The Dybbuk, written by An-sky in Russian, triumphantly staged by Vakhtangov in Hebrew (Moscow, 1922), subsequently a seminal work of the Israeli national theater, often attracted harsh criticism and was a subject of many controversies. While under fire from Jewish Communists for its choice of “bourgeois” Hebrew rather than “proletarian” Yiddish Habima became a cult with the Russian intellectual audience not only  out of reverence for the language of the Bible but also  in the face of the Bolshevik persecutions of religion. It was natural for the artistic public to feel solidarity with the spiritual drama on the stage, made universal by the genius of Vakhtangov — given that was the only place in Moscow where one spoke of the spirit at all. And yet it was not without reservations that the play was received by fellow actors and directors. One piece of evidence to this is a parody review that originated in Moscow Art Theater’s First Studio. This paper is an attempt to interpret the review and explain what in the  production of The Dybbuk could irritate fellow Russian artists.

January 2012: Jeffrey Andrew Barash is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amiens, France.  His publications have focused on the themes of political philosophy, historicism, and modern German thought. He is the author of three books:  Heidegger et son siècle:  Temps de l'Être, temps de l'histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (second, paperback edition, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), and Politiques de l'histoire:  L'historicisme comme promesse et comme mythe (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). He has edited The Social Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). He is currently completing a book entitled Collective Memory and the Historical Past and is also preparing a work on political mythology in the modern world.     

January 2012: Anke Gilleir is currently associate professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Leuven (Belgium). She has published on German women’s literature (18^th--20^th centuries), minority literature in Germany and Europe, gender and literature/literary theory, literature and politics, and historiography of literature. Some recent publications are: Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era. Leiden-Boston: Brill 2010 (with Alicia Montoya  and Suzan van Dijk); Textmaschinenkörper. Genderorientierte Lektüren des Androiden. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2006 (with Eva Kormann and Angelika Schlimmer). With Barbara Hahn (Vanderbilt University) she has co-edited a volume on the work of the German-Jewish author and philosopher Margarete Susman: Margarete Susma: Grenzgänge zwischen Dichtung, Philosophie und Kulturpolitik (Göttingen: Wallstein 2012).

June 2012: Anne-Julia Zwierlein is a professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Website: http://www.uni-regensburg.de/sprache-literatur-kultur/anglistik/staff/zwierlein/index.html

Pieter Vermeulen is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Stockholm University. His work in the fields of critical theory, contemporary Anglophone literature, and memory studies has been published in such journals as Arcadia, Criticism, Critique, Literature Compass, Mosaic, Postmodern Culture, and Textual Practice. His book on Geoffrey Hartman, Romanticism after the Holocaust, was republished by Continuum in paperback in the Spring of 2012.

Updated March 9, 2012

Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982) has been described as having a culturally Japanese location and setting, reflected in its stylized narrative subtlety and indistinctness. However, the functional stage of the novel is not a physical place but rather the recollections and thought processes of the protagonist, Etsuko, as she attempts to come to an understanding regarding her daughter Keiko’s suicide. The historical fact of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and its repercussions for the city and the nation both ground and symbolize Etsuko’s thoughts, her acts of repression and evasion in response to her submerged sense of personal guilt for Keiko’s death through her emigration and remarriage. Ishiguro evokes Etsuko’s inner life through narrative, characterization, and imagery, particularly that of living space. In Etsuko’s memories of Nagasaki, repression is seen at the level of the community of survivors, in interpersonal relationships, and in Etsuko’s cognitive actions of recollection and representation, which often indicate symbolic interconnections or meaningful lacunae caused by psychological repression. While criticism has tended to focus on how Etsuko’s unreliable narration affects the “truth” of the story, the narrative focuses on the ways in which Etsuko’s mental processes reflect a conflict between desire, evasion, and resolution.

Marco Caracciolo is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” Marco's work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (De Gruyter, 2014); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers' Engagement with Characters (University of Nebraska Press, 2016); and A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt; Ohio State University Press, 2016).

updated in February 2018

Antti Salminen is adjunct professor at University of Tampere, spezialized in philosophy of literature and historical avant-garde. He is editor-in-chief of the quarterly philosophical review niin & näin.

updated September 30, 2013

Lisbon holds a special place in Fernando Pessoa’s corpus because this text, uncharacteristically not signed by a heteronym, undertakes a quest for identity which fully coincides with that of his city. Lisbon establishes a reflexive relationship between the poet and his work, in so far as his meticulously evoked image extends over the most developed area of his poetics, that is, his personal mythology. The Portugese capital emerges as a personified city to which Pessoa gives a voice for the sake of constituting it as a language being, like Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague. Lisbon signals the temptation of encyclopedic literature, which relates back to the impossiblity of capturing the other in any way but as visions coming across names of places.

This paper attempts to draw a parallel between Fernão Mendes Pinto, the sixteenth-century adventurer, explorer and writer who spent twenty-one years travelling in the Middle and Far East, and Fernando Pessoa, the twentieth-century poet who spent his working life at the desks of commercial firms in downtown Lisbon. In Pinto’s case, the voyage was the actual physical movement from one place to another, through dangers and adventures, while in Pessoa the voyage was a immobile journey through the inner self. It is argued that Pinto’s book Peregrinação and Pessoa’s book Livro do desassossego can be read as entering a dialogue with each other.

June 2012: Stephanie M. Hilger is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, German, and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on gender, class, and race in eighteenth-century British, French, and German literature. She is the author of Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790–1805 (2009). Her articles have appeared in journals such as College Literature, Colloquia Germanica, Eighteenth-Century Studies, French Review, Lessing Yearbook, Neophilologus, Seminar, Women in German Yearbook, and in various edited collections. She was awarded a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study for her current book project, “The Warrior and the Traveler: Women in the French Revolution,” which examines the depiction of socially and politically active women in German literature during the thirty-year period following the French Revolution.

June 2012: Nicola Minott-Ahl is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Media and Society Program at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She teaches and writes on Adaptation Studies and British and French Literature of the long nineteenth century. Her particular fields of interest include historical fiction and the connection between architecture and novels that develops in early to mid-nineteenth century England and post-Revolutionary France. Her interest in the close connection between the visual arts and the printed word led to her exploration of the problematic relationship between film adaptations and their source texts. She is the author of “Does Jane Austen Write Screenplays? Mansfield Park and the Dilemma of Jane Austen in Film,” forthcoming in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, “Building Consensus: London, the Thames, and Collective Memory in the Novels of William Harrison Ainsworth,” and “Dystopia in Vanity Fair: The Nightmare of Modern London” which appeared in the Literary London Journal in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Her book, The Architectural Novel: How William Ainsworth, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas Constructed the National Identities of 19^th Century England and France is forthcoming from the Sussex Academic Press.

The ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche – in particular the will to power – are patent in the psychology and writings of Álvaro de Campos, who was supposedly born on the philosopher’s birthday, October 15th. Prose pieces such as “Notes for a non-Aristotelian Aesthetics,” with its definition of art as “a struggle to dominate others” and its notion of an aesthetics founded on power rather than on beauty, and the “Ultimatum,” with its explicit invocation of the Superman, make the naval engineer read at times like a Pessoan Zarathustra. I propose, however, that Nietzsche’s influence is more pervasive, informing Fernando Pessoa’s entire literary project, concerned as it was with personal transformation, on the one hand, and domination of other people – namely us his readers – on the other. Self-enlargement and self-proliferation were an ontological as well as aesthetic program, both realized and theorized by the creator of heteronyms.

This paper deals with three kinds of poetical nihilism: the annihilation of the poetic subject in Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic writing; the apophatic definition of the divine demiurge and its repercussion on the poet considered as a substitute of the demiurge in Paul Celan’s poetry; and the gradual disappearance of the poetical word in Edmond Jabès cycle “The Book of Questions.” It is an attempt to connect this three-fold process of annihilation with cultural-contextual (mostly linguistic) factors in the case of Pessoa; with philosophical-pragmatical principles in Paul Celan’s work, and with the poetics of the blank and silence in the case of Edmond Jabès. In spite of this compartamentalization, some overlapping between the nihilist paradigms may occur: Jabès occasionally indulges in a kind of parodic heteronymy, whereas Pessoa’s subjective nihilism reaches an objective dimension through a metaphoric equation between the void of the poetical Self and the non-existence of the Book.

Taking up leading threads from a response by Kent Puckett to the author’s previous essay in this journal on the syntactic figure of syllepsis in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, this article rounds out the exchange by pursuing the continuing literary force of such split grammar — long after Dickens, or the new examples here from Austen and Poe — as it appears in contemporary writers as different as John le Carré and Toni Morrison.  In answering Puckett’s call for an engagement with the mode of doubleness analyzed in William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral, it clarifies previous claims regarding an ethics of ambiguity in sylleptic grammar in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s work at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and poetics.  In the process, this response extends the philosophical reverberations of this marked syntactic trope to include the Wittgensteinian line of thought in J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, not only in their comments on “ordinary language” but in the sylleptic turns of their own writing.

The laws and the literature of a society both express and influence the attitudes and norms of its members. The law, however, has a conservative function, while literature can work to change opinions and, in the longer run, legal systems. This essay argues that legal discourse possesses an inherent narrative potential, giving rise to fictional stories that serve to investigate and expose the effects of particular laws. Like many other novels, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda seems to construct its plot on the basis of the reiterated question “But what if…?” exploring social and moral implications of inheritance law, in particular the principle of primogeniture. The two major strands of Eliot’s double plot, with Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda as the protagonists, together with the subplots involving a series of minor characters, embody four areas concerned with this theme: gambling; the duties that come with heritage; illegitimacy; and the conditions of women associated with a system based on privileging a male heir. By pressing the aesthetic effect of thematic recurrence as well as an element of readerly unease into the service of the ethical, this novel makes a powerful statement on the subject of inheritance. It may have contributed to social and political change, and counteracted the preserving effect of the law.