Eric Berlatsky

Abstract: J7 Бас Berlatsky's The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation is a theory-sawy study of the unique interrelationship of history and narration in postmodern novels. Berlatsky's central concern is the postmodern phenomenon of the withdrawal of the real, in this case the relationship between the past and the present. In pursuing this concern Berlatsky asks what the difference between history as event and history as narration is, whether history is "knowable," and what degree of importance should narration be given in searching for a true history. Berlatsky sees a skepticism in postmodern historical fiction that is similar to Hayden White's skepticism "toward narrative's capacity to represent the past" (21). Both postmodern historical fiction and narrative as White conceives it assume the impossibility of accurate representation. This assumption raises ethical questions alluded to in the title of this volume. Drawing upon the ethics of late-period Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and the "ethical turn" in the humanities, Berlatsky argues that there is a danger in drawing too close a connection between postmoderni distrust of representation and the ineffable horror of real historical events such as the Holocaust. There is a leveling potential which may render the mundane horrific and the horrific mundane.

Abstract: One of the most difficult and confusing of narratological concepts is that of the "narrative frame." While numerous studies refer to and examine the frame, its defin- ition remains somewhat elusive. The central reason for this is the sheer quantity of concepts and ideas to which this singular appellation refers. Internal narrators and narratives, paratexts, advertisements, blurbs, the covers of a book: all of these have been referred to as "frames," in addition to more metaphorical applications. In "Framing in Wuthering Heights," for example, John Matthews looks not only at "em- bedded narratives," but also at the metaphorical frame of the human body, and the general concept of boundaries in order to elucidate how the novel explores "empty middles" and Lacanian psycholinguistic "lack." That is, a look at a more or less ob- jectively identifiable narrative feature (narratives within other narratives) is soon treated figuratively, as "liminality" of both form and content, generating a metaphor- ical slippage that may be productive for understanding the individual novel, but is less so for understanding the concept itself. Indeed, as I will argue, constitutive of the difficulty in pinpointing the term is the link between the literary frame and framing in the visual arts, particularly painting. Some of the earliest discussions of the liter- ary frame attempt to map the typical notion of the picture frame onto literature with problematic and confusing results. In order to address this problem, I divide this essay into two primary parts. First, I discuss the shortcomings of the "picture frame" model, particularly in its con- flation of two distinct concepts: the physical liminality of frames and their capacity to direct interpretation. Through a use of a simple two-axis graph, I illustrate how the conflation of these two functions blurs understanding of the various kinds of frames

Abstract: In recent debates over the proper methods to be pursued by practicing historians, the elusive chimera known as postmodernism has been raised consistently as either the key to a new practice of history that would help historians reach their aesthetic and creative potential or as the dangerous relativism that would dissolve the discipline of History altogether.1 “Postmodernist historiography,” or constructivist historicism, has a deep and pervasive tie to narrative and narrative theory, largely because its central figure, Hayden White, is deeply interested in the ways in which the narrative form has affected the possibility of material reference in historical discourse. While constructivist and relativist skepticism towards the possibility of historical objectivity predate White substantially,2 the focus on narrative as a central barrier to objective reference is most archetypically represented by White’s work. Although there have been some amendments to White’s early radical position, his initial narrativism remains a powerful influence upon postmodern historiography, and a source of contention. Narrativism, in brief, is the belief that no “meaning” is inherent to a collection of historical facts and events retained or selected from the past. Rather, the act of narration itself is responsible for any sense of meaning or causality that links historical events together. In his well-

Abstract: T much of paul auster’s Ghosts, the protagonist detective, Blue, is metaphorically imprisoned in a small room, condemned to the monotony of watching another man, Black, and waiting for him to do something. Eventually, however, Blue begins to break from his routine, leaving his room on occasion because he feels so close to Black that he knows what his counterpart will do even when he is not being watched. Two of Blue’s early adventures expose a blind spot in Blue’s vision, however, a crucial problem for a man whose job it is to watch another. In the first such adventure: “Blue goes to the small grassy yard . . . studying the bronze statue of Henry Ward Beecher. Two slaves are holding on to Beecher’s legs, as though begging him to help them, to make them free at last, and in the brick wall behind there is a porcelain relief of Abraham Lincoln. Blue cannot but feel inspired by these images, and . . . his head fills with noble thoughts of the dignity of man” (189). It is clear in this passage that Blue’s blind spot is race, or in some sense, “color,” despite his name. The statue depicts Beecher as the white hero of the abolitionist movement. The historical truth, however, is more ambivalent, with most accounts of Beecher portraying him not only as an abolitionist, but also as a racist and opportunist whose opposition to slavery was not accompanied by a belief in the social and essential equality of blacks and whites. Indeed, Beecher’s abolitionist

Abstract: To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

Abstract: What constitutes the pervasive cultural assumptions known to us as "America?" Since the American hemisphere actually encompasses a variety of national identities, can it make sense to speak of a unified "American" identity? Can a place for marginalized identities be established within the cultural mainstream? Comparative American Identities maps out a dynamic terrain of "New World" cultural identities, questions and problems. The essays attempt to locate "America" as a cultural and historical site of plurality and division, a discursive space of multiple differences which becomes, paradoxically, the ground for a new notion of American unity.

Abstract: Although the graphic narrative genre is increasingly being utilized to represent human rights atrocities in complex ways, scholarship on this topic tends to focus on the analysis of issues of historical representation Therefore, this essay contributes to this conversation a nuanced understanding of contextual reading practices in human rights discourse by analyzing Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009) through the rhetorical concept of kairos and current theories of comics narratology If kairos draws attention to the layered historical contexts operating within Sacco’s graphic narratives as they stake claims for human rights in Palestine and comics studies scholarship focuses on the spatio-temporal dynamics of the graphic narrative form, then together these critical approaches can disrupt the linear notions of time and bounded spaces involved in the denial of Palestinians’ rights to property, land, and return Such an approach draws attention to the urgency of Sacco’s human rights project even while he questions its efficacy

Abstract: Novels written about comic books possess a unique representational potential. Although many of these novels treat comics chiefly as sources of readymade metaphors, authors such as Rick Moody and Michael Chabon have expanded their figural lexicon. As serial narratives, comic books present novelists with a form of metonymic combination that can conflate or arrest time; as visual narratives, they offer the possibility of escaping conventional linguistic signification. The novels that translate these figurative strategies to prose use comics to challenge some of the most basic tenets of the linguistic turn of twentieth-century critical theory.