An obituary for Wolfgang Iser (1926—2007), a great scholar and a kind and generous person. An overview of the history of Iser’s theoretical thought is followed by a record of an episode of private life.

The article considers some of the ways in which Seamus Deane’s novel maps political, sectarian, and folkloric borders onto the Catholic tradition of textual exegesis. In particular, the essay argues that Reading in the Dark treats Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as a productive site where both political and community identity are reconfigured through direct contact with literary-theoretical concerns.

An obituary for Gershon Shaked (1929—2006), a major authority in Israeli Literary studies and the author of the master-narrative of secular Hebrew literature. The article points to a disparity between Shaked’s recognized status in the country and his view of himself as a subversive, balloon-puncturing eiron, critical of the exalted Apollonian stance in literature as well as in criticism.

Gary Snyder has described his book-length poem Mountains and Rivers without End (1996) as a “mythic narrative of the female Buddha Tārā.” Snyder’s poem “An Offering for Tārā,” like several other poems in his corpus, describes a sensual, forgiving feminine divinity of the sort that many literary scholars now find problematic. By considering two poems from the Sixties alongside one from the mid-Nineties, we can see the developments within Snyder’s own myths and texts, but we also see how the images and ideas woven into discourses such as “Orientalism” or “the divine feminine” can undergo dramatic changes within the career of a single writer. Examining Snyder’s early poems “For a Far-out Friend,” and “Hymn to the Goddess San Francisco in Paradise” alongside Joanne Kyger’s “Tapestry,” the essay closely examines instances of divine femininity in Beat writing before returning to Snyder’s mature work, “An Offering for Tārā,” to show how Snyder fashions a postmodern American mode of tantric poetics that is politically progressive. His poetic approach has not been to repress the afflictive desires identified by feminist and anti-Orientalist critics but rather, in the manner of tantric Buddhist practice, to mindfully embrace and re-organize them.

The paper considers Heart of Darkness as an example of rhetorical counter-terrorism. Conrad’s language partly relies of that of the Gothic discourse of horror, especially when horror manifests itself as an entity with teeth -- a zone of contact between the individual and the horror which can consume, absorb the individual. In Gothic horror fiction the sites where “terror” and “horror” reached their climax were frequently related to the practice of cannibalism. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s Marlow points out that the so-called cannibals, identified as such by their fanged teeth, are neither terrifying nor horrifying. The real cannibal, in the figurative sense, is Kurtz, perpetrator and victim of the Belgian colonial terror, whose image, complete with a toothless but voracious mouth, is associated with human heads on posts surrounding his bungalow – a psychological substitute for the severed hands collected by the basketful by Belgian agents.  By translating “hands” into “heads,” by using the motifs from the well-known discourse of cannibalism to represent the Belgian terror tactic, Conrad provided his readers with an already valorized  language, a semiotics for comprehending this particular horror, and a stimulus for a response to it.

In W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants the oblique relationship between narrative and image --  despite their interplay they are not synthesized – is associated with the workings of postmemory.  In the fourth section of the novel the pictures of a German Jewish family that has emigrated to England and whose experience of the holocaust the narrator seeks to reconstruct are juxtaposed to the landscape which represses that history, generating a reiteration of that repression. The haunting presence of the images is paralleled by the paintings of a descendant of this family. The painter intentionally creates pentimento effects in his work: layers of paint hide and reveal the layers below. The methods of both painter and narrator involve a demonstration of the continued presence of loss.  And when the narrator finally reaches the Lanzburg family gravesite he finds three empty gravestones and the only occupied grave, that of the painter’s mother who committed suicide. This becomes the thematic center of the novel whose narrator is left “no knowing what he should think.” His inability to turn self-reflection into resolution is contrasted with a Turkish woman’s observation of Germany that the country is characterized by a refusal to reflect. The experience of disturbed self-reflection extends to the reader who must not only bear witness to the inconclusiveness of the narrator’s discourse but take part in it, thus revealing the traces of the destruction and murder that the landscape through which he is traveling has tried to erase.

This paper sets out to analyse the concept of what I shall term an “insider Whiteness,” at once African and inevitably always already out of Africa. Specifically I explore life writing narratives by White Africans as a rich setting for an analysis of how White people both relate to the continent as a physical and imaginary space and negotiate their ability to call Africa “home.” Through detailed textual analysis of Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart (1990) and reference to a number of works by J. M. Coetzee, Gillian Slovo, Breyten Breytenbach and Doris Lessing, the paper proposes that the continuing debates about identity and race in post-Apartheid South Africa show that it takes a great deal of work for the White person truly to belong in Africa.

With the “cultural turn” English philology has changed in many places into a kind of super-discipline by taking over, at least in part, the work of sociology, history, psychology, and philosophy. The article argues that in order to avoid dilettantism, the excellent qualification for a semiotic or signifying approach to all aspects of culture should be made use of, especially since this approach goes well together with the more recent view of culture as an immaterial construct in terms of an ensemble, or rather a specific hierarchy, of values. In order to discuss the role of literature in and for the wider domain of culture it seems necessary to first delimit this textual corpus, and for that reason a number of recent attempts to define “literature” or “the literary” are considered -- including one of my own that sees its specificity in a validational modesty resulting from a focusing on the particular and the suspension of reference. Due to this modest confinement to the presentation of merely possible worlds, literature is granted a “free space” in culture where it can even intimate the limits of the culture of its origin. For this reason it deserves special attention even at a time when the study of culture and media studies are in vogue.

What links Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus is a fascination with the dregs of public discourse, its “by-products” or “waste products,” but these to be understood as the negative pole of an exalted ideal of language, though conceived differently by each one. Benjamin was an avid reader of Die Fackel, a polemical gazette focused on Viennese journalism that Kraus published from 1899 to 1936. Benjamin’s 1931 essay on Kraus is one of his most densely woven, recondite productions, filled with formulations that reach back to Benjamin’s 1916 text “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” There, the act of naming designates the dimension of divine creative power in pre-Babelic language. In Kraus’s practice of citation Benjamin found traces of such a primordial capacity of language, a thetic power akin to divine naming. Citing in this sense involves not only the retrieval of a text or a concept, but intervention into the temporal process, the activation of a past in the present: citing as inciting. For Kraus, Benjamin wrote, “justice and language remain founded in each other,” making it clear that while justice in a legal sense (Recht) was often invoked in Kraus’s critique of journalism, what was fundamentally at stake was a reverence for “the image of divine justice [Gerechtigkeit] in language.”

Paul de Man believed that he had dismissed Jorge Luis Borges’ stories in calling them “contes philosophiques.”  However, this appellation only works as disparagement if one considers philosophical stories to be frivolous puzzles. There is a puzzle in Borges’ story “Funes the Memorious,” but it is of the utmost relevance not only to general philosophy but to the philosophy of language and, ultimately, that of ethics. Borges’ central character, Ireneo Funes, does not match his name, being the reverse of peaceful in mind, the reason being that he is gifted or, better, afflicted with the ability to remember all that he has ever sensed in infinitely intricate detail. The effect is to deny him our own humbler ability to classify his experiences usefully, either for himself or, more importantly, for others. The story brings his affliction subtly into focus, astonishing us with its autistic grandeur, but, in so doing, also lays bare the dialogic nerve of human communication.

The paper starts from Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the phrase “reason of state” that Paul Valéry applies to Charles Baudelaire’s poetry.  After exploring how this phrase points to the interconnections between poetry and politics in Benjamin's writings on lyric, from the early essay on Hölderlin to the later commentaries on Baudelaire, it goes on to explicate Baudelaire’s reading of a book on the concept of reason of state by the Italian philosopher and historian Giuseppe Ferrari.  The connections between Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory of la modernité and Ferrari’s politico-historical theory of reason of state are analyzed as a basis for reading a set of prose poems composed by Baudelaire during the period when he read Ferrari.  Special attention is given to the poem from the Petits poëmes en prose entitled “Les Veuves” (“The Widows”).

In memory of Daniel Stern (Jan. 18, 1928 -- Jan. 24, 2007)

This article provides a brief historical overview of the changing perspectives in trauma studies, the field that has spawned an academic interest in the nature and impact of traumatic experiences. The latest insights of psychotherapists, historians, and cultural and literary critics such as Dori Laub, Bessel van der Kolk, Dominick LaCapra, Saul Friendlander, and Cathy Caruth about witnessing, testimony, representation, and working-through traumatic experiences are used as a frame of reference for the analysis of two novels by the Jewish American novelist Daniel Stern, whose work has somehow failed to achieve canonical status. Stern’s two early Holocaust novels, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die (1963) and After the War (1967), it is argued, are remarkable, not only for their understanding of the psychological effects of trauma, but also for their use of narrative strategies to mitigate and contain the traumas that dwell at the core of these novels.

Defining Lawrence’s “expository writings not as laboratory reports on experiments successfully concluded but as signposts to a road” traveled in his art, H. M. Daleski notes that these “theories were consistently modified by the artistic experience, which in turn led to further formulations.” Indeed, these continually revised and modified formulations of theories about almost everything constituted what Lawrence called “thought adventures”; in themselves they were signs of a yearning toward wholeness-in-duality that that can account for this writer’s special charisma. For Lawrence was not just a novelist, a poet, and a critic; he was also, in our current rather inadequate terminology, a public intellectual.

            To be “on the road” with D. H. Lawrence is to be engaged in an extraordinary thought adventure, accompanied by an unfailingly engaged and engaging commentator whose intellectual wholeness-in-duality was of a sort we rarely encounter on the contemporary literary scene. In developing this point, the article also argues that Lawrence’s great intellectual and creative adventure, though acutely modern, was also astutely anti-modernist. Although his early work was championed by such modernist luminaries as Ezra Pound and Ford Maddox Ford, by the end of his career he had become virtually the polar opposite of the quintessential modernist T. S. Eliot. Not coincidentally, perhaps, by the end of his career this thought adventurer addressed his ideas not just to an exclusively high cultural audience of the “fit though few” but to the masses among whom he could be, as he put it, “in the thick of the scrimmage.”