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.

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.

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.

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 Studies, Literature and Theology, Nabokov Online Journal, Nabokov Studies, The Nabokovian, Religion and the Arts and Religion & Literature (forthcoming).

In the early 20^th 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. 

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 20^th-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

Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury attempts to represent first-person experience in a radical fashion. In what I call (paradoxically) “free indirect discourse in the first person,” Faulkner ostensibly presents both thought thought and thought below the level of awareness together in one stream of text. The Quentin section in particular relies on an idealistic picture of language as meaningful in itself, apart from any intersubjective context or significant use, as though we could bypass communication and look inside Quentin’s head, finding not the brain but the “exact language” of his conscious life. I consider this temptation by way of Wittgenstein’s critique of the privacy of the mental. Wittgenstein’s aim, I argue, is not to deny or demote interiority, but rather to impugn a certain picture of how “the inner” must look — a realm composed of private objects to which the “I” alone has access. I thus suggest that we think of Quentin as an experiment, an appeal. Faulkner tries to reveal a mind in the brutal fullness of its suffering without forcing that mind to address us: to tell us that they suffer. I contend that this appeal fails, and in failing reveals the manner in which the (not-so-private) mind is essentially embedded in a shared, intersubjective world.

August 2023: Daniel Schwartz is a PhD student in English at Brandeis University. His work examines the breakdown of mimesis in modernist literature.

From approximately 1500 to 1650, English references to sulfur’s stench focused on sensory indications of hell, demons, and wickedness in worldly environments. Thereafter, most English references to the pungent rock turned proportionately to technics, medicine, and progress. The increasing presence of sulfuric miasma within secularizing applications for fumigations, gunpowder, and industry led to a limiting of the role of sulfur as a signifier of hell within English environments. Due to economic incentives, supernatural discourses on brimstone atmospheres faced semantic dispersion, as sulfur took on a growing number of connotations instead of remaining a significant environmental signifier of the scent of the devil and his toadies. These shifting literary associations for sulfur exemplify the fluctuating powers of the market, religious voices, biopolitical networks, and the state to define what is matter out of place, or what can be considered too environmentally toxic for economic consumption. Revising the prominence of synchronic work in Early Modern Studies that critiques the disenchantment thesis, and redeploying theory from Douglas, Jameson, Greenblatt, Eagleton, and Rancière, this essay highlights connections between the History of Ideas, Environmental Studies, and literary criticism through asserting that the sheer abundance of sulfuric substances in the environment, caused by increased uses for the rock in the coal-fired furnaces of the eighteenth century, added to a literary dislodgment of mystical definitions of sulfur’s smell as signifying evil. As the Industrial Revolution stuffed chimneys with additional sulfur compounds, material encounters with brimstone became common. Continuously taught that sulfur meant profit and purity, reformed English noses found less sin in the smell of acrid sulfur smoke. This analysis portrays that within literatures that included associations to sulfur, the impending Anthropocene was tested, greenwashed, and approved by the masses of the disenchanting English public sphere.

August 2023: Andrew Kettler taught at the University of Toronto from 2017 to 2019 before serving as an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 2019-2020 academic year. He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina-Palmetto College. His work has appeared in Senses and Society, Interface, Human Rights Review, the Journal of American Studies, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Patterns of Prejudice, and the Australian Feminist Law Journal. His monograph, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), focuses on the development of racist semantics concerning miasma and the contrasting expansion of aromatic consciousness in the making of subaltern resistance to racialized olfactory discourses of state, religious and slave masters.

The term “narrative” has become ubiquitous in public discourse, but to date little work has been done to explore how vitally it is related both historically and theoretically to another contemporary buzzword: creativity. By addressing this lacuna this essay seeks not only to illuminate the popularity of narrative as a mode of knowledge, but to shed new light on its relationship to another core concept in the field: fictionality. The essay argues that the narrative turn and the contemporary boom in instrumental storytelling have been facilitated by a lexical and semantic shift from narrative as artefact to narrative as process, and that this shift is the result of ongoing historical intersections with new secularised and democratised theories of creativity as a human faculty. By tracing this shift we can better understand the contested history of fictionality, particularly in relation to debates about the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, and bring a new approach to the epistemological underpinings of the narrative turn in the academy and the subsequent popular appeal to personal storytelling in the networked public sphere.

August 2023: Paul Dawson is the author of three monographs: The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel (OSU Press, 2023), The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction (OSU Press, 2023), and Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005). He is co-editor, with Maria Mäkelä, of the Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory (Routledge, 2022) and guest editor of a special issue of Poetics Today on “Narrative Theory and the History of the Novel” (2018). He is winner of the 2010 prize for Best Essay in Narrative; his essays have appeared in journals such as ELH, Style, Studies in the Novel, and International Journal of Cultural Studies. Paul is also a poet whose first book, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), won the national IP Picks Best Poetry award in Australia. He teaches in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales and in 2023 is President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.

Five issues stand out in the Book of Esther: political feasting, inter-sex conflicts, intra-sex competition, genocidal threats, and the absence of God. Central to these problems is the basic tenet of Persian imperialism, for imperial governmentality is linked to the techniques of judicial, disciplinary, and panoptic power as well as the patriarchal power of (ab)using women to ensure the smooth functioning of family and empire. To rule a multiracial regime, the king’s policies can quickly change from racial assimilation to persecution and later strategic integration. From the point of view of the Jews, multiracial encounters often lead to the birth of hybrid identities, ambivalent mimicry, and racial anxiety or pride. Esther’s survival has much to do with her tactful negotiation with her abused state: she adopts a deracialized profile, becomes a beauty queen, and devises a drama-queen persona to save her people because Haman’s intercessory act is deemed by King Ahasuerus to be a case of sexual assault. The ending highlights three responses: the king accumulates more resources, the Jews celebrate their survival, and Esther positions herself as the queen of vigilance and self-governance. The post-traumatic ethos is not about a descent into cognitive chaos but the resolution to organize the grief-stricken collective memory and broker truthful relationships with neighbors, the self, and God.

March 2023: Magdalen Wing-chi Ki (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) is Associate Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. She has published papers in Philosophy and Literature, Brontë Studies, Poe Studies, English Studies, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Literature Compass, Mississippi Quarterly, Renascence, Dalhousie Review, Renascence, and Theological Studies. Her books include Jane Austen and the Dialectic of Misrecognition (Peter Lang, 2005) and Jane Austen and Altruism (Routledge, 2020).

The paper offers a comment, from the platform of traditional Jewish exegesis, on some of the issues that Magdalen Ki’s article deals with from a more presentist perspective. It highlights the subtlety of the rabbinical approach as well as its modernity and the complexity of the issues that it raises — social (the condition of women and of minorities), philosophical (the absence of God) and symbolic (intertextual reminiscences).

In particular, it is difficult to understand the armed struggle with which this story ends without placing it back into its precise historical context. This episode, which tells of the first organized genocidal project directed against the Jewish people, will serve as a paradigm for the whole history of antisemitism.

March 2023: 

Betty Rojtman is Professor Emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been the Katherine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature. As the chair of the Department of French studies, she has founded the Desmarais Center for French Culture at the Hebrew University, and headed it for many years. Her current research deals with Transcendence and Negativity in traditional Jewish sources (Midrash, Hassidism, Kabbalah) and (post)modern texts (literature, philosophy).

Professor Rojtman is the author of several books, including Feu noir sur Feu Blanc: Essai sur l'herméneutique juive (Verdier, 1986); English translation, by Steven Rendall, Black Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah, Prefaced by Moshe Idel, 1998), Une grave distraction. Preface by Paul Ricoeur (Balland, 1991), Une Rencontre improbable: Equivoques de la destinée (Gallimard, 2002).

In parallel to her academic work, she writes meditative and poetical essays (Le Pardon à la lune: Essai sur le tragique biblique, Gallimard, 2001. trans. Hebrew by Nir Ratzkovski, Seli’hat halevana, Al hatragiut hatana’hit, Jerusalem, Carmel, 2008), Moïse, prophète des nostalgies (Gallimard, 2007).

Her most recent essay (Une faim d’abîme. La fascination de la mort dans l’écriture contemporaine, Desclée de Brouwer, 2019), has come out in English as Longing for the Abyss: The fascination for death in Contemporary French Thought, trans. Bartholomew Begley (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020) and in Hebrew as Kemiha Latehom. Kessem Hamavet bahagut hatzarfatit shel hameah haesserim, trans. Itay Blumenzweig (Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2020).

Emile Durkheim was the first scholar to treat suicide as a sociological phenomenon, collective rather than private, thus illustrating the failure of modern individualism. This paper demonstrates that the tragic endings of Goethe’s Werther and Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis anticipate Durkheim’s suicide classification: Goethe and Foscolo created heroes whose tragic action accords with the basic elements belonging to Durkheim’s typologies.

March 2023: Alberto Castelli is Professor of Human Science at Hainan University, China. He is mainly engaged with Modernism, Postmodern dynamics, and Cross-Cultural Studies. Castelli's publications include: “Bipolarism in the Nineteenth Century Novel” published by University of Toronto Quarterly and “Perspective on Asia: Is China Kitsch?” in International Journal of Asian Studies (Cambridge University Press). Email: 182034@hainanu.edu.cn

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” most inhabitants of the imaginary town fare well, but only on the condition that an unidentified child imprisoned in a dark room suffers: the well-being of most is founded on depriving the child of the inherent right to equality. Such an allegorical image of the suffering child embodies the hierarchical oppositions between adults and children, employers and employees, rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged. This paper analyzes the art of Le Guin’s story and its functioning as a testing ground for ethical theories.

March 2023: Hawk Chang is Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. His research has appeared in journals such as Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, English Studies, Children's Literature in Education, The Explicator, ANQ, Journal of English Studies, Neohelicon, Changing English, Tamkang Review, Wenshan Review, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature, and CLCWeb, among others. His monograph Traditions and Difference in Contemporary Irish Short Fiction: Ireland Then and Now was published by Springer in February 2021.

Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrote the Jero plays (The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis) thirteen years apart, and they shed light on the distresses of a society in transition from colony to postcolony. Philosopher Achille Mbembe describes the postcolony as a site of high levels of corruption and appropriation of wealth by a ruling elite, a place where colonial rules linger and disrupt the workings of the state. Characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation defined by excess and a lack of proportion, in the postcolony, regimes of violence are prone to celebrating their own grandeur through macabre public events such as executions. Soyinka satirizes the protagonist of the Jero plays, a Machiavellian con artist who wraps himself in the cloak of Pentecostal Born-Again Christianity, for using blackmail and grift to secure a profitable spiritual monopoly on Bar Beach (to say prayers before and after each execution, to administer last rites, and to preach on the evils of crime). Through depictions of venality at every level of society, the Jero plays illustrate the difficulty of eradicating colonial legacies and demonstrate the deleterious effects of entrenched social and political corruption on daily life in the postcolony.

March 2023: Mark S. Ferrara is associate professor of English at State University of New York and author of six books including Palace of Ashes, Sacred Bliss, and American Community. He has taught for universities in South Korea, China, and on a Fulbright scholarship in Turkey.