This article reads Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as a rewriting of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s assumption, which interprets In Search as a complex exercise in decoding signs, the article claims that Fun Home stages the attempt of its protagonists, Alison and her father Bruce, to understand the truth about each other. In particular, it addresses the issues of sexual identity, spatiality, and death as some of the crucial motifs in In Search that Bechdel retrieves in Fun Home. The protagonists’ “experiment in decoding” turns out to be a failure, due to the impossibility of understanding and deciphering the signs of each other’s intimate truths.

In 1910–1911, T. S. Eliot studied Henri Bergson’s books and attended his lectures in Paris. Initially fascinated by Bergson’s ideas, Eliot experienced what he called a “conversion” to Bergsonism, but as shown by poetry and prose written during and after the lectures, he quickly became disillusioned. This essay discusses the Bergsonian claims that intrigued Eliot in the winter of 1910–1911, the skepticism revealed in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and other poems dated March 1911, and the critique presented in a previously unpublished lecture for the Harvard Philosophical Club in December 1913. Eliot concludes that dualism is intractable, for the material and moral realms cannot be merged. This conclusion, formative in his intellectual development, is illuminating in regard to his poetry and criticism. It is also suggestive in regard to the more general modernist motif regarding the difficulty of making connections.

What pertinence might the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre hold for Philip Roth’s brief but provocative contribution to Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary collection, “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals: A Symposium” (1961), and for Roth’s attitude to Judaism and ethnic bias generally? The article suggests that ideas advanced in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) helped Roth shape his symposium essay and, more importantly, his early skepticism about religious affiliation grounded in hatred and chauvinism rather than in living, generative faith. The association of Sartrean ideas — the distinction, in Being and Nothingness (1943), between Being in-itself and Being for-itself and Sartre’s views on anti-Semitism — figures in Roth’s comments on twentieth-century Jewish outlook and in his formulation of “Grossbartism.” This existential mix may owe something, as well, to the Heideggerian state of being “thrown” — insofar as Sartre appropriates the concept to discuss the prospect of being thrown into a trans-cultural state of tolerance, a state that Roth seems to desire for Jew and gentile alike.

Children of the Ghetto: Zangwill’s title announced his intention to explore how the Ghetto experience had shaped new English residents who came from Eastern Europe and Russia. Instead of the “Pale of Settlement,” the term for the residence of the Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia, he turned to Italian Jewish history and the Venetian/Italian language to designate what the Jews had become in their long European exile. In Zangwill’s view, the Ghetto was the defining space of modern Jewish life and — not exactly a promised land — generated the psychological drive in the Jews to imagine alternative modern Jewish spaces. The gates of the Ghetto are not easily forgotten: internalized, the Jewish space of the Venice and Rome Ghettos becomes in modern times a psychological force, and even we might say, a central trope in the discourse of modern Jewish experience. The institutionalized practices of the English, “especially regarding matters of education, language, and the poor, prompt the immigrant Ashkenazim” to be, in Zangwill’s phrasing, “their own Ghetto gates.” Like their Italian Ghetto forebears, these immigrant Ashkenazim in England must forge their identities out of an either/or situation.Zangwill, novelist, social critic, and ethnographer devised in Children of the Ghetto a cultural turnabout of the European stigmatized Jewish stereotype.

Fiction writer, playwright, and political activist for whom Jewish identity, if not ritual strictness, remained central, Israel Zangwill used the term ghetto in his early work as shorthand for a Jewish traditionalism that could be viewed as either nurturing or confining as Jews entered modern life; in his 1898 Dreamers of the Ghetto, the ghetto of Venice signified both.  Later, however, Zangwill looked beyond the ghetto to other sites and cities of Italy as inspiration for a wider philosophy. In Italian Fantasies (1910), Zangwill used the genre of the travel essay to develop ideas about art, religion, and society that grounded culture in the experienced life of place. At the same time, he sought to solidify his credentials as a significant figure in European thought, a Jewish commentator who was also cosmopolitan and modern, heir to a Victorian legacy of social critique.

Cosmopolitanism need not always be a duty, an identity, or a condition; it can just as easily be a moment or a memory, an experience that can vanish in a puff of smoke. This article explores the surprisingly similar ways that Zeno’s Conscience (1923) by Italo Svevo and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) by Art Spiegelman imaginatively reframe cosmopolitanism through the figure of cigarette smoking. In particular, it expands attention to No Towers past the discourse of trauma and connects the new graphic canon to a canonical work of literary modernism. The chain-smoking figures at the center of these two texts give us an image of the cosmopolitan which is reducible neither to the Enlightenment ideal of the supranational liberal citizen, nor to its contemporary idiom, the fluid and flexible post-identitarian subject. Instead, both writers use cigarette smoking to delineate an apt cosmopolitan resident for two cities on the verge of being transformed by warlike nationalisms. Where Svevo uses nicotine addiction to connect his twitchy protagonist to prewar Trieste, Spiegelman insistently, but ironically accumulates forms of memory and identity around smoking, from his image as human and as “Maus,” to the smoke of the ovens at Auschwitz, to the burning of the Towers themselves. But this work of belonging is interrupted in No Towers by the New York City smoking ban, which displaces an apoplectic Spiegelman from his briefly “rooted” cosmopolitanism. Ultimately, this article explores an unlikely seam of detail, and a consistent image of the cosmopolitan, which persists across the borders between the twentieth century and the twenty-first, between the modern and the postmodern, and between the First World War and the War on Terror.

The paper focuses on the four “pedagogical” novels by writer and journalist Frida Vigdorova, mostly known for her records of the Joseph Brodsky’s trial of 1964. These novels written in 1949–1958, as well as some of her journalistic publications of the 1950s, made her one of the most influential publicists who wrote on the problems of school and schoolchildren. The article traces Vigdorova’s key ideas and literary techniques back to the second half of 1940s, when she wrote her first novels, first and foremost My Class (1949). Although Vigdorova was regarded as a follower of Anton Makarenko, the famous pedagogue of the 1920s and 1930s, one may find a significant shift in her interpretation of his theory. The main difference consists in her emphasis on the idea of the “individual approach” to each child, by contrast to the earlier attention to the issues of the collective. This idea is represented as a strong moral demand on every teacher or educator. The author shows that this idea was “re-invented” in the late 1940s by the officials of the ministry of education and pedagogical publicists in order to respond to a strong pressure of the pedagogical corps that had to face severe problems that emerged as direct social effects of WWII and were exacerbated by the banning of all psychological approaches to children after 1936. The “individual approach” becomes not only an ideological, but also a literary basis of all Vigdorova’s novels, a structural principle of her narratives.

In seventeenth-century literature on the Grand Tour, the ghetto of Venice appears as a place of cross-cultural exchange and misunderstanding, a contact zone that stimulates interrogation and translation, comparison and projection, prejudice and discovery. The ghetto goes into eclipse in the English letters of the Enlightenment, to re-emerge in a number of Victorian texts. The essays of this forum show how the renewed interest in the Italian Ghettoes served two late Victorian writers, Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy, to reflect on their own modern British and Jewish identity.

This paper argues that the term “comics” can and should be used to refer to prints from early modern England. We have ample reason to shift the starting date for comics to at least the seventeenth century, if not earlier, within the English-speaking world. The invention of print stimulated the creation, adoption, and codification of elements of the comics form. Print also changed the quantity and quality of social encounters with the comics form. Readings from “A true discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter” and The Triumphs of God’s Revenge Against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Murther demonstrate that scholars of the comics canon must turn their attention to the early modern English print.

An attempt to elucidate Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic essay “The Translator’s Task,” followed by an analysis of two approaches to its meaning: the philological-historical, represented by Peter Szondi, and the deconstructionist, used by Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson. In spite of the radical difference between the two, they are surprisingly shown to meet in their final assessment of Benjamin’s intended meaning.

In “Nutting,” which is comprised of a tissue of allusions to Paradise Lost, William Wordsworth carries on a sustained though enigmatic conversation with his great predecessor John Milton.  The speaker in the poem describes a recollected boyhood episode of raiding a bower of hazel trees in terms borrowed from Milton’s descriptions of the tempter Satan and the tempted Eve and Adam. Wordsworth rewrites and internalizes in a compressed lyric space the drama played out in Paradise Lost, choosing a narrative in which the individual falls without external provocation, as both ravager and ravaged.  Attention to the Miltonic elements in “Nutting” suggests, pace Harold Bloom, that, far from experiencing an “anxiety of influence” as he contemplates Milton, Wordsworth finds the example of Milton uniquely enabling, to the extent that assimilation of Milton’s poetry becomes for Wordsworth a condition of writing poetry. What Wordsworth inherits from Milton is, the essay argues, a deep balance of delight and sadness, of joy and sorrow, a balance arising from the sense that the world in which we live is at once a place of exile from paradise and a paradisal home.

Wordsworth’s greatest poetry represents the most fundamental of human volitions. This is the will to achieve a wholeness of experience that is identical to the will to poetry itself. “Yew-Trees” is an exemplary representation of that will. In the 1815 Preface to his Poems Wordsworth, speaking of Milton’s poetry, locates the structure of the will to poetry — the volition for represented wholeness of experience — in “alternations” between the points of view of “unity” and “multitude.” The meanings and usages of these terms are not self-evident. In fact, the provenience of this terminology and structure are profoundly Kantian, likely derived, most immediately, from F. A. Nitsch’s General and Introductory View of Professor Kant’s Principles (London, 1796). Coleridge, who was himself early indebted to Nitsch’s Kant book and other Kantian sources, willfully repressed yet, in spite of himself, vividly, even if obliquely, recorded his recognition of Wordsworth’s will to poetry and, correlatively, of Wordsworth’s Miltonic and Kantian wholeness of experience, in “Yew-Trees.” In Nitsch’s Kantian terms, Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees” represents an “unconditioned concurrence [that] excludes the conditions of time.” This “mutual concurrence” engenders a simultaneity of effect and cause: (a) The desire or will created by such a whole of experience “inclines to disinterestedness” and “the way to virtue.” (b) The desire or will to form such a “whole . . . may be denominated the grand object of human happiness.” This “happiness” is a fulfillment of the will to the “highest good.” In “Yew-Trees” we encounter, concretely, a will to poetry that is the primary volition to grasp a wholeness of experience. Achieved, as it must be, from the point of view not only of the self but of the coexistence of all the entities of nature, the wholeness of such experience necessarily includes a moral purposiveness aimed at the good of the largest possible community.