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Publications

2015
Budick, Emily Miller . 2015. Reading the American Novel: 1920-2010 by James Phelan. Partial Answers 13(1): 171-173. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
James, E. Wynn . 2015. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution by Barbara Hochman and Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein. Partial Answers 13(1): 173-178. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Fishelov, David . 2015. The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion, by Howard Sklar. Partial Answers 13(1): 179-183. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Mitroiu, Simona . 2015. The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond, ed. Dolores Herrero and Sonia Baelo-Allué. Partial Answers 13(1): 181-186. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. 2015. The Ethics of Literary Communication: Genuineness, Directness, Indirectness, ed. Roger Sell, Adam Borch, and Inna Lindgren; Narrative Ethics, ed. Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn. Partial Answers 13(1): 186-191. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Van Parys, Thomas . 2015. The Travelling Concepts of Narrative, ed. Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara, and Lars-Christer Hydén. Partial Answers 13(2): 364-367. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Stromberg, David . 2015. Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. Partial Answers 13(2): 368-371. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Fagan, Paul . 2015. Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life, by Benjamin Kahan. Partial Answers 13(2): 359-364. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Jahlmar, Joakim . 2015. 'Give the devil his due': Freedom, Damnation, and Milton's Paradise Lost in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Season of Mists. Partial Answers 13(2): 267-286. . Publisher's Version

In their collection Milton in Popular Culture (2006), Laura Lungers Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza have established the importance of Miltonic intertextuality in popular culture, while recognizing the importance of William Blake to the field. Blake’s definition of Milton as “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) lies at the centre of a main concern of Milton criticism since the poem’s original publication. The debate between Satanists and anti-Satanists goes back even further than Blake and the Romantics, and this central ambivalence is representative of the “discontinuities” and “irresolvable complexities” which Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (2012) argue are the focus of interest of the New Milton Criticism. Following this strand of critical thought, this article proposes to show how the introduction of Miltonic intertext into Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, in issues 21–28, serves to structure the series’ theme of change and death — which involve questions of freedom and teleology, free will and damnation — through a critical dialogue with, and creative rewriting of Miltonic theodicy in the epic poem. Gaiman draws upon the ambivalent theological dimensions of Paradise Lost not to present his own concept of good and evil but rather to discuss the freedom to change and the damnation inherent in the inability to change as part of the human condition.

 

June 2015: Joakim Jahlmar is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Gothenburg and a teacher in English at University West, Sweden. He is currently working on the dissertation "Shedding the Mortal Coil in Salman Rushdie’s Novels Before the Fatwa: The Ars Moriendi Revisited."

 

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Dwor, Richa . 2015. 'Poor old palace-prison!': Jewish Urban Memory in Amy Levy's 'The Ghetto at Florence' (1886). Partial Answers 13(1): 155-169. . Publisher's Version

In an 1886 piece of travel journalism written for the London-based periodical The Jewish Chronicle, the Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy records some brief, witty observations on the history and current conditions of the Jewish ghetto at Florence. By writing from the narrative perspective of a self-identifying English Jew, Levy addresses in “The Ghetto at Florence” a history of Jewish exclusion and confinement represented by the ghetto, while also using this site to engage her complex attitudes towards Jewishness in the mid-1880s, in London. Rather than an accurate history of place, however, what is foregrounded in her article is self-reflexivity about ways of seeing and the effects of memory. This paper examines her uses of imaginative representation, race science, and the photographic gaze to attempt a tactile and affective encounter with the ghetto. In occupying a vexed space between extreme openness to imagined historical resonances alongside ironic detachment from the inadequacies of the present moment, she embodies the characteristically isolated subjectivity of the flâneur. She does so while contemplating the role of Jewishness in using the past to make sense of modern identity.

 

January 2015: Richa Dwor is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leicester. Her research centers on Anglo-Jewish literature and culture of the nineteenth century and has appeared in interdisciplinary publications including The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Literature and Theology, and English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. Her monograph, Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing, is forthcoming from Continuum/ Bloomsbury Academic in 2015.

 

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Canales, Gustavo Sánchez . 2015. 'The benevolent self was a disgrace beyond measure for every argentine Jew': Between the Need to Remember and the Desire to Forget in Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases. Partial Answers 13(1): 57-71. . Publisher's Version

Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) is a novel structured around two interconnected plots. One of them is the tragedy of the desaparecidos — the disappeared — that began in 1976, the year when general Jorge Rafael Videla came to power after deposing María Estela Martínez de Perón; until early 1981 Videla’s junta was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of students and political opponents to his dictatorship. The other plot is the contradictory personal life of Kaddish Poznan, a Jew who, during the day, tries to keep alive the memory of his mother Favorita’s Argentine-Jewish past but at night works to destroy it by chiseling names off the gravestones of former members of the Society of the Benevolent Self, such as Favorita. Unlike Poznan, his wife Lillian, who has been laying a glass and a plate on the dinner table for her son Pato since his disappearance, refuses to acknowledge his death, In order to address the implications of this traumatic event in her life, I will resort to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), and Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001). This article draws upon the significance of collective memory throughout Jewish history as discussed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), explores the struggle between memory and forgetting, and ponders the dangers of forgetting — and erasing — the past and of transforming one’s identity.

 

Gustavo Sánchez Canales teaches English at the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he is also Vicedean for Research and Innovation. He served as Viceadean for International Relations between 2011 and 2013. From 1999 to 2010 he taught English and American literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research focuses on contemporary Jewish-American Literature. He has published book chapters, articles, and essays on Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and  Michael Chabon, among others.

He has recently coedited with Victoria Aarons (Trinity, San Antonio, TX) a thematic volume on Philip Roth entitled History, Memory, and the Making of Character in Roth’s Fiction. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.2 (2014) http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss2/  

(updated in January 2016)

 

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Kaufman, Heidi . 2015. Borders of Intimacy in Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto. Partial Answers 13(1): 91-110. . Publisher's Version

The article focuses on Zangwill’s unusual depictions of ghetto life in late-Victorian London. Zangwill portrays the ghetto as a space with a proclivity for holding its inhabitants not through economic, legal, or cultural pressures — all features of earlier Victorian writing about the ghetto — but through its affective power. It begins by situating Zangwill’s depictions of ghetto life amidst a longer trajectory of Victorian ghetto discourse. The essay moves on to explore the significance of Zangwill’s innovation in depicting ghetto life as a place that emerges from borders born of the interplay of intimate encounters, emotional knowledge, and embodied experience.

 

January 2015: Heidi Kaufman is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon. She is the author of English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Reflections on a Nested Nation (Penn State, 2009). She has also co-edited (with Christ Fauske) An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth in Context (University of Delaware, 2004) and (with Maria K. Bachman and Marlene Tromp) Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia (Ohio State University Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth Century Studies, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Jewish Studies Journal, and in essay collections.

 

Freedman, Ariela . 2015. Chris Ware's Epiphanic Comics. Partial Answers 13(2): 337-358. . Publisher's Version

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.

 

Ariela Freedman is an Associate Professor at the Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montreal. In 2009 she spent a semester as a Visiting Professor and Halbert Fellow in the English Department of Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is the author of Death, Men and Modernism (Routledge 2003) and has published articles on modernism, the First World War, and comics in Modernism/modernity, JJQ, Literature Compass, Joyce Studies Annual, and other journals and edited collections. She currently holds a SSHRC Grant for a project titled “Charlotte Salomon, Comics and the Representation of Pain,” and her work on Salomon has appeared in Criticism and the anthology Graphic Details: Jewish Women's Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (McFarland 2014).

updated on March 16, 2015

 

 

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Freedman, Ariela . 2015. COMICS AND THE CANON: INTRODUCTION TO THE FORUM. Partial Answers 13(2): 251-254. . Publisher's Version

Survey of the directions taken by the papers of the forum “Comics and the Canon”: a reading of modern prints as an overlooked part of comics genealogy, followed by intertextual and intermedial readings of contemporary graphic novels in relation to canonical art and literature.

Stacy, Ivan . 2015. Complicity in Dystopia: Failures of Witnessing in China Miéville's The City and the City and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Partial Answers 13(2): 225-250. . Publisher's Version

This article examines failures of witnessing in China Mieville’s The City and the City and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. It begins by outlining models of witnessing posited by psychoanalyst Dori Laub noting that his conception of witnessing relies upon an "imperative to tell" and on the assumption of good faith between teller and listener. The article argues that, in Mieville’s and Ishiguro’s fictions, this imperative is absent, and the resulting failures of witnessing on the part of the protagonists create their complicity in the dystopian systems represented.  The failures to bear witness to the atrocities committed by the regimes in these novels stem from failures to see and acknowledge the visible evidence of atrocity, due to its normalisation. The protagonists also fail to construct the narratives that would attest to these atrocities, preferring to perpetuate comforting rumours and forms of unreliable knowledge, often as a result of a desire for empathy with the group of which they are a part. The article concludes that this empathy becomes a troubling virtue: the act of reading itself, in that it involves a degree of identification with the narrator, may cause us to repeat the same failures of the witnessing as the protagonists.

 

June 2015: Ivan Stacy is Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Thimphu College in Bhutan, where he teaches twentieth-century, American and folk literature. He was awarded his Ph.D. from Newcastle University (UK) in 2013 for a thesis examining complicity in W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro. He has presented and published on both Ishiguro and Sebald, and has also edited a volume on the American TV series The Wire.

 

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Sharick, Amanda Kaye . 2015. Confronting the 'Jewish type': Israel Zangwill, composite and mirror photography. Partial Answers 13(1): 111-135. . Publisher's Version

The article considers Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto through the lens of two late-nineteenth century photographic techniques: hinged-mirror and composite photography. These two techniques, each of which played a role in Zangwill’s personal life, can help to reframe Zangwill’s personal and literary struggles with representations of Jewish identity that were confined to notions of “types,” or stereotypes, of race and ethnicity. The article traces Zangwill’s overall discomfort with what it terms the “composite photographic logic of liberalism,” a logic that predicated tolerance on the radical assimilation of Jewish difference and reinforced institutional practices of Anglicization, especially in London’s East End Ghetto.

 

January 2015: Amanda Sharick is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Riverside. She specializes in late-nineteenth British and related literatures, Victorian media and visual culture, Jewish Studies, gender studies, and immigrant literature. Her dissertation traces the transatlantic networks of Anglo and American Jewish women writers from 1880–1918.

 

 

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Iuliano, Fiorenzo . 2015. Du côté de Fun Home: Alison Bechdel Rewrites Marcel Proust. Partial Answers 13(2): 287-309. . Publisher's Version

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.

 

June 2015: Fiorenzo Iuliano works as a lecturer in American literature at the University of Cagliari (Italy). His research interests include contemporary American fiction and graphic novels, cultural studies and theories of the body and corporeality. In 2012 he authored a book on the representation of the body in American fiction of the 1990s and a monograph on the work of Gayatri Ch. Spivak. He is currently writing a book on the cultural scene of Seattle in the 1990s.

 

Brooker, Jewel Spears . 2015. Eliot and Bergson: 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' and the Intractability of Dualism. Partial Answers 13(1): 1-17. . Publisher's Version

In 1910–1911, T. S. Eliot studied Henri Bergson’s books and attended his lectures in Paris. Initially fascinated by Bergson’s ideas, Eliot experienced what he called a “conversion” to Bergsonism, but as shown by poetry and prose written during and after the lectures, he quickly became disillusioned. This essay discusses the Bergsonian claims that intrigued Eliot in the winter of 1910–1911, the skepticism revealed in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and other poems dated March 1911, and the critique presented in a previously unpublished lecture for the Harvard Philosophical Club in December 1913. Eliot concludes that dualism is intractable, for the material and moral realms cannot be merged. This conclusion, formative in his intellectual development, is illuminating in regard to his poetry and criticism. It is also suggestive in regard to the more general modernist motif regarding the difficulty of making connections.

 

Jewel Spears Brooker, Professor Emerita at Eckerd College, has held visiting appointments at Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and (in the fall of 2014) Merton College, Oxford. She is co-editor of two volumes of Eliot’s Complete Prose (2014, 2016), and has published nine books, including Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990, coauthor, J. Bentley), Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994), and T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004). She has received numerous awards and served as president of the South Atlantic MLA and as a member of the National Humanities Council.

updated: July 19, 2014

 

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Duban, James . 2015. From Negative Identity to Existential Nothingness: Philip Roth and the Younger Jewish Intellectuals. Partial Answers 13(1): 43-55. . Publisher's Version

What pertinence might the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre hold for Philip Roth’s brief but provocative contribution to Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary collection, “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals: A Symposium” (1961), and for Roth’s attitude to Judaism and ethnic bias generally? The article suggests that ideas advanced in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) helped Roth shape his symposium essay and, more importantly, his early skepticism about religious affiliation grounded in hatred and chauvinism rather than in living, generative faith. The association of Sartrean ideas — the distinction, in Being and Nothingness (1943), between Being in-itself and Being for-itself and Sartre’s views on anti-Semitism — figures in Roth’s comments on twentieth-century Jewish outlook and in his formulation of “Grossbartism.” This existential mix may owe something, as well, to the Heideggerian state of being “thrown” — insofar as Sartre appropriates the concept to discuss the prospect of being thrown into a trans-cultural state of tolerance, a state that Roth seems to desire for Jew and gentile alike.

 

James Duban is Professor of English and an Associate Dean in the Honors College at the University of North Texas. The author of books about Herman Melville and the Henry James family, he has published, as well, in Philological Quarterly, Philip Roth Studies, Philosophy and Literature, Harvard Theological Review, Literature and Theology, and The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, among others. His current research centers on Philip Roth, Arthur Koestler, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

 

Updated in March 2017

 

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Baumgarten, Murray . 2015. Israel Zangwill and the Afterlife of the Venice Ghetto. Partial Answers 13(1): 79-90. . Publisher's Version

Children of the Ghetto: Zangwill’s title announced his intention to explore how the Ghetto experience had shaped new English residents who came from Eastern Europe and Russia. Instead of the “Pale of Settlement,” the term for the residence of the Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia, he turned to Italian Jewish history and the Venetian/Italian language to designate what the Jews had become in their long European exile. In Zangwill’s view, the Ghetto was the defining space of modern Jewish life and — not exactly a promised land — generated the psychological drive in the Jews to imagine alternative modern Jewish spaces. The gates of the Ghetto are not easily forgotten: internalized, the Jewish space of the Venice and Rome Ghettos becomes in modern times a psychological force, and even we might say, a central trope in the discourse of modern Jewish experience. The institutionalized practices of the English, “especially regarding matters of education, language, and the poor, prompt the immigrant Ashkenazim” to be, in Zangwill’s phrasing, “their own Ghetto gates.” Like their Italian Ghetto forebears, these immigrant Ashkenazim in England must forge their identities out of an either/or situation.Zangwill, novelist, social critic, and ethnographer devised in Children of the Ghetto a cultural turnabout of the European stigmatized Jewish stereotype.

 

Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World:  Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.

 

Updated: March 20, 2016

 

Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World:  Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.

 

Updated: March 20, 2016

 

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