John Whalen-Bridge

• Associate Professor at National University of Singapore

Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (eds.), George Saunders: Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, $109.00 cloth, $84.99 ebook). Pp. 292. isbn978 3 3194 9931 4, 978 3 3194 9932 1. - Volume 53 Issue 3 - JOHN WHALEN-BRIDGE

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats offers an in-depth overview of one of the most innovative and popular literary periods in America, the Beat era. The Beats were a literary and cultural phenomenon originating in New York City in the 1940s that reached worldwide significance. Although its most well-known figures are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,...

Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote pla...

Introduction to special issue of Material Religion "Audio-Visual Religion in Asia." Outlines a three-part scheme for analyzing media-religion relations: What goes in to making media. What happens as it is being experienced by audiences/participants. And what are the lingering effects of the media in the lives of people.

Khyentse Norbu’s 1999 film The Cup came in the wake of several major Hollywood films that presented Tibetan Buddhism as a foil to Western secular modernity. Norbu’s film is organized around an apparent opposition between sacred and profane space and activities. While it is possible to see this opposition as relatively stable, a set of objects in th...

Using Kenneth Burke's concept of dramatism as a way of exploring multiple motivations in symbolic expression, Tibet on Fire examines the Tibetan self-immolation movement of 2011-2015. The volume asserts that the self-immolation act is an affirmation of Tibetan identity in the face of cultural genocide.

Every day or two a friend posts something on Facebook to the effect that religion is backward, violent, ignorant, and out of touch with reality—the irony of atheist fundamentalism appears to escape the attention of the new atheists intent to follow in the tracks of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. This new vocal brand of atheism may obscure...

“Human rights” is a set of attitudes and sometimes laws and other agreements that exist in relation to political economy. Speakers from various countries such as Australia, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States are nervous about China’s emergence in the twenty-first century as a world power. Occasionally heads of...

Tibetan self-immolation is an agonizing way to die that is at once an action and a series of actions. As a form of protest, it demands the attention of diasporic Tibetans, those in the PRC, and of activists, reporters, and news consumers around the world. It provokes boilerplate responses from Chinese news media and government officials. Some ambiv...

Tibetan monks and laypersons protested throughout 2008 in the “Flame of Truth” campaign, shadowing the Olympic torch that was being passed from city to city. The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile (TPiE) organized this high-profile protest, which latched onto the publicity generated by the Olympics in Beijing. It got the world’s attention, but lasted only...

In this book I have attempted to understand Tibetan self-immolation as fully as possible and to provide an account that allows us to understand the movement as Tibetans might understand it themselves. It is likely that there will be a few more political suicides, but it would seem that the main movement is over. The point has been made, and more bo...

To put one’s body on the line in a public protest, one in which there is some danger of harm, is a way of saying that the message is sincerely intended. According to Nadine Gordimer, “There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice” (13). It sounds very primitive; to the degree that we see it as primitivism, as issuing from some interesting but...

While the movement has occurred over a four-year period, each single act occurred in time adjacent to other events, and the self-immolator chose the particular place to end her life. When we ask about the motivation of self-immolators, about whether the act can be considered Buddhist, it is good to recall that about half the acts took place by a po...

Let us start with what “Angry Monk Syndrome” (AMS) is not. Actually, it refers to the phenomenon of protesting Buddhist monks, but what I will call AMS does not include Thai monks protesting about who would be the next abbot of their temple1: The monastic elders in Thailand were busy with the Wat Sothorn monks’ protest two week ago over who would g...

In an essay from 1962 entitled “Buddhism and Asian Politics,” Joseph M. Kitagawa wrote, “in any part of the world, the relation of religion to politics defies simple interpretation” (Kitagawa, 1962, p. 10), and this claim stands strong 50 years later. The particular ways of relating Buddhism and politics have, however, been debated throughout this...

In response to Chinese claims that Tibet has been liberated from feudal power structures and is undergoing a process of modernization, members of Tibet’s Government‐in‐Exile are developing a discourse of Tibetan modernity to counter China’s version. For the Dalai Lama, Director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives Geshe Lhakdor, and Prime M...

Explores the prevalence of Buddhist ideas in American literature since the 1970s. This timely book explores how Buddhist-inflected thought has enriched contemporary American literature. Continuing the work begun in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, editors John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff and the volume's contributors turn to the m...

A wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the martial arts. This landmark work provides a wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the traditional Asian martial arts. Most of the contributors to the volume are practitioners of the martial arts, and all are keenly aware that these traditions now exist in a transnational context. The book's cutting-ed...

Explores a range of Buddhist perspectives in a distinctly American context. The US seems to be becoming a Buddhist country. Celebrity converts, the popularity of the Dalai Lama, motifs in popular movies, and mala beads at the mall indicate an increasing inculcation of Buddhism into the American consciousness, even if a relatively small percentage o...

Norman Mailer died on 10 November 2007, and within a week hundreds of obituaries had been disseminated through the blogosphere. Just as Mailer set his personal vision against a representative official story at the beginning of his most influential work Armies of the Night (1968), it will be useful to begin with two remembrances. The first is from T...

The essays in Norman Mailer’s Later Fictions: “ Ancient Evenings” through “ Castle in the Forest” testify to the vitality of Mailer’s fictional engagements in the last quarter-century of his writing career. After his 1979 masterpiece The Executioner’s Song, Mailer’s work did not receive adequate critical attention, largely because he relished the r...

Gary Snyder has described his book-length poem Mountains and Rivers without End (1996) as a "mythic narrative of the female Buddha Tārā." Snyder's poem "An Offering for Tārā," like several other poems in his corpus, describes a sensual, forgiving feminine divinity of the sort that many literary scholars now find problematic. By considering two poem...

In this interview Mailer discusses orientalist aspects of works such as Ancient Evenings in relation to the notion of karmic morality that connects his works. Throughout, Mailer demonstrates his capacity for bringing together existential risk and infinite playfulness: "And so the book started as a desperate ploy."

In this interview Mailer discusses orientalist aspects of works such as Ancient Evenings in relation to the notion of karmic morality that connects his works. Throughout, Mailer demonstrates his capacity for bringing together existential risk and infinite playfulness: "And so the book started as a desperate ploy."

In Dreamer Charles Johnson recasts Martin Luther King's life as an East/West exchange in which the Christian intellectual traditions and values of Reverend King test and are tested by a the sudden appearance of a disturbing character named Chaym Smith who is an exact look-a-like of King. Smith could be described as a black dharma bum, and the ficti...

American Literature 74.3 (2002) 619-633 The specter that, a century earlier, Marx and Engels had described as stalking the continent of Europe was extending itself to the United States, looming over a nation that had prided itself on its historical immunity to the apocalyptic tragedies of either/or. —Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold Wa...

"Murderous Desire in Lolita" considers Lolita as a transgressive fantasy and compares it with Norman Mailer's novel An American Dream. Engaging D. A. Miller's arguments from The Novel and the Police, the author argues that Mailer and Nabokov are each well aware that they write "under observation" but that each uses narrative contextualization to re...

American Literature 73.2 (2001) 425-426 Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend, a comprehensive study of Kerouac’s fictional universe, examines the development of Kerouac’s use of the Oedipal theme in each work to argue that Kerouac’s fiction, nonfiction (Some of the Dharma), and even poetry are best understood as parts adding up synergistically to a more co...

Said's work has had different significance in different contexts. From a literary perspective his greatest achievement has been his challenging of the New Critical separation of aesthetic and political concerns. His seminal work Orientalism has been the central influence of the last twenty years for literary scholars concerned with cultural exchang...

American Literature 72.4 (2000) 885-887 Suddenly famous in 1948 with the publication of his first novel The Naked and the Dead , Norman Mailer has been a public figure ever since, drawing notice both as a protean man of American letters and as a paradigmatic celebrity. While Mailer has, in the prime of his career, been lauded as a Jeremiah warning...

Ian Hamilton's study purports to "penetrate the mystery" of Salinger and generally to explore the biographer's task. Unfortunately, Hamilton becomes increasingly hostile to Salinger for making the biographer's job difficult, and his hostility is unwarranted. Although the book increases readers' knowledge about Salinger, most revealing is its (unint...

In this interview Mailer discusses orientalist aspects of works such as Ancient Evenings in relation to the notion of karmic morality that connects his works. Throughout, Mailer demonstrates his capacity for bringing together existential risk and infinite playfulness: "And so the book started as a desperate ploy."

Gary Snyder has described his book-length poem Mountains and Rivers without End (1996) as a "mythic narrative of the female Buddha Tārā." Snyder's poem "An Offering for Tārā," like several other poems in his corpus, describes a sensual, forgiving feminine divinity of the sort that many literary scholars now find problematic. By considering two...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Southern California, 1992. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-253).