Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2020"

Materiality in Julio Cortázar’s literature—rereading “Axolotl,” “No se culpe a nadie” and the almanac books

Abstract: In the light of the material turn in the Humanities some aspects of Julio Cortazar’s (1914–1984) work become very evident today as a laboratory of the future. For Cortazar, reading was a transforming impulse, part of a process of liberation from mental ties to which he contributed as an author, challenging the barrier between the fantastic and the real, the limit between the human and the animal, between the living and the inert. Thus, as a critic on blind Modernity, Cortazar, from his stories, questions anthropocentrism in a gesture that in the current crisis of the Anthropocene could not be more topical. Moreover, while he supported the transformation of people’s material conditions of life in Latin America, he innovated and celebrated literature in intermedial texts that are the decanted result of a creative performance, embedded in the strongly transcultural context of a diaspora that was first voluntary and then became exile.

On Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied: counselors, queens, and characterization

Abstract: This article deals with two longstanding interpretive problems in Beowulf criticism. The Beowulf poet’s laconic style, grounded in the assumption of audience familiarity with legendary tradition, has rendered the representation of various characters rather obscure to modern readers. Comparison of Beowulf with the Nibelungenlied, which contains fuller portraits of characters derived from related oral traditions, is undertaken here in order to point toward the archetypes behind some of the poem’s shadier characters. The utility of the Nibelungenlied as a comparandum in Beowulf scholarship is illustrated in two case studies, the first of which focuses on Unferth and Hagen, the second of which focuses on Hildeburh and Kriemhild. In each case, the reticence of Beowulf is complemented by the verbosity of the Nibelungenlied, as evidence from the latter helps to tilt the scales in favor of certain interpretations of the former.

Anarchy in the Game of Thrones

Abstract: Recent scholarship has come to rethink how the concept of anarchy captures the fragmented plurality of contemporary world politics. This article continues that inquiry through an interpretative reading of the popular TV-series Game of Thrones. The appeal of this show partly derives from its animation of medieval tropes to interpellate with contemporary global politics; it echoes power struggles constitutive of today’s international relations. However, while the fantasy show portrays conflictual relations between different claimants of the Iron Throne in Westeros, it also composes subaltern voices amidst these violent claims to power. This article concludes that such an interpretation diversifies the meanings of anarchy, as both violence and freedom, in the ‘game of thrones’ of contemporary politics.

Corporeality, hyper-consciousness, and the Anthropocene ecoGothic: slime and ecophobia

Abstract: The centrality of slime to corporeal theory can hardly be overstated, and phobic responses to slime belie both the exceptionalism we claim as our birthright, on the one hand, and the realities of our bodily existence and experiences on the other. Slime threatens and enables our sense of corporeal identity; triggers horror and disgust (as well as playful delight in children and sexual arousal in adults); and sits firmly within an ecophobic understanding of agencies outside of ourselves. Gendered and threatening, slime is oddly ambivalent matter. It is the stuff of which Anthropocene ecoGothic dreams are made, matter well beyond our command that threatens us precisely because of the ineluctability of its agential presence in our lives.

On ginseng and Iroquois: Epistemic breaches, materiality of knowledge, and globalization in Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746)

Abstract: This study is dedicated to 2 texts written by French Jesuit father Joseph-Francois Lafitau (1681–1746), created in the context of his missionary stay in Nouvelle France: Memoire concernant la precieuse plante du gin-seng de Tartarie (1718) and Mœrs des Sauvages ameriquains comparees aux mœrs des premiers temps (1724). Both texts permit a multi-level analysis of material dimensions of culture and knowledge in the history of knowledge, the first dealing with a botanical subject, the second an anthropological one. They convey a meta-reflective discourse on material-specific epistemological problems that is realized through narrative textual structures. These texts enable a structural view point of systemic functions of the materiality of knowledge in historical epistemological orders. Finally, they show exemplary and significant transmedia representation techniques and the associated textualization and visualization strategies.

Guanxi as a literary archetype in Chinese fiction

Abstract: In China, guanxi is a unique and ubiquitous informal social network. Previous research on guanxi has focused on management, sociology and economics in China. This paper proposes for the first time that guanxi is a significant literary archetype in Chinese fiction. The guanxi archetype originated from the coincidence between an upsurge in fiction writing and the social turbulence created by the economic transformation that occurred in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Confucianism, the cultural root of guanxi, was fortified during the violent ethical upheaval of this era, reinforcing guanxi’s status in both social realities and fictional narratives. As a form of social capital, guanxi was interwoven into the expanded commercialization in this transitional epoch, becoming a shortcut for securing one’s material interests through information asymmetry and flaws in the legal system and thus creating social inequity. Culturally, guanxi therefore earned derogatory implications during the late Ming dynasty, when commercialism prospered, in contrast to its positive evaluation in the early Ming dynasty, when commercialism was less significant. As guanxi is a ubiquitous institution that has been embedded in the social structure of China for more than 2000 years and thoroughly permeates quotidian life, the guanxi archetype persists in modern and contemporary fiction. With the increasing importance of guanxi in China, it will not only remain a significant literary archetype but also be an avenue to interpret Chinese literature.

Materiality and literature : an introduction

Abstract: The field of materiality and literature can be differenciated in two directions. Materiality of literature refers to book design, printing formats and typography. Materialty in literature, however, analyzes the way, ‘things that speak’ are integrated in fictional and non-fictional texts. The introduction reflects the international critical discussion of the field in the last years and situates the contributions of this number in it.

The problem of nonhuman agency and bodily intentionality in the Anthropocene

Abstract: One of the vital issues in the discourse on the Anthropocene is the problem of material or bodily agency. Agency has long been the exclusive attribute of human consciousness and intentionality, but now the boundary between humans and nonhumans, mind and body, has become problematic. How might we reconceptualize agency? This article attempts to answer that question by working through Bruno Latour's posthuman configuration of agency. Latour's plea to reject not only consciousness but also intentionality conflicts with his animistic vision. What we need is not to dismiss intentionality in toto but to dehumanize it and acknowledge that there is a nonhuman form of intentionality. The intentionality that he wrongly paired with consciousness is a restricted and derived version of bodily intentionality. The body is not inert matter but is animate and intentional, for it is an endeavor to continue in its being. This article argues that there is no animism without such intentionality and that Latour's animism will become indistinguishable from mechanism as long as Latour fails to acknowledge animism’s intentionality.

Trapped in class? material manifestations of poverty and prosperity in Alice Munro’s "Royal Beatings" and "The Beggar Maid"

Abstract: This article argues that material objects in Canadian writer Alice Munro’s short fiction both reflect socio-economic concerns of pre- and post-WWII Canadian society and complicate common conceptions of deprivation and material ambition The analyses of “Royal Beatings” and “The Beggar Maid” demonstrate how Munro describes economic hardships, class anxieties, and social discrimination and distinction through items of material culture such as clothes, furniture, and paintings These objects and their symbolic significance draw attention to the conflicts resulting from the interplay of her characters’ upbringings, loyalties, and their longings and aspirations

Terry Pratchett’s thought experiments about the body

Abstract: Terry Pratchett was a fertile fantasy writer whose forty-one Discworld novels contain several fascinating philosophical ideas about the body. Although the magic, unnatural character of the represented world may ignite generic or allegorical interpretations, in this paper I interpret some subtexts and subplots as thought experiments. Focusing on the body, I will discuss the golems as an experimentation with perfect labor, labor rights, and ownership of the body, while an ongoing golem subplot in Making Money experiments with engendering. Igors are a kind of species in the Discworld, through which Pratchett can investigate the questions of bodily identity in the age of advanced transplantation technology. In Unseen Academicals, a personalized myth of the orcs gives him the opportunity to reason about genetic design and its interaction with socialization and education policy, and to do so while also considering the moral and social risks.

Disabled and vulnerable bodies in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People : transcending the human and nonhuman world

Abstract: Foregrounding the disabled and vulnerable bodies in British writer Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007), this article contends that the disability and vulnerability of the human body provides an approach for re-thinking the relationship between the human and non-human world in the Anthropocene. The article seeks understandings about how conceptions of corporeal disability are intertwined with ideas about the non-human world; it also analyzes the vulnerability of the human body to toxic environments. “Disabled and vulnerable bodies in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People” offers a close reading of various disabled and abnormal bodies in Animal’s People through material ecocriticism to question dualisms that pervade our thinking about corporeality and to suggest that the differences between human and nonhuman are not as great as we like to pretend in the Anthropocene.

The Well-Worn Book and the reading child: cultural and cognitive aspects of materiality in German children’s literature

Abstract: Children’s books often feature complex material aspects. Despite that fact, little research has been done on questions of materiality in children’s and youth books. The article aims at outlining the field of the materiality of historical German-language children’s books. By analyzing historical author’s pedagogical statements as well as the design of historical children’s and youth fiction, the article summarizes different approaches concerning the materiality of children’s books. Based on the historical development and the generic study on how children modify the materiality of their books, the article further investigates the book-as-object and emphasizes the child’s point of view by scrutinizing the adult-culture book-toy distinction. It will become apparent that the specific forms of children’s book reception emerge since the materiality of the book and its exploration present a new embodied experience. The specific reception forms can be embedded into a semiotic model of the text-reader interaction in reference to Roland Barthes’ concept of ecriture and scription.

Afterword: new horizons in materiality and literature

Abstract: This article is an afterword (in every sense of that word) on a special collection about “materiality and literature.” It follows up on a promise that Thomas Bremer makes at the end of the Introduction to the special issue, where he acknowledges that there are “new horizons” waiting to be explored in theorizing about the topic. Most prominently visible on these new horizons, but not mentioned in the articles themselves, is what has been called “the new materialism.” This article explores very briefly the contributions of this burgeoning field, touching on matters relating with the current Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and the state of the humanities itself.

Material dimensions of a chivalric romance: metanarrative and book history in Ortúñez de Calahorra’s Espejo de príncipes y cavalleros and other libros de caballerías

Abstract: Apart from a specific set of conventions in book design, the so-called “genero editorial”, the Castilian chivalric romances from the late 15th to the early 17th c., are a varied genre. The paper takes a look at different ways in which materiality plays a role for the romances, situating them between market strategy and complex literary tradition. Certain approaches, from paratextual keywords (‘mirror’, ‘chronicle’) to metanarrative and metafictional elements (found manuscripts, pseudotranslations, metalepsis) are not only fixed topoi, but vary from text to text. In fact, they are in constant dialogue with recent developments in historiography, as well as other fictional genres. Thus, supernatural sources, contradictory textual evidence, and explanations of the marvelous often combine into a complex discursive strategy that helps explain the continuous popularity of the genre for more than 120 years.

Writing about women in ghost stories: subversive representations of ideal femininity in “Nie Xiaoqian” and “Luella Miller”

Abstract: On the one hand, because of the double historical prejudices from literary criticism against ghost stories and women’s writing, little attention has been paid to investigate the ideals of femininity in women’s ghost stories in nineteenth-century America. This article examines “Luella Miller,” a short story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, who indirectly but sharply criticized the ideal of femininity in her time by creating an exaggerated example of the cult of feminine fragility. On the other hand, although extensive research has been done on Chinese ghost stories, especially on the ghost heroines in Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, there are few studies comparing the Chinese and the American ones. By comparing “Luella Miller” and Pu’s “Nie Xiaoqian,” this article does not primarily aim to list the similarities and differences between the Chinese and the American ideals of femininity, but to provide fresh insights into how both Freeman and Pu capitalized on the literary possibilities of the supernatural, because only in ghost stories they could write about women in ways impossible in “high literature.”

Papierstauraum: Bücher und Objekte in Katalogen

Abstract: Bibliotheken bewahren und verwalten nicht nur Bucher, sondern auch Gegenstande verschiedener Art. Kataloge, die in erster Linie der Erfassung und Auffindbarkeit von Buchern dienen, werden auch zur Erfassung von Objekten als Teilen von Sammlungen verwendet. Anhand von drei historischen Katalogen mit Buchern und Anhangen von Gegenstanden und Objekten diskutiert der Artikel das Verhaltnis zwischen den Objekten als Registratur und Dingen mit konkreter Materialitat. Kataloge erscheinen als literarische Speicherplatze mit einer eigenen Materialitat, die den von ihnen verzeichneten und ausgestellten Gegenstanden eine virtuelle Materialitat verleihen.

Semantik und Materialität in der Wiener Gruppe am Beispiel der Gemeinschaftsarbeiten

Abstract: The Wiener Gruppe marked a turning point in the literature of post-WWII Austria Its members (Achleitner, Artmann, Bayer, Ruhm, Wiener) managed to invent a new kind of literature based on the experimental use of language: linguistic exploration and reinvention characterized their output, in which language does not only have a semantic dimension but also—most importantly—a material one The infinite combination possibilities of the language are charted Sentences are systematically deconstructed Single words and graphemes become linguistic bricks that lead to new visual and acoustic forms, to new meanings This essay examines the role of materiality in the collective works of the Wiener Gruppe, with particular focus on the innovative use of the writing machine and of its many creative possibilities The attentive analysis of some collective works shows how the materiality of writing merges with the semantic dimension, thus enabling new textual interpretations

Humanist transfer of knowledge from foreign lands: modes of cognitive perception of the world among Florentine travelers to America between 1490 and 1530

Abstract: In fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy, even before the beginning of the Age of Discovery, numerous (travel) reports were written by commercial travellers to Asian countries, soon followed by those to the Americas and the African coastal regions. In Florence, which was a Renaissance center of cultural innovation and a financially powerful hub for the exchange of knowledge, ideas, techniques and strategies, reports from Florentine travelers received particular attention. These epistemic materializations transformed, in primary emplotments, newfound material reality and real-space travel events into codified knowledge. Once they arrived Europe and circulated among European scholars, these cultural materials were then stored in further processes of knowledge materialization. Such secondary emplotments, from 1492 on, refer to a (geographically and historically) global framework that enforces the generation and classification of knowledge. For these purposes reports from travelling authors who already use a humanist standard of knowledge—like the erudite Florentine travelers Vespucci and Verrazzano—are able to deliver precious epistemic material, that, beyond the requirements of power politics, will contribute to re-coding not only the European perspective on the world, but especially the knowledge of the others.

Musical affect and the emotion–cognition interaction in The Phantom of the Opera

Abstract: This essay explores how the Broadway musical of The Phantom of the Opera blurs the traditional distinction between cognition and emotion with the use of operatic music and librettos. Over the years, the musical has outshone the novel in its immediacy to exert a direct influence on the audience. The overall popularity of the musical points to the successful use of music supported by visual feast and narration. The general effect of Phantom over the audience also contributes to the problematization of mind-body dualism in affect theory and literary criticism, which also surfaces in cognitive psychology as emotion–cognition interaction. It is self-evident that music constitutes the fundamental unit of musical theatres. Thus, the main analysis dwells on the intertwined relationship between music and affect studies in order to explain the underlying reason why Leroux’s literary work has taken a back seat to Webber’s musical theatre, though the former provides an undeniably rich source for the latter and originally frames the debate on consciousness and the mind-body problem.

Das Spiel mit den Falten

Abstract: In the history of books, fold-out pages or page sequences in bound books have at first glance particularly been used for the purpose of reducing large-format illustrations to the format of a book—thus for practical rather than aesthetic or even playful reasons. This applies, for example, to maps, all kinds of complex schematic drawings, chronologies or panoramic-geographical representations. This article is dedicated to the use of folds in children's books from the nineteenth century to the present day, ranging from unfoldable illustrations in books, to pages unfolding out of books, to book objects dissolving through unfolding. The artistic approach to processes of unfolding not only allows for unconventional forms of narration; it can also be an occasion to question the conventionalised material form of the codex.

The feminine voice of subversion and inversion: a comparative reading of “The Story of Yingying” and The Tale of Genji

Abstract: This paper intends to bring the interrelation between premodern Chinese and Japanese literature under the scope of comparative literature. Anglophone studies of Chinese influence on Japanese literature are scarce due to the legacy of Japan’s emphasis on its own “national literature” and the contemporary criticisms of influence study. Through a comparative reading of the “The Story of Yingying” from China and the Japanese canonical work The Tale of Genji, this study argues that it is insufficient to read Genji within the frame of Japanese “national literature,” which presumes a homogenous Japanese culture and tradition. In my analysis, a theme of feminine power represented in Chinese narrative is shown to be further developed in Genji. I find that female characters in these Chinese and Japanese literary texts are not always presented as weak or fragile, rather they speak up for themselves audaciously and directly. I suggest that this feminine voice that subverts and inverts power relations in the Genji is a case of a normally covert activity being practised in plain view, what I call an “open smuggling” of feminine power which is also discernible in “The Story of Yingying”.

Zwischen Moos und Wetterglas: Naturkundliche Interieurs und Objekte in der Literatur der deutschsprachigen Aufklärung

Abstract: We investigate how objects of natural history, interiors, and practices of observation, collecting and experimenting as well as other forms of sensual perception of nature are represented and interpreted aesthetically in writings of the German-speaking Enlightenment. On the basis of selected examples, we analyze how systematizations and methods of natural history are transferred and adapted to literature and poetics.

Il mistero della prima traduzione ungherese del Dei delitti e delle pene di Cesare Beccaria

Abstract: Un mistero avvolge il manoscritto della prima traduzione in lingua magiara del Dei delitti e delle pene di Cesare Beccaria realizzato sul finire del Settecento dall’intellettuale illuminista Ferenc Kazinczy. Si tratta di un lavoro incompiuto e mai pubblicato, oggi custodito nella Biblioteca Nazionale Szechenyi di Budapest. Il presente saggio si pone come obiettivo una doppia operazione: in primo luogo, ripercorrere gli errori e i fraintendimenti compiuti dagli archivisti nella catalogazione dell’opera che solo nel XX secolo e assurta agli onori della letteratura come traduzione originale del Dei delitti. La traduzione, infatti, e stata a lungo fraintesa, giacche catalogata prima come traduzione de L’Esprit des Lois di Montesquieu e piu tardi come un’opera originale, alimentando un fitto mistero che si intende dipanare. In secondo luogo, il saggio presenta nella sua seconda parte l’analisi comparativistica linguistica e testuale della traduzione del Kazinczy mettendo in luce l’originalita di essa per giungere alla conclusione che l’illustre magiaro aveva ben compreso l’ineluttabilita dei lavori di traduzione al fine di svecchiare la lingua e la cultura magiare. Inoltre, viene affermato che, sebbene la traduzione compiuta dal Kazinczy non possa essere considerata tra quelle ufficiali perche frammentaria e inedita, non e oltremodo possibile non considerare lo stesso Kazinczy primo traduttore del capolavoro di Beccaria.

The Princip principle

Abstract: Quite surprisingly, some novels in contemporary France still deal with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by Gavrilo Princip on June the 28th 1914. This is the case in Sarajevo omnibus by Velibor Colic: a six-part novel focused on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, as a way to tell the story of Sarajevo—the city the author had to leave to seek refuge in France during the separatist war in the 1990s. The story of the Sarajevo’s attack is told as if History would have preferred, both ironically and literally, to surrender itself to a Princip Principle (“un Principe Princip”)—which is like a phantom pain of the past, and an uncertainty principle for writing and interpreting History.

San guo yan yi in translation and its parallels with western literature

Abstract: This paper identifies a number of parallels drawn by translators and critics between the classic Chinese narrative San guo yan yi and related western literary works and traditions, with particular focus on three aspects: genre, character and plot. The paper discusses a number of full and partial English translations of the text, including two full-text translations by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor and two excerpted translations by Hawks Pott and Carl Arendt, as well as several other translators who attempted to bring the book to a western readership. Using comparisons with western literature made by these translators, the paper addresses the following questions: What happens when a text of this sort is translated into a language like English? Where does it fit in the western genre system? What similarities, according to the translators, can be identified between San guo yan yi and related western literary works? This paper argues that the translators’ commentaries suggest that they were not familiar with the specific modes of characterization and narration of classic Chinese novels, and therefore failed to identify the stylistic features of San guo yan yi as those belonging to the genre of zhanghuiti. From the perspective of comparative literature, the book can be categorized as an example of a relatively new form—the ensemble historical narrative—that combines both Chinese and western literary traditions. The discussions in this paper not only allow us to extend the scope of genre theory, but also contribute to a better understanding of Chinese literature overall.

The “Jewish Question” in interwar literature: Irène Némirovsky and Károly Pap

Abstract: Irene Nemirovsky (1903–1942) and Karoly Pap (1897–1945) belong roughly to the same generation, and shared the same fate, dying at a young age in a Nazi concentration camp. Aside from that terrible similarity, many things separated them. But they were both deeply preoccupied with what I am calling the “Jewish question for Jews,” and produced powerful fictional works depicting the individual malaise and the existential dilemmas that characterized the lives of secular or acculturated Jews in Europe in the early twentieth-century. They can both be called “portrayers of conflicted Jewish identity.” I analyze some of their most characteristic works, showing that they shared a highly pessimistic view about the possibilities of Jewish assimilation.

From a political order to a knowledge structure: the influence of western library science on Chinese classical literary system

Abstract: The classical Chinese literary system owns no independent status because of its affiliation to catalogue books under the dual pressure from politics and Confucianism. Thus, political and ideological connotations come before the aesthetic value in its creation and interpretation. And Ji, one of the four categories in the Imperial Catalogue, had long been the synonym for classical literary system. Such situation remained stable until the importation of the cataloguing type in modern Western library science that changed the essence of the system into a knowledge structure from a political order. What’s more, it also helped to promote the specialization and discipline of literature, an essential link in the modernization of Chinese thinking and education. Despite the various advantages in this process, this paper argues that we should not neglect the more serious disadvantages in simplifying the essence of classical Chinese literary system into the plane aesthetic value, blind of its multi-dimensional functions indicated by the setting and ranking of categories and also the works’ location in cataloguing, both of which matter much more for the interpretation of classical Chinese literature.