(1958). Anatomy of Criticism, Four Essays. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures: Vol. 12, No. 1-2, pp. 211-215.

Anatomy of Criticism, Four Essays

African American review

In this dissertation I examine uncanny characters in Neil Gaiman’s novels Coraline (2002) and The Graveyard Book (2008). I explore what constitutes uncanny characters in his narratives and the consequent effects these characters have on protagonists’ identities: their self-awareness and acknowledgement of alterity. Both novels have been classified under an experimental genre, Children’s Gothic, known for negotiating identity, making use of elements of horror and using allegorical versions of contemporary cultural debates (Jackson 2017). While critics like Richard Gooding (2008) and David Rudd (2008) have explored the uncanny in Coraline for its adolescent maturation and identity formation, dependent on traditional psychoanalytic paradigms of separating the child from the mother figure, I rely on contemporary re-readings of Sigmund Freud’s “uncanny” (1919) in conjunction with Carl Jung’s notion of “the shadow” to reveal how protagonists in Gaiman’s two novels gain self-awareness and an acceptance of ‘the other’. Through an analysis of the ghost-witch-child, Liza Hempstock in The Graveyard Book, and the beldam or Other Mother in Coraline, I reveal how their uncanniness (ambivalence, uncertainty and unhomeliness) blurs binarist notions of good/evil as well as hegemonies of gender, race and religion. As a ghost from the Elizabethan era, Liza reveals the presence of the past and forms of persecution and violence that are transhistorical (witch-hunts, child oppression and Antisemitism). Not dissimilar to Liza, I argue that the Other Mother’s doubling and ambivalence (good/evil, mothering/malign, human/monster) provides a powerful, transgressive alternative to limiting patriarchal definitions of the feminine. Both the Other Mother and Liza thus challenge oppressive forms of thinking and become catalysts for positive change in the protagonists’ sense of self. An understanding of how the uncanny works will assist readers in coming-to-grips with social anxieties involved in living in a multiple society, in which one is constantly confronted by alterity. Gaiman’s novels teach lessons in transforming the fear of the other into a moment of possibility. For this reason, I argue that Gaiman’s novels are relevant to the South African milieu, and share similarities with certain South African Children’s (or Young Adult) Gothic novels, such as Charlie Human’s Apocalypse Now Now (2013). Through a comparison of uncanny characters in Human’s and Gaiman’s novels, I argue for a space for Children’s Gothic in the South African literary landscape. Through uncanny characters, Gothic has the unique capacity to co-opt young readers into the process of disrupting borders, renegotiating identities and bringing about individual and cultural transformation.

A critical analysis of uncanny characters in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and The Graveyard Book.

Anyone organizing against systems of extra-legal racialized violence will sometimes apprehend, in the course of their struggle, the true depth and strength of the structures they are up against. They might sense an essential immutability in these systems. They might then be overtaken with nausea when a subsequent and long-standing dilemma reveals one of its many faces: if one feels pessimistic about the dawn of racial emancipation, if one lacks faith in a racial time constituted by linear, progressive uplift, how then to imagine hope, resistance, and liberatory praxis? How does one anchor political claims when calls to acknowledge the seeming permanence of racism and other systemic forms of violence simultaneously risk constraining political imagination? 1 In what follows, I propose a reading of Kindred—Octavia E. Butler’s “grim fantasy” novel about a black woman in the 1970s inexplicably transported to antebellum Maryland— that responds to these questions. Readings of Kindred often tend towards two diametrically opposed interpretations that also correspond to two potential answers to this broader dilemma: The novel supposedly tells either a pessimistic, hopeless tale of historical determinism, wherein the protagonist can only facilitate a violence already fated to happen, or an optimistic narrative of triumphant heroism and autonomy. In contrast, I read Kindred with and through Ernst Bloch’s concept of concrete utopianism. In what follows, I connect the novel and its interlocutors to this idea, which reconceives the relationship between optimism and pessimism, affirmation and negation, and hope and despair. Building on this framework, the remainder of the essay argues that the presence of seemingly antagonistic interpretations of Kindred demonstrates the novel’s genius and suggests the presence of something else: concrete utopian movements that confound the

The Dilemmas of Hope and History: Concrete Utopianism in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred

This paper argues that the relationship between law, time, temporality, race and racism is vital to understanding the continuous reproduction of racial injustice and the making permanent of colonial logics. This entanglement is exemplified in the extension, recreation and adaptation of those colonial logics of the human and space-time beyond the time of both racialised enslavement and exploitative colonisation. This paper further argues that the absence of a detailed and central examination of these junctures within legal knowledge – especially in teaching but also in research – can be addressed by recourse to science fiction. A specific area of science fiction, collectively termed here Black/African Science Fiction, has made inroads into unsettling Euro-modern law’s chronopolitics. Using Octavia Butler’s Kindred as an example, this paper argues that Black/African Science Fiction can help us to reframe legal knowledge to disrupt the inevitability of our current version of the future and the question of inevitability itself.

Black/African Science Fiction and the Quest for Racial Justice through Legal Knowledge: How Can We Unsettle Euro-modern Time and Temporality in Our Teaching?

Most scholarship that addresses Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred ([1979] 1988. Massachusetts: Beacon Press) focuses on its value as a forerunner of the neo-slave narrative in African-American literature, and thus the manner in which traces of the past affect the protagonist's present in the novel. However, given Butler's established fixation with the future, I contend that one may also read Kindred from a futurist perspective. I find that Butler's vision of the future in this novel is pessimistic in that the protagonist fails to resist the white, patriarchal authority perpetuated in patrilinear time in a definitive manner, so that the liberatory trajectory of the novel ultimately fails. Because of this, Butler's pessimistic vision of the future is one in which racism and sexism may well continue to haunt African-American experience.

A contested freedom:The fragile future of Octavia Butler's Kindred

The mass appearance of female heroes in popular culture in recent decades may encourage the opinion that the female hero has achieved the same credibility as her male counterpart. This article demonstrates, however, that she continues to generate ambivalence and that the primary reservation of most scholars is that a female hero either cannot or should not perform the masculinity of the archetype. Scholarly arguments tend towards two positions: that a female hero is an oxymoron; or that she should be limited to battles on behalf of women in which she champions feminine characteristics and challenges the belief that femininity is not heroic. Neither of these positions take archetypal heroism into account. Advocating a return to Jungian archetypal theory, I argue that the masculinity of the archetype may be as successfully performed by a female hero as by a male hero. Once this premise is accepted, the female hero should be expected to undergo the same trials and perform the same function as a male hero, in short, she should navigate the heroic monomyth outlined by Joseph Campbell. I illustrate this point through a literary analysis of Tanith Lee’s 1976 fantasy novella The winter players .

/pdf/cosmogynesis-the-female-hero-in-tanith-lee-s-the-winter-chcqan1i70.pdf

Cosmogynesis: the female hero in Tanith Lee’s The winter players

Earning the Right to Wear Midnight: Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching

C. L. Moore is considered a trailblazer of feminist SF because of the short stories she published in the 1930s and 1940s. Her tales ‘Shambleau’ (1933) and ‘No Woman Born’ (1944) have attracted some...

‘A hot and savage strength’: The female masculinity of C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry

In this article, a psychodynamic perspective informs the discussion of the ambivalence associated with individuation and growing up which manifests during middle childhood (from approximately 6 to 11 years of age). The author contends that Terry Pratchett explores this ambivalence in his young adult novel, The wee free men (2003), in which his young, female protagonist, Tiffany Aching, must resolve the fears and anxieties that stem from her ambivalence in order to claim agency and complete the process of individuation from her childhood home. The author argues that Tiffanyâ€™s ambivalence is most clearly reflected in her relationships with the two primary adult females in the novel, Granny Aching and the Fairy Queen, and suggests that the resolution of her ambivalence models resilience strategies for Pratchettâ€™s young readers who may be navigating this same problem in their own lives.Â

“Nae King! Nae Quin! Nae Laird! Nae Master!” Childhood agency in Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men

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