Showing papers in "Partial Answers in 2013"

Communicational Criticism: Studies in Literature as Dialogue by Roger D. Sell (review)

Abstract: Roger Sell of the Åbo Akademi in Turku, Finland, has spent the past decade articulating an interdisciplinary critical approach that attempts to reintroduce what might be termed the “human element” into literary criticism. He began with Literature as Communication (2000), in which he laid the foundations for what he called “mediating criticism” — the title of a 2001 book that developed a notion suggesting the critic’s role as a mediator between author and reader. Communicational Criticism is the next major step in his comprehensive project, a theory of literary appreciation and criticism in post-postmodern times. The book develops the various threads of this theory in applied analyses of English literary works from Shakespeare to Pinter, with chapters on, among others, Pope, Wordsworth, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Churchill, Orwell, and Lynne Reid Banks. To understand the background to Sell’s notion of communicational criticism, it is helpful to return to Literature as Communication for his notion of communication as a semiotic process of negotiating a view shared by two parties of some third “real, hypothetical, or fictional” entity (2000:3). For Sell, “the writing, transmission and reading of literary texts . . . are human deeds, with a fully interpersonal valency” (22). This happens in a phenomenal world that writers and readers both occupy, even if not at one and the same moment, since this valency continues “across time and space” (107). Indeed, “literature’s world [is] the world within which literature itself operates . . . the real world” (44). And while Sell relates to literature’s ability to communicate some notion of “truth,” the truth is not necessarily literal: “At the price of episodic or specific truth, the writer may be able to implicate truth of some other kind” (33–34). Such an approach is actually associated with an Aristotelian notion of the universal truth of poetry or the Wordsworthian moral feeling. Taking literature to be a form of communication, one which can take place “directly or indirectly” (3), Sell argues that the role of the critic is to “mediate” between writer and reader. In Communicational Criticism Roger Sell goes on to explore different kinds of communication as ways of re-describing some of the qualities that make a text literary. He argues that one of the most important aspects in assessing communication pertains to the conditions of dialogue: “In most literature which readers have felt worthy of the name, the invitation extended by any fictional elements to a truly dialogical comparing of notes is very powerful” (2011: 13). Yet the notion of dialogue is itself tied up with non-textual moral considerations: “if communication is to be genuine and effective . . . [w]hat must also come into play are ethical considerations of human equality, of truthfulness, of trust, of fairness, of cooperativeness, and of situational appropriateness” (18). A connection is drawn between a text’s formal aspects and its ethical significance.

Recycling of Doubles in Narrative Fiction of the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract: Doppelganger narratives of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries relate in different and sometimes incompatible ways to their Romantic precursors. They often parody these precursor narratives, criticize their popular interpretations, or tinker with their conventions. Some of them follow the Romantic tradition in highlighting the harsh rivalry between "original" and double and its catastrophic results, whereas in others the double acts as a catalyst for self-reflection and self-transformation. Doppelganger narratives of the last decades tend to focus on the intersection of the psychological with the scientific or the aesthetic domains, while the significance of the supernatural principle is reduced, eliminated, or replaced by implausible coincidences and analogical relations typical of (post)modern fiction. In order to demonstrate these ideas, the article begins with an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixir (1815-1816) and continues with an exploration of five types of later Doppelganger narratives.

Love and Bewilderment: Matvei Kagan's Literary Critical Concepts

Abstract: The essay discusses the literary-critical concepts of Matvei Kagan (1889–1937) – a Russian philosopher of Jewish origin, a student and follower of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and a close friend of Mikhail Bakhtin in his early, constitutive period of the Nevel Circle (1918–1920). The concepts of love and bewilderment, as defined in Kagan’s works on Turgenev and Pushkin, are examined in the context of his philosophy of history, culture, and art. In the center of Kagan’s historical theory of literature lies the idea of the Jewish community as a model for canonization of the cultural work. Kagan views literature as generating self-awareness and national-cultural identity, either through tragic bewilderment at the loss of freedom and love in history (in the case of Pushkin) or through a culture’s self-defining dialogue with other cultures (as in the case of Turgenev). The central concept of this approach is that of svive-libe – “love of environment,” interpreted as love for a community’s cultural contribution in the context of its purposefulness in a universal human context.

Is Style Information

Abstract: In recent years, literary critics and theorists have turned increasingly toward cognitive science for models, including in discussions of literary style More than is usually recognized, such an approach recalls the “affective stylistics” developed by Stanley Fish in the 1970s — a similarity evident in the heavy use both theories make of the term “information” The assumptions behind the use of this term, however, are deeply misleading “Information” implies that styles are parcels or propositions rather than expressions of attitude, and invokes a causal vocabulary that fails to capture how texts convey moods and communicate ideas More plausible models of understanding can be culled from Donald Davidson’s account of Mrs Malaprop and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s descriptions of “seeing-as” Avoiding the twin temptations of skepticism and dogmatism, these discussions suggest that cognitivist and affective theories are logically dependent on the practices of actually existing readers, whose engagements with style are at times effortless and at times full of confusion Styles are not discrete objects, as the language of “information” implies, and understanding them demands a complex training and historically variable set of skills, sometimes referred to as know-how and wit

Margaret Atwood's Feminist Ethics of Gracious Housewifery

Abstract: The article explores Margaret Atwood’s engagement with the ethics of hospitality as manifested in her novel The Blind Assassin (2000) and the short story “The Art of Cooking and Serving” (2006). It claims that these works point to an ethical vision which is best understood in light of the philosophical ideas of radical hospitality suggested by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida but with an important feminist revision. Focusing on allusions to an inspiring cookbook, prominent in the two works by Atwood, the article analyzes the works’ appropriation and reformulation of the feminine myth of gracious housewifery for signifying both the subject’s obligation to the other and the ideal of generous giving and attentive care. It addresses the conflict that Atwood stages between a feminist critique of the duty of hospitality imposed on women and the ethical view of the subject’s un-chosen and absolute responsibility to another.

Waiting for Blanchot: A Third Act for Beckett's Play

Abstract: Waiting and expecting structurally presuppose a futurity conditioned by doubt and uncertainty about the object of the wait. But what can waiting signify when one no longer waits for something/someone to come in a determinable future or when the horizon of such a traditional form of waiting starts receding? This paper attempts to frame this problem within a “dialectical” reading of Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot , starting from the existential-temporal dimension of humanity’s Dasein as “destined-to-death,” which traces the limits of waiting with/for an end as the time of the always missed/deferred encounter with Godot, symbolizing the ultimate appointment with death. As the play unfolds, the main characters may be seen to approach, albeit unwittingly, the threshold of another, more objectless waiting: that of Derrida’s arrivant or waiting without (messianic) expectation in a future-to-come ( avenir ). Finally, after a detour via Blanchot’s own modes of waiting and, as a possible remedy, the form of negation known as forgetting ( Awaiting Oblivion ), it returns to the ultimate inescapability of waiting beyond the “end” of Beckett’s play and, following Abraham and Torok’s speculative endeavor to write a “Sixth Act” in order to put to rest the dramatic uncertainties of Hamlet , it attempts to imagine a “third act,” once the curtain has fallen on Beckett’s characters.

The Personal Pilgrimage of David Lurie — or Why Coetzee's Disgrace Should and Should not Be Read in Terms of an Ethics of Perception

Abstract: Through a reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace this paper discusses the contemporary genre of reading literature in terms of an "ethics of perception." In the fourteen years since its publication the novel has elicited a rich body of commentary and criticism with an ethical edge, often focusing on the unfolding vision or stunted but developing perceptiveness of its uneasy protagonist David Lurie. This path of criticism is paradigmatic of a broader interest in studying literary works as paths to moral philosophical illumination. I discuss how the novel yields to this kind of reading, but also how this path of reading is complicated by its various other features, above all, a plurality of values that may be hard to reconcile and a Christian perspective of grace which is played against the novels secular, intellectual perspective on perceptiveness. I argue that reading Disgrace in terms of any pre-given ethical formula, however compelling, may be problematic considering the nature of Coetzee's authorship.

"Lectura para Personas de Amplio Criterio": Censorship in the Translations of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and The Professor of Desire

Abstract: This article focuses on the effects of censorship on the translations of two of Roth's novels into Spanish: Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and The Professor of Desire (1977). These two novels, published in Spanish for the first time in 1977 and 1978 respectively — a period when Spain had barely left behind General Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975) — suffered various forms of censorship. The article shows how the four criteria (Abellan 1980) used by the censors of the period — sexual morality, linguistic decorum, politics and respect for religion as an institution — were applied in the case of these two Roth novels.

Ventriloquism in Philip Roth's Deception and Its Polish Translation

Abstract: The article examines one of the problems of translating Philip Roth's novel Deception into Polish. In the novel, written entirely in dialogues, the speakers are not defined as regards their identity, including their gender. This device contributes to the novel's theme of deception and ventriloquism: all the voices in the novel, no matter how diverse, belong ultimately to the writer as their sole creator. The translator should leave the dialogues untagged, otherwise the meaningful indeterminacy of the text is lost. This, however, proves impossible in the Polish translation, since the Polish language is gendered, and the Polish translator has to disambiguate the text, deciding who makes what utterances in the dialogue. In doing so the translator has to follow cliched preconceptions about gender or, on the contrary, subvert them. In both cases, what in the source text is left ambiguous and indeterminate becomes concretized and determinate in the process of translation.

The Difference in One Word: The Italian Translation of Philip Roth's American Pastoral

Abstract: This article addresses the problems of the Italian translation of Philip Roth's American Pastoral by Vincenzo Mantovani. The theoretical backdrop against which the assessment is set concerns the novel's intentional system as David Herman interprets it in his "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance." Accordingly, the notion of "intentional equivalence" is proposed as a tool for comparing the original text and its translation. Well aware that the creation of effects starts at the lexical level, word choices at crucial textual junctures are examined, starting with the incipit and proceeding with pivotal moments in the first 90 pages of the book. These pages revolve around a very tight intentional construction depending on Zuckerman's immersion in the Swede's mystique and the consequent need for the narrator to write his story. The article demonstrates that because of inexplicable translation choices the Italian reader is inevitably led into a storyworld different from the original as far as focalizing perspective, ironic distance, and empathetic involvement are concerned.

Introduction: From Translation to Interpretation

Abstract: The forum consists of studies of selected translations of Philip Roth's works into Spanish, French, Italian, and Polish. The translations, along with the interpretations and misinterpretations to which they lead, reflect the time and place in which they are performed but also shed new light on the linguistic and cultural folds of the original text.

The Theory and Practice of Transculturation: Translating Culture-Specific Concepts in Balys Sruoga's Forest of the Gods

Abstract: The article discusses the problems that faced the English translator of Balys Sruoga's Forest of the Gods , a novel written immediately after World War II and based on the author's experience as a prisoner in the Stutthof concentration camp. The article shows that, largely owing to the translator's choices in rendering culture-specific concepts and expressions, the original and the translation may acquire different kinds of standing in the literary-historical process.

Mysticism of Immanence: Lettrism, Sprachkritik, and the Immediate Message

Abstract: The essay examines the epistemological possibilities of artistic imaginary languages and their ontological effects in the avant-garde movement “lettrism.” The movement employed imaginary language, which illustrates an anti-rational theory of language. The problematics of such quasi-language are manifested most radically in relation to quietist-linguistic philosophy ( Sprachkritik ): the identification of the limits of thinking and language in philosophy confronts the utopian belief in the possibility of “private” communication in the avant-garde. Lettrism subverts the normative order of systematic language by means of invented signs, which are not arbitrary but unorthodox. These signs supposedly express that which philosophy designates as epistemic privacy — what can be known to one person only. The paradoxical claim that an imaginary language can express the epistemically private gives rise to what I term the mysticism of immanence . Neither distinctively religious nor atheistic, the mysticism of immanence is based on the idealistic assertion that one is able to express not only the existence but also the contents of epistemic privacy. Moreover, the renunciation of conventional language suggests that immanence is in this case alinguistic. In brief, for lettrists, thinking did not necessitate language. Lettrist imaginary language points out the necessity for convention as a stabilizing framework for meaning production. By advocating the idea of an “immediate message,” which remains between mediation and immediacy, imaginary language exceeds the limits of immanence. Since an imaginary language cannot be shared or self-contained, it is an opening of immanence towards other than immanence. This other is not represented as any absolute transcendence, any version of the beyond, but rather as a collapse of the limits of immanence, limits that are subject to negotiation because the immediate message gives rise to a new and expanded sense of the immanent.

Did Human Character Change?: Representing Women and Fiction from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf

Abstract: This essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf’s much-debated claim that “on or about December 1910, human character changed,” reassessing its import not as the provocation to her contemporaries that seems to have been intended, or as a statement of originality, but in a historical envelope that encompasses Woolf’s own fictional oeuvre within a tradition of representing women in fiction. This tradition is essentially rhetorical and literary rather than essentialist; it engages with representations and associations rather than directly with psychological or philosophical questions about personality or identity. As such, “character” should be understood as involving a series of recognizable codes or tropes played through new contexts, with Shakespeare’s representations of women as a constant touchstone or reference point. A pioneer of “stream of consciousness” prose and Modernist fiction, Woolf is normally read for her innovations in representing selfhood; this experimentalism, I suggest, is built on a bedrock of familiar imagery that reveals her involvement in a continuing literary tradition of character representation. Her interest in late nineteenth-century and contemporary developments in depth psychology notwithstanding, Woolf’s revolutionary prose style shows evidence of her careful reading of previous literary evocations of character, particularly the characters of women. What is at issue, then, is not primarily existential questions about whether character “is” innate, self-fashioned, or merely linguistic, but rather critical or representational issues of how literary character has been evoked so as to create certain responses in readers. In the process, however, the larger existential questions are implicitly invoked, and shown to be not novel concerns of modernist psychology but continuing issues in literary understandings of the concept of “character” itself, at least as far back as the seventeenth century. In addition to a range of Woolf’s own critical and creative writing, the essay considers works by Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Walter Pater, Henry James and Oscar Wilde.

Philip Roth's Professor of Desire in the Light of Its French Translation

Abstract: The article analyzes Henri Robillot's 1979 translation of Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire (1977) into French. It demonstrates the manner in which apparently minor stylistic choices, slight omissions, and more generally the stylistic treatment of male and female characters in the translation constitute a strategy of excessive interpretation and gender politics traced back to the critical reception of Roth's work. Through the analysis of the translation, the article aims to improve the analytical perception of the novel.

Alimentary Poetics: Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg

Abstract: Robert Lowell coined the famous distinction between cooked and raw poetry, but beginning with Joel Barlow’s epic treat The Hasty Pudding there is a long tradition of American poetics sustained by copious and artful use of tropes of hunger, food, and eating. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems and Lowell’s Life Studies would be emaciated beyond recognition without them. Also taking other poems into account, the essay argues that Lowell and Ginsberg did more to enrich the American alimentary poetic tradition than anyone else since T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

Ivan Sergeievich Turgenev: On the Centennial of His Birth

Abstract: First publication in English of the Yiddish article on I. S. Turgenev published by Matvei (Mordechai Nisan) Kagan (1889–1937), a Russian philosopher of Jewish origin, in 1919. Kagan praises Turgenev as the first Russian novelist whose novels made Russian literature and culture a part of the world culture. This was a result of what Kagan called Turgenev’s svive-libe – the love for one’s cultural environment characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia that represented the whole people as the living and powerful collective.

Sartre Recounts a Childhood Story: The Case of Genet

Abstract: In Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr , Sartre tells the story of the writer Jean Genet. He does it from the presuppositions he developed in his major philosophical book, Being and Nothingness , where he presented man as a free being acting in specific situations but always able to surmount the given by decisions of his own. Nevertheless, Sartre describes the story of the orphan Genet as it begins in childhood with the accusation of theft made by his adopted parents and by the adults of the village where he had been sent. This accusation turns out to be traumatic. Genet will actually become a thief later, and a writer of theft and crime. It thus determines his entire life. By telling this story, Sartre himself puts his basic ideas to the test, and has to admit that events which occurred in childhood influence and determine our life. Sartre the philosopher of freedom is thus challenged by Sartre the writer of existence.

Dialogue with/and Great Books: The Dynamics of Canon Formation (review)

Abstract: Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon envisions a bleak future for Great Books curricula: “Finding myself now surrounded by professors of hip-hop; by clones of Gallic-Germanic theory; by ideologues of gender and of various sexual persuasions; by multiculturalists unlimited, I realize that the Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible. All of these Resenters of the aesthetic value of literature are not going to go away, and they will raise up institutional resenters after them” (1994: 517–18). The tone is no less than apocalyptic: “Things,” he writes, have “fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called ‘the learned world’” (1). The Canon wars have been raging for half a century now, as the aesthetes battle it out with the ideologues over the fate and direction of Great Books curricula. In Dialogue with/and Great Books: The Dynamics of Canon Formation, David Fishelov proposes to return to the heated and perhaps moot debate by proposing a way out of this cul de sac of mutually exclusive positions. Rather than contend for either of the existing strongholds (in Fishelov’s terms, the beauty party and the power party), he offers a remedy by bringing this age-old debate into the twenty-first century. The radical suggestion is that we rethink canonicity by exchanging an outdated top-bottom model of canonization for a bottom-top one. The process, he proposes, no longer need be the essentializing selection — a book need not be judged on the basis of its inherent qualities. Its appeal can be judged by the sum of quantifiable, empirical data, such as the number of hits a book generates on a computerized search engine. The institutional evaluating committee or the tweed-wearing professor are rendered obsolete as canonization is purged of political and aesthetic considerations alike. The transition from a qualitative to a quantitative value scheme hinges on the book’s central argument: “the source of a literary work’s perceived greatness lies in the dialogues it generates with readers, authors, translators, adaptors, artists and critics” (ix). Fishelov goes on to conceptualize different forms of dialogue, all pertaining to a book’s negotiation with or allusions to previous works of literature. Drawing inspiration from real-life forms of communication, Fishelov offers three central dialogue forms, all of which are meticulously explained and exemplified. A genuine dialogue is reflective of a dialectical negotiation with a precursor text (in Fishelov’s terms, an initiating text), a negotiation that might be ideological or aesthetic; an echo dialogue is a non-dialectical treatment of an initiating text (for example, a translation), “and a dialogue of the deaf” where a responding text refers to an initiating text in nothing but a pretextual fashion, by way of highlighting an agenda all its own. These different dialogues, in turn, provide the quantifiable data that feed the empirical model of canonization that will allow us to determine whether or not a work of literature is great. The shift to equations, coefficients, and statisti-

Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq by Kate McLoughlin (review)

Abstract: twentieth century to Russian audiences and thus influenced humanistic scholarship in Russia. Ryklin is a strong critic of the neo-Stalinism revived by Putin. However, despite frequent reference to Ryklin’s works, the reader does not learn much beyond the self-evident, such as his support of social behavior defined by tolerance, dialogue, and the free press rather than totalitarian ideas embraced by religious-fascist extremists (118). The last chapter, which deals with Chechnya, is perhaps the least informative. Chechnya’s notorious president, Ramzan Kadyrov, is never even mentioned. At times Russia on the Edge seems to have been written in haste. It does not include most recent cultural and political developments. Nevertheless, students interested in a broad picture of contemporary Russian culture will benefit from reading it.