” (Fauset 21). Angela mimics her mother, the same person who models passing for her and her partner in their segregated household. She acts out the physical signs of frustration, “pursing her lips” and “frowning,” as pleasurable, failing to consider her mother’s indicated displeasure with those obligations. Perhaps her mother “fostered” this behavior because she does not enjoy doing all the household work Angela aspires to.

Angela’s believes that her desires are her own, as evidenced by her frustration with going to church. Angela finds herself, “wondering at just what period of one’s life existence began to shape itself as you wanted it” (Fauset 22). It does not occur to Angela that the activities she would choose are also a function of her socialization.  This section, without explicitly saying that internal racism or gender roles are reinforced within African American families, demonstrates it and its effects on the children. The children do not know that their activities are not the natural instincts they believe, but rather the result of lifelong conditioning. This is the same training that critics of Fauset and other women received, which led them to assume their texts were simple denouncements of black men and traditional roles rather than the societal pressures that, when unexamined, force people into lifelong paths. If they choose their own, as Fauset did, their narratives are ignored.

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral. Beacon, 1990.

Recently, I have written a post for another academic blog on Jean Toomer’s Cane, a novel set in Georgia and the south on the suffering of black community similar to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The book is written in a blend of prose, poetry, and rhetoric that makes it difficult to categorize by genre. In two sections, it covers multiples stories alongside poems that respond to the images and themes that are contained within them. Some of the most powerful moments of the book such as “Esther”, the story a storekeeper who is fascinated by a black man who returns to her town not as impressive as she once thought. A two-page story, “Rhobert”, also caught my eye as a fascinating image of a run-down, black home in the south. I also liked several poems in the book, including “Song of the Son”, “Reapers”, and “Harvest Song”. In my initial blog post, I connected several themes of the end and death to apocalypse, in that the poem’s images of darkness, death, and ends. But these were shallow close-readings of the images. I titled the piece “The Gentle Apocalypse”. But it is not always gentle. One story, “Blood Burning Moon”, confused me as it was a strikingly violent story of lynching that stuck-out next to my examples. This example was not the exception. My idea of the “gentle apocalypse” was the exception. I addressed Toomer’s use of female objectification, violence, and  brutality in the south toward the end, but I am troubled as to how well I accomplished that.  The goal of this re-reading of both the post and Cane is to pinpoint where I could improve the accuracy in my analytical writing.

 

Some aspects of the blog post had commendable aspects, despite several notes it could have addressed several errors in my writing or expanded my argument. It was a good thought to lead with a definition of apocalypse inspired by Susan Bower’s “Beloved and the New Apocalypse”. Apocalypse is looking into the boundary or edge of one realm to another, while observing both and anticipating change. Despite my definition being worded quite differently,  I realized I should have cited her and explained the quote in more detail. In editing the post, I have added the citation for ethical reasons. I realized this post, while confined to only 250 words, had become blatantly “1-on-10” as Writing Analytically would put it (WA, 207). I mention images in Cane like, “dusk and night” at first, but forget to mention locations of this conversation such as in the poem “Song of the Son” (Toomer, 17). The poem literally addresses, “for though the sun is setting on / A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;” among other lines that compare the dawn and dusk to an eternal memory of slavery. The example of the story “Esther” in Cane could have gone farther. While it stated Esther changed her, “perspective of the town possibly because she lost her reason to stay”, I failed to acknowledge that this was in reference to a scene where a girl was disgusted to have almost slept with Barlo, a man many years his senior. There needs to be more discussion of how Esther was humiliated into changing her perspective of the town, that her reason to stay was lost due to becoming an object of sexual objectification. Finally, I needed to wrap together how these images of departure, of violence, and of time passing in dusk and dawn, culminates to this definition of apocalypse. This conclusion would further ask how Toomer imagines the future of the South. Any blog post could be tighter and more composed if it recognizes it’s key point or definition and concludes by bringing it to a new stage of questions. Which is what I am about to do right now:

 

Toomer once called Cane a “swan-song of the South” after observing how the black folk spirit of the south fading with the Great Migration. Can Morrison’s Beloved be seen as a text which can converse with Toomer on Slavery? Is this apocalypse of the south also a Slave apocalypse, a South apocalypse. Or both? I favor both as an answer, but I wonder if the two apocalypses should be considered separate epochs.

 

As for my original blog post, how do you think I did with my self-study? Visit the link and let me know what you think.

 

Works cited:

Bowers, Susan. “Beloved and the New Apocalypse.” Critical Studies in Black Life and Culture, Toni Morrison’s Fiction Contemporary Criticism, Garland Publishing, 1997, pp. 209-228.

Toomer, Jean, and Rudolph P. Byrd. Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. W.W. Norton & Co, 2011.

In my research, I am exploring the female body in ways that it is perceived by society, and how this can evoke grotesque and “uncanny” reactions. In Yoko Ogawa’s novel the Diving Pool, one of the novellas is titled The Pregnancy Diary. Within this novella, the protagonist keeps a meticulous record of her pregnant sister’s behavior. From the start of the novella, the reader gets a sense that the protagonist has a peculiar way of seeing anything to do with pregnancy and the female body. Her ways of noticing details and describing them is almost clinical, and it is the same when she describes her sister, as if she is not someone she is close to, but merely a scientific experiment she is curious to know the outcome of.

When the protagonist and her sister, who are both unnamed, were young, they would visit a maternity clinic called the “M Clinic,” because they were curious about what was inside. The protagonist describes what she sees inside the window not in terms of the excitement and joy of a pregnancy, but rather through a cold and calculating lens. She describes a stethoscope as “a thin, twisting tube, dull silver fittings, pear-shaped rubber bulb of the cuff made it look like a strange insect nestled among the other instruments.” (p. 60). The interesting insight provided by these few lines can be aimed at female bodies and pregnancy.

As pregnancy is an internal process, science has developed in order to understand the process. However, pregnancy is typically seen as something to be celebrated, the beginnings of a new life. The protagonist, however, sees this site, where pregnant women reside, as something cold and grotesque, evoking strange imagery that seems unsuitable to something that should bring excitement. Pregnancy is reduced to being a piece of medical equipment crouching on a cart and resembling an insect, something that is repulsive and something that should be avoided or killed. Although Ogawa does not outwardly say that pregnant female bodies are seen as strange creatures distorted by the science of nature, she implies it by telling the story of a pregnant woman through the eyes of a girl who sees the world in a cold and calculating way.

During this same instance, the two sisters were sometimes able to catch glimpses of the women on the third floor who had presumable just given birth. The rare sightings suggest that they are coveted and held prisoner, as if to be a form of scientific research that must be kept a firm hold of. They are described as wearing no make-up and bathrobes and having expressionless faces. The protagonist then wonders to herself “why they didn’t seem happier at the prospect of sleeping above an examination room full of such fascinating objects.” (p. 61). The pregnant women are described as essentially stripped of their “femaleness” by the lack of makeup and also the fact that they are now without a baby inside them. The baby is external and its own being now, creating the woman as an empty husk, relieved of her one duty on this earth. The are expressionless because they no longer have a purpose and no longer have an identity; they are neither mother, pregnant, nor woman.

Furthermore, the fact that the protagonist dismisses these ideas, she immediately thinks of the examination room and how she would be happy to be in the M Clinic, not to be pregnant, but because she loves the instruments that have aided in stripping those women who appear like apparitions of their identity as female.

I believe that Ogawa oppresses these meanings deliberately, but not so as to throw the reader off of them, but rather to inquire about it. Without challenging the reception of the pregnant female body, how is society to learn what it means to be a pregnant female, and how that identity changes over the entirety of the pregnancy. It is not simply a sequence of events in which the fetus grows and develops and the doctor performs routine tests. It is an identity that transforms woman into mother, and gives her the capacity to care for another being more than any other.

The text that I choose to help further my research on Nazi propganda and its influence on World War two was, Nazi Propaganda, by Z.A.B. Zeman. What draws me specifically to this text was the usage of photos. In one of the photos, on page 98 it says, “Juden sind hier nicht erwunscht” which means that ‘Jews are not wanted here.’ Right across from the sign there is a statue of Jesus on the Cross. This photo shows that the Nazi’s built a hatred towards Jewish people and the Nazi’s forbid them from doing certain activities. This sign was just one of the many signs throughout Europe that forbid Jews from participating in normal daily activities. Additionally, since this photo was taken in 1935 it also shows how Nazi propaganda was building up over a 10 year-long period which lasted until the end of the war (1945).

When I began first reading this book, I learned a lot more about Hitler and how much power he had when he first came into power. Over time, by being in charge he was able to gain more influence on the Nazi party and other European countries as well. After reading this book the first time, I started picking up on some of the smaller details such as how Hitler was a failure when it came to speaking on the radio in comparison to President Roosevelt who was famous for his fireside chats (Zeman, 53). Adding onto that, I was fascinated that when Germany and the Nazi party wanted to expand their propaganda program abroad, Hitler was able to do so. He knew that 27 million Germans were living in other European countries such as, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Russia. By having this knowledge, Hitler knew that by having Germans in nearby countries, this would help the Nazi party influence these abroad countries and turn these places into what would be in the best interest for the Nazi party, such as concentration camps and ghettos. Additionally, these abroad countries were eager to become a part of the Nazi party.

I at first encountered this book when I saw that the novel, Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Nazi Propaganda Speeches would not be able to ship until next week and I needed another book that would have photos of Nazi Germany during World War two. I specifically searched in the library for World War 2 Propaganda and I found this book, Nazi Propaganda and it was written by, Z.A.B. Zeman. Overall, when I found this book I knew right away from looking at it that it would help expand upon my research of Nazi propaganda and how propaganda impacted the war. Additionally, I found that the titles of each chapter were going to touch upon some of the points that I wanted my research to cover.

One passage that resonated with me was one week after the Germans occupied Poland. Hitler talked about propaganda on the 8^th of September 1938, saying that, “Propaganda is an important instrument of the Leadership for forwarding and strengthening the will to victory and for destroying the enemies’ morale and will to victory.” I picked this quote out because before I read this book I always perceived propaganda as being a picture or cartoon about an individual fighting on behalf of their country in the hopes of making their country a safer place. I never thought of propaganda as being something that would destroy the enemies morale. Propaganda destroys the enemies will because in the Nazi’s opinion the enemy was living within Germany and among other European nations as well. When the Nazi’s sent a message saying that the Jews were different and that they were not human beings; this inevitably destroyed many Jews morales about themselves and about the culture that they were living in. Additionally, propaganda gives the Nazi’s more authority and permission to be ruthless and violent towards the Jews because they were not considered to be equal as people, but instead, they were seen as inferior in comparison to the Germans.

Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read argues that you don’t really need to read books to understand them and that there really isn’t such a thing as ‘reading’ as we think about it. He describes four different relations that you could have to a book: books you don’t know, books you’ve skimmed, books you’ve heard of, and books you’ve forgotten. Not that he doesn’t include either side of the read/haven’t read binary in that list.

He is, however, writing this all down in a book, and as a reader of that book, I had to ask myself the question “how does the fact of a reader’s consumption of his argument influence said argument?” Bayard’s two arguments — that you don’t need to read a book to understand it and that there’s no such thing as ‘reading’ as the word is traditionally defined — are influenced differently when their mode of conveyance is considered.

His argument on the first point is long and complicated, relying on another argument he makes about books, as they exist in the sphere of conversation, being informed more by the opinions that are known to be held by others regarding them than they are by the actual texts of the books themselves. In the book’s second section, “Literary Confrontations,” he covers all the scenarios in which discussion of books can arise, and demonstrates how someone who either has only heard of a book in passing or is learning about it for the first time, can more accurately just the book than someone who’s supposedly ‘read’ it. He does show that, in all those scenarios, someone can demonstrate that they’ve read a book without putting in the work required to actually do so, and this is what he bases success in these scenarios on — avoiding embarrassment. After all. the book is titled How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, it shouldn’t be surprising that it bases reading’s worth on whether it improves your ability to talk about books.

So, bearing in mind that the book assumes the farcical stance that reading a book is only valuable so long as it helps you avoid embarrassment, the reader’s actually taking the energy to read the book becomes an extension of the joke — you don’t read for the sake of others, reading is a process of personal enrichment. In this way, the book argues against one of its supposed theses, pointing out the problems with using breadth of book consumption as a status symbol within the literary community.

In regards to the other half of the thesis, since by reading the book, the reader flips the book’s first argument into an argument that reading is an activity motivated principally by personal enrichment, the argument that we’re incapable of actually ‘reading’ a book in the way we think we’re supposed to stands in stark opposition to the theory of personal gain. Bayard doesn’t allow for ‘reading,’ only skimming or forgetting. This invites the reader to think back over their ‘reading’ of the book and see how accurately those descriptors apply. There were likely parts that the reader only glossed over and he likely forgot enough of the closely-read rest of the book to make that ‘reading’ indistinguishable from skimming. Even if the reader memorizes the words, Bayard argues that actual reading requires putting oneself into the gaps in the language to actually understand what’s being said, and that experience of reading can’t be remembered with the language.

Bayard allows for the possibility that reading exists, but it surely isn’t something that can be claimed when talking about a book. We can ‘read’ a finite section of a book, but after the words are even slightly in the rearview, the experience of interpreting them is so foggy that we can only rightly describe our knowledge of that experience as skimming. That’s because Bayard thinks that books aren’t the words on the page, but the associations derived from them, which inevitably deteriorate in time. Just as, when discussing a book, an awareness of the opinions surrounding a book are more material than the text itself, when reflecting on a book, our memory of the reading experience — which is only ever imperfect — is the only thing of actual worth.