Paton, Priscilla

Sexual pleasure, for the male writer, has been accompanied by pain for centuries. Italian poet Dante Alighieri presents a paradoxical treatment of lust by exploring pain and pleasure in Canto XXVI of "Purgatory" in The Divine Comedy. Over four hundred years later, Dante's sexual ideology would evolve into misanthropy and misogyny in T. S. Eliot's poetry. The poetry's aggression towards women begins with "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock," escalates in "La Figlia che Piange" and "Gerontion," and reaches a violent pinnacle of misanthropy in "Sweeney Erect." Although T. S. Eliot attempted to emulate Dante's passion, his contorted visionary work chose the language of renounced, rather than consummated, sexual desire. Eliot's poetry seeks to mimic Dante's philosophy on love and pain expressed in Canto XXVI of "Purgatory," but all that emanates is a sense of pity, loss, and disgust.

Concentrating on Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," with M. L. Rosenthal's term "floating realities" as my starting point, I discuss how time and its malleable nature relates to Prufrock's "linear reality" and his "non-linear" "floating realities." Prufrock's "linear reality" is the external world of appearances and his internal psychological landscape. I then reveal the "floating realities" that are generated by Eliot's otherworldly allusions. Finally, I discuss chaos theory, another way to explore the poem's multi-dimensional nature.

Women have traditionally formed their identity around standards created by a patriarchal society. In this way, they have often denied themselves autonomy and the process of self-discovery. With this knowledge, Marge Piercy through fiction re-imagines "the traditional female concern with personal relationships and the details of daily life and then expand (s) these concerns to include a wider and wider swath of human experience" (Snitow 719). Most of Piercy's novels intertwine politically motivated plots with female characters who reach a new conscious level of understanding about origins of identities, and thus these characters engage in an awareness that allows them to discover a self-formed identity. Piercy realizes that she must challenge the prescribed identity of women before she can concern herself with personal identity. In doing this, she understands that gender precedes identity (Lorraine 18), and politically, she relates her ideas in a feminist way. Because her writing takes place from the 1950s through the 90s, Piercy's work realizes the change in women's identity through this particular time. Moreover, Piercy is able to show the history of the confinement and limitations suffered by women in a sexist society. In doing this, she empowers both her female characters and her female readers to begin to realize personal choice in creating a self-identity.

Gregory Corso is a core member of the Beat Generation which evolved in America during the 1950s to question the causes of a perceived decline in postwar spiritual values. The Beats criticized an America that permitted the atomic explosions over Japan, the McCarthy discourse, the Cold War, and the policies of mistrust and paranoia these events engendered. Corso addressed the issue of nuclear anxiety and its controlling effect on life in a 1958 poem titled "Bomb." This paper analyzes "Bomb," viewing it as a work informed by Corso's life and by his times. In "Bomb," one of the earliest examples of nuclear literature, Corso seeks to neutralize the power of nuclear anxiety by imagining a natural and spiritual survival of the atomic apocalypse. His message reflects the moral and prophetic role he prescribes for poetry in championing the forces of life over death.

In contrast to the widely held notion that an original work is typically superior in quality to its derivatives, Porgy and Bess, the opera, and Porgy, the play, present clearer conflicts between community and individualism than Porgy, the novel. Through narrative description, occasional dialogue, and some brief verse, Porgy, the novel, portrays the struggle between animalism and community. Porgy, the play, offers essentially the same story, but the visible actors and audible dialogue, more vividly creates community. Because these actors exchange their thoughts and feelings verbally, in much the same way as neighbors do, the play creates a more tangible sense of community interchange. The story's operatic treatment, in Porgy and Bess, adds a choral feature to the play's spoken exchanges. As the chorus acts as a communal voice, the opera present the most potent communal message.

Marge Piercy's poetry reflects the way her life and her feminist beliefs have changed over the years. Her public poems reflect her political views while her private poems focus on the linguistic problems encountered in male/female dialogue. In her private poems, she specifically addresses the need for men and women to communicate effectively by showing miscommunication occuring between the sexes. Her later works present a mature piercy as an equal partner in her relationships. Her public poetry shows her drive to change society's view of women. Although critics often reject Piercy's militant style, she continues to push for changes in society. A study of Piercy's poetry is truly a study of linguistic styles, political changes, and male/female relationships.

Toni Morrison's black characters in her novel Beloved dwell in a middle realm between slavery and a life full of responsibility. This middle realm or "safe" haven enables them to "disremember" past injustices. However, it also renders them disabled when trying to resolve moral issues, and allows them to exist blindly within the confines of an isolated illusion of almost pubescent security. In this state, characters have the certainty of the horrors of slavery behind them, but they have the uncertainty of the future ahead. Morrison's characters require the motivation of an apocalyptic upheaval (revelation or unveiling) as a catalyst to move them from that area of stasis and emotional impasse to the next level of their development and finally toward a sense of community. This movement from the middle realm to the apocalypse is conveyed by Morrison through myths drawn from several cultures. Her ability to manipulate and meld these myths provides the link to humanity's quest for control in an illusory world, and growth initiated by apocalyptic awakenings.