The article deals with records of thaumaturgic cures, especially a series of miracle cures taking place within an enclosed community of Colettine nuns in fifteenth-century Ghent. These miracles, all performed by the local founder and saint, Colette Boëllet, consisted in curing several nuns from acute and chronic illnesses. The pain of these illnesses is described in a superlatively extravagant mode, and the record, made by an external notary, is evidence of a “competition in suffering” among the nuns, with harmony restored through the common written testimony.

Literary undertakings of the Faust legend have traditionally associated the fate of the overreacher with a thematized fragmentation. On the level of plot, Faust is torn limb from limb or threatened to be thus handled by a devilish cohort; stylistically, the tight drama that unfolds in the protagonist’s study spirals into a disjointed account of royal courts and sidekick pranks. In John Banville’s Mefisto this fragmentation is articulated in intertextual links that open up the text to a rich anteriority. Signification is consequently produced both horizontally and vertically, both inside and outside the novel. This paper traces the antecedents of the Faustian intertexts present in the novel and test the effects of such accumulation on the practice of hermeneutic deciphering. It shows that Banville’s intertextuality itself functions as a Mephistophilian figure, a playful abundance that creates an obstacle for interpretation. Such a stylized chaos does not allow for a teleological reshuffling or re-ordering of the text into a meaningful and cohesive pattern. The reader, then, is enjoined not to re-order the text but to performatively re-enact it, a creative process that will have us thinking not inside but outside the hermeneutic circle.

If literary theory recently has undergone a fundamental change, the question arises: is it possible that the very nature of theory has itself changed?  This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” provides some strategies that allow us to take up this question. In order to make this clear, one must first bear in mind that Benjamin’s essay implies a new understanding of literary theory by stating that a general theory of understanding has to be designed by using the form of a translation theory that (in contrast to a simple translation) specifies the conditions that must be filled in order for the utterances of one’s own language to be seen as synonymous with those of a foreign language. Thus, like Donald Davidson after him, Benjamin had come to the conclusion that translation must be fused with the interpretational theory of translation in order to avoid infinite regresses. This, however, ultimately means that literary theory is — as pure or true language — the virtual goal, and not the precondition of any cognition that arises from the perspective of literary studies.

This paper discusses the aesthetic and social implications of enacted eyewitness accounts. For Brecht, the principles of eyewitness performance served as a “basic model” for contemporary epic theater as a performed critique of social life, with the “Street Scene” (1940) and a camp scene (1939/40) as the paradigmatic sites of eyewitness acts. With Brecht and Smith, who superimposes these sites in her multi-media work on the Brooklyn Crown Heights Race Riots in 1991 (1992-94), the theatricality of eyewitness accounts, their “uneasy” aesthetics and acting technique, becomes crucial to understanding the present moment in culture.  Concomitantly, enacted eyewitness accounts politicize and de-psychologize our understanding of their scenes. They are not about identity – what we are – but about personhood, about how we are as social creatures, in legal, aesthetic, and material terms.

This paper examines the climactic scene in Ian McEwan’s novel 2005 Saturday in which the protagonist's pregnant poet daughter fends off a home invasion by reciting Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” My broader goal is to demonstrate that McEwan constructs not a nostalgic longing for a Victorian past, but rather a moment of neo-Victorianism: one that turns to Victorian reflections upon domestic and foreign politics, history, and the literary form in order to make meaning in a contemporary literary or cultural text.   The essay explores the phenomenologies (and politics) of reading and re-reading, and works toward the idea that certain acts of postmodernist re-reading lead to a kind of reflection on literary influence that originates (at least for McEwan) with nineteenth-century literature. McEwan’s scene of the reading and rereading of “Dover Beach” in Saturday presents the Arnold poem as an always already reread text — in the sense both that it is a text that rereads itself (containing within the space of the poem oppositional readings of the self and the community), and that it is a text that rereads other, prior texts.

This paper delineates the early-modern re-conception of gender categories in the work of Margaret Cavendish, and her opposition of imagination and wit to the disenchanted reality produced by male thinkers of her time. Conceptions of “knowledge” and “truth” changed significantly during the first six decades of the seventeenth century, fashioning contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity. Against the background of the rise of modern science, within a system of epistemic hegemony synonymous with male strength and social superiority, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, initiated a tacit work of feminine redemption by endorsing and elaborating conceptions imposed by the dominating habits of thought of her time. Responding to those philosophical discourses in which intellectual inquiry had taken on the traits of an allegorical penetration of the masculine “mind” into the secrets of a feminine nature, Cavendish reconceived that mind as the “Rational Soule,” understood as the source and objective of human knowledge. Cavendish forged an epistemological system which was intended not to oppose this “patriarchal” system, but to define a fanciful and witty dimension parallel to the masculine dominion of objectivity, where she manifested and realized the inalienable right for a woman to think within the intimacy of her mind and her house. The privacy of her “solitary mind” was not a prison but the independent locus of feminine cognition and enfranchisement.

With a novelist’s attention to significant detail, in Life Studies Robert Lowell depicts a suite of connecting rooms in which generations of Lowells and Winslows enact their roles in a cultural narrative of the decline and fall of two of New England’s leading families. This paper focuses on three of those rooms – a dining room, a bedroom, and a ship’s cabin – and on how Lowell connects family history and cultural history through use of significant detail evoking Asian associations. Additional rooms, ranging from the prototypical Beacon Hill living room of the Boston Brahmins, to fictional rooms in New England crime novels, to an attic room in Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, are also glanced at on the way to “Father’s Bedroom” in Life Studies. By way of historical prologue to the cultural narrative inscribed in those rooms, the paper begins with a brief account of the origins of New England Orientalism in the China trade and the opening of Japan, before closely examining how Lowell tellingly integrates allusions to the China trade and New England Orientalism in “Fourth of July in Maine” and “Soft Wood,” where they link New England’s past and present, and are assimilated into a broad cultural critique. The detached, ironic rhetorical stance Lowell adopts as New England historian and cultural critic is less distanced, more complex in Life Studies, where he engages with a central personal theme, his problematic relationship with his father.

Frank Kearful is Professor of English at Bonn University, where he has taught since 1974. He has been a visiting professor at Tübingen University and Hamburg University, and before moving to Germany in 1972 he was an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He has written numerous articles on twentieth-century American poetry, is editor of The Robert Lowell Newsletter, and since 2003 he has written the annual chapter on American poetry since the 1940s for American Literary Scholarship.

Updated July 29, 2011

The essay addresses -- in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel -- the link between authority, ideology, and formal features of discourse in “we” fictional narratives. It presents three main types of relationships between the individual “I” narratives and the “we” group to which he or she belongs as well as between the “we” group and “other” (often hostile) groups. These types differ in the group’s stability and cohesion, the possibilities of transition from this group to another community, and the importance of the role attributed to the individual (or to a particular individual) and to other groups in constructing, sustaining, and (re)shaping the identity of the “we.”

These patterns of relationship suggest that not only can “we” fictional narratives be dialogical but also that they often challenge the norms and values uncritically accepted by the group and subvert the authority of their communal-voice narrator(s). Especially notable in this context are “we” fictional narratives in which the main conflict is instigated by an outsider, who is neither a full member of the group nor a member of a rival group and whose “disorienting discourse” undermines the hegemonic discourse. These types of disagreement, which demonstrate the centrifugal forces of the story, are evidence of the fragility of the group and of its tendency to disintegrate, unless these forces are balanced by the centralizing, centrifugal ones. First-person-plural narration is as much a force of disintegration, discord, and instability as of unison, concord, and stability.

At the time of publication, The Female Quixote (1752) by Charlotte Lennox was received on the terms announced by its title: as a Cervantine, parodic novel. Modern critics read it either as a reflection of the historical forces that restricted writers at that time, or as a failed Cervantine novel. Read as a true inheritor of Cervantine narrative strategies, The Female Quixote is a “metarepresentation” that highlights the creative agency of its source, inviting readers to a hermeneutic game. In contrast to modern accounts of the novel that focus on the historical author and her relationship with Samuel Johnson, to whom parts of the novel have been attributed, I argue that the novel parodies Johnson’s style and literary norms. Through an investigation of the novel’s interpretive history, the essay demonstrate that a novel’s point, if a metafictive one, may be lost if we enter through a historical anteroom of little relevance to its concern.

The paper analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go in terms of the narrative techniques that cause the reader to re-enact the cognitive process by which the characters come to comprehend their predicament. It links these techniques with the ethical implications of the novel’s reshaping the topoi of dystopian fiction in view of the modern concerns with cloning and organ transplant. 

Leona Toker, editor of Partial Answers, is Professor Emerita in the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), and articles on English, American, and Russian writers. She is the editor of Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994); and co-editor of Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H.M. Daleski  (1996) and of Knowledge and Pain (2012). Her book Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Inter-Contextual Reading is coming out in the fall of 2019.

The paper discusses Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight as his first English experiment in constructing a model of a possible metaphysical contact between the world of human consciousness and a mysterious dimension beyond it. Nabokov's almost invariable principles of composition make the narrative stance of the novel open to various interpretations; the paper argues in favor of the version in which the title character’s secret (Russ. Taina Naita) is his calculated absence from the book of which he appears to be the biographical subject. The Appendix presents some results of archival study of the novel's extant manuscripts.

Born in Moscow, Gennady Barabtarlo (1949-2019), received a degree in philology from the University of Moscow in 1972, emigrated from the USSR, with his wife and daughter, in 1979, received a PhD from the University of Illinois in 1985, and was since professor of Russian Literature at the Univeristy of Missouri. He has published several books and numerous essays on Nabokov and translated into Russian three of his novels (Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Original of Laura) and all his short stories. He also published articles on Pushkin, Tiutchev, Solzhenitsyn,  and a book of poetry. updated in March 2019

Taking its starting point from Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel featuring an autistic first-person narrator, this paper explores the capabilities and limits of narrative as a cognitive instrument with special attention to the connection between knowing, living, and telling. In the novel the impairments connected with autism, affecting social interaction and the understanding of other persons as beings with minds of their own, influence both the narrator’s style of telling his story and his way of using narrative thinking to plan the future and conceive of the past. The discussion focuses on both these issues, arguing that narrative is not only a cultural technique which enables orientation in time and space as well as the understanding of other agents as intentional – that it is a highly social art, of vital importance for everyday action and interaction in a web of social relations.

What is the relation between public notations of time and the personal experience of duration? And how have these two different approaches to temporality been explored in early novels? This article considers Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, arguing that through renderings of objective time and of the experience of duration Defoe differentiates between two different modes of sociality: contractual relations on the one hand and intimate attachments on the other. Furthermore, in these novels Defoe lays the terms for one of the main tropes through which later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels represent both domesticity (in its inherent duality of love and marriage) and temporality (in its inherent duality of duration and time). This is a trope of parallax view, which captures an important condition of these dualities – that their poles can never be viewed simultaneously even as they coexist in the same phenomena.