The structure of feminine subjectivity in Sophia Lee’s The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times (1783) is frequently reduced to a discursive construction or a maternal substance. When critical attention is focused on Lee’s unique handling of visual and textual “absorption”—a concept I borrow from Michael Fried—it is clear that historicist and Gothic logics of subjectivity fall short of describing what the novel actually achieves. I link Lee’s textual innovations to Jacques Lacan’s theories of the gaze and of feminine desire. Just as Lacan emphasized the literal aspect of the signifier, Lee attempts to literalize the historical and subjective dramas with which she engages in the novel. Her literalizations exceed the standard alignment of the feminine with non-meaning or nature (an alignment that supports the assumption of masculine meaningfulness) as Lee’s literality pertains to the letter itself. To be absorbed by the literal: it is this unique scenario that necessitates a rethinking of the basic pr...

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

The Recess Does Not Exist: Absorption, Literality, and Feminine Subjectivity in Sophia Lee's The Recess

The Sound of Ford Madox Ford: War-Time, Impressionism, and Narrative Form

Considering the immensity and ubiquity of the persistent demand for narratives, any narratology must deal with the reasons for this obvious attractiveness. In this paper, the appeals of the narrative genre are studied from the view-point of the reader. I argue that the aspect of fiction, inherent in any narrative, has the potential for turning readers’ cognition and emotionality into a special and delightful experience feeding on the very difference between the fictiveness of narration and the reality of life. Thus questioning the emphasis of cognitive narratology on the integration of narrative into universal cognizing dispositions, I take up the discussion with the basic tenets of the cognitive approach to narration.

Die Attraktivität der Erzählung. Überlegungen zum Appellpotential narrativer Kombinatorik

Through a close reading of Freud’s last major work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), this article considers the socio-political and literary stakes of a central element of Freud’s oeuvre, which reaches its fullest elaboration in the Moses text: belatedness. Belatedness, or deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), which structures the movement of repression and return in the individual psychology of Freud’s earlier work, is aggravated and intensified in this late modernist text. Now, it is an entire people (the Jews) and (Judeo-Christian) civilization founded upon the temporal predicament of trauma, latency, and the return of the repressed. What is most innovative about Moses—its fragmentary style, its rewriting of biblical origins, its daring conjectures and methods of recording history—gestures back, after all, to the singular problem that both Freudian psychoanalysis and modernism are destined to repeat: the constitutive belatedness of all experience.

After AllTraces of the Literary in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (a Historical Novel)

Iris Murdoch is not usually thought of as an experimental novelist, although Robert Scholes, Patricia Waugh, and other critics have commented on her use of metafiction. But in The Unicorn (1963), she highlights the literary/psychological tendency to mythmaking in her own fiction through a stylized use of Gothic narrative and settings.' Murdoch's metafiction, which mainly exposes the fiction-making illusions of her characters, is heuristic rather than formalistic in the postmodern sense. Waugh, who observes that "metafiction explores the concept of fictionality through an opposition between the construction and the breaking of illusion," places Murdoch's novels "at one end of the spectrum," where "fictionality [is] a theme to be explored," but "formal self-consciousness is limited" (16, 18-19). She asks: "Why do metafictional novelists so frequently concern themselves with the problem of human freedom?" (119) Why, one might add, does Murdoch treat the problem of freedom metafictionally in The Unicorn? The answer has to do with the way she deconstructs the Gothic fantasy of the text and her characters' illusions.2 As Peter Brooks says of Heart of Darkness, "[the] reader's own incapacity to sum up-the frustration produced by the text-is consubstantial with his dialogic implication in the text" (260-61). Mark Currie defines metafiction as "a kind of writing which places itself on the border between fiction and criticism" and emphasizes "the

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

The Recess Does Not Exist: Absorption, Literality, and Feminine Subjectivity in Sophia Lee's The Recess

The Sound of Ford Madox Ford: War-Time, Impressionism, and Narrative Form

Die Attraktivität der Erzählung. Überlegungen zum Appellpotential narrativer Kombinatorik

After AllTraces of the Literary in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (a Historical Novel)

Metafiction, Metadrama, and the God-Game in Murdoch's The Unicorn