While many pre-modern narratives conventionally feature active protagonists, the transition into modernity has seen an increase in inactivity as a literary motif. The prominent European examples of this trend, such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, or the plays of Samuel Beckett, however, exclude speaking from the list of negated activities, instead depicting voluble characters. This paper proposes that silent inactivity may be an Eastern (and Eastern European) notion, and offers two exemplary readings of this motif in Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov and Ha Jin’s Waiting. Drawing from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Roland Barthes, it argues that silence, despite denoting an absence of signs, is meaningful and hermeneutically versatile. A distinction is made between communicative silence and natural silence, the first of which signifies the absence of speech in an interactive situation whereas the latter signifies verbal silence notwithstanding context and — importantly — includes natural soundscapes (as caused by weather, animals or touching objects). Through a number of close readings, natural silence is shown to function as the semantic core of the inactivity motif in that it is a central part of the strategy to attain peace, repose, and contentment. In addition, in both novels the desire for a peaceful way of life dominates the soundscape of romantic relationships. Although the protagonists fall in love with passionate women, they ultimately reject them due to the noise and upheaval they cause. The paper concludes that in connection to the motif of inactivity the notion of silent companionship outweighs that of love (associated with speech). This indicates the existence of culture-specific sound preferences which represent a field of possible future study within audionarratology.

The essay focuses on Jonas B. Phillips (1805–1869), a largely forgotten author, poet, and playwright who was one of the first Jews to enjoy literary success in early 19^th-century America. Phillips won his fame mainly by writing popular stage melodramas that did not openly explore Jewish themes, causing him — like other Jewish writers of his time and literary interests — to be excluded from histories of Jewish American writing, since his work has been seen by scholars as neither “Jewish” nor “literary” enough. The essay argues that Phillips’ play The Evil Eye (1831), an adaptation of a short story by Mary Shelley, gives covert expression to the challenges of early Jewish American citizenship by reworking the image of the Wandering Jew, a mythic figure that had recently been revitalized in Romantic and Gothic literature. Though he is never identified openly with the Wandering Jew, the hero of Shelley’s story and of Phillips’ play bears striking similarities to the famous wanderer, and in Phillips’ adaptation he comes to represent the menacing foreigner who is miraculously recognized as kin and welcomed back into the family. Offering an allegory for the Jews’ homecoming in the newly established United States, the play also reflects lingering fear of anti-Semitism in its efforts to tone down the wanderer’s Gothic “otherness.” A later, uncompleted attempt by Phillips to make a villainous Jew into the hero of a new melodrama points to his lingering interest in Gothic iterations of the Jew, while also suggesting the danger that such demonized figures presented to Jewish authors in the young Republic. 

Yael Shapira is a lecturer in the English Department of Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests include eighteenth-century English fiction and cultural history, the Gothic and the history of popular publishing. She is currently completing a book on the representation of the dead body in the eighteenth-century English novel and beginning a new research project focused on forgotten female Gothic novelists of the 1790s.

Updated on September 15, 2016. 

The article argues that Philip Roth’s Kepesh saga — The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1997), and The Dying Animal (2001) — dramatically morphs, with regard to sexuality and imaginative flight, Sartre’s account, in Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant, 1943), of the origins and possibilities of consciousness and their relation to desire. Indeed, desire, the dominant theme of Roth’s trilogy, corresponds to Sartrian outlooks on transcendent possibility or existential freedom. In Being and Nothingness, moreover, Roth appears to have located, identified with, and artistically transformed outlooks on consciousness and artistic creativity. Roth’s inspiration for imagining a character who exists as a breast, sans body, may also have emerged from Sartre’s treatise, the outlooks of which allow for better appreciation of the concerns and fictive possibilities suggested by The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal.

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.

Photo by Acree B. Carlisle

Updated in March 2017

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.

Audionarratology is enmeshed in the current trend toward media-consciousness in narratological debates. This article connect audionarratological concerns with the (trans- or inter)medial extensions of narratology offered by scholars such as Marie-Laure Ryan and Werner Wolf. It focuses on Richard Powers’s earliest musical novel, The Gold Bug Variations (1991), and his to-date latest novel Orfeo (2014), zooming in on their musical macrostructures, the musical forms and techniques that inform the narrative arrangement of the texts. Having positioned the narrative analysis of macrostructural musical elements within the research scope of a media-conscious audionarratology and having explored The Gold Bug Variations and Orfeo for such musical macrostructures, I reflect on the functions of imitating music in this way.

This introduction reflects on the links between sound, voices, music, and literature. It also delineates the main tenets of audionarratology, a branch of postclassical narratology which focuses on the interfaces between sound and narrative. The forum explores presentations of sounds, silence, and music in fiction and explores voices and soundscapes in audio drama.

In line with the strong emphasis on visuality in the wake of the “visual turn” in literary and cultural studies, graphic novel adaptations of literary texts have recently been the objects of scholarly study and narratological theory building. Much less attention, if any, has been accorded to radio play adaptations of novels like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. An analysis of radio play adaptations acquires a special significance in the case of this highly enigmatic work, which makes a seriously playful use of postmodern narrative strategies. It is perhaps above all this feature which made the adaptation of the novel’s first instalment, City of Glass, into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazucchelli so successful. While the graphic novel visualizes characteristic features of its mother text, this paper explores the different modes of narrative sound in three German radio play adaptations of Auster’s novel. Alfred Behrens’ Stadt aus Glas, Katharina Bihler’s Schlagschatten, and Norbert Schaeffer’s Hinter verschlossenen Türen employ narrative devices like voices in both German and English, the evocation of city soundscapes, the narrative uses of music as well as issues of the simultaneity and/or difference of story and discourse time. The narrative auralization of Auster’s novels in the radio plays under discussion can be shown to foreground non-visual aspects of the pre-texts and to add further dimensions for interpretation that underline the usefulness of audionarratological analysis for adaptation studies. 

A recent development in literature’s engagement with music involves the role played by emerging technologies and the way they not only transmit musical content to the listener, but very strongly condition the form the music takes and the way we listen. While music is still often considered ephemeral and transcendent, there is a new recognition of it as an object and a commodity, whether an LP record or a file to be downloaded from itunes. Technologies coexist; records are now collected and venerated in a nostalgic mode while music moves into the digital sphere of downloads and participatory cultures of online sharing. Contemporary literature can tell us not only about the idealization of music as a non-referential and thus “higher” art, but about the way music is mediated by technologies. The present paper focuses on two recent musical novels that foreground the mass media of musical expression, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995) and Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You (2009). Both celebrate songs — incorporated as records in the former and digital files on an ipod in the latter — as symbols of taste, carriers of memory, means of establishing interpersonal connections, and media that condition our thinking. Songs also exist in relation to others, demonstrated by the protagonist’s fixation on lists modeled on radio’s top-forty rankings in High Fidelity and on juxtaposition of songs on the ipod’s shuffle mode in The Song Is You. The comparison of these novels in terms of their focus on different musical technologies leads to an exploration of modes of listening as characters experience their lives through the lens of popular music.

June 2017: Bernard Harrison is currently Emeritus E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy in the University of Utah and an Emeritus Professor in the University of Sussex. He is one of a number of analytic philosophers, more numerous now than formerly, whose interests include literature and its relationships with philosophy and the history of ideas. His literary work includes Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Chatto, 1975), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Yale University Press, 1991), What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana University Press, 2015), and numerous papers. His more strictly philosophical writings include work on epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language. His most recent book on such topics, Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2004), co-authored with his Utah colleague Patricia Hanna, offers a systematic rethinking, with implications, among other things, for literary studies, of the philosophy of language, as it has developed since Russell and Frege, on the basis of a new reading of Wittgenstein. He is currently (2017) at work on a study of the nature of anti-Semitism, and the continuity between its traditional and contemporary forms, under the title Blaming the Jews: The Persistence of a Delusion. It develops and carries further some of the ideas proposed in his The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

Austrian neo-avant-garde authors excelled in literary forms that foregrounded the acoustic quality of voices. Their concern was not to establish the voice as a disembodied medium of pure emotionality; rather, they experimented with the corporeal materiality and technical mediality of voice and speech, and explored the ethics and aesthetics of non-sovereign, “impure” voices. After some introductory remarks on the work of Ernst Jandl, this essay argues this stance in regard to selected texts by the Viennese author Friederike Mayröcker. In a striking awareness of the cultural history of the voice, her texts present playful parodic rewritings of traditional vocal pathos genres such as the lyrical elegy, the opera aria, and the echolalic lament. They demonstrate the appealing quality of heteronomous, dispossessed speaking or singing voices, an appeal that is well worth listening to.

Poe’s adherence to a strict aesthetic formalism used to be problematic for studies of the relationship between his work and its American context; the methodology of New Historicism has helped to surmount this problem but sometimes with excessive emphasis on socio-historical contexts. This essay examines critical practices at work in the interpretation of Poe’s canonical piece “The Man of the Crowd” in light of the recent debates in literary studies around the problem of context and contextualization in general and the “hegemony” of new historicism in particular. It then suggests an alternative method of reading literary texts and their contexts — one based on Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts. It offers an analysis of “The Man of the Crowd” as an illustration of this method.

June 2017: Iulian Cananau is a lecturer in American literature at the University of Gävle. Before moving to Sweden in 2011, he was an assistant professor at the English Department of the University of Bucharest, where he coordinated the American Studies undergraduate program. He is a Fulbright alumnus (2007/2008 research grant at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge). His latest publication is Constituting Americanness: A History of the Concept and Its Representations in Antebellum American Literature (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015). His research interests lie with literary history writing, literary theory, and conceptual history, as well as, more recently, education theory and the methodology of teaching literature.

This essay examines the protagonist of Nabokov’s 1930 novel The Defense as a character who has much in common with Gogol’s Bashmachkin from “The Overcoat” (1842). Both seek refuge from “real” life in their respective art: calligraphy in Bashmachkin’s case, and chess in Luzhin’s. The two protagonists’ fascination with abstract patterns and disinterest in “real” life results in a transfer of their sexuality from individuals to personified objects, or objectified people: Bashmachkin turns his overcoat into his “wife”; Luzhin gets married but turns his wife into an “overcoat” whose function it is to protect him from the chills of life. There is no “defense” against the games life that plays with the characters, however, and, like Akaky Akakievich, Luzhin destroys himself in his very quest for a protective wrap.

In many of his novels, Romain Gary depicts modes of survival during WWII. Yet survival is not restricted to times of war: in times of peace too, one must use whatever means at one’s disposal in order to survive life’s many challenges. Humor, cynicism, madness, revenge, benevolence, murder, as well as marriage, child bearing, and writing are presented as plausible mechanisms of survival. The common denominator for these methods can be termed “bricolage”: an imperfect yet possible reliance on random components, as well as on hope and imagination, to make existence liveable.Underlying the survival inventory deployed by Gary, are inescapable moral issues. None of us are exempt, and our collective consciousness forces us to realize that each of us is responsible for every kind of manifestation of human behavior. Particularly problematic is the relationship between morality and the human craving for perfection. One of the means to reach perfection is, presumably, art, made with all materials of life, the unpalatable along with the beautiful. For Gary, as long as one keeps in mind that artistic perfection is no more attainable than ridding oneself of one’s collective imperfections, the artist’s work and imagination are endowed with moral agency.