Showing papers in "Partial Answers in 2009"

Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-Witnesses of War: A Tense Relationship

Abstract: The article explores the complex relations between scholars and witnesses of war, taking as a test-case Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front . The article defines two types of witnesses, which lay claim to two distinct types of authority: eyewitnesses, who lay claim to the factual authority gained from the objective observation of events; and flesh-witnesses, who lay claim to the experiential authority gained from having personally undergone certain experiences. Eyewitnesses are a valuable and relatively docile source of scholarly information, providing scholars with data about war without challenging the scholars' ability to process this data. The authority of eyewitnesses thereby backs up the authority of scholars. In contrast, flesh-witnesses often challenge the ability of scholars to understand the experience of war. They thereby undermine the authority of scholars, and set themselves up as an alternative and superior authority on war.

How (if at All) Can We Encounter What Remains Latent in Texts

Abstract: As readers, we sometimes have the impression that texts “know” more than their authors ever did. The article refers to this type of (supposed) textual knowledge as latency . It argues that, if there is no direct, methodological, deductive or inductive way towards that which appears to be latent, the Stimmung (mood, atmosphere) produced by the text, as a maximally light and yet invariably physical environment, can become a symptom of what remains latent -- without transforming latency into a situation of open excess. Thus, for instance, in Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice” the detailed descriptions of the ever changing weather of Venice produce in the reader what is best described as a mood — a quasi-physical certainty of being in the presence of something latent, that will eventually reveal itself as a longing for death permeating the homoerotic desire that has overcome the protagonist. In those cases where long processes of crystallization of latency do not lead to situations of evidence, the intervention of our judgment is required -- the intervention of a judgment that can make itself dependent on better or worse reasons but will never be regarded as exclusively true, or exclusively adequate.

Narrative Tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness

Abstract: There is a basic tension between eyewitness narratives and archival records (which have attracted the attention for many artists and intellectuals in the last decade or two). Archival material bears the imprint of the bureaucratic, of that which has been institutionally preserved. It gives us traces of the dead, evidence of the past that has been recorded but not (yet) processed; it exists as a mnemonic device, as that which awaits the coming of the researcher to be brought back to life. The eyewitness narrative, on the other hand, is intensely personal, even if also collective. The opposition between these two modes of representation and of memory itself has a long history. In “Plato's Pharmacy” Jacques Derrida stages and deconstructs the opposition between memory and re- and com-memoration, between the living truth and the archive. More recently, Giorgio Agamben, writing about the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, analyzes the differences between the “unforgettable” and that which can be recalled to memory and archived. This paper examines the ways in which the dynamic relations between the living and the dead, the private and the public, the fragment and the whole, the personal and the institutional, and the autobiographical and the historical, inform and complicate -- in different ways -- both the eyewitness narrative and the archive. The discussion will focus on the Memorial at Hohenschonhausen to the East German victims of the Stasi (at the site of the former interrogation center and prison, where the tours are all conducted by former inmates), and the Stasi Museum at the site of the former Stasi headquarters, with its miles of archival files.

Conrad's "Woman as Truth" Topos: "Supposing Truth Is a Woman — What Then?"

Abstract: The topos of the dangerous woman in many of Conrad’s narratives is more than an emblem of authorial gynophobia — it stands for the danger of truth or knowledge, typically for the protectively hidden truths of the instinctual, uncontrollable, or savage self whose trampling of self possession is tantamount to death. Is Conrad’s presentation of woman as the alluring and intimidating object of knowledge to be construed literally or metaphorically? I believe that the two options are compatible and belong to the tradition in which woman, like truth itself, holds special claim as the fascinating object of male desire, forbidden, and inscrutable — this last largely as a defense against the danger of what so irresistibly draws men. The ambivalent attitude toward hidden truth in Conrad’s fiction typically derives from its association with woman as both carnal reality and the symbolic incarnation of forbidden knowledge.

Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the Muselmann

Abstract: Part of the project of reweaving the threads of the history of the Third Reich, the essay discusses the complex relation between the testimony of the victims and their body as an epistemic source of the witnessing. On a theoretical bases constructed with the help of Shoah memoirs – by Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Jorge Sempun, Robert Antelme, and others, the paper challenges the notion of the witness as a speaker, a narrator; instead, it treats the kind of victim that since Auschwitz has been known as “a Muselmann” as an integral witness. It is the body of the survivor that constitutes integral testimony; it fills a testimonial lacuna. The presence of the Muselmann is testifiable, and it can replace the memoir by the body as the repository of the event. When the body translates into the corpus of writing, survivor testimony is perceived as incomplete so long as the Muselmann is perceived as the other. The lacuna in survivor narratives is testimony from inside the experience of the Muselmann.

"Why Linger at the Yawning Tomb So Long?": The Ethics of Negative Capability in Keats's Isabella and Hyperion

Abstract: “Do I wake or sleep?” asks the speaker in John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. The question famously exemplifies Keats’s aesthetically productive “negative capability,” a psychic state of lingering “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (I. 193). It has been suggested that Keats’s negative capability resonates with Wordsworthian “wise passiveness,” as negative capability implies a capacious, liberal, “truly protean intellect — wisely passive, watchful, receptive, but also powerfully equal to all things” (Roe 236). Although negative capability undoubtedly fosters receptivity to a variety of ideas, for Keats it is also intrinsically associated with intense existential uncertainty, a dimension that is absent from Wordsworthian wise passiveness. “I have been half in love with easeful death” (l. 52), admits the speaker in the same poem, and this line reminds us that negative capability is often attained by an encounter with the ultimate mystery, death, an experience that challenges and even overwhelms the subject’s sense of identity. Situated within a complex matrix of ontology, epistemology, and ethics,

The Illiterate Reader: Aphasia after Auschwitz

Abstract: After When Adorno made his famous statement in 1949 that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," Paul Celan had already penned "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue," 1944), one of the most famous poems on the Holocaust, Primo Levi his account of survival in Auschwitz, Se questo e un uomo (If This Is a Man, 1947), and Charlotte Delbo the first section of her trilogy Auschwitz et Apres, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return, 1946). The Auschwitz experience evidently stimulated rather than stifled the need for literary expression. This context of literary output inspires a reinterpretation of Adorno's comment: from a stricture against writing to a statement about the ethics of reading; not a warning against writing atrocity so much as a call for recognizing the atrocity in what we read. Nor does Adorno say anything on writing about Auschwitz; as Law- rence Langer points out, this statement appears in an essay that has "little or nothing to do with Holocaust literature or the experience it sought to express" (2006: 123). Adorno makes no claim to the exceptionality of writing about this historical event, which may itself be exceptional — only to an exceptional shift in cultural consciousness, commenting on the time after the event. This reference to chronology rather than content places an emphasis on how we read rather than what we read, imply- ing that we cannot read with conventional assumptions and expectations after Auschwitz has impinged upon our consciousness. The Holocaust radically altered the meaning of practically everything once considered familiar: the concepts of good and evil, civilization, family, friends, com- munity, culture, self, what separates life from death. Adorno raises the question of how it forces us to read in a new way, see film differently,

The Not-So-Modern Proto-Modern: The Intertextual Geography of Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War*

Abstract: In keeping with the spirit of this essay, I shall first consider something other than the work of Melville. Painted by the Philadelphia artist Chris- tian Schussele in 1865, the year before Melville published his volume of Civil War poetry titled Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, "How We Won the Battle" (Fig. 1) is no different from the many sentimental pictures that were on display in American homes during the war. A vet- eran of the Union Army newly returned from the battlefield, his right leg amputated, sits in uniform in his chair before the hearth, surrounded by his family and his adoring dog. His audience is mostly women and chil- dren, though one grandfatherly man faces him, reminding us, as does the empty rocking chair, that few young men survived the war to return to the homestead. As he recounts his role in the war, the veteran clearly relishes the performance. He gestures broadly, his outstretched arm against the background of the window that marks the boundary between the exterior space of the war and the interior space of the home. With the newspaper crumpled and pushed to the corner of the foreground, the rapt members of this family, non-participants decked in their domestic finery, rely on him and his tale to understand the war. Over the mantle and above their stares and frowns hangs a portrait of George Washington, and decorat- ing the other wall are the father's hat and sword. The little boy's Ameri- can flag, which he must have brandished in anticipation of his father's homecoming, droops below his knee, its tip nearly brushing the ground. Behind the father, too, and removed from the rest of the family, a griev- ing widow clothed in black cradles and comforts her daughter. This is no patriotic bedtime story that the father tells his children. It is, rather, as Schussele's dedication suggests, a story for "all who have sorrowed with, or suffered for, our beloved land in her hour of peril" (1865).

Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator": Theory after the End of Theory

Abstract: There are at least two very substantial problems that currently concern literary studies. The first emerges from the widely held impression that the position of literary theory has recently undergone a fundamental change, whose nature no one seems to be able to specify exactly. 1 At best, a vague impression can be identified — namely, that the perennial game of replacing an old paradigm with a new one that surpasses it has somehow come to an end. 2 One senses that peculiar, even strangely apocalyptical questions have become prevalent in the realm of literary theory: who is ready to turn off the lights and finally close the door now? Or is there another round to be played after this one, a theory after the end of theory? Is it possible that the very nature of theory has itself changed? The other problem that concerns literary studies lies in the following question: what does it mean to do justice to the poetic dimension of literature? And more specifically, what does it mean to do these things justice within the framework of a scholarly discipline or a theory? If we are primarily interested in the poetic dimension of literature, then what is the place of this poetic element within scholarship — or within public discourse about literature? The lack of a satisfying answer to this question has earned literary studies a scathing accusation — that they are a secondary undertaking when compared with the primary one represented by the phenomena themselves. Why should anyone consult the critics to see what Goethe said if the answers can be found in Goethe’s own texts, 1 The term literary theory will be used in order to name a genre which was invented by the Russian Formalists in the early twentieth century and which tries to justify the conviction that literary studies, while dealing with textual fictions, are able to produce (the academically valuable currency of) knowledge. Cf. Christian Kohlross, Literaturtheorie und Pragmatismus oder die Frage nach den Grunden des philologischen Wissens (2007: 1–19). 2

Ethical Tempo of Narrative Syntax: Sylleptic Recognitions in Our Mutual Friend

Abstract: In inventing the Victorian novel with Pickwick Papers (1836), Charles Dickens — trailing clouds of Augustan wit as filtered and aerated through eighteenth-century comic fiction — has his inebriated hero, risen to the heights of attempted rhetoric in an impromptu speech, fall "simultane- ously" (19: 254) into a wheelbarrow and sound asleep — as if to say, passing at once from public view and out. Syllepsis: that figure of speech in which, typically, a predicate is understood in two different senses with separate objects, whether indirect or direct. In Pope, well before Dickens, the tea that you take when not counsel can stain your new brocade if not your honor. Syntactically, the twinned temporal prongs of the sylleptic effect are not "simultaneous" exactly, as Dickens would have it — the opposing meanings do not coincide "at once." Beyond any mere doubleness of literary ambiguity, syllepsis requires the textual come-again, often an ironic comeuppance, a backtracking. In its narrow miss of grammatical nonsense, syllepsis is for the most part lightly comic (with, as we shall see, notable exceptions). Its almost punning tendency results from the fact that such a rhetorical turn works only if it is discernible enough to catch hold, and be caught, in a tactical double-take. Laughing matters aside, one can see why Derrida recruited the term syllepsis, albeit loosely, to describe Mallarme's hymen entre as indicat- ing both marriage and its prevention by maidenhead, consummated em- brace and the barrier it must overcome. Two polysemous lexemes, hymen standing for marriage and the membrane and entre meaning "between," are themselves wedded under syntactic duress. 1 In traditional syllepsis, 1 See Jacques Derrida on this reciprocal contradiction of reference from the aptly named "Double Session" in Dissemination (221). The differance to be lifted in the marital bond is the coming-between not of union but of its anatomical deferral. What the reciprocal cancel- lation of this phrasing amounts to, for Derrida, is in effect an unraveling (a deconstruction) of the very seam or tuck (what he likes to call the "invaginated" fold) between definition and functional context, diction and syntax.

Once Tortured, Forever Tortured: Testimony and Autobiography in Jacob Rosenberg's East of Time and Sunrise West

Abstract: It is often assumed that Testimony and Autobiography are clearly distinct genres. On this view Testimony conveys eye-witness reports of particular tragic events, whether momentary or of longer duration (e.g. years in a concentration camp), while Autobiography is seen as more chronologically extended and more introspective. However, since many Holocaust narratives incorporate “testimony” into a larger lifenarrative which, among other things, traces the psychological effects of trauma in later years, it seems reasonable to see Testimony, at least in some instances, as an aspect of Autobiography. As always, such generic markers should be seen as heuristic indicators, not as inflexible taxonomic categories. Most serious writers agentially deploy, develop and combine generic possibilities. One such writer is Jacob G. Rosenberg, Australia's finest Jewish autobiographer and a world class figure in Holocaust writing. Born into a Bundist family in Lodz in 1922, Rosenberg is the author of two award-winning autobiographical volumes, East of Time (2005) and Sunrise West (2007), that narrate his life in the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and Ebensee, and Australia. His is a hybrid art fusing scriptural and folk materials with influences from Yiddish literature and Western modernity. His signature technique -- the imaginatively charged vignette -- is equally attuned to the description of horror and of redemptive, sometimes visionary, enchantment. Though the psychological dimension of his writing owes more to Yiddish sources than to Freudian modernity, his tracing of trauma's aftermath down the years constitutes full-blown autobiographical writing which powerfully incorporates and extends the act of testimony. Rosenberg writes: “Once you have been tortured, you are forever tortured.”

Anna Seward's "Terrestrial Year": Women, Poetry, and Science in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract: The essay discusses the way in which the eighteenth-century writer Anna Seward created an interface between literature and science by challenging the theories of a renowned astronomer through her poetry. No matter what their level of interest, women in the eighteenth century had little recourse to an education in science. Seward’s education was literary, and she paid little attention to the sciences until she attended a lecture in Lichfield given by the astronomer, Robert Evans Lloyd. He illustrated his talk with an orrery. Joseph Wright’s painting, The Philosopher giving that lecture on the Orrery, in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun (1766), demonstrates the prevalent fascination with astronomy. After the lecture, Seward wrote a poem on the same subject, “The Terrestrial Year, passing through the signs of the Zodiac,” but not before she had interrogated Lloyd on his presentation of the juxtaposition of Earth and the constellations, publicly questioning his theories. Although her knowledge of astronomy was founded on references to the zodiac in the poems of Milton and Thomson, she engaged with further scientific research and was able to prove that Lloyd’s system was flawed. Her findings inspired her to write her poem which, despite its origins, has more reference to classical literature than to science. An interesting part of the poem, however, is the introductory ‘Proem’ which gives the scientific rationale for the work, tracing Seward’s challenge and her educational progress. Her proem leads us into the poem and leaves us in no doubt that Seward’s exploration of the complexities of the solar system finds new poetic ground through her quest for scientific knowledge.

Eye and I: Negotiating Distance in Eyewitness Narrative

Abstract: Eyewitness narratives promise immediacy, the authority of you-are-there witness to the events of the past. Such narratives, however, whether those by comparatively removed witness-observers or those by more directly involved witness-participants, pose difficult problems of distance. How do the limits and possibilities of eyewitness experience contribute to working through the identity concerns that autobiographies typically engage? Revisiting history in their relational autobiographies, Passage to Ararat and Maus , Michael Arlen and Art Spiegelman look to eyewitness narrative to bridge the gap that separates them from their fathers. In her Holocaust memoir, Still Alive , by contrast, Ruth Kluger takes a darker view, exposing the manifold registers of distance -- linguistic, psychological, epistemological -- that complicate her own and any quest to stand at the eyewitness ground zero of biographical and historical knowledge.

Hubris, Language, and Oppression: Recreating Babel in Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and the Midrash

Abstract: The essay explores Primo Levi’s description of the Buna tower in If This is a Man as his indirect Midrashic commentary on the Tower of Babel. It shows how the Midrash helps to bridge between the two texts, with Primo Levi’s memoir both drawing on and reinterpreting the Biblical story.

How Browning and Byatt Bring Back the Dead: "Mr. Sludge, the 'Medium'" and "The Conjugial Angel"

Abstract: Just as Robert Browning repeatedly speaks through other voices in his poems, so does his admirer and critic A. S. Byatt in her fiction, ventriloquizing her characters’ poems, stories, letters, and even their academic work. Such writing as Browning’s and Byatt’s can be understood as mediumistic, a channeling of the voices of the dead or the imaginary. In turn both writers create mediums, Browning in “Mr. Sludge, the ‘Medium’” and Byatt in “The Conjugial Angel,” one of the two novellas set in Victorian England that form Angels and Insects . Like Browning’s Sludge, Byatt’s mediums, Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay, function as figures of the creative writer. Byatt has described Lilias as a “novelist manque” and Sophy as poet-like. Sludge is critically acknowledged to be a figure of corruption in art, and through him Browning explores the narrative artist’s inevitable negotiations between truth, fiction, and lies. Sludge’s spiritualist activities are clearly aimed at the greater glory of Sludge. Byatt’s mediums, however, are genuinely involved with the mourners and the mourned in the liminal world in which they move. Lilias brings comfort to a bereaved mother, while Sophy transforms the life of Emily Tennyson Jesse, for this novella is based on the most famous case of protracted Victorian mourning, that for Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H . Browning condemns his character by implication for Sludge’s wish that other people should “participate in Sludgehood.” Byatt represents Lilias and Sophy as intensely aware of others beside themselves. Thus both through their acts of ventriloquism and through their narratives and characters, Browning and Byatt demonstrate a shared anti-solipsistic aesthetic in texts involving the writer as medium. They turn in imagination to what is outside themselves and represent either negatively (through Sludge) or positively (through Sophy and Lilias) the value of such outward movement.

Conflict, Identity, and Creation: Isaiah Berlin and the Normative Case for Pluralism

Abstract: Is there a compelling normative case for value pluralism? Would we be better off in a world of irreducibly diverse and sometimes tragically conflicting values rather than one in which our values fit harmoniously together? This article identifies, examines and evaluates a normative argument for value pluralism suggested in Isaiah Berlin’s essays on the history of ideas and particularly on Russian writers – that is, that deep conflicts of identity bound up with conflicting values sometimes contribute critically to the creation of great works of art, philosophy, and politics Berlin attributes such deep identity conflicts to a range of important European historical figures, from Marx and Disraeli to Tolstoy and Turgenev to Hamann and Mill, and argues that their works of creative genius were motivated in part by the need to transcend their internal conflicts On his interpretation, value conflicts appear to have been a necessary condition for their great works In so far as we value these great creative works, it would then appear that we have a reason for embracing the underlying plurality of values that made them possible But Berlin never linked these insights to his case for value pluralism or political liberalism This article ends by evaluating those potential linkages It concludes that there is a good reason that Berlin did not explicitly build a normative argument for value pluralism on these great works: on careful examination the argument reveals a paradoxical quality that at least partially undermines his critique of monism By consequence, the argument from great works does not lend support to Berlin’s famous defense of pluralist liberalism, but rather to a form of creative liberalism that does not need to choose between pluralist sensibilities and monist aspirations

Aesthetics of Unease: A Brechtian Study of Anna Deavere Smith's Eyewitness Performance in Fires in the Mirror

Abstract: This paper discusses the aesthetic and social implications of enacted eyewitness accounts. For Brecht, the principles of eyewitness performance served as a “basic model” for contemporary epic theater as a performed critique of social life, with the “Street Scene” (1940) and a camp scene (1939/40) as the paradigmatic sites of eyewitness acts. With Brecht and Smith, who superimposes these sites in her multi-media work on the Brooklyn Crown Heights Race Riots in 1991 (1992-94), the theatricality of eyewitness accounts, their “uneasy” aesthetics and acting technique, becomes crucial to understanding the present moment in culture. Concomitantly, enacted eyewitness accounts politicize and de-psychologize our understanding of their scenes. They are not about identity – what we are – but about personhood, about how we are as social creatures, in legal, aesthetic, and material terms.

Thinking Outside the Hermeneutic Circle: Mephistophelean Intertextuality in John Banville's Mefisto

Abstract: Literary undertakings of the Faust legend have traditionally associated the fate of the overreacher with a thematized fragmentation. On the level of plot, Faust is torn limb from limb or threatened to be thus handled by a devilish cohort; stylistically, the tight drama that unfolds in the protagonist’s study spirals into a disjointed account of royal courts and sidekick pranks. In John Banville’s Mefisto this fragmentation is articulated in intertextual links that open up the text to a rich anteriority. Signification is consequently produced both horizontally and vertically, both inside and outside the novel. This paper traces the antecedents of the Faustian intertexts present in the novel and test the effects of such accumulation on the practice of hermeneutic deciphering. It shows that Banville’s intertextuality itself functions as a Mephistophilian figure, a playful abundance that creates an obstacle for interpretation. Such a stylized chaos does not allow for a teleological reshuffling or re-ordering of the text into a meaningful and cohesive pattern. The reader, then, is enjoined not to re-order the text but to performatively re-enact it, a creative process that will have us thinking not inside but outside the hermeneutic circle.

The Ethics of Temporality: Introduction

Abstract: In the last decade, discussions of temporality in literature have emphasized sequence and open movement as key positive values. Gary Saul Morson, for example, celebrates what he calls “processual works” (277) — novels that, instead of being tightly emplotted, open to contingencies and hence seem potentially endless. And Peter Brooks, though taking a very different approach, argues that in reading literature we derive much of our pleasure from its constitutive “clock-teasing” (34) — its many techniques for suspending, slowing, even reversing (that is, extending in surprising different directions) readers’ movement forward towards closure. But if such privileging of process has become almost synonymous with an “ethics of temporality” in literature, the essays collected in this Forum highlight productive tensions between synchrony and diachrony, explore ways in which the two co-inform ethical conceptions, and recover conditions under which the synchronic perspective yields significant possibilities for judgment and justice. In the following essays both sequence and simultaneity underwrite an ethics of temporality, along with various juxtapositions of these two schematic possibilities. This Forum is able to present such varied schemes by virtue of probing numerous specific historical conditions. For us “the ethics of temporality” is constituted by chronotopes in Bakhtin’s sense — constructs both underwritten by and manifesting the values of a particular society located in a particular time and place. It is not the aim of this collection to privilege any choice value; rather, the essays highlight several possible analytical shapes of temporality as these are underwritten by specific cultural and political circumstances and rendered palpable by literature. Frances Ferguson opens the Forum by exploring the notion of the “generation” that rises to social and moral significance in the Romantic period. In the early nineteenth century, Ferguson contends, contemporaneity becomes a key tool for assessing individual preferences and framing public values. Such a privileging of synchrony as the condition of judgment, she explains, results from the development of a new — and for many in the Romantic period exciting — pedagogy, which grouped school chil-

The Emergence of Oedipus's Blessing: Evoking Wolfgang Iser

Abstract: In these pages I present my interpretation of Iser’s model of emergence. I emphasize that what I am presenting is my understanding and exemplification of the relations among the chief terms in Iser’s model, namely, recursion, negativity, and emergence. At the same time, what I offer is, I believe, an extrapolation from what we know of Iser’s terms. I propose that the recursive relations and emergences traced by Iser in effect constitute an interactive experience of that which he called the “imaginary.” This recursive experience is a way of collectively taking part in the emergence of imagined being. This is to suggest that in his theoretical work Iser was moving from a theory of the individual act of reading to a theory of cultural and artistic transformation that is necessarily a shared activity. In its fully specified form I believe that this theory must have profound ontological implications, in other words, for how we participate in the being that, via negativity and the imaginary, we are presently helping to bring into being. Iser, I believe, had begun to explain how the greatest works of art and culture enact an interactive, transformative, and emergent way of being in recursion. The exemplifications of emergence that I analyze are from the works of Sophocles, Milton, and Kant.

The Holocaust: Questions for the Humanities

Abstract: This paper discusses the challenges posed by the Holocaust and its representations to the practices of the Humanities. The nature of these challenges is brought through an examination of the German Historikerstreit and the French controversies surrounding Heidegger’s relation to the Nazis. The nature of historical representation and its relation to affect are examined in works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Humanities cannot appropriate the Holocaust but they cannot ignore it either. They face the daunting task of learning how to remember it.

Paranoid Imaginings: Wilkie Collins, the Rugeley Poisoner, and the Invisibility of Novelistic Ekphrasis

Abstract: If, in an era of Jane Eyres and David Copperfields, there is something curiously generic about “The Woman in White,” we might surmise this is because she is two women, not one. When Walter Hartright, the first of the novel’s rotating cast of narrators, unexpectedly encounters a mysterious woman clad in filmy white on the road to his new post as a private drawing instructor, we are likely to conclude that we have come upon the title character. Yet when Walter arrives at his destination and is introduced to the young woman he is meant to teach, we discover another candidate for that role. Collins’s novel, in nuce, is a story of this likeness, even if the baroque complexities are likely to distract us from this fundamental point. The Woman in White reveals ways in which the body functions

The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov's Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames (review)

Abstract: In this far-reaching and ambitious study, Marina Grishakova examines Nabokov’s manipulation of modes of time, space, and perspective in a context of contemporary Russian and Western cultural, philosophical, and scientific discourses. Grishakova takes a highly theoretical, densely semiotic approach, drawing upon a wide range of contemporary ideas to establish an exhaustive, broad-spectrum context for her elaboration of narrative and structural modelling in Nabokov’s work. The first forty pages of her introduction lay the ground for her analysis, with just the last twenty devoted to Nabokov — to his place in Western art as a “borderline phenomenon,” a figure positioned “between” languages and cultures (51), whose work is dominated by a preoccupation with modes of displacement, defamiliarization, and deception. Such impulses Grishakova identifies with aspects of pre-Revolutionary and early Soviet literary and philosophical movements — the Symbolists, Formalists, Serapion Brothers (particularly Gruzdev) — as well as two key figures, Andrei Belyi and Evgenii Zamiatin. Their poetics of game, their experiments with space and time, their exploration of multi-dimensional worlds, the fantastic and the surreal, and their “thematization of mathematical problems and scientific theories of fiction” (62) can all be read as significant features of Nabokov’s art. Nevertheless, and perhaps mindful of Nabokov’s intransigence on the subject, here and throughout her study Grishakova merely suggests the possibility of influence, preferring to focus on points of connection and distinction rather than offering definitive hypotheses. Here, the most provocative of her comparisons is that of Nabokov and Zamiatin. Zamiatin’s neorealistic manipulation of optical tools to extend and transform visual experience is aligned with Nabokov’s emphasis on an intense and meticulous way of seeing that can effect “a fantastic metamorphosis of . . . routine reality” (63). Grishakova’s source for this comparison is a rarely-cited lecture “The Creative Writer” which Nabokov gave soon after his arrival in the United States and published in the Bulletin of the New England Modern Language Association in 1942. This is in fact the original version of the much later essay, “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” posthumously published in Lectures on Literature (New York, 1980). That Grishakova chooses to cite the initial lecture is important because of the extent to which it differs from the subsequent and better-known version. In this instance, the passage quoted does not appear in the revision, which suggests the potential value of the original text to Nabokov scholars, who may not be aware of its existence. It would have been helpful if the author had pointed this out and indicated where the passages she quotes differ in the two versions. Chapter I, “The Models of Time,” sets out to explore the “oscillation between different time scales, their interference and multiple shifts” in Nabokov’s work

Swearing-in Ceremony: The Police in the Kovno Ghetto, November 1, 1942

Abstract: The leaders of the Jewish police in the Kovno ghetto, a controversial public institution, initiated a project of writing the history of the Jewish police. Their purpose was to leave testimonies and records of the police in the ghetto, and to convey their perspective on the events. The writers were aware of their limitations – their subjectivity and closeness to the events. However, they had an urge to present a narrative describing their organization -- not as memoirs or diaries of individual policemen but as a Geschichte of their unit for future generations. The paper offers an analysis of one episode in this “History” – viz. of the text and the contexts of the unusual swearing-in ceremony that was held at a relative late point in the history of the ghetto police and that in the “History” is not presented in the chronologically appropriate place – commenting both on the possible meaning of the event and on the manner of its representation.