Showing papers in "Partial Answers in 2007"

Reader Response and the Recycling of Topoi in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Abstract: The paper analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in terms of the narrative techniques that cause the reader to re-enact the cognitive process by which the characters come to comprehend their predicament. It links these techniques with the ethical implications of the novel's reshaping the topoi of dystopian fiction in view of the modern concerns with cloning and organ transplant.

"When Desert Armies Stand Ready to Fight": Re-Reading McEwan's Saturday and Arnold's "Dover Beach"

Abstract: This paper examines the climactic scene in Ian McEwan's novel 2005 Saturday in which the protagonist's pregnant poet daughter fends off a home invasion by reciting Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." My broader goal is to demonstrate that McEwan constructs not a nostalgic longing for a Victorian past, but rather a moment of neo-Victorianism: one that turns to Victorian reflections upon domestic and foreign politics, history, and the literary form in order to make meaning in a contemporary literary or cultural text. The essay explores the phenomenologies (and politics) of reading and re-reading, and works toward the idea that certain acts of postmodernist re-reading lead to a kind of reflection on literary influence that originates (at least for McEwan) with nineteenth-century literature. McEwan's scene of the reading and rereading of "Dover Beach" in Saturday presents the Arnold poem as an always already reread text — in the sense both that it is a text that rereads itself (containing within the space of the poem oppositional readings of the self and the community), and that it is a text that rereads other, prior texts.

Culture or Literature

Abstract: With the "cultural turn" English philology has changed in many places into a kind of super-discipline by taking over, at least in part, the work of sociology, history, psychology, and philosophy. The article argues that in order to avoid dilettantism, the excellent qualification for a semiotic or signifying approach to all aspects of culture should be made use of, especially since this approach goes well together with the more recent view of culture as an immaterial construct in terms of an ensemble, or rather a specific hierarchy, of values. In order to discuss the role of literature in and for the wider domain of culture it seems necessary to first delimit this textual corpus, and for that reason a number of recent attempts to define "literature" or "the literary" are considered \-\- including one of my own that sees its specificity in a validational modesty resulting from a focusing on the particular and the suspension of reference. Due to this modest confinement to the presentation of merely possible worlds, literature is granted a "free space" in culture where it can even intimate the limits of the culture of its origin. For this reason it deserves special attention even at a time when the study of culture and media studies are in vogue.

Terror, Terrorism, and Horror in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Abstract: The paper considers Heart of Darkness as an example of rhetorical counter-terrorism. Conrad's language partly relies of that of the Gothic discourse of horror, especially when horror manifests itself as an entity with teeth \-\- a zone of contact between the individual and the horror which can consume, absorb the individual. In Gothic horror fiction the sites where "terror" and "horror" reached their climax were frequently related to the practice of cannibalism. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad's Marlow points out that the so-called cannibals, identified as such by their fanged teeth, are neither terrifying nor horrifying. The real cannibal, in the figurative sense, is Kurtz, perpetrator and victim of the Belgian colonial terror, whose image, complete with a toothless but voracious mouth, is associated with human heads on posts surrounding his bungalow – a psychological substitute for the severed hands collected by the basketful by Belgian agents. By translating "hands" into "heads," by using the motifs from the well-known discourse of cannibalism to represent the Belgian terror tactic, Conrad provided his readers with an already valorized language, a semiotics for comprehending this particular horror, and a stimulus for a response to it.

Dialogue and Authoritativeness in "We" Fictional Narratives: A Bakhtinian Approach

Abstract: The essay addresses /-/- in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel /-/- the link between authority, ideology, and formal features of discourse in "we" fictional narratives. It presents three main types of relationships between the individual "I" narratives and the "we" group to which he or she belongs as well as between the "we" group and "other" (often hostile) groups. These types differ in the group's stability and cohesion, the possibilities of transition from this group to another community, and the importance of the role attributed to the individual (or to a particular individual) and to other groups in constructing, sustaining, and (re)shaping the identity of the "we." These patterns of relationship suggest that not only can "we" fictional narratives be dialogical but also that they often challenge the norms and values uncritically accepted by the group and subvert the authority of their communal-voice narrator(s). Especially notable in this context are "we" fictional narratives in which the main conflict is instigated by an outsider, who is neither a full member of the group nor a member of a rival group and whose "disorienting discourse" undermines the hegemonic discourse. These types of disagreement, which demonstrate the centrifugal forces of the story, are evidence of the fragility of the group and of its tendency to disintegrate, unless these forces are balanced by the centralizing, centrifugal ones. First-person-plural narration is as much a force of disintegration, discord, and instability as of unison, concord, and stability

Time, Duration, and Defoe's Novels

Abstract: What is the relation between public notations of time and the personal experience of duration? And how have these two different approaches to temporality been explored in early novels? This article considers Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, arguing that through renderings of objective time and of the experience of duration Defoe differentiates between two different modes of sociality: contractual relations on the one hand and intimate attachments on the other. Furthermore, in these novels Defoe lays the terms for one of the main tropes through which later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels represent both domesticity (in its inherent duality of love and marriage) and temporality (in its inherent duality of duration and time). This is a trope of parallax view, which captures an important condition of these dualities – that their poles can never be viewed simultaneously even as they coexist in the same phenomena.

Two Patterns of Child Neglect: Blake and Wordsworth

Abstract: Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed an unprecedented interest in childhood as a distinct and formative phase of human life. This new awareness was largely the result of political, socio-economic, and demographic changes, but it was also the product of theoretical reformulations of old as well as recent assumptions about childhood — its nature, its needs, and the obligations that it imposed on adult society. Various theoretical assumptions about childhood in the period offered conflicting definitions of the responsibilities of adults to children. The two major and rival conceptions of childhood in the late eighteenth century — one originating in Puritan and evangelical doctrines and the other shaped by romantic sensibilities — defined each other by way of contrast and struggled for supremacy in British intellectual and social life. In broad terms, social and cultural historians describe a process of delegitimization of the Puritan and authoritarian attitude to children, a process that was accompanied by a simultaneous increase in the influence of romantic and liberating approaches (see, for example, Coveney 33 and Cunningham 61–62). The earlier approach was based on the belief in the original sin and tended to regard children as morally inferior; it was regulative and objectifying; it ignored the distinctiveness of the child’s perspective while projecting adult values onto the child. This attitude was often embodied in the catechism, an authoritarian form of religious instruction that inspired certain poetic representations of children and adults of the period. I shall therefore refer to the regulative mode as catechetical, even when there is no direct link to religious matters, to denote authoritarian forms of communication with children in which the child’s subjectivity is ignored. 1 The second, more innovative approach to children, largely shaped by the sensibilities of romantic writers, was liberating and empathetic; it upheld the idea that children were morally innocent and treated the child’s subjectivity as valuable, fascinating, and profound.

"On Your Knees, White Man": African (Un)Belongings in Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart

Abstract: This paper analyzes the concept of what can be called an "insider Whiteness," at once African and inevitably always already out of Africa. Specifically, it explores life writing narratives by White Africans as a rich setting for an analysis of how White people both relate to the continent as a physical and imaginary space and negotiate their ability to call Africa "home." Through detailed textual analysis of Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart (1990) and reference to a number of works by J. M. Coetzee, Gillian Slovo, Breyten Breytenbach and Doris Lessing, the paper proposes that the continuing debates about identity and race in post-Apartheid South Africa show that it takes a great deal of work for the White person truly to belong in Africa.

Servility and Destructiveness in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day

Abstract: The figure of the butler, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel is a subtle illustration of the ability of human consciousness to deceive itself in what Sartre called \"bad faith.\" The self-deception is enhanced by being legitimized in the framework of a professional ethics. This ethics of the \"dignity\" of a job perfectly well accomplished, which is presented as nothing but blind obedience, not only leads to the character's failure in his life but, more dangerously, to his serving as an instrument of evil action. Indirect commentary on latter aspect of the novel can be sought in Sartre's analysis of \"bad faith\" and Marx's of the alienated consciousness but also in the experiments in social psychology conducted by Stanley Milgram which point to the mechanisms by which ordinary people can become agents of mass destruction.

Taina Naita. Narrative Stance in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Abstract: The paper discusses Vladimir Nabokov's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight as his first English experiment in constructing a model of a possible metaphysical contact between the world of human consciousness and a mysterious dimension beyond it. Nabokov's almost invariable principles of composition make the narrative stance of the novel open to various interpretations; the paper argues in favor of the version in which the title character's secret (Russ. Taina Naita) is his calculated absence from the book of which he appears to be the biographical subject. The Appendix presents some results of archival study of the novel's extant manuscripts.

Epigones in the House of Language: Benjamin on Kraus

Abstract: What links Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus is a fascination with the dregs of public discourse, its "by-products" or "waste products," but these to be understood as the negative pole of an exalted ideal of language, though conceived differently by each one. Benjamin was an avid reader of Die Fackel, a polemical gazette focused on Viennese journalism that Kraus published from 1899 to 1936. Benjamin's 1931 essay on Kraus is one of his most densely woven, recondite productions, filled with formulations that reach back to Benjamin's 1916 text "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." There, the act of naming designates the dimension of divine creative power in pre-Babelic language. In Kraus's practice of citation Benjamin found traces of such a primordial capacity of language, a thetic power akin to divine naming. Citing in this sense involves not only the retrieval of a text or a concept, but intervention into the temporal process, the activation of a past in the present: citing as inciting. For Kraus, Benjamin wrote, "justice and language remain founded in each other," making it clear that while justice in a legal sense (Recht) was often invoked in Kraus's critique of journalism, what was fundamentally at stake was a reverence for "the image of divine justice [Gerechtigkeit] in language."

The Sexual Politics of Divine Femininity: Tārā in Transition in Gary Snyder's Poetry

Abstract: Gary Snyder has described his book-length poem Mountains and Rivers without End (1996) as a "mythic narrative of the female Buddha Tārā." Snyder's poem "An Offering for Tārā," like several other poems in his corpus, describes a sensual, forgiving feminine divinity of the sort that many literary scholars now find problematic. By considering two poems from the Sixties alongside one from the mid-Nineties, we can see the developments within Snyder's own myths and texts, but we also see how the images and ideas woven into discourses such as "Orientalism" or "the divine feminine" can undergo dramatic changes within the career of a single writer. Examining Snyder's early poems "For a Far-out Friend," and "Hymn to the Goddess San Francisco in Paradise" alongside Joanne Kyger's "Tapestry," the essay closely examines instances of divine femininity in Beat writing before returning to Snyder's mature work, "An Offering for Tārā," to show how Snyder fashions a postmodern American mode of tantric poetics that is politically progressive. His poetic approach has not been to repress the afflictive desires identified by feminist and anti-Orientalist critics but rather, in the manner of tantric Buddhist practice, to mindfully embrace and re-organize them.

"Not Knowing What I Should Think:" The Landscape of Postmemory in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants

Abstract: In W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants the oblique relationship between narrative and image \-\- despite their interplay they are not synthesized – is associated with the workings of postmemory. In the fourth section of the novel the pictures of a German Jewish family that has emigrated to England and whose experience of the holocaust the narrator seeks to reconstruct are juxtaposed to the landscape which represses that history, generating a reiteration of that repression. The haunting presence of the images is paralleled by the paintings of a descendant of this family. The painter intentionally creates pentimento effects in his work: layers of paint hide and reveal the layers below. The methods of both painter and narrator involve a demonstration of the continued presence of loss. And when the narrator finally reaches the Lanzburg family gravesite he finds three empty gravestones and the only occupied grave, that of the painter's mother who committed suicide. This becomes the thematic center of the novel whose narrator is left "no knowing what he should think." His inability to turn self-reflection into resolution is contrasted with a Turkish woman's observation of Germany that the country is characterized by a refusal to reflect. The experience of disturbed self-reflection extends to the reader who must not only bear witness to the inconclusiveness of the narrator's discourse but take part in it, thus revealing the traces of the destruction and murder that the landscape through which he is traveling has tried to erase.

A "World of Nothing, but Pure Wit": Margaret Cavendish and the Gendering of the Imaginary

Abstract: This paper delineates the early-modern re-conception of gender categories in the work of Margaret Cavendish, and her opposition of imagination and wit to the disenchanted reality produced by male thinkers of her time. Conceptions of "knowledge" and "truth" changed significantly during the first six decades of the seventeenth century, fashioning contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity. Against the background of the rise of modern science, within a system of epistemic hegemony synonymous with male strength and social superiority, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, initiated a tacit work of feminine redemption by endorsing and elaborating conceptions imposed by the dominating habits of thought of her time. Responding to those philosophical discourses in which intellectual inquiry had taken on the traits of an allegorical penetration of the masculine "mind" into the secrets of a feminine nature, Cavendish reconceived that mind as the "Rational Soule," understood as the source and objective of human knowledge. Cavendish forged an epistemological system which was intended not to oppose this "patriarchal" system, but to define a fanciful and witty dimension parallel to the masculine dominion of objectivity, where she manifested and realized the inalienable right for a woman to think within the intimacy of her mind and her house. The privacy of her "solitary mind" was not a prison but the independent locus of feminine cognition and enfranchisement.

The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 18601930 (review)

Abstract: In order to map out the field researched in Thomas Seifrid’s The Word Made Self, I would like to recall Nabokov’s short story “The Word” (1923). The protagonist dreams that he is in Paradise and addresses an angel with the question that is tormenting him: “What can save my land?” The angel replies by enunciating a single word, one that contains everything, explains everything, and fills the entire being of the protagonist, who cries it out, savoring every syllable. But then comes the moment of awakening: “Oh, Lord — the winter dawn glows greenish in the window, and I remember not what word it was that I shouted.”1 Is the quest for an all-embracing, all-redeeming elusive word a matter of a single story or is it a substantial element of the culture which the story refracts? Seifrid opts for the latter view, a rather “orientalistic” one, to resort to Edward Said’s term: Russians “tended to profess a near-religious, if not indeed fetishistic, veneration for the power of language — for the Word” (1). From this standpoint Nabokov’s protagonist shares the common Russian belief in the magical power of the word. Seifrid notes that this belief calls for an explanation, and he offers one on the basis of texts which he defines as “Russian writings on language.” The range of primary sources involved in Seifrid’s study is highly impressive: Aleksandr Potebnya, Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, Viktor Shklovsky, Velemir Khlebnikov, Osip Mandelshtam, Vladimir Ern, Pavel Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, Gustav Shpet, Aleksei Losev, Lev Vygotsky, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Valentin Voloshinov. I know of no other study in English where the analysis of Russian texts on language has been undertaken on such a scale. The sources belong to different and seemingly incommensurable genres: studies in linguistics side by side with Symbolist and Futurist manifestos, Formalist writings on literary theory next to theological treatises, polemical pieces published in periodicals together with works on the philosophy of language. Nonetheless — and this is the main claim of the book — these heterogeneous texts bear a relation to each other, being outgrowths of one project; they belong to the same discursive paradigm and are part of a single overarching task — “to provide a model of the self or of selfhood that is grounded in language and that finds in language the prototype for what the self should be” (2–3). Although Seifrid does not spell out what this model is, everything in his book leads one to conclude that the Russian self should be an incarnation of the Divine Word. Accordingly, Seifrid actually claims that, consciously or otherwise, these texts move to reformulate the Patristic-Platonic Orthodox doctrine that identifies Lo-

In the Crypt of the Sun: Towards the Narrative Politics of Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark

Abstract: The article considers some of the ways in which Seamus Deane's novel maps political, sectarian, and folkloric borders onto the Catholic tradition of textual exegesis. In particular, the essay argues that Reading in the Dark treats Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises as a productive site where both political and community identity are reconfigured through direct contact with literary-theoretical concerns.

On Poetic Reason of State: Benjamin, Baudelaire, and the Multitudes

Abstract: The paper starts from Walter Benjamin's interpretation of the phrase "reason of state" that Paul Valery applies to Charles Baudelaire's poetry. After exploring how this phrase points to the interconnections between poetry and politics in Benjamin's writings on lyric, from the early essay on Holderlin to the later commentaries on Baudelaire, it goes on to explicate Baudelaire's reading of a book on the concept of reason of state by the Italian philosopher and historian Giuseppe Ferrari. The connections between Baudelaire's aesthetic theory of la modernite and Ferrari's politico-historical theory of reason of state are analyzed as a basis for reading a set of prose poems composed by Baudelaire during the period when he read Ferrari. Special attention is given to the poem from the Petits poemes en prose entitled "Les Veuves" ("The Widows").

On the Road with D. H. Lawrence /-/- or, Lawrence as Thought-Adventurer

Abstract: Defining Lawrence's "expository writings not as laboratory reports on experiments successfully concluded but as signposts to a road" traveled in his art, H. M. Daleski notes that these "theories were consistently modified by the artistic experience, which in turn led to further formulations." Indeed, these continually revised and modified formulations of theories about almost everything constituted what Lawrence called "thought adventures"; in themselves they were signs of a yearning toward wholeness-in-duality that that can account for this writer's special charisma. For Lawrence was not just a novelist, a poet, and a critic; he was also, in our current rather inadequate terminology, a public intellectual. To be "on the road" with D. H. Lawrence is to be engaged in an extraordinary thought adventure, accompanied by an unfailingly engaged and engaging commentator whose intellectual wholeness-in-duality was of a sort we rarely encounter on the contemporary literary scene. In developing this point, the article also argues that Lawrence's great intellectual and creative adventure, though acutely modern, was also astutely anti-modernist. Although his early work was championed by such modernist luminaries as Ezra Pound and Ford Maddox Ford, by the end of his career he had become virtually the polar opposite of the quintessential modernist T. S. Eliot. Not coincidentally, perhaps, by the end of his career this thought adventurer addressed his ideas not just to an exclusively high cultural audience of the "fit though few" but to the masses among whom he could be, as he put it, "in the thick of the scrimmage."

Velimir Khlebnikov in Hebrew

Abstract: The article presents the history of translation of Velimir Khlebnikov's poetry into Hebrew. Khlebnikov (1885\-\-1922), one of the founders of Russian Futurism, was a trailblazer of new linguistic and philosophic vistas in poetry. His poems are singularly difficult and original in their highly involved idiom and construction, as well as the subject-matter which borrows from such diverse fields as history, mythology, mathematics, and biology. The translations of his poems into Hebrew, starting with those by Lea Goldberg, Avraham Shlyonsky, and Eliyahu Tesler in the pioneering 1942 collection "Shirat Rusiia" ("The Poetry of Russia") and ending with Aminadav Dykman's in his magisterial anthology of Russian poetry "Dor Sheli \-\- Khaia Sheli: MiShirat Rusiia BaMea HaEsrim" ("My Generation, My Beast: Russian Poets of the Twentieth Century," 2002), are characterized by ingenuity in rendering Khlebnikov's "trans-sense" idiom while transposing his thoroughly Russian world-view into Hebrew realia. The article also discusses the Israeli reception of Khlebnikov as poet and philosopher, as reflected in Dan Avidan's poetry and Mikhail Grobman's paintings.

Connecting Rooms: Entering "Father's Bedroom" in Robert Lowell's Life Studies

Abstract: ����� ��� With a novelist’s attention to significant detail, in Life Studies Robert Lowell depicts a suite of connecting rooms in which generations of Lowells and Winslows enact their roles in a cultural narrative of the decline and fall of two of New England’s leading families. I will focus closely on three of those rooms — a dining room, a bedroom, and a ship’s cabin — and on how Lowell connects family history and cultural history through use of significant detail evoking Asian associations. Additional rooms, ranging from the prototypical Beacon Hill living room of the Boston Brahmins, to fictional rooms in New England crime novels, to an attic room in Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, will also be glanced at on the way to “Father’s Bedroom” in Life Studies. By way of historical prologue to the cultural narrative inscribed in those rooms, I begin with a brief account of the origins of New England Orientalism in the China trade and the opening of Japan, before closely examining how Lowell tellingly integrates allusions to the China trade and New England Orientalism in “Fourth of July in Maine” and “Soft Wood,” where they link New England’s past and present, and are assimilated into a broad cultural critique. The detached, ironic rhetorical stance Lowell adopts as New England historian and cultural critic is less distanced, more complex in Life Studies, where he engages with a central personal theme, his problematic relationship with his father. A New England vogue for chinoiserie imported from Europe can be dated back to the seventeenth century, but it was during the golden age of the Yankee clippers and the China trade that New England Orientalism came into flower. 1 By 1700 Boston had become the third busiest port in 1 See Dawn Jacobson on the Puritans’ ardor for chinoiserie: “The fashion for chinoiserie crossed the Atlantic surprisingly swiftly, although Puritan voices were raised to point out the moral dangers lurking in things of beauty and their acquisition. In 1698 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Women Friends warned against what was crushingly referred to as ‘needless things,’ and urged ‘that no superfluous furniture be in your houses wich [sic] the truth maketh manifest to the humble minded.’ All the same, the inventories and advertisements of

"Burned by the History of the Twentieth Century": Trauma and Narrative Containment in Daniel Stern's Holocaust Novels

Abstract: This article provides a brief historical overview of the changing perspectives in trauma studies, the field that has spawned an academic interest in the nature and impact of traumatic experiences. The latest insights of psychotherapists, historians, and cultural and literary critics such as Dori Laub, Bessel van der Kolk, Dominick LaCapra, Saul Friendlander, and Cathy Caruth about witnessing, testimony, representation, and working-through traumatic experiences are used as a frame of reference for the analysis of two novels by the Jewish American novelist Daniel Stern, whose work has somehow failed to achieve canonical status. Stern's two early Holocaust novels, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die (1963) and After the War (1967), it is argued, are remarkable, not only for their understanding of the psychological effects of trauma, but also for their use of narrative strategies to mitigate and contain the traumas that dwell at the core of these novels.

Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith (review)

Abstract: restatement of Patristic Neo-Platonism, personifying the linguistic sign and endowing it with an independent life. Seifrid does not explain why Florensky, Bulgakov, and Losev regarded the Patristic-Neoplatonic principle of personification as the realization of the rule of impersonality while investing considerable efforts into constructing their own philosophies of the name, which really were personalistic, as a direct antithesis to it. In the absence of such an explanation, the thesis about the personification of the linguistic sign in the systems of these three thinkers remains unsubstantiated. Finally, it seems that the principle claims of The Word Made Self could not have been made without two of his choices in translation. (1) Seifrid renders the Russian word slovo (for “speech,” or “discourse,” as well as “word”) always as “word.” This allows him to read “word” as a unit which — resorting to a Saussurean distinction — belongs to langue (the system of a language) rather than parole (speech, discourse). However, the definitions for slovo provided by Potebnya, Florensky, Bulgakov, Shpet, and Losev (none are cited by Seifrid) tend to concretize this term as a unit of parole. (2) In contrast to this, there is an entire list of words in Russian, such as lichnost’ (personality), sub’ekt (subject), chelovek (human being), soznanie (consciousness), ya (I), transcendental’noe ya (the transcendental I), psikhologicheskoe ya (the psychological identity) which Seifrid usually translates by means of the single word “self.” Considering the effort invested in defining and distinguishing all these concepts by Russian scholars (especially by Losev and Shpet), such a procedure is problematic. The book is, thus, a subjective view of the Russian philosophy of language. The personal opinion of a scholar of Russian literature7 on philosophical issues is interesting and instructive; however, the central thesis remains unsupported by the argumentation required for a substantial claim. Even so, the deeply provocative quality of this book is effective: it encourages its readers to reexamine the Russian sources.

Wolfgang Iser — In Memoriam

Abstract: An obituary for Wolfgang Iser (1926—2007), a great scholar and a kind and generous person. An overview of the history of Iser's theoretical thought is followed by a record of an episode of private life.