Course Blog

While visiting the Museum of the Salvadoran Revolution in Perquín, Morazan, what struck me most was the museum’s vast dedication to displaying various international posters that specifically address and resist U.S. imperialism in El Salvador/Central America. The posters at the museum ranged in origin from neighboring Latin American countries (Honduras, Nicaragua, Brazil, Guatemala, etc.) to (unspecified) Francophone nations and even the U.S. itself. This demonstrated a global awareness of many of the injustices being perpetuated by the U.S. against El Salvador in the events leading up to and during the civil war. Many of these posters displayed phrases like “Stop bombing El Salvador” and “U.S. out of El Salvador!” in order to address the U.S. government’s instrumental role in supporting the Salvadoran right-wing military through funding, trainings, and other direct involvement.

Upon searching for more information on the Salvadoran Civil War in the Latin American Digital Initiatives through the University of Texas Libraries, I came across the Colección Conflicto Armado, from el Museo de la Palabra y el Imagen (Armed Conflict Collection from the Museum of the Word and Image) in San Salvador, El Salvador. One of the posters I was most interested in is pictured here:

The poster depicts a man dressed in attire typical to campesinos (peasant farmers) holding a corvo (or machete) over his head, in preparation to attack the large and imposing clawed hand that digs into the map of Central American land. The clawed hand is representative of the United States, indicated by the sleeve that bears stars and red and white stripes. Further, the specificity in relevance to the Central American region is made clear by the way the poster isolates the region from its neighboring Latin American countries, and thus centers Central America and the U.S.’s particular role in Central American countries. Through its imagery, the poster characterizes the campesino, in an empowered way, as the central force to resisting the U.S. imperial hand.

The use of the corvo as the campesino’s method of resistance is significant in its indication of class—especially in focusing on a war with origins in the exploitation of the poor and widespread socioeconomic inequalities. As Manlio Argueta remarks throughout his novel Un dia en la vida (1980), the first sign of a Salvadoran campesino man is that he treats his corvo like an extension of his own hand—it is a tool essential to his everyday work but it is also a tool necessary to the campesino man’s defense and protection of his family. In the poster, the corvo is presented as the campesino’s means of resisting U.S. imperial power. While the corvo is positioned so as to attack the clawed hand, it is, interestingly, literally attacking the very word “America” at the top of the poster. The poster therefore highlights the campesino’s corvo as a critical to subverting U.S. power.

Ultimately, the poster’s purpose is made clear in its headline: “U.S. Hands Off Central America Now!” Written in English and produced in the United States at Casa El Salvador in San Francisco, CA, the poster targets English-speaking audiences and is especially relevant to American citizens. It is an important record of how American communities and organizations were responding to the Reagan administration’s continued support of the Salvadoran government during the civil war. This is helpful to my research because it enables a continued broadening of my understanding of the Salvadoran Civil War in both ‘homeland’ and ‘diaspora.’

Although my initial research scan to find the exact purpose or role of Casa El Salvador has not been conclusive, its very name leads me to assume that it was possibly a community organization dedicated to issues in El Salvador but likely also one that was invested in Salvadoran communities living in the United States. Especially given its location in California, such an organization would have likely been accessible to many Salvadoran refugees who fled El Salvador in the events leading up to the war or once it had begun. Continuing to research primary documents will be essential to deepening my understanding of the historical contexts and sociopolitical implications of Salvadoran resistance. These sources will further inform my work, as I begin to analyze the role of resistance in Salvadoran writing.

Although my primary sources may span across the Atlantic to include 19th century short stories from both England and North America, for this blog post I will focus on Victorian literature and Wilkie Collins.

I first read a piece by Wilkie Collins during my class title Victorian Sexualities. I was interested in this author upon reading The Woman in White as I was intrigued by the racialized and gendered language that he used. Not that I am using an intersectional lens to analyze 19th century short stories, it is only appropriate that I start with an author who has sparked my interest in the past.

According to Lyn Pyckett’s Wilkie Collins: Authors in Context, Collins was born in London, 1824. In her book, Pyckett dedicates a section to Collins’s relationship to social change, especially that which centered upon gender and sexuality. Within this section, Pyckett explains that Wilkie Collins produced literature for a liberal weekly paper titled the Leader, and that later, He worked for Dickens’s Household Words. The different papers Collins worked for were associated with political and economic pushes for reform. Collins sought to increase conversations surrounding the, “family, marriage, and relations between the sexes,” (Pyckett, 50). He also had a strong interest in the relationship between women and the law, especially in terms of property rights and marriage. Pyckett explains the social context of Collins’s writing as she says, “The legal vulnerability of women, and their position as objects of exchange between men were already staples  of the Gothic plot when Collins began writing, and partly as a result of his efforts they became central to the plots of sensation novels in the 1860s,” (Pyckett, 52). This focus on women as objects and the role of women within the legal system indicates that Collins’ work might use a feminist lens to analyze his contemporary social context.

Not only did Wilkie Collins have a strong interest in women and reform, but he also held a clear curiosity in gender roles, especially women within the social and the familial contexts. According to Pyckett, Collins lived during a period where women became more vocal about their lack of civil rights and as a result, there became a push against traditional roles of the family. According to Pyckett, “Both Collins’s life and his fiction (in common with quite a lot of Victorian fiction) suggest that the Victorian home, family, and gender roles were rather more fluid and complex in practice than they were in this ideological inscription,” (Pyckett, 57). Pyckett then goes on to elaborate that the reality of the family during the Victorian period was that there was a “domestic ideal”, however, this ideal was simply not attainable by everyone. Thus, Collins saw a variety of family lifestyles that do not all adhere to this “domestic ideal.,” in which women were expected to exist within the private sphere to perform domestic duties while the men ventured into the public sphere to receive employment and an education (Pyckett, 56).

Although the scope of my thesis is still very broad, I am seeing different themes emerge already such as women in the family and mental health, the latter being another interest of Collins. According to Pyckett, “Contemporary sexual mores and morality come under scrutiny as Collins investigates the hypocrisies  of ‘respectable’ Victorian society and the relationship between respectable society and the demi-monde,” (Pyckett, 119). Pyckett goes on to explain that Collins was fascinated by the relationship between mental disorders and one’s divergence from sexual ‘norms.’  This might be yet another avenue for me to explore through my intersectional lens; how race, gender, and sexuality intersect to create social positions that constitute as either respectable or not respectable.

Lyn Pyckett’s Wilkie Collins: Authors in Context exposes the social context of Wilkie Collins and his writing. Knowing the background of his work will allow me to better analyze his short stories such as “A Terribly Strange Bed.” His interest in women within the realm of legal reform, the family, and sexual morality indicates that his work might be feminist texts that will prove integral to understanding writing about women within the Victorian era. As one of the most famous writers of his time, studying the works of Wilkie Collins along with his background is essential to the purpose of my project.

Works Cited:

Pykett, Lyn. Wilkie Collins. [Electronic Resource] : Authors in Context. Oxford : Oxford University Press, UK, 2005., 2005. Oxford World’s Classics.

I have no fucking clue what my focal text is. How to Write About Books you Haven’t Read sounds super on the nose, but I haven’t read it and happen to know that it’s had a pretty unremarkable publication history. Pierre Bayard hasn’t led that wild of a life either (his wiki page is two sentences followed by his bibliography).

So, I’m going to talk about Alan Sokal. Sokal and “The Sokal Affair” were introduced to me as something that I “probably wouldn’t be able to avoid” in my thesis — which I’ve been trying harder and harder to figure out ways to do the more I’ve learned about it (while I read an academic retrospective on the affair, the wikipedia page was more succinct and still accurate [as far as I can tell] so I’m mainly referring to that here).

Essentially, Sokal submitted an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the journal Social Text, in which he made an intentionally nonsensical argument about how the methods used to study quantum gravity have positive corollary implications for the burgeoning methods of postmodern criticism and philosophy, a school of thought which Social Text subscribed to. His modus operandi was to bait the journal with rhetoric they’d like and a conclusion that appealed to their philosophical and political sensibilities to see if he could get a crappy paper published in the hopes of pointing out that

My thesis is going to have something to do with the faulty  appeal to authority argument implicit in a lot of citations in literary criticism. So, even though the Sokal ‘Affair’ runs pretty tangentially to my topic, it’s going to be hard to talk about people getting away with pretending to know more than they do without bringing up this very famous incident.

However, I’m really hesitant to bring it up for a few reasons.

First off, the Social Text responded to Sokal’s admission of the hoax by saying that they’d asked him to make edits to the paper, but he was able to get away with refusing to do so because he was a well-known figure. That fact calls attention to a couple key points: A- it’s unclear how egregious of an oversight the paper’s publication was and B- Sokal’s celebrity was a very big factor that he didn’t properly take into account. Journals are businesses, and while there is an element of tacit endorsement that they lend to the papers they publish, their readers consist both of people who read everything in the journal because they trust it and people who want to read articles from specific, big names. So, journals have undue pressure on them to publish work from these big names. Therefore, for a big name like Sokal to single out this one journal is pretty unfair.

I’m also hesitant to talk about it because Sokal seems like an ass, got into an ill-tought-out argument with Derrida because of the paper (putting him on the wrong side of history), and because a “study” with the same goal was done much more scientifically to less fanfare before Sokal came along.

To linger on that second-to-last point: the Sokal ‘affair’ has a weird mix of pro and anti-intellectualism to it. If I do end up talking about it, this point will probably be my takeaway. While Sokal was supposedly motivated by a desire to point out a lack of thoroughness in academic work, he also discredited some valid intellectual work (such as Derrida’s philosophy) because it seemed too involved to him. That’s sort of like the opposite of having your cake and eating it too: pointing out that journals need to think really hard about and research the shit out of everything they consider publishing because it’s really hard to tell whether the author actually knows what she’s talking about while simultaneously not thinking hard enough about valid scholarly work because he didn’t want to waste time thinking about something that may have been bullshit.

One takeaway of the double edged sword of cynicism and guillibility this whole thing brings up is that academic-speak of the kind used by Sokal (and the author I’m presenting on tomorrow) really needs to be burned because it makes a really hard job even more difficult. There’s a sort of appeal to authority implicit in overly-complex writing — a suggestion that the author knows what he’s talking about because he can manipulate language and use the words oft associated with academic writing (trust me on this count — in my experience, this is usually a defense mechanism to mask ideological floundering on some level or another).

I’m over the word count so I guess I’ll figure out a more compelling takeaway at a later date (but don’t worry, I definitely know what to make of the whole thing — I read the wiki page).

EDIT: I wrote the title before I knew what I was writing and then I accidentally published without changing it. I was going to think of something that made sense, but then I realized that it actually worked with the writing — you have no choice but to assume it was an intentional statement about something or other, then you probably read a little bit of the post and figured it had something to do with incoherence, then got sort of pissed because it’s a really fucking pretentious thing to do. That works super well because that pretty closely parallels my thought process regarding Sokal’s stunt, which makes it infuriatingly applicable. Since it is applicable, you as the reader must have assumed it was intentional, while it was really a mistake. My concluding point was that it’s damn-near impossible to tell whether writers actually know what they’re doing, so it functions as a really good meta-point. However, the same mechanism that renders is valid (the fact that it was unknowably unintentional) also renders it invalid as an artistic statement because it was an accident and not a statement. Now that I’ve written this, affirming that it was an accident originally, you know it’s now intentional because I didn’t change it. I assume you think I’m a pretentious little shit for doing that, because that’s exactly what I think of Sokal, but since I know I’d hate me I’m somehow better (?).

Henry Louis Gates’ “What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom” is a critique of a criticism by Joyce Joyce, a well-lauded black female critic who wrote “The Black Canon.” His criticism focuses on a woman’s work, but his evidence almost entirely relies on men’s criticism and literary writing. His connection to Africa through travel and scholarship combined with his appointment to a position named for one of what he feels to be the great African American legends cast this piece in an interesting light, suggesting the critic’s concern for his own legacy.

Gates came from a very working class background, but transitioned to elite institutions of learning. He went to a local junior college and left for Yale University bachelor’s degree in history. After graduating, Gates transitioned into exploring Africa physically and academically. He took a leave of absence after graduating to travel through Africa, serving as an anesthetist in Tanzania. This fact, though unrelated to his later work, made me wonder if he was inspired by differences in treatment of black people in hospitals in America versus Africa. It has been documented that black people in America are often given lesser diagnoses and less pain medication, and I know that many minority scholars who travel to Europe or a country where they are the majority experience a significant shift in their sense of self.

It seems clear that Gates’ travel did impact him in some way because when he moved on to study at Cambridge University, he was under the tutelage of a Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka. Soyinka is the one responsible for persuading Gates to study literature, for which he received a doctorate degree in 1979. He then taught at several institutions, including Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard.

At Harvard, he was appointed the W.E.B. du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. This stuck out to me because in my source, Gates brings up Du Bois multiple times in mixed levels of praise and condemnation. He begins one section by saying that he is going to highlight the “salient points” of Joyce’s piece, which he proceeds to undermine by saying that the first only reveals the stupidity of Joyce’s student quoted in the article. He says of her reaction he deems faulty that any good teacher, including Du Bois, would have told Joyce’s student, “back to the text and told her to read it again” (Gates 354). He goes on to refer to her as not a full teacher and suggests that her opinion that authors have failed to be clear to readers is in fact her own failing as a scholar.

The next mention of Du Bois in the article is to refer to him as, “a mediocre poet and a terrible novelist” (Gates 355). He does this in the part of his argument where he says Joyce is categorically wrong to say the best critics are creatives. In what I think is a clear move to align himself with Du Bois, Gates mocks the almost legendary figure, writing, “Du Bois was probably the very first systematic literary and cultural theorist in the tradition. Rather, we genuflect to Du Bois” (355).

This fact about Gates’ career really changed the way I perceived his treatment of Du Bois in the article. Clearly, Gates thinks highly of himself and his conclusions from his repeated totalitarian dismissal of any others as wrong or rather passive aggressively as “muddled” (356). If Gates feels himself to be in the same group as Du Bois, it would explain more fully the extent to which he takes Joyce’s criticism of respected critics so personally. She suggests that some black critics have attempted to assimilate into whiteness, and Du Bois repeatedly asks his audience if different things he does in his criticism make him “less black.” I am not suggesting that this is Gates’ primary interest, but the article was written two years after he received that title, which might have put Du Bois in his mind as a predecessor or peer. It also seems to make him feel as though he can completely dismiss Joyce and many other ideas. Furthermore, his thoughts should be, as he phrased it, genuflected to. His piece’s themes of “legacy” and “integrity” and repeated defense of himself reflect a goal of legendary status he fears more intersectional criticism might upset. In this way, his response to a women’s criticism of black male writing is very familiar.

Gates, Henry Louis. “‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?”: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom.” New Literary History, vol. 18, no. 2, 1987, pp. 345–362. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/468733.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encylclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 24 Oct. 2014. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Louis-Gates-Jr.

In choosing to focus my thesis on the concept of monstrosity and literature of terror in 18^th and 19^th century Britain, I determined that it is important for me to gain insight into significant events, ideas, or societal changes that inspired fear in the British public in order to analyze the connection that literary monsters may or may not have to the society in which they were formulated. For this reason, the emerging scientific theories of Charles Darwin and Henry Maudsley during the late 19^th-century are of significance to my thesis and the concept of societal fear because their theories caused late Victorian Englishmen to express a newfound sense of anxiety about their inability to discern whether one’s degeneration, or gradual loss of morals and virtue, stemmed from one’s social influences or one’s ancestry and biology. It is though gaining insight into Darwin and Maudsley’s theories regarding heredity, genetics, and evolution that one is able to identify the ways in which emerging scientific theories spurred societal terror and helped to mold late 19^th-century literary monsters in Britain.

The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, coupled by the work’s surge in popularity towards the end of the 19th century, paved the way for the society and scientists of Britain to work towards accepting the concept of biologically determined moral degeneration (Paul 214). Advocating the validity of “Darwinism,” or the “theory of evolution of species by natural selection,” Darwin’s Origin of Species utilized scientific data to demonstrate that animals and peoples’ traits are passed down from one generation to the next and that each individual is formulated by a culmination of physical characteristics that were previously possessed by familial ancestors (Darwin;Paul 214). This scientific work not only sparked a war between science and religion amongst the late-Victorian population of Britain by fueling confusion about whether or not God plays a direct role in shaping individuals, but undoubtedly caused many Englishmen to fear that their actions and morals were not under their individual control (Kent 667). Similarly, Henry Maudsley’s Body and Mind (1870) also caused a stir among the people of Britain by proposing that “multitudes of human beings come into this world with a weighted destiny against which they have neither the will nor power to contend; they are the step-children of nature” (Maudsley). By stating that a “multitude of human beings” are biologically and inwardly immoral from birth, Maudsley advocates that the possession of an inward deviance is a common plight among people. In this way, these two theories worked collectively to perpetuate the societal fear that certain individuals are born with a predisposition for deviance and immorality that cannot be controlled.

By gaining insight into the prominent scientific theories of the fin de siècle and their impact on the fears held by the British public, I have been able to gain a better sense of the primary novels that I want to work with moving forward and have developed further lines of inquiry that I want to pursue for my thesis. For example, at the start of my thesis journey, I planned to focus my work entirely on Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Goblin Market because I had chosen to define monsters as non-human beings with demonic appearances. Now that I have analyzed these scientific documents, however, I hope to utilize my thesis as a method for connecting monsters to the societal fears that existed during the time period of their inception, enabling me to expand my definition of monsters to one that touches on their ability to embody the social and moral concerns that confronted the people of late 18^th and 19^th century Britain. For this reason, I plan to also include Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in my thesis because they treat humans as monster-like figures and directly touch on the societal fear of degeneration that existed during the time of their publications. In addition, this work with primary sources has encouraged me to continue to link literary monsters with the societal fears of Britain regarding issues such as morals, colonialism, gender, and science in order to truly encompass the various facets that make up Britain’s literature of terror in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. While, ultimately, I will have to narrow my focus to one or two major social themes, this exercise has enabled me to better understand the objective of my thesis, incorporate the historical lens that I had hoped to utilize, and understand the multiple opportunities my topic affords me.

Works Cited

Darwin, Charles and Morse Peckham. The Origin of Species. [Electronic Resource]: A Variorum Text. Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959. Evidence-Based Acquisition (PALCI EBA) Discovery Record (JSTOR).

Maudsley, Henry, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Influence , Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders: An Enlarged and Revised Edition: To Which Are Added Psychological Essays (London: Macmillan (1870) 1873).

Kent, John. “Review.” Rev. of The Post-Darwinian Controversies, by James R. Moore. Journal of Biological Studies 2 Oct. 1980: 667-69. JSTOR. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

Paul, Diane B. “Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics.” The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. By J. Hodge and G. Raddick. 2nd ed. London: Cambridge UP, 2003. 214-39. JSTOR. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

The 2011 film Melancholia by director Lars Von Trier synchronizes it’s ending with the end of the world, which runs the risk of overshadowing the characters and story of the film. Peter Szendy, author of the 2015 book “Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World”, believes this ending is the true ending of apocalypse cinema. Szendy feels he “disappeared at the same time the last image [of the film] did,” in which he became one with the last moments during the finale; The small planet Melancholia destroys the Earth with a flash, a cloud of smoke, and the music of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Szendy, 1). For Szendy, the ending embodies a “true” apocalypse genre theme: The end of the world should correspond to the end of the film itself. The majority of this chapter on Melancholia in “Apocalypse Cinema” spends a great deal of effort explaining the scene’s importance to him, but not it’s importance to the entire story.

Szendy praises the fact that that the film lets “the last image be the very last image” of “all past present and future” (Szendy, 2). Like the characters displayed in the film, the film audience too experiences a kind of “death” by cutting to black. Szendy’s experience of being “in the black screen” the film plays tribute to how the audience shares existential finality of death here (Szendy, 1). Szendy calling this image “past, present, and future” becomes erroneous in interpreting importance in Von Trier’s film and Apocalypse cinema in genre. It is erroneous in that the impact of Apocalypse is still in the before and after of the story, not the apocalyptic event itself. If you took this last image alone, you would be missing out on the rich character dynamics of Justine (Kristen Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the sisters who hold hands with Claire’s son Leo in the final scene. You would miss Justine as she sinks into a depression spurred by the stress of her dysfunctional family, her manipulative boss Jack, and cheating on her newlywed husband with Jack’s nephew. That includes missing her apathetic- depressive personality as a result. You would not witness Claire panicking about Melancholia while her husband John dismisses her fears in a patronizing way. You would miss the confrontation in which Justine’s acceptance of the end conflicts with Claire’s fear of death. Each of these plot points reflects personal devastation within the characters themselves. The world is both literally and figuratively ending for Justine and Claire. If you, the audience, only took away the final moments of the film as Peter Szendy implies are most essential, you’re missing 99% of the actual apocalypse conversation.

“The earth is bad, we don’t need to grieve for it, nobody will miss it.” Justine concludes to Claire (Melancholia, 2011). The fact that she been hurt by Jack, and has hurt by Michael affects her. The way she mentions “Earth is bad” gives evidence to how she has distanced herself from her own reality.  Justine mirrors the dysfunctional attributes of her family from the earlier in the film in her difficulty in coping with the past and present. By bringing Justine’s depression into the story as a form of apathy for everything, Lars Von Trier juxtaposes depression to the apocalypse. Justine calls Claire’s plan to spend her last moments together, “ a piece of shit” with deadpan eyes, mocking the “niceness” of her gesture (Melancholia, 2011). Justine wishes Claire to stop caring, or to “grieve for it”. Her emotional and physical state are both facing annihilation.  The arrangement of the scene has dim light, which only illuminate the each actresses’ expressions. The soft classical music that transitions each scene gives the film a dream-like quality. Szendy calls the last image an “end of cinema” moment in which the film itself perishes when the world ends. Von Trier’s character and film form evoke emotions related to the apocalypse as well as 

Szendy’s point on Melancholia’s final scene has merit, but his claim to it being the truest Apocalyptic film falls short by not imagining events that could complicate. A flashback would have been more meaningful. Keep in mind the ending of the ending of Matt Reeve’s Cloverfield (2008), in which the ending cuts to a found-footage flashback from before the film. He compares Melancholia’s ending to the ending of Ted Posts’s Beneath the Planet of The Apes. In Post’s film, an atomic explosion ends the world, followed by a narrator dialogue explaining the world “is now dead”. The post-film exposition was only meant to set up a sequel and is therefore not as apocalyptic as Melancholia according to Szendy. What’s wrong with events happening after the end? Can’t an apocalypse have a post-apocalypse?  The point of an apocalyptic fiction’s plot  isto show us the events leading up to the end and of what happens after, not to gratify us with an explosion. There is more of a narrative to an apocalypse genre fiction piece than the scene where “it all ends”, since it should be widely known that “true apocalypse” fictions are also the ones in which the narrative leads up to and continues after the end.

Sources:

Szendy, Peter. Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World. New York : Fordham
University Press, 2015.College Complete.

Trier, Lars von, et al. Melancholia. 2011.

Update:

I wish I had a place to put this in the rest of the blog. After writing this piece, I found two other movie that fit into Peter Szendy’s definition of the “true” apocalyptic cinema. Go watch (or rewatch) Miracle Mile (1988) with director Steve De Jarrett if you have a chance. Miracle Mile has a similar “ending”, in that a nuclear weapon is dropped on LA in the last moments of the film. Seeking a Friend For The End Of The World (2012) is another film I had forgotten about until the last minute. Will Ferrell and .  It’s unfortunate that I could not rewrite the entire post in time to discuss it further, but it adds to the point that Szendy’s concept is not unique to Melancholia.