June 2012: Nicola Minott-Ahl is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Media and Society Program at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She teaches and writes on Adaptation Studies and British and French Literature of the long nineteenth century. Her particular fields of interest include historical fiction and the connection between architecture and novels that develops in early to mid-nineteenth century England and post-Revolutionary France. Her interest in the close connection between the visual arts and the printed word led to her exploration of the problematic relationship between film adaptations and their source texts. She is the author of “Does Jane Austen Write Screenplays? Mansfield Park and the Dilemma of Jane Austen in Film,” forthcoming in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, “Building Consensus: London, the Thames, and Collective Memory in the Novels of William Harrison Ainsworth,” and “Dystopia in Vanity Fair: The Nightmare of Modern London” which appeared in the Literary London Journal in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Her book, The Architectural Novel: How William Ainsworth, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas Constructed the National Identities of 19^th Century England and France is forthcoming from the Sussex Academic Press.

The ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche – in particular the will to power – are patent in the psychology and writings of Álvaro de Campos, who was supposedly born on the philosopher’s birthday, October 15th. Prose pieces such as “Notes for a non-Aristotelian Aesthetics,” with its definition of art as “a struggle to dominate others” and its notion of an aesthetics founded on power rather than on beauty, and the “Ultimatum,” with its explicit invocation of the Superman, make the naval engineer read at times like a Pessoan Zarathustra. I propose, however, that Nietzsche’s influence is more pervasive, informing Fernando Pessoa’s entire literary project, concerned as it was with personal transformation, on the one hand, and domination of other people – namely us his readers – on the other. Self-enlargement and self-proliferation were an ontological as well as aesthetic program, both realized and theorized by the creator of heteronyms.

This paper deals with three kinds of poetical nihilism: the annihilation of the poetic subject in Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic writing; the apophatic definition of the divine demiurge and its repercussion on the poet considered as a substitute of the demiurge in Paul Celan’s poetry; and the gradual disappearance of the poetical word in Edmond Jabès cycle “The Book of Questions.” It is an attempt to connect this three-fold process of annihilation with cultural-contextual (mostly linguistic) factors in the case of Pessoa; with philosophical-pragmatical principles in Paul Celan’s work, and with the poetics of the blank and silence in the case of Edmond Jabès. In spite of this compartamentalization, some overlapping between the nihilist paradigms may occur: Jabès occasionally indulges in a kind of parodic heteronymy, whereas Pessoa’s subjective nihilism reaches an objective dimension through a metaphoric equation between the void of the poetical Self and the non-existence of the Book.

Taking up leading threads from a response by Kent Puckett to the author’s previous essay in this journal on the syntactic figure of syllepsis in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, this article rounds out the exchange by pursuing the continuing literary force of such split grammar — long after Dickens, or the new examples here from Austen and Poe — as it appears in contemporary writers as different as John le Carré and Toni Morrison.  In answering Puckett’s call for an engagement with the mode of doubleness analyzed in William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral, it clarifies previous claims regarding an ethics of ambiguity in sylleptic grammar in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s work at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and poetics.  In the process, this response extends the philosophical reverberations of this marked syntactic trope to include the Wittgensteinian line of thought in J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, not only in their comments on “ordinary language” but in the sylleptic turns of their own writing.

The laws and the literature of a society both express and influence the attitudes and norms of its members. The law, however, has a conservative function, while literature can work to change opinions and, in the longer run, legal systems. This essay argues that legal discourse possesses an inherent narrative potential, giving rise to fictional stories that serve to investigate and expose the effects of particular laws. Like many other novels, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda seems to construct its plot on the basis of the reiterated question “But what if…?” exploring social and moral implications of inheritance law, in particular the principle of primogeniture. The two major strands of Eliot’s double plot, with Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda as the protagonists, together with the subplots involving a series of minor characters, embody four areas concerned with this theme: gambling; the duties that come with heritage; illegitimacy; and the conditions of women associated with a system based on privileging a male heir. By pressing the aesthetic effect of thematic recurrence as well as an element of readerly unease into the service of the ethical, this novel makes a powerful statement on the subject of inheritance. It may have contributed to social and political change, and counteracted the preserving effect of the law.