Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2014"

The past is always in the present. Aether and the returns of history and Europe’s new post-1989 peripheries. The cases of Mihail Sebastian’s diary and Emir Suljagić’s Srebrenica memoir

Abstract: In this article I have used the notion of ‘the aether’—radio space—in two non-fiction texts, to analyse how both older and more recent trauma reconfigured post-1989 European literary geography into a new constellation of a centre and peripheries. I describe how Mihail Sebastian’s Diary, written between 1935 and 1944, but not published until 1996, reflects the idea of a European Hochkultur that could be maintained by listening to classical music on the radio, while anti-Semitism and ethnic persecution denied the author his cosmopolitan Romanian-Jewish identity. The author’s ‘identity confusion’ was transposed in the 1990s, when his diary’s first publication in the midst of ‘Romania’s cultural wars’ (Livezeanu) led to heated debates about the holocaust in Romania as a moral touchstone for its ways into Europe. The case of Sebastian is discussed alongside Emir Suljagic’s literary Srebrenica memoir, in which comparison with the holocaust deeply influences both the protagonist’s interpretation of his own experience of ethnic persecution, and the European world’s failure to identify with his position. The two cases shed light on how an imaginary European centre emerged in Eastern-Europe and the Balkans from the perspective of two peripheries, one old, one new.

Earl Miner: comparative poetics and the construction of world poetics

Abstract: In current international comparative literature scholarship, Earl Miner’s significant contribution seems to be overlooked, although comparative poetics is still discussed periodically. To the author, Miner is not the first to shift critical attention from a traditional Eurocentric or West-centric mode to East-West comparative literature and theoretical studies. But he should, however, be regarded as having transcended what was achieved by his contemporaries such as Rene Etiemble, Douwe Fokkema and James Liu; and as having reached the level of general literary studies. His practice is close to current studies of world literature, although he seldom used this term. But the present discussion on the issue of world literature lacks the construction of world poetics. Inspired by Miner’s preliminary work, the author tries to continue his incomplete project and offer his own theoretical construction of such a world poetics as crossing the boundary of languages and cultures. To the author, even in today’s global cultural context, Miner’s legacy should still be considered important and pioneering in the construction of world literary theory.

Earl Miner: New Sinology through comparative literature

Abstract: The rise of Chinese–Western comparative literature studies, which is part of Eastern–Western comparative literature studies, expanded the focus of comparative literature from the age-old Eurocentrism to one with a more global orientation. This achievement owes considerably to three European and North American scholars: Rene Etiemble (1909–2002), Douwe Fokkema (1931–2011), and Earl Miner (1927–2004). Given the historical significance of their contributions, it is no exaggeration to regard these three scholars as the Troika from the West in the field of CWCLS. This article’s focus is on Earl Miner and his contribution toward the merge of sinology with comparative literature through a non-Orientalist’s approach that secured an equal opportunity for both Chinese and Western literatures. Earl Miner’s success owes much to the paradigm shifts in sinology that happened in the later half of the twentieth century. These shifts also played a role in the rise of New Sinology.

Cross-cultural translation: attitudes, feelings and affective interactions

Abstract: Translational attitude varies from culture to culture, and different underlying assumptions about how translation functions merit careful attention. The supposed neutrality of translation belies principal points of political contention and cultural conflict. While violations of strict neutrality are committed all the time, either consciously or unconsciously, when complex emotions, attitudes, moods and dispositions are entangled with cultural politics and aesthetic norms of the target language, its negative side also becomes apparent, for it may well result in apathy or aloofness. Thus, the translator’s intervention, though often politicized, is required to make the task of cross-cultural communication possible. It is mainly in response to cultural differences embodied in translational attitude that intervention is called for, which then determines the way in which appropriation is implemented. Aside from thoughts, feelings and emotions in the original should be translated to be inferred and represented to enable and empower the target reader to fully engage in cross-cultural experiences. This paper offers a way of understanding the nature of translational attitude in relation to the complexity of the original with its nuanced feelings and emotions, and of examining their reproduction in shaping and determining the end-product of translation.

Completing a new official history: significance of White-Deer Plain

Abstract: Post-Mao China witnesses the rise of the province in the Chinese political and economic system. Echoing the Central’s cultural nationalism, the province has used cultural materials, especially historical resources, to create its own identity for distinctiveness. This paper examines the regional consciousness of Chen Zhongshi, a writer from central Shaanxi. His two novellas of the mid-1980s clearly demonstrate the cultural difference between central and northern Shaanxi. Chen views his discerned Confucian tradition in central Shaanxi differently in his most well-known novel, White-Deer Plain, which shows his regional consciousness and, on larger scales, provincialism and nationalism. These works raise a question on the relationship between his culturalist stance and the official ideology. His new viewpoint has acquired him much more than those writings deserve. The long acceptance process of the novel reflects and also articulates a new national context; it also shows the negotiations among state agencies on China’s transition.

“The Rhetorics of Space”: Introduction

Abstract: The group of articles here assembled and entitled “The Rhetorics of Space” describes a specific re-appropriation of the concept Steven Mullaney so dubbed. The phenomenon, in the present context, refers to the trans-national discourse of nationalism(s) and its “cultural inscriptions” in space. Variations of the rhetoric of space characterize some nation-states’ capitals, namely those that received the formal-political status of a capital in the course of well-known emancipation movements in Europe—from the 19th century forward. The particular variants of the rhetoric of space explored within the pages of the essays to follow, however diverse in approach or focus, are all bound by one common thread: the intense cultural-political function of each national literature and its correlations with literary history.

The problem of theorizing comparisons (in science and literature)

Abstract: In a first step, I will explain why there is something theoretically problematic about comparisons and how this problem can be described. Second, I will expound the matter historically: in three texts—two ‘scientific’ ones and a ‘literary’ one—dating from around 1870, thus, from an epoch which is, in several respects, critical for the comparative method in European science and literature. The authors discussed are Charles Darwin, Max Muller, and Lautreamont.

“Every monument erected by a nation to its greats is erected to the nation itself”: Vodnik, Prešeren, and the nationalization of the Carniolan capital’s topography

Abstract: This paper center-stages the canonization of two key figures of Slovenian poetry, each of the early nineteenth century: Valentin Vodnik and France Preseren, and the placement of their statues in the public space of Ljubljana, capital of the Habsburg province of Carniola. Late in the nineteenth century, monuments to “cultural saints” became an important symbolic battlefield for the Slovenian national movement, striving for greater cultural and political autonomy. More broadly understood, Ljubljana turns out to be a paradigmatic example of how the literal battle for the nationalization of the city was fought through the occupation of public space by statues of “great men of literature.” The struggle, then, adopts semiotic significance. The Carniolan capital would eventually become a spiritual metropolis of “Slovenedom,” densely sown with far-reaching monumental symbols.

Re)staging the rhetorics of space

Abstract: The essay takes three examples of the recent Slovene politicized post- or retro-avant-garde big stage events in order to discuss their rhetorics and politics of space. It examines closely to which extent they can be interpreted as a contemporary version of rituals referring to the performative spatial signs as representations of the Slovene cultural space’s ever changing late- and post-socialist identity. Performed in some symbolic places within the territory of the capital of Ljubljana (The Republic Square, the biggest cultural and congress centre Cankarjev dom) these big scale events confirm and subvert the cultural identity of the community. They traverse the borderlines within the semiosphere of a cultural capital in which peripheries begin to synthesize new texts and introduce innovative ideas that are foreign and unknown to the centre and that might possibly act as catalysts for change. Using signs from peripheries these artistic events generate new meanings, structures and texts that invade the centre. We can interpret this procedure as an animated, dynamic process of the performance: a spatial machine characterized by parallel passages from real to formalized space, from frontal to circular and multi-centred space. Borders of the semiosphere that are originally used in order to separate and create identities, thus also connect and construct these identities by juxtaposing the own and the alien. By appropriating relations between spatial signs in different historical periods of Ljubljana they culturally present and deconstruct the past and present while using postmodern performative reading of objects of the past and present, intermixing and compounding art/theatre/film/music/literature/ballet/sports models. Thus they radically blur the borderline between real and fictive experience.

Literary Tallinn at the end of the nineteenth century: the structure of its townscape. An overview

Abstract: Estonian literature of the late nineteenth century is examined in terms of its various and often questionable depictions of the town of Tallinn. Such representations appear in several stories as well as in the first Estonian city-novel. The townscape that emerges from such writings is controversial: it is seemingly divided into different spaces, and each encounter brings with it some sort of conflict. In this optic, we, as readers, witness the perceptions of the city through the lens of given writers at a given moment in literary history.

Facts, fiction, cognition

Abstract: This article analyzes some aspects of the interdisciplinary convergences between cognitive sciences (psychology and neurosciences) and literary theory, with a stress on the blurring of the boundaries that separate fact from fiction in the 1990 until now. The focus falls on the misleading uses of metaphor as “transportation” and “simulation,” which led some psychologists and neuroscience specialists to overstate the powers of fiction, while also erasing the specificity of fiction. Finally, it shows how some literary theorists who embraced the simulation thesis were forced to invent a pseudo-simulation, a counter simulation or an anti-simulation to reassert the distinctive features of fiction.

From devotion to disillusionment: the changing face of Penelope from Homer to Buero to Miras

Abstract: This paper examines the adaptation of the classical figure of Penelope in two twentieth-century Spanish dramas: Antonio Buero Vallejo’s La tejedora de suenos (1952) and Domingo Miras’ Penelope (1971). Unlike Homer’s epic, the Penelope of these modern tragedies regrets the return of her husband, who at this point in time lost his heroic status. Buero’s and Miras’ works are not unique in their treatment of this theme, but they are among the first, at least in Spain, to consider the drama from Penelope’s perspective, while remaining faithful to the essential plot and setting of Homer’s Odyssey. Miras goes further than Buero in reducing his heroine to a (literally) vegetative state at the conclusion of the drama while Buero’s Penelope will be lauded for her constancy, though, paradoxically, she dreams of her love for Anfino, not for her husband, Ulysses. Homer’s Penelope tirelessly awaits the return of her husband over the course of a twenty-year period; yet, such devotion is absent from all modern interpretations of this myth. Modern critics of these works justify such an altered characterization of Penelope as a function of the brutish nature of the bellicose Ulysses, whereas Homer’s Penelope relishes his bloody (and by extent, combative) appearance. Moreover, Odysseus is classified as a new hero, distinct from Achilles and Ajax, for example, both earlier warriors. He is strategically armed, and such tactical know-how, in addition to the advocacy of, and counsel from, Athena, ensure his survival. The modern incarnations of Penelope, however diverse, share several notable constants: sustained dreams of romantic and filial love; diminished devotion to gods and spouses; and manifest disillusionment with both marriage and with the glory borne of warfare.

The literary translator as social agent: Zhou Zuoren and the literature for children

Abstract: This article analyzes Zhou Zuoren’s (1885–1967) engagement with foreign children’s literature. It is argued that Zhou Zuoren, a pioneering figure in the New Culture Movement, pursued his progressive agenda chiefly through championing Ren de wenxue (a humane literature) in general and a children’s literature in particular. Translation was for him not only a tool in creating a new and genuine literature for children, but more importantly, a means of education that was designed for the formation of children’s mind. Eventually, his aim was two-fold: to turn China into renguo (a country of human individuals) and to find it a place in the modern world. The tensions between the nation, the individual and the world in modern China were thus all weaved into Zhou Zuoren’s conception of children’s literature. Through Zhou’s case, this article endeavors to examine how the literary translator, being exposed to foreign literatures and cultures, could help effect positive literary and social changes within her or his own culture. The aim is to explore the function and role of the literary translator as an effective social agent in the global era.

The socio-logic of knowledge-in-formation between discovery and error : some considerations from 'normal science' under exceptional conditions

Abstract: A sociology of knowledge of a specific kind, namely that emerging from observations on the work of scientific thought collectives, is what Thomas Kuhn acknowledges as Ludwik Fleck’s (Denkstile und Tatsachen. Gesammelte Schriften und Zeugnisse, Suhrkamp, Berlin, 1936) influence on his own Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Yet the relationship between thought and collective that turns out to be one of the central problematics in Fleck’s thought, remains troubling to Kuhn. The reservations expressed by Kuhn go to the core of Fleck’s conceptualization of the structures, roles, scientific achievements, illusions, and errors of thought collectives, as well as to the sociology of knowledge with which he is credited, but which remains a theoretical blindspot. I would here like to take a closer look at this problematic, with a view to specifying the nature and the dynamic of a ‘sociology of knowledge’ that a leading thought would engender in a scientific collective, in its refractions between internal and external conditions of knowledge formation, operationalized under conditions of scientific work in Nazi concentration camps, as they were retrospectively recounted by Fleck (Cognition and fact: material on Ludwik Fleck, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1946).

An overview of literary mapping projects on cities: literary spaces, literary maps and sociological (re)conceptualisations of space

Abstract: The status of literary mapping projects as applied to national capitals or large cities invites fascinating modes of exegesis. The use of literary maps, now one of the main tools in spatially-oriented literary studies, reveals, among other phenomena, the relationship between real and imaginary spaces. This essay proffers two options: maps used in literary studies in a limited fashion and in tandem with spatial studies—i.e., geographical analyses—or a renunciation of maps when literary imageries of cities are determined to be fictional and unreal. The latter possibility is supported particularly by modern sociological (re)conceptualisations of space, which, prior to the spatial turn in post-modernist studies, advocated the view that (city) space is a result of specific material features and of the social dynamics and practices of the users of that space. All considered, it is time perhaps that literary studies reconsider these models and the (appropriate or inappropriate) use of maps.

The recognizable European. Sebald’s and Tišma’s human geographies of stitches and scars

Abstract: This article describes how two novels with a strong European presence from the 1990s onward, Aleksandar Tisma’s The Book of Blam and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, offer an understanding of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s through the prism of the Holocaust. First, a reading of Austerlitz reveals an intriguing lacuna in Sebald’s melancholic map of Europe. I read this lacuna, using Judith Butler’s notion of ‘the recognizable human’, as Sebald’s predominantly Western-European perspective. I then place this next to Aleksandar Tisma’s conception of Srednja Evropa. This European middle space offers more suggestive and ambivalent East–West imagery for post-1989 Europe, and also, as I contend, a more complex framing of the Yugoslav wars with reference to the Holocaust. The essay will then try to assess literary fiction’s renewed claim on the real, particularly with respect to the distribution of ‘the recognizable human’ within the various zones of Europe.

“Relax and enjoy these disasters”: news media consumption and family life in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

Abstract: This essay constitutes an analytical exploration of the contemporary media-saturated environment and, concomitantly, the television’s palpable effects upon everyday (and family) life—issues manifest throughout Don DeLillo’s fiction and, more specifically, in what has been deemed his “breakout book”: White Noise. Significant theories vis-a-vis the consequences of media and the data gathered and interpreted by media reception ethnographers (e.g., David Morley, Jean Baudrillard) are brought to bear. Ultimate conclusions point to the fact that media sources do, in fact, provide impetus for the sharing of human concerns and fears, and thus embody a cohesive and pragmatic “apparatus” of family life.

The memory of national literature in Budapest city centre

Abstract: This paper, which focuses upon the analysis of street names and public monuments in the central area of Budapest, leads us to consider how the fundamental and far-reaching under-girdings of literature (world literature, the very system of writing, literary art, literary institutions) ultimately influence the portayal of the cityscape and the very representation of the city. In such evocations of Budapest, one discovers that description and depiction constitute, above all else, a conduit for political content.

The brain and the ballad stanza: notes in the margins of interdisciplinary work

Abstract: With the growing influence of neuroscience and empirical psychology in the humanities, transdisciplinary fields like “cognitive poetics” claim to redefine the epistemic status of literary studies. Drawing from the working experience in a research project dedicated to the emotional processing of poetic meter, this paper discusses some of the implications of this claim. Poetic meter seems to be of special interest here, because even in classical poetics it was considered rather an object of measuring than of interpretation, thus forming a sort of intermediate object between a hermeneutical and an empirical approach. In order to be introduced into an experimental setting, a poem has to be transformed into a “stimulus”, which raises the question of how the experimental process relates to the individual act of reading: who (or what) is reading the poetic stimulus? In the final section of my paper I introduce the psychoanalytical concept of transference to describe the difference between the act of reading and the cognitive experiment. I argue that transference is precisely the effect the experimental setting is designed to exclude.

Earl Miner: from comparative literature to comparative world literature

Abstract: This essay is divided into two parts. The first one intends to make a summary of Earl Miner’s cross-cultural comparative poetics. The author asserts that Earl Miner, as a distinguished scholar in comparative literature studies, has made innovative contribution in three aspects: his proactive global vision, his pioneering research methods, and his insightful academic thoughts. The second part, starting from Miner’s pioneering work and his theory in comparative literature, focuses on the comparative studies in China. The author argues that comparative literature studies in China has generally ignored its uniqueness in discipline status and academic community, mainly on “the positioning of discipline” and the Chinese comparatists. Under the circumstances of Chinese comparative literature studies, moving toward a conscientious construction of world poetics, the author is committed to the idea of “comparative world literature” with the great help of translation. Such “a study of foreign literatures in translation” will enable scholars to conduct researches on literary relations, cultural studies and/or interdisciplinary studies.

Political interrogation in contemporary Chinese fiction

Abstract: Many factors have played a role in the process of contemporary Chinese fiction. Chinese fiction in the twenty-first century is featured by various thematic concerns of which the political concern stands out. Writers in the new century have diverged from the conventional way to sing along with and speak for the dominant ideology of the reform as many did during Deng Xiaoping’s reign. They have shifted their attention to the shaded side of contemporary China, writing about the disadvantaged/marginalized and reflecting on the social problems that accompany the existing social order. Their voice is harsh, interrogative, but heart-wrenching. This paper will cite the texts by Yan Lianke, Mo Yan and Liu Xinglong to examine how these writers interrogate the leading policies and write up the grassroots rebellion against the orthodox society.

Alienation or empowerment? Reading, writing, and orature in God's Bits of Wood

Abstract: The article presents the significance of reading, writing, and orature in Ousmane Sembene’s classic novel, “God’s Bits of Wood” in light of theories regarding education and foreign language reading particularly in the context of a decolonizing West Africa. A close reading of the text reveals Sembene’s preoccupations with the politics and utility of literature and orature. Ultimately, Sembene can be seen to allow for a hybrid text and culture where written and oral language are both used to serve the interests of a community.

Die narrative Theologie als Meta-Narratologie

Abstract: Der Begriff der narrativen Theologie taucht ab den 70er Jahren im deutschen Diskurs auf, gepragt vor allem von J. B. Metz und H. Weinrich. Er gewinnt gerade in jenem Jahrzehnt als narratologische Forschungsrichtung Konturen, als die interdisziplinar ausgerichtete Narratologie ihre produktivste und vielseitigste Phase erlebt. In meinem Vortrag befasse ich mich mit der Frage, in welcher Art und Weise das gemeinsame Interesse der Theologen und Narratologen zum Prozess der „narrativen Wende” beitrug. Narratopoetologische Kategorien bekommen wiederum bei den Interpretationen von biblischen Texten, verschiedenen Gattungen und Diskursansatzen eine besondere Akzentuierung. Paul Ricoeur behandelt den Fragekomplex der Erzahlforschung in gegenseitiger Wechselwirkung der Philosophie, Hermeneutik und der theologischen Reflexion. Der Aspekt der narrativen Theologie spielt auch in der rabbinischen Exegesetradition (J. Schulte) eine wichtige Rolle. In der Kleinen Apologie des Erzahlens (1973) weisst J. B. Metz die gemeinschaftsbildende, identitatsstiftende Funktion der narrativen Erinnerung in der Geschichte des Christentums zu. Den Akzent legt er auf religiose Erfahrungen, die weder durch den Ritus noch durch das Dogma vermittelt werden konnen. Die Schopfung, die Auferstehung sowie die Leidens-, Erlosungs- und Heilsgeschichte sind nur in narrativen Form artikulierbar: „sie alle sprengen das argumentative Raisonnement und widersetzen sich einer perfekten Auflosung oder Umsetzung einer Erzahlgestalt. Sie bringen den Logos der Theologie, sofern er sich sein erzahlendes Wesen verbirgt, in jene Verlegenheit, von der die Vernunft steht, wenn sie sich etwa den Fragen nach Anfang und Ende und nach der Bestimmung des Neuen, noch nicht Gewesenen stellt.” (1973, S. 335). Nach dreieinhalb Jahrzehnten und nach der Ablosung der klassischen Narratologie durch die Postnarratologien besteht die Notwendigkeit, jene Ergebnisse und Implikationen der Narratologie zu reflektieren, die von der Theologie bereichert wurden.

Postwar Italian drama and the theater of Carlo Terron

Abstract: The theater of Carlo Terron is perhaps the most varied of his generation. His works range from the grotesque to the tragic, from psychological drama to allegorical farce. Whether it takes the form of comedy or serious drama, Terron’s oeuvre is essentially concerned with an investigation of the roots of guilt, and as such it reflects the moral climate of post-World War II Italy. In this respect, Terron’s plays may be compared to those of his contemporaries Ugo Betti and Diego Fabbri. In most of his plays Terron used his training as a psychiatrist to provide the intellectual framework for a world-view in which the motives for action are seen as being so intertwined with the complex nature of life that it is almost impossible to fix individual moral responsibility. “Postwar Italian Drama and the Theater of Carlo Terron” attempts to introduce this compelling dramatist to the English-speaking world.

Refiguring the subversive in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

Abstract: The standard critical reception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning as the first radical female poet of the English literary tradition is by now a popular one. To be sure, this assumption survives on two theoretical positions, viz: one, that Browning’s poetry falls outside the so-called “sentimental” poetic tradition of her female precursors and, two, that her poetry resists comparison, for that reason, with female precursors and/or contemporaries. The implication is that Barrett Browning’s poetry will only have to be compared with that of her male contemporaries such as Tennyson, Clough, Robert Browning and Arnold. While this comparative approach appears on the surface to endorse Barrett Browning’s poetry, it fails considerably because of its implicit assumption that the male poetic tradition is the starting point for discussing both the successes and failures of either a Romantic or Victorian woman poet. In order to re-align Browning’s aesthetic practices with her female contemporaries, I demonstrate in this paper the many angles from which Browning’s gynocentric strategies of subverting patriarchal hegemony in Aurora Leigh connect closely with those of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”. Using this comparative model, I hope to return Browning’s poetry to the larger feminist pool to which it rightly belongs. At the same time, I renegotiate the status of Rossetti whose reputation has suffered as a result of her poetry being judged in the light of male poets.

Chinese practice and T. W. Adorno’s theory of mass culture

Abstract: The paper explores the significance of T. W. Adorno’s theory of mass culture in the context of contemporary Chinese criticism. To this end, his theory is converted into two questions. First, what is the purpose of Adorno’s critique of mass culture? The answer offered here is the salvation of the individual. Second, how does Adorno justify his charges against mass culture? The rationale is that Adorno believes that the truth-content of a culture is of vital importance for individuation. Chinese scholars have paid scant attention to the inner logic of Adorno’s theory, because they are more concerned with the applicability of his theory in Chinese culture than with his theoretical potential. We find that, in the light of Adorno’s theory, the cultural practices of the writers Mo Yan (1955) and Han Han (1982) have little to do with individuation, but rather seek to strengthen national narrative than to break with it. In turn, Adorno’s theory of mass culture awakens our consciousness of the long-procrastinated mission of enlightenment.

When “Boy Meets Tractor” became “Scientist Meets Cybernetics”: post-war scientific paradigms and the socialist realist plot

Abstract: In the 1976 novella One Billion Years Before the End of the World, the Soviet Union’s science fiction writers A. and B. Strugatsky created a tale about contemporary Moscow scientists who are prevented by mysterious forces from completing their work. This analysis shows how the Strugatskys imbedded the systems feedback (cybernetic) paradigm into the familiar narrative stages of a socialist realist fairytale. The non-teleological principles of cybernetics could not be reconciled with the formal structure of socialist realism, so that the exchange between science and literature proceeded in an unanticipated direction. Insofar as writers used advances in Soviet science as a source of aesthetic material, they were able to create new possibilities of meaning and interpretation in a mandated literary form.

Taking Darwin metaphorically and literally: genres and sciences in a survival struggle

Abstract: The tendency to emulate the nomothetic discourse of the natural sciences appeared in the history of genre theory, including that of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. According to both the positivist history of literary genres (Brunetiere) and the materialistic-systemic approach (Moretti), the concept of evolution figures as an epistemic metaphor through which the discipline can re-conceptualize itself and thus achieve a scientific nomothetic character. During the present heyday of social Darwinism and global economism, the epistemological difference between the humanities and hard sciences is escalating into a struggle for the survival of both: the modern branch of literary Darwinism understands the theory of evolution literally and uses it to interpret literature (including its genres) as a phenomenon resulting from remote evolutionary adaptations of the human species. Neo-Darwinists advertise that a full harmonization of literary studies with the natural-science paradigm (“consilience”) will ensure the former’s survival; yet, they practice traditional literary interpretation, seeking in literary texts allegories of the biologically conceived “human nature.”

Narrativity and scientificity: the emergence of the genre of novel in modern Japan and its connection to psychology and neurology

Abstract: Relatively late, towards the end of the nineteenth century and under the influence of Western scientific publications, Japanese culture came to recognize the brain as the center responsible for mental activity. Japanese literati became interested in neurological and consciousness related phenomena, as well as relating psychological issues with epistemological principles. Early-modern Japanese literati often suffered from nervous breakdowns and more than often referred this disease to cerebral malfunctions. This arguably enabled a confessional mode of literature, which in turn contributed to the emergence of new sexual subjectivities. This paper focuses on the complicity between the narrative engines of modern Japanese fiction and the available Western medical/psychological/sexological discourses.