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

Trade, Time, and the Calculus of Risk in Early Pacific Travel Writing

S OON AFTER STARTING my research on personal files from the former secret police archives in Bucharest, I realized that I was often their second reader.' Because my predecessor, the secret police archivist, had left thick pencil marks that had survived through the decades, I could easily trace the trajectory of that first reading, with its narrow emphasis on the main narrative, the conclusive evidence, names, and court decisions. The archivist rushed to the inexorable closing of the files, intent on quelling any questions along the way. Following that red thread, I gradually learned to decode acronyms and pseudonyms and to read for the plot. Before long, however, I lost my place in this tedious, complicit reading. The file appeared as a disturbing collage of found objects still pregnant with untold stories: yellowed newspaper clippings, a love letter opened before reaching its intended destination, the transcript of an overheard conversation, scalloped-edged photographs, and fragments of literary manuscripts. If the suspicious gaze of the secret police had turned everything into incriminating evidence, I became interested in returning that gaze from the critical perspective of a reader of literature.

Arresting Biographies: The Secret Police File in the Soviet Union and Romania

just what I desire to produce gentle thoughts and happy remembrances" (Haight, Selections 204). Carlyle had written of how she "could fancy in reading it, to be seeing and hearing once again a crystal-clear, musical, Scotch stream, such as I long to lie down beside" (Haight, Letters 17). It seems surprising that Carlyle reports having a mental picture which is nowhere present in the book. But that a book might prompt its reader to a peaceful reverie of her own is modeled within the novel itself. In one moment late in the novel, Seth Bede sits with a volume in hand, "Wesley's abridgement of Madam Guyon's life," similarly thinking of something else: he appears with his "blue dreamy eyes, as often as not looking vaguely out of the window instead of at his book." "'[T]h' lad,'" Adam says of his brother, '"liked to sit full o' thoughts he could give no account of; they'd never come t' anything, but they made him happy'" (531). Putting the book aside in favor of private "thoughts and ... remembrances" appears, paradoxically, to have been "the sort of effect" Eliot sought. But imagination could not simply be counted on to conjure "gentle thoughts and happy remembrances." Eliot often discovered her readers daydreaming in ways she found discouraging. For over the course of her career, Eliot found that many of her readers were busily engaged in an imagining of their own direction and one little like Jane Carlyle' s "remembrances." Reading several of Eliot's novels in serial form, readers often guessed what the next installment would contain and guessed wrong. Over the many months during which Romola or Middlemarch first appeared, a complex relation developed between the author and her forecasting audience which became an increasing anxiety for the novelist. As Blackwood recorded of her remark about her last novel, Daniel Deronda, "It was hard upon her that people should be angry with her for not doing what they expected with her characters" (qtd. in Martin 235). Eliot's recognition that she could not control the wayward imaginings of readers was compatible with the growing recognition in the period that the imagination was not easily controllable. In the mid-nineteenth century, Victorian psychologistsamong whom Eliot's partner, George Henry Lewes, was a central figure were beginning to theorize the unconscious workings of the imagination, which appeared particularly immune to rational control or coaxing. While Eliot modeled in Adam Bede the kind of daydreaming she thought was compatible with novel reading (as Seth Bede's reverie echoes the benign daydreams of Carlyle), so she also modeled a kind of daydreaming that she scorned as wholly incompatible with novel reading (e.g. Hetty Sorrel). Eliot thus enlists her fiction in an effort to sway her readers' minds towards "gentle" thoughts, and away from Hettyesque wishfulfillment.

Reading Ahead in George Eliot

The most common story for children is one in which a central character leaves home in search of an adventure or is pushed out of an originary home, journeys to an unfamiliar place, and, after a series of exciting and/or dangerous experiences, either returns home, or chooses to claim the unfamiliar space as a new home. Whether as historical novel, domestic fiction, or fantasy, this story finds its happy ending in the agreement of the child to be secure (and secured) inside. The turn of the millennium, however, has seen an increasing number of narratives for young readers that challenge the earlier pattern. Using three Canadian novels for young people (published in 2004, 2006, and 2007) as examples, I demonstrate that, while these narratives may locate themselves within the context of a social-justice pedagogy and are concerned to teach young people the facts of homelessness and to promote thoughtful reflections on the underlying social causes of which homelessness is the symptom, readers are also invited to understand the young characters in the text more abstractly, as figures that represent possible ways of being in the world. Indeed, many of the recent narratives for young people replicate, almost uncannily, the metaphors and rhetorical turns of the theorists of globalization. Keywords: children’s literature; street kids; globalization; mobility; figuration; Canadian literature; award-winners (Published: 24 May 2013) Citation: Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics, Vol. 4 , 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/blft.v4i0.20605

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/pdf/no-place-like-home-the-facts-and-figures-of-homelessness-in-wzlq7f1r4i.pdf

“No place like home”: the facts and figures of homelessness in contemporary texts for young people

In the last two decades of the Qing dynasty, installment publication became the dominant mode of presentation for Chinese fiction, as it had been for European and Japanese literature for more than half a century. Whether printed daily as one feature in a newspaper, weekly in literary supplements, or monthly in the fiction journals that took off in the early 1900s, Chinese vernacular fiction of this period appeared in parts over time, just as the works of Honore de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Jippensha Ikku, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and even Henry James did (Link 1981; Lee and Nathan 1985; Chen 1988). As early as 1892, Shanghai author Han Bangqing praised the installment form for heightening suspense and forcing the reader to imagine what might happen next; by 1910 “addiction” to installment fiction could be understood as an aesthetic experience, and the popularity of the format would only increase in the decades to follow. This article seeks to trace the rise of the installment form in late Qing and early Republican China, investigate its ties with the contemporaneous cultural production of Shanghai as a metropolitan media center, and demonstrate the effects of its associated aesthetic.

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

Citations

Trade, Time, and the Calculus of Risk in Early Pacific Travel Writing

Arresting Biographies: The Secret Police File in the Soviet Union and Romania

Reading Ahead in George Eliot

“No place like home”: the facts and figures of homelessness in contemporary texts for young people

Building Shanghai, One Page at a Time: The Aesthetics of Installment Fiction at the Turn of the Century