EAPSU Online: a Journal of Critical and Creative Work
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EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work Published by the English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities Volume 8, Fall 2011 ISSN 1548-1964 © 2011 English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities EDITOR Jeffrey Hotz, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania OFFICERS OF THE ASSOCIATION Cynthia Leenerts, President, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania Margo Wilson, Vice-President, California University of Pennsylvania Richard Van Dyke, Secretary, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania Mike Downing, Webmaster, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Carl Seiple, Treasurer, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Cheryl Wilson, Past-President, Indiana University of Pennsylvania © English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities 2 EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work Table of Contents Volume 8, Fall 2011 Introduction Jeffrey Hotz, Editor ......................................................................................................................... 4 Essays, Stories, and Poems “Are Ye Gods?”: Interrogating the Divine in Melville’s Timoleon Etc. Jonathan A. Cook, Middleburg Academy ........................................................................................ 6 Linguistic Bias and English as a Counter Offensive in the Fiction of Arturo Islas Timothy K. Nixon, Shepherd University ......................................................................................... 54 Modernism and Contemporary Arab Fiction: James Joyce and Somaya Ramadan Kim McKay, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania ............................................................ 81 A Hole in the World Hannelore N. Rogers, Independent Scholar .................................................................................. 99 The Muffin Hannelore N. Rogers, Independent Scholar ................................................................................ 103 Selected Poems: Ghosts of Milos; Sex Education, Dystopia Debate Noel Sloboda, Penn State York ................................................................................................... 107 Converting Stereotype to Archetype in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson Michael Downing, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania ............................................................ 110 “In geography and in geography”: Mapping the Form, Subjectivity, and Determinism of Gertrude Stein’s Geographical Imagination Andrew Vogel, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania ................................................................. 134 Selected Poems: The Future of English; Nicodemus and the Cat Michael Downing, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania ............................................................ 168 EAPSU ONLINE submission and subscription information .................................................... 169 © English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities 3 EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work Introduction I am very pleased to introduce these selections for the Fall 2011 edition of EAPSU-Online. As usual, we have an excellent blend of scholarly and creative pieces, including memoir and poetry. A theme of this edition concerns boundaries and borders, as well as crossings. We find different iterations on the theme in each contribution. In “Are Ye, Gods?”: Interrogating the Divine in Melville’s Timoleon Etc.,” Jonathan A. Cook examines Melville’s stance of religious skepticism—a conviction in the impossibility of absolute truth—in his final collection of poems, Timoleon Etc., which appeared a few months before Melville’s death in 1891. Jonathan A. Cook’s detailed exegesis of Timoleon Etc. is an important contribution to Melville scholarship, shedding light on a work that very few scholars have written on. Moving from the boundaries of human knowledge to the constraints (and opportunities) of language, Timothy K. Nixon’s “Linguistic Bias and English as a Counter-Offensive in the Fiction of Arturo Islas” explores Mexican-American writer Arturo Islas’s strategic use of English in his novels as a way of challenging the hegemony of English in the United States. Nixon’s essay analyzes instances of boundary bending in his use of English across a number of Islas’s works. Kim McKay’s “Modernism and Contemporary Arab Fiction: James Joyce and Somaya Ramadan” considers the borders of literary movements. McKay argues that modernism remains a current, evolving tradition, which Egyptian author Somaya Ramadan draws upon in her 2001 (2002, in English translation by Marilyn Booth) novel Leaves of Narcissus: A Modern Arab Novel. McKay examines a number of modernist authorial influences on Ramadan’s novel, most notably James Joyce, and encourages us to read contemporary Arab texts, more generally, as part of a living modernist tradition. Hannelore N. Rogers’ “A Hole in The World” and “The Muffin,” two works of memoir, examine sensitively the ability of language and gesture to provide vital meaning in the face of changes and challenges. Rogers’ pieces are stories of connection amidst loss, of finding wholeness through communication. Where boundaries exist, these pieces tell us, we find opportunities for crossings. Noel Sloboda’s three poems draw upon literary and historical subjects. Two poems, “Sex Education II” and “Dystopia Debate,” dramatize the English classroom, a place where discussions of literary works often lead to unusual insights. His poems demonstrate how meaning often forges its own paths, into new fields (and forests). Michael Downing’s “Converting Stereotype to Archetype in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson” continues his analysis in the 2010 edition of EAPSU Online of August Wilson’s use of archetype. Downing provides a thorough reading of this important play—perhaps Wilson’s most anthologized work—and argues that Wilson is dramatist as mythographer, who transforms the debased language of stereotypes into transcendent ideas. © English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities 4 EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work Andrew Vogel’s “In geography and in geography”: Mapping the Form, Subjectivity, and Determinism of Gertrude Stein’s Geographical Imagination” offers a key to Stein’s geographically informed view of human nature and the individual. Vogel highlights Stein’s belief that environmental factors and the experience of location determine our subjectivity, in terms of both its content and its modes of understanding. The borders of our consciousness are outlined in the geographies that we inhabit. Finally, we conclude with two pieces of occasional poetry by Michael Downing. Written during the Fall 2011 EAPSU Conference at Bloomsburg University, these poems cross the margins of time and bring us back to this conference. I thank all of the contributors for their excellent work, and I thank you, the reader, for your support of this publication. Yours truly, Jeffrey Hotz, Associate Professor of English East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania © English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities 5 EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work “Are Ye Gods?”: Interrogating the Divine in Melville’s Timoleon Etc. Jonathan A. Cook, Middleburg Academy Although the posthumously appearing Billy Budd is often considered Melville’s literary “last testament,” the lesser-known work that actually terminated his career as a published writer was a collection of forty-two poems, Timoleon Etc. Appearing a few months before his death (which occurred on 28 September 1891) in a self-published edition of only twenty-five copies, Timoleon Etc. officially ended the sequence of four volumes that Melville had published during his later career as a poet, although a substantial amount of poetry and prose, including a completed volume of poems dedicated to his wife, Weeds and Wildings, remained in manuscript at his death. Divided into two parts, the second of which was entitled “Fruit of Travel Long Ago”—a reference to Melville’s extended tour of Europe and the Levant in 1856- 1857—Timoleon Etc. distinguished itself from his previous volume of sea pieces and nautical reminiscences, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), by its subject matter of religion, art, and the role of the artist in society. If we consider Timoleon Etc. a kind of last testament within Melville’s total oeuvre, a significant part of this testament would be the religious skepticism that had shaped his imagination during the previous four decades. This essay will examine the sequence of poems in Timoleon Etc. relating to religion in order to understand the final phase of the author’s creative interrogation of the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose deus absconditus © English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities 6 EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work had become increasingly conspicuous by his absence, in Melville’s view, during the later nineteenth century.1 As a writer who had undergone a protracted crisis of Christian faith comparable to many of his Victorian contemporaries (but not his American peers until a generation later), Melville had early embraced the tradition of philosophical and religious skepticism which began in the classical world. Codified by the second-century philosopher Sextus Empiricus, classical skepticism was traditionally denominated Pyrrhonism after one of its leading practitioners, Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-275 BCE), who pioneered the technique of questioning the finality of truth claims and the logical methods by which truth could be discovered. Encouraging suspended judgment (epoche) and