Philip Armstrong

What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity

Introduction. 1. The Inhuman Fictions of Swift and Defoe 2. Gulliver, Frankenstein, Moreau 3. Rendering the Whale 4. Modernism and the Hunt for Redemption 5. Animal Refugees in the Ruins of Modernity

The Postcolonial Animal

Concerned as it is with the politics of historical and contemporary relations between “Western” and other cultures since 1492 or thereabouts, postcolonial studies has shown little interest in the fate of the nonhuman animal. In identifying the costs borne by non-European “others” in the pursuit of Western cultures’ sense of privileged entitlement, post-colonialists have concentrated upon “other” humans, cultures, and territories but seldom upon animals.

Shakespeare in psychoanalysis

General Editors Preface Acknowledgements A Note on References Introducing. Part One:Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis 1. In Vienna 2. In Paris 3. In Johannesburg Part Two:Psychoanalysis out of Shakespeare 4. Shakespeares Memory 5. Shakespeares Sex Conclusion Bibliography

Troilus and Cressida: Space Wars

‘I’ll interrupt his reading/ In the middle of Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses wanders with studied nonchalance, book in hand, in front of Achilles’ tent, pretending to ignore him and hoping thereby to shame him into joining battle against Troy. As he passes, Achilles calls out to him: ‘What are you reading?’ Ulysses answers that A strange fellow here Writes me that man, how dearly ever parted, How much in having, or without or in, Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection — As when his virtues, shining upon others, Heat them, and they retort that heat again To the first givers

Macbeth: Mimicry and Masquerade

What does Macbeth want? For one thing, it might he seen that many of his actions and words display the desire to see; or rather, the desire for access to an omnipotent and all-encompassing vision — of the witches, for example, or their apparitions; of his subjects, or of the future. In this respect, the play typifies the humanist fascination with lucid and penetrating vision as the primary expression of the sovereignty and agency of the subject. But perhaps more often, Macbeth’s most desperate utterances reveal a ‘black and deep’ desire for sightlessness: that is, both invisibility and blindness: ‘’Let not light see my black and deep desires’ (I.iv.51); ‘I am afraid to think what I have done, / Look on’t again 1 dare not’ (II.ii. 49–50); ‘Avaunt, and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee’ (III.iv.92); ‘Strange things 1 have in head that will to hand, / Which must be acted ere they may be scanned’ (III.iv. 138–9); ‘But no more sights!’ (IV.i.171).

Hamlet: The Stage Mirror

The scene: a town In Norfolk, late sixteenth century, A theatrical company is performing the History of Friar Francis, in which a woman, besotted with a younger man, murders her husband. Subsequently, the dead man’s ghost continues to appear to her In private. Now, however, as the spectre comes on stage, a certain woman In the audience, a respected local widow, cries out in distress: ‘’Oh my husband, my husband! 1 sec the ghost of my husband fiercely threatning and menacing me/ Distracted from the play, the other spectators turn to stare as she claims to see before her eyes the menacing ghost of her own dead husband. She requires no further prompting to confess that seven years earlier, she too had been infatuated with a young man, and had poisoned her husband. To her, the ghost on stage represents his exact likeness. Following this incident, an investigation by the local justices results In this woman’s conviction for murder and, presumably, her execution.

Othello: Black and White Writing

In Hamlet, ‘woman’ Is the name for the frailly of the dramatic visual order; in Othello, It Is ‘Othello’’. Shakespeare’s slage cannot ‘In truth’’ portray either a woman or a black man; instead, it can only play up the visual marks of Identity — racial and sexual — in the forms of masquerade. In the same way the figure of Oswald in King Lear embodies, in his presumptuous and extravagant dress, the incipient fragility of that social organisation which the Elizabethan sumptuary laws were designed to reinforce.

King Lear: Uncanny Spectacles

Discussions of ‘King Leaf always begin again. For the text in question is irreconcilably double: there are two plays, a Folio and a Quarto, and each has an equal claim to ‘authenticity’. The Oxford Complete Works offers the two versions under different titles, The History of King Lear and The Tragedy of King Lear. 1 In spite of Wells and Taylor’s deployment of a validating authorial presence behind each version — ‘’the 1608 quarto represents the play as Shakespeare originally wrote it, and the 1623 Folio as he substantially revised if’ (Wells and Taylor 1988, 909) — the two texts could equally be said to represent the transcription of conflicting accounts of actors, shareholders, audiences, compositors…. whose mediations act as an intervening stage between ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘King Leaf t functioning as a glass to refract the (always lacking) ‘original’ text into an uncanny duplicity. This prohibits any recourse to a unique and authentic work, or to the invocation of a unified authorial intention.2 Jacques Derrida describes this theatrical evocation of ‘a double that doubles no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least that is not itself already double’’ (1981, 206). He calls this movement”’ dissemination’, which ‘can never become originary, central, or ultimate signified, the place proper to truth. On the contrary, dissemination represents the affirmation of this nonorigin’ (268, n. 67).

Dis/Coveries: Allen Curnow's Later Poems

&dquo;Allen Curnow’s Later Poems&dquo; not his last. The incomplete comparative remains necessary, because Cumow himself remains very much with us: last year, 1998, he turned eighty-seven, and published several new poems. No doubt the protracted shelf-life of the Curnow brand owes less to the poet’s own longevity than to the exceptional durability of his poetic and, in particular, of his very substantial contribition to the project of a midcentury cultural nationalism that sought to define in no uncertain terms a canon for literature in New Zealand.’ Cumow’s two anthologies A Book of New Zealand Verse in 1945 and The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse in 19602 and the long critical introductions that accompanied them, functioned as founding documents in this mapping out of a predominantly masculine, Pakeha (i.e. non-Maori, of European descent), and modernist high ground for New Zealand poetry. So authoritative did the voice of this movement become that writers, readers, teachers and students of this country’s literature continue to answer or answer back to it today. Plenty of backchat has occurred over the course of recent decades. In the late ’sixties and early ’seventies, poets associated with the magazine Freed. (Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde, Murray Edmond and Alan Brunton, to