Comments on William Wordsworth’s much-debated poem “A slumber did my spirit seal” (1800) fall into two interpretive positions: “shock” readings and “non-shock” readings. The poem can be understood in a new way through the concept of intermedial experience and the rhetorical device of ekphrasis. I call for a kind of visual reading that does not let the intermedial experience of poetry be reduced to an interpretive position, as there always remains an excess of experience, something that is not part of the interpretation and cannot be exhausted by offering another interpretation. Becoming involved with the excess and reflecting on it can yield insight into how intermedial experience is constituted. In the readings of “Slumber,” it has consistently been the empty space between the poem’s two stanzas that has appeared to generate such excess. I discuss the images readers have seen in reading the poem, the narrative they have used to describe them in their own words, as well as the effect of the empty space on their responses. Who is the source of the significance of the poem’s visual images, the reader, the poetic I, or Wordsworth himself, and what does the reading come to in terms of the selves involved? I argue that interpretive positions such as the “shock” and “non-shock” readings of “Slumber” can be viewed as ekphrases in which the reader verbally describes the images of the poem with the consequence of narrative appropriation. In doing so, the intermedial experience of poetry is reduced to an interpretive position, and the reading process subjectively closed off into a private sphere. Studying the device of ekphrasis shows how reading, understood as intermedial experience affected by empty space in “Slumber,” both maintains and disrupts this sense of subjective closure.

This essay focuses on the various forms of narrating, mediating, and interpreting selves within and around a book object, the novel S. (2013) by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The novel S. is an experiment in producing a deceivingly realistic replica of a maltreated library book object, but its discursive practices also rely on familiar literary forms, harking back to epistolary commonplaces, as well as to marginalia, both ancient and modern. The book object S., which carries the text of the novel-within-a-novel, the readers’ multilayered markings, and paraphernalia, forms an archive dramatizing the workings of memory, thought, and emotion. That archive also demonstrates how the characters collect, organize, and process data from a variety of media sources. S. also problematizes narration, mediation, and the representation of textual selves through its data overkill verging on unreadability. Modifying Garrett Stewart’s notion, the essay considers the possible significances of narrative “demediation” in experiments with the nearly dysfunctional book form. The very act of demediating signifies conceptually, by its very presence, as conceptual art customarily does. In the case of S., it conceptualizes textual communication and minds in interaction even to a degree of confusion, not-reading, or veritable library silence in reception.

Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently she is running two research projects, Dangers of Narrative (2017–2020) and the research consortium Instrumental Narratives (2018–2022). In 2018, she is Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Fictionality Studies, Aarhus University. She is co-editor of Narrative, Interrupted (De Gruyter, 2012) and Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (Routledge, 2015). She has published on consciousness, voice, and realism across media, the literary tradition of adultery, authorial ethos, and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.

updated on September 26, 2018

This paper discusses the reinvention of the humanist ideas and values in the Soviet post-World War II and post-Stalinist culture (the 1950s and the1960s) with the help of Renaissance plots and images in Soviet semi-official art, the main examples being Pavel Antokolsky’s poem Hieronymus Bosch (1957), the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God (1963), and Grigory Kozintsev’s films based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970), as well as David Samoilov’s poem Bertold Schwarz: A Monologue, set in the late Middle Ages. The paper isolates an aesthetic movement that developed in the Soviet culture of those decades; I propose to call this movement “posttraumatic humanism.” It was based on the new aesthetic idiom of “gloomy Renaissance,” including images of conflagration, ruins, violence. The works of this movement did not use the Aesopian language — or, at least, did not use it as a primary or only tool. Rather, it involves a covert comparison of the Soviet present with the European pre-Enlightenment past and aesthetical valorization and sublimation of 20^th-century catastrophic experience. Images of “gloomy Renaissance” conveyed the erosion the Soviet belief in progress and moral modernization as inevitable consequences of Bolsheviks’ revolution. One of the earliest mature works of posttraumatic humanism in Soviet culture was Vasily Grossman’s essay The Sistine Madonna (1955). Alexei German Sr.’s film Hard to Be a God (2013) can be regarded as the concluding and summarizing work in this movement.

June 2017: Ilya Kukulin received his PhD in literary theory at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. His monograph Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (Moscow, 2015, in Russian) was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize. He has co-edited six volumes focused on topics from the history of schooling in the 20^th Century Eastern Europe to the cultural practices of the internal colonization in Russia. He is also the author of a number of articles on Russian literature, unofficial social thought in 20^th-century Russia, and political discourses of the Russian social media, published in Russia, Germany, Norway, China, Lithuania, Armenia, and the USA. At present he is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow), Senior Researcher at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences (HSE), and Senior Researcher at the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow).

Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky’s texts of the 1920s offer compelling examples of the tensions endemic to aesthetic modernism and inherent in Jewish nationalist discourse during the interwar period. This essay discusses Jabotinsky’s Atlas (1925), his unproduced film script A Galilean Romance (1924–1926), and his anthemic poem “Two Banks Has the Jordan” (1929). While the ideological value of the works examined is self-evident, the artistic features of Jabotinsky’s work have received scant attention. This essay reveals Jabotinsky’s indebtedness to themes and techniques identified with early European literary modernisms and their associated socio-political contexts. The article concludes that scholars can profitably locate Jabotinsky’s creative output of the 1920s within the nexus of early aesthetic modernism and collectivist nationalism.

Thomas Pynchon’s interest in music is audibly reflected in the rich intertextual environments of his works such as Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel which includes numerous allusions to musical pieces, descriptions of performances, and song lyrics. The latter stand out from prose narrative as they introduce new diegetic dimensions to the novel by offering playful commentary on its plot and characters. The present study examines the novel’s acoustic background, pointing to the formal structure of songs and its role in locating singing human voices in opposition to noises emitted by technological devices such as V2 rockets. A classification scheme shows how Pynchon’s formal experimentation juxtaposes written and oral variants of language, thus connecting songs to one of the novel’s thematic centers — problematics of order. This function of songs is examined in an episode of Vaslav Tchitcherine’s mission of promoting literacy among oral tribes of Kazakhstan, that serves as a commentary on the conventional character of writing systems and their ability to transform the poetic quality of language into a systematic structure.

Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) eludes generic categorization by crossing the boundaries between dystopian fiction, fantasy novel, life writing, and fiction marked by magic realism. In postmodern fashion, it plays with spatiotemporal frameworks and narrative order, shifts narrative voices, and perspectives and uses a multiplicity of presentational modes including dialogue and scholarly text commentary with encyclopedic annotations. In its “Epilogue,” the novel features metalepsis when it introduces the author, who talks to his protagonist about his work. The question arises how the novel’s radio play adaptation, first broadcast by the BBC on 1 November 2014, translates this playfulness into its own semiotic system. This paper particularly focuses on the narratological category of “voice” and explores what happens when narrators’ and characters’ voices are actualized in radio drama, how the radio play uses voice-over narration, voice qualities and the doubling of parts to create a recognizable as well as surprising aural storyworld. It also analyzes how sound techniques and music are employed to create narrative structures. Because of their medial instantaneousness and evanescence, radio plays arguably have to rely on disambiguation to make themselves accessible to a listening audience. However, as this paper shows, they also have a range of radiophonic techniques at their disposal to create narrativity on their own terms.

This article analyzes Proust’s listening by placing it in the contexts of French reception of late Beethoven in Proust’s era.  At stake are questions of perception of and through the work of art, of music as the figure of something greater than love or desire in Proust.  Thinking music and silence together, through the framework of “modern” listening, allows us to see how Proust seeks new definitions of time within subjectivity.  By bringing together Beethoven’s era, Proust’s, and our own, we can articulate how both Beethoven and Proust push the limits of tonality and temporality in order to hear what had never before been sounded and to which their work gives voice.

In 2014 New Perspectives Theatre Company staged the first adaptation on the stage of a short story by Saul Bellow, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth.” The changes made to the story in its adaptation for the stage inform our understanding of the comic effect of the story, particularly in relation to the different endings involved. The dynamic of the story depends upon the deployment of two different concepts of comedy — as the expression of an aggressive, materialistic society (Freud, The Joke in Relation to the Unconscious)  or as a means of reforming society in green comedy (Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism). The story focusses upon the legitimate irresponsibility of comedy, and on the relation of comedy to freedom, defending it as a social and even a sacred good. The one-liners uttered by the hero exemplify comedy of a corrective nature, offering a healthy critique of social behavior, particularly in terms of the relation of art to money, and contest Freud’s theory as tainted by its social context and economic basis.

This paper reads Chris Ware’s Building Stories in light of his many references to art and literature, especially to Cornell, Courbet, Duchamp, and James Joyce. The author argues that Building Stories requires intermedial reading, knowledge of both the “high” canon of modernist literature and art and the history and iconology of twentieth and twenty-first century comics. In Building Stories Ware incorporates the work and ideas of canonical art history through an allusive play that is hybrid, layered and subversive. The paper claims that Ware’s citation of Duchamp and Courbet reframes a dissociated and dissociating trope, the dismembered female nude, in a story critical of the objectification of women, the mask of femininity, and the traps of gender. Ware ultimately does so in the service of a sentimental and redemptive narrative frame the paper calls the epiphanic mode. As used by Ware, the epiphanic mode marries one of the most sacred and revered concepts of modernism, the epiphany, to the formal device of the comics capsule as used by Bil Keane, one of the most maligned and popular comics artists of the last fifty years. The turn towards a devalued device — the Bil Keane capsule, or epiphanic circle, and a devalued experience — the domestic, rejects the internal hierarchies not only of the art world but also of the comics world, which is so often associated with masculine and public models of heroism.

This article reads Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as a rewriting of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s assumption, which interprets In Search as a complex exercise in decoding signs, the article claims that Fun Home stages the attempt of its protagonists, Alison and her father Bruce, to understand the truth about each other. In particular, it addresses the issues of sexual identity, spatiality, and death as some of the crucial motifs in In Search that Bechdel retrieves in Fun Home. The protagonists’ “experiment in decoding” turns out to be a failure, due to the impossibility of understanding and deciphering the signs of each other’s intimate truths.

Cosmopolitanism need not always be a duty, an identity, or a condition; it can just as easily be a moment or a memory, an experience that can vanish in a puff of smoke. This article explores the surprisingly similar ways that Zeno’s Conscience (1923) by Italo Svevo and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) by Art Spiegelman imaginatively reframe cosmopolitanism through the figure of cigarette smoking. In particular, it expands attention to No Towers past the discourse of trauma and connects the new graphic canon to a canonical work of literary modernism. The chain-smoking figures at the center of these two texts give us an image of the cosmopolitan which is reducible neither to the Enlightenment ideal of the supranational liberal citizen, nor to its contemporary idiom, the fluid and flexible post-identitarian subject. Instead, both writers use cigarette smoking to delineate an apt cosmopolitan resident for two cities on the verge of being transformed by warlike nationalisms. Where Svevo uses nicotine addiction to connect his twitchy protagonist to prewar Trieste, Spiegelman insistently, but ironically accumulates forms of memory and identity around smoking, from his image as human and as “Maus,” to the smoke of the ovens at Auschwitz, to the burning of the Towers themselves. But this work of belonging is interrupted in No Towers by the New York City smoking ban, which displaces an apoplectic Spiegelman from his briefly “rooted” cosmopolitanism. Ultimately, this article explores an unlikely seam of detail, and a consistent image of the cosmopolitan, which persists across the borders between the twentieth century and the twenty-first, between the modern and the postmodern, and between the First World War and the War on Terror.

This paper argues that the term “comics” can and should be used to refer to prints from early modern England. We have ample reason to shift the starting date for comics to at least the seventeenth century, if not earlier, within the English-speaking world. The invention of print stimulated the creation, adoption, and codification of elements of the comics form. Print also changed the quantity and quality of social encounters with the comics form. Readings from “A true discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter” and The Triumphs of God’s Revenge Against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Murther demonstrate that scholars of the comics canon must turn their attention to the early modern English print.

The narrative of Joseph Wright’s figures is eloquent and complex. In many ways, the sitters defined themselves and their cultural aspirations for posterity through clothing, posture and props. However, Wright subverts the tenets of eighteenth-century portraiture as he attempts to identify the physical markers that give the viewer a closer understanding of character. The painting of Thomas Day, for example, is far removed from the conventional portraiture of the wealthy gentleman. Its signifiers suggest the complexities of Day’s character. Most of what we know of the eccentric Day has come to us through Anna Seward’s unorthodox biography of Erasmus Darwin and his circle. This text is supplemented by letters between Seward and Walter Scott, which disclose the publishing censorship levelled at her memoir of Day when she attempted to find a psychological cause for his experiments with education and his rejection of wealth and luxury. Her private letters give an alternative view of the public figure that was part of her literary coterie, her “dear Quartetto.” This essay discusses the representation of character in Wright’s portrait of Thomas Day and decodes its cultural markers through a synthesis of painting and word-painting.