The Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University is one of the most important Faulkner Studies centers in the US, and Dr. Christopher Rieger, the director of the center, is a famous Faulkner scholar who has published his book Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature, a very important and influential work in the field of American Southern literature study. His book analyzes a kind of post-pastoral perspective reflected in Faulkner and three other American Southern writers’ works during the Great Depression, and he argues that these Southern authors emphasized seeking a more interdependent and cooperative ecological model rather than an individualistic and competitive one from the past, in order to achieve a sense of balance between humans and nature, technology and wilderness, or the urban and rural. This book has been regarded by American scholars as a significant contribution to Southern literary studies. Dr. Rieger is also very interested in the comparative study of Faulkner and Chinese writers, and has written a paper on the comparative study of Faulkner and Mo Yan. In July 2015, as part of the research project William Faulkner and His Influences on Contemporary Chinese Writers sponsored by the National Social Science Fund, Li Mengyu visited the center for an academic exchange and conducted a special interview with Dr. Rieger. The interview covered topics such as new Faulkner research approaches, the historical and cultural background in Faulkner’s writing, race, gender, religion, modernity and postmodernity, and the comparative study of Faulkner and contemporary Chinese writers. It is hoped that this interview can provide new thoughts and perspectives for Faulkner studies in Chinese academic circle.

Silence is in this article looked at as a formal element which obtains its meaning within communication processes. This meaning has to be ascertained by the recipient in a creative process. General observations on the history of silence in literature are followed by a theoretical discussion, which starts with the definition of silence as a meaningful suspension of speech and distinguishes various forms of silence. A distinction between silence and stillness makes it necessary to include manifestations of silence in modern authors like Samuel Beckett. Textual analysis is opened by examining a special rhetorical figure, silence as a break within a sentence (aposiopesis), in Julius Caesar, King Lear, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra. In the central part of the essay silence is investigated as a significant component within the thematic concerns of several plays, for instance the relation between silence and death in Hamlet, the villain’s silence in Othello and female silence in Measure for Measure. With regard to the comedy Much Ado About Nothing and the tragedy Titus Andronicus two different forms of silencing a person by force are treated, kissing and mutilation. With its new orientation on form and communication this article goes beyond Harvey Rovine’s standard study on silence in Shakespeare (1987).

As a set of socially constructed traits and behaviors, masculinity is generally connected with men. Some of these masculine attributes include freedom, integrity, financial independence, strength, and stability. These traits vary by context and are affected by social factors. When a man is unable to conform to the stated expectations, he is said to be in crisis either consciously or unconsciously. This paper brings to the fore the issues of masculine identity, the crisis of masculinity, and its consequences regarding the male characters, Lee and Austin, in Sam Shepard’s True West. The role of their disintegrated family, the stress over their future careers, as well as their backgrounds bring both Lee and Austin to the verge of crisis. The consequences are committing crimes, drinking alcohol, giving vent to their anger, frustration, and perpetrating violence.

The article discusses Paul de Man’s treatment of the ethicity of allegory in Allegories of Reading, particularly a difficult passage in the chapter “Allegory” (Julie), where de Man describes ethics or ethicity as “a discursive mode among others” and defines it as “the structural interference of two distinct value systems.” Despite the acknowledged opacity of the passage, many scholars quoted it, interpreted it, and incorporated it in their own elaborations on ethics and literature. The article claims that the established interpretations of the passage are erroneous. In addition, it seeks to demonstrate that the close reading of de Man’s text discloses its inconsistency. The conclusion is that de Man’s famous but enigmatic formulations cannot serve as a ground for a fruitful ethical literary criticism.

The Santhal tribe, one of the most significant tribes in India, with all pride, have been trying to keep their tradition, culture and language alive but over the time, their transactions with the neighbouring communities has changed their way of life. Their close association with the Hindus and the Christians has developed a new set of attitudes towards their cultural, social, political, and religious practices. The present paper investigates these partial changes that came about in the process of acculturation. Folktales have been used as means to explore the changes which would help the readers in gauging their evolved liquid identity. The paper analyses them in the light of acculturation of the Santhals as a subaltern group. It is largely based on the works of Rev. P.O. Bodding and A. Campbell who managed to collect and translate the Santhal folk tales with the purpose of giving voice to the voiceless.

It has often been maintained that the detective novel belongs to the category of entertainment narrative and as such has too much in common with trivial literature in order to be considered an equivalent counterpart to the mainstream norms of epic expression. In my article I dispute such assertions and show on the contrary that the modern crime genre has developed new standards of narration, which are comparable to the masterpieces of contemporary novel fiction. Instead of being something of inferior value, the best crime novels have conquered a status of excellence within the broad field of modern narration. I confirm my observations through references to modern Scandinavian crime novels and in so doing I discuss the role of the detective as a modern representative of the spirit of Enlightenment, who intends to elucidate the criminal scenery and bring the perpetrator to justice. Finally, I focus on the occupational understanding of the detective role in modern crime novels, hereby paying attention to questions regarding the ethical understanding of the detective’s profession.

Commenting on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image and its applicability to his study of nature as ruin in allegory, Susan Buck-Morss notes in her work The Dialectics of Seeing that “the illumination that dialectical images provide is a mediated experience, ignited within the force field of antithetical time registers, empirical history and Messianic history.” Viewing the burnt doll in the short story as a dialectical image will solve what James Phelan in his work Living to Tell About It refers to as “the puzzling signals about the relation between time of the action and time of the telling.” The burnt doll is an image of the ruin and an emblem of the transient nature of capitalist culture. It is a dialectical image in the sense that it constructs an alternative gender identity that is futuristic and fluid, gathering its building material literally out of a warehouse fire that has caused the new Barbie dolls to be sooty and, in the case of one of them, cousin Francie, disfigurement as it now has “a left foot that’s melted a little.” The telling is done by an anonymous young girl to her sister and involves an imaginative narration about two dolls which the girls dress and undress; the dolls fight over a boyfriend, an “invisible Ken.” They are on the lookout for new dolls on a Sunday that is presumably time present or immediate past and find Career Gal and Sweet Dreams, sooty and water-soaked dolls damaged by fire. The defective, melted left foot may easily be disguised “if you dress her in Prom Pinks.” That way “who’s to know.” The final statement summarizes the ambivalence of an uncertain future project: The dialectics between the natural wholeness of inherent gender and the future fluid, literally melting or melted gender is manifested in the emblematic image of the melted left foot. It is there though hidden from public view.

Natasha Trethewey is a former US Poet Laureate, whose third collection of poems Native Guard (2006) won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It is a book about her personal history, her mother’s memories and the nation’s memories during the Civil War (1861-1865). Through details such as photographs, daffodils, her mother’s tombstone, a black soldier’s palimpsest journal, a monument, etc., Trethewey depicts many “things” in the 26 poems in Native Guard. In light of Phelan’s narrative progression (2007) and Bennett’s “thing-power materialism” (2004), this paper argues a possibility of lyrical progression which is embodied in Trethewey’s Native Guard. The poems are arranged in a sequence of three sections and form a flow of matter-energy both for the speaker and the readers, which gives impetus to the development of Trethewey’s emotions and changes of her mood. The interactive dynamics between the poet and the readers construct the lyrical progression in the book.

The paper examines the narratives of violence in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place. The black women characters are presented as fragile bodies and easily available commodities not only for the white men but also for the men of their color. The rape episodes in the novel suggest the vulnerability of the women whose bodies are considered as holes “or containers: fragile, static, open, waiting to be filled with everything from semen to language” (Hite 133). Violence is a dark reality for the black women. It comes to them in the form of rape, sexual abuse by partner, domestic violence, verbal abuse, slavery and racism. While investigating the nature of violence in The Women of Brewster Place, the attempt is also to probe into the lives of Black women characters to showcase their material and psychic realities — pain, trauma and their resilience to fight back.

This paper is devoted to the issues of memory, art therapy and creation and their contributions to the survival and well-being in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Suzanne Nalbantian’s ideas are employed to investigate the memory in To the Lighthouse. Nalbantian’s theories are based on Jean-Pierre Changeux’s neuroscientific theories which would be linked with Antonio Damasio’s proposition concerning the nature of the arts. Therefore, as the consciousness and memory are some means to contribute to the well-being and quality of life, the arts follow this similar path to, first, argue that Woolf’s long term memories of her childhood, which helped her to create To the Lighthouse led to her well-being and optimal life through modulating her emotions and feelings concerning her mother; and, second, to abolish the gap, the feud, the so-called difference, between literature and science through tracing the roots of the arts to the biological notions of consciousness and memory. Simply, this paper argues that To the Lighthouse and Lily’s painting in the novel are both engendered through the long term memory. These creations, consequently, led to the well-being of their creators because art has a therapeutic nature due to consciousness and memory.

This paper, by the means of illustrating the specific elements of Existentialism including “absurdity,” “existential Angst” and “ethical decline,” aims to show how Gregor as the main character of The Metamorphosis fails to fulfill self-definition. Kafka’s protagonists are lonely because they are caught midway between a notion of good and evil, whose scope they cannot determine and whose contradiction they cannot resolve. This makes them become alienated from a society in which fear is a central idea. Gregor, due to his family’s financial issues and fear of being shamed in society, is unable to release his inner pressure. This pressure causes him to look for death as a suitable tool to escape the absurdity that society and his family offered him earlier.

The study explores the question of representation in the first novella of the Lebanese-French writer Yasmine Ghata, The Calligraphers’ Night (2006). Narrating from the afterlife, the protagonist Rikkat Kunt presents the reader with two simultaneously attached-detached narratives spanning her life as wife and mother and as a calligrapher. Her search for meaning in the two narratives drags the reader into deeper analysis of the absence and deferral of meaning in the process of representation. Building on Kobena Mercer’s “burden of representation” and Jacques Derrida’s “deferral of meaning,” the study aims to show that meaning in Rikkat’s double narrative is unconquerable; it is endlessly produced but never exhausted. Neither as wife and mother nor as a calligrapher could Rikkat realize this truth; it is only after death that she is able to accept the fact that no matter how hard she tries to make up for loss through producing meaning, some state of absence is sure to result from the constant deferral of meaning. After all, and as Derrida has always taught us, the sole conductor of the process of representation is the word, which is driven “by the absence that makes it necessary.” (Reynolds 4) This realization is enough to turn the process of representation into a burden, even after death.

This paper endeavors to address the socio-political situation of ethnicities’ lives through literature. André Brink is a South African novelist whose Rumors of Rain (1978) demonstrates the situation of ethnicities during apartheid. Victor Witter Turner (1920-1983) is a British cultural anthropologist whose concept of liminality will be exclusively studied in this paper. Brink’s novels have been examined by different researchers. However, most of them have demonstrated either historical characteristics of his novels or a particular ethnic group in them. Although like the colors in a rainbow one ethnic group may allocate a greater range than others, such a suffering regardless of their ethnicity and color, gathers them in the same structural spot and provides them with the relatively same socio-political condition. The significance of the present research is relevant to the very fact that the dominant impression supposes the blacks to be in a more in-between situation; however, this research reveals liminality in the lives of other ethnic groups as well. The present paper comes up with this conclusion that different ethnicities are like the guests in a carnival who are welcomed equally without any priority and superiority. South Africa has become an anti-structured entity in which the boundaries between high and low are broken and due to the fixation of the beings in liminality, the very liminality itself seems to have become an integral component of South Africa.