Real, compared to what? Insertability of constrained realemes in Dave Eggers’ What is the What

The paper examines Eggers’ What is the What (2006) that has problematically been called an autobiographical novel and memoire, narrating Valentino’s chequered past as one of Sudanese Lost Boys. The text yields potential perspectives that demand scrutiny for understanding of the fascinating reciprocity between fictionality and historicity. The article engages theorizations of the complex coalescence offered by Zohar (1980) and McHale (1987) to benchmark the thematic dimensions of the selected text against the cutting-edge postulates. In addition, Valentino’s preface to the “novel”, engaging with the purpose of his collaborative working with Eggers, and Eggers’ essay “It was just boys walking” (2004), negotiating the genesis of the project, have also been used as a methodological touchstone. The analysis vindicates the correspondence between the fictional and the historical versions, albeit the author has fictionalized gaps of Valentino’s historicized life. Thus, Eggers’ text consummates blurring by encompassing both the thematic dimensions, fusing fiction and fact, and the structural schemas, mixing the techniques of different genre traditions, inasmuch as his work exhibits a hermeneutic playfulness found at the heart of the aesthetics of postmodern and 9/11 fiction.

Faces of the Captives: Aesthetic Distance and Emotional Absorption in Young Children's Engagement with Theatre

<p>When Captain Hook has the lost boys tied up on his ship he cannot recognise that the sparkle on the ‘faces of the captives’ is the thrill of mimesis. It has been suggested that if young children cannot distinguish between reality and illusion then instead of suspending disbelief in the stage world, they will actually believe and therefore experience a dangerous level of emotional absorption. Using Peter Pan as a frame of reference, this thesis examines responses to three contemporary theatre works, Capital E National Theatre for Children’s Songs of the Sea and Boxes and Scottish company Catherine Wheels’ White to challenge the idea that aesthetic distance provides a necessary protective function. Instead, it will be argued that the imagination, empathy and emotion contagion provide the conditions in which children can capably enter the aesthetic space of fictional worlds on stage.</p>

Faces of the Captives: Aesthetic Distance and Emotional Absorption in Young Children's Engagement with Theatre

<p>When Captain Hook has the lost boys tied up on his ship he cannot recognise that the sparkle on the ‘faces of the captives’ is the thrill of mimesis. It has been suggested that if young children cannot distinguish between reality and illusion then instead of suspending disbelief in the stage world, they will actually believe and therefore experience a dangerous level of emotional absorption. Using Peter Pan as a frame of reference, this thesis examines responses to three contemporary theatre works, Capital E National Theatre for Children’s Songs of the Sea and Boxes and Scottish company Catherine Wheels’ White to challenge the idea that aesthetic distance provides a necessary protective function. Instead, it will be argued that the imagination, empathy and emotion contagion provide the conditions in which children can capably enter the aesthetic space of fictional worlds on stage.</p>

Peter Pan, Wendy, and the Lost Boys: A Dead Mother Complex

Melanie Klein and André Green offer competing descriptions of primitive mental development. The former emphasizes the need to control internal objects through splitting and projective identification, while the latter emphasizes a narcissistic retreat from objects through progressive deadening of the self. To bridge these theoretical differences a spectrum of fantasies is proposed ranging from reanimation (bringing deadness back to life) to reparation (healing damage caused by paranoid attack). Clinically, alternations between these two defensive patterns occur, acting together to avoid painful anxieties. The interplay of these defenses is illustrated by a dream drawn from clinical practice, from the life of James Barrie, and from his fictional creation Peter Pan.

Is Beckett’s Island Dystopia(n) or not?

The literary genre of dystopia remains popular in the English-speaking world, particularly in young adult fi ction. The word “dystopia” is a nineteenth century English neologism formed upon the logic of Thomas More’s utopia. Dystopia denotes a physical “bad place”, and a metaphysical “negative space”. In Malone Dies the novel’s fi nal scene is happening on an island or “islet”, as Beckett wrote. What unfolds is a scene of horror, a slaughter committed by guardian Lemuel. The islet thus becomes Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” (bad place), and Lemuel the boatman Charon who ferried souls to the underworld in Greek mythology. Endgame is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and everything is happening in a kind of bunker-shelter. Outside there is, probably, nothing. Or, maybe, only Death, as Hamm says. Are they situated on an island or not? Are Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell the last survivors of an atomic war? A kind of Robinsons, lost on an island in the middle of a desert planet, like the lost boys in Golding’s Lord of the Flies? Beckett wrote some other works that can be considered dystopian, but in my paper I will focus on the two mentioned above, and try to analyze characters in those hostile landscapes, and their useless efforts to avoid the inevitable – the end.

Beyond Bare Life

This chapter discusses Southern Sudanese forms of citizenship, resettling Christians, social and cultural citizenship, political citizenship, gendered citizenship, and the Lost Boys. It discusses how the Southern Sudanese enacted multi-sited citizenship through religious, social, political, and familial assemblages. The chapter discusses how the Church became an important social service to the Southern Sudanese because social services were not providing enough support. It talks about the New Sudanese Community Association, which was the only Southern Sudanese–led organization registered as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in Fargo Moorhead in 2007–2008. It also discusses women's participation in the community and how men viewed Sudanese women who have lived in the United States. It also discusses The Sudan People's Liberation Army and Sudan People's Liberation Movement formed in 1983 to fight the military domination and political interests, respectively, of the ruling Northern Sudanese elite.

Foundation News

The Kakuma Refugee Camp (including the nearby Kalobeyei Camp) in the Turkana Desert of northwestern Kenya is home to approximately 200,000 refugees from 21 countries. The camp was established in 1992 to accommodate approximately 40,000 “Lost Boys” who walked there from their villages in Sudan. I have heard many experienced humanitarian aid workers describe Kakuma as the worst place in the world. In Dave Eggers book, What is the What, Lost Boy Achak Deng, after surviving for years as a child wandering across deserts and swamps in Sudan and eventually reaching Kakuma, describes it as “a place in which no one, simply no one but the most desperate, would ever consider spending a day” (Eggers, 2007).