The article offers a discussion of two Latin American fictional historiographies: the short story “Guayaquil,” by Jorge Luis Borges (1970), and The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2011). Both these fictional historiographies are intertextually related to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), and both may be read as inscriptions of a Postmodernist sensibility, but their respective engagements with the earlier fictional historiography offer very different versions of the relations of story, history, and historiography, highlighting some significant, albeit often-overlooked aspect of their hetero-text.

May 2019: Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan is Professor of English, currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of Haifa University Press and Academic Head of the Haifa University Library. She is the author of Graham Greene's Childless Fathers (Macmillan 1988) Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (OUP 1991), The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (1999), Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject (Stanford University Press, 2013), and numerous articles on literary modernism and continental philosophy. Her recent research project is provisionally titled "Hetero-biographies."

Michael Longley’s poetry has responded to the Northern Irish Troubles with great skill and sensitivity. This article approaches his Troubles-related work from a trauma perspective. It reads this poetry as functioning as a form of palimpsest, whereby different conflicts and wars are transposed onto one another. Longley’s relationship to his father is given special focus, as it relates Longley’s Troubles verse to the memory of World War 1 through a prism of postmemory. Other contexts are important for Longley, though, and an interpretation of “Ceasefire” concludes that Longley’s acts of multidirectional memory cannot simply be defined as instances of historical witnessing but also involve imaginative and mythical manoeuvres.

May 2019: Charles I. Armstrong is a professor of English literature at the University of Agder, in Norway. Among his publications are Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the co-edited volume The Legacy of the Good Friday Agreement: Politics, Culture and Art in Northern Ireland after 1998 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Providing the literary and philosophical comparative context of Petr Guber’s short story “Job Dulder (A Variation on the Old Theme)” (1923), the essay analyses a pre-Holocaust literary treatment of the Book of Job, enacting the collision of the traditional (Judaic) worldview of East European Jews with disastrous sides of modernity in Word War I and its aftermath. The paper juxtaposes two major actualizations of the Book of Job in modernist texts — (1) its appraisal in In Job Balances (1929) by Russian-Jewish existential philosopher Lev Shestov as a basis for his distinction between European rational philosophy and metaphysical belief and (2) a self-consciously anti-cathartic literary re-enactments of the Job story in Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples (1922), Guber’s story, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Job” (1970). The essay shows in what historical and ideological contexts these post-metaphysical subversions of the biblical proto-text are rooted. In these terms, “Job Dulder” presents an important variant of the Modernist thematization of the Job story. It situates the Jewish predicament between the hammer and the anvil of both Russian and Polish nationalisms during WWI. I argue that this representation of the precariousness of Russian-Polish-Jewish relations was generated by a specific historical and ideological situation in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s.

May 2019: Edward Waysband received his PhD in Russian Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2010. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Linguistics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg. His research interests encompass Russian and European Modernism; Russian-Polish-Jewish nexus; literature and identity (including the contexts of diaspora and exile); and postcolonial, nationalism, and minority studies. He has published articles on these issues in academic journals. He is currently writing a monograph on Vladislav Khodasevich.

Georgy Demidov’s Gulag stories were published belatedly, in the new millennium, and have acted as a timely reminder of the suffering and death of great numbers of innocent people in the camps. This article attempts to explain the literary qualities of Demidov’s Kolyma stories as well as the way in which, despite their fictionalized plots, they can be read as works of testimony. Comparing Demidov’s narrative techniques with those of his contemporaries, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, whom the sad history of the manuscripts had turned into his precursors, I focus on the significance of Demidov’s choice of extraordinary rather than typical characters and plots, his ample use of narrative commentary, and his gearing up narrative time to cognitive rather than experiential response of the audience. Judging by an implicitly autodescriptive touch in a story devoted to an artist who perished in the camps, the use of fictionalization in attesting to camp experience was not a calculated choice on Demidov’s part but a genuine product of the workings of his literary imagination.

May 2019: Leona Toker (English Department, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), and Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading (forthcoming). She is Editor of Partial Answers.

This article argues that fictional accounts of the Holocaust that include historical characters and events face special ethical challenges. In particular, the presentation of the inner lives of characters representing real people (such as their private thoughts and emotions, their inner speech) is seen to be especially problematic, especially in the case of victims. The article focuses on three fictional accounts of an actual event that took place in the Auschwitz death camp: the shooting of an SS officer named Josef Schillinger by a female prisoner awaiting gassing. These accounts are “The Death of Schillinger” by Tadeusz Borowski (first published in Polish 1959 and in English translation in 1967, but written shortly after Borowski’s release from Auschwitz in 1945 and before his suicide in 1951), “Revenge of a Dancer” by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk (which came out in English translation from the unpublished Polish manuscript in 1985, but was written before 1967 when publication in Poland was denied), and A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova by Arnošt Lustig (published in Czech in 1964 and in English translation in 1973). While Lustig’s novel presents the reader with the female victim’s thoughts and feelings, the two shorter works do not, and the article explores the ethical ramifications of this difference.

March 2019: Jeremy Hawthorn is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His book The Reader as Peeping Tom: Nonreciprocal Gazing in Narrative Fiction and Filmwas published by Ohio State University Press in 2014. He has published three monographs and many articles on the fiction of Joseph Conrad and is presently co-editing a volume in the Cambridge University Press Edition of Conrad's works. The fourth edition of his A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory was published in 2000, and the seventh edition of his textbook Studying the Novel by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017.

Focusing on the representation or presence of shoes in several literary texts and war memorials as metonymies of the Holocaust, this article will rely on Jean-François Lyotard’s call for (impossible yet necessary) linkages “after Auschwitz” to make connections between these various textual and museological scenes. As a point of departure, I revisit Jacques Derrida’s notion of “restitution” in his critique of the debate between Martin Heidegger and art critic Meyer Schapiro on the origin of a pair of shoes in van Gogh’s eponymous painting. While being sensitive to Derrida’s economic argument in The Truth in Painting, I attempt to make a case for the necessity of rehabilitating “restitution” in works of representation and commemoration, across literature, visual arts, memorials and museums.

May 2019: Arleen Ionescu is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her major research and teaching interests are in the fields of 20^th-century fiction, especially Modernist prose, as well as Critical Theory, Holocaust Studies, Translation Studies and, increasingly, Memory and Trauma Studies. She has published widely on James Joyce and other related aspects of modernism, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida in James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual, Parallax, Partial Answers, and Scientia Traductionis. She is co-general editor for Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Her books include Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality (Peter Lang, 2014) and The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is currently working on a book (co-edited with Maria Margaroni) entitled Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield in 2020).

This article addresses narrative ethics from a media and memory studies perspective. It discusses the ethics of premediation in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Premediation is a forward-facing, generative dynamic of cultural memory: the medial preformation of imagination, experience, storytelling, and action. I first explore Ulysses’s mimesis of premediation, showing how in the Calypso episode, Bloom’s imagination is premediated by Orientalist stereotypes, and how in the Ithaca episode, Stephen’s ballad of Little Harry Hughes exposes the premediating power of age-old anti-Semitic narratives. Both episodes reveal the ethically problematic dimension of premediating schemata, which often operate non-consciously. But they also hint at the possibility of critical reflection, of “turning around upon one’s schemata” in the psychologist Frederic Bartlett’s sense. In a second step, I discuss the novel’s references to the Odyssey as a case of premediation, showing how new concepts of memory and mediation can elucidate this famous case of intertextuality. I argue that the particular presence of Homer in Ulysses — not as remediation, but as premediation — marks modernism’s new temporal regime, where tradition is used to tell new stories and thus turns into a future-oriented and enabling resource. Discussing the dynamic of premediation both on the level of narrative representation and in the novel’s intertextual relations, this article explores the potentials of a memory studies concept for the fields of (ethical) narratology, Joyce studies, and classical reception studies.

May 2019: Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt (Germany) and founder of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform (FMSP). Her research fields include memory studies, narratology, media studies, and transcultural studies. Erll is general editor of the book series Media and Cultural Memory (with A. Nünning, de Gruyter) and author of Memory in Culture (Palgrave, 2011). Recent publications are Audiovisual Memory and the (Re)Making of Europe (Image & Narrative 2017, ed. with A. Rigney) and Cultural Memory after the Transnational Turn (Memory Studies 2018, ed.with A. Rigney). In her current research project, she studies the afterlives of the Odyssey.

Writing in the genre of “Letter to an old friend,” James Phelan offers an appreciation of the deep interconnections between the character and the scholarship of Jakob Lothe, to whom this issue of the journal is dedicated. Phelan contrasts T. S. Eliot’s dictum about the desirable separation between the “man who suffers and the mind which creates” with his own experience of Lothe. Phelan finds that in Lothe the man who suffers is inseparable from the mind that interprets and theorizes and that this continuity between “man” and “mind” contributes to the superior quality of each.

May 2019: James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State University. His research has been devoted to developing a viable account of narrative as rhetoric. He has written about style in Worlds from Words; about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots; about voice, character narration, ethics, and audiences in Narrative as Rhetoric; about the rhetoric and ethics of character narration in Living to Tell about It; and about narrative judgments and progression in Experiencing Fiction.  He has taken up the relationship between literary history and rhetorical analysis in Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010 (2013), and he has further extended the conception and consequences of his rhetorical approach in Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017).  In 2020, he and Matthew Clark will publish Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. He has also engaged in direct scholarly give-and-take in Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates co-authored with David Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol (2012). In 1991, Phelan brought out the autobiographical journal Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor. 

In addition to publishing well over 100 essays, Phelan has edited or co-edited seven collections of essays, including the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (with Peter J. Rabinowitz, 2005), Teaching Narrative Theory (with David Herman and Brian McHale), and After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (with Susan R. Suleiman and Jakob Lothe, 2012).  With Gerald Graff, he has edited two textbooks for the classroom, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (1995, 2004), and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (2000, 2009)

Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. Since 1993, he has been co-editor, with Peter J. Rabinowitz (1993-2018), Robyn Warhol (2012-2016), and Katra Byram (2017--), of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.

June 2006: Born in Flushing, NY, James Phelan received his BA from Boston College (1972) and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1977). He began as an Assistant Professor at Ohio State in 1977, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1983 and to Professor in 1989. He served as Department Chair from 1994-2002; in 2004 he was awarded the University's Distinguished Scholar Award. Phelan's work focuses on theoretical issues or problems in narrative. He has written about style in Worlds from Words; about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots; about voice, character narration, ethics, and audiences in Narrative as Rhetoric; and about the rhetoric and ethics of character narration in Living to Tell about It.  He has also published the autobiographical journal Beyond the Tenure Track and has edited, with Peter J. Rabinowitz, Understanding Narrative, and, with Gerald Graff, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy.

            Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature and winner of the 1993 CELJ Award for Best New Journal. Since 1993, he has been co-editor, with Peter J. Rabinowitz, of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.

After decades of research writing, literary critics are often moved to write not “about” literature but “the real thing” — poems, fiction, or memoirs. Jacob Lothe of Oslo University, author of four books and editor or coeditor of several collections of collaborative literary research, was moved to collect oral testimony about the Holocaust. In 2006, with Anette Storeide, he published narratives by concentration-camp survivors — Tidsvitner: Fortellinger fra Auschwitz og Sachsenhausen (Time’s Witnesses: Narratives from Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen). This book records the ordeals and survival of eight men who were victims of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, as told by themselves. It was followed in 2013 by Lothe’s collection of narratives by ten women who survived concentration-camp incarceration, translated into English as Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust (2017). The title of the present special issue, Literature as Time’s Witness, salutes these two books while responding to a large part of Jakob Lothe’s research interests, including his concern with the ethics of narrative. The articles collected in this issue in his honor do not advocate reading literary works as documents of historical periods but recognize the multifunctionality of literary works and discuss the relationship between the art and the attesting potentialities of fiction and poetry in addition to factographic writing.

Starting from an interest in witnessing as a set of conceptual and narrative operations that also involve comparison as a fundamental cognitive practice, this essay examines the work of the witness at two historically entangled moments. In the “multi-directional memory” (Rothberg) of the British Jewish writer and political activist Leonard Woolf early 20^th-century colonial trauma connects with the rise in racial persecution and absolute power in Europe of the 1930s. Woolf’s experience as a colonial administrator in Ceylon is given fictional form in his 1913 novel The Village in the Jungle; an analysis of the condition of colonialism that is enabled by his complex and contingent position as a witness. Strikingly, the novel’s comparative operations and conceptual tropes reappear in his historiography of “the origins of totalitarianism” in Barbarians at the Gate (1939). For Woolf, the extreme events of the 1930s spur an almost compulsive historicism that leads back to the history of European imperialism and to his own colonial encounter, bringing together different temporal and spatial coordinates in a manner that is at once prescient and familiar. Not only is this an anticipation of Hannah Arendt’s famous “boomerang thesis” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); more generally Woolf’s narrative offers a historical perspective on recent transnational and global approaches to comparison where network- or other horizontal and lateral models dominate and where connections among coordinates can only appear tentative and fractured. Like Arendt’s, Woolf’s grand narrative was composed with the urgency of the witness to extreme events, illuminating the potential, as well as the risks, of cross-temporal comparison.

May 2019: Randi Koppen, professor of British Literature at the University of Bergen, has published on various aspects of modernist literature and culture, including fashion and body culture, popular science, sound technologies and broadcasting. Her work has appeared in leading journals such as New Literary History and Modern Drama, and with international publishers such as Edinburgh University Press and Bloomsbury Academic. Her book Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), explores the modern fascination with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice, demonstrating how Woolf’s work provides illuminating examples of all of these aspects. Professor Koppen’s current research centres on the interwar writing and activism of Leonard Woolf, especially its advancement of international collaboration, solidarity and justice.