Until the mid-1960s, two groups of readings of Melville’s Benito Cereno represented the implied author’s sympathies in opposite ways. According to one group of readings, the rebelling slaves and their leader Babo symbolize demonic evil. According to the other, the slaves are admirable freedom fighters. In the last generation, new interests and new interpretive methods have made the controversy obsolete. This article uses the controversy as an opportunity to attempt to explain what makes contradictory readings of an implied author’s attitude possible and what prevents them reaching a compromise.

This article, which is part of Daniel Avitzour's PhD research project, was accepted for publication just a couple of months before the author’s untimely death. Despite limitations imposed by a serious illness, Avitzour pursued his research, which offers an in-depth examination of conflicting interpretations of literary works. Avitzour's project is an important contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of critical controversies: the ways in which they emerge, evolve, and sometimes are either resolved or become irrelevant. I had the privilege of serving as the director of his PhD dissertation and, in that capacity, meeting a rare individual who combined a keen analytical mind – Avitzour held a PhD in mathematics and enjoyed a successful career as an engineer – with the sensitivity of a perceptive literary critic, attentive to the complexities of literary texts. I already miss our challenging and rewarding intellectual dialogue.

David Fishelov, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This article reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics, Oscar Wilde, from the angle of an increasingly influential conception of mimesis understood not as simple representation but as a conditio humana. Adopting genealogical lenses that trace continuities between ancient (Plato), modern (Pater and Nietzsche) and postmodern (Lacoue-Labarthe) accounts of mimesis, I argue that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde dramatizes an excess of affective forms of imitation whose implications are double, for mimesis has both a critical and theoretical side. I suggest that Wilde’s manifesto of anti-mimetic aestheticism continues to rely on a dramatic conception of mimesis that leads human lives to imitate Dorian, and thus, Greek models. A genealogy of mimēsis paves the way for contemporary theoretical concerns with performativity, affective contagion, and the power of fictional models to influence aesthetic lives. My wager is that once the two sides are joined, a new picture of Oscar Wilde will take form.

March 2020: Nidesh Lawtoo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and English at KU Leuven.  His work is located at the intersection of literary theory, continental philosophy, and political theory, with special focus on theories of mimesis, contagion, and identification. He is the editor of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought (2012), and the author of The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (2013), Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory (2016; Adam Gillon Award 2018) and (New) Fascism: Contagion, Myth, Community (2019). This article is part of a 5-year project on mimesis funded by the European Research Council, titled Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism.

Translated into French as La Méprise and into English, with revisions, as Despair, Vladimir Nabokov’s seventh Russian novel Otchaianie (1932–1936) reveals the novelist’s evolution as an international author. This narrative, whose version in English circulates as a “Vintage International,” started out as the work of an author with no solid national attachments. In a sinister twist on Nabokov’s cultural/linguistic fluidity, Otchaianie focuses on a Russo-German narrator, the unreliable Hermann, and his memoir of a murder plot gone awry. Hermann imagines that his book can be an international success, with distinctive attractions for French and American readers, among others. A key scene for each audience features creative parodies expressing Nabokov’s position on Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s importance for fiction, then at its height. Otchaianie strongly favors Tolstoy, but a dismissive review of La Méprise from the internationalist wing of French literary opinion, in the person of Sartre, was blind to the polemical force of these parodies, to the point of missing Nabokov’s rejection of Dostoevsky. 

That rejection sharpens in Despair even as Nabokov’s admiration for Tolstoy reaches new heights. In general, his career shows that, given his total estrangement from Soviet Russian literature, he turned to French and Anglophone centers of literary authority. Nabokov did not respond to the broader internationality implied by Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s differing visions of world literature. 

The essay evaluates Nabokov’s addition of “national” to a key passage in the French and English versions of Otchaianie, addresses variations in the significance of his intertextual practices, and calls for a revaluation of this novel as an expression of free-speech authorship in peril.

March 2020: John Burt Foster, Jr., is a University Professor in the English Department at George Mason University in Virginia, where he teaches European and world fiction. He holds a doctorate from Yale in comparative literature and has published widely in that field. His books include studies on Nietzsche and modern fiction (Heirs to Dionysus), on Nabokov’s art of memory in relation to European modernism, and on the “transnational” Tolstoy. With his colleague Wayne Froman he edited Thresholds of Western Culture and Dramas of Culture for the International Association for Philosophy and Literature. From 2010 to 2016 he was an executive officer for the International Comparative Literature Association.

It might seem intuitive to say that attention is a matter of looking really closely at something, zeroing in on a particular object. In contrast to such an understanding of attention, it is here argued that attentive understanding of particular persons, things or events can only be apprehended by means of attending to the world in which they belong.

          Iris Murdoch’s example of M and D is often described as a clear illustration of what “attention” is. I argue that the example is rather unhelpful, precisely because we get no description of the work of attention. There is, therefore, a hole in the argument. The strategy of this paper is to fill that hole by means of a reading of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Here a clear view of another person is attained by attention to the world together with unearthing one’s own prejudices — a view shared by Murdoch but missing in the reception of her thought.

March 2020: Niklas Forsberg is Head of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, Department of Philosophy, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic; and Docent (≈ associate professor) in Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, and in Philosophy at University of Helsinki, Finland. A large portion of Forsberg’s research deals with problems found at the intersection between theoretical philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. He has written papers about Austin, Cavell, Coetzee, Collingwood, Emerson, Murdoch, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, discussing various topics such as pain, sin, love, language, and literature’s relation to philosophy and philosophical argumentation. He is the author of Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013 [pbk. 2015]).

This article examines the collocation of the Dersim Rebellion (1937–1938) in Eastern Anatolia and Turkey’s entry into the Korean War (1950–1953) in Erendiz Atasü’s 1995 autobiographical novel Dağın Öteki Yüzü (The Other Side of the Mountain, 2000). Atasü writes in her “Letter to the Reader” that the protagonist Vicdan is based on her mother, who in 1935 climbed Mount Uludağ in Bursa with her brothers to celebrate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s foundation of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923. Vicdan’s unnamed daughter-narrator, however, idealizes neither her Kemalist mother, who supports the armed conflict in Dersim, nor her veteran uncles (Burhan, Reha, and Cumhur): Burhan’s guilty conscience connects the causalities of the Korean War to his murder of the rebels in Dersim; Reha remembers the woman he raped in Dersim; the disabled Cumhur suppresses his anger at the government that forsakes lives in Korea for NATO membership. Atasü’s circular narrative that travels backward and forward in time portrays history not as progressive but as repetitive due to Turkey’s involvement in war. The Other Side of the Mountain narrates the silenced “other side” of the Republic by recalling Turkey’s entry into the Korean War and the armed conflict in Eastern Anatolia.

March 2020: Ayşe Naz Bulamur is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has articles on the works of British, American, and Turkish writers, such as Margaret Fuller, Hannah W. Foster, A. S. Byatt, Elif Şafak, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Martin Amis. She is the author of Victorian Murderesses: The Politics of Female Violence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Her research focuses on postcolonial theory, urban theory, feminist criticism, and nineteenth-century and contemporary fiction.

Milan Kundera laid out his concept of Central Europe in “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1984) with unprecedented force and conviction. His defense of the region’s political identity and cultural uniqueness as well as its West European connectedness sparked heated polemics among leading intellectuals of the day. Kundera stood solidly at its very center, both as an intellectual and fictional writer. Retrospectively, this prominent role turned out to be short-lived. Central Europe, as a cultural and geographical concept, has all but disappeared from his work and, contrary to expectation, not because of the post-1989 realities but rather because of his artistic goals and ambitions, which have expanded well beyond the borders of Europe. Kundera’s novel L’Ignorance (2000) attests to this re-evaluation. It offers a new perspective on the region, no longer privileging its central location but redefining its state of in-betweenness as that of geographic, cultural, and linguistic fluidity. To trace Kundera‘s development of his concept of Central Europe is to reimagine the once enclosed territory but also to reinvent the adventure that lies ahead of the European novel.  

March 2020: Hana Pichova is Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Recently, she published a book, The Case of the Missing Statue: A Historical and Literary Study of the Stalin Monument in Prague, in which she documents the history of one of the largest Stalin statues ever built and explores narrative accounts of this event as meditations on the function of monumentality, aesthetics, and power. 

The paper traces the quest of Max Aue, the perpetrator-narrator of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, for his lineal origin, sexual identity, and wholeness through an “inner experience” à la Bataille. This quest, and his attempts at merging with the Other by producing a pristine unity with his sister or by obliterating others, is futile. The paper demonstrates, on the one hand, the subversive ways in which alterity returns in the novel, and on the other hand, the ways in which Aue’s claims to a unique identity are undermined: Aue’s character, which on the first reading may seem homogenous and univocal, turns out to be built upon inter-texts and quotations that bring heterogeneity to the fore. Conversely, his endeavors to distinguish himself from other Nazi perpetrators are invalidated either on the plot level and or the narrative level by comparisons, repetitions, and paraphrasing. Unable to reach unity and identity by erasing alterity, Aue remains in a maze where he can only deteriorate morally and psychologically in an endless cancrizans.

March 2020: Orit Yushinsky Troupin holds a PhD in General and Comparative Literature from the Hebrew University. She is currently an independent scholar and teaches Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and cultural theories in different clinical institutions. Her main interests are Lacano-Marxism, French thought and letters, ethics and political philosophy.

William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral belongs to a body of worka that make the case for sympathy as an effective and affective social strategy. This article maps out a net of relations that links three key issues in respect to Gibson’s novel: the strategy of metonymy, the exploration of sympathy, and the rethinking of realism. Despite the well-rehearsed laments about the bleak future and uncertain fate of the novel, in particular, and of the humanities more broadly, by turning to speculative fiction I hope to celebrate the possibilities that still lie in both the literary form and the scholarly endeavor. The growing turn to enhanced realities as well as speculative and alternative realisms can be critically and productively understood through the mechanism of metonymy and through a mode of sympathy.

March 2020: Keren Omry (University of Haifa) is the author of Cross-Rhythms: Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature (Bloomsbury, 2008). Her more recent work has appeared in journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa , and The New Centennial Review, on topics ranging from gender and posthumanism, through hip hop aesthetics in speculative fiction, to Israeli/Palestinian futurisms. She currently serves as the President of the Science Fiction Research Association, and she is writing a book on Alternate Histories.

This paper posits that Esther Syiem’s poem, “To the Rest of India from Another Indian” (2013) engenders a subnational discourse that, by interrogating the national status of a privileged pedagogy, opts for a confederal political imagination of multiple and equal centers. It fosters this desire by modulating a counter imagination in two strategic ways — foregroundong its strangeness and implanting its own subnational pedagogy which constitutes its imagination. The subnational discourse, then, homogenizes the national imagination, and sets it in binary opposition to the modulated counter imagination which is also homogenized. It proceeds, after setting up a binary opposition, to contradict, delimit, and alienate itself in order to be recognized as another authentic and central entity parallel to the pedagogy that is deemed to be national. This paper concludes that Syiem’s subnational discourse, considered as a form of minority discourse, goes against the grain of Homi K. Bhabha’s view of minority discourse.

October 2019: 

Muthukumar Manickam is a Research Scholar working on Nationalism with a focus on the representation of the North-East. He studies the points of intersection between Nationalism and Subnationalism. He has published an article titled “Historicising the Banal: Media Representation of India’s North-East as Discriminatory Pedagogy Begetting Subnational Discourse” in Archiv Orientalni, Published by Oriental Institute Czech Academy of Sciences

Vinod Balakrishnan teaches Creative Writing and Communication. He is a motivational speaker, practising poet, and yoga enthusiast. He reads on Life Writing, Nation, Indian Writing in English, Cultural Representation. He has published articles in journals such as a/b, Pragmatism Today, Journal of Somaesthetics, Dharmaram University Journal of Religions and Philosophies, Journal of Creative Communication, and Lit Crit. He has also contributed chapters in various edited volumes published by Springer, Bloomsbury, and Brill.

The critics have noted that Thomas Pynchon’s work tends to center around attempts to unravel mysteries, yet, these  would-be etective plots have generally been associated with epistemological or ontological quest narratives rather than with crime fiction. However, Pynchon’s two most recent novels, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), engage directly and openly with the conventions of the hardboiled. This paper explores Pynchon’s use of the form, examining contributions that it has made to his recent work — a strong narrative framework, access to a set of powerful yet flexible generic tropes, and an anti-authoritarian interest in systematic corporate and governmental corruption. Pynchon’s hardboiled, I conclude, is an elegiac yet radical fictional mode highly suitable for his critical analysis of American history.

October 2019: Eric Sandberg completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, and is currently an Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong and a Docent at the University of Oulu. His research interests range from modernism to the contemporary novel, with a particular interest in the borderlands between literary and popular fiction. His monograph on Virginia Woolf appeared in 2014; he co-edited Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige for Palgrave in 2017, and edited 100 Greatest Literary Detectives for Rowman & Littlefield in 2018. He has published essays in numerous edited collections, and in journals including Ariel, The Cambridge Quarterly, the Journal of Modern Literature, Critique, and Neohelicon.

References to Vladimir Nabokov’s texts are frequent in the works of contemporary British writers, but it is John Banville who seems to be engaged in an unceasing conversation with Nabokov. As this essay will argue, in Banville’s comments on Nabokov’s sophisticated structures the readers can glimpse a hint of Banville’s own practice. The essay discusses Banville’s celebrated ethical thriller, The Book of Evidence, which not only resembles Nabokov’s Despair and Lolita in its theme and structure, or borrows phrases and images from these books, but also creates intimations of a hidden story, which remains decipherable though not conclusive, thus reproducing Nabokov’s textual model. Using a heuristic comparative approach, this essay treats Despair as a case study of Nabokov’s method of concealment of a storyline beneath flamboyant narration, and then studies Banville’s novel with particular attention to the signals of unreliability, which, keeping in mind the deceptions of Despair, can be seen as evidence of untold story. The essay proposes a reinterpretation of the plot in The Book of Evidence by analogy with Despair, as well as a rereading of Despair under the influence of Banville’s novel.

October 2019: Irena Księżopolska, PhD, graduate of the English Studies at the University of Warsaw, is author of the monograph The Web of Sense: Patterns of Involution in Selected Works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov (2012) and of articles in books and journals on the topics connected with textual studies, culture and film, She has co-edited a collected essays Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory (2019). She teaches British and American literature and culture at Vistula University, Warsaw. She is currently working on the monograph on Ian McEwan, which will include the results of her research as Kościuszko Foundation scholar in McEwan’s archives at Harry Ransom Center in February-May 2019.

Why might Philip Roth, in 1980, have published a revised edition of The Breast (1972), and what do many of his emendations have to do with recent scholarly disclosure of the existential concerns of the original narrative?  How, moreover, in the second edition, does de facto co-authored narrative technique pertain to Sartre’s tenet that consciousness arises as an upsurge of nothingness amid the dross substance of non-reflective Being? I conclude that in the revised edition Roth imbues David Kepesh, his once-autonomous narrator, with levels of authorial cognizance that subordinate Kepesh’s early outlooks to the consciousness-usurping intrusion of the author — now the author-narrator. That act of domination may dramatize Sartre’s description of the existential “look,” which stands to usurp the consciousness of “the Other.” The act of thus revising an already existential narrative illustrates the flight of the Sartrian “For-Itself” toward “the higher functions of consciousness.”

October 2019: 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 also published 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, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He has recently, as well, turned attention to delineating the contrast between the heroic past and the conspiratorial present in James’s The Ambassadors.

updated in November 2019