June 2014: Dr. Frederik Van Dam is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). He has published several articles on liberal and formal aspects of Anthony Trollope’s novels and is one of the principal organizers of the Trollope Bicentennial Conference (17-19 September 2015, KU Leuven). He is now embarking on a project that proposes to examine the interplay between English and Irish literature in the context of British foreign policy and the Risorgimento. His work has been supported by the Research Council Flanders (FWO) and the Research Fund KU Leuven (BOF).

Judith Levy specializes in the novel, particularly the modernist and post-colonial novel. She is the author of V. S. Naipaul: Displacement and Autobiography (1995). She has also written on memory and the concept of boundaries in literature and visual art and the relationship between them.

updated March 23, 2016 

The article explores the thematics of breathing in Paul Celan’s (1920–1970) poems and poetics. It is argued that in Celan breathing is a holistic phenomenon and an essential part of the poems’ materiality, a force that animates both the poetic and bodily corpus. Thus we ask here, by what poetic means written and oral word and respiration are connected. The bodily, temporal, spiritual, inspirational and interpretational aspects of breathing are addressed in order to understand how respiration as a bodily phenomenon becomes poetic and what kind of thematics are thus evoked. Exploring these thematics, including divine inspiration, asubjective experience, and non-causal temporality, Celan’s oeuvre is read in the context of Büchner, Heidegger, Mandelstam, and Abulafia.

Developing in a specifically religious register a poetic epistemology, this essay argues for rehabilitating revelation as a model of knowing that challenges some of our modern and especially postmodern prejudices against striving to envision truth as a whole. It aligns these results with some of the recent advances in critical theory, for example, by Frederic Jameson, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Zizek, who likewise attempt to break through the confinements of strictly scientific epistemology. Extending the range of such contemporary critiques in directions suggested by Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and Blanchot, the essay exposes the deep roots in canonical and classical humanities tradition of such revisionary thinking of knowledge as finally a form of “revelation.” The kind of wholeness and the ideal of universality embodied in the epic and in humanities knowledge in general appear in a striking new light based not on the concept, with its inevitably exclusionary logic (A versus not-A) but rather on a negative-theological thinking of the not-All which involves, nevertheless, a relatedness to all without restrictions or exclusions.  This thinking-beyond-the-concept is shown to drive the dynamics of imaginative expression striving towards epic wholeness.

Ortwin de Graef is Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at KU Leuven. He is the author of two books on Paul de Man and has published widely on Romantic and post-Romantic writing ranging from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and George Eliot through Virginia Woolf and Pearl S. Buck to Hafid Bouazza and Alan Warner. His principal research interests are the Very-Long-Nineteenth-Century ideologies of sympathy, science, and the State reflected and refracted through the transmission technologies of the literary.

Updated March 5, 2014

This article discusses the challenges involved in the formation of a “genre” of Korean adoptee autobiographical writing. It provides a brief outline of the political and historical background of the phenomenon of Korean international adoption and discuss a text that frames some of the problems involved in defining the genre of Korean adoptee autobiography — namely Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s Somebody’s Daughter (2005). The author of this book was not adopted, and the book is a novel, a fictional text; at the same time, given the fact that half of the text is written in first-person — a Korean adoptee recounting her return to Korea — Somebody’s Daughter at times resembles an adoptee autobiography in an uncanny way. This resemblance is further enhanced by the fact that neither the text nor the paratext indicate whether the author is an adoptee or not. The book is indirectly offering the illusion of an “authentic” testimony of adoptee experience (it has indeed been used in academic contexts as an example thereof). But does it matter that the author was not adopted? Would it have made any difference — and for whom — had she been an adoptee? Is it even possible to speak of an “authentic” testimony of adoptee experience, regardless of whether the author is an adoptee or not? The article attempts to clarify some of these issues, while arguing that a novel like Lee’s challenges the genre of adoptee autobiography but also helps to define its potential.

June 2014: Christoph Irmscher is Provost Professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. His books include The Poetics of Natural History, Longfellow Redux, and Public Poet, Private Man as well as the co-edited collection A Keener Perception:  Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (with Alan Braddock, College of William and Mary).  For the Library of America, he has edited John James Audubon's Writings and Drawings. His most recent book, the biography Louis Agassiz:  Creator of American Science, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was selected as “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times Book Review.  Christoph Irmscher’s fields of expertise include 19^th and 20^th century American and Canadian literature, with a special focus on nature and science writing, history of the book, and poetry.  He was featured in two documentaries about John James Audubon, the award-winning American Masters program Drawn from Nature and, more recently, A Summer of Birds, produced by Louisiana Public Television.  His online exhibit on H. W Longfellow won a Leab Award from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. He can be reached through his homepage at www.christophirmscher.com.

Tolstoy’s concise, highly suggestive short novel Hadji Murad (posthumously published in 1912) emphasizes war but also includes two distinct depictions of erotic attachment across the Russian/Muslim border.

If Stendhal was a theorist of love before becoming a novelist, and if Lawrence’s love novels became increasingly expository, Tolstoy represents a third alternative: his best thinking about love takes place in narrative. As Isaiah Berlin noted in a different context, he was a Heraclitean fox, splendidly attentive to varied details, rather than a hedgehog expounding one big idea.

Hadji Murad’s first key set of scenes gives parallel accounts of Nicholas I’s and the imam Shamil’s love lives, which undermine sharp distinctions between Christian monogamy and Muslim polygamy. Another group of scenes shows the responses of Murad and the Russian army officer Butler to Marya Dmitrievna, the lower-class mistress of another officer. These scenes of erotic attraction explore potential disruptions in boundaries between cultures and classes alike only to drop the possibility when this war-torn novel ends in brutal tragedy.

Further comparison with Stendhal and Lawrence addresses Fabrizio and Clélia in The Charterhouse of Parma and love conflict in “The Princess.” In highlighting each novelist’s fascination with love across borders, these situations bring out Tolstoy’s relative restraint in an intertextual series where treatment of this motif led to operatic grand passion or intimacy gone horribly awry.

Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World:  Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.

Updated: March 20, 2016

June 2014: Erik Gray is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  His criticism, including The Poetry of Indifference (2005) and Milton and the Victorians (2009), focuses on poetry, primarily of nineteenth-century England, though he is now at work on a transhistorical study of European love poetry.  Most recently he helped edit Alfred Tennyson's Selected Poetry (Broadview, 2014).

June 2014: In her research, Dr. Naomi Rokotnitz explores the intersections between literature, philosophy, and science, investigating  the relations between knowledge acquisition, inter-personal communication, moral accountability and bodily modes of reception and perception. Author of Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and numerous articles, she teaches at Tel-Aviv University. 

Questions play a prominent role in W. B. Yeats’s mature work. This essay discusses the use of questions in three of Yeats’s most renowned interrogative lyrics: “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Among School Children.” By reviewing the critical discourse regarding these canonical texts and locating a key semantic commonality linking the three poems, the article posits that questions reveal a revolutionary approach to epistemology that distinguishes Yeats as a poet whose lyric form breaks the monologic mold. Yeats’s interrogative verse is ultimately shown to offer a new form of dialogic knowledge that addresses an interrogated other as a means of inquiring what wisdom poetry affords in a world beset by epistemic doubt.

Elie Wiesel’s Night, which first appeared in French as La nuit in 1958, may well loom as the archetypal Holocaust survivor narrative. But it was only in 1994, in his memoirs, that the author addressed the fact that Night is part adaptation, part translation, of a Yiddish work he originally published in Buenos Aires in 1956: …Un di velt hot geshvign (…And the World Was Silent). Critics have read discrepancies between the two versions in various ways: favorably, as resulting from appreciation for the distinct literary idiom of each language; provocatively, as the consequence of Wiesel’s desire to cast the Holocaust in Christian, rather than Jewish, terms; and disparagingly, as part of a strategy to hide ideologically unpalatable, ethnocentric attitudes from a wider audience.

This article reviews the merits and flaws of these interpretations of differences in versions of Night. Further, it offers a new approach that involves a re-examination of Wiesel’s relationship with François Mauriac, the towering writer who encouraged his entry into French letters.

In mid-nineteenth century America, science education was often presented as a panacea, capable of providing students with mental discipline, moral instruction, and useful knowledge.  In her 1871 novel, Little Men, Louisa May Alcott assesses the ability of science education to fulfill these aims, selectively embracing some of the beliefs, goals, and methods promoted by advocates of science education while critiquing others.  Unlike these advocates, Alcott highlights the differences between children and their diverse educational goals, presenting science education chiefly as a means to an end. Alcott’s investment in science education is tempered by her commitment to moral and domestic education. Through the character of Dan she demonstrates that increased scientific literacy does not necessarily lead to moral growth or future domestic happiness.  Instead, science and the domestic prove incommensurable throughout the novel: the students who most heartily embrace science, Dan and Nan, are also the most decidedly undomestic graduates of Plumfield, as their science education gives them access to alternatives to home life, for good or for ill.

Susan Fenimore Cooper’s slow-moving nature journal, Rural Hours (1850), is an education of the senses in which both author and reader learn where to look and how to look.  Her creative decision represent herself as a “gleaner” and to both use and subtly subvert the seasonal cycle (so that we may see more deeply, more intimately, more truthfully) is part of a larger critique of the paternalistic spirit that helped found the very place she writes about — Cooperstown, New York. More unobtrusively than Thoreau, Cooper develops her own sophisticated version of an “ecology of reading,” brilliantly anticipating recent attempts by ecocritics to imagine a “democracy of all life-forms” (Timothy Morton).

The narrative of Joseph Wright’s figures is eloquent and complex. In many ways, the sitters defined themselves and their cultural aspirations for posterity through clothing, posture and props. However, Wright subverts the tenets of eighteenth-century portraiture as he attempts to identify the physical markers that give the viewer a closer understanding of character. The painting of Thomas Day, for example, is far removed from the conventional portraiture of the wealthy gentleman. Its signifiers suggest the complexities of Day’s character. Most of what we know of the eccentric Day has come to us through Anna Seward’s unorthodox biography of Erasmus Darwin and his circle. This text is supplemented by letters between Seward and Walter Scott, which disclose the publishing censorship levelled at her memoir of Day when she attempted to find a psychological cause for his experiments with education and his rejection of wealth and luxury. Her private letters give an alternative view of the public figure that was part of her literary coterie, her “dear Quartetto.” This essay discusses the representation of character in Wright’s portrait of Thomas Day and decodes its cultural markers through a synthesis of painting and word-painting.