The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, Volume 12

Spring 2023 Volume 12

RENAISSANCE RENAISSANCE

Letter from the Editor

Following our transformation of the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism into an abolitionist study group and magazine, the Spring 2023 edition set out to expand our abolitionist mission of social and literary critique. Recognizing that art, creativity, and imagination are the prerequisites of revolution, of imagining a world without harm, we aimed to approach this semester like a child with finger paints.

If you’ve ever seen a kid finger paint — it’s beyond inspiring. They’re uninhibited. They charge at the paper with bold strokes, bright ideas. They have a vision they try to execute, and they usually change it — because, to them, the tactile method of creating, of expressing, is often more important than what gets put on the fridge to display. It's process, not product oriented. They get messy. Oftentimes, they move their art from paper to the table, to the walls, to their own bodies. They challenge the constraints of lines or instructions — they create new colors by accident.

The Renaissance issue thematically follows directly from our Fall 2022 Consciousness issue. As our mission defines abolition as asking “why?” and dreaming of more, Consciousness was about “waking up,” of attuning yourself towards the existence of the carceral state and its harms. Subsequently, Renaissance is about re-imagining, innovating, returning attention towards “classical antiquity,” structures we once took for granted. It’s about dreaming: a rediscovery of the socio-political power of art, culture, and music. Renaissance is not replicating the old, it’s procreation — examining the old, responding to it, and creating something new. Renaissance is a radical transformation of perspective — promoting both criticism and creativity.

With this in mind, let’s return to the old — to childhood, to finger painting, to a time where imagination was listless

and curiosity was constant. Renaissance is a renewal of this approach. It’s us, as a student publication, pushing for renewed interest in questioning the “established,” the status quo. This Spring, our publication invited creators and now invites readers to innovate, to re-imagine, and to showcase a renewed appreciation of philosophy, literature, and art from a critical lens. We believe our selected works truly embody this theme. We are beyond excited to share their creativity with you.

This Spring, the MJLC study group brought together students and the larger Madison community in discussions about narratives we take for granted, be it voting, sitcoms, art museums, policies, or activism. In critiquing, challenging, and re-imaging these topics, the work of the group directly influenced our staff to create and curate an issue that reflects our discussions. This issue looks at Fitgerald and Kafka with renewed appreciation. It “scrap-books,” moving past the constraint of singular texts. It showcases existentialist short fiction and discusses televised representation, sex education, and internal -– mental health oriented — interventions. In creating this collaborative publication, I am beyond grateful to our study group for their ingenuity and our staff for their dedication. I am honored to share their work, and the work of talented hometown and international artists, with all of you.

I am so proud of this edition and so beyond proud of our team.

Keep asking questions. Keep dreaming.

With so much Love,

Ria Dhingra Editor in Chief

Acknowledgements

It is so beyond necessary to have a separate letter of acknowledgements—not a slim paragraph at the end of an editor’s statement for this publication. There are so, so, so many amazing people who have worked tirelessly to bring this journal together.

We would all like to thank the previous MJLC team for continuing to entrust us with their publication and allowing us to derail it towards new, unknown, and exciting directions. We are also so beyond grateful for the continued aid and support of the L&S Honors Department, WUD Publications, and the Activist Student Action Program. We’re indebted to English Advisor Erin Polnaszek Boyd, whose timely responses, magic ability to find funding, last minute letter of recommendations, and reassuring words hold us together through the chaos of making a magazine. To Professor Ingrid Diran, who has (behind the scenes) been sparking and continues to spark the inspiration behind this publication, we are so so thankful for your support and leadership. Our study group and resulting magazine simply would not exist without her. She gave us a purpose over the course of our collegiate careers—she changed my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The MJLC is first and foremost a study group. Together, we make a magazine. We are so thankful for this found family. Our study group has some of the most caring, passionate, brightest minds on this campus. I, personally, look forward to seeing them weekly and feel so lucky to have found them. Many of these amazing students contribute to the publication and are (dare I say destined?) to take the MJLC to great heights once our current team graduates.

To our contributors, thank you for sharing your work with us. We are so honored to be showcasing your art—work that elicited care, inspired us to ask “why?” and then dream of more. To all those who submitted—thank you. Shocked doesn’t even begin to describe how we felt we first

saw all the submissions flood our inboxes. We received emails from fellow students, scholars, community members, and international academics. We are beyond excited to showcase fellow Badgers, high schoolers, and academics! Editing, reading, and viewing your work was truly a joyous process. We do hope to hear from you all again.

We are so excited that the creation of this issue resulted in event collaborations with the organizations of Sex Out Loud, PubCom, Friends of Lakeshore Nature Preserve, and the Chazen Art Museum. Appreciative does not begin to cover how lucky we felt to work with such amazing groups and create spaces, abolitionist praxis, in our community.

I am going to switch to first person (fully!) now. I want to take some time to thank the MJLC team, our staff, and my closest friends. As a fully student run group/publication, our team is unpaid, our publication lacks stable funding. Everything we do, we do on our own. This means that these lovely people not only work to create a magazine together, but raise the money to print it among so many other administrative tasks—we run a magazine together. Over the last couple of months, we have sold nachos at basketball games, expanded outreach via social media, presented to grant committees, made lesson plans, event planned, watched youtube tutorials, stayed up all night editing/writing, and so much more. Making this magazine takes so much out of so many people—who are crazy enough, passionate enough, to do it willingly!

First, I want to thank Emily Wesoloski and Sophia Smith. Who, while abroad this semester, spent winter break preparing us for smooth sailings this semester. They designed social media posts, drafted emails, and rewrote text for our website. Despite being abroad, they submitted to, wrote for, and created content for the MJLC. We all miss them dearly and cannot wait to work together this coming

Fall.

To my best friend, co-editor in chief Anna Nelson, thank you. Anna found me freshman year. Anna made this magazine possible. Before going abroad, Anna put in an incredible amount of effort to jump start the work for this edition and support us all while being away. None of what any of us do would be possible without her. Excited does not even begin to describe the feeling in regards to her coming back to us. I cannot wait for you to come back Anna.

I would like to thank our spectacular team this semester: Julia Kay Smith, Lacey Brooks, John Nugent, Jonathan Tostrud, Sophia Shashko, Cree Faber, Nuha Dolby, Carsyn Barber, Landis Varughese, and Aspen Oblewski. While being full time students, these people came back for round two of the insanity that is creating the MJLC. I am so confident that, with them, this publication has the foundation to continue its mission long after we graduate. They wrote features, read close to one hundred submissions, and provided one another with their constant creativity and energy. They provided me with patience and honesty when I messed up, care when I was overwhelmed, and support when I needed it most. They trusted me. They put up with “Hell Week” during midterms and stayed up past midnight designing artwork and reaching out to contributors for edits. More importantly, we showed up for one another–constantly. This started as a magazine, we started as a staff. We are so much more. To everybody who was here and who is abroad. I love you dearly. Thank you all for your trust, time, and care. I am so emotional and excited to share this edition with all of you and our surrounding community.

With so much Love and Gratitude, Ria

TABLE OF CONTENTS

08

12

15

We The Beautiful, We The Damned: A Lyric Essay - Jeffrey H. Maclachlan

Positive Representation - Landis Varughese

The Spirit of the Forms - Emily Wesoloski

16 Insight: Poetry, History, and Ecocriticism

18

20

21

22

22

23

23

24

28

32

34

35

40

40

41

41

Retreat - John Nugent

Rip My Heart Out Why Don't You - Casey Coolidge

Falling Point - Stella D'AcquistoT

Returning Home - Christa Statz

Viewfinder - Haley Paige Polzin

In The Margins - Mel Pryor

Head in the Clouds - Catherina O

Radical Joy in Banjo - Luke Tillitski

Rearranging: A Literary Renaissance

Baby Steps - Lacey Brooks

Am I a Man Or Am I a Muppet - Rachel Dunn

Dr. Faustus: Marlowe, Kafka, Žižek, and the Incompleteness of God - Karim Mitri

Pencils Are Dying - Caleb Delos-Santos

Shamrock Shake - Ava Albelo

staring in the bathroom mirror - Sarah Kirtsch

Femmeissance - Cristina Rodriguez

42 Interactions and Intercourse

44

45

48

56

56

59

60

Dante's Deal - Stella D'Acquisto

Untitled - Parker Hurkman

Ghostly Forms: Living with Ghosts in W. G. Sebald and Anne Carson - Grace Dowling

Public Property - Heather Colley

Untitled - Mario Loprete

fuckovid enamel - Mario Loprete

Bookshelf Listicle

62 International Blurb Spread

64 Cycle of rebirth - Cloey Deignan-Kolzer

64

Metamorphosis - Catherina O

65 Contributors

THE DARE.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned dares you to write about it. Staring down potential pauperism, protagonist Anthony Patch asks his friend Richard Caramel for guidance to become a professional writer. He warns Patch “So far as articles on literary subjects in these obscure magazines go, you couldn’t make enough to pay your rent.”

This sentiment echoes a poem that hurls cocktail tomatoes at literature professors by Thomas D’invillers in This Side of Paradise: “You’d sniffled through an era’s must / Filling your nostrils up with dust, / And then, arising from your knees, / Published, in one gigantic sneeze”

In response, literary critics have either trashed The Beautiful and Damned or whistled past its graveyard. Otto Friedrich described it as a “failure” and faulted the text for “dullness and shallow melodrama” in takes that The American Scholar thought were smart enough to publish in 1960. Richard Astro piled on with “even Fitzgerald’s most reputable critics have condemned [the novel] as immature, unrealistic, trivial, and generally unsuccessful” in Modern Fiction Studies in 1968. Geoff Dyer also described the first half of the novel as “showy [and] shallow” in 2010 for an introduction to the novel itself. A quick JSTOR search reveals little else beyond the first page of results. Tenured men have spoken: this novel is a shoe-deep puddle of shit. I guess there’s no benefit in exploring how the text Polaroids post-antebellum America and how we continue to tug-of-war that portrait until it snaps. We should stick to the green light in The Great Gatsby until the Atlantic consumes Manhattan in one final gulp—the turquoise curtain call of America’s main character.

THE MIMIC.

Early in the novel, Anthony Patch lives pleasurably in New York. He has a British butler named Bounds. The British butler is the last component of the Revolution: an English servant tidying after the New World Aristocrat. At the same

by Jeffrey H. MacLachlan

time, Americans crave the approval of a bona fide British subject. Patch doesn’t demand too much of his employee because “he was also the Bounds of two other gentlemen in the neighborhood.”

America has never kicked the addiction of mimicking Union Jack. After Oprah interviewed Meghan Markle in 2021, Joanna Weiss of Politico pointed out that American liberals were “fully pro-Duke-and-Duchess of Sussex” while American conservatives were concerned with “the strain this must be putting on […] the monarchy.”

Apparently, I don’t fall into either political category because I don’t give one Scottish fuck. If this were up for a vote, I say we finish the revolution and disintegrate Buckingham into imperial rust. Like it’s a fucking revelation that these inbred layabouts are racist slime. The fact that this essay is written in English is a testament to how much the British Crown has licked this planet with her mother tongue.

THE WAITING GAME.

Anthony Patch spends the early part of the novel waiting to inherit his grandfather’s fortune. In the Land of Family Values, the speaker keeps it real: “He had hoped to find his grandfather dead, but had learned by telephoning from the pier that Adam Patch was comparatively well again—the next day he concealed his disappointment and gone out to Tarrytown […] a veritable maze of walls and wire fences guarding the estate—this, said the public was because it was definitely known that if the Socialists had their way, one of the first men they’d assassinate would be old Cross Patch.” Later in the text, the “moralist” Cross Patch eliminates Anthony from the will due to his decadent bacchanals.

The rich white fucks hoarding American wealth know they are loathed. Anthony Patch is a fussy barfly and even he can’t tolerate this prick. The rich fuck’s anthracite heart is the organ that powers capitalist engines of exploitation. So, he supports a private healthcare system knowing that he can secure the finest global medicine and everyone else

must exhaust themselves with labor to afford adequate care. Guaranteed to live way past what God intended, he must defend his decaying body with expensive security measures. Finally, the rich white fuck curses socialism with every cobwebbed breath because only through his sunrise plasma would an equitable America emerge.

HATE & HERITAGE.

During Patch’s honeymoon with Zelda facsimile Gloria Gilbert, the couple visits the Arlington House. While white tourists seem to savor Robert E. Lee’s traitor crib, Gloria asks, “Don’t you think they’ve left a breath of 1860 here?” Patch, like many Fitzgerald dipshits, has a soft heart for the Confederacy. He asks, “Don’t you want to preserve old things?”

Gloria responds to this question with a thoughtful statement that you’d expect from a halfway moral person: “just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too […] Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.”

Gloria is uncomfortable with the restoration of a plantation because that era is unfashionable. While no one would confuse Gloria for a social activist, she does think that Confederacy Tourism is fucking weird. The Confederacy died, and therefore its physical manifestations should rot with it.

While Gloria thinks that the ugliness of the plantation should not survive the nineteenth century, contemporary conservatives are terrified of Confederate artifacts being destroyed in the twenty-first. Timothy Snyder describes the recent push to legally enforce teachers to hopscotch around slavery as “memory laws.”

In the authoritarian’s mind, “to preserve old things” means to preserve white naivety about the power plantation owners enjoyed during the first two centuries of the republic.

In 1861, Marx said, “In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest of the slaveholders served as the guiding star.” When critical pressure is applied to white memory of slavery, they frantically scan the evening sky for Polaris to return to the path of harmless memories: the pasty Underground Railroad.

AMERICAN LABOR.

As Patch’s money dwindles, he is forced to do the unfathomable and get a goddamn job. Since he has a bourgeois pedigree, he lands an entry-level position at a financial firm. When inspecting the Capital Gods, the speaker says, “It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge […] Then, abruptly, he quit.”

Since capital grants domain over labor, the ruthless assholes who direct capital also grow in stature. This obvious byproduct of American capitalism shocks Patch because he is forced into sobriety during normal business hours for the first time since graduation. Naturally, he throws up the deuces and returns to daydrinking. This is infuriating. He sees that white men puppeteer the economy without any noticeable intellect and never takes that next step by asking,

“Hmm…I wonder how many people of color are also fucking bright and would benefit from a great job?” Instead, he retreats to contaminate his liver with top-shelf liqueur.

NOBLE BULLSHIT.

The Beautiful and Damned features one of the most repugnant minor characters in literature: Maury Noble. Noble is Patch’s friend and is the Jazz Age Tucker Carlson. He bubbles venom from his larynx like shaken champagne at the end of a gala hosted by the Patches.

Just listen to this fascist slop: “nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of her inferior and thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher—or, let us say, her more amusing—though still unconscious and accidental intentions. […] In this republic, I saw the black beginning to mingle with the white—in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity.”

According to Maury Noble, white mastery of land and treasure is the direct result of Mother Nature favoring her golden white children. Despite the planet’s blessed intentions to exterminate non-white races, why, black and white Americans now welcome each other’s company! The white race is burdened with the knowledge of how to organize lazy races into productivity.

I recently visited The Edge in the late capitalist prison that is Hudson Yards. During the lengthy wait to take the elevator to the top, a wall states in all white caps: “HUDSON YARDS IS A BLANK SLATE TO CREATE TOMORROW’S CITY.” This is the most American sentence I’ve ever unintentionally encountered. This idea that America is a “blank slate” is the em-dash that connects the stars of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and gentrification into a demonic constellation. Non-white spaces are misused wastelands that lust to be transformed with white wealth. Hudson Yards is the final evolution of Manhattan becoming pure capital: inside its glass and aluminum architecture, you are nowhere and everywhere at once—OLED screens at all angles previewing your ideal self via modern purchasing power.

Later in the text, Noble knocks back bourbon and exhales pure führer: “That’s my theory: immediate electrocution of all ignorant and dirty people.” What makes this scene so goddamn hilarious is that Jack Daniel learned how to distill bourbon from Nathan Green, a Kentucky slave. Every honey-fire drip on Noble’s tongue hisses at the racist smoke escaping his throat.

Maury Noble is the future of the Republican Party. A few decades ago, white conservatives at least workshopped their racism before publishing malevolence. Donors are now

paranoid that white voters won’t receive the message unless they’re expressed like Tom Cotton in The New York Times: “nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa […] In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military ‘or any other means’[.]” White and black protestors collaborate and BLAMMO! This republic and its businesses are destroyed. American capitalism will only continue if the original racial hierarchy is upheld. The Gray Lady is once again exposed as an inexcusable coward.

THE SALE.

Late in the novel, Patch is once again forced to get a fucking job. When he arrives for the interview, he joins a room of unemployed men waiting for the boss, Sammy Carleton. Sammy proceeds to bellow an inspirational speech about capitalist success: “every man is a born success, he makes himself a failure; it’s not to teach you how to talk, because each man is a natural orator and only makes himself a clam […] you and you and you have the heritage of money and prosperity waiting for you to come and claim it.” At this point, the speaker mentions that an Irishman walks out the door and Sammy adds, “That man thinks he’ll go look for it in the beer parlour around the corner […] He won’t find it there.”

Variations of this speech have infected American rhetoric for the past two centuries. The more famous version is Alec Baldwin’s monologue in the film adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross. Baldwin’s character, Blake, gives a motivational speech to salesmen who fail to hit their quotas: “I am here on a mission of mercy […] You can’t close the leads you’re given, you can’t close shit, you are shit. […] Guy doesn’t walk on the lot unless he wants to buy. Sitting out there waiting to give you their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it? […] The money’s out there. [...] If not […] you know what you’ll be saying? Bunch of losers sitting around a bar.”

The myth that every American is born a natural success and only through misguided individual decisions does he descend into penury is crucial to defending industrial capitalism. If you come to terms with the fact that capitalism necessitates mistreatment of climate and labor, then the entire system becomes morally indefensible. The fact that many Americans consume alcohol to cope with an immoral system is then condemned as personal sin. Sammy wants his recruits to sell his book Heart Talks, which he claims will help businesses improve their sales. When Patch returns home, the speaker says, “With an accompaniment of ironic laughter Anthony told Gloria the story of his commercial adventure. But she listened without amusement.” Anthony then says, “If there’s anything older than the old story, it’s the new twist.” The speaker says, “It required an astonishing amount of moral energy on Glo-

ria’s part to intimidate him into returning [to work].”

Patch sees through Sammy as a blustering con man and assumes Gloria will chuckle at his thoughtful observation. This scene demonstrates how differently they view their financial future. A dumb fuck selling worthless self-improvement texts to other dumb fucks? Patch once again throws up the deuces. In this way, Patch subconsciously sells a fantasy to Gloria that he’s above this work and will no doubt find something better. Gloria is not so sure. She makes the home environment so hostile to his presence that he is forced to leave the next morning.

Like Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, Sammy’s sales strategy involves being a deplorable bully to complete strangers. After the second day of orientation, the speaker says, “Anthony began to feel a sort of disgusted confidence in him. The man appeared to know what he was doing. […] It did not occur to Anthony that the type of man who attains commercial success seldom knows how or why, and, as in his grandfather’s case, when he ascribes reasons, the reasons are generally inaccurate and absurd.”

The speaker argues that even if Patch wasn’t quiescent, he wouldn’t necessarily reach the financial heights of his grandfather. Cross Patch is even wealthier than Sammy, but both of their successful trajectories cannot be articulated because they lack the self-reflective tools necessary for that understanding.

One of the most enraging aspects of American politics is the idea that a successful businessman will naturally become a successful politician. These two professions have fuck-all to do with each other, but our inadequate educational system doesn’t inoculate American voters from this collective delusion. Being a relentless asshole who views employees with misprision will not result in policies that address social inequities. It will result in policies that discipline the poor delivered with a condescending lecture.

CONCRETE JUNGLES.

New York City has successfully marketed itself via film and pop narratives as the land where everyone’s fantasies materialize. Although Ragged Dick is unrealistic for most, New York’s sense of neighborhood and community is often tangible in the airflow, the way racism is in Parisian avenues. Patch, however, views minority communities as free entertainment: “The train moved in through the deepening twilight, above and past half a hundred cheerful sweating streets of the Upper East Side, each one passing the car-window […] with its vigorous colorful revelation of poor children swarming in feverish activity like vivid ants in alleys […] ‘I like these streets,’ observed Anthony aloud. ‘I always feel as though it’s a performance staged for me[.]’” Secret shame: I cried through In the Heights. While the musical raises uneasy questions, (why aren’t the women permitted to rap? why are many of the actors lighter than me?) I can’t help but root for characters to achieve happi-

ness and acceptance in a culture that renders them invisible. For Patch, he does not see these communities in terms of human beings creating New York on their own terms. These minority children are tropical ants performing circus tricks for his white applause.

When I returned to Brooklyn for the first time after mass vaccinations, I visited Shenanigans, my favorite Kensington dive bar with my brother-in-law. Sipping rounds of Jack at Shenanigans makes you recognize the one truly grand thing about the city: the realization that you are just one of millions of stories that have been told within the five boroughs. In a culture diseased with individual ego, New York is a curative injection of external experiences.

The ten o’clock news covered the mayoral race and a man approached the bar voicing vague observations like “You see this stuff?” and “Ehh the Democrat will probably win” until he confirmed he was among left-leaning friends. “You gotta be so careful with this stuff nowadays,” he said with widened eyes.

As Patch and Gloria’s financial reserves continue to dwindle, their care of not offending people also dwindles. Gloria tells a nurse, “’Millions of people […] swarming like rats, chattering like apes, smelling like all hell … monkeys! Or lice, I suppose. For one really exquisite palace … on Long Island, say—or even in Greenwich […] I’d sacrifice a hundred thousand of them, a million of them.’” Patch calls frenemy Bloeckman a “Goddam Jew” outside of a bar after spending all of his pocket cash on spirits, and the bank manager is a “greedy Mick” for closing his account after a string of bounced checks. The speaker adds, “The sense of the enormous panorama of life, never strong in Anthony, had become dim almost to extinction.”

Today there is one major political party, however flawed, that at least attempts to shape a republic for this enormous panorama of life. The other deviously craves its extinction. Political scientist Diana Mutz found that Republicans are concerned with “issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status.” When the Patches were socially influential, they were selfish centrists who were friends with a racist. Now estranged from Manhattan’s aristocratic community, their mouths lurch rightward into overtly racist speech acts.

GOSSIP GIRLS.

After several legal setbacks and mounting debt, the Patches finally inherit the fortune guarded by Cross’s estate. While on a ship destined for Europe, a “pretty girl in yellow” comments to a fellow passenger that Gloria “had on a Russian-sable coat that must have cost a small fortune […] I can’t stand her, you know. She seems sort of—sort of dyed and unclean, if you know what I mean.” Despite finally affording the fashionable jacket she craved throughout the text, another knockout recognizes the interior ugliness that cannot be disguised by fur.

The speaker observes wheelchair-bound Anthony and says, “he was concerned with a series of reminiscences, much as a general might look back upon a successful campaign and analyse his victories. […] They had tried to penalize him for the mistakes of his youth. […] his friends had deserted him—even Gloria had turned against him. He had been alone, alone—facing it all. […] Great tears stood in his eyes, and his voice was tremulous as he whispered to himself. ‘I showed them,’ he was saying.”

A protagonist ending up miserable at the end of a text is not unique among Fitzgerald’s work, but what is unique is that the marriage remains locked in an eternal cold war. Their love of money, disgust of the working class, and aversion to labor are the only things that fuel the relationship. Once again, experiencing the negative effects of capitalism makes Patch discover a truth—in this case, no American should be ruined for doing stupid shit as a young adult. Instead of advocating for the incarcerated, however, he ends the text seething on a luxury cruise.

Louise Maunsell Field’s contemporaneous review of the novel is mostly negative. She said, “Anthony Patch, most important of them all, lacks even physical courage” although her critique lacks any mention of all the fucking bigotry. In 1931, she published an essay titled “What’s Wrong with the Men?” in The North American Review. She considered the sudden lack of strong male characters in literature as “one of the most remarkable, most arresting phenomena of the present day.” She adds that, “Not only has the hero vanished, but his place as protagonist […] isn’t even a respectably back-boned aquatic individual, but a mere jellyfish.”

The literary critic for the Jazz-Age Times wasn’t aghast that white supremacy is the gruesome root system amassing nutrients beneath Fitzgerald’s botanical prose, but that Patch lacks sufficient machismo. This is revealing in that it was socially acceptable to exclude non-white Americans from society, but not to be a spineless puss.

It might seem excessive to dunk on a dead lady from the 1920s, but the same American publication allowed a handsome senator to pen the same sentiments in the 2020s. We the Beautiful, We the Damned.

by Landis Varughese

Growing up a young brown boy, there were two South Asian kids on T.V. to look up to –Ravi Ross from Disney’s Jessie and Baljeet of Phineas and Ferb. You could argue that these characters were effectively the same person; it just so happened one was animated, one wasn’t. Both were Indian pre-teens, possessing thick accents and extremely nerdy personas. These characters held down the entire fort for representing all of South Asian to kids in the 2010s. Unfortunately, they also represented a far more damning reality for the audience they portrayed. Hank Azaria, a white man, played the voice of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon for three decades on The Simpsons before calling it quits, correctly saying voicing an Indian person without actually being Indian wasn’t right. After a long thirty years, Azaria finally decided that his race granted him yet another privilege: to operate under the voice of anyone he wanted to, without facing any repercussions for perpetuating harmful stereotypes.

These images of brown people — my people — reflect a much broader issue. Modern media has always been concerned with catering to the white male majority and never anyone else. That’s held true even as the 2020 census found around 40% of the United States population is people of color. Production companies, made up of predominantly straight, cisgendered white men, have effectively owned the

narratives of everyone they choose to depict in film and television. Such producers don’t have to go out into the world and face the repercussions of the narratives they create. Instead, the audience is forced to grapple with the images shown and go out into a world where others live as if those images are pure fact, not just a sensationalized form of the truth.

So maybe unsurprisingly, seeing Disney characters who looked like me didn’t have much of a positive effect on my life. While I was fortunate that my dad’s second job gifted us with the wonders of cable television, many of my friends remained loyal to Arthur, Curious George, and Martha Speaks — a cast of characters residing on the local channels accessed by fiddling with a T.V. antennae. On the other hand, for my friends who had access to cable, something changed. There was no outright offense taking place, but I noticed it.

“Can you please do the Baljeet accent?”

“Why don’t you put your hands together like Apu?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be good at math like Ravi?

At seven years old, I wasn’t concerned with lofty adult ideas about how these questions reflected the general public’s perception of

Indians. In all honesty, I was confused about how they were framing their questions. I didn’t know what the “Baljeet” accent was. To me, Baljeet sounded like my little cousins back in India. I guarantee those seven-year-olds couldn’t point to India on a map, yet could tell you “everything” about Indian clothing from that one episode of Jessie where they break out into a dance number, Bollywood movie style.

In Biology, there’s a concept known as a positive feedback loop, where an event triggers another event. That second event’s impact makes the initial event continue to grow larger and spiral beyond. The larger the loop grows in magnitude, the greater the impact of both events. And the science applies here, too. Diluted, inaccurate images of marginalized people are depicted in the media, and make their way to the screens of incredibly large audiences across the country. When it reaches those unfamiliar with these marginalized people — white communities with small of-color populations, for instance — that audience revels in curiosity over these outgroups. All they know now is what’s presented, and they often don’t have a real-life example to prove it wrong. The problem grows when you double up and double down, like Baljeet and Ravi. When the majority accordingly tunes in without question, the production companies don’t feel the need to change their flawed formula.

And it’s weird how Hollywood rewards the tired tropes about people of color portrayed in the media. It’s a system that “values” authenticity and truth in their work but gleefully erases that paradigm for stories about the marginalized, in pursuit of the almighty dollar and maintaining the status quo. Egregiously, the narrow storylines haven’t stopped white actors from playing characters of color, making the caricature all the more poignant. From contemporary blockbuster mainstays Emma Stone and Jake Gyllenhall, to traditional cinematic greats Katharine Hepburn have all, at one point in their career, played the role of another race. Emma Stone played an Asian-American Pacific Islander in Aloha. Gyllenhall donned the titular character in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Hepburn played a Japanese woman in the movie Seed. None of these actors represent

the communities they portray, yet all saw these productions greenlit, filmed, edited and shared with thousands of viewers across the globe. Hollywood not only grants these actors the opportunity to play in Oscar-nominated movies year in and year out, but also gives them the pass to treat people of color as costume –getting paid plenty for all this on top of that. Once again, it’s a positive feedback loop: more actors playing such roles means more money for these actors, and notoriety for the production companies who hook these A-list artists into their projects.

No, this isn’t a recommendation to cancel these actors, but it’s interesting to compare the roles white actors get to play versus POC. Karan Brar has played the same nerdy Indian kid for eight years, from the Diary of Wimpy Kid franchise to Jessie to Bunk’d. White actors get to branch out and take on whatever creative ventures they so please, and nobody bats an eye.

The question then becomes what does qualify as “necessary” or “good” representation for people of color in the media. Some might argue that POC deserve to have the exact same roles that their counterparts have – the heroine in a dystopian universe, the angsty teenager in a coming of age classic, or the protagonist in a romantic-comedy. Initially, this seems like the best solution, considering that actors of color are released from the chains of stereotypes. Theoretically, they’ll fit into the system that has worked against them since the dawn of

time, and just like the white actors will rake in money for producers who are looking to cultivate the “next big thing” by bringing a fresh batch of actors to take up narratives that they’ve traditionally written for white actors.

Yet the reality is, it is impossible to write people of color into traditionally whitedriven narratives, because being a part of a marginalized community is what drives the narrative.

For example, you can’t write a romantic comedy, starring an Indian person, that disregards the overwhelming importance of marriage within Indian culture. As a person of color, I can never leave my identity at the door when I walk into a room, just as an actor of color cannot refrain from representing their culture, nuances, and complexities when they appear on camera. Actors of color deserve to portray themselves in their three dimensions when they pursue their craft; this means not just taking on the roles that the white actors before them declined, it means writing narratives that actually take on the task of representing people of color for everything they are – and more.

In hindsight, I understand that my classmates weren’t trying to be rude or insensitive. They were simply recalling what they had seen on their plasma screens at home. However, I can’t help but imagine what life would be like had

there been more nuanced storytelling of South Asians for children. Shows that weren’t limited to the nerdy, socially-awkward kid who had just moved from India, but rather where they take on the more traditional tropes that appeared on Disney or Nickelodeon for the white kids, who turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, packed with moral resilience and an absurd amount of laugh-tracks.

Reimagining representation doesn’t mean that there can no longer be Indians with accents on television, it means that there should be Indians with accents who actually contribute to the plotline and garner the same fanbase support as their counterparts. It means expanding beyond the confines of sticking people of color as the side plot whose only relevance comes 30 seconds before the commercial break, to up-front and center stories of their triumphs, trials and tribulations.

When we look at the system of Hollywood, those who champion it, and those who are rewarded for holding it up, the status quo looks bleak. The convenient response is to simply align ourselves within the system as opposed to tearing it completely apart. However, the proper response warrants a creation of a new system that disregards former stereotypes and tropes in favor of authenticity, honesty, and humanity.

The Spirit of the Forms

Emily Wesoloski (right)

Poetry, History, and Ecocriticism

In examining a renaissance of perspective, instants of insight—often, a sudden, visceral, understanding—allows for personal revelations and moments of clarity. Often, the greatest personal insights can be found in nature, while looking out.

The Friends of Lakeshore Nature Preserve, a community nonprofit organization, works to inspire others to connect with and care for the UW Lakeshore Nature Preserve. Serving as the University’s “largest outdoor classroom on campus,” the preserve also provides the greater Madison community a place of respite and recreation. In appreciating the benefits provided by the Lakeshore Nature Preserve as a University property, it is critical to acknowledge here that University and surrounding area sits on occupied Ho-Chunk land, Teejop, since a forced removal in 1832. Furthermore, large-scale environmental efforts and organizations have been notorious for centralization on white narratives—negating the voices of individuals of color and indigenous practices. As the environmental movement pushes for a narrative to center attention, care, to the nature around us, there is dissonance within their own historical narrative in regards to topics of inclusion and perceiving land as an “object” from an individualistic rather than a community, collective, standpoint.

Aware of this dissonance, the Friends recognized they could do more to amplify diverse voices and perspectives, former Outreach Committee Chair Lillian Tong (1949-2022)

initiated the “It’s in our Nature” poetry open mic in 2019, an event and platform to reinterpret the term “nature” and create a space for all narratives regarding our shared land. As the event promoted more diverse perceptions , the yearly open mics became a staple part of the Friends of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve Programming.

In 2021, the organization began their audio-trail initiative, matching the poems performed to specific, geographical, locations along the Lakeshore trail through the use of a story map. In pairing poetry about nature to the natural itself, trail-goers are encouraged to consider other narratives and perceptions during their own time outdoors.

On February 25th, 2023 the fourth annual poetry open mic was put on with the theme of insight and with collaboration from us at the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism. Prefacing the poetry event with programming regarding literary criticism, poetry as a medium of criticism, and abolition,this year’s open mic continued past tradition while sharing new stories.

“There is a poem hiding behind every leaf, every snowflake” - Will Vuyk, President of the Friends of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve

collectivity - a human race innately of love

practice of empathy is education leisure is prideful joy is rebellion

family around the dinner table nourishing meals locally grown foods mother earth in our plates in our bellies on our minds embedded within the soul of our community

giving back to the biome that gives to us planting and flowering cultivating and caring organic and authentic and natural but soft and imperfect the opposite of plastic the equivalent of paper mache walkable and with green housing bustling with life life accepted and supported in every stage replaced a loving, daring humanity radical idealism hope and motivation food is fuel and food is for all love is love and love is thriving

a dream of a community

the echo of anger in today’s protest is the happiness of those in the future who reap the grains grown with our tears the silent gratitudes at the dinner table sitting on the porch watching the sunset on our green world for another day

this is the hope that ignites the room

In Sight - Paul Noeldner

You always see more

Of what you’re looking for

If you’re looking for a window

You might not see a door

In that flock up on the line

There’s one bird of another kind

Be sure to keep an open mind

You never know what you might find

You thought stones are inanimate. Like bones, we carry them from here to there. We set them in a ring, and they remain. But no. Take another look through your lenses fashioned of silica sand. Rocks dance when you turn your back to them, refract colors hummingbirds see and sing to. While your glass spectacles dissolve into puddles and reef corals fossilize, boulders dazzle sky and tree. They beckon. We haul, cobble cairns, believing we mark the passages of planets. All the while mountains sway and hurl their molten shimmer to the speed of light. It’s all relative – you, me, the stones. Listen. Did you really believe these hills are silent? They are laughing at our mayfly tempo. Beauty is stone deep. At what point do we align our sight for unimagined changes in hue?

Stone Circle - Catherine Young

Dreamer's Dillema - Amanjot Kaur

by John Nugent

The day he turned twenty-five, he turned his back on society and walked into the wooded area off the side of the road, far enough from the car left abandoned on the emergency strip to feel alone. This was not premeditated. While surveying the other drivers passing him, and him them, he had reached the epiphany that he was no longer one with humanity. All of a sudden, there was no purpose left to his meandering, mundane existence. All the build up to this moment—the smiling faces of people passing him, genuinely happy, not the facades he presented to the world every day, but real emotion, and the spacing out at work, half an hour gone with the blink of an eye in a sterile cubicle, or the having to go back into the living room to make sure the light was off come bed time, but not really time for sleeping, no, time to sit and scroll endlessly on social media—came to its damning conclusion.

Now his phone was gone, cast under the passing cars as soon as he pulled over, the glittering shards of its all knowing screen scattered across the asphalt, diamonds shining against the tar interspersed throughout the electric corpse. No one could stop him now, shoving their message down his throat, telling him he was abnormal, or wrong. He was going into the woods to do what he thought was right: to be truly human. This would prove futile, of course, but a certain naive air of certainty had imbued his spiritual core, and he pushed on feeling sure of himself for the first time since childhood.

Reaching a point far enough away from the road for the noise of cars flying by to have died down, he slowly sat on the mildly damp carpet of leaves below. Intermixed between the weeds and mushrooms were patches where the dirt shone through. He reached forward, clawing up a chunk, feeling the moist earth as it lodged underneath his fingernails. It was this which was good, this which was holy, him and the earth and nothing more than this. He lacked the clarity to wonder why more people did not just take off like this. There was a part of him, deep down, which wished he had his phone now, something to record this experience, to show the world that he was gone, leaving it behind, and all the better for it.

A horn sounded from the now distant interstate, interrupting his thought. He stood up and walked on further, closing his eyes every now and then and humming along to the reverbing energy emanated from around him. This was peaceful, even invigorating in a way, until he tripped over an exposed root and came down hard, scraping his elbows and knees but avoiding any trauma to the head. It was funny to him while he stood up, brushing off the natural detritus, to be hurt by the world in a way which people could see. Still, after this, he watched where he stepped. He was once again stopped in his tracks, not by the physical world this time, but by his thoughts. There was no shelter for him tonight. This seemed like something to be worried

about but, curiously, he found his body unable to elicit the response. Perhaps he was breaking through the wall that had been erected around him, all bricks and mortar laid and paved by the mother, father, mentors, teachers, presidents, and all those others who had yet affected him to be this way, to be no one but “himself” as long as that person stood in his four walls and played the game with the rules in mind, to just say no and to not ask questions, to write in simple, declarative sentences and practice his cursive and read his Bible verses when he was told and recite them with everyone else and shake his head yes when necessary and no when necessary and to be motionless and quiet and blind and dumb whenever else, those blank spaces of time in which there seemed to be nothing good or right or just in the world but to simply retreat into the walls and wait.

Too much time had passed. The sun was setting on a cold and dead world. In the distance was the consistent roar of the air, bullied by hunks of metal driven on by their impatient masters. His stomach rumbled and his throat ached for a drop of water. Sweat plastered his shirt to his back. This was not the freedom he had imagined. He was not the monarch here, but a simple subject of nature. Wherever he turned to face, he was subject to forces bigger than him, governed by laws which kept him in line.

Nightfall landed on him as his attempts to build some form of shelter came crashing down around him. Maybe he should have been a better Boy Scout, paid more attention to his troop leader. He watched this world of his, in which he had imagined himself master, crumble. Dejection set in and he turned back toward the road. Headlights cast their uncanny beams forward, flickering through the tree line ahead as his beacon. Following this guiding light, he tried to wrap his head around his fate: he had failed to escape, to break out of the cycle of likes and dislikes and of social anxiety, of wandering through the crowded throngs of employees leaving the building at five o’clock. It was intentional obsolescence to be human, born into a world in which one is destined to fail solely based on the fact that they can not escape themselves. Exiting back into the realm of the many, he turned towards his car, walking slowly, head hung in shame. His vehicle had been towed. As a punishment for his insurrection, he was forced to stick out his thumb and hope for passing pity.

Rip My Heart Out Why Don’t You

Casey Coolidge

By Stella D’Acquisto

In the home country, they tell you flight is a slow process, like learning a language: one word at a time. Well, I never knew more than a few words, so on the day of my ritual, I had to leap off a cliff with my eyes closed, never knowing if I would reach the bottom safely.

You think I’m speaking in metaphor. I’m not.

The whole family was gathered around me, wings splayed so wide they almost blocked out the sun, casting a protective shadow over my cousins and I as we prepared for the flight. My cousins stood confidently, having trained for years at the flight academy. Only I was shivering in anxiety under the cloak my mother had given me.

They tell you flight is a slow process, like learning a language: one word at a time. Well, I’ve never been any good at learning languages, and my wingtips never grew out the way my cousins’ did. I had to make my own wings, fashioning them feather by feather out of wax and bark, keeping them hot while they formed, then letting them cool until they hardened, strong enough to withstand the vicious winds of the open air.

The wind caught me in the face when I tumbled off the cliff, slamming me upward so fast it forced my wings open. I spun, hurtling toward the earth as the pinpricks of pine trees grew alarmingly in size. Then an updraft caught me, and my wings snapped back with a sharp pain that burned through my shoulders. I was flapping, I was gliding, I was free.

My family’s soaring shadows passed above me. I didn’t notice the sun pressing down on me, quietly piercing through my wings, carefully stealing them away.

They tell you flight is a slow process, like learning a language: one word at a time. For me, flight was like being forced to learn how to swim.

And then it was like drowning.

RETURNING HOME

by Christa Statz

Her perfume will remain untouched; perched on the chipped window sill. Forvering holding the need to fulfill. To never linger in the morning air. To never see her morning pinned hair.

Old movie ticket stuffed between the ruffled pages. Keeping her from losing her place. A different world to chase. The story will never see the end; something I will never be able to comprehend.

Settled at the top of the medicine cabinet, her nail polish in the shade “Big Apple Red”. To be there till I move, I dread. Only to be seen in the rubies and poppies. In hopes of indulging in her old hobbies.

Folded over, unfinished, crossword puzzle from last week. She couldn’t figure out the word mystique. Grinned up at me from her woven chair. Blanket pulled up past her dusky hair.

Wrapped around her wooden vanity, as graceful as the scattering rain, sits a dainty pearl chain. That once sat upon her tired frame. I will continue in her name.

Viewfinder by Haley Paige Polzin

Head in the Clouds

by Catherina O

IN THE MARGINS

by Mel Pryor

Black, queer, woman, poor–words pressed into my skin. Like grill marks into meat, like brands into cattle.

But in those words I see community. Bright pink smoke in my grandfather’s green yard.

Kinky black coils, big enough to block out the sun.

The shine of gold bamboo hoops and nails as long as claws. Skin mothered by the sun.

But in those words I feel truth. Velvet hips and plush thighs, heat that speeds through my body and brings it to a blush. Expressive and seen and celebrated. Love in all its forms.

In those words I hear joy. The click-clack of heels, and stilettos, and

pumps, and mary janes. A secret, a warning, good news and bad news–all told in one look.

Shouts of “I’ve got an extra tampon” from a stall over.

The endless laughs in a quiet room.

In these words I smell my childhood. The saccharine scent of canned fruit cocktail.

Grassy fresh breezes from slip-n-slides in my best friend's backyard.

Heady chemicals from the chlorine of a hotel pool.

The dry dusty air of thrift stores and rehab shops.

Black, queer, woman, poor–These words pressed into my skin. Like a tight hug on a hard day, or the sun’s love on a summer afternoon.

RADICAL JOY

Upon first interacting with Banjo, Claude McKay’s second novel and quasi-sequel to Home to Harlem, it appears to be classically picaresque, similar to Don Quixote and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The back cover promises potential readers a story of “drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, [and] loving,” and McKay even subtitles the novel A story without a plot, further advertising its picaresque structure. However, focusing on the episodic, raucous nature of the novel ignores its political depth and complexity. Banjo addresses innumerable topics salient to the Harlem Renaissance, from Pan Africanism to police brutality, nationalism to Négritude, socialism to sexuality, all of which destabilize the status quo of the “white world” and “morality of the Christians” (McKay 268).

Despite the breadth of topics that McKay’s novel addresses, much of the critical literature surrounding Banjo frequently attempts to explain its complexity and political radicalism with a single theory.1 For instance, Brent Edwards argues in his book, Practice of Diaspora, that Banjo seeks to “institutionalize a vision of black internationalism” (220). Eric Newman differs, contending that we must “read … queerness as essential rather than incidental to the structure and politics of [McKay’s] most famous novels” (167). Tacking in an

even different direction, Anthony Reed views improvisation as the theme that crystallizes the intricacies of Banjo.

However, reading Banjo through the lens of one theory fundamentally misidentifies its project, which is best articulated by Gary Holcomb: “Banjo is a Europeanimported queer anarchist little black bomb clandestinely constructed to be chucked into the works, into the Imaginary, of international capitalism and imperialism, nationalist racism and fascism” (143).

You could add an indefinite number of -isms to Holcomb’s list of modern oppressive structures that Banjo seeks to disrupt. In other words, Banjo argues for the resistance of categorization, seeking to destabilize the ways in which civilization (McKay’s standin for Western modernity) imposes identity structures upon individuals. To essentialize a particular reading of this novel, or classify it into a particular genre, would miss its radical ethos.

The novel signals the reader to view it as destabilizing in a myriad of ways. For the sake of brevity, I will address three systems Banjo destabilizes: identity, through the character Banjo, institutions, via an analysis of music’s role in the novel, and form, by the way of McKay’s authorial choices. These three examples of destabilization are reflective of Banjo’s larger project: to

call into question the assumptions and structures of early 20th century white society. McKay offers an alternative in the form of Black joy, which celebrates spontaneity and heterogeneity, reflective of his own lifestyle.

Banjo (the character) defies definition and categorization, refusing to conform to the identities imposed upon him. Start simply with his true, government name: Lincoln Agrippa (McKay 3). Lincoln and Agrippa were two white, powerful statesmen who protected the institution of the state, the American Union and the Roman Republic, respectively (Bowersock). He casts off these names in favor of the humble moniker “Banjo.” Furthermore, while “[e]verything about him – accent, attitude, and movement – shouted Dixie[,]” Banjo “announced that he was not an American” (McKay 12, 11). With regards to his nationality, Banjo is unmistakably American, Dixie being a uniquely American culture, yet he refuses to conform to that identity. None of this even begins to address Banjo’s homoerotic relationship with Ray, and his refusal to name his sexuality one way or the other. Deliberate, internal associations with identity markers matter to Banjo, not arbitrary, external associations.

Music serves a similarly radical function in the novel. The boys of the Ditch play primarily the genres of jazz and blues. These

1 My use of the word “radical” does not imply any normative judgment. Rather, I mean radical simply in the sense of antagonistic to the entrenched status quo. This will be true for the rest of the paper as well.

IN BANJO LUKE TILLITSKI

two musical siblings stand in stark contrast to the music that is considered canonical, namely, classical, Western music. Where classical music centers the traditional major scale, jazz elevates the dorian scale, which flats the third and seventh notes. Where classical music focuses on rehearsal of a prewritten score, jazz utilizes improvisation. Elevating jazz and blues is not the only way McKay subverts music in the novel. Banjo, the character, brings a banjo, the instrument, to his jazz band, yet banjos are not typical instruments in jazz music. This is not a background detail; McKay centers the banjo, noting that it “dominates the other instruments,” calling the reader’s attention to its disruptive nature (49). Lastly, Banjo insists that the musical group he forms with the boys of the Ditch constitute an “orchestry” (orchestra) (McKay 90). Yet, a handful of musicians busking from bar to bar does not an orchestra make. Orchestras are definitionally rather large, and they typically do not perform spontaneously as Banjo’s group does. Banjo creates an orchestra in name, but in practice forms what most people would define as a band, another example of he – and the novel –refusing delineations imposed by society. Thus, the radical role that music serves in the novel destabilizes the institution of classical music itself.

McKay’s authorial choices with regards to Banjo’s form also subvert what is

considered “traditional” or “correct” for a novel. McKay writes much of this novel in dialect, meaning characters such as Banjo and Goosey speak not with “proper” English, but in their respective vernaculars. Choosing to elevate African American Vernacular English (AAVE) was a contentious choice during the Harlem Renaissance, as Black scholars debated to what extent it should be utilized. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God arguably heralds AAVE most famously; McKay did so in Banjo almost a decade earlier.2 Additionally, as mentioned earlier, Banjo is subtitled A novel without a plot, which is apt; Banjo is largely plotless with almost no sense of temporality. Besides its use of dialect and plotlessness, Banjo further disrupts the classic novel because it makes no mention of its sequel status either in the paratext or text itself, even though it is a sequel. For instance, when first introducing Ray, McKay peculiarly writes that “Banjo … reminded [Ray] happily of Jake,” making no mention of the necessary context for this information, that being Home to Harlem. In short, McKay actively refuses to conform to the typical conventions of the novel.

These three examples – rejection of identity, institution, and form – are by no means an exhaustive list of the structures the novel destabilizes, but they depict an accurate representation. Importantly, what

unites them, and thus makes the novel cohere, is their positioning in opposition to civilization, which Reed identifies as McKay’s euphemism for “encroachments of modernity” (Reed 760). I will analyze each of the three in kind.

In the case of Banjo’s identity, autofictional Ray observes that he and Banjo “‘just haven’t got … the instinct of civilization” (McKay 289). Similarly, “the sharp, noisy notes of the banjo … [is] an affirmation of [African American] existence in the midst of … civilization (McKay 490). The banjo notably serves as the symbol for the disruption of the institution of music. While McKay, for obvious reasons, does not directly address the question of form in his novel, he does write that “African sculpture” is “remote from … the conventionalism of a civilized drawing room,” further emphasizing that “vulgarity was altogether a scab of civilization” (McKay 192). In much the same way that visual Black art is perceived as vulgar, Black prose utilizing AAVE being labeled as vulgar and not up to the standards of white, Western art, is also a result of civilization, according to this passage. The takeaway from the three vignettes of destabilization, then, should be that McKay is preparing the reader to question the validity of civilization.

This intuitively begs the question, “what should we read civilization to mean?”

2 This should not be construed as minimizing Hurston’s accomplishments or acclaim, but rather demonstrating the novelty of McKay’s work. The two are not mutually exclusive.

As mentioned earlier, Reed asserts that civilization stands-in for “encroachments of modernity,” but I posit that more specifically, it represents the 1930’s social structure dominated by whiteness and Christian morality that sought to categorize people into particular identities and use those identities to maintain systems of inequality. Conversely, the antithesis to White modernity is Black primitivism, which McKay reclaims as an elevation of instinctual, Black joy.

Civilization denies Banjo’s characters the ability to instinctively feel joy. Strategically placed by McKay about halfway through the novel, Ray encounters “a one-armed man … begg[ing] alms” (McKay 163).

Ray refuses, noting that “he never gave alms in public” because “[i]t made him feel cheap and embarrassed[,]” even though “he would have liked to give something”

(McKay 163). This episode leads Ray to a moment of self-reflection beyond just the interaction with the beggar, where he proclaims to “hate … civilization because its general attitude toward the colored man [is] such as to rob him of his warm human instincts and make him inhuman”

(McKay 163). This “inhumanity” takes the form most saliently in a lack of spontaneity, a semi-articulation of DuBois’ doubleconsciousness: “under [civilization] the thinking colored man could not function normally like his white brother, responsive and reacting spontaneously to the emotions of pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow, kindness or hardness, charity, anger, and forgiveness” (McKay 164).

In this episode, Ray takes an objective good that he wishes to partake in (giving

charity), attributes his inability to do so to societal norms (the embarrassment of being charitable), and then connects this experience to the many other ways society precludes him from acting how he would choose naturally (fully accepting the pleasure of his homosexuality, confidently experiencing Black joy, accepting his stateless status, etc.) In other words, civilization serves as a kind of social panopticon, where characters hesitate to engage in their natural sources of joy because social norms have conditioned the characters to feel judged and consistently monitored. Furthermore, by defining civilization as “inhuman,” McKay subverts the classic interpretation of civilization as the laudable telos of humanity. It makes sense, therefore, that McKay writes “the police were strongarmed against the happy irresponsibility of the Negro in the face of civilization” (313). The police, who are tasked with protecting society and seemingly omnipresent, disrupt characters’ attempts, intentional or otherwise, to resist “civilization.” Some examples include deporting undocumented immigrant characters and breaking up jazz performances. In Banjo, civilization’s social structures are unnatural and dangerous.

Black primitivism, in contrast, elevates instinctual joy, disrupting civilization. Nearing the end of the novel, as autofictional Ray is reflecting on what he has learned from Banjo and the boys of the Ditch, he opines, in the form of McKay’s third person narration, that “as the rag is to the [all-trampling civilized] bull, so is the composite voice of the Negro … being himself … [to] a world where

everything is being reduced to a familiar formula” (McKay 314). Civilization seeks to homogenize people formulaically, trampling marginalized folks who cannot neatly fit into its boxes of white, Christian morality. Black primitivism, on the other hand, gives people the freedom to be who they choose – “to laugh and love and jazz” – antagonizing the bull of civilization in the process (McKay 319). This argument is articulated most saliently when Ray converses with Crosby, a white, American intellectual who “felt, naïvely, that in Europe … there was no problem of color” (McKay 272). Ray, again in the form of McKay’s third person narration, asserts that “[i]f the Negro had to be defined, there was every reason to define him as a challenge rather than a ‘problem’ to Western civilization” (McKay 273). This quotation is integral to understanding Banjo because it a) resists the concept of essentializing the Black experience by putting the sentence in the conditional mode and b) points out that the Black experience is fundamentally positioned in opposition to encroaching White modernity. In summary, McKay writes a novel inundated with destabilization to elevate Black primitivism in opposition to white modernity.

This leaves the final question of “Why?” Why would McKay go to such great lengths to write an “anarchist little black bomb”of destabilization (Holcomb 143)? Perhaps it is because an undefined, radical life was how McKay interacted with the world. For example, biographical information suggests that McKay was openly bisexual, but he did not claim to be a part of the queer community and remained coy about his sexuality in his autobiography (Newman

168). McKay immigrated from Jamaica to the United States, then spent many years in several countries in Europe, before again returning to the United States. He also moved in and out of Marxist and socialist spaces, depending on how he viewed the movement at the time. Additionally, while he was associated with the Harlem Renaissance, McKay had fundamental intellectual differences with many figures of the time, namely W.E.B. DuBois. The list of liminality continues. The novel even signals the audience to make this reading; Ray concludes in the final pages that an “instinctive way of living was more deeply related to his own self-preservation [emphasis added] than all the principles, or social-morality lessons with which he had been inculcated by the wiseacres of the civilized machine (McKay 319). In short, McKay – not unlike Banjo the character, Ray, or Banjo the novel – defied categorization, living life by pursuing his instinctual joy.

This is where the crux of my criticism of essentializing Banjo with a particular theory

lies. Only a broad reading could possibly begin to encompass the omnipresent grip that civilization has on the characters in Banjo. To explain the complexity of McKay’s social commentary to just queerness, or simply improvisation, or merely black internationalism misses the point entirely; by doing so, a literary critic would be imposing the same limiting structures of identity that Banjo fights against. Banjo demands an intersectional and radical reading from its audience because McKay demanded an intersectional and radical life from society. I read Banjo to be a novel of liminality, destabilizing the many oppressive structures of White modernity, likely mirroring McKay’s own life. The radicalism of Banjo is likely what contributed to its poor commercial success and relative lack of canonical status (“Claude”). For a novel that seeks to be so disruptive, of course it never cohered into a particular canon; there were too many societal structures and incentives to reject it. I propose that McKay would not

WORKS CITED

have minded, though, because the entire project of Banjo is diametrically opposed to the concept of a canon. McKay wrote this novel as an act of radicalism, willing to walk away from its reception, liberated from establishment criticisms and categorization, not unlike how Banjo and Ray walk away from Marseilles, secure in their instinctual love and radical joy.

Bowersock, G.W. “Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www. britannica.com/biography/Marcus-Vipsanius-Agrippa.

“Claude McKay.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ claude-mckay.

Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Nationalism. Harvard University Press. 2003.

Holcomb, Gary Edward. Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. University Press of Florida. 2007.

McKay, Claude. Banjo. Harcourt and Brace. 1929.

Reed, Anthony. “‘A Woman Is A Conjunction’” The Ends of Improvisation in Claude McKay’s Banjo: A Story without a Plot.” Callaloo, Vol. 36, No. 3, Summer, 2013. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24264845.

A Collaboration with the Publications Committee of

the Wisconsin Union Directorate (PubCom)

A LITERARY RENAISSANCE

As an abolitionist, student-run, literary publication, our mission aims to promote everyday forms of critical thinking and questioning by engaging with literary criticism in mediums beyond the constraints of academia. The practice and skill of literary criticism is a discipline that prompts one to embrace, uncover, and create complexity. It is comparison, interpretation, argumentation, and analysis—working to holistically understand a text rather than provide a simple summary. Literary criticism, engaging ourselves with subjects that fascinate and frustrate us, is needed today more than ever before. In a world where unregulated misinformation, soundbites, political alignments, and headlines dominate a collective worldview, having the tools to navigate an increasingly complicated society is a prerequisite for bettering it.

We believe in our mission, but recognize that the medium, the arrangement, of a magazine itself can be a constraint that limits revolutionary thinking. As stated by the Boston Social Justice Design Studio, written works are arranged to be comprehensible with the exigence of trying to be easily “read” and understood. Yet ideas are often complex, contradicting the format of efficiency they are presented in, and as ideas are embedded in arrangements which in turn produce effects, we found it necessary to alter our literary arrangement.

In honoring our limitation, we decided to partner with the Publications Committee of the Wisconsin Union Directorate (PubCom), a group responsible for publishing four other student-run publications at the University of Wisconsin Madison, to provide an outlet where our own literary structures could be subverted.

Madison Barnes Freshman

Julia Kay Smith Junior

Kie Forss Junior

On February 21st, 2023, we hosted Scrapbook night: an event where the Madison community was invited to cut up, draw on, fold, rearrange, and deconstruct text. We provided students with copies of our own magazines, newspapers, grocery receipts, poems, old homework assignments, crosswords, and more— encouraging them to move past the arrangement of text to produce new forms of expression. In changing our design praxis, we hope to draw attention to new effects, creativity, and ideas that came from our scrapbook night.

Ria Dhingra Junior

Natalie Suri Sophomore

Laasya Adusumilli Junior

Sarah Kirsch Sophomore

Erin Brew Junior

Sophia Shashko Sophomore

Kennidy Pelnar Sophomore

Melissa Junior

Jonathan Tostrud Freshman

Landis Varughese Freshman

John Nugent Senior

Lexi Connors Junior

Mia Rogowski Freshman

Kylie Hollenstein Junior

Madison Barnes Freshman

Rebekah Bonin Sophomore

Olivia Ligman Junior

Lacey Brooks Junior

Dorothy Palmer Junior

Nuha Dolby Senior

Kylie Hollenstein Junior

Mia Rogowski Freshman Kennidy Pelmar Sophomore

Lili McGuffey Junior

Bri Rau Junior

Fiona Hatch Senior

Yasmin Mirhashemi Junior

Carsyn Barber Senior

BABY STEPS

AUTHORS NOTE

TW - subtle mentions of depression, anxiety, and suicide

Baby steps. That’s what I tell myself. Almost every day I remind myself that life is one step at a time. Mass change is possible, not always all at once, and sometimes it has to be broken down. These are excerpts from my personal journal and it’s a pleasure to be sharing it with you. Keep in mind that these excerpts have been hand selected and picked apart to showcase the message I want to share with you - that habits reap change. With that in mind, this piece is a showcase of one perspective or life experience, so this might not resonate with everyone. But I hope everybody can find something in it to appreciate.

Hugs and kisses - Lacey

2/6/23

I’m still trying to figure out how to quiet my mind. Maybe right now in this moment I’m finding it hard to calm down because my laundry is air drying all over my room since the dryer didn’t do its job (actually I overloaded it but I’m not gonna pay for another load) - hence clothes laying all over my bed, spaced out on hangers, draped over the now empty laundry basket, over the back of my desk chair. My hypothesis is that my space feels unsettled, so I feel unsettled. Maybe that’s why my anxiety is bad and why I’m stressed all the time, because my life as a whole feels unsettled. Maybe that’s why I’m always in fight or flight mode. Holy shit. I feel like I just connected the dots. That was more revolutionary than any therapy session I’ve ever had before.

Yeah, so how do I get out of fight or flight mode…

2/8/23

I realized in the shower tonight that when I’m having one of those days where I’m not sure how I feel and I don’t know what to do with myself and everything feels blank or empty and I should probably do something but I don’t know what because I don’t know what I’m even feeling… when I’m feeling untethered, I actually do have some degree of control over how I retether myself.

… I had one of those days today. After classes and then work and then an exam, all the way up until my late night shower, I felt blank.

But in the shower I started doing I guess what you would call positive self talk. I don’t know why honestly. But I did it. I sat down, not in the way you sit down in the shower when you turn the water so hot it burns your skin so you can feel something and you sink into a little puddle of gloom; I sat down in the way when you realize that you’ve had a long day so you give yourself a break to rest for a moment and feel grounded and the water is warm like a hug. I had a warm shower. And

I started thinking about…all the little inanimate objects in my life that love me and would miss me if I was gone. I know it’s kinda silly, thinking about how my bed would miss me or my vinyl records or my 0.38 tip Pilot G-2 pens would miss me, or my $6 amazon blue light glasses or baking supplies or cleaning supplies or my bathroom mirror or even my damn phone. I know it sounds silly, it is, but I think it’s sweet too. My thinking was that they would miss me because they love me because I love them. I reminded myself that, at the end of the day, I have such a capacity for love. Even after all the shit that I’ve been through that’s made me tough…

I am strong and I am loving and I am loved. It all made me tear up a little as I took my warm shower. I can still be soft.

I can be soft and strong. And I think that’s lovely.

2/9/23

…one thing that I was thinking about tonight as I was getting ready for bed - I can tell that I’m improving my life or healing or growing or whatever the fuck you wanna call it. The reason I started thinking about it was because I braided my hair of all things. It’s a really small detail, some would say insignificant, but in all those “get ready with me for bed” or “nighttime routine” or “hair care tips” videos you see on social media, it always ends with a hair oiling and braiding step, tying it loosely with a scrunchie before putting on a chilled eye mask and falling asleep peacefully on a silk pillowcase. I was just wiggling around to music as I got ready for bed, and I turned and saw the braid, and every one of those videos flashed across my mind. Because I looked like them, if only for a second. Those girls that always seem to have their lives together. I looked like them. It made me happy. And kinda surprised me too lol. And it was the fact that this small step is always in my nighttime routine. It’s habit for me now. It makes me feel like I’m taking care of myself. I’m growing.

I’ve also noticed that I’ve been craving reading lately. I don’t remember the last time that reading for fun didn’t feel like a chore. I like that. Reading is good. I’m growing. I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about what’s important to me and who in my life I want to put energy into. I go back and forth about a lot of relationships I’ve made with people since being at college. Whenever I start to think about how maybe I missed my chance with people or I didn’t do enough, I remind myself that what’s meant for me will find me (and will stay) and that energy needs to be reciprocated - if people aren’t going to make an effort to spend time with me or be genuine with me, I’m not going to bend over backwards to do the same. I’m growing.

… I’m starting to see it in the little moments, when I’m patient with myself and let myself rest, even if that means missing class that day; in my awareness of the relationships that are or aren’t in my life; where other people are coming from and how that affects how they do or don’t show up for me; trying my best to take care of my body and health; trying my best not to just survive but to live.

Trying my best.

That’s not to say I don’t fuck it up sometimes or have bad days. I have no idea what I’m doing. But I’m trying my best. I’m growing.

Cheers

I'M GROWING

2/12/23

I’m tired lol. I’m happy but I’m tired. I put in the work this week… I can feel that settled in exhaustion or burnt out feeling. Even now writing this my hand is skipping words and jumbling letters.

I’m still working to find this balance in my life… the balance between work and life really.

I’m at a point right now where I have to pick and choose the most important things to get done during the day… choose between eating and showering, or doing laundry versus going to the gym, or going to work versus doing homework. Doing self care before bed or getting more sleep. It’s like a balancing act and eventually somethings gotta drop.

…Life is all about balance, prioritizing the things that are most important to you.

And self love is the basis for living, or at least it should be. (I know I said “self love” and society has chewed up that term and spit it back out again, but bear with me).

So many people think that learning to love yourself is an era or a phase or period of time, it’s an action that has a beginning and an end, when in reality, it’s a mindset, a lifestyle, a foundation piece off which you build the rest of the things

that matter to you. When you love yourself, only then can you go about life genuinely, happily, consensually, confidently, intuitively, and honestly, knowing that at the end of the day, you have everything you need or you at least have the tools to create the opportunities and moments that make life worth living.

Yeah, that’s at least what I tell myself. That’s what I believe. You must love yourself, not to survive but to live.

Okay I’m actually really fucking tired so I’m gonna go to bed now.

Hugs and kisses

2/19/23

A new page. What does that even mean.

When people say they’re going to start a new page, turn a new leaf, the old them doesn’t die and get reborn like a phoenix from the ashes. A “fresh start” is really just a series of phasing out things that were with things that will be. It’s slow, it’s intentional, it’s calculated, and it’s gradual. It’s not instantaneous. Which is why it’s hard to see the change when it’s happening.

I like to think that soon I’ll be able to look back and see the change.

SELF-CARE A.K.A. FIGHT ING INSTANT DOPAMINE A.K.A. TR ICKING MY MIND OU T O F FIGHT OR FL IGHT MODE

-bake something

-change up appearance (cut hair, paint nails, full body shave, experiment with makeup)

-give someone something (especially something homemade)

-read

-take a hot bath

-work out

-water plants

-change up your space (rearrange furniture, chan ge up decor, switch up products)

-declutter

-spa day

Am I a Man Or Am I a Muppet

by Rachel Dunn

Karim Mitri

INTRODUCTION

Why is it that humans cannot grasp the concept of God? One explanation is that humans do not possess the mental and intellectual capacity to contain such a grandiose concept and so, acknowledge God’s existence on Faith rather than fact. In other words, there is only so much we can know and that does not even begin to cover the immensity of the “God” concept. This is the position adopted by skeptical theism (McBrayer). The skeptical theist would concede that God’s knowledge unimaginably surpasses one’s own and so, understanding God becomes an epistemological impossibility. However, a second, and far more interesting notion that perhaps the reason we cannot grasp the concept of God is that there is nothing to grasp, that behind this façade of Godliness lies precisely nothing and our inability to accept this concept creates the illusion of a hidden truth, a truth that ultimately does not exist.

Dr. Faustus is an interpretation of the ancient Faust legend written by English playwright Christopher Marlowe and performed during the Renaissance period until the present day. The protagonist is Dr. Faustus, a prominent polymath and larger than life genius who becomes chronically bored with the world and knowledge to the point that he sells his soul to the devil in exchange for magical powers and hopefully, a more exciting life. This act was done in order for Faustus to overcome the boredom that comes with Earthly knowledge and start asking and getting Divine answers for some of life’s deepest questions. However, his quest takes a turn towards the absurd as he gets into juvenile shenanigans with historical figures such as the Pope, Helen of Troy, and many others who shift the focus of the play such that, as O’Brien claims, “attains a comical absurdity rather than an independent glory” (7). The absurdity is then followed by a tragic downfall as Faustus slowly crumbles into regret and misery. So, this paper highlights how Faustus’s act of selling his soul to the devil is not enough to unravel the God concept and this seems to demonstrate that perhaps there is no secret to begin with, acknowledging an incompleteness to the concept of God.

FAUSTUS’S FALL BEGINS

In the prologue, the story of Faustus is compared to the Icarus myth, foreshadowing his inevitable demise: “swollen with cunning, of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And, melting, heavens conspired his overthrow” (Marlowe 3). Daedalus, Icarus’s father, exclaims to Icarus: “take the course I show you!” (Ovid 387) and as Icarus failed to follow these instructions, he perished as his waxen wings melted for flying too close to the sun. Icarus did not take the course Daedalus showed him; similarly, Faustus did not take the course his Christian Father showed him which resulted in that same perish. But, why were there wings? To offer Icarus a deep yearning for the heavens: “When the boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher” (Ovid 388); why were they waxen? To make sure he never succeeds in fulfilling that goal such that the heavens always remain a riddle either through failure or death. The tragedy of Dr. Faustus resonates profoundly with this image: either Faustus would remain in utter failure, eaten up by chronic boredom, or driven to his inevitable demise in death and regret. Why was it architected in such a way that victory is rendered utterly impossible? Why were the wings waxen if they were wings, meant to make you fly? Why was there a yearning for eternity installed in a being cursed by very near death? “Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man. Couldst thou make men to live eternally, Or being dead, raise them to life again?” (Marlowe 5). What do the heavens hold that is so unreachable? What is God that one fails to experience Him? O’Brien argues that “in Faustus’s aspiration to godhood, Faustus seeks ‘that to which he would have come had he stood too fast, and he destroys himself by his impatience” (2). Through this point of view, it seems that the reason behind Faustus’s failure of accessing God lies in his vices notwithstanding his uncontrollable haste. Therefore, according to O’Brien, had Faustus acted differently, virtuously, he would not have failed on his quest: “It is only through fidelity to this union that man can achieve the Divinity which he is created to enjoy” (8). Indeed, this is precisely what Christ admits: Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” (John 11:40). But, save for a few paranormal incidents, no one really encounters God and the Christian justification is the contrapositive paraphrase of (John 11:40): If you don’t see God, then you haven’t believed. But, what Faustus seems to wonder and what Lucifer has wondered shortly before and long after his exile from Heaven is, what if there is nothing behind the irremovable cloak of godliness but empty anticipation? What if this constitutional loop hole of the causality of faith and encountering God is but a clever ruse? Why predicate God’s encounter on faith and insist on the human’s inability to reach it?

In grandiose skepticism, Faustus doubts the power of God: “Ay, we must die an everlasting death. What doctrine call you this? … What will be, shall be. Divinity adieu!” (Marlowe 6, emphasis added). Humans “die an everlasting death” and do not pass “from death to life” (John 5:24) as God seems to promise His Christian believers. Therefore, his doubts concerning a world-transcending afterlife drive him to gain answers in life. Just like Icarus recognizes the weakness of his waxen wings against the heavens where the sun resides and still chooses to fly towards it, Faustus recognizes the weakness of his humanity against the God concept and still chooses to pursue this task. Sachs posits that Faustus’s despair is what has driven him to sell his soul to the devil. What is this despair? It is characterized by Faustus’s hopelessness to satisfy his deepest Divine yearnings for God and an answer. Later on, Faustus expresses his appreciation for Divinity, in which he specialized and to which he dedicated his life up to the point of chronic despair that participated in his demolition: “Philosophy is odious and obscure; Both law and physic are for petty wits; Divinity is basest of the three, Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile” (Marlowe 8). Faustus seems to have contradictory views over Divinity; “it is the basest of the three,” or in other words, it overcomes law, physics, and philosophy in fundamentality and importance, but at the same time is “unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile.” Evidently, it could be that the difficulty which the study of Divinity leads to this contemptibility, but for a scholar like Faustus, a Doctor in divinity “so much he profits in divinity, / The fruitful plot of scholarism graced, / That shortly he was graced with doctor’s name,” (Marlowe 3), whose knowledge reached unprecedented heights, “Excelling all, whose sweet delight disputes / In th’ heavenly matters of theology” (Marlowe 3). Sachs attempts to answer that same question too: “But what makes Faustus reject Divinity? Is it also simply because Divinity is insufficient to the spirit’s immortal longings? Is it because it fails to answer the essential question? Not at all” (634). Therefore, there must be something that turned this historical success into misery. What is Divinity but the search for a meaning to the systematic nature of the world, to the universe and its Creator? Žižek argues that one truly unravels the secret of Divinity when one paradoxically realizes that “there is no mystical Secret that we are approaching, no Grail to be uncovered, just dry bureaucratic haggling – which, of course, makes the whole procedure all the more uncanny and enigmatic” (On Belief 110111). This remark of Žižek is originally a comment on Kafka’s parable of the door of the law as part of the chapter “In The Cathedral” in The Trial. The priest tells it to Josef K. on the concept of “being deceived” (Kafka 153). It is about a man who wants to gain entry into the door of the law but who is denied entry by the doorkeeper saying that he cannot grant him entry

just yet. The man grows old and weary and after countless tries of entering the door of the law and failing, the parable ends in classic Kafkaesque fashion:

“‘Everyone seeks the Law,’ the man says, ‘so how is it that in all these years no one apart from me has asked to be let in?’ The doorkeeper realizes that the man is nearing his end, and so, in order to be audible to his fading hearing, he bellows at him, ‘No one else could be granted entry here, because this entrance was intended for you alone. I shall now go and shut it.’ (Kafka 155)

The argument runs in parallel for both Dr. Faustus and the parable of the door of the law. The man has one purpose, get into the door of the law. And Faustus has one main purpose, experience God through Divinity. Faustus studied Divinity just as the man was “studying the gatekeeper” (Kafka 154). But what both the man and Faustus realize is that the only truth about the proverbial doors of Divinity and the Law, as Derrida writes, “keeps itself without keeping itself, kept by a door-keeper who keeps nothing, the door remaining open and open onto nothing” (as cited in Agamben 172). The biggest of revelations is that there is no revelation and that the coin for which one has been looking throughout one’s life has been in one’s pocket all along.

Faustus considers the choice between the Good and Bad Angels. He asks one valuable question in the entire almost absurd soliloquy: “Shall I make spirits … resolve me of all ambiguities?” (Faustus 7). What Faustus truly wants, amongst other trivial earthly matters, is to resolve the ambiguities, the most important of which is the God concept riddling him, driving him to sell his soul to the devil. However, whilst this is wished in one almost afterthought when compared to the assertive statements of “I’ll have them fly to India for gold” (Marlowe 7) along with twelve equally absurd wishes that solve none of his deepest true ambiguities as the demonstrates. Why is it that most of the emphasis is on earthly matters? Why is it that one preoccupies oneself with the futile on one’s quest towards the deepest secrets of the universe? Did Faustus know from the start that he shall unravel nothing? Or even worse, did he know that there was nothing to be even unraveled? Then, why did he sell his soul to the devil? Žižek quotes theologian G.K. Chesterton’s commentary on “The Book of Job” in words that echo profoundly with Faustus’s choice of selling his soul to the devil: “But what is the purpose of God? Is it worth the sacrifice even of our miserable humanity? Of course it is easy enough to wipe out our own paltry wills for the sake of a will that is grander and kinder. But is it grander and kinder?” (Chesterton as cited in “Ibi Rhodus, Ibi Saltus!” 18). This is precisely the question Faustus seems to ask

himself; his skepticism is justified, for a doctrine such as Christianity seems to offer empty promises (John 11:40) that allow one to stray away from “the righteous path.” Faustus is faced with the reality that through his faith, he can encounter God, but is also faced with another, more important, reality that this faith is almost impossible to gain in life, and encountering God is but a distant fiction. So, Chesterton argues that “the refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man” (as cited in “Ibi Rhodus, Ibi Saltus!” 19).

While in conversation with Mephostophilis shortly before selling his soul, Faustus ponders that exact decision: “Stay Mephostophilis, and tell me, / What good will my soul do thy lord?” and Mephostophilis answers with the Latin proverb: “Solamen miseris, socios habuisse doloris” (Marlowe 19) which translates to “It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery” (Marlowe 86). The reason behind this misery helps uncloak an unfortunate reality. Faustus, like Lucifer before him, wanted to experience God, to truly know God as something other than an ungraspable inconsistency, as transcending ambiguity, and both failed. Therefore, the reason for their despair begins when they believe in the utter futility of their grandiose task. Sachs also offers a comparison between Faustus and the Devil: “The prototype of Faustian despair is of course the Devil himself: Dante saw him flapping black wings in the last circle of his hell … vainly attempting to escape from his murky empire” (628). Kafka’s man from the country faces the same ordeal as he “spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper” (Kafka 154), just to realize that he shall die without having accomplished that task; it is interesting to note that the doorkeeper does warn him: “I am only accepting this so you will not think there is something you have omitted to do” (Kafka 154). Interestingly, as Sachs argues, Faustus’s choice and betraying God was not urged by “intellectual doubt”: “Even when Faustus betrays atheistic thoughts these are not at all due to intellectual doubt as we would understand the term today, but essentially to his insane fear and to his personal despair” (632). Sachs helps bring this idea of religious despair to life as demonstrating how it is the worst of all sins quoting from Burton Anatomy of Melancholy:

thou [who are in despair] are worse than Judas himself, or they that crucified Christ: for they did offend out of ignorance, but thou hast thought in thine heart there is no God. Thou hast given thy soul to the Devil, as Witches and Conjurers do, explicitly and implicitly, by compact, band, and obligation (a desperate, a fearful case) to satisfy thy lust. (as cited in Sachs 633).

In St. Luke’s passion, Christ on the cross looks up and utters, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). And the fact that Faustus and his likes “thought in thine heart there is no God” makes their sin of religious despair unforgivable. However, as demonstrated in the second section below, was not Christ in that same position as he felt abandoned by God? And Christ who has recognized and lived this religious despair is not only redeemed and but the redeemer. Is not this the biggest example of a double standard between the human and the Divine?

There is a carefully constructed, inherently erroneous hope that Faustus and the man from the country have been fed in order to make their journey seem meaningful because the meaningless would be too much to bear. Žižek explains it as such: “‘God’ is thus ultimately the name for the purely negative gesture of the meaningless sacrifice, of giving up what matters most to us” (On Belief 150). To meaninglessly give up what matters most to us is what Kafka’s man from the country and Marlowe’s Faustus have experienced. Therefore, going back to Mephostophilis’s proverb, what the wretched truly need is the comfort that there are other wretched people who have gone through the same absurd ironic Kafkan trial. O’Brien offers a counterpoint: “The union of a man with God effected through Christ’s Redemption and accepted through the vows of Baptism have been traditionally expressed as a marriage between man and God. By his agreement with the devil, Faustus has divorced himself from God” (8). Of what is this union constituted? Does one see God? Or does one constantly lie to oneself in a hopeless attempt at simulating a pseudoencounter with God during one’s life? This is what unsatisfied a smart theologian like Faustus and what drove him to sell his soul to the devil. In other words, Faustus must have attempted “the union of man with God” at various instances of his long, toilsome life of chronic dissatisfaction and when it inevitably failed, as demonstrated above, he was tempted to try the other side.

This “union of man with God” seems to be an unsolvable riddle. Through Hegel, Žižek attempts to rationalize this seemingly impossible question; he argues that there is a “traumatic experience” about the enigma of God because “the enigma of God is also the enigma for God Himself – our failure to comprehend God is what Hegel called a ‘reflexive determination’ of the divine self-limitation” (On Belief 133). Žižek explains this idea more profoundly by using Hegel’s story of the Sphinx; Hegel wonders why it is so inexplicably difficult for humans today to understand how the Ancient Egyptians built their civilizations as the riddles keep adding up, causing the human mind to almost explode. However, Hegel comes up with a clever albeit controversial solution that echoes the above-mentioned conception of God: “The enigmas of the Ancient Egyptians were enigmas for the Egyptians themselves” (Hegel as cited in On Belief 145). Hegel explains it as such: “In this sense we regard the Egyptian works of art as containing riddles, the right solution of which is in part unattained not only by us, but generally by those who posed these riddles to themselves” (as cited in “Ibis Rhodus, Ibis Saltus!” 18). Why are the solution the sphinx figured out so effective? As they are faced with the riddle of the origin of their own art, they shade this ambiguity by adding an external cloak of ambiguity and make it an ambiguity for everyone else too. The catch is that everyone now thinks that they must have the answer (it is their art after all!) and that the general should remain in constant search of the answer they supposedly have. That is how God seems to work. That is why Christian faith not only highlights Faustus and Mephostophilis’s inability to access God, but God’s inability to access Himself, completing the move from “the enigma OF God” to “the enigma IN God Himself” (On Belief 145).

Faustus’s skepticism as regards Mephostophilis true skill persists as he says to himself: “These slender questions Wagner can decide! / Hath Mephostophilis no greater skill?” (Marlowe 26). Despite this, Faustus decides to give his now-servant the benefit of the doubt and

tries once more: “Now tell me who made the world?” (Marlowe 26) in a vain attempt to salvage the dying purpose of his deal. Following this request, “MEPHOSTOPHILIS: I will not. / FAUSTUS: Sweet Mephostophilis, tell me. / MEPHOSTOPHILIS: Move me not Faustus. / FAUSTUS: Villain, have not I bound thee to tell me anything?” (Marlowe 27). This encounter is what breaks Faustus’s heart, and symbolizes his true death, as that of the man in Kafka’s “Before the Law,” a death you only feel following the sight of an unbreakable wall or when you realize that there is no wall, and yet you must break it, which brings you to a paralytic position of utter helplessness.

FAUSTUS’S FALL ENDS

Throughout Act V of Dr. Faustus, Faustus regrets his actions but it was too late for him to repent: “2 SCHOLAR: Yet Faustus, look up to heaven, and remember God’s mercy is infinite FAUSTUS: But Faustus’ offence can ne’er be pardoned. The serpent that tempted Eve may be saved, but not Faustus” (Marlowe 74). What happens here can be viewed as Faustus, the proverbial sinner, who regrets his actions and feels undeserving, incapable of salvation yet demanding it. Alternatively, it presents the Faustus who has understood the riddle of God, or rather its impossibility, and that this riddle is also in God Himself as mentioned above (On Belief 145), an incomplete God which is what causes his relentless misery. “Hell, ah hell, for ever! Sweet friends, what shall become of Faustus, being in hell for ever?” (Marlowe 74). O’Brien argues that “the hope that the play offers is its reassertion that no man is a god of himself, that God is the Christ’s of Faustus’s outcry” (2). However, it is because God has equated Himself with manhood that the riddle seems to become unsolvable. In Faustus’s pursuit of becoming “a god of himself,” he fails because he is pursuing what he has already accomplished but therefore, failed. What has he accomplished? A union with God, through Christ. This occurs by virtue of Christ becoming human and henceforth abandoned by God as demonstrated below. Therefore, Faustus accomplishes a union with God, Christ, who has been abandoned by God. How does that make sense? That is why Faustus’s struggle is not resolved because this “union with God” seems to inevitably spiral into contradiction.

In his last words before his death, Faustus screams, “My God, my God! Look not so fierce on me!” echoing the words of the abandoned Christ on the cross: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:46). The abandoned Faustus succumbs to the same fate as the

abandoned Christ. Žižek argues that in that instance, when Christ is abandoned, his “appearance itself effectively stands for God’s death: in it, it becomes clear that God is NOTHING BUT excess of man, the ‘too much’ of life which cannot be contained in any life-form” (On Belief 132). And what else is this “too much of life” and “excess of man” but Faustus himself? What if the task of searching for God has been accomplished before its start? This renders the act of searching futile but most importantly, impossible! How can you search for what you have already found? How can you open an already open door? Thus, in grandiose contradiction, Žižek echoes Faustus’s last moments, when he feels the furthest from God: “When I, a human being, experience myself as cut off from God, at that very moment of the utmost abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myself in the position of the abandoned Christ” (On Belief 146). What Faustus does not know is that when he longed for Christ’s blood to save him, Christ longed for his Father. Žižek explains that this reality “signals God’s fundamental imperfection. And it is only within this horizon that the properly Christian Love can emerge, a Love beyond Mercy. Love is always love for the Other insofar as he is lacking – we love the Other BECAUSE of his limitation, helplessness, ordinariness even” (146-147). Christ did not save Faustus, nor did the Father save Christ, but does that mean there was no love? On the contrary, this is precisely how the love must be exemplified.

This essay studies the incompleteness of God in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus by applying the theories developed by Slavoj Žižek alongside Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law.” The main takeaway from this paper must be to urge ourselves to reconsider that when believers strive towards recognizing and reuniting with God to think long and hard about whether this encounter is possible at all. In life, it is almost impossible because it is guaranteed after death? But is it really? What if behind the thin wall of promises lies an endless abyss of emptiness? What if God, like the sphinx, is shading His own incredulity?

WORKS CITED

Agamben, Giorgio, and Daniel Heller-Roazen. “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin.” Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Fernando, Ajith, J. I. Packer, and Wayne Grudem, eds. ESV Global Study Bible: English Standard Version. Crossway, 2012.

Kafka, Franz. “In The Cathedral.” The Trial. Translated by Mike Mitchell. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Marlowe, Christopher. Dr. Faustus. York, York Classics, 1988.

McBrayer, Justin P. “Skeptical theism.” Philosophy Compass 5.7 (2010): 611-623.

O’Brien, Margaret Ann. “Christian Belief in Doctor Faustus.” ELH 37.1 (1970): 1-11.

Sachs, Arieh. “The Religious Despair of Doctor Faustus.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 63.4 (1964): 625-647.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Father, Why Did You Forsake Me?” On Belief. Oxfordshire, Routledge, 2001.

___. “Ibi Rhodus, Ibi Saltus!” Problemi International (No. 2/2018): 5.

PENCILS ARE DYING

by Caleb Delos-Santos

When I was a writing-student-baby schooling in elementary, pencils gleamed and paper-streamed freely.

Sure, I was a kid, and every able adult feeds children with lead sticks gleefully.

But still, pencils then sort of meant something. They carried esteem and possibility, especially for a tiny notebook-writing delinquent like me.

Now, touch phones and keyboard screens equal literacy, popularity, and eye-worthy identity, leaving pencils to crust, crack, snap, age, fade, and bleed.

Sure, you see pencils occasionally. But now, they read, academic dependency or pretentiously edgy, not destiny, not dreams, not a working-baby-author fighting for something worth writing.

Pencils are dying.

Society does not support a pencil’s streaming or an author’s screaming or any bodies aching for writing, poetry, or anything with artistic beauty.

Pencils are dying.

Art is breaking. Dreams are fading. We are aging. And, naturally, I am worried.

Shamrock

by Ava Albelo

Shake

staring in the bathroom mirror

TW: mentions of suicide

i brush my teeth shirtless now. when i can’t sleep and i think the world is too busy to watch me i take my shirt off and sleep without it. my mom would call it sexual, my father would be disgusted, and i wake up before anyone else to return the shirt onto my body. my estrogen and antidepressants are working backwards

because my breasts are bigger, but i am lonelier. i look more feminine, but i feel more masculine. and every so often, my mother calls me to ask if i am thinking of killing myself again. we don’t mention my ever-regressing hair: how i arrive every month with a new inch off or how i’m still shopping in the men’s section and i used to hide it, but now she helps pick and she doesn’t mention it. she finds a baggy sweater and calls me her favorite girl in the entire world. and i comb my hair shirtless.

by Sarah Kirsch

Femmeissance by Cristina Rodriguez

INTERSECTIONS & INTERCOURSE

How Sex Education Narratives Impact your Perspective

As we grow up, we’re exposed to a variety of narratives and ideas that influence our experiences with sex and sexuality. At Sex Out Loud, UW-Madison’s peer-to-peer sexual resource, we aim to support every individual on campus with sexual health education, safer sex supplies, and connections to accurate and helpful resources.We were thrilled to collaborate with the MJLC — we wanted to see what revelations we could come upon when combining our missions.

To do this, SOL and MJLC hosted “Intersections and Intercourse: How Sex Education Narratives Impact Your Perspective.” At the event, we reviewed some of the influences we may have encountered growing up: everything from fanfiction to that classic American Girl puberty book. We were working to answer the question: “how did our perception come to be?” We then looked at modern influences, like scenes from “Normal People” or popular smut books. By comparing current and past influencers and media, we were able to gain a better understanding of how our perception interacts with media and of how the world around us can impact our experiences.

Dear Reader,

Sex Out Loud’s mission is to “promote healthy sexuality through sex-positive education and activism.” Our mission is informed by the knowledge that each individual's sexuality is uniquely shaped by all facets of identity and experience. We often say at the beginning of a program or event, “there are around 40,000 different students on campus, which means there are around 40,000 different sexualities.” Acknowledging this is so important to our organization because we want to meet everyone right where they are at.

Comprehensive sex education that fits our specific needs is important to us because it gives us more autonomy over our body, empowers us in our day-to-day life, and allows us to bring pleasure into our lives.

Knowledge of our anatomy allows us to become better advocates for ourselves, in and out of the bedroom. What hurts? What feels good?

Understanding barrier methods and STIs allows us to have safer sex (which can also make pleasure more likely). Simply talking more about sex empowers us to talk about sex in other places: with our friends, our therapists, and our partners.Regardless of what we learned growing up, everyone has the right to have safe and pleasurable sex. And it’s never too late to learn more.

At Sex Out Loud, we look at the theme “Renaissance” as an opportunity to encourage our peers and community members to take the time to have their own “sexual renaissance” and learn more about themselves and their bodies. Welcome pleasure into your life because you deserve it. And, if anyone needs support along the way, we are here.

Love, Sex Out Loud

Jane Houseal (SOL Marketing and Outreach Coordinator)

I have always been passionate about sexual health and education. Despite my interest in learning more about sex, I still struggled to feel comfortable exploring my own sexuality in a healthy way. In high school, I experienced a lot of slut-shaming that I responded to by owning my “slut” label and pretending I felt empowered by the experience. The reality was I didn’t. I was trying to emulate the narrative I had seen so many times before of a young girl who was okay being mistreated because she was sex positive, confident and empowered. By the time I got to college, I had already started to rework that narrative and feel truly empowered in my sexuality. For me, empowerment was learning how my body worked, learning that I had a right to pleasure, and extracting shame from sex all together. The more I learn, the more confident I feel in myself and my ability to relish in my sexuality.

Mia Warren (Sex Out Loud Chair InTraining)

Before joining Sex Out Loud, I was heavily uninformed about sex and sexual health due to the lack of sex-education I had. I was inspired when a group of Program Facilitators from SOL came into my POSSE seminar during my freshman year and facilitated a “Safer Sex” program, and I immediately learned so much from this and felt like I was part of a truly inclusive space in such a short amount of time. I felt like all the embarrassing questions and misconceptions I held were valid and safe for me to express. Now working at Sex Out Loud has offered me such a unique perspective on the importance of Sexual Health knowledge & accessibility, and I simply fell in love with the work we were doing! I changed my major and entire career path after these experiences informed my journey to finding my passion within the Sexual Health field and I am now on track to becoming a Sex Therapist.

Maddy Hu (Sex Out Loud Event Coordinator)

I don’t think I knew what sex really was until high school. I probably had some conception of it before then, but it only existed in my head and in my knobby-kneed girl body. Even at a young age, I knew it was something that you weren’t supposed to talk about. It was silence, shame, this thing on your back that you pretend not to see and don’t notice it’s ripping out your hair.

High school was no better. It was pictures of infections, boils, and rashes at 9am. It was pregnant teenage moms and their horrible life after a devastating mistake. It was gross, it was slut, it was this bright red stain on your shirt that you couldn’t get out.

I decided to go out of state for college, wanting a fresh start. There, I found Sex Out Loud, where sex was exclaimed, shouted from the rooftops, celebrated. Everyone was so open about this thing I thought you kept inside. I finally let it escape. I uttered the word, I made a fuss. Sex is exploration, sex is intimacy, sex is pleasure.

DANTE’S DEAL

by Stella D’Acquisto

My uncle had all kinds of strange stories to tell me when I was a kid. Usually they were obviously made up, folkloric tales of magic and wizards and bandits meant to send a thrill down the kids’ spines and creep us out as we lay in our beds that night. But sometimes, when he sat far back in his chair and lit up a cigar, the stories my uncle told were just weird enough that I almost believed they were true.

My uncle came up in the punk scene of the eighties, where everybody was in a band — at least one — and everybody was determined not to become famous, even if they secretly longed for it. Just about everybody he hung around with was young and wild, but there were a few older rockers who held the community together, even if they were sometimes kinda weird.

One night, my uncle sat at a bar with one of his friends after she finished up a show, and as she nursed a beer, he asked her where she got the guitar she’d played that night. It was a sixties Gibson SG, a glossy red electric guitar with curling red tips like devil horns.

“Got it from Dante’s place,” she said. “He’s the only guy who’d have this kind of thing. It was only about five hundred bucks, too.”

“Five hundred bucks for that?” my uncle echoed. “Who the hell is that guy?”

“You’re telling me you’ve never heard of Dante?” She sounded shocked, but then she grinned, excited to be able to reveal this secret to him. “Man, you’re missing out. He’s got everything. The craziest, freshest shit nobody else knows about.”

She went on to say that Dante was a middle aged man who owned this mysterious hole in the wall, and the

only downside of going to his shop is that you usually had to sit through a weird little story before he’d let you buy anything. He had been pretty influential in the music world back in the day; he used to run a pirate radio station out of his store in the sixties and seventies, and when a band got on his station, you knew they were legit. He would buy instruments from who knows where — probably some off the black market — but you didn’t ask questions since the prices were so good.

“Everybody wants to get into his basement,” she continued. “That’s where all the good stuff is supposed to be, but nobody I know has ever been down there. I’ve only heard stories.” That very moment, my uncle decided it was his mission to get down into Dante’s basement.

Dante’s shop was so out of the way that at first it looked like part of the optometrist’s building next door. It was only after my uncle walked down the rest of the block that he realized what he thought was the optometrist’s side door was actually the door to Dante’s. There was no sign at all, and only one window that was too dusty to see through. My uncle thought to himself that it was remarkable the man was still in business, but that was before he saw his goods and realized why the place was better off without advertisement.

The main room of the shop was barely cleaner than the outside, and when my uncle went in, he immediately started coughing. The whole place smelled like weed and mold, and the floor was covered in sticky squares of red and black linoleum tile. It seemed like there were no lamps in the whole place, so when the door swung closed with a thump, all the remaining light came through the grime-coated windows on the

narrow storefront.

As my uncle walked further inside, the wall of guitars to his right caught his eye. He reached out to touch a classic telecaster, brushing off the dust to reveal a powder blue body underneath.

Slow, uneven footsteps on creaky stairs announced Dante’s approach. The slight sixty-something man appeared from a door in the back of the shop, his curly salt-and-pepper hair flying out from his head at an odd angle. He walked with a slight limp, leaning on a cane with one arm, and to say his clothes were rumpled would have been a generous description. Still, he had an air of authority as he strode across the shop toward my uncle: like this was his domain, and my uncle was simply a guest.

“You like that one, huh?” he grunted with the voice of a lifelong smoker. “It’s a 1972 tele custom. Wide range humbucker in the neck. Rare color, too.”

“How much you selling it for?” my uncle asked.

“For a new customer?” Dante lifted a shoulder. “I’ll do you two hundred. Once I get to know you, we can talk discounts.”

My uncle blinked. “Two hundred bucks for this?”

He looked at him blankly. “You want it, or what?”

My uncle ran through his bank account in his head, then sat down and plugged the guitar into an amp to give it a test drive, but he already knew he was going to say yes. As he brought the guitar up to the table in the back that served as a checkout, Dante went around a corner into a small pantry space full of boxes to look for a guitar case.

“You believe in the devil?” Dante said suddenly, still hidden in the back room.

“Um… maybe.”

“What about selling your soul?” said Dante. “You believe in that?”

“I dunno. Maybe like in the metaphorical sense. I mean, you can sell out. You can sell your morals.”

Dante returned with a black guitar case. “I don’t mean selling out. I mean selling your life in the next world to get something in this one.” He placed the telecaster into the case. “I tried to sell my soul to the devil once. Didn’t work out.” With that, Dante finished ringing my uncle up and passed him the guitar.

My uncle gaped at him.

“See you next time, kid,” said Dante, wandering back to the door in the corner. My uncle heard his footsteps descend slowly, and it occurred to him then that Dante was going down into his basement. It seemed he had been dismissed.

Some people might have seen such an alarming comment as a reason not to return, but it only poured oil onto my uncle’s burning desire to get into that basement. Somebody who had tried to sell his soul to the devil had to have some rad stuff.

So my uncle kept coming back, even when he didn’t need new instruments or gear. It was like an addiction — every time he left Dante’s shop, he still wanted more. Each visit brought the smallest taste of Dante’s bizarre devil story, and though it brought my uncle no closer to the basement, it just made his curiosity stronger.

See, in the sixties, Dante kinda fell off the deep end. He drove down to the Devil’s Crossroads in Mississippi at the crossing of Highway 61 and Highway 49, where blues legend Robert Johnson was fabled to have sold his soul to the devil.

Untitled Parker Hurkman

“He’s walking down the side of the highway,” Dante told my uncle one time, “and this guy shows up and offers to tune his guitar. Robert says sure, but little does he know he’s letting Satan himself tune his guitar. And after that, he got famous. He became an icon.” According to Dante, Robert Johnson’s guitar playing was known to have an eerie quality, almost as if the devil was playing another guitar along with him.

Dante, then a growing underground success in radio but a failed blues musician, took all his disappointment and longing for stardom and went to follow in Robert Johnson’s footsteps. But it immediately went wrong.

“I crashed my car right by the crossroads,” he said. “Had a little too much beer and smashed into a telephone pole.”

It went on like this, with Dante dropping mere morsels of the tale every time my uncle came in. He kept hanging on, thinking that if he could just get through every single story, Dante would finally let him go into the basement. But every time he asked him, Dante just said, “Maybe next time.”

Slowly but surely, my uncle learned that the devil had appeared in Dante’s dream, and he had told the devil that he wanted to make a deal with him so he could become the greatest blues guitarist who ever lived.

“What did he look like?” my uncle asked.

Dante acknowledged this rare question with an appreciative grunt. “Nothing like all that cartoon shit. He was just… eyes.” He seemed to be looking inward, his mind somewhere else. “Glowing red eyes in fog. And then… a beckoning hand. I told him I wanted to make a deal.”

But the devil rejected him. “He laughed in my face,” Dante said with a scowl. “Told me my soul was too insignificant to trade.”

The obvious answer was that Dante got a little messed up in the car crash and it was just a dream, but Dante was convinced that it all really happened.

“Anyway,” he finished, “then I woke up in the hospital.”

When he finally got to his conclusion, the shop was quiet. The ending felt hollow, unfinished. “So that was it?” my uncle said, the basement momentarily forgotten. “You just woke up from the car crash and nothing ever happened?”

“Yep.” Dante scratched his chin absently. “You wanna buy this pedal, or should I show you the basement?”

“Uh, yeah,” my uncle stammered, surprised to realize he was actually disappointed the story was over. “I wanna see the basement.”

Dante nodded and casually walked over to the door in the corner as if my uncle hadn’t been dying to get down there for months. The door opened to reveal a rickety wooden staircase that barely held both their weight. Dante completely gave up on his cane and instead clung to the splintering handrail as they descended into a darkness lit only by a small, swinging bulb at the top of the stairs. My uncle felt a cold chill down his back and wondered for the first time if he was in actual danger, but he smothered the thought.

The first thing he saw when Dante switched on the tiny lamp in the corner was an enormous, six-foottall oil painting of a man with long, wild black hair and an old-fashioned black suit. He was holding a violin, bow poised to strike the strings as if it was a hammer. The man’s eyes stared right into my uncle’s own with a feral, orange gleam.

“Niccolò Paganini,” Dante said resentfully. “The devil took him.”

“I didn’t know you were into violin,” my uncle remarked.

“If you like violins, you should see the one I got in the back.”

It was only then that my uncle was able to tear his eyes away from the towering painting to look around. The basement was, impossibly, even dirtier than the upstairs room; cobwebs clung to every surface, and my uncle’s shoes sank slightly into a film of dust over the stone floor. It was a cramped

cellar with shelves of instruments in cases and cardboard boxes, and Dante approached a small one all the way at the bottom of a tilting shelf.

He pulled out a surprisingly glossy violin and carried it over to my uncle, who squinted in the dim light to look at it. It was a Stradivarius, one of the most valuable instruments in the world.

Dumbfounded, all my uncle could say was, “How do you just have this, and no one knows? Is it legal? Aren’t there only a few hundred of these things in existence?”

Dante just grinned, his face lit eerily in the dimness of the basement. “The devil gave it to me,” he said with a strange fervor. “Delivered it to my doorstep a decade ago just to taunt me. It was him telling me I could have my deal. I just had to learn to play the violin.”

Before my uncle could ask anything else, the strange glow in Dante’s face vanished. He turned and moved on to another case, this time pulling out a glorious acoustic guitar with pearl inlaid along its rim and in soft shapes up and down its neck.

“Is that a Martin D45?” my uncle breathed.

“Last pre-war Dreadnought ever made,” Dante said with a proud smirk. “Got it off an old guy who had no idea what he had. This one ain’t cheap.”

“That’s an understatement. It’s gotta be worth five hundred grand, at least!”

“More,” Dante said mysteriously, strumming a single chord on the guitar. The harmonics that emanated from its string hit my uncle like a physical sensation. He felt a shiver move through his body to the tips of his fingers. Dante just smiled in the corner of his mouth and placed the guitar back in its musty, cobwebcovered case.

Dante continued through the cellar, showing my uncle more shocking treasures till his jaw felt like it couldn’t drop any lower. Though he didn’t demonstrate many of the instruments himself, Dante offered a few to my uncle, who numbly declined, afraid

to even touch them. Once Dante did stop to slap a few notes out on a 4001 Rickenbacker bass not unlike the one Paul McCartney used to play. My uncle just shook his head in amazement.

But despite the more punk instruments for my uncle to focus on, he couldn’t stop thinking about that Stradivarius and the devil’s offer. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore and asked, “So did you ever learn to play the violin?”

Dante didn’t look up, still playing the bass absently. “Been practicing for years. Violin Concerto No.1 in D, Opus 6. Allegro maestoso.”

“Huh?” My uncle was never all that into classical music.

The thumping of the bass ceased. “Paganini’s masterpiece. I hear when he played it, the shadows peeled away from the walls and danced.”

Another chill passed through my uncle’s body.

“I’ve never played it all together, though,” Dante went on, oblivious to my uncle’s discomfort as he returned the bass to his shelf and pulled out the violin again. “Cause when I do, the devil’s gonna come and take my soul.”

There was a strange twinkle in his eye, and somehow in this dark and musty basement, my uncle started to believe it could all be true.

Dante was holding a bow in his other hand now, and he ran a small cube of rosin over its hair. He lifted the bow, moving it toward the violin in an arc. And then he began to play.

My uncle, a staunch punk guitarist, attested that this was the greatest music he had ever heard. Dante coaxed melodies out of the strings that my uncle didn’t even know existed, and he felt like he was high. He could almost hear the rest of the orchestra playing alongside him, echoing around the narrow subterranean space. He could almost detect the sound of another violin, emanating from somewhere below them. He could almost see the shadows start to move. The concerto went on and on and on, and then finally, the last, ringing note,

drawn out with a shuddering vibrato, completed the piece. There was a long period of silence.

Then Dante’s eyes widened, and he pointed to a space behind my uncle in awe. “Do you see him?” he whispered to my uncle, his face white and ghoulish. “Do you see the light bringer?”

My uncle’s heart dropped. The basement was silent as a tomb. He turned around to see where Dante was pointing, somehow certain that when he turned, he would see the glowing eyes and the hand, beckoning and beckoning.

But there was nothing. There were the cobwebs, and the old cases, and the sharp gaze of Paganini peering lifelessly out from his place on the wall. But he couldn’t see anyone else in the room.

“Do you see Lucifer?” Dante said again, more urgently. It was almost as if he couldn’t trust his own eyes. As if he knew what was real and what wasn’t, but he wanted so desperately to believe.

“Yeah,” my uncle said after a moment. “Yeah, I see him. He’s there.”

Dante said nothing more, looking into the shadows of the basement with rapture still dawning on his face. My uncle waited for a few minutes, looking around the basement. For just a second, he thought about taking that D45 while Dante was distracted, but he left without touching any of it.

Just before he began to climb the stairs, he glanced back at Dante. The man was staring at that priceless violin in his hands, and then, as my uncle watched, he turned the violin around and extended it into midair as if to hand it to someone who was not there.

My uncle climbed the stairs before it happened, but he still heard the smash when he left the shop for the last time. It was the mournful sound of the Stradivarius splintering as Dante tried to hand it to the devil to play. Or maybe it was the price of striking a deal.

Living with Ghosts in W. G. Sebald and Anne Carson

by Grace Dowling

In W. G. Sebald’s novels Austerlitz (2001) and The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Anne Carson’s poem Nox (2010), ghosts are a part of the narrator’s everyday lives. Partial memories produce ghosts, which I define as the palpable, though not graspable, presence of the dead; everything you cannot know about the thing that’s lost. Ghosts can be encountered through traces of the dead, things that lurk unsaid or unacknowledged, that one can nevertheless intuit. How can we talk about the half-ontology of a spectre, make it seem present, when a ghost’s essence lies in the impossibility of completely accounting for it? How can writers and critics interact with ghosts? The closest I’ve come to locating them is by identifying the forms that the resurrection, recovery and redemption of the dead take. These nouns depict how each narrator’s grief is driven by a longing for the past. Firstly, I look at how architecture in Sebald and the scaffolding of Carson’s text create analogous structures of the mind that house and repress memories. The authors then use the shape of a fold to try to uncover truths that the dead took to their graves. Finally, I examine how the writers characterise the archive, (which I define as a space that stores documents from the past), as ghostly, a site where the dead can return. I question whether the authors believe that an archival space offers the possibility to redeem the past by uncovering it.

Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993) made ghosts visible in critical practice. His spectres are imminent and past, invisibly shaping reality. The “revenant” endures constant attempts to eradicate it.1 Similarly,

Avery Gordon (1997) uses the ghost as a metaphor for something that refuses to be eliminated, despite having been historically elided. Sociology leaves behind complexities that cannot be accounted for, and haunting is “a paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted”.2 Ghosts are an ‘absent presence’ that need to be ‘produced’, an itch that needs to be scratched. Supposedly, paying close attention to our ghosts can solve them. Sebald and Carson disagree: we cannot eradicate ghosts. We can limit their haunting by housing them, or by giving them a recognisable shape through which we can interact with them. But some presences insist on being partial. We must recognise ghosts, not in the hope that this will eradicate them, but so that we can interact with the past in all its haunting discomfort.

I struggle with the interpretation of a ghost as a metaphor for memory, as this implies that it is an embodied concept. Ghosts in these texts aren’t physical apparitions, but rather traces of things lost, the feeling of the dead that refuses to dissipate when grieving them. Nevertheless, ghost is the metaphor I work with to give these presences an ontology. I also work in analogies, emulating the texts and acknowledging the literary self-reflexivity of both authors. Carson’s epitaph is a personal translation of Catullus 101, while Sebald’s travelogue-historybiography uses personal experiences to reveal what national histories occlude. But the texts are also deeply inter-personal, and I don’t think that they can be sufficiently

Structures of Memory

Unfolding the Past

Prowling the Archive

Primary Material

Secondary Material

1Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), 12

2Avery Gordon, Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), 7

analysed by feigning critical “distance” when the reason I’m so affected by their ghosts is because of how they speak to spectres I’ve felt.3 Therefore, I imitate the analogous structures of each text by “prowling” (Carson) for my Mum’s buried history. I want to know what happened to her when she was flown into occupied Kuwait and taken hostage during the first Gulf War. Her trauma has anonymously seeped into my life, and is choked by silence on a national and personal level. I get inside the discomfort of using someone else’s pain for a literary project, the vicarious grief that Sebald negotiates by blending his narrator’s subjectivity with Austerlitz, while Carson intertwines her loss with a grieving feminine community, exploring the pain of losing a son, a husband and a brother. I let the uncomfortable analogies, that lodged themselves throughout my research, sit in an essay that analyses thematic continuities across personal and historical traumas. My personal analogy runs through the essay like its own ghost.

STRUCTURES OF MEMORY

“Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards”.

Søren Kierkegaard. 4

Both Nox and Austerlitz rely on physical structures to enable the recovery of memory. In Nox, this is the tomb-like box that encases Carson’s grief, and in Austerlitz, the architecture of Liverpool Street Station, where he arrived in England as a child, having fled Nazi occupation on the Kindertransport. Carson and Sebald therefore create an analogy between architecture and memory. They characterise the act of remembering

as a resurrection that raises something buried from the ground; this disinterring is emulative of drawing forth memories from the recesses of the mind. The authors posit an anamnestic model of memory, suggesting that remembering is a return to something that haunts you. Recovering memories resurrects ghosts.

Resurrection requires digging something up; this upward recovery of the past is mirrored in how Sebald’s architectural structures must be ‘raised’ from the ground to access what is buried. James Cowan suggests that Austerlitz’s “fanatical accumulation of knowledge” of architectural history is a mechanism to repress his past, which I describe as the ghosts that haunt him.5 Therefore, the memories housed and repressed by architectural structures are uncovered when buildings are seemingly dismantled. The physical settings in the novel give us blueprints for how memories are shaped. The “ballast between the tracks, the cracked sleepers” (180-1) at Liverpool Street Station construct a lattice that structures are built-up from, which raise Austerlitz’s memories alongside them. Sebald is concerned with shapes and outlines: the “panes of the tall windows, the wooden kiosks” (181). Rectilinear shapes start to contort in an almost hallucinogenic vision that anticipates the mental breakdown Austerlitz suffers when confronting his past. He describes houses “cobbled together out of beams, clods of clay” (186) from his research on eighteenth-century cities, as linear “beams” morph into earthy clumps that emerge from the ground. The “strata of soil” that the cities have “grown above” (186) suggests the same upheaval of sedimentary layers that mirrors bringing up bodies. It is as though Sebald is playing with the homophones ‘razing’ and ‘raising’, as subterranean layers of the past are destroyed to build new structures. Austerlitz, however, sees a shadow-world in which these traces of the past linger. Memories blend into one another and the present: the first image of the “skeletons” (185) Austerlitz saw at an architectural dig are fleshed out by, and start to resemble

3 Rita Felski, Hooked: art and attachment, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 6

the “muscles and sinews” (186) of engineer plans on the map of eighteenth-century London, while the train-tracks that form the ground of his experience are transposed onto the lines of this street map. The vertiginous, undulating ground analogises the digging into his mind and the violence of recovering buried sufferings.

Then, it is as though dust creates a figure in projection, almost a hologram, of ghostly shapes that emanate from the blueprint. Santner reads dust in Sebald as the “deposits of unredeemed suffering” that materialise as ephemeral matter.6 My interpretation takes this materiality further by envisaging the dust as constructing its own architecture, suggesting that structures are built from traces of the past. The “coke dust and soot, steam, sulphur and diesel oil” that cover the “cast-iron columns” (181) become physical manifestations of the “accumulated” “pain and suffering” (183) that the station has witnessed, but also form a murky, structural replica of the columns. Sebald develops this way of seeing, depicting how the growth of the city is “mingled with the dust and bones of decayed bodies” (186). These dusty projections rise as a ghostly shadow of a resurrected world, thickening the sites of memory with a palpable grime.

The upheaval of memories occurs against the background of a rhythm set by the lapsing waves of passengers throughout the station. The rhythm creates a hallucinogenic harmony where the past blends into the crepuscular train station, lulling Austerlitz and readers into a dream-like reverie. The movement of disembarking passengers is reflected in the rhythmic “ebb[ing] away” of “pain and suffering” (183), that is then replicated in the migration of buried skeletons: “When space becomes too cramped the dead, like the living, move out into less densely populated districts [...] more and more keep coming, a never ending succession of them” (184). The lapsing movement created by repetitive language culminates in visions of the exiled “dead”, whose “slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing” blurs into the Porter’s rhythmic “sweeping” “over and over again” (188) that transfixes Austerlitz right before he re-encounters the Ladies’ Waiting Room. Susan Sontag

4 Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Repetition’, in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. Howard Hong, Edna Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 102-3

5 James Cowan, ‘Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part II’, Monatshefte, 102, no. 2 (2010), 195

6 Eric Santner, On creaturely life, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 114

acknowledges a “musical structure” in Sebald’s work,7 and Massimo Leone studies the “hypnotic rhythm of walking” in The Rings of Saturn, 8 but a tempo structures the microlevel of this memory-sequence. We enter Austerlitz’s sleepwalk with him as Sebald emphasises the supra-bodily experience Austerlitz has as he returns to the site of a traumatic memory.

The rhythm simulates a peace that contrasts Austerlitz’s distressing psychological collapse, which is depicted by the architecture that dissolves before him in visions. The once clear corridors of the station become an “ever-changing maze of walls” (183). It is as though the right memory has locked into place when he encounters the Ladies Waiting Room, and this alignment causes his mind to unravel. Sebald uses present participles to distort the station into a psychedelic vision, as he sees dust “departing from the rectilinear and twisting in spirals”, creating “wavering shadows” against the background of visions where “huge halls open up” (190). Instead of reading architecture as an “anchor” against “otherworldliness” in Sebald,9 I interpret it as the site where the dead (spectral) and living (material) meet and collapse, allowing the involuntary memory. There’s a longing and fumbling to the recovery of memory in Austerlitz that speaks to the grief that Carson entombs. Unlike Austerlitz, hers is a grief with lid, a structure that prohibits ghosts from emanating. The box is an infantile time-capsule, a headstone, a coffin. Enclosed, Michael can only haunt when the tomb is opened. Like visiting a grave, memory is confined to a site. Therefore, the physical structure of the poem performs a compartmentalising alike to what Gordon calls “routine amnesia, that state of temporary memory loss that feels permanent and that we all need in order to get through the days [which] is bound to develop a sophisticated consciousness of ghostly haunts”10. In an interview with Robert Currie, the designer of the poem, Carson explains that she is trying to make “something that I can put down” rather than a “history” for the poem to “carry on”. Currie adds: “It’s to get rid

of it”.11 Nox is a purgation and expulsion of memory, as though materialising it can stop it from haunting. While the box allows the fantasy of resurrection, by opening the form of the tomb and excavating the pages, Carson’s desire for resurrection is inhibited by the absence of things to resurrect. Resurrection is one of grief’s fantasies of survivable death: it is a desire to experience mourning and the mourned for simultaneously. The resurrected are acknowledged as dead but their presence is simulated. This simulation is what creates wandering spectres, or for Derrida, “the thing itself and its simulacrum”.12 Derrida’s emphasis on similitude characterises the spectre as a departure from an original. Bringing something back to life distorts it; the dead thing is mis-translated into its double. Carson explicitly refers to resurrection when mentioning Lazarus, which follows a childlike painting of two orange hands that depict a cartooned, clichéd scene of horror, where the buried claw themselves out of the ground; or out of hellfire, as the orange paint suggests. Lazarus’s “resurrection” means that he had to “die twice”. Michael’s disappearance and re-emergence somewhere unknown under a new name was his first death. His actual death entombs the nomadic ghost he existed as for Carson and her mother since his disappearance. Like Michael, Lazarus is “mute” after his resurrection. Two folds over, Carson writes: “There is no possibility I can think my way into this muteness”. Whereas Austerlitz’s memories spill beyond his control, Carson’s are contained by her box, in which the slate-cold certainty of death encloses ghosts and tries to silence them. Resurrection is not the memory that, by chance, uncovers itself, but a ritualised indulgence in and exploration of grief.

I sometimes feel the need to search for bits of my mum, as if I can make sense of her. She buried lots after returning from Iraq in 1990 (part of a self-preserving amnesia). But there’s something harrowing about trying to resurrect her

7 Susan Sontag, ‘On W. G. Sebald’ (2000). http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-sebald.html

past, however necessary it feels. I want to solve her ghost’s muteness, the fact that so little of the truth exists outside of her. I want to find it, this not-quite buried past that haunts her, that I can feel. Burying is not enough; her cries slip out of the box, crawl up from the recesses of her mind. A grief with a lid is a fantasy.

UNFOLDING THE PAST

“[T]here are rhythms of folds and unfolds that traverse the living being. That is what creates the flesh, the flesh that’s irreducible to infinity”, Gilles Deleuze. 13

Sebald and Carson use the physical motion of unfolding to analogise accessing hidden memories. Folds are a cognitive and (meta) physical model of revealing: unfolding what is wrapped-up in the mind, or revealing sections of time that are skippedover. However, there’s a tension between the possibility of creating meaning by rearranging or uncovering something folded over, and the fact that folded things always have a final, expended shape. Carson creates a fundamental homology between the poem and her brother: it is all she knows and has of him. The concertinaed pages entertain the possibility of concertinaed time, as if one could rearrange it and forge meaning against the finality of death. I distinguish homology from analogy because of the materiality of the poem: textures of paper are simulated by a photocopier, and require a tenderness to caress its pages, imitating the humaneness of encountering someone’s remains. The homology also investigates the effect of reducing someone to words and paper. Carson confronts the difficulty of writing her memory of Michael into existence because this reproduces him finitely, but she remains painfully aware of the infinitude of

8 Massimo Leone. ‘Textual wanderings: a vertiginous reading of W. G. Sebald’, in W. G. Sebald- A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long, Anne Whitehead (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 100

9 Naomi Stead, ‘Architecture and memory in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, Architectural Research Quarterly 19, no.1 (2015), 41, 46

10 Gordon, Ghostly matters, 151

11 Anne Carson, Robert Currie, ‘An interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie’, interviewed by Megan

12 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 10

13 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Lecture 1’, Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Charles Stivale, Seminar Transcript, 9 https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/seminars/leibniz-and-baroque/lecture-01

a life and how lacunal her knowledge of Michael is. If the folds are a homology for her brother, Carson analogises writing as a form of longing: faced with absence, literature becomes the supraanalogy that tries to reconstruct the un-reconstruct-able. By supra-analogy, I interpret writing as a reparative act that tries to account for grief by bringing an emotion into material existence. Maurice Blanchot’s enigmatic attempt to get at the nothingness of writing reflects upon the futility that Carson edges close to acknowledging: “one can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing. In order to write one must already be writing”.14 Writing to or about the dead acknowledges a disjunction in time that is impossible to resolve.

The folds of Nox make the compulsive return to death into something tender as well as haunting. Searching through them is a longing to reshape Michael’s life by painfully excavating his remains, hoping they will answer “WHO/ WERE/ YOU”. Childlike shading reveals these monosyllabic white etchings, secretly nestled in the paper. Carson tries to speak to ghosts, as the past tense creates a tension between expecting an answer and recognising the impossibility of what she’s asking for, which is furthered by omitting a question mark. Nevertheless, she wants the pages to reveal something about him. The crude lines of the letters desperately jar on the page revealing a “bitterness emerging from tenderness” that can characterise a frustration felt during grief.15 The letters leave their impression on the following folds, like scars into skin, echoing through the poem. Later, the preposition “LIKE” is violently scratched into the paper seven times and there is a ghostliness to the simile whose analogy is nothing. Walter Benjamin characterises Marcel Proust’s world as one in a “state of resemblances”,1⁶ where each observation recalls another involuntary memory, but Carson tries to grapple with a world where things

resemble ‘nothing’. Similitudes fail as she is confronted by the absence of her brother in her life and memory. The empty simile has its counterpart in the unexplained diegetic noun when Carson transcribes “I HAVE NEVER KNOWN A CLOSENESS LIKE THAT” from Michael’s letter. Under each comparison, each organising analogy of the text, there is a mute nothingness, that is literalised by the white, blank underside of the folds.

Carson fixates on a letter from Michael, folding and re-arranging it across three pages, as if she is trying to make new meanings from his words. However, she suggests that folds lose their ability to reveal anything new. Stephéne Mallarmé claims that the fold can be “rewritten by the one who reads”.1⁷ Folding becomes an interpretative and investigative act, driven by a longing for meaning. While Carson contorts the letter into different shapes, section 2.2 is repeated across the bottom of each page. It declaratively begins “My brother ran away in 1978, rather than going to jail”, without giving a reason for his persecution. The repeated section speaks to the impossibility of changing the past while Carson re-arranges the letter in the hope that it will reveal something new to her. The tension between uncovering the past when faced with the finality of death speaks to Michel Serres idea of folded time, which Georgina Wilson explains as the “possibility that time might be malleable”.1⁸ Serres uses the fold’s ability to juxtapose distant moments as an analogy for how memory is non-linear, and how re-arranging it might produce new narratives. The letter enacts in miniature how the concertinaed pages of the poem experiment with re-organising time to elicit new meanings, piecing together childhood memories with new information from Michael’s widow. But we confront the paradox of the fold: it sustains a fantasy of making and altering meanings, but when the letter is unfolded it will always say the same thing. Like the letter, death and the past are unchangeable.

In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s concatenating language acts like Carson’s folds, traversing subjects and creating a logic

of its own by repeating a word. It is a way of re-assembling meaning, collaging concepts to try to make sense of them. Sebald draws a deeply uncomfortable analogy between herring fishing and the Holocaust, perhaps to express the incomprehensibility of the latter, that it can never be prepared for, nor understood through a specific context. Sebald concludes his analysis of herring by asserting “we do not know what the herring feels” (57). Discussing the fishes’ luminescence, he digresses to the “apt[ly]” named scientist “Herrington”, whose failed research “constituted no more than a negligible setback in the relentless conquest of darkness” (59). The mass fishing of the herring and Sebald’s depiction of epistemology as a continual groping in darkness, accumulate a perverse momentum when Sebald eventually aligns them with the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The concatenating language explores how quickly words can curdle: “perhaps it was that darkening that called to my mind an article I had clipped [...] on the death of Major George Wyndham Le Strange” whose regiment “liberated the camp at Bergen Belsen” (59). Genocide is uncomfortably peripheral to the story until the reader unfolds a double page spread image of piles of bodies. Confronted by mass murder, we realise that Sebald has constructed a connection between the “millions of herring” (55) killed and those murdered in the Holocaust. The analogy is also a form of attention that glances at genocide, letting the muteness of the photograph resonate, perhaps more potently than an explanation could. This technique reflects Carson’s use of unexplained diegetic verbs and unfinished similes that suggest the impossibility of articulation. Carol Jacobs proposes that “what moves the text of Sebald remains unseeable, ungraspable”,1⁹ but here his ‘logic’ is too apparent. He suggests that there is a corrosive potential in longing for meaning by making narrative connections or analogies.

The papers that Austerlitz searches through for evidence of his parents reflect the pages we unfold to uncover Carson’s brother in Nox. Sebald uses the tactility of material

14 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, in The Gaze of Orpheus and other literary essays, trans. Lydia Davis, (New York: Station Hill, 1981), 104

15 Simone Weil’s The Iliad or The Poem of Force: A Critical Edition, trans. James Holoka, (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 64

1⁶ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Shocken Books, 1981), 211

1⁷ Craig Dworkin, ‘Pli Selon Pli: Mallarmé and the Significance of the Fold’, Inscription: the journal of the material text 3, 6

1⁸ Georgina Wilson, ‘Folded Time: An Extra Hour(glass) in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes’, Inscription: the journal of the material text 3, 19

traces to suggest that unfolding can be a redemptive act, discovering and recovering buried lives through their documentary traces.

However, the emphasis on semblances as he searches through “letters, files on employees, programmes and faded newspaper cuttings” to find “the photograph of an anonymous actress who seemed to resemble my dim memory of my mother” (353) remind us that whatever Austerlitz might disinter is already a ghost. Austerlitz depicts a world indentured to disappearance, characterised by a postapocalyptic sparsity of remains. This absence makes Austerlitz’s personal loss almost a “domain of the ungrievable”,20 not in Judith Butler’s sense of not possessing language or the cultural parameters for grief, but because there are not enough “remains” to “ontologize”:21 he doesn’t know quite what he is grieving. Sebald’s emphasis on semblance compliments how Marianne Hirsch characterises pictures as “no more than spaces of projection, approximation” that retain only “an aura of indexicality”.22 Can we make purposeful meaning from remains? Should we, like Roland Barthes, ask what “will be done away with” when the photo deteriorates? 23 Do the traces of people preserve more than a fantasy of recovering them? The video reel that Austerlitz unfurls in slow-motion produces “nightmarish” (349) noises, and we open a double page spread of pixels that intimate the shadowy shapes of two faces (346-7). The “scant document” is ghostly, revealing barely tangible, distorted traces. Austerlitz extends it “to four times its original length”, revealing “previously hidden objects and people, creating, by default as it were, a different sort of film altogether, which I have since watched over and over again” (345). Unwinding “hidden” details from the tape emulates how national and personal histories are uncovered throughout time. Santner’s

characterisation of dust as “deposits” of “unredeemed suffering” feels pertinent again: 24 perhaps these deposits also materialise in the physical traces of people. Applying Santner here asks whether preserving the past offers the possibility to gleam some sense of redeeming its sufferings.

Jean Baudrillard claims that the Gulf War was erotically inevitable, “unfold[ing] like a long strip tease”.25 Footage of the war is a “spectral evocation” only.2⁶ Unfolding cannot reveal anything new. There is nothing more to know. Despite this, I scavenge for evidence of a different story that I know exists, for evidence of my mum. I unfold diaries and newspapers, looking for secretions of truth, but white muteness crawls all over the little I do know: ‘hostage’, ‘Kuwait’, ‘Operation Sandcastle’, her breakdowns and unintelligible triggers. Disinterring her feels almost sadistic, and doesn’t even leave me with enough remains to ontologize. I can prowl photos, documents, corners of the internet, but they all speak with the same muteness of conspiracy.

PROWLING THE ARCHIVE

“[W]e cannot disguise the lost and shadow archives, and the absences, that haunt all we are able to collect”.2⁷

Marianne Hirsch.

By preserving the past in a material form, the texts become archival. Housing the undead remains of people, the bits that have survived them, the archive is a spectral, speculative, space. Its existence is justified by the possibility that dead things can return and ghosts will speak. It stores information that might produce an alternative reality to the supposedly ‘finished’ view of history we believe we have. But ghosts do not exist “unmediated”: 2⁸ they are not copies, but apparitions, thriving from the uncertainty of ‘appearances’. They are translated from the past in the process of curation and interpretation. However, by insisting that they speak, we risk making the ghosts disappear, distorting them by demanding that they give something a meaning. In their respective procuring of or digging through an archive, the authors ask whether preserving and recovering the past can redeem it, and how literature interacts with these questions. I suggest that there is something redemptive in recovering history, as though we can stop its hauntings by validating it in collective consciousness. Gordon proposes that we can stop ghostly haunts by asking “what paths have been disavowed, left behind, covered over and remain unseen?” when knowledge is produced.2⁹ The selectivity that haunts all knowledge is encapsulated by the history of the “Grand Bibliothèque” (403) in Austerlitz. Sebald turns the archive into

1⁹ Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 53.

20 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 80

21 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 9

22 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of postmemory: writing and visual culture after the Holocaust, (New York: Columbia University Press), 46

23 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: reflections on photography, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 94

24 Santner, On creaturely life, 114

25 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War did not take place, trans. Paul Patton, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 82

26 Ibid., 48

2⁷ Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 247

28 John Arnold, ‘Talking with ghosts: Rancière, Derrida and the archive’, Journal of Medieval History 48, no. 2 (2022), 242

29 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 41

a sinister site, eradicating any potential it had for recovering Austerlitz’s lost past. Henri Lemoine, an old acquaintance of Austerlitz, explains that the Paris library is built above a Nazi “warehousing complex” (401) that stored stolen possessions from Jewish households during the M-Aktion looting campaign. Lemoine describes how “the whole affair is buried in the most literal sense beneath the foundations of our pharaonic President’s Grand Bibliothèque” (403), using litotes and hyperbole to articulate disbelief. He disturbingly reminds us that the past is never eradicated, only buried. Cowan studies how Sebald manipulates his historical sources to leave the fate of the stolen objects ambiguous.30 Instead of revealing how the warehouse was firebombed, Sebald lets the objects lurk under our feet. Recovering the truth would require destroying France’s emblem of epistemological progress, which he knows is impossible. Nevertheless, Sebald’s attention to the subterranean articulates a fantasy of digging up the world to reveal what histories it hides.

The rows of library books are aligned with the warehouse’s display of robbed possessions, as Lemoine asyndetically lists examples of “everything our civilization has produced”, including “whole libraries”, that were “stacked” (402) underground. By mirroring the structures of the warehouse and library, Sebald physically entrenches the present in the murky underworld of the past, similarly to how he experiences ghosts in Liverpool Street Station. Sebald’s casts a pessimistic picture of social progress as supposedly enlightening books physically smother the history of Nazism. The archival properties of the library and the warehouse, both storing ‘artefacts’, convert them into what Tara Blake terms “tools of forgetting”,31 rather than offering the possibility to recover knowledge or redeem the past. Lemoine’s subtle irony in his metaphor of the “Babylonian library [that] now rises” (401) refigures the library’s prowess as decadent ruins of a civilisation. However, the two-fold allusion to the Tower of Babel reminds the reader of how Austerlitz miraculously “understood”

(219) Czech when he found his childminder Vera. She is the only person who provides Austerlitz with an intelligible or sentimental trace of his past. The history of the Paris library is a pessimistic declaration on the impossibility of redeeming the past, which is the preserve of oral histories, of unfolding people and not their material traces.

By aligning bookshelves with the “stacked” (402) possessions, Sebald probes the dark notion that his writing about Austerlitz is a form of looting him, displaying his traumas and leaving with a profit. However, his doubt is complicated by the fact that Austerlitz is a transcription of Austerlitz’s oral storytelling. Jacobs reflects that “Austerlitz is [...] a museum of sorts” as it lays out in “cold facts and statistics [...] a reality we would perhaps rather not view”.32 However, I think that Sebald accesses the crux of the discomfort when his narrator and reader feel compelled to rummage through Austerlitz’s history with him, almost partaking in a dark detective fiction. Although Austerlitz ends the novel continuing to search for his parents, we sense that something of the past has been redeemed by our listening, yet Sebald hovers around unanswered questions of where sympathy and discovery become a predatory, self-satisfying quest.

Nox is Carson’s own archive. She makes it into something illicit, collecting evidence so that she can make peace with death by declaring the ‘case closed’. Her archive acquires a strangely seductive mystery that counterpoints the despondent “muteness” of Michael’s life. Curating an archive is also creating a memorial, a ritual that works through the contours of grief. She tries to alleviate the longing for understanding by figuring it as a “detached”, detectivestyle fiction.33 Carson labels each fragment of text numerically, imitating the archaeological acquisition of evidence, and transcribes monosyllabic phone calls that ache with silence:

“Mother is dead.

Yes I guess she is.

She had a lot of pain because of you.

Yes I guess she did.”

In her essay ‘Foam’, Carson claims that “part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life of sentences and make off with a point of view”.34 In one sense, Nox emulates the “documentary technique” of displaying real-life remnants, but it is haunted by its inability to make any facts from them. Carson capitulates to the irrecoverable loss of her brother. Although she closes the box, his memory still haunts her; she has just found a way to limit these hauntings. The process of recovering her memories is a ‘prowling’: “A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end”. She explains in an interview that her grief felt like being in a “room where I was groping around, finding in the dark” to solve the “puzzle of understanding” him.35 The tentativeness of her prowling treads carefully between predatorily stalking her brother and refusing to ‘loot’ him, refusing to make a narrative for the sake of appeasing her pain. While her ‘prowling’ and ‘groping’ is predatory, it is also the innocent fumbling of a little sister: she hunts for Michael because she wants to cling to him. The dark room translates into the whiteness of the page, the emptiness of the archive. Carson does not forge answers or conclusions. The mute gaps are both distressing and peaceful, and the fluctuations between these feelings encapsulate the strange grief Carson confronts.

When Carson’s mother makes a “box” of “all your letters” (2.1), she commits to living with ghosts. For her, ghosts aren’t a deficit but ameliorative, better than absence. She lives torn between believing he will return, glancing “up every time a car came spinning along the road” (4.1), and relenting him to death: “When I pray for him nothing comes back” (4.2). Therefore, her archive doesn’t necessarily declare him as dead, but makes him into a ghost, something disappeared. It is a loving act that says, ‘I will live a haunted life if it means I can feel you there’. The archival instinct to preserve embraces death by promising comfort from a ghostly afterlife. The closure death provides allows Carson to seal Nox, a closure not afforded

30 James Cowan, ‘W. G. Sebald's 'Austerlitz' and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part I.’, Monatshefte 102, no. 1 (2010), 76

31 Tara Blake, Archive Fevers, (Norwich: Boiler House Press, 2022), 96

32 32 Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision, 113

33 Jocelyn Parr, ‘A Dignifying Shame: On Narrative, Repetition, and Distance in Anne Carson's Nox’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 62, no. 4 (2014)

34 Anne Carson, ‘Foam’ in Decreation (London: Jonathon Cape, 2006), 45

35 Anne Carson, ‘An Interview with Anne Carson’, interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel, Brickmag, June 10, 2014, transcript. https://brickmag.com/aninterview-with-anne-carson/.

to her mother. Like Nox, the box of letters was almost a talismanic access to Michael, a way to compartmentalise her grief without forgetting him; a way to endure the haunting.

My mum kept a box of things of her late dad’s, which were in turn partly things he’d kept of her when she was ‘missing’ in 1990. She recently found a copy of her General Declaration of entry into Kuwait when looking back through the box. It wasn’t the copy that she gave into the Iraqi military at the border. It was clean, no folds, no traces of having been slipped into the waistband of her skirt, pressed against a starved body that wasn’t washed for four months. She makes a story for it: it must have travelled from the embassy at the request of her dad, as he built his own archive that defied his daughter’s death (which in some sense made a ghost of her already). I have tried to resurrect the ghost of my mum, to secretly collect the scraps of her and hold them. Like her dad’s, my instinct to preserve her became more pressing when faced with her mortality, the cancer, the “death” that she now carries in her “body like a condemnation”. Her story only exists in her: her employee file was wiped, and the documents have been entombed in an alternative underworld of truth.

Sebald and Carson allow the ghosts that pervade their worlds, the spectres produced by unspeakable or irrecoverable pasts. In a sense, it is literature’s aim to conjure apparitions, to make us see and feel things that we didn’t know were there, or could only imitate. Perhaps then, any essay is an attempt to stop these hauntings by making ghosts into something tangible, producing ‘meaning’ by speaking over or through something that whispers to us. By identifying the forms and shapes that these spectral presences manifest themselves in, I’ve tried to avoid ventriloquising them, or representing them, to preserve an essence of their ghostliness.

PRIMARY MATERIAL

Carson, Anne, Decreation, (London, Jonathon Cape, 2006)

Carson, Anne, Nox, (New York: New Directions, 2010)

Sebald, W. G., Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, (London: Penguin Books, 2002)

Sebald, W. G., The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse, (London: Vintage Books, 2002)

SECONDARY MATERIAL

Adorno, Theodor. 2003. "Cultural Criticism and Society." In The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings , by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 280-282. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. "'What is a Camp?'." In The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings , by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 252-257. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Arnold, John. 2022. "Talking with ghosts: Rancière, Derrida and the archive." Journal of Medieval History 48 (2): 235-249. Accessed November 24, 2022. https://ezproxyprd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2102/10.1080/03044181.2022.206 0483.

Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. The Gulf War did not take place. Translated by Paul Patton. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Accessed November 10, 2022. https://ia800907.us.archive.org/5/items/BaudrillardJean.TheGulfWarDidNotTakePlace.Indian apolisIndianaUniversityPress1991.0004/ Baudrillard%2C%20Jean.%20The%20Gulf%20War %20Did%20 Not%20Take%20Place.%20Indianapolis-Indiana%20University%20 Press%2C%201991._0004.

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books. https://esquerdadireitaesquerda.files. wordpress.com/2016/11/benjamin-illuminations.pdf.

Blake, Tara. 2022. Archive Fevers . Norwich : Boiler House Press.

Blanchot, Maurice. 1981. The Gaze of Orpheus and other literary essays. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York: Station Hill .

—. 1986. The writing of the disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. London: University of Nebraska Press.

Brockmeier, Jens. 2008. "Austerlitz's Memory." Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6 (2): 347-367. Accessed November 23, 2022. https://ezproxyprd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2090/docview/226125318?pq-origsite=primo&accountid=13042.

Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. Accessed November 15, 2022. https://sutheory. files.wordpress.com/2017/02/judith-butler-antigones-claim_-kinshipbetween-life-and-death-2000.pdf.

Carson, Anne, interview by Eleanor Wachtel. 2014. An Interview with Anne Carson Brickmag, (June 10). Accessed November 23, 2022. https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-anne-carson/.

Carson, Anne, and Robert Currie, interview by Megan Berkobien. 2022. An Interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie Accessed October 17, 2022. https://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-with-annecarson-and-robertcurrie/.

Ceuppens, Jan. 2012. "Seeing Things: Spectres and Angels in W. G. Sebald's Prose Fiction." In W. G. Sebald- A Critical Companion , by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 190-202. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Cowan, James. 2010. "Sebald's Austerlitz and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part II." Monatshefte 102 (2): 192-207. Accessed November 24, 2022. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20764190.

Cowan, James. 2010. "W. G. Sebald's 'Austerlitz' and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part I." Monatshefte 102 (1): 51-81. Accessed November 15, 2022. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20622282.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. "Lecture 1." Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Charles Stivale. Paris, October 28. Accessed November 6, 2022. https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/seminars/leibnizand-baroque/lecture-01.

Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Spectres of Marx. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

Dowrkin, Craig. 2022. "Pli Selon Pli: Mallarmé and the Significance of the Fold." Edited by Adam Smyth and Gill Partington. Inscription 3: 7-11. Accessed November 19, 2022. file:///C:/Users/grace/Downloads/2572_Inscription_3_Journal_Artwork_Digital.pdf .

Eder, Richard. 2001. "'Austerlitz': Excavating a Life ." New York Times, October 28. Accessed November 15, 2022. https://www.nytimes. com/2001/10/28/books/excavating-a-life.html.

Felski, Rita. 2020. Hooked: art and attachment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. https://www.vlebooks.com/Product/Index /2084603?page=0.

Fleming, Joan. 2016. "'TALK (WHY?) WITH MUTE ASH': ANNE CARSON'S 'NOX' AS THERAPEUTIC BIOGRAPHY." Biography 39 (1): 64-78. Accessed November 20, 2022. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24803342.

Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. https://ebookcentral.proquest. com/lib/oxford/detail.action?docID=346045.

Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of postmemory: writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. doi:https://doi. org/10.1215/033353722007-019.

Holoka, James. 2008. Simone Weil's The Iliad or The Poem of Force. New York: Peter Lang.

Jacobs, Carol. 2015. Sebald's Vision. New York: Columbia University Press.

Jaggi, Maya. 2001. "Recovered Memories." The Guardian, September 22. Accessed November 15, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation.

Kierkegaard, Soren. 2000. The Essential Kierkegaard. Edited by Howard Hong and Edna Hong. New Jersey : Princeton University Press.

Kunz, Julia. 2016. "The Ghost as a Metaphor for Memory in the Irish Literary Psyche." In Ghosts- or the (Nearly) Invisible: Spectral Phenomenon in Literature and the Media, by Maria Fleischhack and Elmar Schenkel, 107-114. Frankfurt: Peter Lang AG. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2t4d7f.

Leone, Massimo. 2012. "Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of W. G. Sebald." In W. G. Sebald- A Critical Companion , by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 89-101. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.

Lorde, Audre. 2020. The Cancer Journals . London: Penguin Classics.

O'Rourke, Meghan. 2010. "The Unfolding: Anne Carson's 'Nox'." The New Yorker, July 5. Accessed November 17, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/12/the-unfolding.

Parr, Jocelyn. 2014. "A Dignifying Shame: On Narrative, Repetition, and Disatnce in Anne Carson's Nox." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 62 (4): 341-358. Accessed November 23, 2022. https://ezproxy-prd. bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2102/10.1515/zaa-2014-0036.

Ranciere, Jacques. 2011. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London; New York: Verso.

Rapatzikou, Tatiani. 2017. "Anne Carson's Nox: Materiality and Memory." Book 2.0 7 (1): 57-65. Accessed November 20, 2022. https:// web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=961f66d 6-931a-4fdea083-bf6cfe7fff98%40redis.

Ratliff, Ben. 2010. "Lamentation." The New York Times, June 10. Accessed November 18, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/ review/Ratliff-t.html.

Santner, Eric. 2006. On creaturely life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oxford/detail.action?docID=574772.

Sebald, W. G., interview by Maya Jaggi. 2001. The Last Word (December 21). Accessed November 15, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumanities.highereducation.

Simmel, Georg. n.d. "The Ruin." Translated by David Kettler. 259-266. Accessed November 18, 2022. http://maxryynanen.net/wp-content/ uploads/2016/06/Simmel_Ruins.pdf.

Sontag, Susan. 2000. "On W. G. Sebald." Accessed November 15, 2022. http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-sebald.html.

Stead, Naomi. 2015. "Architecture and Memory in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz ." Architectural Research Quarterly 19 (1): 41-48. doi:10.1017 S1359135515000263.

Swales, Martin. 2012. "Theoretical Reflections on the Work of W.G. Sebald ." In W. G. Sebald- A Critical Companion, by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 23-28. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.

Ward, Simon. 2012. "Ruins and Poetics in the Works of W. G. Sebald." In W. G. Sebald- A Critical Companion, by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 58-71. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.

Wilson, Georgina. 2022. "Folded Time: An Extra Hour(glass) in George Wither's A Collection of Emblems." Inscription: the journal of material texttheory, practice, history 3: 18-21. Accessed November 19, 2022. file:///C:/ Users/grace/Downloads/2572_Inscription_3_J

PUBLIC PROPERTY

“And where was the blood found, exactly?”

“Well that’s the thing, right. Everywhere, in a way.”

“Everywhere?”

“In a type of way. But it was deliberate.”

“Deliberately everywhere?”

“So.”

“And we’re sure about those responsible?”

“Yeah. It’s always the teenage fucking girls.”

In her classroom Jane cried.

I stood and said things that you’re meant to say when a friend is crying. I said things like, it will really all be alright, in the end. “When is the end?” she said. I don’t know, I said. Not for a long time. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

It didn’t help her mood that we were public property. We are mothers and fathers and aunties and social workers and big brothers and sisters, and coaches and mentors, and therapists and doctors, and psychiatrists, and real estate agents and customs officials and lawyers, and representatives and lobbyists, and key constituents of the political debate, and thinkers and scholars and leaders, and custodians and janitors and mental health professionals, and the problem for me, it has always seemed – is that I am just a woman. It is no longer enough, unfortunately. I must be woman and everybody, or else I am not woman at all.

We are entirely public. This is why Beau and Ashleigh stormed Jane’s room that morning and stormed on till they reached her desk, where she was trying to wipe her tears with the wetness of more tears. Tears have tears. But because Beau and Ashleigh were 16 years old, they didn’t notice. Many teenagers reject curiosity. If you’re not disengaged, you’re not modern. And because we are teachers, we tolerate it. Nobody wanting us for anything much; our arms are extensions of the filing cabinet and our toes figments of the cleaning cupboard. We are

by Heather Colley

inanimate objects for a lot of the time.

“Something has happened,” Ashleigh said. As things do, I said. They looked at me like I was out of line.

“What’s wrong, girls?”

Jane was a natural-born teacher. She claimed that she could not see herself doing anything else. While this was intended to imply a sort of inherently philanthropic nature, I suspected that it was more to do with complacency. It is so easy to do the easy thing, especially when you do it every day. That is why teachers stay teachers stay teachers. I sometimes feel that the sidewalk never ends to the grave. Then I’ll be looking at it and I’ll think oh fuck, my whole life has been a pursuit of the professional. I’ve despised it.

And now the girls told a manic story that involved bathrooms and blood and puberty. Another working day begun, and already so tired, tired, tired.

Untitled by Mario Loprete

I had to go to the pharmacy during my lunch.

The Academy was toward the top of High Street, which was a hill. Life happened on either side of it. Here was the roadman just inside the coffee shop. Here was the barista, training another barista. Here was the trainee barista, reading an employee handbook. Somewhere was the writer who wrote it. Somewhere near them was the Executive who demanded it, and somewhere near them was the salesman who supported it. Elsewhere was a man getting rich.

I was nowhere to be found. That was how it was, then: Life was a lovely bustle all around, and I with not a single toe through its door.

The pharmacy was sterile and unlovely. A line of people stood extended outward from the sign: PRESCRIPTION PICKUP. Everything ticks in a pharmacy. Toes, pens. The heart at certain rhythms.

There had recently been a complication. It began when I started this medication, and it happened again on that morning, as I stood before the pharmacist. They can’t just give a refill and send me off back down the road. I suspect that this is their conspiratorial punishment. Your brain, they’re saying. It’s not quite right. It’s a bit off, your brain. It’s gotten so tired; it’s gotten so weepy! Sorry – what was your last name again?

“Bird.”

“B – e—a – r –d?”

“Bird.”

“Sorry?”

“Like a canary?”

“I thought it was bird.”

“Then why did you have to ask?”

“So.”

“B-i-r-d.”

“Date of birth?”

Another pharmacist joined. He asked: “Date of birth?” as his colleague wandered away.

“October the 27th, 1995.”

“I’m sorry. What was the last name?”

“Bird.”

“That’s pretty.”

“And then the date of birth is October the 27th. 1995.”

“First name?”

“Mary.”

“Spell it.”

“M—a—r—y.”

“So, it’s one month’s supply? Of this –”

I made it back in time for the lesson, the start of which was unusually uneventful. I settled into a suspicious calm.

I assigned a creative writing task. I instructed the students to compose a short story about a scene which involved exuberance, a word which appeared on that month’s spelling list. The story can be real or made up, I said. Or a mix of both. You must use literary devices. Metaphors, similes, allegories, and so on. You must work silently. You have twenty-seven minutes from now. No hands for the first ten minutes. I wrote these instructions on the board. Begin, I said. Seven hands went up. I nodded to the first one, which belonged to Dexter.

“Miss, are we allowed to make it up?”

“Yes.”

Two hands went down as another shot up. I nodded toward the new one, belonging to Millie.

“But does it have to be made up?”

“No. It can be real. It is up to you.”

I nodded toward Kieran, who suffered from deep anxiety and had a “leaving pass” as a consequence. He could exit the room without permission if emotionally overwhelmed.

“Miss, how much time do we have?”

“About twenty-one minutes now.”

“Oh. Really?”

I nodded. His hand shot back up, then down. I said, “No questions for the next ten minutes. If you want individual guidance, reread your work, then I will help.”

Kieran put his hand down. He looked straight at me, our glares meeting in the stinky space of the room’s cluttered prepubescence. He pulled his card from the inside of the blazer, I nodded, and he exited the room. I prepared myself.

“Miss, why is he allowed to up and leave?” This from Dexter.

“He’s got a pass. Working silently.”

“I’ve got a pass.”

“No. We’re working silently now.”.

There was a knock at the door. Nadine was the new internal social worker, and she appeared in my door frame at least twice per day.

“Sorry about this, Miss.”

She looked outward across the audience.

“I need to borrow Joanne. Would that be alright, Miss?”

Joanne’s bag was packed and her foot out the door before Nadine had finished delivering her question. Unspoken, it was always alright. Yes, thank you, Mrs. Turner, I said. I turned back inward.

“Miss?”

“Working silently now, Dexter.”

“I don’t have any ideas.”

“Anything that interests you.”

“Nothing interests me, Miss.”

I went toward his desk. Dexter was capable once he set off; the trouble was that he rarely ever started, which convinced him that there was no way through or around or over. He liked to stay behind, where nobody expected anything much.

“Anything interesting happen this weekend that you would like to write about?”

“Nothing that you would like to read about.”

I faced Dexter with my back to the door. A compromised position. The school was made of glass: the classroom doors, the walls of everything. The only opaque spaces which still retained the pre-remodel concrete were the offices of those in senior leadership.

This is why standing with your back to the classroom entrance is a risk. The leadership spend a significant amount of time pacing the halls and staring freely through the glass of classrooms, serializing teachers’ mistakes and shortcomings and students’ failures, depressions, episodes.

I abandoned Dexter still without ideas or desire. Paced once around the room, pretended to read over bits of stories. Kieran had returned by the time I arrived at his desk, front right. He was our star. He scored well on his exams but his creative writing was stifled.

“Can I see what you’ve got?”

He handed me his workbook, half of a page filled, the writing getting bigger and more robust the farther down it went.

It was the middle of the night. It is hard to feel exuberant in the middle of the night. So, I didn’t. Then I got up. Something was at my window. What was it? Tap. Tap. Tap. Oh my god, I think.

I scanned the rest, landing with satisfaction at his conclusion – Was it all a dream?

“It was,” he tells me.

I stared at it. He stared at me staring at it. “Miss.”

“Miss.”

“Miss.”

Pens clicked, bags opened, flirtations began again. I looked toward the glass.

He was approaching. His attempts to appear meandering were pathetic. Dr. Halls opened the door, shot his head in, stared directly at Dexter, who stared directly back.

I looked again at Kieran’s story.

“Lovely,” I said. “That’s brilliant.” The silence held and quivered. “I like your use of metaphors. The ending is evocative.”

Kieran smiled as Dr Halls shut the door. They ruptured, then. Papers ripped; pens bled. I let the chaos onward. It is sometimes nice to let it force its way in, to let it climb inward and around. I dismissed them early, slumped down for a moment, then walked over to Jane’s room, where she also had a free period, and where she’d again begun to cry.

“They’re sometimes manic, and sometimes not.”

“That’s year 10,” said Jane.

“Sure. Highly hormonal.”

“Especially this lot.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. There’s been a development in the Year 10 girls’ bathroom story.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Menstrual.”

“You’re joking.”

“Nope. They sent it off somewhere. I heard from Laura who heard from Josh. Who was told by Dr. Halls.”

“So it was actual writing?”

“Yep. Various things, in blood.”

“Want a coffee?”

“Yeah.”

We wandered down the English hall into Maths, Science. Then into the staff room, where we made coffees from stale dust. We wandered back toward the Humanities side, penetrating through the glass of the Maths rooms as we went. Dr. Halls passed us by before we reached English. His eyes went in and all around.

My year 7s were characteristically early, lined up outside. I went in and locked the door. I placed a copy of Peter Pan on each desk. An odd choice, I thought. Jane disagreed. “It’s easy enough for them to follow,” she’d say. “It’s a part of their popular culture, sort of. It’s pretty.” Is it, I’d say.

Sometimes I think it’s revolting.

“Yeah,” she’d respond. “I guess that’s the beauty of interpretation.”

After my Year 7s I had three back-to-back Year 8 grammar lessons, each of which were the exact same as the one before.

I started to feel the cloud. It always came back around toward the end of the school day. It made children despicable. It made me despicable. Something welled up in my womb. The posters on the walls were farcical advertisements. Macbeth and Scrooge and Miss Havisham cackled in lightning laughter. I told my final year 8 group that we’d finish with a film, and pulled up the original Wizard of Oz. Everyone sunk into it. I closed my eyes till final bell.

Jane often worked until after 5pm, and so we never left school together. I always left as early as possible, once the children vacated. I despised speaking to them after hours, when I was not myself anymore. Just before 5pm I glided into the bathroom to change into gym clothes. I felt the hormonal warmth. My fingers are small. They were covered in brightness. It was beautiful. With my pointer finger, I began to write.

fuckovid enamel by Mario Loprete

OUR BOOK SHELF

The MJLC Study Group Renaissance Reading List

one to be bothered by the urgency society places on building the next generation of wealthy. The young Jewish protagonist growing up in the 1980s is encouraged to overcome his interest in art and desire to help his African American friend so he can pursue a stereotypically lucrative career and make his immigrant Jewish family proud. Isn’t it possible to make a living even if you do not have a financially lucrative career? Armageddon Time forces viewers to dream of a world where society promotes pursuing personal passions over wealth.

Healt h Communism (book)

by Beatrice Adnler Bolton & Artie Vierkant

Health Communism reckons with the political economy and carceral logics of health whilst urging readers to consider the relationship between health and capital. Advocating for a methodological overhaul of the medical industry, Bolton and Vierkant introduce an imagination of abundant care, anticapitalism, liberation, and justice in a manner that requires critical reflection of the historical and political forces that have shaped contemporary healthcare.

complicated relationship with her mother after she has passed away. As the author revisits memories with her mother, pleasant and unpleasant, she explores how these core memories have influenced her identity and outlook on relationships. The novel offers a glimpse into how human relationships can undergo a revival in the face of tragedy and trauma, in a way which is as beautiful as it is heart wrenching.

Little Fires Ever ywhere (novel)

by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere follows two families (one nuclear, the other a single mother and her daughter) and their chaotic journey in questioning the validity and perceived security of normative family structure in the U.S. The novel also examines different forms of privilege between the characters (race, gender, socioeconomic status) and how they affect relationships and attitudes within a community. Celeste Ng forces her audience to question whether or not the “suburban dream” is truly desirable when what happens behind closed doors is never really dealt with.

The Comet (short stor y)

by W.E.B DuBois

The Comet is a reckoning, a glimpse into a world where race suddenly doesn’t serve as the basis for capitalistic division and where the market need for racism is dissipated. Credited as a foundational text for Afrofuturism, this story alludes to religion, the creation story and interpersonal and race relationships in a way that is reminiscent of a (transformed) Renaissance painting.

Educated (novel)

by Tara Westover

Educated is an autobiographical account of how a woman escaped the mental incarceration of her abusive, Mormon survivalist family into the world of higher education. Westover recounts spending her early adulthood gaining autonomy, learning how to be loving to herself and others, and how she went from having no formal education to receiving her Ph.D. in history. Educated is a transformative story about the power of selfdetermination during traumatic times.

Harrison Bergeron (short sto ry )

by Kurt Vonnegut

In an effort to ensure true equality amongst its citizens, the government mandates everyone possess a handicap that hinders whatever feature differentiates them from others. This satirical criticism of totalitarianism and our definition of equality shows us that a complete renaissance of our world means nothing if we fail to consider the individual beauty each of us possesses.

Slouc hing Towards Bethlehem (essay collection)

by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem serves as a journalistic watershed, synthesizing stylistic features of traditional journalism with fiction. Didion’s reflections on culture and humanity in the Californian sixties — intertwined with striking observational reporting — tread beyond genre and ultimately urged a literary movement that yielded immersive, impactful, and revolutionary storytelling.

A Hard Rain s A-Gonna Fall (folk song /poem)

by Bob Dylan

From 1962, the 7-minute ballad from Dylan’s magnum opus, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), comments on the general human condition, and all the love, bigotry, greed, suffering, and powerlessness that goes with it. Following the questionand-answer structure used in traditional folk ballads, its lyrics seem subtle yet are powerful, and recall a time when music arts was guided more by (small e) existentialism than consumerism. Critics were astounded by its complexity and forceful overtone. Pete Seeger, arguably the greatest American folk musician, was of the opinion that this was Dylan at his best. A Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg once “wept” the first time he heard Dylan. Fellow folk musician Dave Van Ronk also stated that it “represented the beginning of an artistic revolution.”

Justice (short sto ry )

by Mariama Kaba

Reimagining a world that prioritizes safety over security and transformative justice and healing over retribution, Mariama Kaba tells a tale of Small Place: a society without gender or race binaries, a place where “we trust and love each other.” This story is a re-focalization of values often neglected in the status quo. It’s the revival of trust, love, compassion, understanding. It’s imagining that world and illustrating how maliciously we treat the notion of it.

Sic k Woman Theor y (essay)

by Johanna Hedva

Johanna Hedva leaves readers with a critical sentiment: “So, as I lay there, unable to march, hold up a sign, shout a slogan that would be heard, or be visible in any traditional capacity as a political being, the central question of Sick Woman Theory formed: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of Bed?”. They challenge capitalistic temporal dimensions and call readers to embrace fragility, nonconformity, embodied resistance, unconventional protest, and radical care. This reframing of protest and evaluation of productivity gestures to potential for flourishing in a world that is built for the survival and success of a very select few

Kindred (novel)

by Octavia E. Butler

Kindred is a novel that examines how families, race, gender, and violence all play a role within the system of slavery in the Antebellum South. A critical lens is placed upon the characters and their actions, seeing how they affect others and create ripples across generations. Butler uses the sci-fi genre and time travel to juxtapose 1970s California and 1800s Maryland, and explore what exactly it means to be kin

All This Could Be Diff erent (novel)

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

This is a novel about love, growing up and friendship, about being brown and queer and identifying simultaneously as an immigrant and a Midwesterner. This novel melds old and new perspectives, with a subplot focusing on the creation of a shared commune. In showcasing the harsh realities of the world and merging it with the possibility of what lies ahead, Matthews’s novel is a Renaissance focusing on both new change and old beauty — it’s full of hope.

Exhalation (short sto ry )

by Ted Chiang

Reading this story is more like reading the journal entries of an air-driven mechanical scientist in another world. The air they use to operate is slowly running out, and it’s having a slowly noticeable effect on how they live. It’s a story about reimagining how the human body works, how it mirrors machines and the implications of using up the resources we need.

Bread and Roses (poem / folk song)

by James Oppenheim

Bread and Roses is the name of a poem, song, and political slogan published in 1911 that concerns themes of both women’s rights and labor rights. Originally a line from women’s suffrage activist Helen Todd’s writings, “Bread for all, and roses too,” it’s mainly associated with the Textile Strike in 1912. This advocates for the development of activism and rights in a way that isn’t just about wages and conditions and material rights, but also respect, love and dignity.

GOING INTERNATIONAL MJLC staff members abroad

Throughoutmy past three weeks in Nepal, I have experienced many new realizations that challenge my assumptions about both South Asia, America and their comparison. Nepal is a prime example of a country in transition, but my personal understanding of what transition and social development looks like has drastically changed. As I challenge these assumptions, I am also navigating my identity as an outsider and the role I play in Nepal’s development.

My most evident assumption addresses the relationship between tradition and progression. While on a walk through Patan (southern Kathmandu), lecturer Anil Chitrakar stopped us at a temple. The temple was centered in a public common space available for the general passersby to touch, walk around and gather at. All were welcome to interact and approach, and one side even had graffiti painted onto it. In looking closely, one can see the differences between the sides of the Temple’s woodworking. Each side had varying levels in detail — while some looked worn and weathered, others seemed newly carved. Yet, while the age of this temple exceeded that of any monument in the United States, it contrastingly was not under any security or protection like American monuments. In fact, the golden statue placed inside of the temple was recently brought back from the U.S. where it was secured under high surveillance in the Chicago Museum of Art. Now, it lies in the open, unguarded, available to all passersby. Why would this be? As Chitrakar explained, some sides remained original pieces up to thousands of years old,

others were replaced by more recent “replicas.” However, the “replicas” allowed for creative liberties and did not replace originals with accuracy. Chitrakar explained this is because the government of Nepal that owns these spaces places more value in preserving the artists and techniques that can produce these pieces of art, rather than preserving the original art itself. This perspective of tradition as a living practice differs starkly from the material based, unchanging perspective I grew up with. In analyzing these various perspectives of tradition, I have questioned what it means to hold both tradition and progression simultaneously.

Growing up in America, tradition is often seen in opposition to progression. Our politics create a binary between conservative ideologies that value tradition and strict readings of the constitution and liberal, progressive ideologies that value more rapid change. Before coming to Nepal, I often wondered how Nepal was addressing this contrast as a developing country with such deep roots in religious and cultural traditions. After this excursion, however, I now question instead why I thought the two could not work in tandem. If tradition is a living practice based in people, not material things, tradition may instead serve as a benefitting factor to progress and development. Tradition may already serve as a method for moving forward, and self balances what must be continued and what can be left behind.

Anna Nelson

Emily Wesoloski

Studying in Rome the past few months,I’m constantly surrounded by art. The streets and buildings are painted with old murals and pastel colors, or they’re decorated with mosaics and stone carvings. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the surface of this city's intricate beauty and forget that each piece of art has an artist and a history behind it. Not too long ago, I decided to do some research on a fountain I pass each day going to class, La Fontana della Piazza dei Quiriti. Completed and opened in 1928, meters away from a Church of St. Joachim (father of the virgin Mary), the statue was decidedly not popular at its debut. It features four stone Sabini women, each depicted naked and supporting a heavy water basin above them. The Romans of the late 1920s were scandalized by the womens’ nakedness, the church going so far as to cover them with sheets on holy occasions and petition for the fountain’s removal.

The Sabini were an ancient tribe of Italians who lived outside of Rome. They are best known from the ancient story wherein Romulus committed a mass abduction of Sabini women shortly after he founded Rome due to his concerns in the city’s ability to maintain a strong population (most of its inhabitants being men). He ordered his soldiers to each take for themselves a young woman to marry, ripping them from their homes and families for the good of Rome. The women of the fountain support not only the water basin but a giant pinecone — a Roman symbol for fertility and the birth of creation.

When I see these four women, depicted with their muscles tense and bodies on display in a square that initially hated them, this new context offers complicated feelings. Is using their bodies for art once again taking advantage of the Sabini women? Is the presence of the pinecone mocking in a way, as they were stolen for their ability to reproduce? Or is the pinecone a tribute to how they strengthened Rome, and their bodies a form of protest, saying: you took us for this originally, now you cannot ignore it? No matter the artist’s intentions, I’ve come to understand it’s always worth seeking out the complexity behind beauty. Even everyday objects

and systems have expansive histories and reasons for being. Learning about those histories may complicate things, it may diverge your perspective in uncomfortable ways, but it's always worth it. To comprehend complexity is important to understanding our world and how we can change it.

Carsyn Barber

My partner’s roommate is from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and last summer he invited a group of friends to travel there to visit where he grew up. Tanzania is such a beautiful country with very welcoming, jovial people. I had an amazing time there eating local food, hiking in Lushoto, going on a safari in Mikumi, camping, taking a boat to Mbudya Island, visiting Zanzibar, and getting to know my friend’s family and friends. One of the most prominent memories from this trip was when we were driving to my friend’s parents’ house for dinner on one of our first nights in Tanzania. We were in a traffic jam and got a flat tire. Within a few seconds of pulling over to the side of the road, a man immediately started jacking our car to switch the tire for us. He did not know us and did not have any reason to help us mechanically-lacking young adults. My friend tried to pay him for his trouble but he waved him off and did not expect anything in return for helping us. This man’s immediate reflex to help strangers is something that is not very common in the United States. If my tire went flat on the highway, people would likely drive past me and carry on with their day (unless they knew me or unless I was in a very small town). There is more community connection and mutual aid in Tanzania. I also noticed there is more use of public spaces — people cook food on street corners and converse with each other as they walk on the sides of the street to work or school. Since there is an emphasis on community building and rapport, people are more willing to help each other out and care for other people — something I don’t notice as much in the United States, where the expectation is that people should be self-sufficient and avoid burdening others with any help they may need. Maybe it is time to rethink individualism and self-reliance, a central aspect of the work culture in the United States, and lean into other community based possibilities in the workplace and in public life.

Metamorphosis by Catherina O

CYCLE OF REBIRTH

Elm trees are the cycle of rebirth, guiding me through this everlasting void of guilt and regret, constructing a new form of myself after I die,

others perceive this idea as foolish, tell me I'm full of stupidity. They say that being reborn is not possible and that it’s a hoax, but I continue my beliefs, forced to keep my mouth shut, my mind open.

Elm trees, bats, lotus flowers, all forbidden to talk about but I know that it’s not evil, it’s rather more astounding, I envision days of rebirth. Good karma, reincarnation, spirituality, no bodily form is permanent, reluctancy creeps into realization.

Cautiously I continue to believe what I believe in and I live each day with practice, this universe is a beautiful place, full of so many mysterious, and ethereal forms of science.

by Cloey Deignan-Koelzer

Contributors

Caleb Delos-Santos / Pencils are Dying

Caleb Delos-Santos (he/him) (2023) is a senior double majoring in Acting for the Stage and Screen and English at Azusa Pacific University. He recently published his first two poetry books, A Poet’s Perspective and Once One Discovers Love, through Cyberwit.net and won the APU Esselstrom Prize for Creative Writing in Poetry. Caleb has also published thirty-eight poems and one non-fiction with West Wind Magazine, Outrageous Fortune, GoldScriptCo, Bluepepper, Poetry Archive, Spectrum, Indian Periodical, Forbes and Fifth, North Dakota Quarterly, Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, UNLV Creative Arts Journal, Translate Iowa Project, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, and Taj Mahal Review. Today, he dreams of a successful poetry career. “Pencils are Dying” discusses society’s gradual loss of pencils, handwriting, and literary artistry. As technology and economy conquer and society crumbles, art slowly dies. Ultimately, the world needs a literary renaissance, or art will soon perish.

Christa Statz / Returning Home

Christa Statz is a sophomore at Lodi High School. She is fifteen and has taken a couple of writing classes throughout her school years. She believes that her poem relates to the theme of a renaissance; it's about a man returning home after his wife had passed. It shows the aftermath of losing someone and being forced into something different.

Sarah Kirsch

/ staring in the bathroom mirror

Sarah Kirsch is a sophomore at UW-Madison studying Journalism and English with certificates in Digital Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies. Originally from Minnesota, Sarah resides in La Crosse, Wisconsin when not in school. They have been newly attending the MJLC study groups, which compelled them to submit some poetry. Centered around gender and sexuality exploration and religious influence, Sarah decided to submit these topics after the long journey of accepting their identity.

Cloey Deignan Koelzer / Cycle of Rebirth

Cloey Deignan Koelzer is a twenty year old student in the Madison area. They love nature, yoga, meditation, writing, art and everything else related to these activities. They work with children as a summer camp and afterschool club leader as well as a blog writer. Writing and creating art has been something they've been interested in for years and they believe that they have a talent for it. Her three pieces all relate to renaissance in a way because they deal with the reformation of pieces of art and ideas.

Jaeana Sabally-Pyror / In the margins

Jaeana Sabally-Pryor was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. Right now they’re a junior at Middleton High School. They’ve always loved writing but recently they’ve made it a personal goal to submit more of their writing. One piece, "the sun and other stars", was written in honor of their friends and how much they love them as people. The other piece, "in the margins", they wrote as a way to reflect their love for their communities. They think that both pieces are similar in the way that they connect to renaissance-- through the idea of reimaging your worldview. The pieces both involve a shift in how the main objects are viewed.

Stella D’Acquisto

/ Dante’s Deal

Stella D'Acquisto is an undergraduate at UW-Madison studying International Studies and Legal Studies. A twentyyear-old born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Stella primarily studies human rights and is fascinated with all forms of communication, from creative writing to foreign language. This piece is a love letter to unrecognized creatives and the unique communities they form. The character of Dante is loosely based on a real person who once owned a music store in Milwaukee, and the story more broadly explores capitalism's effect on art and what it means to "sell your soul."

Stella D’Acquisto / Falling Point

This piece explores what happens when one forces themself to experience a renaissance, pushed by social pressure, generational trauma, or a desire to belong, but find that the armor they built up can not get too close to the sun.

Heather

Colley / Public Property

Heather Colley is a doctoral candidate in Literature and Arts at the University of Oxford in the UK. She holds a Master's in English from the University of St Andrews, and a Bachelor's in English and Sociology from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Originally from Tarrytown, New York, Heather's research focuses on convergences between African American musical aesthetics and literature, and her creative writing looks at deficiencies in American education systems. Her short story "Public Property" subverts the archetypical coming-of-age story - think, Perks of Being a Wallflower - by deploying the perspective of a young female teacher dealing with oppressions at the intersection of womanhood and mental health. It attempts to speak to the cultural environment of female rage and discontentment spurred by regressions in abortion rights

and bodily autonomy in America, and thereby imagines a "renaissance" of female articulation and experience.

Jeffrey H. MacLachlan / We the Beautiful, We the Damned: A Lyric Essay

Jeffrey H. MacLachlan hails from Skaneateles, NY but he is now a Senior Lecturer of literature at Georgia College & State University. Two years ago he decided to dedicate each summer to reading a specific author. Last year he read Fitzgerald's "lesser" novels and was inspired to write this essay. It relates to the theme of "renaissance" because it involves a "rebirth" of a novel largely ignored by literary critics.

Emily Wesoloski / The Spirit of the Forms

Emily Wesoloski (she/her) is a 21-year-old student originally from Green Bay, WI studying creative writing, marketing and digital studies at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. "The Spirit of the Forms" was created using pressed flowers and re-contextualized materials cut from an art history book inherited from her great grandmother. Rather than allowing the book to continue collecting dust, as she was never much of a sculptor or painter herself, Emily took pieces and phrases from its lessons to create a collage. It represents the ways she views art as an open, accessible discipline while incorporating the forms her great grandmother loved studying too.

Haley Polzin / Viewfinder

Haley Polzin is a twenty-year-old UW-Madison student from Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. Currently, she is studying social work in hopes of becoming a mental health social worker. Her abstract self-portrait features a painting of her current self held atop a background of childhood photographs. These pictures were taken on a camera she received in 2007, but only recently rediscovered. Following the Renaissance theme of transformation, Haley reflects upon herself and her upbringing with a critical eye: one which has been sharpened by an increasing awareness of the world around her and the corruption that both it and pieces of herself hold.

Catherina O / Head in the Clouds & Metamorphosis

Catherina O is a junior at UW-Madison from a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The two works shown are "Head in the Clouds" and "Metamorphosis". "Head in the Clouds" is a collage piece made up of cuts of prints from a Vincent Van Gogh book and paint. When making the piece, Catherina wanted to do a reimagining of a famous and iconic artist's work. This applies to the theme Renaissance because of its theme of remaking older and existing works into something new. "Metamorphosis" is a response to the "male gaze" and is a view of the female nude through a female gaze. This applies to the theme due to its reimagining and twist on the traditional male gaze

that is still prevalent in art today.

Casey Coolidge / Rip My Heart Out Why Don’t You

Casey Coolidge, 35, is a Madisonian born and bred and an alumnus of UW–Madison (Piano Performance and English Creative Writing, 2011) currently serving on the education team at the Chazen Museum of Art. His piece Rip My Heart Out Why Don't You was created out of a need to address the ever-present grasp of religious trauma and the way that structures and beliefs can coil and tug long after. "Born-Again" is fraught in this context, as it addresses both past and process, both the old way and the need for selfactualized rebirth.

Rachel Dunn / Am l a Man Or a Muppet?

Rachel is a 21-year-old marketing and graphic design major hailing from the great city of Chicago. When tasked with creating an artwork that did not use blending, she was reminded of the color blocking often seen in Muppets. Conversely, Renaissance art is famous when artists began to experiment with realism and introduced blending into their works. Compelled by this juxtaposition, she felt there was no better subject to explore this with than herself. To answer the question of what was more influential, the Renaissance or the Muppets, Rachel reimagined herself through the combating styles of the Muppets and the Renaissance.

Mario Loprete / fuckovid enamel & Untitled

Mario Loprete is an Italian artist who wishes to show his artistic projects. Painting is his first love. An important, pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the spasmodic research of a concept with which he wants to send a message to transmit his message is the base of his painting. The sculpture is his lover, his artistic betrayal to the painting. That voluptuous and sensual lover that gives him different emotions, that touches prohibited cords. . .in the last years, he worked exclusively at his concrete sculptures. Throughout some artistic process, in which he uses plaster, resin and cement, he transforms them into artworks to hang. His memory, his DNA, his memories, remain concreted inside, transforming the person that looks at the artworks into a type of post-modern archeologist that studies his work as if they were urban artifacts. He likes to think that those who look at his sculptures created in 2020 will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, the fear that each of us has felt in front of a planetary problem that was covid 19. . .under a layer of cement there were clothes with thich he lived this nefarious period. Clothes that survived covid19, very similar to what survived after the 2,000 year old catastrophic eruption of Pompeii, capable of recounting man’s inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies. In the last five years about 400 international magazines wrote about his work, turning the spotlight on his art project and attracting the

attention of important galleries and collectors

Parker Hurkman / Untitled

Parker Hurkman Is a 20 year-old student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has always used art as a means of self expression. Art to Parker is incredibly personal, he explores his deepest thoughts and insecurities by creating colorful and magical portrait paintings.

Ava Albelo / Shamrock Shakes

Ava Albelo is a sophomore in the UW Art program. She is originally from Miami, Florida but studies here in Wisconsin. Her pieces explore the low-brow, surreal, and silly, using things from media references to art history in her work. She uses mostly in ink pens and India ink, focusing on line quality and flow in her pieces.

Cristina Rodriguez / Femmeissance

Cristina Rodriguez is in her senior year at UW-Madison. She was born and raised in Milwaukee and has been making art for as long as she can remember. This is a piece she completed earlier this year that puts a modern twist on the classical female nude. Many (male) artists that are synonymous with the Renaissance such as Titan, Rafael, and Botticelli rose to fame in part due to painting nude women. This painting is a modern day reclamation of our abilities, bodies and stories.

Karim Mitri / Dr. Faustus Marlowe, Kafka, Žižek, and the Incompleteness of God

Karim Mitri is a 21-year-old student from a little olive town in North Lebanon called Kfaraakka. Karim is studying English Literature and Philosophy at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon and does research in English and World Literature, European philosophy, and the social sciences. The topic of Renaissance, and

especially the reimagination of key ideas and literary pieces of the time sparked Karim's interest as he presented a literature term paper at the end of his Renaissance Drama class, offering a new perspective on Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, namely, based on Slavoj Zizek's Christian Atheist reading of theology. It goes against the traditional reading of Dr. Faustus as a morality play and warning against trusting in the Devil.

Luke Tillitski / Radical Joy in Banjo

Luke Tillitski is a junior English major at Yale University from Charlotte, North Carolina. Luke’s primary interest within the English department is exploring how marginalized authors respond to dominant literary modes, methods, and influences. Aside from discussing Claude McKay, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, this paper relates to the theme of renaissance because it demonstrates the radical, alternative worldview that McKay envisioned as possible. Luke believes that we could all afford to follow "instinctual love and radical joy" more.

Grace Dowling / Ghostly Forms: Living with Ghosts in W. G. Sebald and Anne Carson

Grace Dowling is a student currently studying and living in Oxford. This was for a coursework piece on Shakespeare, but, as well as being products of the historical period, the plays resonate with the concept of a Renaissance. We can consider characters and puppets as creatures that are constantly reanimated or reborn only to be killed. How might we understand this kind of life? The puppets and the plays ask questions about how we endure public spectacles or reports of violence, simulated horrors, and where the human becomes nonhuman.

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The Madison Social Justice Center

MADISON JOURNAL OF LITERARY CRITICISM