Father and Daughter: Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf

( Ira Nadel ) 한국영어영문학회 2016 영어 영문학 Vol.62 No.2

An analysis of the complex psychological relationship between Virginia Woolf and her father and how her response to his temperamental and demanding nature led to her experiments with narrative form. The importance of “Attachment Theory,” initiated by John Bowlby, forms a critical part of the discussion, as well as her troubling relationship with her siblings. The stages of Woolf’s assessment of her father linked to ideas of Victorian patriarchal society, inherited attitudes of “men of genius” and ways of working through such inhibitions are analyzed in relation to her discovery of new ways of writing. This was a psychological as well as aesthetic breakthrough marked by such texts as Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves. The encounter with attachment, loss and partial recovery for her characters mirrors her own personal situation concerning her father at two crucial stages: (1) his grief over the death of his second wife, Julia Stephen and (2) his long illness and dictation to Woolf of his memoir entitled the Mausoleum Book just before his death in 1904. Working out a cure for her psychological issues largely initiated by her father led to the invention of narrative experiments that masked a series of adjustment disorders.

Maugham and Woolf in Russia: Ashenden & Orlando

Ira Nadel 한국영어영문학회 2020 영어 영문학 Vol.66 No.1

Mixed with a general British fascination with Russia was the actual presence of Somerset Maugham in Moscow in 1917 acting as a foreign agent, later fictionalized in his popular novel of 1928, Ashenden. Virginia Woolf never went to Russia but she studied Russian, co-translated several Russian volumes and wrote about its literature in various essays and Orlando, also appearing in 1928, a banner year for English fiction devoted to Russia. Parallel approaches by these two early twentieth century novelists to the country is the subject of this essay which highlights satire as their common aesthetic practice. Each began with distant admiration but also skepticism, overstating Russia’s characteristics and importance for comic purposes. Love, itself, became a satirical focus in both novels which also contain international intrigue if not danger. Biography is also a point of contact. Maugham was in Russia in 1917 and had to escape when his role as a British agent was discovered. He had also had an affair with a Russian princess before he arrived, so was familiar with the elements of Russian love. Woolf never went to Russia but had studied its history as a young woman and she admired its literature. She then learned the rudiments of its language, co-translated several Russian works and incorporated elements of Russian life in her writing, most dramatically in Orlando. The coincidental publication of both Ashenden and Orlando in 1928, and their co-reliance on satire as the means to address the internal repression and outward instability of Russia, marks a parallel and critical response to the Russian experiment.

Pierre Boulle: Singapore, Conrad & Spies

( Ira Nadel ) 한국영어영문학회 2021 영어 영문학 Vol.67 No.1

Analyzing the work of the French novelist Pierre Boulle (1912-1994), this essay examines how fiction translates pain, trauma and war into dramatic action borrowing themes and styles from Conrad. Boulle shows how the art of narrative and fiction provides an individual with a form of adjustment by writing through the trauma. His engagement with espionage, war and hardship led to a literature of survival through which identity emerges. Boulle went to Malaya in 1936 at age twenty-four to work on a rubber plantation, but joined the Free French Movement in Singapore in 1941 to counter the Japanese who had moved into Indochina and then to Siam (Thailand) and Malaya. Following an aborted mission to the Indochina coast, he returned to Singapore to become an explosives and paramilitary expert who undertook a daring but ultimately unsuccessful operation to infiltrate French Indochina, specifically Hanoi. Arrested by a French Major sympathetic to the Vichy government and not the Free French after a harrowing river journey down a tributary of the Mekong to infiltrate present day Vietnam, Boulle spent two years and four months in a Japanese prison camp, not unlike the one he describes in his international bestseller, The Bridge on the River Kwai. His autobiography, My Own River Kwai, narrates a great deal of his actual adventures and how he evaluated them in his fiction. Conrad, and to a lesser extent Maugham, were central to the conception of his Southeast Asian fiction. This essay shows the preeminence of Conrad’s Victory (1915), not only the source of the epigram to The Bridge on the River Kwai, but a major influence on Boulle’s work thematically and stylistically. Violence, narrative structure, and ethics are further presented within the shadow of Conrad.

Noël Coward’s Singapore: “Pretty Polly” and the Intersection of Languages

Ira Nadel 한국영어영문학회 2023 영어 영문학 Vol.69 No.1

Noël Coward’s Singapore was both a stage and place of action. He acted there with an English touring company and used his many visits as a stimulus to write and explore the city’s darker side. Yet he published only one work about Singapore, a short story originally titled “Pretty Polly Barlow,” later shortened to “Pretty Polly.” The 1964 story outlines linguistic clashes within the transnational city and how misunderstandings expose not only cultural but social divides. Through the incorporation of slang, Imperial English, foreign languages and what would become Singlish, Coward represents a conflict of languages and behavior re-shaping the colonial landscape. Coward saw Singapore as the crossroads of cultures and creates a vector between the prim, English young woman Polly, the slightly degenerate lifestyle of its inhabitants, especially the ex-pats and those who inhabit Bugis Street, and the Singaporian, Amaz, the embodiment of the 19th century East and the modern West. To balance out these roles at the end is the athlete American millionaire Rick Barlow who, appropriately, will leave Singapore on the same ship as Polly. The unexpected wealth of Polly alters her identity, language and relationship with all the figures, re-defining her role from ingenue to a potential femme fatale. And with displacement as the story’s overarching theme, it is proper that the principal figures leave Singapore at the end, replacing a formal if archaic language with natural speech that marks the end of Empire and a revision of linguistic protocols.

Fingerprint or Photograph? The Fiction of Biographical Facts

( Ira Nadel ) 한국영어영문학회 2014 영어 영문학 Vol.60 No.1

What is the nature and reliability of facts in biography? Are they closer to the accuracy of fingerprints or the interpretative power of photographs? Beginning with Boswell`s first meeting with Dr. Johnson and Isaiah Berlin`s encounter with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, this paper analyses the reliability of biographical fact and the importance of the biographer in filtering or distorting information. Through examples ranging from the 18th to 20th centuries, the paper analyzes how the crossing of the record with its interpretation establishes the narrative force of fact in the effort to reveal biographical truth. This is essentially a search for coherence in the life of the subject, something the reader desires and the biographer creates. The double act of the biography, identifying as it analyzes, is set against the reliability or not of the source information. Fingerprints are particularly confirmatory but their history reveals early skepticism regarding their accuracy which is being questioned even today. Photography, mixing the documentary with the interpretative, suffered a similar fate: it began as a sure form of identity used by legal authorities but by the beginning of the 20th century, it turned into an art form. Its reliability came under scrutiny as its practice became theorized. Susan Sontag`s remark in Regarding the Pain of Others that “to photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude” is especially helpful in analyzing the immediacy of photographic records which always document incompletely. The impact of these critical perspectives on the nature of biography and possible new ways of telling a life drawing on the visualization of narrative, shape the final section of the paper.

Apollinaire/ Stein/ Picasso

( Ira Nadel ) 한국영어영문학회 2015 영어 영문학 Vol.61 No.2

What did the interaction of Apollinaire, Picasso and Stein, three seminal figures of the avant-garde, mean for Modernism? This paper analyzes the exchanges between the poet, prose writer, and painter and how their encounters, direct and indirect, contributed to the shaping of modernism via a re-thinking of verbal and visual forms in the early years of the 20thcentury. How they met, who they knew and what they created are as important as their criticism and complaints of each other as they shaped the art of the time. Stein wrote a poem entitled “Apollinaire,” Picasso painted Stein’s portrait and Apollinaire wrote a study of Cubism. These are only a few of the surprising intersections examined in this study. One remarkable element is the way artistic distinctions dissolved among the three. Apollinaire’s views of Cubism, Picasso’s view of Apollinaire’s art criticism and Stein’s view of both men intersected and overlapped so that the ideas of one were absorbed by the other. In this way, the modernist enterprise, at least between 1900-1920 possessed a kind of unity of approach and understanding. The death of Apollinaire in 1918 and the visual advances undertaken by Picasso, as well as new work by Stein, separated the three-but for a certain period they interacted on multiple levels: artistically, socially and historically forming a remarkable triumvirate that remade art, poetry and prose setting the path for others to follow.

Jersey Boys: Philip Roth & Bruce Springsteen From American Pastoral to Born to Run

Ira Nadel 한국영어영문학회 2019 영어 영문학 Vol.65 No.3

One of the more unexpected literary associations is that between Philip Roth and Bruce Springsteen yet a reading of Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, reveals surprising stylistic and personal connections linking the two New Jersey-born artists. It begins with a shared artistic practice and the importance of discontent, if not anger, as a catalyst for their writing. Both are also disciplined performers committed to their work who developed similar methods that enhanced their writing, whether a novel or song. The influence of fathers and their parallel attitudes toward love relationships provides another point of intersection. An additional similarity is that in their late careers, they both consider mortality, the overriding feature of Roth’s last five novels, from Exit Ghost through to Nemesis, which Springsteen’s late albums and recent Broadway show exhibit. The “late style,”associated with a more focused and in some cases minimalist method, inhabits the work of both artists: Roth moved from the energetic and elaborate method of Operation Shylock or Sabbath’s Theatre to the more restrained Everyman or Nemesis. Springsteen moved from the raucous sound of the E Street Band to solo performances and a quieter sound. Place and its recreation is another singular feature of both writers, for Springsteen Asbury Park and Freehold, NJ, for Roth, Newark, NJ. That Roth read and admired Springsteen’s autobiography enriches their connections defined in part by the emergence of a shared “Jersey Style.”

Mechanical Pound

( Ira Nadel ) 한국영어영문학회 2017 영어 영문학 Vol.63 No.2

The importance of Ezra Pound`s shift to a machine poetics and how it reflected larger adjustments in early 20th century aesthetics, incorporating art, music and machinery, is the focus of this essay. With specific examples ranging from the paintings of Leger to the industrial photographs of Paul Strand and the music of George Antheil, as well as The Cantos, the importance of a new mechanical praxis for Pound emerges. More precisely, the essay analyzes the appeal of the mechanical for Pound during a critical period in his poetic development and how this shift was prepared, first, by the adaptation of the mechanical to the compositional nature of painting, movement in dance and performance in music. Photography also contributed to the new mechanical aesthetic which for Pound meant a greater focus on precision and efficiency which he had been promoting since his study of such classical writers as Horace and Propertius and expressed in works like Mauberley. The ideas of the Futurists also play an important role in Pound`s acceptance of the new mechanical approach to art. His critical writing from ca. 1929-1934 further confirms his attraction to a machine aesthetic.

Odd Fellows: Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth

( Ira Nadel ) 한국영어영문학회 2018 영어 영문학 Vol.64 No.2

This paper examines the relationship and ideas of Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth including how they met, their correspondence and intellectual parallels, particularly in their shared criticism of Jewish ideals and culture in Europe and North America. It analyzes similarities in their careers and texts, especially between Eichmann in Jerusalem and Operation Shylock, as well as The Ghost Writer, while measuring their reception as social commentators and writers. Kafka was an important figure for both writers, Arendt’s earliest writing engaged with the significance of Kafka in understanding and criticizing twentieth century political and cultural values in Europe. For Roth, Kafka offered a similar critique of moral principles he found corroded in North American Jewish life. Arendt connected with other writers, notably Isak Dinesen, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell and William Styron who further linked the two: he knew both Arendt and Roth and cited, incorrectly, a work by Arendt as the source for the key incident in his 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice. He claimed it was Eichmann in Jerusalem; it was Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s reaction to Roth’s fiction, however, remains a mystery: she died in 1975, before Roth began to seriously and consistently engage with Holocaust issues in works like The Ghost Writer (1979) and Operation Shylock (1993). Yet even in death they are joined. Their graves are only steps apart at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, eds. Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2013. 168pp. Available as an ebook

( Ira Nadel ) 한국영어영문학회 2014 영어 영문학 Vol.60 No.3