Myth Building and Cultural Politics in W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe
The mythic vision of America and its national pastime which W. P. Kinsella constructed in Shoeless Joe ([1982] 1991) has extended into millions of American imaginations, both in the form of the novel and its film adap- tation, Field of Dreams (1989).1 Kinsella built the myth, and people came to live it. Perhaps literary critic Neil Randall best articulates the popular response to Shoeless Joe when he calls it a "moral book" which "makes us come away in the end feeling 'pretty damn good about being alive for the rest of the day"' (1987, 181). But when we read beyond what Randall calls "fantasy and the humor of fellow-feeling," and explore the context of the novel's morality, an unsettling portrait of America emerges (1987, 173). In this essay, I will argue that Kinsella engenders a culturally conservative world, which reflects the historical circumstances of the 1980s and repro- duces the ideology of Ronald Reagan's presidency. By discussing the text within the framework of Reagan's America and the social ...
A Note on W. P. Kinsella's Humor
sessively couched in Lacanian terms and constructed on Lacanian principles, partly by way of Jane Gallop's The Daughter's Seduction.* Against all this, however, should be set Bersani's cautions: "Wuthering Heights is both almost embarrassingly vulnerable and astonishingly invulnerable to psychoanalytic interpretation," for "it is not enough to say that this sort of evidence exists in Wuthering Heights; we have to consider its status in the novel," and "to the extent that the novel does dramatize a fantasy of the self triumphantly 'leaving' itself for other forms of being, both familial drama and the sexual symbolism connected to it appear almost irrelevant to a gluttonous yet almost ascetic, erotic and yet sexless, passion for otherness."
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.