In this book, Robert Doran offers the first in-depth treatment of the major theories of the sublime, from the ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime (attributed to 'Longinus') and its reception in early modern literary theory to the philosophical accounts of Burke and Kant. Doran explains how and why the sublime became a key concept of modern thought and shows how the various theories of sublimity are united by a common structure - the paradoxical experience of being at once overwhelmed and exalted - and a common concern: the preservation of a notion of transcendence in the face of the secularization of modern culture. Combining intellectual history with literary theory and philosophical analysis, his book provides a new, searching and multilayered account of a concept that continues to stimulate thought about our responses to art, nature and human events.

The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant

A standard approach in historically minded disciplines to documents and other artefacts that have become suspect is to concentrate on their dissimilarities with known genuine artefacts. While such an approach works reasonably well with relatively poor forgeries, more skilfully done counterfeits have tended to divide expert opinions, demanding protracted scholarly attention. As there has not been a widespread scholarly consensus on a constrained set of criteria for detecting forgeries, a pragmatic maximum for such dissimilarities—as there are potentially an infinite numbers of differences that can be enumerated between any two artefacts—has been impossible to set. Thus, rather than relying on a philosophically robust critical framework, scholars have been accustomed to approaching the matter on a largely case-by-case basis, with a handful of loosely formulated rules for guidance. In response to these shortcomings, this dissertation argues that a key characteristic of inquiry in historically minded disciplines should be the ability to distinguish between knowledge-claims that are epistemically warranted—i.e., that can be asserted post hoc from the material reality they have become embedded in with reference to some sort of rigorous methodological framework—and knowledge-claims that are not. An ancient letter by Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215 CE) to Theodore, in which two passages from the Longer Gospel of Mark (also known as the Secret Gospel of Mark) are quoted, has long been suspected of having been forged by Morton Smith (1915–1991), its putative discoverer. The bulk of this dissertation consists of four different articles that each use different methodological approaches. The first, a discourse analysis on scholarly debate over the letter’s authenticity, illuminates the reasons behind its odd character and troubled history. Second, archival research unearths how data points have become corrupted through unintended additions in digital-image processing (a phenomenon labelled line screen distortion here). Third, a quantitative study of the handwriting in Clement’s Letter to Theodore shows the inadequacy of unwittingly applying palaeographic standards in cases of suspected deceptions compared to the standards adhered to in forensic studies. Additionally, Smith’s conduct as an academic manuscript hunter is found to have been consistent with the standard practices of that profession. Finally, a study of the conceptual distinctions and framing of historical explanations in contemporary forgery discourse reveals the power of the methodologic approach of WWFD (What Would a Forger Do?), which has recently been used in three varieties (unconcealed, concealed, and hyperactive) to construe suspected documents as potential forgeries—despite its disregard of justificatory grounding in favour of coming up with free-form, first-person narratives in which the conceivable functions as its own justification. Together, the four articles illustrate the pitfalls of scholarly discourse on forgeries, especially that surrounding Clement’s Letter to Theodore. The solution to the poor argumentation that has characterized the scholarly study of forgeries is suggested to be an exercise in demarcation: to decide (in the abstract) which features should be acceptable as evidence either for or against the ascription of the status of forgery to an historical artefact. Implied within this suggestion is the notion of constraint, i.e., such that a constrained criterion would be one that cannot be employed to back up both an argument and its counter-argument. A topical case study—a first step on the road to creating a rigorous standard for constrained criteria in determining counterfeits—is the alternative narrative of an imagined creation of Clement’s Letter to Theodore by Smith around the time of its reported discovery (1958). Concealed indicators of authority, or the deliberate concealment of authorial details within the forged artefact by the forger, is established as a staple of the literary strategy of mystification, and their post hoc construction as acceptable evidence of authorship is argued to follow according to criteria: 1) that the beginning of the act of decipherment of a concealed indicator of authority has to have been preceded by a literary primer that is unambiguous to a high degree, 2) that, following the prompting of the literary primer, the act of deciphering a concealed indicator of authority has to have adhered to a technique or method that is unambiguous to a high degree, and 3) that, following the prompting of the literary primer and the act of decipherment, both of which must have been practiced in an unambiguous manner to a high degree, the plain-text solution to the concealed indicator of authority must likewise be unambiguous to a high degree.

A Study in Authenticity : Admissible Concealed Indicators of Authority and Other Features of Forgeries : A Case Study on Clement of Alexandria, Letter to Theodore, and the Longer Gospel of Mark

This dissertation examines the discourse that emerged in the late 1980s positing a “retour du romanesque” in French literature Through a survey of the scholarly work on the subject of contemporary literature and the romanesque, as well as a close analysis of three major authors associated with the “retour du romanesque”--Jean Echenoz, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine--this dissertation aims to provide a fuller account of the modalities, stakes and goals of the contemporary novel In particular, it seeks to address the question of how the contemporary return to the romanesque contributes to defining the aesthetic postulates that underpin the last thirty years of French literary production The broader aim of this study is to interrogate the theoretical positions that might justify alternative readings of a development that could otherwise be considered purely in terms of regression to conservative standards of literary quality The three authors considered in this study are exemplary of the diverse understandings of the developments of 20th-century literature, and the ways in which these understandings influence decisions pertaining to literary kinship and filiation Jean Echenoz riffs on the standards of conventional genre fiction, at once sabotaging and renewing its cliches Jean Rouaud polemically refuses what he sees as a tradition of experimental fiction, and returns to the romanesque as a literature of slow contemplation and strong axiological positions Antoine Volodine constructs violent alternate realities, as well as an entire fictional community, in an attempt to sever his literary works from any relation to literary past, present, or future This dissertation finally argues that these writing projects all point to the need for a theoretical paradigm which would reconcile critical and naive, reflective and immersive reading practices Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Romance Languages First Advisor Gerald Prince

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Problematic returns: On the romanesque in contemporary French literature

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories involve a hermeneutic game in which Holmes attempts to uncover the mystery of unsolved crime. The work of Hans-Georg Gadamer enables Holmes’s methods to be seen as both playful and creative as he seeks to understand what G. K. Chesterton refers to as the poetry of the modern world. Holmes is therefore a creative and scientific detective, one who loses himself in the game of detection in order to find himself in the search for truth in the wider world. Through the agency of Dr Watson, the reader is invited to join the game and attempt to work out the solution to the mystery as the narrative unfolds before them. Peter Huhn’s work on the detective as reader and writer is extended in relation to the work of understanding and creation carried out by authors who add new works to the genre of Holmesian fiction. This process is explored in the context of two playful writing workshops in which participants passed the opening of a piece of Holmesian fiction they had written to another participant to continue, before sharing the results with the group. Hans Robert Jauss’s ideas about genre and other perspectives on reimagining Holmes help contextualize the strategies used by participants, while Gadamer’s conception of the festive enables insights into the communal processes of creation and understanding.

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“The game is afoot”: Sherlock Holmes, hermeneutics and collaborative writing

In the past two decades, transcultural or cross-cultural literary texts have sparked several public controversies in various Scandinavian countries. Bokhandleren i Kabul (2002; The Bookseller of Kabul, 2003), by Asne Seierstad, in Norway; Gomda (1995; Buried Alive) and Asyl (2004; Asylum Granted), by Liza Marklund and Maria Eriksson, in Sweden; the poems of Yahya Hassan (Tahya Hassan: Digte, 2013) in Denmark; and Layla (2011), by Jari Tervo, in Finland are among these controversial texts that are located between cultures. All of these texts have induced arguments between those who write them and those whom they are written about (or who perceive themselves to be the object of the writing). The reasons for these controversies are manifold, but one almost always has to do with the question of realism: that is, to what extent have these texts been written, presented, or read as realistic and generalizing or as generalizable depictions of the texts' respective cultures and people? In recent decades, this problem has been particularly topical in Scandinavia; however, the issue is larger. Similar questions have touched cross-cultural literary texts all the way from The Satanic Verses (1988), by Salman Rushdie, to The White Tiger (2008), by Aravind Adiga (on Rushdie, see Pipes 1990). Are these texts offered to readers as realistic descriptions of alien cultures? Or, alternatively, to what extent are they read as true representations, regardless of their genre? The current article approaches this cross-cultural problem by examining the reception of the Finnish novel Parvekejumalat (2010; Balcony Gods), by Anja Snellman. As one of the first novels written in Finnish to deal with Somali immigration, Parvekejumalat narrates the story of a girl with a Somali background and a Finn who has converted to Islam. In the spring of 2010, several newspaper critiques of Parvekejumalat included a strange and, perhaps, worrying feature. More than one critic seemed to have read this novel, which describes cultural contact zones (Pratt 1992), as a truthful, realistic period piece, revealing aspects of society that had previously gone unnoticed. They read Parvekejumalat as a kind of expose of the taboos of contemporary Finland. As such, the reception of Parvekejumalat seemed to repeat the starting points for many literary conflicts located on the borders of cultures. This article focuses on this question of a realistic reading of Parvekejumalat. Even if Snellman's novel did not ignite an actual public controversy, by examining its reception, we can better understand why narratives located in cultural crossroads so often evoke strong emotions and determine the role of realistic reading practices in the controversies that follow. The article approaches this question by analyzing two sets of data in the reception of Parvekejumalat. newspaper reviews of the novel and entrance exam answers about the novel produced at the University of Turku. The first part of the article examines nine newspaper and magazine critiques of Parvekejumalat and the inclination of these critics to read the novel as a plausible and realistic story. It focuses particularly on critics' tendency to read and interpret the patriarchal violence of the novel in a larger culturalist frame. The second part of the article analyzes entrance exam results concerning Parvekejumalat, which were produced in the Department of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku. (In the Finnish educational system, access to universities is gained through participation in an entrance exam, for which material must always be read beforehand. In 2011, this material included Snellman's Parvekejumalat.) The second part of the article discusses how the examinees perceived the novel as a depiction of the clash between cultures, and tended to confuse the categories of fact and fiction. With the aid of these two source categories, reviews and examinations, I will discuss how Parvekejumalat was interpreted in relation to contemporary reality, which many consider to be plagued by a conflict between the values of Islam and Somali culture, on one hand, and Finnish and Western values, on the other. …

Like "Any Muslim Family That Has Moved to Finland": The Fallacy of Realistic Reading Practices in the Reception of Parvekejumalat by Anja Snellman

Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary Representation

Kirjalliset väärennökset : Huijauksia, plagiaatteja ja luovia lainauksia

Rewritings and adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories are traditionally called pastiches among fandom. This article juxtaposes that established use with the literary critical notion of pastiche as imitation of style, and shows how stylistic affinity to the originals produces complex effects in the imitations. The article identifies two main strands in the pastiches: one that aims to correct the mistakes and fill in the gaps in the original stories, and one that supplements the canon with stories Watson left untold. Balancing among homage, criticism, and usurpation, the pastiches comment on the original story world and its cultural context, and engage in fictions of authorship to account for the apparent inauthenticity of the retellings.

Authorship and Authenticity in Sherlock Holmes Pastiches

Literature and International Copyright after the Berne Convention (1886)

In this paper, I argue for the usefulness of the historical study of concepts for the understanding of relations between the arts and between the different disciplines of arts research. Discussion on concepts often focuses on precision: by careful definition and delimitation we make concepts into functional “tools” that are the result of a linear, teleological formation. Such streamlining often obscures from view the multiple, fragmentary origins of concepts and their transfer across disciplinary borders. Yet it is particularly the ambiguity and discursivity of concepts that renders them their cultural and critical relevance. Taking as an example the concept of burlesque, I demonstrate the role of concepts as sites of debate that retain their edge even when they become adapted to new contexts. The case of burlesque shows how interdisciplinarity begins “at home”: much of the critical vocabulary that literary studies uses is not its own but shared with and shaped by other arts and disciplines.

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Sanna Nyqvist

Papers

Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary Representation

Kirjalliset väärennökset : Huijauksia, plagiaatteja ja luovia lainauksia

Authorship and Authenticity in Sherlock Holmes Pastiches

Literature and International Copyright after the Berne Convention (1886)

Shared Concepts in Arts and Literature