In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, gestures using the fingers/hands and the sense of touch are richly depicted. Examining the effect of these tactile depictions seems important when we consider that the final line from a lyric poem by E. E. Cummings, in which words such as “fingers,” “touch,” and “texture” are utilized as key terms, is attached to an edition of Menagerie as an epigraph: “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” However, critics have tended to focus on visual effects/sensations, mainly because they pay attention to the cinematic techniques Williams employs in the play. In this paper, I will discuss the use of hand/finger gestures and the depiction of tactility in a wider sense, and will consider their relationship to the playwright’s consistent interest in painting.
Several studies on art in the 1930s set forth the opinion that “touch,” or the role played by hands in the process of creating art like paintings, had disappeared as a result of the rise of reproductive techniques like photography. They considered how the roles of hands had been replaced by those of eyes. Similarly, in Menagerie, which is explicitly set in the 1930s, the depictions of hands/fingers and tactile effects/sensations are, in many cases, contraposed to those of eyes and visual effects/sensations, and such contrasts seem to characterize the confrontation between painting and photography.
First, in Menagerie, the playwright explains his notion of “plastic theatre,” a new theatrical concept, and compares the conventional realistic play to photography. According to him, a photographic likeness, ostensibly depicting things objectively, is unimportant; instead, he considers “atmospheric touches” to be particularly important in the plastic theatre. Memory, which “takes a lot of poetic license,” can change the form of things it touches and transform them to represent the truth. It is noteworthy in this context that recent critics recognize a parallel between German painter Hans Hofmann’s notion of “plasticity” and the plastic theatre. Thus, the word “touch(es),” which the playwright uses to explain his new concept, becomes associated with the artistic term “touch,” merging the acts of writing and painting intimately.
Second, Laura, who is compared to a religious painting and who is similar to an artistic work in that she has what Walter Benjamin calls an “aura,” is described with rich reference to the gestures of her hands/fingers, in contrast to other characters, who are notably compared to photography and other reproductive works. Furthermore, the conflict between the two senses of touch and sight illuminates Laura’s relationship with her tiny glass animals: she usually cures herself by touching them, but in her most tragic scene, we notice that they have lost their power to cure her and have become mere objects, sadly reflected in her eyes. Nonetheless, Williams impressively describes the revivification of tactility when Laura takes Jim’s hand and places the broken glass unicorn in his palm. Here, in a sense, she bravely opens herself to a dialogic relationship with others through the tactile sense. It is due to her bravery that Tom decides to tell his sister’s story not as a poem but as a play, a dialogic form that always expects the existence of an audience; the intertextual analysis of related short fictions by the playwright enables us to see the fingers/hands as a sort of “point of origin” where Tom and Laura overlap beyond time and space, clarifying at once the poetic and political strategy of writing/painting in The Glass Menagerie.

抄録全体を表示

In Cold War America, modernist literature, especially that of William Faulkner, represented its Cold War liberalism and was endorsed by apparently apolitical literary journals including The Kenyon Review, edited by the ex-Southern agrarian and New Critic John Crowe Ransom and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. This essay attempts to bridge apolitical literary studies in the United States and American studies and American literary studies in post-war Japan. Those disciplines were a cultural alignment that enabled the defeated country to reenter the international community as a friend of the West, or the United States, and functioned within the intertwined complex of politics, the military, economy and culture. We can see one aspect of what Naoki Sakai calls in his The Trans-Pacific Imagination “the formula of complicity between US global domination and Japanese nationality” (7) through the reconstruction of Japanese national culture as a democracy, to which process the introduction of American studies and American literary studies and modernist aesthetics was conducive.

An analysis of the institutional introduction of the American modernist canon and its translation, especially the works of T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner, together with New Criticism and the corresponding transformation of Japanese literature will indicate how those disciplines and cultural products of the U.S. and the post-war introduction of democracy in Japan were instrumental in refiguring Japan as a self-colonizing, or voluntary, “model-minority.”

This paper explores how literary scholars negotiated with the post-war reintroduction of American literary studies, the American modernist canon and New Criticism, and how that process was instrumental in re-casting American literary studies as fundamental to the Cold War cultural alliance of the United States with Japan. The first section outlines the cultural occupation and cultural diplomacy of the United States in post-World War II Japan in terms of reintroduction of American literature to Japan through book programs of Civil Information and Education section of GHQ/SCAP during the occupation and USIS after the Peace Treaty, and then moves on to the analysis of the blueprint drawn by Rockefeller, III in his Report and the very first phase of American studies and American literary studies during the occupation and post-treaty years. Especially the University of Tokyo and Stanford University Seminar for American Studies sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation inspired by the Salzburg seminar was a locus where scholars of emerging American studies and Japanese scholars mutually fashioned American literary studies and at the same time themselves as subjects of the democratic nations. Finally, by analyzing how Japanese scholars focused on learning the discipline and text themselves, the paper shows how they were voluntarily subject to the idea of the “free individual” and inadvertently fashioned themselves as Cold War liberal subjects. Voluntary promotion of American studies and Americanliterary studies in post-treaty years was supposed to help promote a continued cultural occupation, as it were, under the name of cultural interchange.

抄録全体を表示