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Against the background of the traditional scholarly portrayals of Aemilia Lanyer’s "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" as the religious gesture of a woman writer in early 17th-century England, whether sincerely spiritual or socially motivated, this essay complicates the understanding of the poet’s range of intentions and stock of concepts for the expression of her ideas. Lanyer’s conceptions of sympathetic sight and communion-based vision are presented as a probable poetic interaction with contemporary male-centered discourses of objectivity. In the context of early 17th-century philosophical disputes over the nature of vision and optics — with the publication of Johannes Kepler’s Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena in 1604 and of Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius in 1610 — Lanyer’s poetry presents sight in religious terms as the glorious means through which a woman could aspire to gain an essential understanding of things and acquire a clear perception of Christic truth. While Kepler and Galileo promoted a model of vision which separated the physical perception of things from their subjective understanding, making the act of seeing imprecise at best and deformed at worst, impersonal and absolutely unrelated to the observer’s consciousness, Lanyer’s religious poetry presents sight as the means for the reader to internalize the perceived and attain a state of Eucharistic communion with it. While vision was becoming the passive and impersonal reception of light rays, and the mind’s conceits of things were believed to be the result of a deception of the sense of vision, Lanyer wrote and published her poetry as a moment of Eucharistic perception: the perception of Christ’s “perfect picture,” hidden behind the aenigmata of her poetry, was attainable, for Lanyer, solely through the “eie of Faith.”
Yaakov Mascetti is lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. His work focuses on metaphysical poetry, early-modern conceptions of sight and cognition, the role of occultism in the rise of modernity, and definitions of femininity in early-modern English literature. He recently completed his first book on Humanist sign-theory and Protestant sacramentalism in early-modern English religious lyrics, and is now working on a new project on shifting conceptions of truth and sight in early-modern and enlightenment England.
The premise of Monika Fludernik’s “natural” narratology is that all narratives, including the most “artificial” literary narratives, ultimately rely on the basic cognitive parameters of naturally-occurring, spontaneous conversational narrative. We naturalize texts by narrativizing them. Fludernik attributes this idea of naturalization, correctly, to Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975), where it modestly masquerades as a synthesis and rationalization of ideas already current in the Formalist-Structuralist tradition. More than merely a synthesis of precursor concepts, however, Culler’s naturalization actually offers something like a unified theory of literary convention, underwriting a profoundly demystifying account of the literary — one that is arguably incompatible with Fludernik’s narrativization, while it also undermines some of the claims of the unnatural narratologists.
Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. A co-founder of Ohio State’s Project Narrative, which he directed in 2012–2014, he is also a founding member and former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). He was a vice-president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2014–2015, and president in 2016. He is the author of four books on postmodern literature and culture, including Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015). He has co-edited five volumes on twentieth-century literature, experimentalism, and narrative theory. Since July 2015 he has edited the international journal Poetics Today.
This article examines the view of the Brazilian Jewish author Clarice Lispector on the triangular relation between Jewishness, the Shoah and the chosenness of the Jewish people by combining biographical evidence with a close reading of her short story “Perdoando Deus.” Through an analysis of allegorical motifs, “Perdoando Deus” emerges as a historical, philosophical, and personal (anti)theological process. As such, this short story, mostly overlooked due to its obscurity, marks a watershed in Lispector’s oeuvre in terms of the recognition of her Jewishness — which she defines not as a religion but as an ethnic category and a collectivity of survivors.
June 2018: Sebastian Musch is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at Osnabrück University, Germany. He wrote his dissertation on Jewish Responses to Buddhism in German Culture 1890-1940 at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg. He has held fellowships at the University of Haifa, UC Berkeley, and the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College, among others. His research focuses on German-Jewish culture and intellectual history of the 20th century.
June 2018: Bieke Willem is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. In 2016 she was a postdoc at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American literature and visual culture, especially of the Southern Cone. Her first monograph, El espacio narrativo en la novela chilena postdictatorial, was published in 2016 by Brill.
If the yearning for the Absolute — the unconditioned — initiates and to a large extent defines the Romantic gesture, then post-Romantic imagination seems to stretch this yearning towards the Absolute to such a degree that it could readily destroy any unity of the concept, including that of the Absolute itself. Skeptical of any immediate relation between word and object, Celan in his early stage was deeply involved in what could only be described as a “striving” against Hegelian discourse that aims to crown the concept through dialectics. Celan’s effort at permanently doubling and overflowing the Idea has arguably launched a strange, perhaps the strangest, poetic project since Romanticism — a poetics that cuts off the self-relation of the object, turns sense certainty against itself, and puts the phenomenal world in a nearly unintelligible order (yet not chaos). In a hidden dialogue with the works of Hegel, Novalis, and Hölderlin who postulated and sought the Spirit as the Absolute, Celan’s early work opens doors to those modes of being that manifest themselves as the destructive aporia of the concept of the Absolute rather than its sublime or beautiful representations.
June 2018: Feng Dong is Associate Professor of English at Qingdao University, China. He is particularly interested in finding out how poetry helps us access alternative realities (possible modes of being) by working through both Freudian and Heideggerian versions of the uncanny toward a new conception of the poetic, which is based on continuous, deep transactions with psychic and political potentials of the contemporary subject. He has published essays on Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, and W. S. Merwin. He is the author of Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwin’s Poetry (2017). At present, he is working on a book on Paul Celan’s poetics and its epistemological and ethical consequences.
Monika Fludernik’s Toward a Natural Narratology (1996) develops a detailed historical account of how the textual structures of experientiality identified in the theoretical framework have developed in English fiction since the 17th century. According to Fludernik’s account, the English novel gets progressively better at matching the cognitive schemata underlying such experientiality. The present article argues, however, that such an understanding of the historical dimension of experientiality is an instance of “the curse of realism,” that is, of discussing early modern texts in light of the expectations established by 19th-century realism. It proposes an alternative model for engaging with the historical dimension of cognitive narratology, which is rooted in embodied cognition and predictive processing.
June 2018: Karin Kukkonen is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. Her most recent project investigates how stylistic and narrative changes in 18th-century prose writing in England and France contributed to the immersive, embodied qualities of the novel. She has published widely on cognitive and transmedial narratology, with articles in journals like Style, Paragraph, Anglia, Orbis Litterarum, and Substance, as well as the monographs Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013) and A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel (2017).
This paper teases out the intersections of list-making as an everyday experience and the incorporation of lists and enumerations in literary texts. Drawing on cognitive literary theory and the notion of experientiality, I argue that lists evoke our sensorimotor experience (the practice of writing lists) as well as our capacity to structure and organize the world (using and making sense of lists). When we as readers encounter lists in literary texts, such as the shopping lists in Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, our experience of making lists ourselves is evoked and thus leads to an experiential response that cannot be explained by Monika Fludernik’s definition of experientiality as a “quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience.’” This is due to the nature of lists and the practice of making lists, which combines physical with cognitive experience.
June 2018: Eva von Contzen is junior professor of English literature at the University of Freiburg and the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Lists in Literature and Culture.” She is the author of a monograph on medieval hagiography (The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration; Manchester 2016) and pursues her interest in narrative theory and medieval literature in the interdisciplinary network “Medieval Narratology.” She is the co-editor of a handbook of historical narratology (with Stefan Tilg). Currently, her main project is devoted to lists and enumerations in literary texts from Antiquity to postmodernism.
The paper deals with the nature of the genre of Flamenco known as Petenera, which in the past was erroneously attributed a Jewish origin. The comparative analysis of multiple variations of texts produced for this genre suggests that it subsumes within it the memory of a historical trauma related to the vanishing and absence of Jews since the end of the 15th century and that this memory is expressed both in performative aspects of the genre and in folkloric perceptions of it. The image of the Jew is present in collective consciousness and manifests itself as part of the system of textual conventions of an art form that has a folkloric component and folkloric origin. Within the conventions of this genre, expressions of the attitude toward the Jewish “ghost” are welded to a gendered layer — the bearer of this image is a woman, and the analysis shows that the texts embody different variations of the same recurring themes and features: eros, sin, guilt, remorse, and a touch of morbidity. The argument here is that palo (Spanish for “a genre of Flamenco”) contains a literary-textual component, an element of content, and not just musical components. These folkloric texts should be given a closer reading; the analysis perfomed in this paper is one way of doing so.
Einat Davidi, author of Paradiso as Pardes: A Contrapuntal Reading of José Lezama Limas’ Poetology and the Cabalistic Theory of Language and History (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012) and of several articles on Cuban Literature (José Lezama Lima, Guillermo Rosales) and Spanish Baroque literature (Calderón de la Barca, Antonio Enríquez Gómez) is faculty member at the department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa.
Modern forms of travel allowed Victorian women and their afterlives in neo-Victorian fiction to redefine gendered spaces and gender roles, in the metropolis as well as in the empire’s peripheries. The Introduction to the forum surveys issues pertaining to the relationship between female modernity, travel, and the subversion of imperial roles as explored by the papers of the forum.
In her book Towards a Natural Narratology, Fludernik defined narrativity through the notion of experientiality. This essay argues that, despite the success of Natural Narratology, the significance of experience has not yet been fully charted out in narratology. A look at philosophical discussions shows that experience need not be pitted against plot. The phenomenological tradition in particular has highlighted the temporal dimension of experience. Encompassing the temporal dynamics of narrative as well the role of consciousness, the concept of experience may help overcome some of the shortcomings of approaches that focus on fictional minds and tend to downplay plot.
June 2018:
Jonas Grethlein holds the Chair in Greek Literature at Heidelberg. His monographs include Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity (Cambridge UP 2017); Die Odyssee (C.H. Beck 2017); Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge UP 2013); The Greeks and their Past (Cambridge UP 2010); Littells Orestie (Rombach 2009).
In addition to broadening the range of examples with which narratology deals, Monika Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology draws on cognitive theory to describe the ways in which readers process language to make even highly anomalous texts narrative –an important contribution. But her emphasis on readers’ success in “naturalizing” the apparently deviant or nonsensical makes it difficult to find ways of resisting critical misreadings that conceal the potential force of disruptive elements. Naturalization is not a wholly benign operation.
June 2018: Jonathan Culleris Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, author of Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, and numerous books on critical theory. His Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction has been translated into 26 languages.
Storytelling is not just a human practice, but a practice that reflects the physical and cognitive make-up of human beings. This is the intuition at the core of Monika Fludernik’s notion of “experientiality.” One of the upshots of this idea is that narrative struggles to come to terms with realities (such as natural evolution or geological history) that are not human-scale. In light of recent discussions in posthumanism and ecocriticism, one may ask if and how narrative can overcome this anthropocentric bias. This essay addresses this question through a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), a novel set a million years into the future, when humanity has evolved into a radically different species. The essay explores formal strategies and affective impact of Vonnegut’s novel, using it as a springboard to rethink narrative’s experientiality in the face of a more-than-human vantage point.
Marco Caracciolo is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” Marco's work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (De Gruyter, 2014); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers' Engagement with Characters (University of Nebraska Press, 2016); and A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt; Ohio State University Press, 2016).
Though the literary figure of engineer-inventor George Stephenson epitomized Samuel Smiles’s “self-help” ideal of the “manly” liberal subject enabled by laissez-faire policies, Stephenson himself advocated for parliamentary intervention during the heated Railway Regulation debates of the 1840s. This essay deals with women writers’ engagement in those debates and their recognition that improved safety standards for railway travel depended on the inventor and vice versa. In City and Suburb (1861), Charlotte Riddell stylizes passages to mimic the dramatic cross-examinations of the Railway Regulation debates, effectively putting anti-regulation on trial. I argue that Riddell reworked Smiles’s Stephenson narrative in her fiction to promote thoughtful regulation that would enable rather than hamper innovation. Because women themselves sought recognition as part of the larger network of central decision-making, women writers such as Riddell saw the advantage of regarding the inventor not as an isolated hyper-masculine figure but rather as part of the integrated network of contingencies that defined Victorian modernity.
Kathryn Powell is a post-doctoral Lecturer and Assistant Director of the Writing Center at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests are in Victorian literature with special emphases on 19th-century cultures of technology, mobility, progress, and affect. Her dissertation, completed August 2017, is titled, "Railways and Regret: Revising Mobility Myths in Literature and Culture, 1857–1891." An article on a related topic: “Engineering Heroes: Revising the Self-Help Narrative in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis,” Gaskell Journal 29 (2015).
In her response to the essays, Monika Fludernik concentrates on tackling two major points of critique: the question of the natural and the term experientiality. She also engages with Shen Dan's complex remarks about narrativity and its relationship to experientiality and with Maria Mäkelä's remarks on diachrony in the context of models of reader response. As for experientiality, she welcomes both Jonas Grethlein's and Marco Caracciolo's extensions of the term, though signaling some caution about a conflation of experience and experientiality.
June 2018: Monika Fludernik is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is also the director of the graduate school Factual and Fictional Narration (GRK 1767). Her major fields of interest include narratology, postcolonial studies, “Law and Literature,” and 18th-century aesthetics. She is the author of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993) and the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996). Among her several edited volumes are Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Literature (1998) and Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor (2011). She is currently co-editing the Handbook Narrative Factuality with Marie-Laure Ryan.
January 2018: Jacob Hovind is Assistant Professor of English at Towson University. He has published articles on figures as diverse as Alice Munro, Erich Auerbach, and Samuel Beckett. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, on the ontology of character in the modernist novel.
While it has become a commonplace among Beckett’s critics to read his novels as inquiries into the unstable nature of selfhood and identity, this tendency takes for granted the novelistic specificity of these works. Beckett consistently maintained his works’ generic specificity, and as his interested in contemporary philosophy was ambivalent, his work demands critical reappraisal not through the lens of philosophy but through that of the works’ ongoing conversation with their own literary inheritance. This article begins by exploring what kind of questions might arise from reading the “novelness” of the prose works. What do they have to tell us about the work of fiction as such? And more specifically, what may they tell us about this unique kind of novelistic being, the literary character? Framing Beckett’s fiction not within philosophical discussions of selfhood but within literary-critical analyses of character’s uniquely fictive mode of being, I analyze the characters of his novels not as people but distinctly as literary characters and ultimately argue that Beckett’s characters gain their fictive semblance of life, their illusion of personhood, by reference not to extratextual subjects but to other literary characters. Reading the role of literary-historical allusions in the creation of Molloy’s protagonist, the article suggests that Beckett offers us something like a theory of its mode of being, a means of considering this uncanny way in which character lives as a uniquely fictional entity, one whose existence amounts to the invention of something out of nothing.
Lucy Strange, the protagonist of Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004), can be seen as an early example of a global citizen. Travelling between the periphery and the center of the British Empire, Lucy repeatedly makes sea-journeys that last for months — a kind of journey that no longer exists in today’s world. Although this travelling helps shape her identity, it also makes her incapable of calling any one location her home. This article discusses the portrayal of Lucy as a modern 19th-century woman who is simultaneously a 21st century, neo-Victorian creation. It analyzes the links between femininity and voyages in the novel. Lucy’s travels serve to depict the movement of women and mothers across the sea as an inherent part of globalization, writing them into what was often seen as a development led by male adventurers and businessmen. Jones presents Lucy as a young woman at the edge of modernity. Nevertheless, Lucy’s lack of rootedness also questions whether travelling requires different — more modern — constructions of female identity.
January 2018: Daný van Dam obtained her PhD on postcolonial neo-Victorian fiction from Cardiff University, Wales, UK, in 2016. Her next research project engages with foreign-language neo-Victorian fiction and (inter)national cultural memory. Daný is co-editor of a special issue of the online journal Assuming Gender on the subject of “Consuming Gender” (Winter 2017), and she has previously contributed an article on racial and sexual passing to a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies (“Neo-Victorian Sexploitation,” 2017). Since August 2017, Daný is working as a lecturer in the Comparative Literature Department at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
January 2018: Alexander Ullman is a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies 20th-century literature.
Despite the output of scholarship in the field of sound studies over the past three decades, relatively little work has been done on sound and translation. By engaging the translation theories of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Naomi Seidman, this essay takes an interdisciplinary approach in arguing that sound functions as a productive obstacle in translation. The essay situates sound within current frameworks of translation theory, considers the role of sound in late modernist experimental works that use translation as a generative mode of literary composition, and surveys the performative aspects of sound in contemporary translations of liturgical Hebrew poetry known as piyutim.
