Emmanuel Alvarado

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Indelible Ink of the Palimpsest: Language, Myth and Narrative in H.D.'s Trilogy

Michele Braun

As a modern poet, H.D. struggled to reconcile her art with her personal experiences and reconcile modern life with literary and mythological tradition. Trilogy rewrites myth as a means of recuperating images of Judeo-Christian, Egyptian and Greek patriarchy into a narrative of female resurrection that draws upon H. D.'s experience as writer, classicist, woman, and poet. H.D. remakes reality in the process of resolving the conflict between the myth that precedes her poem and her own experience by recognizing the continuing power of myth to influence, while revising it to suit her own ends.

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Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick

The palimpsest, as H.D. uses it in “The Flowering of the Rod” (1944), remakes reality by reconfiguring it. The palimpsestic design of Trilogy, the three-part epic poem of which “The Flowering of the Rod” is a part, offers healing through a revisioning of the world in feminist terms, created and represented by superimposed feminist characters and enacted by poetic language. This feminist use of the palimpsest effects healing and empowers women because it breaks with the traumatizing (for women) traditions that are imbued with masculine form and content. As a result, H.D. reclaims female types and reinvents them to form a new poetic template that counters the exclusion of women from master narratives and advocates healing from trauma. In short, H.D.'s palimpsestic design in Trilogy encourages the validation of a feminist worldview and ideology, thereby battling silence and fostering empowerment of women.

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Rethinking the Maya: Understanding an Ancient Language in Modern Linguistic Terms

Rhianna C. Rogers

Since the 1500s, Mayan language and glyphic systems have been romanticized by Eurocentric interpretations. In recent years, many anthropological works have perpetuated these myths by presenting inaccurate analyses of Maya linguistics. Rather than showing the Maya as an advance and civilized people, these texts promoted a weak, barbarous Maya who could be easily manipulated by European culture, language, and written form. Utilizing French poet Charles Baudelaire's (1821-1867) idea of the Palimpsest, traditional anthropologists have perpetuated the Mayan Palimpsest, or the masking over of the original Mayan culture with the new. Rather than revealing the underlying cultural characteristics of the Mayan languages, as Baudelaire's theory would have presumably encouraged, Westerners have reinvented the Mayan past and masked over Mayan spoken and written languages with new vague and biased interpretations of their peoples and languages. The underlying goal of this paper is to deconstruct the Mayan Palimpsest; that is, the Eurocentric views within traditional Mayan language studies, in order to promote a more accurate interpretation of the Mayan linguistic past.

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Monarch of All I Can Sway: “Crusoeing” Alongside Oscar Wilde's “The Decay of Lying”

Val Czerny

Pursuing the terms, “remaking” and “eroding,” this exploration celebrates the fictional lie inherent in every backward search—in any overwriting of a construct conceived of as “original.” Because the search for origins inevitably involves mystery, the disclosure of earlier layers of “reality” is not always easily achieved, for when reality is “remade,” the “truth” of its source material—its foundation—necessarily involves a certain masking through the erosion of accepted constructs. Beginning with Robert Louis Stevenson, moving to Daniel Defoe, and concluding with Alexander Selkirk, I illustrate how the claim of Oscar Wilde's character, Vivian, in “The Decay of Lying,” that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” upholds the palimpsestic narrative, which, giving more credit to the re-envisioned account than to the historical one, exaggerates the truth of the mask so spiritedly and indefatigably that the dematerialized life under the mask reveals itself as uninspiringly life-less.

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Mina Loy's Design Flaws

Colbey Emmerson Reid

"Mina Loy's Design Flaws" examines a publishing mistake that resulted in the layering of a scrap of the poem "Chiffon Velours" over several lines from of a second poem, called "Photo After Pogrom." This palimpsest was no accident, but turns out to be one of many similar such anomalous designs constructed, archived, and patented by the poet. Loy is one of a number of artists who produced and theorized textual mistakes after the second World War. I argue that Loy and others treated radical dissonance, both poetic and historical, as metaphors. By approaching post-War incommensurability as a site of poetic meaning-construction rather than a sign of the disintegration of meaning, Loy transformed the marks of the total destruction of the subject into an occasion for ontological regeneration.

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Form and Function in the Social Perception and Appreciation of Web Sites

Emmanuel Alvarado

In traditional aesthetic theory the forms and shapes of an object are paramount to its aesthetic appreciation. However, here it is argued that the aesthetic evaluation of a Web site challenges traditional theory and reconfigures it since it is a combination of an Internet site's form and function that produces aesthetic satisfaction. Specifically, the article deals with the various elements involved in considering Web sites as works of art and the issues surrounding their aesthetic appraisal as such by taking into account key philosophical notions on the definition of art and aesthetic theory. Aesthetic dualism, or the aesthetic approach in which both form and function play equally important roles in the appreciation of an object, is presented as the optimal standpoint to aesthetically assess a Web site.

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