Editors’ Note

As in previous years, we would like to thank our talented authors and book reviewers as well as all of our thoughtful anonymous manuscript reviewers who give so much of their time in the process of preparing, selecting, and revising the articles appearing in Pacific Coast Philology. Several of the articles that were collectively chosen for this issue focus on roles and relationships within families. Four essays place a particular emphasis on gender roles and feminist readings, two articles investigate the formal language of film and photography, and three are concerned with works of poetry. All five articles use enriching and often surprising lenses and backdrops, “via,” “in light of,” and “against” which they analyze the primary text of their investigation.

In “ ‘Some / would like you to make room, / mother . . .’: On Mothers and Sons in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs,” Hannah Baker Saltmarsh argues that the poetic voices of mother and son in Song 14 by Berryman collaborate, while also remaining distinct from each other. Thus “Song 14 places the mother-son relationship at the crux of Henry’s development as a poet.” This example of male-voiced confessional poetry, then, can be read as emanating from a speaker who is neither a detached subject nor an infantilized object. The voice evolves as it calls out from the child’s self-asserting boredom against the mother’s chiding, and from situations of shared conversations, games, special occasions, and mourning for a lost father and husband. Henry, the speaker, also imagines himself as a birthing mother and poetess, interrogating and swapping gender roles in his poetic project. By turns, Song 14 and other poems and writings by Berryman are shown as celebrating, resisting, quoting, and emulating the mother’s voice. As Saltmarsh’s analysis suggests, the male confessional voice is marked by a commitment to, and inflection by, a mother’s voice; it turns out to be participatory, intersubjective, dynamic, and playful.

In her essay “Mourning Glory: Grief and Grieving in Robinson’s Home,” Susan Petit analyzes the narrator Glory as the actual protagonist in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home. In a close reading of the text, Petit lays out the various familial, personal, and romantic grieving processes Glory is able to complete against many odds, and walls of family silence, as she returns to her childhood home and takes up residence there. At thirty-eight, Glory is shown as carefully and constructively coming to terms with her grief over the loss of a beloved niece; the repeated disappearances of her favorite brother, Jack; the disappointment and shame of her failed courtship with what turned out to be a fraudulent fiancé, and, most importantly perhaps, the non-fruition of her own youthful hopes and aspirations. Petit examines numerous psychological theories of grieving and mourning as well as midcentury family trends and statistics. Against this analytical and historical background, she teases out a complex and compelling portrait of Glory and demonstrates that “Glory’s gradual recovery from her situational depression provides a unifying thread and the central arc in Home.”

In his essay “Michael Haneke’s Amour in the Light of Italian Neorealism,” Kevin Bongiorni appropriates the concept of the palimpsest to explore cinematic remnants that not only hover beneath the surface of Amour and its themes of decline and love but are also visibly presented. Although Amour does not share the “technical poverty” of postwar Italian Neorealism, it nevertheless focuses on the simple reality of everyday life, especially, the plight of the elderly couple and their dependent relationship that becomes a fundamental part of the narrative. In a carefully structured analysis comparing De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Amour, Bongiorni argues that the film’s simplicity, naturalness, and representation of the drama of old age and its accompanying social issues in an increasingly aging society demonstrates Haneke’s successful use of Italian Neorealism. Bongiorni even goes so far as to say that it is not Haneke’s debt to Italian Neorealism but Italian Neorealism’s debt to Haneke that is at stake here, “as with his film he achieves a Neorealist purity that even they [the Italians...