Showing papers in "Partial Answers in 2015"
TL;DR: The authors examines failures of witnessing in China Mieville's The City and the City and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and concludes that the act of reading itself, in that it involves a degree of identification with the narrator, may cause us to repeat the same failures of the witnessing as the protagonists.
Abstract: This article examines failures of witnessing in China Mieville’s The City and the City and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go . It begins by outlining models of witnessing posited by psychoanalyst Dori Laub noting that his conception of witnessing relies upon an ‘imperative to tell’ and on the assumption of good faith between teller and listener. The article argues that, in Mieville’s and Ishiguro’s fictions, this imperative is absent, and the resulting failures of witnessing on the part of the protagonists create their complicity in the dystopian systems represented. The failures to bear witness to the atrocities committed by the regimes in these novels stem from failures to see and acknowledge the visible evidence of atrocity, due to its normalization. The protagonists also fail to construct the narratives that would attest to these atrocities, preferring to perpetuate comforting rumours and forms of unreliable knowledge, often as the result of a desire for empathy with the group of which they are a part. The article concludes that this empathy becomes a troubling virtue: the act of reading itself, in that it involves a degree of identification with the narrator, may cause us to repeat the same failures of the witnessing as the protagonists.
9 citations
TL;DR: For instance, the authors suggests that ideas advanced in Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) helped Roth shape his essay and, more importantly, his early skepticism about religious affiliation grounded in hatred and chauvinism rather than in living, generative faith.
Abstract: What pertinence might the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre hold for Philip Roth’s brief but provocative contribution to Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary collection, “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals: A Symposium” (1961), and for Roth’s attitude to Judaism and ethnic bias generally? The article suggests that ideas advanced in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) helped Roth shape his symposium essay and, more importantly, his early skepticism about religious affiliation grounded in hatred and chauvinism rather than in living, generative faith. The association of Sartrean ideas — the distinction, in Being and Nothingness (1943), between Being in-itself and Being for-itself and Sartre’s views on anti-Semitism — figures in Roth’s comments on twentieth-century Jewish outlook and in his formulation of “Grossbartism.” This existential mix may owe something, as well, to the Heideggerian state of being “thrown” — insofar as Sartre appropriates the concept to discuss the prospect of being thrown into a trans-cultural state of tolerance, a state that Roth seems to desire for Jew and gentile alike.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the four "pedagogical" novels by writer and journalist Frida Vigdorova, mostly known for her records of the Joseph Brodsky's trial of 1964.
Abstract: The paper focuses on the four “pedagogical” novels by writer and journalist Frida Vigdorova, mostly known for her records of the Joseph Brodsky’s trial of 1964. These novels written in 1949–1958, as well as some of her journalistic publications of the 1950s, made her one of the most influential publicists who wrote on the problems of school and schoolchildren. The article traces Vigdorova’s key ideas and literary techniques back to the second half of 1940s, when she wrote her first novels, first and foremost My Class (1949). Although Vigdorova was regarded as a follower of Anton Makarenko, the famous pedagogue of the 1920s and the 1930s, one may find a significant shift in her interpretation of his theory. The main difference consists in her emphasis on the idea of the “individual approach” to each child, by contrast to the earlier attention to the issues of the collective. This idea is represented as a strong moral demand on every teacher or educator. The author shows that this idea was “re-invented” in the late 1940s by the officials of the ministry of education and pedagogical publicists in order to respond to a strong pressure of the pedagogical corps that had to face severe problems that emerged as direct social effects of WWII and were exacerbated by the banning of all psychological approaches to children after 1936. The “individual approach” becomes not only an ideological, but also a literary basis of all Vigdorova’s novels, a structural principle of her narratives.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the children of the ghetto through the lens of two late-nineteenth century photographic techniques: hinged-mirror and composite photography, and trace Zangwill's overall discomfort with what they call the "composite photographic logic of liberalism, a logic that predicated tolerance on the radical assimilation of Jewish difference and reinforced institutional practices of Anglicization, especially in London's East End Ghetto."
Abstract: This article considers Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto through the lens of two late-nineteenth century photographic techniques: hinged-mirror and composite photography. These two techniques, each of which played a role in Zangwill’s personal life, are useful for reframing Zangwill’s personal and literary struggles with representations of Jewish identity that were confined to notions of “types,” or stereotypes of race and ethnicity. The article traces Zangwill’s overall discomfort with what I term the “composite photographic logic of liberalism,” a logic that predicated tolerance on the radical assimilation of Jewish difference and reinforced institutional practices of Anglicization, especially in London’s East End Ghetto.
5 citations
TL;DR: Zangwill portrayed the ghetto as a space with a proclivity for holding its inhabitants not through economic, legal, or cultural pressures, but through its affective power as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The article focuses on Zangwill’s unusual depictions of ghetto life in late-Victorian London. Zangwill portrays the ghetto as a space with a proclivity for holding its inhabitants not through economic, legal, or cultural pressures — all features of earlier Victorian writing about the ghetto — but through its affective power. It begins by situating Zangwill’s depictions of ghetto life amidst a longer trajectory of Victorian ghetto discourse. The essay moves on to explore the significance of Zangwill’s innovation in depicting ghetto life as a place that emerges from borders born of the interplay of intimate encounters, emotional knowledge, and embodied experience.
4 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors trace a linear development from the proliferation and centering of sexual discourses in the new sexology of Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and Freud, through Mina Loy's “Feminist Manifesto” (1914) to the transformations in feminist politics that took place in 1969.
Abstract: The conventional narrative of modernism’s relation to sexuality concerns a generation of writers who led a “modernist rebellion against sexual censorship” (Boone 2014: 281) through overlapping acts of formal and sexual experimentation. This narrative, which has survived a number of challenges throughout the last decades,1 traces a linear development from the proliferation and centering of sexual discourses in the “new sexology” of Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and Freud, through Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” (1914) to the transformations in feminist politics that took place in 1969.2 This was also the year in which “The Storm,” Kate Chopin’s 1898 story of discreet sexual transgression, pleasure, and autonomy, was finally published — an appropriate co-occurrence given that this history turns to modernist writing for many of its most crucial anchoring points: from explorations of the fulfillment of desires outside of the confines of marriage in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to the gender reversals of Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and the interweaving of formal experimentation and sexual politics of Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). As modernist liberation from the cultural norms of the Victorian age was increasingly cast in sex-positive terms, celibacy came to be positioned as freedom’s opposite: a paralytic remnant of prudish values and oppressive religious discourses that stood as an obstacle to modernity. This rhetoric, in turn, has long informed and ordered modernist criticism. Thus Richard Brown, in his authoritative James Joyce and Sexuality (1985) writes, representatively, that “Joyce’s portraits of . . . ‘celibate’ Dubliners” were directed towards the “identification of the sexual problem of celibacy” (128; emphasis added).3
4 citations
TL;DR: In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) by Art Spiegelman as discussed by the authors, the author explores the surprisingly similar ways that Zeno's Conscience (1923) by Italo Svevo, and In the Shadow-of-No-Towers (2004, art Spiegelman) imaginatively reframe cosmopolitanism through the figure of cigarette smoking.
Abstract: Cosmopolitanism need not always be a duty, an identity, or a condition; it can just as easily be a moment or a memory, an experience that can vanish in a puff of smoke. This article explores the surprisingly similar ways that Zeno’s Conscience (1923) by Italo Svevo, and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) by Art Spiegelman, imaginatively reframe cosmopolitanism through the figure of cigarette smoking. In particular, it expands attention to No Towers the discourse of trauma and connects the new graphic canon to a canonical work of literary modernism. The chain-smoking figures at the center of these two texts give us an image of the cosmopolitan which is reducible neither to the enlightenment ideal of the supranational liberal citizen, nor to its contemporary idiom, the fluid and flexible post-identitarian subject. Instead, both writers use cigarette smoking to delineate an apt cosmopolitan resident for two cities on the verge of being transformed by warlike nationalisms. Where Svevo uses nicotine addiction to connect his twitchy protagonist to prewar Trieste, Spiegelman insistently, but ironically accumulates forms of memory and identity around smoking, from his image as human and as “Maus,” to the smoke of the ovens at Auschwitz, to the burning of the Towers themselves. But this work of belonging is interrupted in No Towers the New York City smoking ban, which displaces an apoplectic Spiegelman from his briefly “rooted” cosmopolitanism. Ultimately, this article explores an unlikely seam of detail, and a consistent image of the cosmopolitan, which persists across the borders between twentieth century and the twenty-first, between the modern and the postmodern, and between the First World War and the War on Terror.
4 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that the term "comics" can and should be used to refer to prints from early modern England, arguing that Fig. 1, an engraving published as part of The Triumphs of Gods revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Murther in 1653, resembles a comic strip.
Abstract: This paper argues that the term “comics” can and should be used to refer to prints from early modern England. Indeed, Fig. 1, an engraving published as part of The Triumphs of Gods revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Murther in 1653, resembles a comic strip. In this seventeenth-century work, there is a strip-like sequence of juxtaposed images from left to right, top to bottom. The text accompanying each image matches the plot of “HISTORY IV,” below, and the text identifies the strip’s actions and characters, but the role of the images exceeds that of
4 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that reading Chris Ware's Building Stories requires intermedial reading, knowledge of both the high canon of modernist literature and art and the history and iconology of twentieth and twenty-first century comics.
Abstract: This paper reads Chris Ware’s Building Stories in light of his many references to art and literature, especially to Cornell, Courbet, Duchamp, and James Joyce. The author argues that Building Stories requires intermedial reading, knowledge of both the “high” canon of modernist literature and art and the history and iconology of twentieth and twenty-first century comics. In Building Stories Ware incorporates the work and ideas of canonical art history through an allusive play that is hybrid, layered and subversive. The paper claims that Ware’s citation of Duchamp and Courbet reframes a dissociated and dissociating trope, the dismembered female nude, in a story critical of the objectification of women, the mask of femininity, and the traps of gender. Ware ultimately does so in the service of a sentimental and redemptive narrative frame the paper calls the epiphanic mode. As used by Ware, the epiphanic mode marries one of the most sacred and revered concepts of modernism, the epiphany, to the formal device of the comics capsule as used by Bil Keane, one of the most maligned and popular comics artists of the last fifty years. The turn towards a devalued device — the Bil Keane capsule, or epiphanic circle, and a devalued experience — the domestic, rejects the internal hierarchies not only of the art world but also of the comics world, which is so often associated with masculine and public models of heroism.
3 citations
TL;DR: The authors read Bechdel's Fun Home (2006) as a rewriting of Proust's In Search of Lost Time and interpreted it as a complex exercise in decoding signs, and claimed that the protagonists' experiment in decoding turns out to be a failure, due to the impossibility of understanding and deciphering the signs of each other's intimate truths.
Abstract: This article reads Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as a rewriting of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time . Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s assumption, which interprets In Search as a complex exercise in decoding signs, the article claims that Fun Home stages the attempt of its protagonists, Alison and her father Bruce, to understand the truth about each other. In particular, it addresses the issues of sexual identity, spatiality, and death as some of the crucial motifs in In Search that Bechdel retrieves in Fun Home . The protagonists’ “experiment in decoding” turns out to be a failure, due to the impossibility of understanding and deciphering the signs of each other’s intimate truths.
3 citations
TL;DR: Zangwill as mentioned in this paper explored how the Ghetto experience had shaped new English residents who came from Eastern Europe and Russia and found that the institutionalized practices of the English, especially regarding matters of education, language, and the poor, prompt the immigrant Ashkenazim to be, in Zangwill's phrasing, their own Ghetto gates.
Abstract: Children of the Ghetto : Zangwill’s title announced his intention to explore how the Ghetto experience had shaped new English residents who came from Eastern Europe and Russia. Instead of the “Pale of Settlement,” the term for the residence of the Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia, he turned to Italian Jewish history and the Venetian/Italian language to designate what the Jews had become in their long European exile. In Zangwill’s view, the Ghetto was the defining space of modern Jewish life and — not exactly a promised land — generated the psychological drive in the Jews to imagine alternative modern Jewish spaces. The gates of the Ghetto are not easily forgotten: internalized, the Jewish space of the Venice and Rome Ghettos becomes in modern times a psychological force, and even we might say, a central trope in the discourse of modern Jewish experience. The institutionalized practices of the English, “especially regarding matters of education, language, and the poor, prompt the immigrant Ashkenazim” to be, in Zangwill’s phrasing, “their own Ghetto gates.” Like their Italian Ghetto forebears, these immigrant Ashkenazim in England must forge their identities out of an either/or situation. Zangwill, novelist, social critic, and ethnographer devised in Children of the Ghetto a cultural turnabout of the European stigmatized Jewish stereotype.
TL;DR: In an 1886 piece of travel journalism written for the London-based periodical The Jewish Chronicle, the Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy records some brief, witty observations on the history and current conditions of the Jewish ghetto at Florence as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In an 1886 piece of travel journalism written for the London-based periodical The Jewish Chronicle , the Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy records some brief, witty observations on the history and current conditions of the Jewish ghetto at Florence. By writing from the narrative perspective of a self-identifying English Jew, Levy addresses in “The Ghetto at Florence” a history of Jewish exclusion and confinement represented by the ghetto, while also using this site to engage her complex attitudes towards Jewishness in the mid-1880s, in London. Rather than an accurate history of place, however, what is foregrounded in her article is self-reflexivity about ways of seeing and the effects of memory. This paper examines her uses of imaginative representation, race science, and the photographic gaze to attempt a tactile and affective encounter with the ghetto. In occupying a vexed space between extreme openness to imagined historical resonances alongside ironic detachment from the inadequacies of the present moment, she embodies the characteristically isolated subjectivity of the flâneur . She does so while contemplating the role of Jewishness in using the past to make sense of modern identity.
TL;DR: E.g., T. S. Eliot concludes that dualism is intractable, for the material and moral realms cannot be merged as mentioned in this paper, and this conclusion, formative in his intellectual development, is illuminating in regard to his poetry and criticism.
Abstract: In 1910–1911, T. S. Eliot studied Henri Bergson’s books and attended his lectures in Paris. Initially fascinated by Bergson’s ideas, Eliot experienced what he called a “conversion” to Bergsonism, but as shown by poetry and prose written during and after the lectures, he quickly became disillusioned. This essay discusses the Bergsonian claims that intrigued Eliot in the winter of 1910–1911, the skepticism revealed in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and other poems dated March 1911, and the critique presented in a previously unpublished lecture for the Harvard Philosophical Club in December 1913. Eliot concludes that dualism is intractable, for the material and moral realms cannot be merged. This conclusion, formative in his intellectual development, is illuminating in regard to his poetry and criticism. It is also suggestive in regard to the more general modernist motif regarding the difficulty of making connections.
TL;DR: In "Nutting" as mentioned in this paper, Wordsworth rewrites and internalizes in a compressed lyric space the drama played out in Paradise Lost, choosing a narrative in which the individual falls without external provocation, as both ravager and ravaged.
Abstract: In “Nutting,” which is comprised of a tissue of allusions to Paradise Lost , William Wordsworth carries on a sustained though enigmatic conversation with his great predecessor John Milton. The speaker in the poem describes a recollected boyhood episode of raiding a bower of hazel trees in terms borrowed from Milton’s descriptions of the tempter Satan and the tempted Eve and Adam. Wordsworth rewrites and internalizes in a compressed lyric space the drama played out in Paradise Lost , choosing a narrative in which the individual falls without external provocation, as both ravager and ravaged. Attention to the Miltonic elements in “Nutting” suggests, pace Harold Bloom, that, far from experiencing an “anxiety of influence” as he contemplates Milton, Wordsworth finds the example of Milton uniquely enabling, to the extent that assimilation of Milton’s poetry becomes for Wordsworth a condition of writing poetry. What Wordsworth inherits from Milton is, the essay argues, a deep balance of delight and sadness, of joy and sorrow, a balance arising from the sense that the world in which we live is at once a place of exile from paradise and a paradisal home.
TL;DR: In this paper, the introduction of Miltonic intertext into Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, in issues 21−28, serves to structure the series' theme of change and death, which involve questions of freedom and teleology, free will and damnation, through a critical dialogue with, and creative rewriting of the Miltonic theodicy in the epic poem.
Abstract: In their collection Milton in Popular Culture (2006), Laura Lungers Knoppers and Gregory M. Colon Semenza have established the importance of Miltonic intertextuality in popular culture, while recognizing the importance of William Blake to the field. Blake’s definition of Milton as “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) lies at the centre of a main concern of Milton criticism since the poem’s original publication. The debate between Satanists and anti-Satanists goes back even further than Blake and the Romantics, and this central ambivalence is representative of the “discontinuities” and “irresolvable complexities” which Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (2012) argue are the focus of interest of the New Milton Criticism.Following this strand of critical thought, this article proposes to show how the introduction of Miltonic intertext into Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, in issues 21–28, serves to structure the series’ theme of change and death — which involve questions of freedom and teleology, free will and damnation — through a critical dialogue with, and creative rewriting of Miltonic theodicy in the epic poem. Gaiman draws upon the ambivalent theological dimensions of Paradise Lost not to present his own concept of good and evil but rather to discuss the freedom to change and the damnation inherent in the inability to change as part of the human condition.
TL;DR: Moore as mentioned in this paper describes a man who enters into the feigned distresses for the piece with every symptom of real emotion, and even sheds tears with the profusion of a girl present for the first time at a tragedy.
Abstract: He enters into the feigned distresses for the piece with every symptom of real emotion, and even sheds tears with the profusion of a girl present for the first time at a tragedy. . . . I do not readily comprehend, how he can be more easily moved and deceived, by distresses which he himself invented. . . . While these tears are flowing, he must believe the woes he weeps are real: he must have been so far deceived by the cunning of the scene, as to have forgot that he was in a playhouse. (Moore 1996 [1783]: 124–25)
TL;DR: In this paper, an attempt to elucidate Walter Benjamin's enigmatic essay "The Translator's Task" is made, followed by an analysis of two approaches to its meaning: the philological-historical, represented by Peter Szondi, and the deconstructionist, applied by Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson.
Abstract: This is an attempt to elucidate Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic essay “The Translator’s Task,” followed by an analysis of two approaches to its meaning: the philological-historical, represented by Peter Szondi, and the deconstructionist, applied by Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson. In spite of the radical difference between the two, they are surprisingly shown to meet in their final assessment of Benjamin’s intended meaning.
TL;DR: The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) is a novel structured around two interconnected plots as discussed by the authors, one of which is the tragedy of the desaparecidos (the disappeared) that began in 1976, the year when general Jorge Rafael Videla came to power after deposing Maria Estela Martinez de Peron; until early 1981 VidelA's junta was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of students and political opponents to his dictatorship.
Abstract: Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) is a novel structured around two interconnected plots. One of them is the tragedy of the desaparecidos — the disappeared — that began in 1976, the year when general Jorge Rafael Videla came to power after deposing Maria Estela Martinez de Peron; until early 1981 Videla’s junta was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of students and political opponents to his dictatorship. The other plot is the contradictory personal life of Kaddish Poznan, a Jew who, during the day, tries to keep alive the memory of his mother Favorita’s Argentine-Jewish past but at night works to destroy it by chiseling names off the gravestones of former members of the Society of the Benevolent Self, such as Favorita. Unlike Poznan, his wife Lillian, who has been laying a glass and a plate on the dinner table for her son Pato since his disappearance, refuses to acknowledge his death, In order to address the implications of this traumatic event in her life, I will resort to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), and Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001). This article draws upon the significance of collective memory throughout Jewish history as discussed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), explores the struggle between memory and forgetting, and ponders the dangers of forgetting — and erasing — the past and of transforming one’s identity.
TL;DR: The essays of this forum show how the renewed interest in the Italian Ghettoes served two late Victorian writers, Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy, to reflect on their own modern British and Jewish identity as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In seventeenth-century literature on the Grand Tour, the ghetto of Venice appears as a place of cross-cultural exchange and misunderstanding, a contact zone that stimulates interrogation and translation, comparison and projection, prejudice and discovery. The ghetto goes into eclipse in the English letters of the Enlightenment, to re-emerge in a number of Victorian texts. The essays of this forum show how the renewed interest in the Italian Ghettoes served two late Victorian writers, Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy, to reflect on their own modern British and Jewish identity.
TL;DR: The authors used the term ghetto as shorthand for a Jewish traditionalism that could be viewed as either nurturing or confining as Jews entered modern life; in his 1898 Dreamers of the Ghetto, the ghetto of Venice signified both.
Abstract: Fiction writer, playwright, and political activist for whom Jewish identity, if not ritual strictness, remained central, Israel Zangwill used the term ghetto in his early work as shorthand for a Jewish traditionalism that could be viewed as either nurturing or confining as Jews entered modern life; in his 1898 Dreamers of the Ghetto , the ghetto of Venice signified both. Later, however, Zangwill looked beyond the ghetto to other sites and cities of Italy as inspiration for a wider philosophy. In Italian Fantasies (1910), Zangwill used the genre of the travel essay to develop ideas about art, religion, and society that grounded culture in the experienced life of place. At the same time, he sought to solidify his credentials as a significant figure in European thought, a Jewish commentator who was also cosmopolitan and modern, heir to a Victorian legacy of social critique.
TL;DR: Phelan as discussed by the authors argues that the Epilogue to the book completes what is begun in the Prologue or, as he is inclined to feel, yields to the author's wish to be conciliatory to the reader and thus to appeal to a larger audience.
Abstract: not within the context of romantic encounters (as in the two other novels, one written by a white male writer, the other by a black female writer), but within the context of the protagonist’s political involvements. Phelan then enters into an existing debate about the novel: whether the Epilogue to the book completes what is begun in the Prologue or, as he is inclined to feel, yields to the author’s wish to be conciliatory to the reader and thus to appeal to a larger audience. The Epilogue, in Phelan’s view, soft pedals the anger and criticism expressed at the beginning of the novel, even though both the Prologue and the Epilogue are cotemporal, both written after the events of the narrative: