Duke University Press Log

Volcanic Eruptions and Environmental Disasters in Literature and History

Cataclysmic events, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which happened on this day, have fascinated people for thousands of years. Individuals have attempted to express this captivation in various ways from Pliny the Younger, who survived the Vesuvius eruption and subsequently wrote in detail about his experience, to the leaders of the French Revolution, who invoked the powerful symbolism of a natural, unstoppable force that volcanoes represent. Writing about natural disasters helps people move on, but not forget, these catastrophes. As these experiences are immortalized over time, they come to symbolize hope, survival, power and destruction. Poetics Today and French Historical Studies delve further into these instances of expression and demonstrate the link between why people write about natural disasters such as Mount Vesuvius’ eruption and how that calamity empowers and embodies events long after.

In Francoise Lavocat’s “Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and the Emergence of Interpretative Viewpoints,” he discusses the reasons and ways people write about natural disasters:

Braccini’s narrative of the Naples volcanic eruption illustrates the narrator-witness’s need to explain his personal, intellectual, and even emotional perception of a given event. The 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius gave rise to many narratives that emphasized the contrast between “the curiosity” of the witness-narrator and the credulity of Neapolitans nurtured by legends. This contrast was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s attitude toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is also by reference to Pliny that the taste for observation, even close to the eruption site, is asserted and staged, as can be seen in Braccini’s writing. Another priest, Angelo Eugenii da Perugia, compares his “experience” of the “natural effects” of the eruption to the “extravagant exaggerations” of his contemporaries, who interpret the phenomenon as the beginning of the Apocalypse. No one denies the existence of divine causes, but nor does this prevent the consideration of secondary causes. Braccini goes to a library in Naples and does a public reading of Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, declaring to his fellow citizens: “Here is a description,58 1550 years old, that corresponds exactly to what you have before your eyes today”. In the case of the eruption of Vesuvius, the repetition of this catastrophe and the comparison it invites between AD 79 and 1629 beg for demystification: at least, the repetition suggests that this eruption, similar to a previous one in antiquity, is not the last and so very unlikely to be the Apocalypse. Braccini’s rational point of view thus partly secularizes the interpretation. The historical dimension is fundamental to this new approach to catastrophe, expressed several times around 1630, regarding the eruption of Vesuvius and the plague in northern Italy. Most narratives include an appendix that lists previous catastrophes in chronological order,60 focusing on disasters that occurred in the recent past (especially the sixteenth century) while ignoring biblical and mythical accounts. Catastrophes are no longer prophetic of other catastrophes.

Read more from “Narratives of Catastrophe” here.

In “Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution,” Mary Ashburn Miller establishes a relationship between the language of natural history and the political rhetoric of the French Revolution by tracing the iconography of the volcano throughout the revolutionary period:

Le jugement dernier des rois, a play written by Sylvain Maréchal, opened to enthusiastic reviews at the Theater of the Republic in Vendémiaire of Year II. Maréchal subtitled his play ‘a prophecy in one act.’ The journalist Prudhomme also embraced the future foreseen by the playwright and hoped for by the supportive Committee of Public Safety. ‘The theatrical fiction will soon become historical fact,’ he wrote. The overthrow of Europe’s kings, their return to an ‘uncivilized’ state, and their ultimate destruction by natural forces was fiction presented to, and patronized by, a broad French public, playing in Beauvais, Compiègne, Grenoble, Le Mans, Lille, Metz, and Rouen. And the volcano, symbol of revolutionary fervor and destruction, became the ultimate demonstration of nature’s justice, annihilating the monarchs in a single, terrifying, and glorious moment described in the play’s liner notes: ‘The explosion takes place: the fire attacks the kings from all sides; they fall, consumed in the innards of the opened earth.’ The quite literal fall of the monarchs, although enabled by the French Revolution itself, was portrayed as the work of natural forces.

Read more from “Mountain, Become a Volcano” here.

Happy Birthday, Emily Brontë!

Happy birthday, Emily Brontë! Celebrating what would have been the author’s 196th birthday, we have selected several journal articles in honor of her work. Her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights, was poorly received when it was first published and Bronte died of tuberculosis just a year later. Today, Wuthering Heights is considered a classic and a masterpiece of literature.

In “Postcolonial Life and Death: A Process-Based Comparison of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Ayu Utami's Saman,” Tiffany Tsao examines the two novels' respective treatments of internal colonization,a shared thematic concern that only becomes apparent with critical attention to the similarities between scenes found in each work. Read an excerpt below:

Viewing Wuthering Heights and Saman as alike in their portrayals of the violence of domestic colonization inevitably illuminates and augments key aspects of each work. That is, when we focus on the features that the two works have in common, the differences we discover about those features, ones that previously meant little in a sea of innumerable differences, gain new significance. More specifically, we find that the two works diverge in their portrayals of the extent to which the colonization process may transform the “savage” and, consequently, the extent to which a post-colonial life based on pre-colonial ways of life is possible. Whereas Wuthering Heights portrays colonization as enacting a total transformation of the savage into the civilized, Saman portrays “savage” pre-civilization as an enduring and powerful reality that remains unaltered by the attempts of civilizers to change it. As a result, Wuthering Heights regards resistance to civilization as a reversion to a non-existent, pre-civilized past; Saman, by contrast, envisions it as the product of a way of life that has always been ongoing, independently, beneath civilization’s veneer. To put it another way, unlike Wuthering Heights, Saman posits the existence of an alternate reality an unseen primordial realm that continues untouched and undisturbed by the incursion of a so-called civilization that is oppressive.

Read more from “Postcolonial Life and Death” here.

In “'Whose Injury is Like Mine?’ Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and the Sincere Postures of Suffering Men,” Kevin A. Morrison argues that these authors, focusing on the transition from a traditional yeoman economy to a system of capitalist property ownership, present male suffering as authentic and histrionic, indicative of both power and powerlessness, and as an attempt to manage perceived threats to the self. Read an excerpt:

I employ the term sincere postures to describe Brontë’s and Eliot’s efforts to figure the gestural and rhetorical modes of male suffering as suffering while also recognizing them as calculated strategies. Representing male suffering as both authentic and histrionic, indicative of both powerlessness and power, enables these novelists to acknowledge the emotional violence that men inflict on women but then to assign a specific cause for it largely outside men’s individual control. This is less an effort to excuse such behavior than it is, I think, an attempt to authorize Brontë’s and Eliot’s own respective projects of establishing sympathy as the foundational virtue of the new bourgeois owning class whose hegemony they help to bring about. If men’s behavior toward women can be seen as emanating from genuine distress rather than inherent misogyny, women can play an active role in offering the kind of succor that might heal the wound and stop the violence that male suffering produces. However, this paradox, in which suffering is at once both a symptom of masculine precariousness and incoherency and an asset for a man’s preservation and reassertion of authority, allows Brontë and Eliot to resolve one problem only to introduce another. If suffering is constitutive of masculine dominance, then the concept of reparative compassion is incoherent because male authority relies on appeals to female sympathy to keep it intact. In my reading, these novels are poised between conservation and critique, producing an ambivalence that can be reconciled only through “imaginary or formal ‘solutions’” to the disquieting paradox of liberal masculinity.

Read more from “’Whose Injury is Like Mine?’” here.

Celebrate Bloomsday!

James Joyce set his classic novel, Ulysses, on the 16th of June, 1904. The day, nicknamed “Bloomsday” after the protagonist Leopold Bloom, has since become a commemoration of the life and work of James Joyce. In honor of Bloomsday 2014, sample several recent articles on James Joyce and Ulysses.

Beth Blum’s article “Ulysses as a Self-Help Manual” examines Declan Kiberd’s “Ulysses” and Us, a guide for the common reader of Ulysses, that attempted to “pry Joyce’s masterpiece from the grip of the ‘corporate university.’” Read an excerpt:

‘It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people,’ Kiberd declares. Instead of tracing Homeric parallels or poring over skeleton keys, we should, he suggests, approach Joyce’s text as nothing other than a ‘self-help manual.’ Ulysses, he explains, ‘is a book with much to teach us about the world--advice on how to cope with grief; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how women have their own sexual desires and so also do men; how to walk and think at the same time.’ Kiberd’s book was received favorably in the popular press and, perhaps unsurprisingly, less so in the academic journals. Scholars appreciated his lucid, jargon-free prose but recoiled at his brash claims, his reliance on ‘anecdotal’ evidence, and the text’s ‘gossipy biographical flourish.’ If Joyce’s goal was really to reach the ‘common reader,’ reviewers wondered why he did not write more simply.

To read more of “Ulysses as a Self-Help Manual,” click here.

In “Non serviam: James Joyce and Mexico,” Brian L. Price juxtaposes Mexican authors and James Joyce and considers how Joyce is “assimilated into their own cultural projects as literary object and literary experience.” Read an excerpt:

Non serviam is Lucifer’s declaration that he will not serve the God of heaven. It is a challenge to authority, a declaration of autonomy, and--at least since Blake--it was become a motto for embattled artists. Thus, near the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce’s fallen angel, Stephen Dedalus, declares that he will not answer the Church’s call to serve a priesthood to which he had earlier dedicated himself following the spiritual retreat in the third chapter…. Despite Stephen’s explicit declaration that he will not serve either Irish nationalism or the British literary canon, however, he is ‘supersaturated’ with that in which he says he does not believe: Ireland, Catholicism, and Shakespeare plague him throughout A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. This tension between the desire for unfettered artistic exploration and the omnipresence of national concern is one of the hallmarks of Mexican cosmopolitan writing.

To read more of “Non serviam: James Joyce and Mexico,” click here.

For a comprehensive list of all Duke University Press journal articles on James Joyce, click here.

Articles:

“Ulysses as a Self-Help Manual? James Joyce’s Strategic Populism,” by Beth Blum in Modern Language Quarterly, volume 74 and issue 1 (March 2013)

“Non serviam: James Joyce and Mexico” by Brian L. Price in Comparative Literature, volume 64 and issue 2 (Spring 2012)

Nominees for the Pushcart Prize from the minnesota review

The minnesota review has just announced their nominees for the 2012 Pushcart Prize! The Pushcart Prize is a literary prize that honors the best poetry, short fiction, and essays published by small presses. The six works nominated from the minnesota review have been made freely available to view. Click on the titles below to read the nominee's work:

Barrett Bowlin, "But I Can Only Do It Once"
Paul Robert Chesser, "The Widening Gyre"
Keith Leonard, "A Brief History of Fiction"
Maxim T. Loskutoff, "The Dancing Bear"
Christa Romanosky, "Gutter"
Margot Schilpp, "Casualties"

Be sure to check the the minnesota review blog in a few weeks for the announcement of the winner! Best of luck to all the nominees!

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Cultural Politics

Cultural Politics seeks papers for issue on Affective Landscapes

About the special issue:

Issue editors Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson seek exciting disciplinary and transdisciplinary proposals from scholars working in fields such as cultural studies, literary studies, cultural politics/history, creative writing, film and media studies, area studies, photography, and fine art who are interested in examining the different ways in which human beings respond and relate to, as well as debate and interact with, landscape.

Please submit essays of around 6,000 words or creative pieces combining images and words of around 2,000 words by November 16, 2012.

About Cultural Politics

Moving beyond the boundaries of race, gender, and class, the journal examines the political ramifications of global cultural productions across artistic and academic disciplines. The journal explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture by bringing together text and visual art that offer diverse modes of engagement with theory, cultural production, and politics.

To submit a manuscript, please contact Neil Campbell at [email protected]. 
For a list of indexers, visit dukeupress.edu/culturalpolitics.
For a style guide and instructions for authors, please visit dukeupress.edu/culturalpolitics.

Walt Whitman, Bureaucrat

Poet Walt Whitman has been in the news this week, when the National Archives announced that scholar Kenneth M. Price has found a trove of thousands of documents Whitman worked on when he was a government clerk. What's perhaps most surprising about the documents is that Whitman appeared to take his work seriously and even enjoy it. As Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Jennifer Howard puts it, "Government workers, take heart: One of America's most influential literary figures found his federal work engaging and thought well of many of his fellow bureaucrats, according to Mr. Price." Previous accounts of Whitman have described Whitman as a slacker at his government job, putting in a few hours a day for a much-needed paycheck. This is also the justification scholars give for his writing of the temperance novel, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate. Whitman himself described the novel as "rot," but perhaps in light of this new, more earnest Whitman the editors will need to reconsider? Regardless, the discovery of the government documents and the novel both add to our understanding of the complexity of one of America's greatest poets.

Duke Professor and Author Reynolds Price Dies

The Duke community is mourning the death of Reynolds Price, Professor of English for over fifty years and beloved author of more than three dozen books. The New York Times called him "one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction" in their obituary. At Duke he is remembered also as a beloved teacher whose rich, deep voice was instantly recognizable on campus. Duke President Richard Brodhead told the News and Observer, "Reynolds was a part of the soul of Duke; he loved this university and always wanted to make it better. We can scarcely imagine Duke without Reynolds Price." At Duke Press we were proud to publish Price's notebooks in 1998, in the form of the book Learning a Trade: A Craftsman’s Notebooks: 1955-1997. Critics praised the book for giving readers a look into the workings of the mind of an author. "Learning a Trade is a rare contemporary example of [a published working journal], giving us an almost full documentary of the mind of this author," wrote Alexander Theroux in the Wall Street Journal. Duke University Press Books Marketing Mangaer Emily Young sums up our experience working with Price: "It was an honor to be able to work with him on this project and to share in his unending generosity and enthusiasm for the craft of writing and teaching others about writing. And his deep appreciation for the role of publishing was felt in every email and conversation. He wrote in an email to me, after a meeting to discuss how to market his book, 'delighted to know the staff are hopeful—thanks again for all the good feeling.' And now we say thank you, Reynolds Price, for all the good feeling you brought to our world at here Duke Press. You will be missed."

Praise for Bring on the Books for Everybody

Some great praise today for Jim Collins's Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Collins's book is a hopeful assesment of the culture of reading and books that considers film, e-books, Oprah, and the rise of the chain bookstore. Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Tara Brabazon says the book is "the "killer app" for popular cultural studies." She exhorts readers to "Buy it. Borrow it. Download it. Now. It is a book that we will remember where we were when we we first read it. This is a game-changer for popular cultural studies, media studies and the new humanities." The Chicago Tribune thinks the book is one of five that writers should read right now. So what are you waiting for? Get reading!

Janell Watson discusses the minnesota review

Janell Watson, editor of the minnesota review (new to Duke University Press in 2011), recently sat down to discuss the journal with us.  In the video below she recounts her first encounter with the journal at the MLA, considers the journal's future under her editorship, and lets us in on what the minnesota review looks for in new submissions.

 

Ariel Dorfman in Johannesburg

Ariel Dorfman is in Johannesburg this week, hosting readings, screenings and talks in advance giving the 8th Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture tomorrow. The prestigious lecture has previously been given by Nobel Peace Laureates Professor Muhammad Yunus, Professor Wangari Maathai, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Kofi Anan, former presidents Bill Clinton and Thabo Mbeki, and President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Dorfman is the author of many books and plays, including Some Write to the Future (1991), In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land (2002), and The Empire's Old Clothes (2010). We also published the first monograph about Dorfman this year, Sophia McClennen's Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope. Congratulations to Dorfman on this great honor!