The essay discusses the way in which the eighteenth-century writer Anna Seward created an interface between literature and science by challenging the theories of a renowned astronomer through her poetry. No matter what their level of interest, women in the eighteenth century had little recourse to an education in science. Seward’s education was literary, and she paid little attention to the sciences until she attended a lecture in Lichfield given by the astronomer, Robert Evans Lloyd. He illustrated his talk with an orrery. Joseph Wright’s painting, The Philosopher giving that lecture on the Orrery, in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun (1766), demonstrates the prevalent fascination with astronomy. After the lecture, Seward wrote a poem on the same subject, “The Terrestrial Year, passing through the signs of the Zodiac,” but not before she had interrogated Lloyd on his presentation of the juxtaposition of Earth and the constellations, publicly questioning his theories. Although her knowledge of astronomy was founded on references to the zodiac in the poems of Milton and Thomson, she engaged with further scientific research and was able to prove that Lloyd’s system was flawed. Her findings inspired her to write her poem which, despite its origins, has more reference to classical literature than to science. An interesting part of the poem, however, is the introductory ‘Proem’ which gives the scientific rationale for the work, tracing Seward’s challenge and her educational progress. Her proem leads us into the poem and leaves us in no doubt that Seward’s exploration of the complexities of the solar system finds new poetic ground through her quest for scientific knowledge.

Is there a compelling normative case for value pluralism? Would we be better off in a world of irreducibly diverse and sometimes tragically conflicting values rather than one in which our values fit harmoniously together? This article identifies, examines and evaluates a normative argument for value pluralism suggested in Isaiah Berlin’s sessays on the history of ideas and particularly on Russian writers – that is, that deep conflicts of identity bound up with conflicting values sometimes contribute critically to the creation of great works of art, philosophy, and politics. Berlin attributes such deep identity conflicts to a range of important European historical figures, from Marx and Disraeli to Tolstoy and Turgenev to Hamann and Mill, and argues that their works of creative genius were motivated in part by the need to transcend their internal conflicts. On his interpretation, value conflicts appear to have been a necessary condition for their great works. In so far as we value these great creative works, it would then appear that we have a reason for embracing the underlying plurality of values that made them possible. But Berlin never linked these insights to his case for value pluralism or political liberalism. This article ends by evaluating those potential linkages.  It concludes that there is a good reason that Berlin did not explicitly build a normative argument for value pluralism on these great works: on careful examination the argument reveals a paradoxical quality that at least partially undermines his critique of monism. By consequence, the argument from great works does not lend support to Berlin’s famous defense of pluralist liberalism, but rather to a form of creative liberalism that does not need to choose between pluralist sensibilities and monist aspirations.

In these pages I present my interpretation of Iser’s model of emergence. I emphasize that what I am presenting is my understanding and exemplification of the relations among the chief terms in Iser’s model, namely, recursion, negativity, and emergence. At the same time, what I offer is, I believe, an extrapolation from what we know of Iser’s terms. I propose that the recursive relations and emergences traced by Iser in effect constitute an interactive experience of that which he called the “imaginary.” This recursive experience is a way of collectively taking part in the emergence of imagined being. This is to suggest that in his theoretical work Iser was moving from a theory of the individual act of reading to a theory of cultural and artistic transformation that is necessarily a shared activity. In its fully specified form I believe that this theory must have profound ontological implications, in other words, for how we participate in the being that, via negativity and the imaginary, we are presently helping to bring into being. Iser, I believe, had begun to explain how the greatest works of art and culture enact an interactive, transformative, and emergent way of being in recursion. The exemplifications of emergence that I analyze are from the works of Sophocles, Milton, and Kant.

Eyewitness narratives promise immediacy, the authority of you-are-there witness to the events of the past. Such narratives, however, whether those by comparatively removed witness-observers or those by more directly involved witness-participants, pose difficult problems of distance. How do the limits and possibilities of eyewitness experience contribute to working through the identity concerns that autobiographies typically engage? Revisiting history in their relational autobiographies, Passage to Ararat and Maus, Michael Arlen and Art Spiegelman look to eyewitness narrative to bridge the gap that separates them from their fathers. In her Holocaust memoir, Still Alive, by contrast, Ruth Kluger takes a darker view, exposing the manifold registers of distance -- linguistic, psychological, epistemological -- that complicate her own and any quest to stand at the eyewitness ground zero of biographical and historical knowledge.

The end of the Middle Ages is characterized by significant changes in Mediterranean geopolitics: in Eastern Mediterranean, the Christian powers were driven out by the progression of the Mameluks and the Ottoman Turks. In the Western Mediterranean, however, the Christian powers of the Iberian Peninsula completed the Reconquista. The fall of Acre in 1291, the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the capture of Granada in 1492 inspired a whole range of narratives from eyewitness reports to indirect and sometimes exagerated accounts. I would like to investigate the process of amplification that provoked the crystallization of some stereotypes related to the lost of the aforementioned cities: the massive massacre of the Christians in Acre reported in the anonymous Chronicle of the Templar of Tyre, the legend of the miraculous transformation of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Paleologos into marble transmitted by Greek folklore, the story of Boabdil gazing for the last time at the Alhambra from a rocky eminence south of Granada. These stories show an interesting interplay between eyewitnesses, amplification nurtured by a high dose of nostalgia, and reminiscences of older narratives related to the topos of the capture of such antique cities as Troy or Carthago. My approach will analyze the process by virtue of which the intertextual processes obliterated the taste of authenticity contained in the genuine eyewitness report.

This paper discusses the challenges posed by the Holocaust and its representations to the practices of the Humanities. The nature of these challenges is brought through an examination of the German Historikerstreit and the French controversies surrounding Heidegger’s relation to the Nazis. The nature of historical representation and its relation to affect are examined in works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Humanities cannot appropriate the Holocaust but they cannot ignore it either. They face the daunting task of learning how to remember it.

Just as Robert Browning repeatedly speaks through other voices in his poems, so does his admirer and critic A. S. Byatt in her fiction, ventriloquizing her characters’ poems, stories, letters, and even their academic work.  Such writing as Browning’s and Byatt’s can be understood as mediumistic, a channeling of the voices of the dead or the imaginary.  In turn both writers create mediums, Browning in “Mr. Sludge, the ‘Medium’” and Byatt in “The Conjugial Angel,” one of the two novellas set in Victorian England that form Angels and Insects.  Like Browning’s Sludge, Byatt’s mediums, Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay, function as figures of the creative writer.  Byatt has described Lilias as a “novelist manqué” and Sophy as poet-like.  Sludge is critically acknowledged to be a figure of corruption in art, and through him Browning explores the narrative artist’s inevitable negotiations between truth, fiction, and lies.  Sludge’s spiritualist activities are clearly aimed at the greater glory of Sludge.  Byatt’s mediums, however, are genuinely involved with the mourners and the mourned in the liminal world in which they move.  Lilias brings comfort to a bereaved mother, while Sophy transforms the life of Emily Tennyson Jesse, for this novella is based on the most famous case of protracted Victorian mourning, that for Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.  Browning condemns his character by implication for Sludge’s wish that other people should “participate in Sludgehood.”  Byatt represents Lilias and Sophy as intensely aware of others beside themselves.  Thus both through their acts of ventriloquism and through their narratives and characters, Browning and Byatt demonstrate a shared anti-solipsistic aesthetic in texts involving the writer as medium.  They turn in imagination to what is outside themselves and represent either negatively (through Sludge) or positively (through Sophy and Lilias) the value of such outward movement.

from Notes on Contributors June Sturrock Simon Fraser University   January 2009: June Sturrock is an Emeritus Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where she continues to teach occasionally in the Graduate Liberal Studies Programme.  Her publications include about sixty articles and book chapters, Heaven and Home:  Charlotte Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate about Women, and an edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.  Forthcoming are a book on nineteenth century domestic fiction and several more articles.

As readers, we sometimes have the impression that texts “know” more than their authors ever did. The article refers to this type of (supposed) textual knowledge as latency. It argues that, if there is no direct, methodological, deductive or inductive way towards that which appears to be latent, the Stimmung (mood, atmosphere) produced by the text, as a maximally light and yet invariably physical environment, can become a symptom of what remains latent -- without transforming latency into a situation of open excess. Thus, for instance, in Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice” the detailed descriptions of the ever changing weather of Venice produce in the reader what is best described as a mood — a quasi-physical certainty of being in the presence of something latent, that will eventually reveal itself as a longing for death permeating the homoerotic desire that has overcome the protagonist.

In those cases where long processes of crystallization of latency do not lead to situations of evidence, the intervention of our judgment is required -- the intervention of a judgment that can make itself dependent on better or worse reasons but will never be regarded as exclusively true, or exclusively adequate.

The essay explores Primo Levi's description of the Buna tower in If This is a Man as his indirect Midrashic commentary on the Tower of Babel. It shows how the Midrash helps to bridge between the two texts, with Primo Levi's memoir both drawing on and reinterpreting the Biblical story.

On the bases of discussions of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, as well as of Charlotte Delbo’s, Jean Améry’s, and Primo Levi’s memoirs, Fred Wander’s The Seventh Well, John Felstiner’s translation of Celan’s Todesfuge, and Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader, this paper presents a model for reading the Holocaust structured around the ideas of “illiteracy” and “aphasia,” the opportunity to transform linguistic disability into a means of access to what seems “beyond the word.” Rather than precluding insight, verbal insufficiency serves as a form of “negative capability,” the potential to dwell in a space with no complete answers, no security, respecting the terms upon which victims of the event had to read their own experience. Using specifically language-related terms emphasizes the difference between knowing about an event through representation and knowledge from direct personal exposure, not to detract from the limits of understanding outlined by trauma theory but to decouple the experience of trauma itself from reading about it. Our belatedness, reading “after Auschwitz,” carries the ethical obligation to recognize the distinction between then and now, between illiteracy as inability to derive meaning from an event without context and a willful blindness that chooses to deny, between aphasia from immediate injury and aphasia from posthumous grief. The Nazi genocide of the Jews leaves a legacy of semantic abuse, yet the voice of the witness also persists, allowing us to turn linguistic breakdown into insight. To read with insightful illiteracy, to recognize our aphasic limitations, is not merely a strategy for coming to terms with the Holocaust but an ethical necessity.

There is a basic tension between eyewitness narratives and archival records (which have attracted the attention for many artists and intellectuals in the last decade or two). Archival material bears the imprint of the bureaucratic, of that which has been institutionally preserved. It gives us traces of the dead, evidence of the past that has been recorded but not (yet) processed; it exists as a mnemonic device, as that which awaits the coming of the researcher to be brought back to life. The eyewitness narrative, on the other hand, is intensely personal, even if also collective. The opposition between these two modes of representation and of memory itself has a long history. In “Plato’s Pharmacy” Jacques Derrida stages and deconstructs the opposition between memory and re- and com-memoration, between the living truth and the archive.  More recently, Giorgio Agamben, writing about the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, analyzes the differences between the “unforgettable” and that which can be recalled to memory and archived.

This paper  examines the ways in which the dynamic relations between the living and the dead, the private and the public, the fragment and the whole, the personal and the institutional, and the autobiographical and the historical, inform and complicate -- in different ways -- both the eyewitness narrative and the archive. The discussion will focus on the Memorial at Hohenschönhausen to the East German victims of the Stasi (at the site of the former interrogation center and prison, where the tours are all conducted by former inmates), and the Stasi Museum at the site of the former Stasi headquarters, with its miles of archival files.