Critical Survey

The present article addresses the evocative potential of posing nude in Carol Ann Duffy's poem ‘Standing Female Nude’. My assumption is that the posing model/prostitute displays two bodies: the physical body and the signifying body. The interplay between both bodies triggers a process of signification whereby art is not simply a studio production but a meta-frame encapsulating a reflection on society, culture, self-representation and politics of identity. The poem substantiates the poet's experimental method of writing which draws on nude art genre, the dramatic monologue, theatre and metafiction. What the posing female nude recounts is not just experience of posing nude in a studio, but reflections on her body as a posing model and as a writing model or a narrative imbricating in its texture cynical comments and attitudes on artistic and socio-cultural values as the female model pokes fun at the reception of artistic work in the bourgeois society.

Francis Meres’ 1598 Palladis Tamia, subtitled in English ‘Wit's Treasury’, is a quintessential document in Shakespeare studies. With ten Shakespeare plays already in print anonymously, Meres’ commonplace book for the first time identifies ‘Shakespeare’ as a playwright, and within weeks of Meres’ book, the name ‘Shakespeare’ appears on the second quarto title pages of Richard II and Richard III, transforming ‘anonymous’ into ‘Shakespeare’ in a blink. This article analyses the methods of commonplace book arrangement used by Francis Meres, Master of Arts at both Cambridge and Oxford, to have his private say about Shakespeare. In his 1597 God's Arithmetic, Meres approves the opinion of Pythagoras who wrote over the door of the entrance to his school: ‘Let none enter here that is ignorant in Arithmetic’. The ideas of God's Arithemetic, applied to Palladis Tamia, disclose Meres’ meticulous mastery of erudite humanist design that is the hallmark of his pedagogic method and his ‘post-Stratfordian’ conclusions.

Drawing on the consequences of violence that ensued from the outbreak of conflict in Syria against the background of the 2011 uprising, this article examines the traumatic effects of the Arab Spring among Syrian refugees and war survivors in the two novels An Unsafe Haven (2016) by Nada Jarrar and The Frightened Ones (2020) by Dima Wannous. It dwells upon various types of trauma, focusing on the problem of displacement, individual plights and the war dilemma. Wannous’ and Jarrar's narratives are concerned with the agonies experienced by refugees and war survivors, especially women. Traumatic incidents that refugees and war survivors encounter in their home countries include interpersonal violence, sexual violence, life-threatening accidents, witnessing the murder of loved ones, and torture. A descriptive and analytical method is followed in conducting the study relying on the two texts as primary sources and critical literature produced on them and the main issues discussed as secondary sources.

This article presents a study of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Coleridge and ‘Resolution and Independence’ by Wordsworth. The readings are mainly addressed by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and try to present a conception of sublimity which mainly revolves around ethical awareness and sensibility so as to gauge the extent to which they can possibly hint at ethical issues at stake. We propose that these poetic works deal with the other and the sublimity of the encounter between the self and the other. Each of these works offers similar images of the self before the encounter – that of dwelling, self-preoccupation and enjoyment – but the speakers come out of the encounter differently: in ‘The Rime’, the Mariner roams throughout the country and recounts his experience for other ‘others’ in the hope of spreading what he now can probably identify as ‘the Good’; in ‘Resolution and Independence’, the speaker simply comes out of the unsettling and sublime encounter with the leech-gatherer enlightened and mindful of the other. The conclusion is that one significant part of the idea of the sublime in Romanticism deals with irreducible alterities – cosmic/ontic as well as (more importantly) human – and while they ineluctably reduce them to the language of poetry, each treatment can be evaluated by analysing how well they express the ruptures and interstices of alterity within a language which can go beyond language.

William Campbell, the major character of Hemingway's ‘A Pursuit Race’, fails to hold the lead, gets off his symbolic bike and barricades himself under a sheet in a hotel room, from beneath which he oozes his paranoid discourse of madness. This unexpected stoppage of an advance man for a burlesque show entails a profound distortion of the harmonious pattern of motion and immobility. Immersed in the paranoid, manoeuvring between the reasonable and the schizophrenic, Campbell resembles the Nietzschean rope-dancer, who improvises the present in his dramatic performance that starts anew with every fall. The major aim of this article is to analyse the paranoid condition of Hemingway's subject-in-madness through the prism of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a desiring-machine as well as the Foucauldian perspective on insanity. The analysis will be carried out with reference to Hemingway's notion of ‘balance under pressure’, and the improvisational aspect of paranoid and non-reasonable.

Though post-9/11 metapoetry effectively represents the critical reality of 9/11, there has been no concerted scholarly study of this subgenre of poetry so far. In this article, I wish to examine three post-9/11 metapoems to attain a bipartite aim. First, I want to demonstrate that, through a much more sophisticated metapoetic subjectivity than is found in many ‘belated’ post-9/11 poems, these three poems enact the crisis of language and the difficulty of representing 9/11. Second, I would like to formulate a theory of post-9/11 metapoetry based on the analysis of these poems and the consciousness of their twentieth-century counterparts to indicate a new aesthetic stage in the representation of crisis in metapoems. My article conveys the ultimate message that post-9/11 metapoetry overcomes the crisis of representation in a way that transcends the particular event of 9/11 and becomes a general aesthetic mode of speaking the unspeakable in the face of any ineffable traumatic experience.