Kelly MacPhail

"'Scratched blood': The Erinyes and Anthony Mann's The Furies." The Good, the Bad and the Ancient: Westerns and the Classical World, edited by Sue Matheson, McFarland P, 2022, pp. 111-126.

Winner of the 2022 Ray and Pat Browne Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture Award, Popular Culture Association.

In 1680, the Puritan Congregationalist John Owen preached a sermon series called “The Christian’s Work of Daily Dying,” in which he argued that dying well depended upon living well. Owen admonished Christian believers not to fear death but instead to live and die in cheer, comfort, and triumph by adhering to a daily duty of the constant exercise of faith, by having a readiness to part with the earthly body, and by adopting a wisdom that is not surprised by death’s arrival. Crucially, Owen expresses an early modern reinterpretation of death by understanding it as a messenger sent by God to bring believers to Heaven and resurrect them in a new ontological category of being, as isangeloi.

KEYWORDS: Puritan theology, ontology, isangeloi, sermons, death and dying, personal eschatology

Access at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv2f4vjtv.14

In his novels The Searchers (1954) and The Unforgiven (1957), Alan LeMay offers a double thought experiment regarding the possibility of cross-cultural and cross-ethnic assimilation in the cases of two young girls, one white and one Kiowa. The subsequent cinematic adaptations of LeMay's novels by John Ford (1956) and John Huston (1960) continue the experiment; in each case, the majority white community reacts to assimilation with deep-rooted fears of miscegenation and the racial contamination of white women that reflects the cultural homogeneity of Hollywood and of America at the times these films were released. Both films revolve around young girls transplanted from their families and ethnic groups and, to varying degrees, assimilated into another. The questionable success of these assimilations gives rise to a troubling and compelling ambivalence at the heart of these narratives that centers on the fruitful binary of captivity verses adoption. Several battles are fought, partially in order to possess and control women's bodies and thus to define these bodies through concepts of identity focused on purity, contamination, adaptation, and assimilation; the central conflicts thus particularly arise from white families and communities that struggle with their long entrenched beliefs surrounding race. By shedding light on the majority culture's fears of the cross-cultural assimilation, miscegenation, and contamination of women, these Westerns challenge such essentialist presuppositions about gender, cultural identity, and notions of power based in racial superiority.

"'The detachment of God': A Theopoetic Reading of Steinbeck's The Pearl." Critical Insights: John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Salem/Grey House Publishers, 2019, pp. 121-134.

A central aim of Steinbeck's The Pearl (1945) is to question religion's explanations for the tragic events that so often cloud human life and for God's possible responsibility for what occurs. Read as a theodicy, The Pearl certainly offers a pessimistic answer but at the same time complicates assumptions about theological responses to human questions. Steinbeck intends the novella as a modern day parable, even insisting in the book's epigraph that "If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads his own life into it"; hence, though this is a simple tale, it is meant as an allegory that has several complex layers of application to the reader. Likewise, Steinbeck joins his rendering of this Mexican folktale to Christ's parable of "The Pearl of Great Price" as well as the pious late 14th-century poem, The Pearl. In offering a theological view of suffering, Steinbeck invokes several other metaphors, including light and dark, mountains and sea, the destroyed ancestral boat, and, perhaps most tellingly, Kino's perspective of the ants that mirrors "the detachment of God," given God's transcendent perspective of suffering human beings. Notably, Kino and Juana also represent a Latin American religious syncretism that blends Catholicism with traditional Indian beliefs that are revealed in their ritual songs that enshrine the goodness of family against the evils of the forest and men who seek to do the family harm. The theological argument indeed aligns itself with this traditional theodicy in that the greatest evils come from other men and not from what Kino sees as divine fate. As good and evil play out, it is human greed that leads to the ultimate downfall of Kino and his family as they are not only cheated by the doctor, priest, and salesmen but also tracked and assailed by the armed hunter. They find loyalty only with family as the plot moves from the luck or blessing that fates Kino to find the pearl toward the greatest terror of the death of Coyotito that parallels the sacrificial death of Christ.

The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 42, no. 4, Fall 2018.
A chief task of the poetry of Wallace Stevens is to reassert an intimate connection between metaphysical belief and the role of the poet. Stevens’s spiritual concerns are represented with depth and complexity, and, although their declaration is perhaps more explicit in his later poetry, earlier poems such as “Peter Quince at the Clavier” best express the liturgical role of poetry and of the poet. Stevens must be reckoned as a modernist poet whose central concerns are metaphysical, which is itself a placeholder term for concepts that are themselves placeholders: religion, spirituality, truth, beauty, the sacred, faith, prayer, God. Much as other modernists sought to reinterpret Christian themes or symbols, Stevens repositioned liturgy to rethink the roles and the possibilities of poetry, the poet, and the imagination in a manner appropriate for the modernist era and aesthetic, thereby manipulating the gaps of language and epistemology to allow readers a privileged view “through the bushes” of the poet working to uncover metaphysical truths.

European Writers in Exile. Lexington, 2018. 

This paper discusses the exilic experience of Joseph Conrad, who was born in a partitioned and occupied Poland and became an English writer only after he joined the "Great Emigration" of Polish elites into permanent exile. As described, Conrad initially followed a boyhood fascination with tales of the sea and joined the French and then British merchant marine, where his life reflected the loneliness that first defined him as an exile. There, too, he experienced and witnessed being cast as "the Other," and it is his sensitive reaction to this experience that allows his fiction to describe exile so keenly in his best known texts. In particular, this paper brings to vivid life the stories of exile Conrad penned in Lord Jim (1900), where Jim goes into voluntary exile after an act of cowardice, and "Amy Foster" (1901), where a shipwrecked Eastern European is washed ashore in England. The key example of the exile experience in Conrad's writing is, of course, Heart of Darkness (1899). At its core the novella condemns the grave racialist injustices of imperialism, which Conrad knew well from his own life. His response to the misery he saw in colonial Africa resulted in what E.D. Morel, an influential leader of international protests against colonial abuses, identified as "the most powerful thing written on the subject." It took Conrad, a writer who knew exile from an early age, to equate the colonialist's quest with the profound disenchantment of exile that conquering and subjugating another people produces.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498560238/European-Writers-in-Exile
https://www.amazon.com/European-Writers-Exile-Robert-Hauhart/dp/1498560237

In Dance of the Happy Shades, Munro re-evaluates mid-twentieth century ideals of progress by illuminating the effects of a growing urban consciousness bound to forever change Canada. Munro demonstrates how the complexities of progress often result in a troubling centralized control that attempts to domesticate wilderness areas, animals, and human bodies. Although Munro portrays both the positive and negative effects of progress, she ultimately argues that despite its claims to efface the past and erect a better future, the shadows of Canada’s wild history will nonetheless abide.

Dans The Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Alice Munro réévalue les notions du progrès du milieu du vingtième siècle, en se penchant sur le processus d’urbanisation qui changera le Canada à jamais. Elle dépeint des idéaux du progrès qui concernent la domestication des zones de nature sauvage, des animaux, et du corps humain. Bien qu’elle présente à la fois les effets positifs et négatifs du progrès, Munro suggère que le « sauvage » demeurera présent, malgré les promesses du progrès qui semblent effacer le passé et créer un meilleur avenir.

http://journals.openedition.org/eccs/445