English III:
English Literature After 1900: "After the 'Angries':
Rage, Resistance, and Recuperation in Post-WWII English Fiction."
Session Coordinator: Gavin
Keulks
Dept. of English,
345
keulksg@wou.edu
Will Self,
Deracination and Disaffection: The Case of Zack Busner
Since the publication of his first collection of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), Will Self has consistently represented the individual as a figure alienated by and from much of modern life. One recurring character, the self-styled “anti-psychiatrist” and former pop culture icon Dr. Zachary Busner, embodies the motif of estrangement that characterizes in part the works of the so-called Angry Young Men in the 1950s. Busner’s history emerges and changes through various works, from Self’s early short story “Ward 9” to the novella “Dr Mukti” (2004). However, no single work is as significant to understanding Busner’s many complexities as Self’s second novel, Great Apes, in which Busner and other characters are refigured as chimpanzees, a “satirical trope” that questions many of the underlying assumptions of humanism.
M. Hunter Hayes
Hunter_Hayes@TAMU-Commerce.edu
“[S]he [Un]do [Eliot] in Different Voices”: Pat Barker’s Recuperation
of The
Pat Barker’s early novels about working-class women depict cultural tensions similar to those found in the male angries’ portrayals of working-class men. However, it is in the first novel of Barker’s World War I trilogy that the working-class woman functions most profoundly as a figure of redemption. In Regeneration’s elaborate subtext, Barker recuperates Eliot’s The Waste Land, especially its evocation of the grail myth. “In The Waste Land the women are . . . caricatures of degeneration. I wanted . . . to make [them] . . . speak for life,” Barker explained in a 1999 interview. While critics have noted occasional Waste Land references in Regeneration, the full extent of Barker’s feminist revision of the poem has not been explored. My paper traces symbolic echoes of The Waste Land’s five sections throughout Regeneration and reads Barker’s re-telling of “What the Thunder Said” as her most radical challenge to Eliot’s vision. During a thunderstorm, shell-shocked Prior, a Tireasian questor, is transformed by a sexual encounter with Sarah, a munitions worker. Her coppery hair, electrified by lightening and drenched by rain, functions as a salvific counterpart to the demonic tresses of Eliot’s women. In Barker’s subversive tarot reading, the cup is the winning suit: Sarah “became a cup from which [Prior] drank.” Regeneration looks back in anger at The Waste Land; it talks back as well, elevating the sexuality of a working-class woman—a persistent symbol of degeneration for Eliot—to a symbol of cultural, spiritual, and literary regeneration.
Annette Oxindine
Ian McEwan and the Culture of Anxiety
Critics of Ian McEwan’s fiction often focus on his engagement with issues of masculine identity, and his novel Black Dogs in particular has been read for the way it pits the rational, “sociological” Bernard against his mystical, intuitive wife, June. I argue that although the dynamics of gender do pervade McEwan’s work, the conflict arises from a deeper, sinister trait in human nature: in short, the debate about gender is motivated by the question of violence and how best to deal with its threat. Ian McEwan’s fiction hinges on anxiety about when the black boot heel will drop next, and in McEwan’s world, it could come from anywhere – from a plane falling out of the sky, from thugs emerging out of a side-street, from our deepest, unknown selves. Moreover, rationality proves to be impotent in the face of sadism, violence, and perversion. Black Dogs establishes a clear metaphor for this wider culture of anxiety through the marauding dogs that disrupt Bernard and June’s honeymoon, that inspire June’s spiritual conversion and subsequent divorce from Bernard, and that are finally, menacingly left roaming the hills of Europe. Here, the black dogs do not simply represent the legacy of evil propagated by the Nazis, who literally bred the beasts. Rather, they reflect an innate capacity for savagery that the narrator, importantly, identifies within himself as well. McEwan, finally, remains skeptical about our ability to stifle this drive, with the only possibility of hope arising from a heightened awareness of our dark nature.
Jeff Roessner
jroessner@mercyhurst.edu