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Forthcoming
Whitman, Jon . Forthcoming. Introduction to the special issue "The Literal Sense" [provisional title]. Partial Answers 22(2).
Copeland, Rita . Forthcoming. Ambiguity and Intention in Ancient and Medieval Rhetorical Thought . Partial Answers 22(2).Abstract

In the ancient rhetorical tradition and its medieval afterlife, the question of letter and intention (scriptum et voluntas) provides a theoretical framework for considerations of the literal sense. Is the word — as encountered in writing, in an authoritative text — to be the repository of the author’s intention? Or is that intention to be found somehow behind the word, in action or voice, or perhaps hovering around the word in a spiritual meaning to be inferred by reading beyond or against the letter? These are problems that haunt any field that takes its theoretical vocabulary from rhetoric, especially law, theology, and textual interpretation. But there is another question, subsidiary to that of scriptum et voluntas, that proves to be even more difficult to pin down: ambiguity. Legal rhetoric does not like ambiguity, because it gets in the way of clear arguments and outcomes. Theologians are wary of ambiguity. But poetry and poetic theology can veritably embrace and even weaponize ambiguity as a kind of escape clause from arguments that might bind too much. Because ambiguity troubled rhetorical theorists, studying its fortunes as a necessary element of rhetorical thought gives us insights into the real social problems that teachers, speakers, and writers expected their audiences to encounter on the ground. In this way, ambiguity can be an index of the most resistant questions of social experience and language practice. This essay begins with the problems of scriptum et voluntas and ambiguitas in the rhetorical theory of the ancient Roman West, surveying these complexities up through the fourth century CE and Augustine’s Christian rhetoric. Then crossing the centuries to the Ciceronian “revival” of the late 11th and early 12th centuries, we turn to the roles of ambiguitas in medieval rhetorical and legal thought, and finally to the exploitation of ambiguity in poetic theology.

 

January 2024: In the ancient rhetorical tradition and its medieval afterlife, the question of letter and intention (scriptum et voluntas) provides a theoretical framework for considerations of the literal sense. Is the word — as encountered in writing, in an authoritative text — to be the repository of the author’s intention? Or is that intention to be found somehow behind the word, in action or voice, or perhaps hovering around the word in a spiritual meaning to be inferred by reading beyond or against the letter? These are problems that haunt any field that takes its theoretical vocabulary from rhetoric, especially law, theology, and textual interpretation. But there is another question, subsidiary to that of scriptum et voluntas, that proves to be even more difficult to pin down: ambiguity. Legal rhetoric does not like ambiguity, because it gets in the way of clear arguments and outcomes. Theologians are wary of ambiguity. But poetry and poetic theology can veritably embrace and even weaponize ambiguity as a kind of escape clause from arguments that might bind too much. Because ambiguity troubled rhetorical theorists, studying its fortunes as a necessary element of rhetorical thought gives us insights into the real social problems that teachers, speakers, and writers expected their audiences to encounter on the ground. In this way, ambiguity can be an index of the most resistant questions of social experience and language practice. This essay begins with the problems of scriptum et voluntas and ambiguitas in the rhetorical theory of the ancient Roman West, surveying these complexities up through the fourth century CE and Augustine’s Christian rhetoric. Then crossing the centuries to the Ciceronian “revival” of the late 11th and early 12th centuries, we turn to the roles of ambiguitas in medieval rhetorical and legal thought, and finally to the exploitation of ambiguity in poetic theology.

Gleave, Robert . Forthcoming. Interpretations of Literality: Muslim Legal Hermeneutics and Whitman’s Five Questions . Partial Answers 22(2).Abstract

Jon Whitman, in his opening contribution to the collections of essays Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, poses questions about interpretive communities’ assessment of the “literal sense” of canonical texts, about the criteria for downplaying parts of these texts in the process of allegorization, about the influence of enhanced allegorization on changes in the interpretive communities, and the continuities of idiom and orientation behind such changes. This essay discusses the answers that can be derived from the Muslim tradition, and, in particular, from the system of Muslim legal hermeneutics known as uṣūl al-fiqh, to these questions, and explores how these questions can illuminate interdisciplinary understanding of the functions of the literal sense in contrasting intellectual traditions.

January 2024: Robert Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. From January 2023 until January 2026 he is British Academy/Wolfson Professor with the research project “The Foundations of Modern Shi’ism: The End of Akhbārism and the Beginnings of Uṣūlism.” His research focuses on Islamic legal theory and practice, particularly legal hermeneutics, and the history of Shi’ite legal thought and institutions. He has directed a number of international research projects exploring these issues. His most recent research projects (concluded in 2022), were Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shi’ite Islam, funded by the European Research Council, and Islamic Law on the Edge, in collaboration with Dr Adday Hernandez-Lopez of Complutense University, Madrid, examining neglected and marginalized areas of Islamic legal studies.

Cohen, Mordechai Z. . Forthcoming. Abraham Ibn Ezra’s “Way of Peshat” in Light of Shifting Christian Conceptions of the Literal Sense . Partial Answers 22(2).Abstract

The reputation of Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089 or 1092/93–1164 or 1167) as a key proponent of the peshat (“plain sense”) of Scripture has been questioned due to his tendency (1) to adjust his exegesis to conform with rabbinic halakhic (religious-legal) traditions and (2) his philosophical readings, especially in the Psalms. Drawing upon evidence from his own Sefardic intellectual heritage and by analogy with the complexities of the Christian conception of the “literal sensew” brought to light in recent scholarship, this study aims to clarify the broader definition of peshat conceived by Ibn Ezra that incorporated interpretive considerations beyond the simplest philological construal of the biblical text.

 

January 2024: Mordechai Z. Cohen is Professor of Bible and Associate Dean at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and Director of the Chinese-Jewish Conversation at Yeshiva University in New York. His research focuses on Jewish Bible interpretation in its Muslim and Christian cultural contexts, as well as a comparison with traditional interpretation of Chinese classical texts. Among his publications are Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor (Brill Academic Publishers 2003; 2nd edition 2008), Opening the Gates of Interpretation (Brill Academic Publishers 2011), The Rule of Peshat (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020), and Rashi, Biblical Interpretation, and Latin Learning (Cambridge University Press 2021).

Greenstein, Edward L. Forthcoming. “My hand I place over my mouth”: Interpreting Gestures in the Poetry of Job. Partial Answers 22(2).Abstract

The Book of Job, like other ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts, makes relatively frequent use of gestures in its discourse. The interpretation of these gestures is often moot. Is a particular gesture physical, which is to say literal, or (also) symbolic, which is to say figurative? How is a gesture’s meaning in a particular context to be divined? Job’s placing his hand over his mouth, for example, is almost universally understood to reflect his self-censure, his silencing of himself. Comparing other instances of this gesture, in Job and elsewhere, leads to a very different nuance of meaning. Silencing oneself is not self-censure but rather an indication of a desire to listen or hear more. This and other gestures in Job will be discussed with attention to the criteria by which meaning, in such instances, is (or is not) determined.

 

January 2024: Edward L. Greenstein is professor emeritus of Bible at Bar-Ilan University. He has held professorships at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Tel Aviv University and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School, Yale, Princeton, the Hebrew University, and elsewhere. Recipient of the EMET Prize ("Israel’s Nobel") in the field of Humanities-Biblical Studies, Greenstein has authored and edited numerous works, most prominently Job: A New Translation  (Yale University Press, 2019). He is currently writing commentaries on Job, Lamentations, and Ruth, as well as other books.

Cohen, Jeremy . Forthcoming. Rashi, Honorius Augustodunensis, and the Shulamite: The Nexus of Exegesis and Interreligious Confrontation Early in the 12th Century. Partial Answers 22(2).Abstract

This essay explores the convergence of new emphases on the literal-historical sense in biblical exegesis, the burgeoning of interreligious polemic, and aspects of the commonality of Jewish and Christian cultural experiences early in the 12th century. It probes instructive similarity and difference in the Song of Songs commentaries of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, 1040–1105) and Honorius Augustodunensis (d. after 1140), particularly in the Song’s praise of the Shulamite in 6:10–7:11. Their commentaries signal the importance of contemporary interreligious debate, of Christian hopes to convert the Jews, and of expectations for the ultimate salvation of exiled Israel at the end time. Most impressively, they reflect a shared landscape characterized by growing awareness of the other and the need to situate the other on one’s own map of the world.

 

January 2024: Jeremy Cohen is professor emeritus in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, where he held the Spiegel Family Foundation Chair for European Jewish History. He has authored seven books, edited or co-edited another eight, and published some fifty articles – on the multifaceted interactions of Jews and Christians from antiquity until early modern times: interreligious polemics, biblical exegesis, historiography, martyrology, and more. These works include The Friars and the Jews (1982), Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict (1991), From Witness to Witchcraft (1996), Living Letters of the Law (1999), Sanctifying the Name of God (2004), Christ Killers (2007), and The Salvation of Israel (2022)

Kramer, Michael P. Forthcoming. The Raison d’être of “The New Colossus” . Partial Answers 22(2).Abstract

Combining textual analysis, cultural contextualization, and the history of ideas, this essay excavates the complex “literal sense” of Emma Lazarus’s iconic sonnet, “The New Colossus.”  Beginning with the deliberate misreading of the statue’s intended and acknowledged signification and noting the poem’s network of contrarieties, the essay dwells on the contrast between the “wretched refuse” on Ward’s Island and decadent Gilded Age exhibition where the poem was first read; it goes on to argue that the poem disables the connection between progress and poverty, reinvigorates the rhetoric of asylum, points to the Hebraic roots of American history, and reimagines American modernity as a benign merging of contrarieties.

 

January 2024: Michael P. Kramer is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University.  He has authored and edited numerous works on Jewish and American literature.  His most recent book is an annotated translation of S.Y. Agnon’s And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight.

Sandberg, Eric . Forthcoming. Review of K. Ludwig Pfeifer, Sociability and Society: Literature and the Symposium. Partial Answers 22(2).Abstract
Book review
Bagocius, Benjamin . Forthcoming. Review of Elizabeth Anderson, Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing. Partial Answers 22(2).Abstract
Book review
Yi, Jingxuan . Forthcoming. Review of Nishi Pulugurtha, ed. Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence. Partial Answers 22(1).Abstract
book review
Milesi, Laurent, and Arleen Ionescu. Forthcoming. REVIEW ESSAY: Beckett in the Posthuman Technocene: Jonathan Boulter, Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett’s Short Prose and Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar, and Mark Nixon, eds. Beckett and Technology . Partial Answers 22(1).Abstract
review essay
2024
Wen, Yongchao . 2024. Anissa Janine Wardi, Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color. Partial Answers 22(1): 206-210. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book review
Robinson, Ira . 2024. Shana Rosenblatt Mauer, Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values. Partial Answers 22(1): 203-206. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book review
Berkovits, Balázs . 2024. Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma, ed. Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni. Partial Answers 22(1): 199-203. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book review
Hadar, David . 2024. Creative Work Ethic and Autofiction: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?. Partial Answers 22(1): 179-197. . Publisher's Version

The rise of autofiction in the 2010s can be partially explained by the genre’s reflection of the contemporary work ethic, specifically its demand to use personal life as part of people’s work. Readers can recognize their tendency to use life for work in the way autofiction writers utilize their experience to write. This paper argues that Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010), one of the primary examples of contemporary autofiction, deals with the idea of using life for work in the context of increased expectation of employers to do so. At first, social engagement and writing are presented as competing for the protagonist’s attention. Then through the development of her friendship with the painter Margaux and tape-recording their conversation, life turns into a resource for writing. Sheila hopes that the new relationship with a friend, mediated and preserved through recordings, will save her writing project. It is not just that life is an inspiration for writing, but that it actively contributes to work by providing a text that will be part of the novel we are reading. Then as the novel progresses, problems with this new arrangement come up, and we are asked to question the viability of subordinating personal relationships to work. By its end, a temporary truce between work and life is presented, one that may be satisfying to readers but does not subvert the contemporary work ethic.

 

August 2023: David Hadar teaches English literature at Beit Berl College and Kaye College, Israel. His work has appeared in journals such as Narrative and Studies in American Jewish Literature. His book Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature was published in 2020.

Smith, Andrew . 2024. Saul Bellow’s Gothic Ontology: The Victim and More Die of Heartbreak. Partial Answers 22(1): 161-177. . Publisher's VersionAbstract

Saul Bellow’s “Gothic Ontology: The Victim and More Die of Heartbreak” examines the different types of Gothic employed by Saul Bellow in The Victim (1947) and More Die of Heartbreak (1987). The article argues that in The Victim Gothic doubling becomes erased by an idea of hospitality which challenges the status of the Gothic ‘other’. This is contrasted with More Die of Heartbreak where the Gothic is used in order to critically read the psychological and emotional damage caused by a materialist culture. The article explores Bellow’s complex engagement with the Gothic and examines how he employs the Gothic to raise questions about ontology and materialism.

 

August 2023: Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield where he co-directs the Centre for the History of the Gothic. He is the author or editor of over 20 published books including Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934: The Ghosts of World War One (2022), Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History (2016), The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010), Gothic Literature (2007, revised 2013), Victorian Demons (2004) and Gothic Radicalism (2000). He is currently writing a book on Dickens and the Gothic for Cambridge University Press. With Professor Ben Fisher he co-edits the series “Gothic Literary Studies” and “Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions” for the University of Wales Press. With Professor William Hughes he co-edits the “Gothic Companions” series for Edinburgh University Press.  He is a past president of the International Gothic Association.

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Acquisto, Joseph . 2024. On Listening and Failure: Roger Laporte with Marcel Proust. Partial Answers 22(1): 141-159. . Publisher's VersionAbstract

This essay reads Roger Laporte’s Une voix de fin silence (A voice of fine silence), the second volume of his idiosyncratic work Une vie (A life), in dialogue with the early volumes of Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).  A constellation emerges from the analysis that allows us to consider the interrrelations and interdependence of Laporte’s text, his work as a critic on Proust, and the Recherche itself. The essay argues that Laporte’s textual engagement with Proust allows us to re-evaluate notions of literary failure so as to redefine what counts as the success of a literary project conceived as a writing about writing and becoming a writer.  Both Proust and Laporte practice a literary writing that evokes mental experience while never being synonymous with it because, as their texts demonstrate, mental and literary experience can never coincide perfectly.  Laporte labels the writer’s search a “listening,” a precarious activity which, like failure, is impossible to summon on command and which can only be recognized as such in retrospect as a motor of literary creation. 

 

August 2023: Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont.  His research focuses on literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the relations between literature, music, and philosophy. His books include French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music, Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures, The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy, and Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence.

Eklund, Erik . 2024. The Mirror and the Icon: A Theological Perspective on Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Partial Answers 22(1): 117-140. . Publisher's VersionAbstract

The search for the author(s) of Nabokov’s Pale Fire arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem of repetition and its relation to the question of origins, temporal and timeless. For insofar as an origin is a thing (res) that is not always already in the movement of repetition (identical or otherwise), however distantly removed from its source (finite or otherwise), there can be no finite or immanent origin in the book or in the world. There is only its sign, which incorporates and refracts within its generative gaze all the temporalities and identities as non-identical repetition. In Pale Fire such as sign is represented by St. Sudarg of Bokay’s triptych of bottomless light.

 

August 2023: Erik Eklund is a Research Scholar with the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought. He received his doctoral degree in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of Nottingham, and teaches courses in English literature and religious studies at Northwest University. He is the recipient of the inaugural Dieter E. Zimmer Prize for Best Postgraduate Work from the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. He has written several articles on religious themes in the works of Vladimir Nabokov, as well as articles and book chapters on trinitarian theology and the influence of the medieval system on C. S. Lewis’ work and thought. His publications appear in Journal of Inklings StudiesLiterature and TheologyNabokov Online JournalNabokov StudiesThe NabokovianReligion and the Arts and Religion & Literature (forthcoming).

Wang, Lang . 2024. Excluding the Rural Girl Student: Rural-Urban Divide, Knowledge Transmission, and Female Homosociality in Xiao Hong’s 'Hands'. Partial Answers 22(1): 95-115. . Publisher's Version

In the early 20th century, the figures of both the peasant woman and the “New Woman” caught the attention of Chinese writers. While the “New Woman” has been the subject of considerable scholarship, the representation of peasant women has not received much scholarly attention. This essay examines the peasant woman as represented in modern Chinese literature to complement the existing understanding of Chinese modernity. It focuses on the rural girl student, as she signifies the clash of two worlds: the rural family as her point of provenance and the modern school as her entry into the urban. Relying on Xiao Hong’s short story “Hands” in the context of historical accounts, I argue that hygiene becomes a type of biopower that punishes the rural girl student for her class origin and racializes her as a barbarian, the process capturing a rural-urban divide. The modern school that expels the protagonist, Wang Yaming, is not an institution that promotes upward mobility but a tool to perpetuate class privileges. Although the narrator shows occasional sympathy with Wang Yaming, under the influence of class difference female solidarity is not achieved.

 

August 2023: Lang Wang has received her doctoral degree in comparative literature from Purdue University. She is currently an assistant professor in English and Comparative Literature at Beijing Institute of Technology. She specializes in French and Chinese women's literature, feminism, gender studies, and ecocriticism. Her publications have appeared in The French Review, French Studies Bulletin, International Comparative Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and are forthcoming in Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

 

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Richardson, Brian . 2024. Misreadings, Self-Misprisions, and Fabricated Resolutions in Joyce's 'The Dead'. Partial Answers 22(1): 55-70. . Publisher's Version

Joyce’s “The Dead” contains a number of partial and misleading narratives related in an unexpected manner, and as such greatly rewards a narrative centered analysis. Misinterpretation is general in this work; one might argue that the text is primarily a record of Gabriel’s repeated misinterpretations of the people and narratives around him. This is true of the women he interacts with; most egregiously, he does not even imagine that his wife has a story independent of her life with him. An attention to narrative and interpretation in turn leads to a different reading of the ending of the text. Far from being a definitive epiphany that finally reveals the bitter truth about himself and his marriage, Gabriel's closing convictions are yet additional misinterpretations about his marriage, his situation, and his life, and rather Romantic ones at that, which the reader trained by this text would be wise to question and reject in favor of a more skeptical conclusion. In addition, the kind of third-person narration with a single focalizer for nearly all the text lends itself to the kind of misleading narration which Margot Norris has identified; this strategy of narration reproduces and even re-enacts the text’s larger hermeneutical dramas, as the reader is challenged to see though a rhetoric that naturalizes an ideological perspective that seems untroubled by imperial rule.

 

August 2023: Brian Richardson is a Professor in the English Department of the University of Maryland and former president of the Joseph Conrad Society of America. He is the author of several books, including Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006); A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019), and The Reader in Modernist Fiction (2024). He is the editor or co-editor of many volumes, including Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices (2009) and a special issue of Conradiana on “Conrad and the Reader” (2002). He has written numerous articles and book chapters on 20th-century authors, especially Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, in which he discusses class, voice, interpretation, plot, closure, the sense of touch, the reader, character, and the narratives of literary history. He is currently completing a book on Joseph Conrad and the making of modernist fiction. Website https://brianerichardson.weebly.com