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.

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.