At first glance, nothing seems to relate Jean Genet’s play “Les Nègres” (“The Blacks”) to Maurizio Cattelan’s exhibit “Not Afraid of Love.” The two works belong to separate conceptual mediums, yet they share the dynamics and effects of the mask-function, concealing the individual donning the mask while revealing a compound identity, experienced by all spectators. Vestiges of sacred rituals, masks are used here as profane icons, strangely animating inanimate artifacts, thereby generating a sense of wonder and unease. While metaphors require neither visibility nor animation, the interaction between exhibit/actors and spectator/s conjures up an almost tangible metaphor. Not all metaphors are masks, but all masks are powerful visual metaphors, whose impact alters not only those who don them but also those who participate in their display. In both media, the effect of the mask on the spectator/s is one of transformation from subject to object, by means of the gaze, inadvertently a simultaneous, two-sided activity.

October 2019: Nourit Melcer-Padon is senior lecturer and head of the English ESL department at the Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem. Her research interests include comparative literature and literary theory, cultural studies, the interrelationship of history and literature, and social Jewish history.

Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is more than a tribute to life at sea, but the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of a multi-national group of physical laborers paid a meager wage, living in harsh conditions, and performing repetitive and physically debilitating work, is significantly understudied. The present article considers Conrad’s compelling representation of the life of British merchant sailors for a middle-class literary audience. I demonstrate how Conrad makes his readers listen to the voice of the sailors, reflect on the value of their work, and appreciate the importance of seemingly menial, physical labor — such as serving coffee during a storm.

October 2019: Johan Adam Warodell has published articles on Conrad and Melville in The Cambridge Quarterly, Conradiana, The Conradian, English, Leviathan, Notes & Queries, and the Yearbook of Conrad Studies. His writing has won prizes from the Joseph Conrad Societies of Britain and America. He was most recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He is presently completing a monograph on Conrad.

There is a tradition of Wordsworth criticism that begins with William Empson in 1951, continues with Christopher Ricks in 1971 and Isobel Armstrong in 2000, and concludes with Anne-Lise François in 2008, which considers the disruptive effects of the poet’s blank verse lines upon his poetry’s semantic or rhetorical function. I seek to revive this tradition by invoking Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s articulation of the relationship between what he calls “presence effects” and “meaning effects” to emphasize instances where individual lines in Wordsworth’s Prelude produce disruptions or ambiguities that subvert the governing rhetoric of the verse structures in which they reside. I revisit several of the poem’s most iconic passages to explore how certain suggestive lines and line breaks form an affective and material counter-rhetoric that undermines the poem’s narratives of personal growth and redeemed trauma. I also consider the extent to which these disruptions may represent the presentification of “the latent” as Gumbrecht defines it.

October 2019: Art Zilleruelo is Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Penn State Schuylkill.  He is the author of the poetry chapbook Weird Vocation (Kattywompus Press, 2015) and the poetry collection The Last Map (Unsolicited Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Western Humanities Review, and other journals. His literary criticism has appeared in Joyce Studies Annual. 

This article relates Swift’s critique of science to his view of women by resorting to Lakoff and Johnson’s theory on the function of metaphors in human conceptualization. Through the overarching conceptual metaphor NATURE IS A WOMAN, the gap between these two areas in Swift studies, which have remained largely isolated so far, is bridged. The analysis shows that Swift’s strange aesthetic view of and peculiar attitude toward women were, through the conceptual metaphor, extrapolated to nature, which can explain his condemnation of science as not only “unaesthetic” and “indecent” but also futile and morbid.

October 2019: HE Xiyao received his PhD from Hong Kong Baptist University and is currently a lecturer at the School of English Studies, Zhejiang International Studies University. His research interests include 18^th-century English Literature, Chinese myths and legends, and Pre-1949 Chinese Maritime Customs. He has recently published an article on the criticisms embedded in Chinese myths and legends, and is now working on the collation and translation of historical files from Pre-1949 Maritime Customs in Zhejiang Province, China.