Sheila Watson as a Reader of Simone Weil: Decreation, Affliction, and Metaxu in the The Double Hook

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 669-690
Author(s):  
Kait Pinder
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Sheila Watson ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Ethical Project

This article examines Sheila Watson’s interest in the notoriously difficult thought of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Watson read Weil’s work in English and French throughout the 1950s, especially during the time she spent in Paris in 1955 and 1956. While critics have examined Watson’s Paris journals for her discussion of modernists such as Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis, little attention has been paid to her synthesis of, and response to, Weil’s thought in the same pages. Contextualizing Watson’s revisions to The Double Hook in her sustained reading of Weil, this article argues that Weil’s thought informs Watson’s aesthetic and ethical project in the novel. The article analyses Watson’s understanding of three central concepts in Weil’s philosophy – decreation, affliction, and metaxu – and offers a Weilian reading of The Double Hook. By resituating Watson as a reader of Weil, the article also highlights the Canadian author’s belonging within a wider circle of women writers in the mid-century who, like Weil and Watson, also demanded unsentimental responses to violence and suffering.

GUESSES AND RECESSES: Notes on, in and towards Dream 0/ Fair to middling Women

1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobn PiIling
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Novel ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Compositional Technique

This essay studies Beckett's first novel, Dream 0f Fair to middling Women (written 1931-32, posthumously published in 1992), in the light of a notebook donated to the Beckett International Foundation by' the Samuel Beckett Estate. The notebook contains a mass of unsourced jottings, some of which surface verbatim in Dream, and all of which, to a greater or lesser degree, contributed to the composition of the novel. Some specimen pages of the notebook are shown, in spite of their fragmentary appearance, to have specific (and sometimes unexpected) sources in, the books that Beckett was reading. On this basis, and in more general terms, new light is cast on Beckett's compositional technique in Dream.

The Prophet Today: The Novel in Distress

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-225
Author(s):  
Maya I. Kesrouany
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Translation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Original Source ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Egyptian Literature ◽  
Universal Reason

The conclusion historicizes these translations in the story of the Arabic novel before the 1950s, after which the novel becomes canonised. Colonial translation promised facts and truths based on the European master-text, and some Arab reformists confirmed the superiority of philosophy to religion, and hence science to Islam, but the translations complicate such neat cultural translation. The novel is born somewhere in between the original and translation, obfuscating intentionally the original source of which becomes secondary to the process of its adaptation and transmission. The reformist aspirations of the authors remain unrealised much like a perfect emulation of the prophet. Finally, it interrogates the dominant critical approach to these modernist intellectuals as secularising liberals who intentionally separated religion from literature by adopting the reductive Western humanisation of the prophet. The translations reveal how they trespass the separation between literary and religious interpretation bringing the stakes of narrative representation to bear on European ideals of subjectivity and universal reason. In this transgressive space, precisely the incubator of “modern” Egyptian literature, translation becomes neither domesticating nor foreignising but a space where various representational claims are simultaneously adapted and contested.

A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s “little book on poetry”

2021 ◽  
pp. 107-135
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Studies ◽  
The Real ◽  
Experimental Works ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
The Prestige

In several essays concurrent with her major experimental works of the 1920s, Woolf proclaims that the novel will usurp the tools and the place of poetry. Most important among these essays is the book-length A Room of One’s Own (1929). Here Woolf identifies the lack of poet foremothers available as models to women writers. She urges young women to fill this gap by writing not poetry per se, but rather prose whose greatness qualifies it as “poetry.” Woolf wants to gain for prose, and by extension women writers, the prestige historically accorded to verse. This chapter sketches the historic link among English Studies, poetry, and patriarchy. This link contributed to Woolf’s vision of the novel as the democratic, feminist alternative to poetry. It also spurred her subtle challenge in A Room of One’s Own to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who had doubted women’s ability to write poetry. This chapter concludes by considering the real women poets who inspired Woolf’s fiction of Judith Shakespeare.

Pain of Privacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-132
Author(s):  
Susmita Roye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gradual Rise ◽  
Prescriptive Authority ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
Western Imagination

If the rite of widow-immolation fired Western imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century, then purdah (life in seclusion) held captive the West’s attention at the turn of the twentieth. Purdah took on a special connotation especially during the British Raj. With the gradual rise of the novel ideas of nationhood across religions, languages or cultures of the subcontinent, purdah became more than the sceptre of male prescriptive authority for upholding religious/cultural precepts of a community. It became further charged as the confrontational ground of conflicting authority—for one race to rule and for the other to forge its identity as a self-ruling nation. Not only is women’s representation of purdah in their writings considered more authentic but they also often challenge the stereotyping of a purdahnashin and reject the broad-brushed, mono-toned portrayal of their existence. Although Hindus too practised purdah of a sort, this chapter focuses on two Muslim women writers (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Iqbalunnissa Hussain).

The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975

1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl E. Pletsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scientific Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Cold War

Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their places in the social scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of modernization theory. This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habits of mythological thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorientation of these ideas in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the novel division of the globe into three conceptual “worlds” in response to the Cold War.

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