This paper argues that the missing object, the titular moonstone, in Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel influences the characters and the circumstances, functioning as an overarching consciousness which I interpret as a Hegelian Consciousness. The loss of the diamond initiates the action of the novel; however, it is the overwhelming presence of the diamond inside the consciousness of the characters that causes their entanglement not only with one another but with the absent/present diamond as well. The diamond has a transformative effect on the characters, reaching deep down into their unconscious, and promoting self-discovery. Collins’s deployment of a series of symbolic triads, along with his combination of fragmented narratives, dismisses any attempt to assign a central position to any one character. In the absence of a center, and through the symbols of spirituality surrounding the diamond, oppositions are dissolved and the moonstone becomes the source of light that illuminates the problems concerning a sense of belonging, (im)perfection, marginalization, contradiction, and existence per se in a world that is divided more and more as individuality replaces collectivity in the name of modern progress. Collins posits a critical outlook towards this replacement.

 

 

October 2026: Seda Pekşen received her doctorate in English Literature from Middle East Technical University in 2008. She has been working as an instructor at Ankara University’s Department of English Language and Literature since 2010. Her fields of interest are Victorian fiction, contemporary fiction, science-fiction and fantasy literature, children’s literature, and literary theory.

In the spring of 1887, Chekhov embarked on a journey from Moscow, traversing the vast expanse of the southern Russian steppe with the intention of visiting his hometown Taganrog. Less than a year later, in February 1888, he completed his novella, Steppe: A Story of a Journey, widely regarded as transformative in his literary career. The present article delves into the innovative aspect of Chekhov’s novella by focusing on its pivotal moment of departure. Beside referring to the steppe journey that inspired the story, “departure” pertains to the literary departure of Steppe itself. Published a few decades after the introduction of trains in Russia and just before the advent of cinema, Chekhov’s Steppe, I argue, introduced an original literary “moving image.” By situating the emergence of this image in the broader context of the 19^th-century revolution of seeing, I trace the existential charge of this aesthetic moment, which cast time itself as the vital and pivotal hero of Chekhov’s prose.

 

October 2025: In the spring of 1887, Chekhov embarked on a journey from Moscow, traversing the vast expanse of the southern Russian steppe with the intention of visiting his hometown Taganrog. Less than a year later, in February 1888, he completed his novella, Steppe: A Story of a Journey, widely regarded as transformative in his literary career. The present article delves into the innovative aspect of Chekhov’s novella by focusing on its pivotal moment of departure. Beside referring to the steppe journey that inspired the story, “departure” pertains to the literary departure of Steppe itself. Published a few decades after the introduction of trains in Russia and just before the advent of cinema, Chekhov’s Steppe, I argue, introduced an original literary “moving image.” By situating the emergence of this image in the broader context of the 19^th-century revolution of seeing, I trace the existential charge of this aesthetic moment, which cast time itself as the vital and pivotal hero of Chekhov’s prose.

The essay points to an overlap between Metamorphosis and Kafka’s early unfinished story “Wedding Preparations in the Country”; it highlights the theme of the incomplete metamorphosis as underlying the protagonists’ predicament. The theme of the incomplete transformation is then traced in a number of Kafka’s short stories, revealing its importance in Kafka’s world-view.

Writing in the years before, during, and right after WWI, Christian Friedrich Weiser published scholarly and political-utopian works of planning for a German victory: Germany’s idealist philosophy, when realized as a political reality, would offer the world a beneficial alternative to the poverty of “Anglo-Saxon” pragmatism. To give imaginative shape to his plans, Weiser also wrote a novella, Die Hoffnung des Iren (1915). Translated into English as The Faith of an Irishman, it latches on to the Irish hatred of the English, the Irish for whom the “German Day” would also come as liberation. In his scholarly book, Shaftesbury und das deutsche Geistesleben (1916), Weiser represents Shaftesbury as inspiration for German idealism. The utopianism in his pamphlets and his fiction is informed by his experiences as a returning immigrant: he believes that ethnic Germans outside the Reich must take the lead in realizing the “German Day.”

 

October 2025: Rudolphus Teeuwen (PhD Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania) recently retired as professor of English at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he taught for nearly 30 years. He now lives in his native the Netherlands. He taught courses related to eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, aesthetics, the utopian imagination, and literary theory, and published on these matters in edited volumes and in journals such as Cultural Critique, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Theory, Culture & Society, Philosophy and Literature, and Symplokē. A special subject of interest to him has been Roland Barthes’s approach to life and letters, and the place of mysticism and utopian imagining in it. Questions of migration, exile, and nostalgia are also of prime interest to him. These elements— mysticism, utopianism, and migration — inform his contribution to Partial Answers as well. With Steffen Hantke he edited Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers and the Global Academic Proletariat (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

This article demonstrates how Samuel Beckett’s Endgame fleshes out the implausible entailments of a world premised on the emotivist understanding of the self –– on a noncognitivist conception of metaethical anti-realism, which is precisely the moral theory of meaning that Alasdair MacIntyre sets out to dismantle in After Virtue. I delineate an analogy between MacIntyre’s critique of post-Enlightenment conceptions of obligation and Beckett’s staging of moral incoherence and interpersonal manipulation parodied throughout Endgame.

 

October 2025: Dr. Paul Andrew Woolridge is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Qatar University. He specializes in the history of literary criticism and theory, with a particular emphasis on modernist periodicals in Anglo-American letters. Dr. Woolridge has held appointments at Northeastern University, New York University Shanghai, and Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist (UIC). He has published in a number of academic journals, including The Cambridge Quarterly and Journal of the History of Ideas. His research areas include topics in cultural criticism, transatlantic modernism, and the relationship between literature and philosophy.

This essay analyzes Anthony Burgess’s “answer to Orwell” in his 1962 dystopia The Wanting Seed. It claims that the cyclical dynamic of liberal, oppressive, and conservative phases that critics have traditionally taken to be Burgess’s anti-Orwellian philosophy of history is balanced in the novel by an alternative picture of perpetual war, which may even be seen as the beginning of the Orwellian end of history. The text overlays these two interpretations, and it is not possible decisively to favor one over the other. The protagonist’s final existentialist insight is that we must “try to live” whatever world and history it is we live in.

 

October 2025: Jan-Boje Frauen is an associate professor at Zhejiang International Studies University (ZISU), Hangzhou, PR China. Jan’s academic background is in English, American and German Studies and philosophy (Göttingen University & University of California Santa Cruz). His Ph.D. is in International Relations and he has successfully completed a postdoc in science philosophy (Xiamen University). Jan’s interests span a wide array of fields in his academic publications, ranging from abstract philosophical considerations about the nature and future of subjectivity in the physical world to practical politics and recent history. However, 20th-century dystopian fiction and the work of Anthony Burgess have been with him ever since he wrote his M.A. thesis on Burgess many years ago. He has published numerous articles on Orwell’s 1984.

This paper analyzes Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children within the framework of selected tenets of Karen Barad’s agential realism. With its focus on the inherent agency of matter and its uncanny creative power as well as intra-active entanglements among entities, Barad’s theory provides a context for a new reading of Rushdie’s magical realist novel. The project draws inspiration from quantum physics and points to the “spiritual” dimension of materiality while broadening the notion of agency to include all kinds of beings. Midnight’s Children exhibits a new materialist strand of the posthumanist perception of reality: the human body is depicted as embedded in intra-active connections with various kinds of entities, the human vs. animal opposition is questioned, and the non-human is appreciated. Most importantly, Rushdie accentuates the peculiar uncanny quality of matter. The paper argues that in Midnight’s Children human “magical” corporeality corresponds to the uncanny corporeality of the world.

 

October 2025: Malgorzata Kowalcze is an early-career researcher who holds a PhD in English literature and a Master’s degree in philosophy. Her principal research interests are in the fields of contemporary English literature, phenomenology, and posthumanism, with particular focus on New Materialisms. She is the author of William Golding's Images of Corporeality: Insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body (in Polish) as well as of a number of papers published in international journals. Her articles apply selected posthumanist theories and ecocriticism to the study of literature. She has guest-lectured about posthumanism in Spain, Italy, Romania, as well as Israel and Uzbekistan. In her current research project, she explores the connections between new materialism and the genre of magical realism. She is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies of the University of the National Education Commission, Krakow, Poland, where she teaches courses in the history of English literature and posthumanism.

Naipaul’s final two novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds, revisit the question of what it means to lead a valuable life with a greater patience than he previously displayed for the possibilities of worthwhile belonging. This essay offers a different way through which the complexity and irresolution of these under-discussed novels might be approached by placing them in dialogue with the philosophical discussion of modern identity. Building upon the work of Charles Taylor and Kwame Anthony Appiah, among others, I argue that Naipaul’s late fiction reconsiders belonging and withdrawal as constituting a problematics of value. His late fiction takes seriously the difficulties of leading a life in relation to conflicting value systems, difficulties which are often overlooked in his own earlier writing and thinking.

October 2025: Leo Kadokura is a PhD candidate and modern literature tutor at the University of Oxford. His project examines the reciprocal relationship between literary innovation and changing constructions of English national identity across the 20^th century. He teaches 20^th-century English literature with an emphasis upon global and postcolonial approaches.

Book review

Book Review

Book review

The introduction to the special issue “Performing Selves in the 21^st Century” discusses the turbulent changes that both the theory and practice of life writing have undergone in recent decades, as well as the sociocultural and media context of contemporary autobiographical and autofictional storytelling. It also surveys the papers included in this issue, which, in their different ways, expose and analyze the strong inclination of 21^st-century self-representation acts towards self-performance and self-invention.

In the new millennium, new media have made conscious self-performance an everyday and continuous activity. Memory has always been creative, but in the digital age it is becoming more commonplace to actively shape pictorial and verbal stories of oneself according to what one wishes to remember and show to the world. Many autofictional books explore the boundary and the overlap between memory, self-presentation, and self-invention, often through protagonists whose acts of writing appear to affect the lives they lead. This article argues that a new autofictional form turns the fluidity, mutability, and collaborative nature of self-presentation into a structural principle. It shows how Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010/2012), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) critically explore the potentials and dangers of new media ecologies, suggesting that self and world can be changed through acts of (self-)presentation. The article also addresses the question of how autofictional destabilizations of reality relate to concepts such as “alternative facts” and proclamations of a “post-factual” age, and reflects on political and ethical implications of how autofictional texts challenge the belief in uniform and universal truth.

 

December 2024: Alexandra Effe is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo, where she is part of the interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative “Literature, Cognition, and Emotions,” and teaches Anglophone and comparative literature. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression (Palgrave, 2017) and co-editor of The Autofictional (Palgrave, 2022) and Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour (Routledge, 2023). She has published articles and book chapters on narrative and cognitive theory, twenty-first-century literature, postcolonial literature, and testimonial writing. As Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she co-convened the project “Autofiction in Global Perspective.”

In recent years one has observed the rise of new forms of (self-)life-storying, not only as a means of expressing one’s dissatisfaction with the turn-of-the-21^st-century auto/biographical boom but also as a manifestation of the crisis of both the auto/biographical self and form. These new self-narratives ostensibly resist the canonical “laws” of auto/biographical writing yet eagerly embrace real events from the authors’ lives. This article discusses one of the most acclaimed examples of 21^st-century (self-)life-storying, Rachel Cusk’s “Fay” trilogy — Outline (2014), Transit (2016), and Kudos (2018). Drawing on Cusk’s archival records, it focusses on the way Cusk’s auto/biographical authorial self becomes first fictionalized and then compartmentalized into the series’ fictional characters. By referring to Clair Bishop’s Artificial Hells (2012), this essay argues that Cusk’s trilogy should be recognized as employing the strategy of “delegated performances,” where the narrativization of the self is dependent on “outsourcing” the authorial self. This strategy is here seen as a signpost of new autofiction.

 

December 2024.  Robert Kusek (Ph.D, D.Litt) is Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, Faculty of Philology, as well as Head of Research Centre for Transnational Literary Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. His research interests include life writing genres, the contemporary novel in English, queer heritage, as well as a comparative and transnational approach to literary studies. He is the author of two monographs and several dozen articles published in books and academic journals. He was a researcher in a number of Polish and international projects – currently he is a principal investigator in the National Science Centre funded project entitled “(Un)accidental Tourists: Polish Literature and Visual Culture in South Africa in the 20th and 21st Centuries.”

This article discusses the changing understanding and practice of autofiction in the broader cultural context of the transformations of lived reality, the media landscape, and ways of writing and reading life stories. Originally defined as an autobiographical narrative breaking the conventions of classical autobiography, autofiction and its meaning change as notions of autobiography and the autobiographical loosen. The article suggests that a signaled autofictional intent and deliberate ambiguity of framing are important markers of contemporary autofiction. The second part of the article analyzes the strategies of such signaling in Czech writer Jan Němec’s Ways of Writing about Love (2019). It demonstrates how this work underlines the performative nature of self-representation by commenting on the process of self-narration and self-invention as well as by enacting a patchwork identity through inserting other texts and playful touches into the narrative. By allowing new media to influence the form of the book and by transcending the boundaries of the text to continue his self-performance in other media, Němec probes the possibilities not just of “writing about love” but also of performing the self. The work thus exemplifies autofiction’s tendency to respond to sociocultural developments, including changing patterns of life storytelling.

 

December 2024: Zuzana Fonioková is Assistant Professor in the Department of Czech Literature, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Her research interests include narrative theory, life writing, autofiction, and autobiographical comics. She is author of Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch: Bending Facts in Unreliable and Unnatural Narration (2015) and Od autobiografie k autofikci: Narativní strategie vyprávění o vlastním životě (From autobiography to autofiction: Narrative strategies of life narratives, 2024). She is co-editor of Narrative Inquiry special issue “Life Storytelling across Media and Contexts” (2025).

The study examines two autofictional narratives — The Seventh Autobiography (2000) and The Eight, or Unfinished Autobiography (2007) by the Czech writer Ota Filip (1930–2018). The texts were written in reaction to a media scandal as well as some traumatic events in the author’s private life. The study attempts to understand the different ways in which the two texts were received, both in the Czech context and when compared to the reactions to the German version, Der siebente Lebenslauf (2001). The cognitive-hermeneutic theory of autobiography and autofiction by Liesbeth Korthals Altes is the basis of my analysis of textual and paratextual clues that allow reading the Autobiographies in different cognitive frames, or in the evaluation framework of “five worlds” as presented by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. An intepretation of Filip’s works within the concept of the “Inspired World” is also related to the context of Czech autofiction literature (Ludvík Vaculík, Pavel Kohout, Bohumil Hrabal).

December 2024: Jan Tlustý is an associate professor in the Department of Czech Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, as well as in the Department of Czech Language and Literature at the Faculty of Education, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. He serves as chief editor of the scholarly journal Bohemica Litteraria. His research focuses on interpretation and aesthetic experience, particularly from the perspectives of phenomenology, hermeneutics, cognitive science and Czech poststructuralism (studies on Jan Patočka, Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Milan Jankovič, and others). He is the author of Příliš hlučná prázdnota: Mezery, otřesy a smysl literárního díla, 2022 (Too loud an emptiness: Gaps, shaking, and meaning in works of literature). His research also extends to autofiction in Czech and world literatures (studies on Bohumil Hrabal, Ota Filip, and John Maxwell Coetzee) and to the work of literary scholar Zdeněk Kožmín.

The paper examines how telling someone else’s life story, especially if this person is a close relative, sheds light on the author him- or herself or at least invites readers to wonder about the author’s relationship to the person whose life is told. The text analyzed is Jeannette Walls’s “true-life novel” Half Broke Horses, in which the author has her grandmother tell her own life in the first person. Drawing on research about narratives of vicarious experience, “fictional contamination” in life storytelling, and “narrator and disclosure functions” discussed in the context of unreliable narration, the paper unravels some of the ambivalences and conflicting (self-)images created in the text and explores the effects that such narrative choices might have on readers’ interpretations and how they create “resonance.”

December 2024. Jarmila Mildorf is Professor of English language and literature at the University of Paderborn. She has published widely on socionarratology, autobiography, oral history, medicine and literature, the medical humanities, dialogue, second-person narration, audionarratology and radio drama. Recent publications include Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity  (De Gruyter 2023) and the edited collections Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama  (Ohio State University Press 2021), Narrative and Mental Health: Reimagining Theory and Practice  (Oxford University Press 2023) and Word, Sound and Music in Radio Drama (Brill 2024).

The central problem of post-secular literary criticism is conversion, understood as a turn to various forms of spirituality beyond the traditional, canonical forms of religiosity. This article examines conversion threads in narratives that combine autobiographical and phantasmal selves. The analyzed texts reveal an interplay of fictionality and referentiality that leads to fundamental life changes for the selves. The paper comments on selected works by Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee, Paul Auster, Annie Ernaux, and Andrzej Stasiuk. It also indicates analogies between literary conversions and the philosophical concepts of Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk.

 

December 2024: Jacek Bielawa holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Silesia (Katowice). His research interests focus on the intersections of life writing, Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self and Peter Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics. His recent publications include articles on Polish autofiction in “Czas Kultury,” “Autobiografia,” and “Romanoslavica.” He is currently conducting a research project titled “Autofictional Conversions and the Central European Identity in the Works of Waldemar Bawołek, Marek Bieńczyk and Andrzej Stasiuk,” financed by the National Science Centre, Poland.

The article inquires into the place and function of autobiography in today’s “hypermnesic” (Hayles) social, medial, and cultural situation. It discusses Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, Day, Fidget, and The Ideal Lecture, which hardly anyone reads as autobiographical texts. In a self-reflective and quasi-theoretical manner Goldsmith opens the question of a “life record,” pointing at the medium of language and its performance, and at the media in a technological sense. In an attempt to theorize the way digitization changes the possibilities of subjectivizing the lived, experienced presence and human memory, this study relies on the concept of “tertiary retention” (Stiegler) and problematizes the notion of memory and “archive.” It also points at “ideality” or “utopia,” as used in Goldsmith’s The Ideal Lecture, in light of the problem of language as a memory device and the inherently temporal narrative structure we are used to give to our lives.

December 2024:  Miroslav Kotásek is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno. After studying English and Czech languages and literatures, he devoted his Ph.D. thesis to the topic of self-referentiality, especially in narrative texts. Despite dealing with the topic primarily within a literary theoretical framework, this research has led him to broader questions of media borders and capabilities, the relationship between fiction and “reality,” and the domains of affect and performance. In his university courses or in his writing he struggles with these topics ever since, adding culture theory and the study of popular culture to the mix. Nowadays he is mainly concerned with the representation of Holocaust and the role of memory in general, the study of autobiography (life-writing), and the construction of the future in different discourses. He is also active as a translator of non-fiction (e.g. Frank Kermode, Hayden White, Dick Hebdige).

Book review