1. How does humor operate in the work of artists who are not primarily humorists?

2. To what extent is humor, as a form of fiction, culture-specific? Is 'black humor' always black humor?

3. In major humor theories (the big 3 - relief, superiority, incongruity), do we account for the prospect of storytelling? Namely, where does the fine line between 'the punchline' and the storytelling practice draw itself?

4. How do we measure laughter?

5. (Reinhard Moller) To what extent does Kierkegaard's 'controlled irony' model work, in terms of strategies of writing, epistemologies, and ethical issues?

6. (Nada Kujundzic) Woody Allen's philosophy of humor - an example of 'controlled humor'?

***

1. (Verena Vortish) Arthur Schnitzler's concept of comedy: as a metaphor and a generic label (playing with the expectations of the genre - writing comedy/comedies as an example of national duty?

2. Since comedies get close to chaos but cannot stay in chaos, to what extent does humor tap into raw emotion and/or sentimentality?

3. Spalding Gray's work in 'Swimming to Cambodia': humor and ethnography. Strategies - laughter and hell (sense of dirtiness - glass of water, hands waving, repetition but no rant) as examples of the violence of humor and the humor of violence?

4. The intersection between stand-up and performance art: playing with fire as the power to ignite vulnerability, pain, discomfort, laughter?

5. Pryor's 1982 comedy routine: is the human body in pain? is the black body in pain?

6. The insider/outsider debate/s: who is to represent what? (questions the connection of taboo and comedy)

A few open-ended questions, as we plow our way through Anderson's 'Imagined Communities' and Foucault's 'Of Other Spaces', not to leave out a new text (at least for me) by Odo Marquard on Art as Anti-Fiction:

1. Do we still live/embody a theological fiction? If so, are we to embrace our own fictionalization by allowing art to defines itself/herself/himself as being against fiction, i.e., as Marquard terms it 'anti-fiction'?

2. Taking cue from Vertovec and Cohen on conceiving cosmopolitanism, as a philosophy and a political project, an attitude and a practice, how far are labels in text going to reach out? Namely, can an English-born author simply write cosmopolitan novels, and would they then stop being British, or?

3. Nationalist novels: dialogical sites, or agit-prop, through and through?

4. The Hybrid Cosmopolitan: both a producer and a product? Does hybridity necessitate (global) agency? Is it a case of resistance, having access to subvert?

Exile is mostly a linguistic event. (Joseph Brodsky)

Some of my favorite writers, if not all, had come to writing through a particular exilic relationship. Either with their birth place or their citizenship status or their choice of residence. Even with their choice of language.

Albahari, Hemon, Joyce, Nabokov, Kundera, Soyinka, Ugreshic, Milosz, Stein, Pound, Rushdi, Brecht, Harwood, Skvoretcky, Todorov, Auden.

Whether we agree or not, with the claim that the past century, due to its geopolitical stance, afforded a shift in the mythic understanding of exile as ‘man’s fall from God’s Grace’ and thus reduced the punishment of banishment to a mere East to West dislocation, the notion that writing and exile are almost inextricably linked seems to persist and with that continue to question the very nature of writing and creation. Namely, as Albahari aptly put it in his ‘The Exiled Fragments’ (2003), ‘an exile, a wanderer, a writer’ all appear to coexist, as synonymous ‘borderers on the same path’.

Yet, I wonder, and with that open the question to the larger audience – which one of the two necessitates the other: does exile (in its widest form, therefore including all forms of expatriation and displacement) condition the act of writing, as a needed attempt to move oneself towards freedom or is writing such as state of creation, primarily a singular solitary experience (both in motion and execution) which compels each writer’s voluntary exile, at least through the linguistic event of ‘putting his words down on paper’?

Etymologically speaking, exile, from its Latin roots, implies a state of flux, a paradoxically dangerous motion of ‘being on the outside of things’, forever looming, wandering, jumping ahead. However, most writers-in-exile and exiled authors, describe their own ‘exiled state’ as a rather passive form, a passive attempt to return to the active presence of ‘living’. Perhaps, indeed, it is this rather impassive life which necessitates the process of writing, as the ‘exile’s’ attempt to ‘live’, to be active and living again. On the other hand, it seems as if, at least to the ‘naked eye’ (and the voracious reader of texts produced through exile) that there is more to this want to change states: if in fact an exiled life is forcefully nothing but a passive form of being, then what are we to make of bilingualism, i.e., exiled writers, who like Nabokov and Beckett, started multiple ‘linguistic events’, thus creating in more than one language simultaneously, and with great success, ‘words on paper’ which propelled other forms of looming, wandering, jumping ahead, from each and all of us, their readers?

As I prepare for a life in exile (not banishment or exclusion), a chosen form of living on the outside of my given (home) environment, thus anticipating multiple linguistic events in my near future, I wonder about other writers, out there. Not the famous kind, you see. The published footnotes. My concern lies with the league of extraordinary young men and women whose exiled writing selves are found on the pages of term papers, research abstracts and lengthy tests, at universities abroad. In the case of their writing, call me romantic, I’d like to believe that the writing they produce, though necessitated by the exiled condition in which they dwell as academically displaced people, is mostly an active form, a conscious attempt to live a present life, one of value, one of ethics.

In the Prologue to the 1998 edition of his individual and communal journey into the imagination and verbal traditions of his people – the Kiowas, titled ‘The Way to Rainy Mountain” (1969), N. Scott Momaday writes: ‘In one sense, then, the way to Rainy mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and its old and essential being in language. The verbal tradition by which it has been preserved has suffered the deterioration in time. What remains is fragmentary: mythology, legend, lore, and hearsay – and of course the idea itself, as crucial and complete as it ever was. That is the miracle.”

As I was reading Momaday’s masterfully woven triptych of his people’s mythical origins, followed both by historically rendered perceptions and personal mementos of these life-shaping legends, I kept in mind the miracle that ties them in. Scholar J. Frank Papovich has traced the very same miracle in the pedagogical value of Momaday’s narrative. Namely, Papovich plays with the notions of a none-native versus a native observation of the American landscape, juxtaposing Thoreau’s 19th century romantic reaction to the Wilderness and Momaday’s 20th century invocation of his people’s timeless relatedness to the natural world of the ‘American frontier’. Teacher Robert L. Berner furthers the pedagogical reach of Momaday’s text, engaging with it at a structuralist level while studying this text for a classroom setting. And then there is the referential piece by critic H. David Brumble III, which opens up Momday’s narrative to a wider conceptualization of the self (as given). That is to say, by trying to draw the audience closer to the ‘consummate being’ of Momaday’s text, Brumble approaches the narrative indirectly, likening it to ‘similar’ stories of/by Native Americans. Yet, all three respective thinkers take a detour on the journey of discovering Momaday’s text. The result: an academic distancing of the very words which bring the Kiowas to life, the miracle of it all.

The question then, how are we to approach such a simplistically intricate narrative? How do we teach culture in all of its traditions? How do we teach such a life narrative? Especially when: The miracle of Momaday’s narrative lies in its existence, in its language and its structure, speaking to different readers, differently. Like the epic forms of the oral traditions of other indigenous peoples across time and space, the miracle of this cultural narrative is found in its words and their meanings, textually rather than contextually, in its vocality and outspokenness while trapped by the graphics of a printed page. In its endurance.

One label would be that of a female Bildungsroman. Pin-chia Feng's essay, titled 'Rethinking the Bildungsroman: the Politics of Rememory and the Bildung of Ethnic American Women Writers' equips me with the proper tools for such a task. While contrasting the development of the German bourgeoisie Bildungsroman and its English counterpart to that of the emerging sub-genre of the female Bildungsroman, particularly looking at the works produced by ethnic women writers in America, Feng reinstates Tzvetan Todorov's conceptualization of genre. Since Todorov views genre as both the process and the product of the dynamics between abstract notions and certain historical contexts, Feng is able to build on this fluid definition as she forges her own understanding of ethnic women's generic texts. Her definition of the female Bildungsroman is a rather inclusive one, since it allows her to examine "any writing by an ethnic woman about the identity formation of an ethnic woman, whether fictional or autobiographical in form, chronologically or retrospectively in plot, as a Bildungsroman." (15) In this respect, Jade Snow Wong's text is a prime example of the generic Chinese-American female Bildungsroman.

If I am to settle for this rather too neat of a label, I must take it a step further, that is to say, I need to unwind the intricate father-daughter text for what it tries to accomplish and for what it does accomplish, once the tale is told. Elaine Kim's essay, 'Second Generation Self-Portrait' looks at a number of texts by American-born children of Chinese ancestry and their myrriad struggles to create and sustain an identity, separate, from that of the parental lineage, amidst a rather hostile while mainstream culture. Kim's rendition of Wong's autobiography centers on the formal appearance of the text; namely, how it, in turn, conditions the structural thematic of the piece. For the most part, Kim finds Wong's attitude towards the outside world, beyond Chinatown, an example of a desparate need for recognition, comfort, love, and ultimately compassion, from her own community, from her immediate family.

To an extent, I agree with Kim's evaluation of Wong's life-persona as given throughout the text. Whether she was aiming at such an outcome is another point altogether. However, as someone who has been living and working in a double margin herself, for the past thirty odd years, I feel compelled to relate some of my own life's sentiments as I analyze Wong's life story. When one's identity is a complex and unsettling mixture of polarized 'initial' identities (Macedonian, Serbian, Woman, Multilingual, Single, Educated, Atheist, Burdensome Last Name), it is difficult to explain to others, even close family members, how one sees one self, or at least attempt to do so. It is almost impossible to remain focused and proportionally rounded once the explanation gets published. 

In the introductory note to the original edition of her autobiography, Jade Snow Wong attempts to justify her life story to the prospective readership. The text we, the anonymous public, are about to read is to be read as one author's, one woman's, one Chinese American woman's "attempt to evaluate personal experiences, many of which were not 'typical'". She continues to explain how these experiences were significant to the formative aspect of her character, her identity in twentieth century American society, which in turn, may not necessarily equate that of any other American. Thus, even before we turn to the actual story, delivered in the objective third person singular point of view, apologies for what is about to come are being made.

My question goes towards the need for such a self-justification: does it - the prefaced apology - arise because the text may pose a threat to someone's ego? Is it perhaps a customary cultural tradition of Wong's patriarchal upbringing to say that 'you are sorry before anything bad begins to take place'? Is is because she is a woman? Is it because she is a woman and a member of a large yet conveniently marginalized ethnic minority in the US? Is it the time itself (1960) when the autobiography was published, a rather conservative period in American social life? Is it something her editors had 'encouraged' her to do, as a way of combating the coming hailstorm of discontent?

As I voice these thoughts, I also realize that they may or may not be of high consequence to the way I read Wong's life story at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I am tempted to put instant labels on the text, a fashionable trait in our otherwise unfashionable postmodern sentiment.

The first time I trespassed on Walden literary territory was during my junior year as an undergraduate student, since it was required that all English majors with an American Studies minor attend the Survey of American Literature class. I have never been partial to anything that comes under the title 'required', so this was no exception. However, with the exuberant nature of the lecturer and the provocative appeal of his teaching methods, I embraced the ride. It was in the second half of the first semester that we encountered the American Renaissance, or better, that IT hit us face on. Coming from a nation that has always striven to express its individual self amid all the conformity of tradition and burdensome tillage of the past, we could relate to the essays of Emerson and to the Walden experience of Thoreau. We could not, in turn, understand how their contemporaries were not able to relate to these appealing notions of the unity of nature, humanity, and divinity, since it all seemed a very novel idea, disregarding the original period in which it was written. Nonetheless, our class was a survey-based study of American Literature, attending to the needs and demands of the curriculum, chronologically treating all the major and minor 'isms' of American (non)fiction responses.

Approaching Thoreau's Walden for the second time, with a new agenda in front of me, I try to grasp the wilderness experience in accordance with this new agenda. As I read towards the last chapter, I am tempted to agree with those scholars who view the piece as a latter-day spiritual autobiography. For example, to Paul Schwaber, Thoreau belongs to the pantheon of a few great presences in our midst, who have managed to live a unification of mind, aspiration, and event. However, the fact that Thoreau published Walden seven years after its initial composition, working on the manuscript so diligently, ironing out the oddities and inappropriate elements, makes me wonder about the validity of the moral development as foreseen by Schwaber in his essay.

As I try to find a comprehensive answer to some of my questions regarding the validity of Thoreau's coming of age, I think back at the Don Henley's Madison Square Garden concert, an effort on the behalf of the rock star and his musician friends to save Walden from developers. However, the pond and the parcel of forest that Henely and comrades were trying to salvage bore little, to no resemblance, to the one Thoreau lived beside in the 19th century. Then why bother saving it? Again, it all seems to boil down to our desperate need to believe in the purity of things, objects, landscape, people or words. In the desperate search for such genuine answers, definitions, examples, expressions, solutions, I also came across R. W. Lewis's remark on Thoreau's Walden. It reads: "Thoreau liked to pretend that his book was a purely personal act of private communion. But that was a part of his rhetoric, and Walden is a profoundly rhetorical book, emerging unmistakably from the long New England preaching tradition; though here the trumpet call announces the best imaginable news rather than apocalyptic warnings."

I just realized today, that I have counseled my last group of seniors, through the rather thorny path of college admissions. And it has been a tough year, finance-wise. It seems that the crash, crisis, or whatever label we place on this 'money-less pit', has hit International Admissions hard. And it keeps on hitting.

However, I do not want to talk about any of that.

What I hope to do in the next few lines, is find decent words for the great people I got to meet through this process; yes, they are/have been technically my students, but truth of the matter is, I have learnt so much more from them that I could ever teach back.

Thus, without any further adlieu,

Thank you, good good people, for allowing me a glimpse into your lives, personal and professional, and trusting me in. With all of the 'gobbledygook' of finance aside, I am certain that you are going to travel through the next four years, with great, great speed. And so much gusto.

See you soon, dear colleagues to be.

Author: Mina Netkova (Class of 2010)

In the second part of Morrison’s novel, we can see the presence of the motif of Beloved in all other motifs identified. Beloved is the moving force in the second part of this novel, since it controls the actions of the other characters, like Sethe and Denver. Beloved feeds of Sethe’s stories from the past, and while Sethe loses her vitality and liveliness, Beloved grows and gains energy and power that lead Sethe to her destruction. Beloved’s presence in the house and their isolation from the outside world is linked to the bondage created between Sethe, Beloved and Denver. This also leads to a creative method of expression, found in the second part only, that Morrison chooses for presentation of the characters thoughts and enables more of a character-bound narration. The stream of consciousness method of expression would not be possible for the characters without Beloved’s presence in one of the main focal points in the novel, 124. 124 is as well another motif in the novel, but not only as a physical space, but also as a center of all the events in the second part. Beloved acts slowly, but manages to acquire her goal, which is keeping Sethe and Denver only for herself. While in the beginning of part two there is the presence of unidentified, unspeakable thoughts as registered by Stamp Paid, as the second part progresses these thoughts unfold through the characters’ streams of consciousnesses. Beloved’s narration is still cracked and interrupted, same as her way of speaking. However, this part is followed by a clarification narrative and a long passage that reminds of a free verse poem and is actually a dialogue between the characters. In this long passage, it is noticeable that Beloved is more than just a character in the novel. At certain instances, it seems as if she is a foil character, and without her the exposure of other characters would not be possible. Nevertheless, in this passage, Beloved presents information, not only about Sethe and Denver, but also a recollection about the Black African-American past. There is the reminiscence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which alludes to instances from a collective heritage and collective past experience of the African American people. Beloved is strongly tied to the past and her primary function is to pull both Sethe and Denver in the past, and does not let them go on with their lives and focus on building their future. In the second part, after chasing Paul D away, Beloved can finally have Sethe and Denver for her, and uses this to the maximum. They start playing her games, do whatever she wants and restrain from the things they desire.

In the beginning, it all seems as a harmonious and pleasant relationship, a mother has with her daughters, but as the narration progresses, it is clear that is not the case. This is even visible in the beginning of their bonding, when all three of them go ice skating. Beloved is the most stable one and she has things under her control, since she uses the one appropriate pair of skates. Sethe skates with shoes, which demonstrates her current position of being unstable and dependent on the others. And Denver is found somewhere in between, both of them, since she skates with a mixed pair of skates and shoes. Although, all of them fall, there is no one to see them falling. However, somehow Beloved does not seem to fall at all, but it stands still, the same as she keeps things under control and has incredibly strong influence over Sethe especially. Sethe feels the burden of guilt coming all back to her, for murdering Beloved and tries to make it up for her in every way possible. The fact they lock the door of 124 provides the atmosphere for Sethe’s complete dedication to Beloved, without any interruption of the outside world. This goes in favor of Beloved since her initial wish is to gain possession of Sethe. Beloved gives a different connotation of the term mine. The motif of mine is present throughout part II as well, and Beloved is its main proponent. In her stream of consciousness, she keeps repeating, I am Beloved and she is mine. Her hunger for overpowering Sethe and getting in that way a sort of revenge, leads to the inevitable downfall of Sethe and her self-destruction aided by Beloved. Sethe does not seem to have her own opinion or goal in life except for making every wish and demand of Beloved come true. However, Beloved does not manage to fool Denver, so in the third part she asks for help from someone objective and self aware to help them get rid of Beloved, who would still remain present in their memories. The reason why Beloved is one of the motifs, is because she is present in most of the motifs in the novel, including memories and recollections of past events that belong not only to single characters, but also to the collective community of African Americans. Beloved serves in the novel primarily as a foil character, and without her presence the enfolding of the other characters would not be possible. However, she discloses much more than just their memories, such as the shocking recollections of the Transatlantic Slave trade and life of African American people in general.

Author: Ana Angelovska (Class of 2010)

 

In Part II of Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, one of the motifs present is the motif of ‘falling’. Namely, the motif of ‘falling’ is presented through two focal points in the narration: the ice skating scene and Paul D’s downfall as a man.

During the ice-skating scene, because of the lack of stability, as well as the lack of ice skates, the three women – Sethe, Beloved and Denver -, especially Sethe keep on falling. The repetition of the sentence “Nobody saw them falling” (pg. 205) can be interpreted in a few ways. Firstly, in respect to Paul D’s word in Part I – “I’ll catch you ‘fore you fall”(pg. 55) – it can be understood as Sethe’s liberation; that she no longer needs to depend on someone to help her, such as Halle, Amy, Baby Suggs, holy and lastly Paul D. Thus, Sethe is finally free, and has the luxury to fall is she wants to, and no one to hold her back. Secondly, the fact that this ice-skating scene is thick with happiness creates an ominous sense about it. In other words, reading through Part I, it is highly implausible that Sethe and the physical representation of her dead baby will have a picturesque life together. Also, going back to Baby Suggs, holy’s fear that there was “too much” food (pg. 161), and that something bad was about to follow, implies that since there is too much joy now, later the reader should expect sadness. Going back to the sentence – “Nobody saw them falling” – implies that even though it seems that the three women of 124 are finally happy, the other characters of Beloved are not aware that they are “falling”, and that the entire ice-skating scene is Morrison’s way of masking the monstrosity of Beloved. Furthermore, use of diction – “falling” instead of “fall” – implies that Sethe, Denver, and Beloved’s fall was not simply at that instance on the ice, but they will continue to fall, as the narration progresses.

While the first representation of the motif of ‘falling’ was represented through a physical fall, the second representation, namely, Paul D’s downfall is psychological fall. Through Paul D’s character-bound focalization, and thus through his rememory of Sweet Home, Alfred, Georgia and finally 124, the narrator presents Paul D’s fall as a man. Namely, Paul D sees his inability to stay put, and always being pushed or even moved outside a house to a shed, Paul D was being “clipped” (pg. 259) from his masculinity. Also, through this character-bound focalization, Paul D establishes his doubt if Mr. Garner gave him the illusion that he is truly a man, while Paul D is never able to establish it on his own. Specifically, Paul D’s archetypical representation of a ‘wanderer’ shows that he is not the master of his own fate, but a puppet of his own life; others guide his next post. This, in turn denies Paul D from his masculinity. Moreover, the fact that Paul D was not able to ‘claim’ Sethe, form a family and “catch [her] ‘fore [she] fall[s]” represents Paul D as a failed man. Thus, through this memory rollercoaster, Paul D remembers all of the instances he failed to establish himself as a man, which in turn results in his psychological fall(ing).

All in all, in Part II of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the motif of ‘falling’ is portrayed through two key instances in the novel. Specifically, it is presented through the ice-skating scene between Sethe, Denver and Beloved, as well as Paul D’s psychological downfall.