Showing papers in "Studies in The Novel in 2016"

The Paradox of Narrative Empathy and the Form of the Novel, or What George Eliot Knew

Abstract: A man falling into dark water seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones; and Silas, by acting as if he believed in false hopes, warded off the moment of despair. --George Eliot, Silas Marner (47) The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility. --T. S. Eliot, "East Coker" (11.48-49) It is usually assumed that empathy--the ability to imagine oneself into the inner life of another--is a good thing (Prinz 211). Recent research links empathy with ethical consequences such as "altruism and prosocial behavior, moral development, interpersonal bonding, and improved intergroup relations" (Harrison 256). Empathy has become a ubiquitous concept in areas ranging from politics, law, and business ethics to medical care and education, to name just a few (Coplan 3). The benefits of empathy are presumed to be considerable and the lack of it is often deplored, sometimes being associated with psychopathy and criminality (Harrison 256). Several perspectives, including evolutionary ones, are based on the view that empathy is an evolved faculty, vital to humankind's cooperation and hence survival (Moore and Hallenbeck 471). In other words, empathy is thus often considered to be useful, indispensable, and even morally good. (1) The notion that the act of reading literature expands our empathy is a popular one. (2) The idea that reading develops our ability to shift perspectives, and that it enhances our understanding of unknown others, is often heard in academia as well as beyond. Martha Nussbaum believes that the empathy induced by reading literature can have an influence on a person's moral development and even prompt altruistic behavior in the real world, a contention she shares with many other philosophers and with (developmental) psychologists (Keen, "Novel Readers" 21). Recently, the psychologists David Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a conspicuous study in Science, submitting that reading (good) fiction improves empathy. Although the outcomes they reported were far from conclusive, the impact on the public debate was massive and bolstered the case for literature as a tool to improve our moral character. Even so, the idea that empathy, or what is referred to here as narrative empathy--that is, "the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another's situation and condition" (Keen, "Narrative Empathy")--has a civilizing effect on our behaviors and attitudes has been challenged within literary studies. That empathy somehow enters into the fictional experience may be a fairly uncontroversial idea. As Fritz Breithaupt puts it, "there would probably be no fiction if we did not have the ability to imagine how it feels to be another or to be in another's situation" (2); but empathy's role in prosocial behavior and altruism has been greatly debated. Although admitting empathy's essential role in reading, Suzanne Keen is critical of the altruism-empathy hypothesis as it relates to fiction. In her influential book Empathy and the Novel (2007), she questions "the contemporary truism that novel reading cultivates empathy that produces good citizens for the world" (xv). According to Keen, there is very little empirical evidence that suggests a clear causal relationship between novel-reading and altruism. In fact, Keen shows that readers empathize in unforeseen ways (Morgan 32) and that altruistic behavior after reading is quite unusual. (3) The recent anthology Rethinking Empathy through Literature (2014) follows up on some of the questions raised by Keen, addressing the increasing need to problematize the concept of empathy and confront the widespread idea that reading literature generates prosocial behaviour. (4) This discussion sets out to problematize the empathy-altruism hypothesis as it relates to literature--that is, the assumption that literature makes us better people--by examining a paradox engendered by empathy in the novel. …

Mary shelley's mathilda: melancholy and the political economy of romanticism

Abstract: Although Mary Shelley was better known in her lifetime than her husband, her writings other than Frankenstein have been largely forgotten until recently. It is, moreover, a curious fact that the reassessment of her place in the canon (and of the canon in relation to that "place") is being mobilized by the reissuing of two of her most depressing texts: The Last Man and Mathilda.1 Part of the fascination of the latter seems to be that it was never published. "Censored" by Godwin, who was asked to secure a publisher for it but found its focus on father-daughter incest "disgusting,"2 and then left behind by Mary Shelley herself as she turned from the political to the domestic novel in Lodore, it was first brought out by Elizabeth Nitchie in 1959, when it must have seemed no more than a psychobiographical curiosity.3 That it lends itself more to psychoanalytic than to formalist interpretation, and that it is unlikely to impress those committed to an ideology of the aesthetic, are, by contrast, reasons for its borderline attraction within a very different political economy of reception. Mathilda is a short, bare narrative of trauma: a lyric novella in which the feeling gives importance to the situation and not the reverse. Beginning with its narrator's idealization of a father who returns after an absence of sixteen years, it deals with his (ambiguously reciprocated) incestuous desire for her, her horror at his confession, his flight and suicide, and her subsequent incurable dejection. The narrative is addressed at the point of death to Woodville, a Shelleyan visionary who has also suffered an overwhelming loss and has tried unsuccessfully to draw Mathilda back into the world of the living. The situation of Mathilda encrypts that of Mary Shelley herself as she experienced the deaths of her children while she tried to deal with Shelley's intellectual abstractedness and Godwin's massive indifference to anything but his own financial troubles. Even as she repudiates him, Mathilda is haunted by the figure of her father, whom she cannot mourn but whose loss leaves her

From Digressions to Intrusions: Authorial Commentary in the Novel

Abstract: "Be it known, then, that the human species are divided into two sorts of people, to wit, high people and low people." (146) --Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742) "And so we need not trouble ourselves any more either about the insertions or about the exordiums. They both please me; the second class has pleased persons much better worth pleasing than I can pretend to be." (xx) --George Saintsbury, introduction to Joseph Andrews (1910) I would like to preface this article by asserting that there are two types of people in the world; those who like authorial intrusions, and those who don't. And just as these preferences tell us much about the people who hold them, the critical reception of authorial intrusions reveals much about our theories of the novel. Authorial intrusions are typically characterized, and criticized, as interruptions to a narrative that disrupt the illusion of fictional truth to varying degrees. In this way, intrusions highlight by contrast our sense of two formative elements of the genre: its narrative structure and its referential status. Gerard Genette (1997) tells us that the authorial preface is a paratextual frame in the service of ensuring that the text is read properly: explaining to readers why and how they should read it. I think we can profitably approach authorial commentary as an intratextual continuation of this rhetorical enterprise, and this is one reason why intrusions have been condemned. As a result we can also approach them as barometers for historical shifts in concepts of the novel because of the various ways they both evoke and respond to critical reception. My aim is to investigate the reasons why authorial commentary is considered intrusive, and whether these reasons have been constant throughout the history of the novel. Central to this investigation will be tracing the significance of a broad terminological shift, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, in which the common rhetorical practice of digression, or turning away from a narrative, came to be characterized as an intrusion into a narrative. Answering these questions will help address what Mary Jane Chilton Curry has called "the much disputed question of the relation between authorial intrusion and realism" (31), and I hope to demonstrate, in particular, the paradoxical role authorial commentary has played in both establishing and challenging the conventions of realist fiction in relation to eighteenth-century theories of probability, nineteenth-century theories of sympathy, and twentieth-century theories of impersonality. Authorial Intrusions and the Realist Novel When formalist theories of the novel took shape in the twentieth century, they enshrined all forms of intrusion, self-reflexive or otherwise, as an interference to the aesthetic ideal of the genre itself: the verisimilar effacement of the medium of narration, described by Percy Lubbock, in The Craft of Fiction (1921), as the practice of showing rather than telling. (1) This was also the central tenet of modernist novelists themselves, best expressed by Ford Madox Ford's assertion that it is "an obvious and unchanging fact that if an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will endanger the illusion conveyed by that story" (148). The influence of this belief on historical scholarship can be found in Ian Watt's seminal work, The Rise of the Novel (1957), which defines "formal realism" as the narrative methods for providing an authentic report of individual experience that were developed in the eighteenth-century English novel. The prototype for authorial intrusions in this tradition is provided by Henry Fielding's essayistic musings in Tom Jones (1749), and according to Watt's theory of realism, "such authorial intrusions, of course, tend to diminish the authenticity of his narrative" and "break the spell of the imaginary world represented in the novel," preventing readers from being "fully immersed in the lives of the characters" (285). …

Towards a "Narratology of Otherness": Colum McCann, Ireland, and a New Transcultural Approach

Abstract: In his 2002 Yale University lecture "Step Across This Line," novelist Salman Rushdie discussed the recent dissolution of borders around the globe, concluding that "this new, permeable post-frontier is the distinguishing feature of our times" (425). In this new "post-frontier" age that Rushdie described, information, goods, money, and media endlessly traverse national boundaries, while migratory forces and cheap travel mean that humans also step across their lines, millions now residing in a land they did not previously call their own. As part of this loosening of global borders, literary texts are similarly enjoying mass circulation. The Amazon marketplace alone currently lists 32.8 million titles available for sale and international shipment. Meanwhile, particularly in the UK and US markets, the rising popularity of the "world literature" genre reflects readers' desire to purchase works by overseas writers (even as critics such as Emily Apter warn against the genre's tendency towards the commodification or branding of difference [2]). However, while British, American, and European readers are avidly consuming works by writers from Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and other Anglophone contexts, another dissolution of frontiers has occurred in writing coming from authors within Anglo-American and European literary traditions. Increasingly, many of these authors appear more inclined (or, indeed, more equipped) to step beyond their traditional frame of reference--to dismiss the age-old adage to "write what you know" and instead to inhabit, through their fiction, subject positions that are not in fact their own. Rushdie himself asserts that "the crossing of borders, of language, geography, and culture" has become central to his writing project (434), while elsewhere, Irish-American novelist Colum McCann talks of "ridding [himself] from the work": "I think that's what one has to do. Don't write about what you know, but towards what you want to know. There's a great freedom in the fictional experience" ("Write What You Want To Know"). Yet, despite this supposed freedom, critics are very quick to point out the ethical complications inherent in producing such fiction, such as the potential for discursive domination of "other" subjects by white and/or Western writers. (1) Indeed, examinations of the work of these writers have been almost entirely devoted to assessing the political implications thereof, whereas formal examinations of the texts remain considerably less prevalent and, in most cases, underdeveloped. As such, in order to expand the parameters of existing critical dialogues, this essay will argue that by devising and applying a narratological lens to contemporary transcultural fiction the focus may be shifted away from the field's preoccupation with ideological questions. (2) This is not to disavow the importance of such questions; rather, it is to illuminate the formal ingenuities enacted by certain transcultural writers, the majority of which have been heretofore overlooked. Taking Ireland as my case study (a decision for which I will provide apt justification), I will devise this proposed narratological lens--as I term it, this "Narratology of Otherness"--by examining the work of Colum McCann. This will at once shed new light on the formal nuances of McCann's fiction, whilst also revealing the implications such a narratological lens may have for both Irish and transcultural literary debates moving forward. Existing interrogations of transcultural writing inevitably invoke the important work of Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha. Spivak's seminal essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) posits that the "other" traditionally cannot be given a voice in fiction--particularly since such a voice could only ever exist via the dominant discourse against which they are trying to speak out in the first place--while Bhabha warns that any possibility of speech would necessarily be "unrepresentable in itself' (37). …

"Your Own Goddamn Idiom": Junot Diaz's Translingualism in the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Abstract: Whilst Bharati Mukherjee has identified Junot Diaz as a new American immigrant writer who refuses to abandon his mother tongue and “pre-migration historical inheritance,” Toni Morrison has argued that language is “the most valuable point of entry into the question of cultural (or racial) distinction.” Considering both the difference between old and new American immigrant writing and the question of cultural and racial distinction in Diaz’s writing, close analysis of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao shows the newness and the political valency of Diaz’s translingualism. It reveals how his narrator Yunior’s oral-sounding discourse is created from high literary techniques and references combined with the “tainted” languages of sci-fi and fantasy, hip hop and Spanishes of the street. It is in this cultural and linguistic miscegenation that Diaz’s originality and radical poetics reside, as they make up an original new-immigrant literary discourse that is distinctly his “own goddamn idiom.”

On Labors of Love and Language Learning: Xiaolu Guo Rewriting the Monolingual Family Romance

Abstract: In Translingual Imagination, Steven Kellman cites the popular monolingual myth that "there seems to be something not only painful but unnatural, almost matricidal, about an author who abandons Muttersprache" (3), only to list many authors who have succeeded and have renewed the languages to which they chose to contribute. Note the vocabulary of "pain," "abandonment," "unnaturalness," even monstrosity implied by the "matricide" of writing in another language. According to Yasemin Yildiz in Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, it is the persistence of such affectively charged vocabulary that undergirds the power of what she names the "monolingual paradigm": "a key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as imagined collectives such as cultures and nations" (2). As a belief in the irreplaceable biological origin of a person's language, it was introduced alongside the nationalist foundations of modernity in the eighteenth century and made the "mother tongue" not a metaphor, but a fetish and a "condensed narrative" that sees "affect, gender and kinship, tied to a story of origin and identity" (12-13). In order to allow for a multilingual paradigm to re-emerge, alongside the possibility of affective relationships with other languages or a productive estrangement from them, Yildiz argues that we need to unsettle the "linguistic family romance" and deconstruct "the manufactured proximity between 'mother' and 'language'" (12). Translingual writers creating in more than one literary language have long been writing against the monolingual paradigm, showing the need for other metaphors to describe the connection between writers and their languages. Their putative matricidal attempts originated often in the need to evade the matrix of national cultures' oppressive monolingualism or gender norms. In a postcolonial context, this gave rise to the vocabulary of appropriation or abrogation (Ashcroft, 1989), cannibalism (Fernandez Retamar, 1971) or theft (Ramazani, 2001). John Skinner's The Stepmother Tongue: an Introduction to New Anglophone Fiction (1998) suggested "stepmother tongue" in an effort to find a term to classify Anglophone fiction composed in a language imposed by the unequal power structures of colonialism. The compulsory language of the colonizer, contrasted with the local 'mother tongue,' inhabits here the archetype of a stepmother. Critics have since turned to this somewhat playful metaphor to refer to writing in a non-native language in contexts other than postcolonial, which because of the increased mobility of people in the age of globalization has become also common in immigrant and diasporic literatures. Josip Novakovich employs "stepmother tongue" in his introduction to a collection of stories by non-native English speakers writing in the United States. "Writing the Stepmother Tongue" returned as an umbrella term for translingual creativity in the recent symposium on Translingual Writing organized by Kellman, Natasha Lvovich, and Ilan Stavans at Amherst University in October 2015. During the proceedings, translingual writers assembled in the opening panel of the symposium interrogated the governing metaphor as they proposed that the dynamics of language acquisition as often include lovers as ancestors. Ilan Stavans suggested that his wife was the giver and listener of the language: "many of us are married to non-our-first-language speakers" and "the true translators, the true transfer ticket holders are those partners." Sergio Weissman followed with a comment about the "intimate informant," and Gustavo Perez-Firmat admitted that the only two people he ever collaborated with and allowed to edit his work were his wife and a best friend. What these statements point to is that the second language chosen for translingual writing--especially outside the postcolonial context--allows for more voluntary affections: it is not so much a "stepmother's tongue" as a lover's tongue. …

The Travelling Doll Wonder: Dickens, Secular Magic, and Bleak House

Abstract: In summer 1849, a small group gathered at Winterbourne House at Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight to watch a conjuring show by "The Unparalleled Necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos," a magician apparently "educated cabalistically in the Orange Groves of Salamanca and the Ocean Caves of Alum Bay" (Forster 89-90). The show promised a number of amazing set pieces, all of them 'wonders': "The Leaping Card," "The Pyramid," "The Conflagration," "The Loaf of Bread," "The Pudding," and "The Travelling Doll" (Forster 90). The audience watched the conjuror as he made two cards selected by the audience and replaced in the pack leap forth at his command; another card was selected, named by the conjuror, set on fire, and then reproduced from the ashes; another audience member's card was locked in a box and then materialized in the middle of a freshly cut loaf of bread. It is unlikely that many in the audience would have known the means by which these effects were achieved; it is certain, however, that they knew the true identity of the unparalleled necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos, who was none other than Charles Dickens. In this article, I consider the connections between Dickens's fiction and the art of conjuring, what Simon During calls "secular magic" (1)--that is, magic that makes no claim to the supernatural, as opposed to magic in its supernatural or anthropological guises. I consider Rhia Rhama Rhoos's routine 'The Travelling Doll Wonder' as a paradigm for reading Dickens's fiction, and Bleak House in particular, arguing that Esther's doll, an uncanny subject/object that disappears and reappears at crucial points of the text, is informed by Dickens's own performance with a disappearing doll that raises similar questions of perception and subjectivity. My wider aim is to demonstrate that what John O. Jordan calls "the Bleak House effect"--that is, "the novel's way of luring its characters (and its readers) to imagine things that might have been but never were or that exist only in their minds" (147)--can be understood in the context of a similarly hyperphenomenological cultural practice with which Dickens engaged during the composition and publication of the novel, that is, secular magic. I argue that Dickens's interest in performance magic functions metacritically in his work, especially in Bleak House, and furthermore that while the enchantment of conjuring underpins the novel, Bleak House also draws attention to the traumatic component of secular magic. Although not traumatic in itself, the experience of conjuring resembles, in Cathy Caruth's phrase, the unclaimed experiences of trauma, and it is in Bleak House that Dickens explores the connection between these discourses. Dickens's interest in performance magic is well evidenced in his novels, letters, and performances. As John Forster records, he was a keen observer of such performances in both England and France; for instance, on May 3, 1853, Dickens invited Frank Stone to accompany him to a performance given by the influential French conjuror Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin at Sadlers Wells (Letters 7: 76). Such performers became the addressees, and subjects, of his writing; Dickens corresponded with magicians, in particular the hugely popular Austrian conjuror Ludwig Dobler (Letters 4: 113-14), and depicted humbler conjurors in his fiction. Sweet William, one of the travelling showmen in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), makes his living through card tricks and various other conjuring routines (150-51); in Dombey and Son (1844-46), Paul Dombey's roommate Tozer is taken by his uncle to see a conjuror, an occasion the uncle ruins by turning it into a classics examination (251). Similarly, in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) the card tricks performed by Jonas become a metaphor for his double dealing with Charity and Mercy Pecksniff (242). Household Words, too, carried writing on magic; the edition of April 9, 1859, granted its front page to Saul Dixon's extensive review of the English translation of Robert-Houdin's Memoirs (1859). …

Diaspora, Social Protest, and the Unreliable Narrator: Challenging Hierarchies of Race and Class in John Fante's Ask the Dust

Abstract: Although the work of John Fante remains relatively understudied, with only a few articles published to date about Fante's novel Ask the Dust (1939), (1) the conversation about his fiction has shifted and developed in important respects. Notably, this includes the discussion of Arturo Bandini's Italianness in Ask the Dust, which has gradually given way to discourse about his whiteness and the prejudices that accompany it. If earlier readers were interested in interrogating how Fante's narrator navigates the space between assimilation and cultural identification, (2) more recent critics such as Matthew Elliott have dedicated themselves to examining Bandini's complicity with racist ideology: the ways that he embraces and asserts his own whiteness while essentializing and even denigrating people of color, including individuals from other diasporic communities such as the Filipina/o community and especially the Chicana/o community in 1930s Los Angeles. (3) And indeed, this perspective is more than valid. While Arturo Bandini might loudly proclaim himself to be an outcast incapable of winning true acceptance in an urban society whose vision of white American culture only intermittently includes Italian Americans, Ask the Dust ultimately presents us with a protagonist whose own investment in joining this white society is matched by his disdain for the non-white city residents with whom he is so routinely associated in the eyes of others. Should we conclude, then, that Ask the Dust itself is ultimately a conservative rather than a subversive text, that it consolidates more than it protests the hold of racist ideology on Depression-era American society? Does the novel itself encourage us to turn a blind eye to the intermittent bigotry of its protagonist? Given that Ask the Dust is widely read as a roman-a-clef (4)--and with good reason given the biographical correspondences between Bandini and Fante, on which Fante himself is known to have commented (5)--we might feel some temptation to assume that Ask the Dust positions Bandini in the role of hero. Certainly, this is the perspective that Charles Bukowski seems to have assumed in identifying so closely with Bandini in the introduction to the 1980 edition of the novel. (6) My contention, however, is different. In this article, I argue that Fante's novel encourages readers to protest white supremacist logic--and, in particular, racist depictions of Chicana/o culture--in the same way that it encourages us to challenge class hierarchy: via negative example. I also argue that to understand how this occurs, we must consider Bandini as a diasporic character struggling and failing to cope with the intersection of his own diasporic trajectory with those of other displaced individuals--most importantly, the Chicana waitress whose ethnic identity Bandini repeatedly insults and essentializes. (7) This is a new approach that previous criticism has not considered in depth. In colliding Arturo Bandini with Camilla Lopez, Ask the Dust creates a diasporic triangle that connects Italy and Mexico with Bandini and Camilla's shared adopted homeland of the United States. Interestingly, rather than modeling the type of solidarity that we might imagine stemming from such a collision, Ask the Dust instead presents us with a cautionary tale of intersecting diasporas: Fante illustrates what occurs when one diasporic community competes for class standing and acceptance into white "majority culture" rather than resisting claims of both white superiority and socioeconomic elitism. Fante's text is narrated by an often misguided diasporic voice: the voice of a very young man who as often succumbs to classist aspirations and judgments as he resists or battles them, and who as often resorts to stereotyping or bigoted views of other diasporic communities as he denounces such views. Still, Fante shapes Bandini's character in ways that ultimately encourage us to question this example that he sets rather than embracing or even passively observing it. …

"Reader, I Did Not Even Have Coffee with Him": Lorrie Moore's Adaptation of Jane Eyre (1847) in A Gate at the Stairs (2009)

Abstract: This essay explores Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009) as a neo-Victorian rewriting of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Initially praised as a campus novel or a coming-of-age narrative, Moore’s book is starting to be seen as a more ambitious text: a post-9/11, ‘state of the nation’ novel, a work of feminist metafiction, a commentary on ethnicity. However, no one has approached it as a neo-Victorian narrative, though doing so illuminates intersections among these interpretations, highlighting its participation in debates on race, feminism, and ‘home’ security, and its formal innovations. Moore reworks Bronte’s characters, gothic tropes, and themes to update Jane’s quest for acceptance and narrative agency, and rebellion against patriarchy, to a contemporary setting. However, she uses parody and metafiction to interrogate Jane Eyre’s more conservative elements and to transform its ending. Moore’s intertextual allusions and humor serve to criticize Tassie’s passivity (which makes her accountable for the suffering of her loved ones), and to expose Jane Eyre as similarly complicit in perpetuating damaging social fictions. Reading the novel as a neo-Victorian text suggests its significance goes beyond domestic concerns to encompass wide-ranging literary and political critiques, and helps to clarify the boundaries of this genre itself.

Polyphony beyond the Human: Animals, Music, and Community in Coetzee and Powers

Abstract: Although most literary scholars are familiar with Mikhail Bakhtin's argument about how the novel orchestrates a polyphonic symphony of socially diverse voices, our account of these voices, and of novelistic sound more generally, remains far from complete. Aiming to address these gaps in a recent pamphlet of the Stanford Literary Lab, Hoist Katsma has reinvigorated Bakhtin's insights with the help of quantitative reading protocols to describe the "patterned voices" of the nineteenth-century novel (13), paying special attention to Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1869). Though I will argue that Katsma's argument is ultimately flawed because it overlooks technological and biological sounds, making this model unfit for my central case studies, novels by J. M. Coetzee and Richard Powers, the pamphlet rightly emphasizes the structural role of sound in prose fiction as well as the importance of the reader's aural experience. Katsma also proposes several hypotheses that invite further research: that loud voices in the nineteenth-century novel usually come from individuals rather than groups; that certain grammatical structures (involving commands, questions, em dashes) are better indicators of loudness than specific "speaking verbs" such as "whisper" or "shout"; that loudness is organized in the novel, as its quasi-musical "polyphony" of voices is systematically related to plot structure, narrative space, and chapter divisions (16); and that the quantitative analysis of this loudness reveals a "general muting of the novel over the course of the 19th century" (21). This pamphlet hence illustrates how new digital techniques can enrich existing insights in literary studies. But Katsma's argument shows flaws as well. Without further reflection, he dismisses the existing work on sound in literature, confidently claiming that "little has come of the study of sound in the novel" (2). If he would have considered the work of scholars at the intersection of literary studies and sound studies, like that of John Picker, Philipp Schweighauser, or Justin St. Clair, Katsma might also have been able to complicate his further assumption that sound in the novel can be reduced to the "voices" of narrators and characters (1): "at the level of textual mechanics, a novel's aural trajectory, heard by the reader, is created via the novel's string of consecutive voices" (10). In his view, the words of storytellers and characters are quasi-heard in our minds, whereas the music, noise, and other environmental sounds described by these words are not part of the novel's soundscape at all. In a footnote, Katsma admits that sometimes these human voices "ask the reader to imagine secondary sounds" via the description of raindrops, for instance, but these are supposedly "less intense," "fleeting and rather infrequent" in every form of literature (2). This dismissal of described sound is unsatisfactory because Katsma's lopsided focus on human voices might explain why he finds growing stillness where others discover increasing loudness. Whereas his analysis of voices suggests a gradual muting of the novel during the nineteenth century, as I mentioned, John Picker's account of described sounds rather than imagined dialogue reaches the opposite conclusion; as fictional and other documents show, he confidently states, the Victorian age was "a period of unprecedented amplification, unheard-of loudness," "alive with the screech and roar of the railway and the clang of industry, with the babble, bustle, and music of city streets, and with the crackle and squawk of acoustic vibrations on wires and wax" (4). Katsma fails to consider, in other words, that the growing stillness of human characters might be related to the increasing loudness of urban noise. The fact that the opening scene of The Idiot is set on a train, for instance, is taken to have no implications for the sequence's loudness, even though the text mentions that it is travelling at full speed and with crowded compartments. …

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Emergence of American Literary Realism

Abstract: This article makes an argument for the significance of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's early work, particularly her 1870 novel, Hedged In, to the scholarly understanding of two overlapping fields: those of nineteenth-century American women's writing, and postbellum American literary realism. Examining how Phelps mobilizes the emerging tropes of realist writing, my account nuances the recent portrayal of Phelps as a member of a "transitional" generation of women writers bridging the gap between the popular sentimental novelists of the 1850s and turn-of-the-century female regionalists and realists. Such late-nineteenth-century women writers as Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin, it has been claimed, belonged to the first generation of women writers to unambiguously assume the pose of high-cultural authorship, a model established just as the transitional generation was coming of age. (1) Originally associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne's sense of alienation from popular readership, this paradigm of the author as high literary artist has been seen as not fully available to the women authors who came of age in the early postbellum period precisely because it was constructed in opposition to the practice of antebellum women writers. These latter, Naomi Z. Sofer points out, generally adopted either "the persona of the writer driven by financial necessity or the identity of a mere medium for a religious message" (1), whereas, as Anne E. Boyd observes, the Hawthorne whose individual "genius" was extolled by Melville represented a model in which "the writer as artist began to represent another, higher realm than that inhabited by ordinary men" (16). These critics suggest that the transitional generation of women writers made a partial shift towards the latter model of authorship, seeing "themselves as artists whose inspiration and motivation could be drawn equally" "from their religious and social commitments," as had been largely the case with antebellum female writers of popular works, and "from their native talent and ambition" (Sofer 3), as was the case with male writers of high-cultural works both before and after the Civil War--the antebellum romancers like Hawthorne and their postbellum successors, the realists.(2) The presentation of Phelps as a figure of transition is echoed in critics' tendency to invent genre categories that express a sense of the hybridity of her work, including the traditions of "reform fiction," "sentimental naturalism," and "ethical realism." (3) The problem is not only that such categories assume the fixity of the genre definitions being fused, but also that these appellations imply the mingling of generic gender-identities, as the feminine-associated terms of "reform," "sentimentalism," and "ethics" are joined to the masculine-associated terms "fiction," "naturalism," and "realism."(4) By contrast, I argue that realism itself as an emergent literary practice offered a space that allowed Phelps to entertain notions of high-cultural authorship conceived beyond the models of gendered authorship articulated during her own time--indeed, to participate in the development of realism in such a direction. As Nancy Glazener illustrates, the definition of realism was both shifting and contested over the course of the latter part of the nineteenth century, for realism was a term subject to "competing appropriations," which "were almost always made relationally, in the course of a reviewer's or an author's distinguishing realism from some other form" (13). Glazener shows that in the 1850s and through the 1860s, "a set of heavily nationalistic discourses... were used to distinguish realism from the romance. These discourses articulated realism with modernity, democracy, science, and Protestant-inflected secularity, whereas they articulated the romance with the outmoded, the aristocratic, and superstitious, and the Catholic or pagan" (94). Given that the romance had been the vehicle through which high-cultural authorship was both established and established as male, the fact that realism defined itself against romance while still insisting on its own high-cultural status meant that the genre's gender identity was up for grabs. …

Impersonal Style and the Form of Experience in W. G. Sebald's the Rings of Saturn

Abstract: This article argues that W. G. Sebald’s prose fiction reverses the traditional positioning of the witness as a point of singularity, theorizing instead a relationship to the act of witnessing that, while anchored in personal experience, is imbued at its core with impersonal form. Using The Rings of Saturn as my central example, I demonstrate that it is the tension between the immediacy of first-person experience and the characteristic distance of Sebald’s style that makes possible the narrator’s attunement to the “traces of destruction” that he encounters during his walk, and to which he bears witness both in and through his narrative. Sebald’s witnessing, then, is less a relation between past and present or witness and event than it is a critical orientation that produces the imperative to bear witness as a function of the very permeability of these categories.

Excess and Economy in Sons and Lovers

Abstract: The novel has a future....Instead of snivelling about what is and has been, or inventing new sensations in the old line, it's got to break a way through, like a hole in the wall. And the public will scream and say it is sacrilege: because, of course, when you've been jammed for a long time in a tight corner, and you get really used to its stuffiness and its tightness, till you find it suffocatingly cozy; then, of course, you're horrified when you see a new glaring hole in what was your cosy wall. --D. H. Lawrence, "Surgery for the Novel--or a Bomb," 520 In the 1925 essay "Morality and the Novel," D. H. Lawrence gives us what is surely one of his meilleurs mots: "If you try to nail anything down, in the novel," he writes, "either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail" (528). While often taken to be a warning against exhaustive interpretations, (1) the context from which this line is so often orphaned suggests a more precise meaning. To begin with, Lawrence has in mind the composition of a novel, not its reception. But more significantly, the witticism encapsulates something crucial to Lawrence's view of ontology and the poetics it supports. Unlike religion and philosophy, both of which are concerned with "nailing down"--defining, taxonomizing, separating--the world and its inhabitants, the novel's business "is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment" (527). Indeed, when executed "morally"--that is, when true to the complexity of life--the novel conveys "a pure relationship, a pure relatedness" (529). Life, for Lawrence, is nothing else but just such a "pure relatedness," or as he claims, "this perfected relation between man and his circumambient universe is life itself, for mankind" (527). Like his contemporary Virginia Woolf, for whom the capture of a strikingly similar "life" was the categorical imperative of fiction, Lawrence here thinks of the novel's involvement with the "pure relatedness" of life in ethical or "moral" terms. The danger, or rather immorality, in trying to pin down something in the novel is that the novel's intimate relation with "life" is threatened. At worst, it is forfeited altogether, bringing down the novel with it; at best, it lives on in spite of the novelist's foolhardy intervention, though likely in a maimed capacity. One of the questions of this paper concerns what it means to "nail" something down within the novel, and how a novel operating within a formal tradition very much invested in various manners and degrees of nailing things down--here, that of the Bildungsroman or novel of development--might go about resisting such tendencies. Lawrence suggests that the quickest route to novelistic immorality is to give free rein to one's ruling passion, what he calls the novelist's "helpless, unconscious predilection" (529). Thus, provided his conscious self does not intervene and moderate, the novelist in the throes of love will write a novel likewise in the throes of love. Such a novel is "imbalanced," insofar as it denies human experience its variety and reduces life to a falsifying sameness. Woolf, again an ally here, might refer to such a novel as "egotistical," by which she would mean that it lazily accommodates itself to a single dominant and dominating perspective that stamps out difference. (2 ) This same "immorality" can be expressed formally as well. A novel that is overly faithful to formal strictures will, unsurprisingly, forfeit Lawrence's precious "life." In Lawrence's own work, the tension between form and the dynamism of life (which, in its very dynamism, tends to disrupt form) is perhaps the most aesthetically productive and compelling quality of his work. Particularly, the incongruity between the development narrative and the "pure connectivity" of life accounts both for Lawrence's distinctive brand of modernism and his seemingly retrograde sincerity. (3) To a certain extent, the idea of Bildang--of self-cultivation, of development, of growth--is central to all of his novels. …

English as a Literature in Translation by Fiona J. Doloughan (review)

Abstract: DOLOUGHAN, FIONA J. English as a Literature in Translation. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 179 pp. $100.00 hardcover; $89.99 e-book. Fiona J. Doloughan's new study is an examination of contemporary novels in English through the prism of translation. Taking her departure in the translational turn in Humanities, Steven G. Kellman's influential concept of literary translingualism, and English's role as a lingua franca for non-native speakers worldwide, Doloughan sets out to discover how writers who have found English as opposed to having been born into it (e.g., Eva Hoffman, Ariel Dorfman, Xiaolu Guo) and bilingual writers or writers for whom a non-standard variety of English is the starting point (Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, James Kelman) are changing the expression of literature in English. Doloughan's interest lies with what she coins as "narratives of translation," that is, "works that thematize, narrativize and/or are structured around, questions of language, cultural identity and what it means to translate oneself or one's culture" (79). The main focus of the study is not primarily the way the examined writers are changing the English literary language of today's globalized world; rather, it is the thematic aspects that dominate--that is, how experiences of switching languages and/or moving through cultures are expressed in the chosen works. It is an optimistic narrative Doloughan is writing. She wants "to suggest that the prototypical notion of language as loss, and translation of self and other as a predominantly painful and traumatic experience, have given way to a greater sense of what is to be gained, both at the individual and societal levels, through access to different languages and cultures" (1). She regards this development as correlating with a more positive understanding of bi- and multilingualism in linguistic research as well as in society. While literary multilingualism undoubtedly is a vehicle for renewing literary expression, a question already extensively explored in literary scholarship (e.g., Doris Sommer's Bilingual Aesthetics from 2004 and Hana Wirth-Nesher's Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature from 2006, just to mention a couple of works), the narrative of "from loss to gain" is problematic. Firstly, the chronology of the chosen works contradicts it. The most radical argument for linguistic and cultural hybridity as gain, not loss in the study, Anzaldiia's classic Borderlands/La Frontera from 1987, is actually the oldest of the works, preceding Hoffman's story of language learning as the loss of another language in Lost in Translation (1989) by two years. It also precedes, by over a decade, Ariel Dorfman's memoirs with their eroticization of language ties in terms of bigamy--itself an excellent illustration of the monolingualist conception of the mother tongue as "a family romance" described by Yasemin Yildiz in Beyond the Mother Tongue (2012). Secondly, the transformation of literature in English by writers with a background in other languages is not a new phenomenon. Multilingual modernists like Beckett. Conrad, and Nabokov that Doloughan briefly mentions (162) were not exceptions to monolingualism; instead, translingualism, exile, and textual multilingualism are constitutional traits of European literary modernism (cf. Languages of Exile, eds. Englund & Olsson, 2013). …

Queering Philip Roth: Homosocial Discourse in "An Actor's Life for Me," Letting Go, Sabbath's Theater, and the "American Trilogy"

Abstract: Much has been written on Roth’s representation of masculinity, but this critical discourse has tended to be situated within a heteronormative frame of reference, perhaps because of Roth’s popular reputation as an aggressively heterosexual, libidinous, masculinist, in some versions sexist or even misogynist author. In this essay I argue that Roth’s representation of male sexuality is more complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent than has been generally recognized. Tracing a strong thread of what I call homosocial discourse running through Roth’s oeuvre, I suggest that the series of intimate relationships with other men that many of Roth’s protagonists form are conspicuously couched in this discourse and that a recognition of this ought to reconfigure our sense of the sexual politics of Roth’s career, demonstrating in particular that masculinity in his work is too fluid and dynamic to be accommodated by the conventional binaries of heterosexual and homosexual, feminized Jew and hyper-masculine Gentile, the “ordinary sexual man” and the transgressively desiring male subject.

"Singing in her song she died": Form as Heterotopic Mirror in Tennyson and Byatt

Abstract: Writing is like a carpet that is being unrolled in front of one, and the writer both discovers and makes the intricate patterns she sees appearing from inside the roll. It is the fact that they are there, and yet one has to set them down, that is so satisfactory. --A. S. Byatt (qtd. in McGillis) But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights, For often through the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot: Or when the moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed; "I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott. --Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Lady of Shalott" (lines 64-72) In an essay originally presented at All Souls College in Oxford, A. S. Byatt explains her interest in Tennyson and Arthur Henry Hallam as poets of "sensuousness." Reflecting on her reading of Marshall McLuhan's 1951 essay "Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry," Byatt objects to McLuhan's disappointment that Tennyson approached but failed to achieve modernism's "'landscape of the mind"': she "liked Hallam and Tennyson because their sensuousness was a guarantee of something resistant 'out there' as opposed to paysage interieur" (On Histories and Stories 106-07). Tennyson's influence on Byatt as a thinker and writer--particularly his insistence on the tangibility (1 ) of representation, rather than its symbolic nature--is evident in her many allusions to the poet in her fiction and criticism, (2) and, more importantly, in her own philosophy of artistic creation. In a 2011 interview, Byatt remarked: One of the things I was taught as a schoolchild was that the word "maker" is the medieval word for a poet. Philip [a potter in The Children's Book] uses the word "making," and that's what 1 believe in. I believe in making things. Christopher Frayling, the Rector of the Royal College of Art, sent me a huge book of projects of postgraduate work. And I couldn't understand more than about a tenth of any of the things that were written therein. And I'm not stupid. I actually believe in the common speech. And it may be that they were making things, and were just writing alongside, like two railway lines. I think that is what's probably happening. But some of them make projects that are concepts. And my temperament is not sympathetic to that. (Harrod and Adamson 80-81) A writer's prose, for Byatt, is "the Thing Itself (On Histories and Stories 6), not something to be taken for something else, or something to be pursued to some unreachable theoretic space, or something to be seen through by a critic on his or her way to an interpretive otherwhere. Byatt's debt to Tennyson is perhaps best displayed in The Children's Book. Set in the England and Europe of the 1890s through the end of World War I, the liminal period of late Victorian aestheticism upon the cusp of modernism, the novel explores the creative act and its connections to and effects upon creator, subject, and reader/spectator. In doing so, the novel revisits an earlier exploration of art and artist by Tennyson in "The Lady of Shalott." In Byatt's novel, Tennyson's discontented and isolated Lady is echoed in several of the women characters, but more importantly for this paper, her status as artist and her mysterious curse are assigned, respectively, to two characters: the writer of fairy-stories, Olive Wellwood, and her son Tom, who is connected to his mother by the story she writes and who dies when the fiction they share is made public upon a stage. The Children's Book, I argue, re-envisions "The Lady of Shalott" and, in doing so, reasserts that the act of creation, of representation, is potentially both life-giving and annihilating to art's subject as well as artist, precisely because of its materiality. As one of Byatt's characters says in the novel, '"art is more lifely than life but not always the artist pays"' (295). Even more significantly, however, in focusing on the creative act itself and its impact on the lives of many of the novel's major characters, The Children's Book illuminates the complexities and moral dimensions of Byatt's own writer's aesthetic, a subject Byatt has explored in previous works of fiction and nonfiction; in doing so, the novel tacitly offers a response to poststructural and cultural criticism of Byatt's fiction as essentialist and reactionary. …

Edna Ferber and the Problems of the Middlebrow

Abstract: Contemporaneous writing about the redoubtable Edna Ferber anticipates her eventual neglect. Ferber's 1968 obituary in the New York Times hailed her as "the greatest American woman novelist of her day"--no mean designation, despite the gender qualifier, considering that her "day" included such figures as Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Willa Cather--making much of the fact that her books were "required reading in schools and universities." Yet, like much contemporaneous writing about her, it also registers a certain reservation about her long-term import, conceding that "her novels were not profound," damning them with the faint praise of "minor classics." Within a few short years, the name "Edna Ferber," which once stood for an entire swath of literary achievement, was unrecognizable (Gilbert 12). Although during her lifetime she had some consistently loyal champions among prominent reviewers and editors, much of Ferber's critical reception has had a recurring arc: effusive praise, coupled with inevitable condescension based on the very same virtues that were praised. Writing in 1941, Margaret Wallace calls Ferber almost the only writer who seems to be "actually writing in technicolor [sic]"; Yet, for Wallace, Ferber's verve can't quite replace a "fuller knowledge of history or keener sense of character analysis." Orville Prescott can't help liking 1952's Giant, a "brisk, clever, constantly moving story." And, although Prescott dismisses his misgivings about Ferber's "brisk" stories' lack of "depth" as "needless carping" without detailing them at length, he goes on to articulate a central tension of Ferber's career, predicting with startling accuracy what would be her legacy: "[a]fter the last page is read surprisingly little remains in the memory." Edna Ferber, the "well-dressed lady novelist" (Nichols)--a delineation which she courted but also disdained--was "interesting" (Prescott); Edna Ferber was "a historical painter" (Woods); Edna Ferber was "brilliant" (Barkham), according to writers in the country's most widely circulated periodicals. Yet for some elusive reason, in the blunt words of one critic, "she ha[d] not achieved greatness," so indeed after her last page was written, few remembered her at all (Parker 448).(1) Given the swiftness with which Ferber fell into decisive obscurity in the decades directly following her death, it's easy to forget the staggering potency of her literary celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century. By some measures, Ferber was the top-selling American author of the twentieth century, despite a modest output of twelve novels, two autobiographies, and assorted volumes of short stories and plays over a half-century. (2) A Ferber novel was sometimes a Pulitzer contender, once a winner, and very often a blockbuster film, sometimes two--with Ferber's name in lights right alongside those of James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor (Smyth 223-26). Despite tremendous commercial success in her lifetime, however, dissonance in her critical reception plagued Ferber, and anxiety about its duality permeates her work, from its production, to its distribution, to its content. The problems of Ferber's legacy exemplify the problems of the tier of mid-century literature sometimes called "middlebrow." Though the term is far from stable, middlebrow is generally used to describe books produced for a bourgeoisie that read for leisure but not frivolity, seeking the Arnoldian balance of edification and delight. Scholarship on this tier of fiction has grown in the last few decades, notably Joan Shelley Rubin's foundational Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992) and Gordon Hutner's more recent and more comprehensive What America Read (2009), which studies "middle-class realism." (3) Since work on the middlebrow tends to take a broad view of mid-twentieth-century print culture rather than focus on individual careers or texts, Ferber hasn't emerged as a single figure for extensive study within that framework; the current, growing body of scholarship on Ferber more commonly invokes "women's culture" (Berlant), domesticity (Edmunds, Zink), Jewish studies (Batker, Shapiro), "class" defined more broadly (Haytock), or focuses on Ferber films (Smyth). …

Bilingual Obscenities: James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Linguistics of Taboo Words

Abstract: In a letter to Nora Barnacle, one of the infamous "dirty letters" James Joyce sent her from Dublin in the winter of 1909, Joyce wrote: "As you know, dearest, I never use obscene phrases in speaking. You have never heard me, have you, utter an unfit word before others. When men tell in my presence here filthy or lecherous stories I hardly smile" (SL 182). (1) This from the same man who wrote Ulysses, the book that was banned on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for its professed obscenity. Yet where his work is concerned, at the time of this letter to Nora he was right: there had been little obscenity in his writings so far. In fact, there is little obscenity in any of Joyce's writings until Ulysses, apart from the private, sexually explicit letters he wrote Nora. Printers and publishers had objected to the word "bloody" in Dubliners, where, after endless negotiations with the publisher, it appears four times, and to words like "fart" and "ballocks" in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and they had refused to set in print a large section of Portrait's chapter three, in which Stephen thinks about his wanderings around Dublin's red light district (Potter 28). Yet these instances are tame compared to some of the language in Ulysses, especially in the "Circe" and "Penelope" episodes. The language of Ulysses was so sexually explicit and blasphemous that it was not just considered obscene by law, but by many of Joyce's literary peers as well. (2) The book "raised a blush" upon the cheeks of Virginia Woolf (231), who complained to Lytton Strachey: "First there's a dog that p's--then there's a man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject" (234)--too much of a prude to write the words pee and fart; Katherine Mansfield found it "so repellent" that "it was difficult to read it," as she wrote to Sydney Schiff: "It shocks me to come upon words, expressions and so on that I'd shrink from in life" (432); and Arnold Bennett claimed that "Ulysses is not pornographic, but it is more indecent, obscene, scatological and licentious than the majority of professedly pornographic books" (qtd. in Potter 96). Even D. H. Lawrence, himself no stranger to allegations of obscenity and a recurrent user, in his works, of bad words such as "fuck," "cunt," and "balls" (all of which Lady Chatterley 's Lover uses more frequently than Ulysses, according to British prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffiths-Jones [qtd. in Conley, "Joyce's Bad Words"]), wrote in horror to his wife: "The last part of it ["Penelope"] is the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written. Yes it is, Frieda. It is filthy.... This Ulysses muck is more disgusting than Casanova" (qtd. in Meyers 362). This repellent, licentious muck was written by a man whose young alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, had been shocked "to read the word Foetus cut several times" in a school desk in Portrait of the Artist, where the obscene word "startled his blood" (89) and disturbs him profoundly. If the earlier and later of Joyce's works are indeed "a meeting of extremes... between the early romantic phase in which Stephen Dedalus vowed to forge the 'uncreated conscience' of his race, and the monumental profanities of the later Joyce" (Parrinder 13), then what gave rise to this dramatic shift in style? At least in part, a cause may be found in Joyce's increased involvement with Italian during the eleven years, from 1904 to 1915, he spent in Pola, Rome, and Trieste. During this period of his life, Joyce gained an almost native competence in Italian. As I will suggest in this essay, his fluency in Italian had important consequences for his writing, especially with regard to his use of obscene language. Psycholinguistic studies of language emotionality suggest that late bilinguals (people who, like Joyce, become bilingual as adults) process emotional words differently in their respective languages. Linguists have found that affective processing is deeper in the native language than in languages that have been learned as adults. …

The Translingualism of Kurdish Writers: A Postcolonial Reading of Ali-Ashraf Darvishian's Autobiographical Novel Sālhāyi Abrī (Cloudy Years)

Abstract: Kurds are often referred to as the largest people without a state of their own. The vast majority of their estimated population of 25-30 million live in a contiguous area of western Iran, northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, and eastern Syria, comprising about 11-15%, 17-20%, 15-20%, and 11-14% of the population in these countries respectively (Sheyholislami and Sharifi 77). They experienced the first and most permanent division of their lands in 1639 when a treaty between the Ottoman and Iranian states resulted in drawing the first official border between the two empires and also separating what is known today as Iranian Kurdistan from the rest of Kurdish territories. When the Ottoman Empire was dismantled at the end of the First World War, the Ottoman part of Kurdistan was re-divided among the newly-born states of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Thus, divided mostly among four neighboring countries of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, Kurdish speakers, along with other minorities, became subjected to oppressive state policies aimed at constructing homogenous nation-states of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic speakers. These policies ranged from deliberate killing of the language or linguicide to restricted and controlled tolerance. Kurdish was banned in Turkey from 1925 until 1991 at which point it was allowed limited and controlled freedom partly due to pressures from the European Union (see Fernandes; Ungor; Zeydanhoglu). Iran also banned minority languages, including Kurdish, at least during the Reza Shah period, 1925-1941 (see Hassanpour; Sheyholislami), while his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, followed a policy of restricted and controlled tolerance towards non-Persian languages that continued, more or less the same, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution (Sheyholislami). In Syria, beginning in the mid-1950s, the government destroyed Kurdish publications and banned language instruction in any language other than Arabic (Hassanpour, Skutnabb-Kangas, and Chyet 370), a policy that was in place until 2011 when the Syrian civil war started. It was only in Iraq that Kurdish was recognized and allowed to be used in the media, elementary education, and local administration (Hassanpour). The formation of the Kurdistan Regional Government in 1991 and the officialization of Kurdish as one of the two state languages of Iraq in 2005 have further contributed to the flourishing of Kurdish in Iraqi Kurdistan. Now despite the relative easing of the ban on the public usage of Kurdish in Turkey since 1991 and the introduction of a Kurdish language and literature program at the university level in the Iranian Kurdish city of Sanandaj in 2015, Kurdish is still denied the right to be taught in schools or be the medium of instruction except in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. Therefore, with a literature dating back to at least the sixteenth century, Kurdish still struggles for survival in Turkey and Iran (see Zeydanhoglu; Sheyholislami) while uncertainty shrouds the Kurds' future in war-torn Syria. The process of linguistic homogenization through the education system enforces the official language on Kurds and other linguistic minorities who, without education in and access to their native tongue and its literary heritage, grow up feeling a greater sense of intimacy, respect, and admiration towards the official language of their country. Educated solely in the official languages, some of these bilingual children have grown up to become canonical figures of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic literatures. It is indeed to the canons of these literatures that they owe their artistic inspiration in the first place. The phenomenon of authors writing in a language other than their primary one, also called "literary translingualism" (Kellman, Translingual Imagination ix), has been widely discussed in regards to literatures from countries that have experienced colonization by European powers. Many colonial writers have had to use the imposed European tongues to represent their condition in their works. …

Elsewhere: Translingual Kundera

Abstract: While other translingual writers have seemed to blossom into a new, and often revelatory, aesthetic connected to their embrace of a second language, Milan Kundera's novels have become shorter, more circumspect, and less obviously new in their form and aesthetic as he has moved into a second language. The urgency of his middle period--with the critically acclaimed and bestselling novels Kniha smichu a zapomneni / The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Nesnesitelnd lehkost byti/ The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Nesmrtelnost/Immortality--seems to have petered out into small, novella-like diversions that seem to display an unremarkable encounter with the second language he has embraced: no obvious shaving of words down to their core like Beckett, or capacious playfulness like Nabokov. Has the translingual Kundera been disappointing, or is there more to his embrace of the French language than meets the eye? Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, and for the first twenty years wrote his novels in Czech knowing that the vast majority of his readers would only read him, because of Czechoslovak censorship of his work, in translation; translation, he wrote, was everything. According to one of his translators, Peter Kussi, his awareness of a non-Czech readership made him self-conscious about his Czech language. Kundera worried that he was overly clarifying his language, "that he washed out his [Czech] tongue to be absolutely crystal clear" (Kussi 1999). Yet Kussi also pointed out that Kundera's Czech was already "clear, formal, what you might call normal Czech," unlike the great Czech stylists he admired such as Vladislav VanCura, Bohumil Hrabal, even (in his use of street Czech) Jaroslav Hasek--a clarity possibly connected to Kundera's love of classic French literature (Kussi 1999). That love is apparent; from his first prose piece, "Ja, truchlivy buh" (1958), Kundera has kept returning, for instance, to Rostand's Cyrano in order to underline a central trope in his own work of misunderstanding and our tragicomic belief in language and symbols to overcome it. Have Kundera's French novels been misunderstood, too? Or, more precisely, have Kundera's linguistic aesthetics been misunderstood paradoxically because of the apparent clarity, or straightforwardness, of his prose? French critics, such as Francois Ricard, have characterized Kundera's language as being solely instrumental: "simple," "classic," and only "entirely dedicated to the meaning it must transmit" (Ricard 165). In attributing a "classic" prose style to Kundera's work, critics like Ricard imply that Kundera was always, in spirit, a French writer; his translingualism is normalized into a certain tradition of French prose. After Kundera's work received one of the ultimate French literary accolades by being published as a two-volume Pleiade edition in 2011, Mohammed Aissaoui marveled at the "stylistic unity" of Kundera's Czech and French work. Aissaoui noted that "Kundera's translated French has the same traits of economy, precision and clarity as the French written directly by him" because "Kundera's natural diction, in Czech and in French, has always been in harmony with our classic prose." In this article, however, 1 want to suggest that Kundera's French novels are in fact linguistically and thematically disruptive (in terms of French norms in language, national culture, and tradition). As a Czech writer in exile, intimately attuned to discrepancies in language and its untranslatability, Kundera became interested in what language does and how it works (and does not work). While retranslating the French translations of his Czech novels, he became cognizant of the trajectory of his aesthetics, and particularly how he used language. He articulates this discovery in his first French essays, published as L'art du roman (1986) and Les testaments trahis (1993), arguing that great writers have their own "style personnel de l'auteur" / "author's personal style" that transgresses the norms of their own language whether or not their personal style is obviously disruptive (Testaments trahis 134; Testaments 110). …

Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Bored: Echoes of Flaubert's Egyptian Travel Writing in Madame Bovary

Abstract: In the afternoon we ride in the desert... We have the impression that we are on a beach and are about to see the sea; our moustaches taste of salt, the wind is sharp and bracing, footprints of jackals and camels half obliterated by the wind. One keeps expecting to see something new from the top of each hill, and each time it's only the desert. --Flaubert in Egypt, 56 All the while, however, she was waiting in her heart for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar some white sail in the mists of the horizon... But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the next day. --Madame Bovary, 53 In this pair of passages, one from Gustave Flaubert's Egyptian travel notes (1849) and the other from his novel Madame Bovary (1856), the traveler in the Orient bears a resemblance to the disillusioned housewife, Emma Bovary. In both excerpts, fantasies of the sea express desire for an interruption to spatial and temporal continuity. Flaubert's travel notes use the desert as a symbol of routine and repetition. Madame Bovary likewise turns monotony into a problem of geography, evoking an ever-misty "horizon" as the remote zone of experience. Juxtaposed, these passages present Flaubert and Emma as uncomfortable bedfellows, both plodding through life more attuned to mirage than reality. In his 2008 essay "Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed," Jacques Ranciere underscores another parallel between Emma and Flaubert: just as Emma conflates art with furniture, Flaubert mixes the poetic and the prosaic. Both Emma and Flaubert participated in a widespread undoing of aesthetic and social hierarchy, as each "embodies the 'democratic' equality of any subject with any other subject" (237). Yet, Ranciere shifts to oppose the novel's protagonist and her author. Emma, the anti-artist, contaminates art by subsuming it into an economy of materialist consumption. Flaubert, however, rescues art from consumer culture by shifting the grounds of aesthetics from subject matter to manner or style. While Emma tries to arrest aesthetic experience in objects she can possess, Flaubert strives to liberate aesthetic sensations and impressions from economies of desire and ownership. This feat, Ranciere tells us, would not be complete without the sacrificial death of Emma. Ranciere is not alone in reading Emma as a scapegoat. Margaret Cohen demonstrates that by pathologizing Emma's reading habits Flaubert "devalorizes" the gendered sentimental tradition and creates a space for himself in the literary marketplace (749). For Ashley Hope Perez, Flaubert's negative portrayal of Emma as "an incompetent writer" manifests his view of female authorship as a "degraded" art (32). In each of these interpretations, Flaubert establishes his own artistic originality by exemplifying in Emma "the wrong way" of reading, writing, and relating to aesthetic objects (Ranciere 238). The mirroring of author and character is thus set aside as critics pursue Flaubert's negative portrayal of his protagonist. This essay revisits Flaubert's characterization of Emma by attending to resonances between his Egyptian travel writing and Madame Bovary. In doing so, I claim that Flaubert was concerned with the perceptual and even epistemological conundrum posed by boredom. Flaubert's Egyptian travel writing catalogues his belief that exhausted modes of representation, such as cliche, inhibit one's ability to come to know the world through sensory perception. Rather than encountering the world through our senses, one "rediscovers" the world as the mirror of tropes and idioms inherited from popular literature, mass culture, religious rhetoric, and other discourse {Flaubert in Egypt 81). (1) The result is a withering of sensory perception and an atrophy of wonder. …

Constructing Ordinary Time in Adam Bede: The Architectural Structure of Eliot's Realism

Abstract: In George Eliot's Adam Bede (1858), our first look at Hall Farm, the Poyser family home, emphasizes both the way the house manifests its own history and the impossibility of seeing this complete history in a single glance. The initial peek reveals only a rusted gate, choked with weeds, but the narrator suggests that by looking through "we can see the house well enough" (133). We see a once impressive house with boarded-up windows and a door that "like the gate... is never opened" (133). As it happens, from this position we cannot see the house "well enough" at all, we can only see what it once was. In the past, this must have been the home of nobility, but "at present, one might fancy the house in the early stage of a chancery suit" (133). Everything about the house from this point of view--from the decrepit classical stone pillars to the "great wooden doll, which, so far as mutilation is concerned, bears a strong resemblance to the finest Greek sculpture" (134)--suggests the ruins of an older civilization. It is only when we begin to combine this image of the house with contradictory clues, first in the form of the farm animals, and then the human family and workers, that finally "the history of the house is plain" (134). The house is not deserted, but bustling with life and activity. It once belonged to an aristocratic family that has died out; the Donnithorne family absorbed the land and the house, and now leases it to tenant farmers. The narrator explains that it is only the focus of the house that has shifted, from the parlor to the farmyard and the kitchen. As this description makes clear, Hall Farm has a past and a present (and a future as well, which comes into question later in the novel), and all are part of its story and therefore relevant to our understanding. Because the front of the house tells only part of the story, our more complete understanding requires an adjustment to our spatial perspective. Distance and field of vision affect what we can know about the object we are observing, but in this description, we do not gain a more extensive field of vision effortlessly or instantly. Even though it is our "imagination" that is the "licensed trespasser," the narrator emphasizes the physical exertion and time required to move from one side of the house to the other, as we "climb over walls and peep in at windows" (133). By highlighting the inadequacy of any isolated moment to reveal a complete picture, this description of Hall Farm offers an architectural experience analogous to that of moving through the temporal structure of the novel. Just as our imagination travels from front to side to back to learn the more complete story of the house, it also must move through the experiences of the novel's various characters to learn who they have been and what they will become. The narrator repeatedly warns us against forming judgments based on an isolated moment, arguing that "until we know what has been or what will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man's critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character" (369). Only through knowing the past and the future--the "what has been" and the "what will be"--can we begin to "think ourselves wise." Because narrative, and the realist novel genre in particular, is capable of moving us around and through a sense of a lived experience, it can aspire to offer the more holistic picture that realism and true sympathy requires. Adam Bede uses the temporality of its architecture to signal that its own construction reproduces the lived experience of moving through the present, remembering the past, and anticipating the future. With its descriptions of houses, farms, churches, and workshops this novel self-reflexively examines its characters' and its own strategies for constructing temporal experience, thereby exposing the stakes of limited temporal perspectives. Throughout her body of work, Eliot emphasizes the consequences of our limited perception; my architectural analysis demonstrates that in Adam Bede this thematic concern is also expressed in its formal properties. …

Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political by Peter DeGabriele (review)

Abstract: examples of the ways essays in this collection complicate the linear history sketched earlier. A compelling part of the current volume lies in its focus on the popular novel in India, which has significantly challenged what we talk about when we talk about the novel in English in India. These popular fictions have altered the premises whereby the critical history of the novel has understood itself. As a result, to speak now of the Indian novel in English is to speak of two sets of output: one emerges from the works we would traditionally associate with the kind of history Anjaria summarized in the first page of her introduction. Another has little if anything to do with these works. New popular writers write of and speak to local audiences and their particular concerns. Five of the essays in Anjaria’s collection reflect on issues thrown up by popular and new fictions: Chetan Bhagat, Chick Lit, and fantasy are some of the subjects covered. The vast field of the novel in English in India is, of course, impossible to contain within the bounds of a single volume. By her own admission, Anjaria points out that there is no coverage of literature from the North East, or Kashmir, or of genres like science fiction. For me, the problem lies not in the fact that many regions and writers are not covered here, but that a large volume such as this one would have benefited by offering categorizations—chronological or thematic—to negotiate one’s way into the field. As it stands, the volume has a catch-all quality, which, while problematizing the linear history of the novel, we expect also produces its own problems. While addressing and acknowledging the importance of Rushdie’s novel as well as the surge of creative and theoretical productivity unleashed in its wake, Anjaria’s collection on the history of the Indian novel in English offers a timely, necessary, and compelling set of alternates that embed the history of this novel in other histories, and not only those in English or of the West.

The Value of the Novel by Peter Boxall (review)

Abstract: BOXALL, PETER The Value of the Novel New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015 156 pp $1799 paperback Peter Boxall's invigorating new book aims to articulate anew the work the novel does in a world marked by the pressure points of virtual reality and environmental calamity He begins by charting historical transformations in the definition and assessment of cultural value that have determined the novel's worth The prevailing attitude toward the humanities in the early twentieth century as the preeminent source of moral value, he demonstrates, gave way to the late twentieth-century insistence, fueled by the proliferation of literary theory, on the "freedom of the critical imagination from ideological prescription" (1) Boxall locates competing forces of valuation in our contemporary moment: the ethical turn in literary studies, the governmental injunction on the humanities to account for themselves in a market-driven world, and the Internet, a forum in which criticism has become a public, devalued activity This evolving historical account motivates Boxall's study, which, in its focus on the novel's enduring centrality, resembles recent wide-ranging works that consider narrative alongside theories of affect, cognitive mind, and ethics The flexible concept of value, however, allows Boxall to transcend specific theoretical commitments and craft an impassioned manifesto for the ethical, philosophical, and political necessity of the novel The book is divided into two sections: "Art" and "Matter" Part I looks at the concept of voice within the novel and the history of realism, and part II looks at the novel's engagement with the material world in its representation of bodies in space, in time, and as operated on by law This organization allows Boxall to range widely and expertly in his methodology and historical focus Driving the complex argument is his claim that conventional literary historical delineations mask the relatively stable genealogy of the novel, or its distinctive oscillation between existence and non-existence To combat this critical tendency Boxall traces continuities among early versions of fiction, realism, modernism, and postmodernism In examining the novel's "voice," for example, Boxall turns to Dickens and Beckett, two writers who represent the height of realism's popularity and mastery, and the endpoint of its viability in late modernism, respectively David Copperfield demonstrates the instability and fictionality of the voice or "presence" (33) while Beckett's trilogy and other prose works, far from fully evacuative, assert the primacy of the voice to subjectivity Despite these efforts to erode historical boundaries, Boxall is careful to engage with the cultural specificity of the novels he reads, such as Defoe's construction of modern individualism in the face of capitalism and imperialism, and More's dissatisfaction with the political corruption of sixteenth-century Europe in Utopia And yet a major element of his argument consists in showing that the novel engages, as no other form can, with the specific problems of discourse and matter that shape our world today, namely the information age and the ecological crisis Through fascinating readings of formal experiments with temporality in Wells, Proust, and Woolf, Boxall shows the novel's political and ethical responses to momentous changes in our understanding of space and time, predominantly as they took place at the turn of the twentieth century …

Judgment and character, evidence and the law in tom jones

Abstract: Ever since Ian Watt's analysis of Fielding's methods of characterization in The Rise of the Novel (1957) critics have generally agreed with his thesis that Fielding presents his readers with the "outsides" of his characters as opposed to Richardson who reveals his characters' inmost thoughts and psychological processes. At present two schools of thought attempt to account for why Fielding chose this method of characterization. The older of the two, presided over by Martin Battestin, holds that Fielding wrote under the influence of a theological school of thought that values works over faith. Accordingly, the reasoning goes, he values what a man does over what he thinks or professes.1 The second, more recent school, derives from Lockian discussions of identity. Historians of ideas agree that Locke located human identity in the ever-changing human psyche, a position that threatened traditional notions of moral responsibility, for if a man today is not the same person he was yesterday, he cannot be held responsible now for his moral lapses in the past.2 According to Ira Koningsberg, Fielding tries to "fix Personal identity and make the individual morally responsible," and he therefore must "stay mostly outside his characters and not get caught in the impermanence of the human psyche."3 I would argue that there is a third, immediately context-related reason for Fielding's method of characterization in Tom Jones. The legal context in which the novel was written, especially the contemporary dispute over evidence, witnesses, and their credibility, helps explain a good deal about not only characterization, but about much else in the novel as well. Remarkably little has been written about any possible connection between Fielding's knowledge of the law and his novels in spite of the fact that thirty years ago William Empson observed that "the unusual thing about Fielding as a

Telling run away: Novel testimony in toni cade Bambara's those bones are not my child

Abstract: This essay on Toni Cade Bambara’s little-studied final novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), examines the centrality of the novel form to Bambara’s investigation of testimony as a response to racial violence in the United States. As a novel, Bambara’s account of the real-life case of Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered Children can house opposing methods of giving testimony—a mother finds her voice, a son suffers and exercises the power of his silence, and writer and reader conspire to witness without hope of conclusion—and call attention to the complications of playing representational roles in the context of racial injury. Those Bones thus points the way to a more complex notion of agency and a reformulated theory of testimony calibrated to the particular challenges of responding to historical and immediate violence against black Americans.

Mediation, Authority, and Critical Reading in The Warden

Abstract: In The New Zealander, the book-length critique of Victorian England that Anthony Trollope wrote in the mid-1850s, Trollope bemoans the fact that the newspaper press, especially the Times, has so much influence on society. But, to his mind, the readers of the paper are more at fault for this dangerous consolidation of power than the Times itself. Trollope likens that most influential of newspapers to a "Leviathan" that tyrannizes English society with the threat of its opinions (37). Yet, Trollope says, "If we have a tyrant ruling us... we have none to blame for our thralldom but ourselves" (42). Trollope goes on to suggest that this subjection to a newspaper comes from the fact that the English people consume the articles of the Times with no critical discernment. "The readers," he says, "do the work of brainless idle men, to whom the trouble of thinking for themselves would be a pain too great for endurance" (45). This line of thinking, in many ways, elaborates on the themes that Trollope had dealt with in his portrayal of the press in The Warden (1855), the novel he wrote before starting The New Zealander. In this essay, I examine The Warden as a novel that aims to make its audience into the kinds of critical readers that The New Zealander finds to be so lacking in England. Critics such as Bo Earle and Elaine Hadley have recently turned to The Warden to examine the ways in which Septimus Harding's reaction to the press represents Trollope's notions of ideal liberal citizenship. (1) Yet these accounts have done little in the way of addressing how Trollope deals with the press itself. Trollope, I argue, attempts to educate his readers in that book to be skeptical of the writing of authorities like the Times, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle (who are represented in The Warden by the Jupiter, Mr. Popular Sentiment, and Dr. Pessimist Anticant respectively); he wants his readers to understand that these figures are fallible despite the air of infallibility that they cultivate. More importantly, though, Trollope wants his audience to be aware of the ways in which these sources do not offer immediate access to their subject but are conditioned by various mediations. Trollope shows that the very air of authority that these texts project is an effect of medium and convention. Moreover, Trollope's desire to scrutinize the effects of mediation also manifests as a self-consciousness about the ways in which his own novel works. At several points in The Warden, Trollope calls his audience's attention to the ways in which the genre of his text, the material realities of the book, the marketplace, authorial labor, or his narrator shape his portrayal of the narrative. For instance, in the last chapter of The Warden, Trollope confesses that he is writing a conclusion mainly because he feels the pressure of generic expectations. "Were it not for the custom of the thing," Trollope writes, he would not bother "to collect the scattered threads of our little story" but would rather "leave it to the imagination of all concerned to conceive how affairs at Barchester arranged themselves" (278). Such moments in the novel, I argue, no matter how flippant they may seem, aim to reinforce the sense that readers need to have critical awareness of all the factors that are shaping the texts that they read. If he can teach his readers that the works they encounter do not offer immediate access to the truth or reality but rather versions of these things that are shaped by generic conventions and material contingencies, Trollope believes that he can help to educate the public to be more critical readers and more discerning thinkers than they are. Trollope's Media Awareness and His Realism In what sense is Trollope conscious of the mediations that shape his and other texts? (2) For my purposes, mediation refers both to the workings of technical media--such as print--and to more abstract entities like genre. I am here following John Guillory, who has recently argued that scholars of traditional art such as literature must take equally seriously both the mediation of literature by technologies such as print. …

Language Politics: The Boundaries of Homeland and Translingual Israeli Literature

Abstract: Historically, Zionism posited a fundamental connection between Hebrew language and Israeli culture and identity. Recent developments in Israeli literature, in particular the rise to prominence of both Israeli authors writing in non-Jewish languages and Hebrew writers living abroad, have begun to test the link between language and homeland. This article reads a recent work of translingual Israeli literature in English, Shani Boianjiu’s 2012 novel The People of Forever Are Not Afraid , through an earlier fictional and theoretical work in English by the Israeli writer Rela Mazali. Through their approach to translingualism, these texts question the naturalness of the assumed bond between language and homeland and offer a contemporary challenge to the Zionist negation of exile.