June 2004: Kay Young is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy, a study of narrative intimacy and happiness. Currently, she is writing a book called Coming to Consciousness: Mind, Body, Emotion and the 19th-Century English Novel.

In recent years, focus on issue of the spatial has increased exponentially. Briefly charting this rise in its various theoretical forms, we may locate a common theme within many of the positions taken up in response to the spatial: a concern with turmoil and oppression, and with a shifting of both physical and political boundaries. Nowhere is this concern more explicit than in the post-colonial response to what may be seen as the most violent violation of space: the colonial appropriation of land and territory as part of the various imperial projects of previous centuries. In post-colonial writing the colonial space is acknowledged, rejected for its inauthenticity and then re-made. A detailed reading of a particular text – Ben Okri’s Infinite Riches – and of a particular space within this text – the city – allows us to exemplify some of the narrative strategies by which such a powerful reclaiming of space may be asserted by the post-colonial author.

The essay traces the development of the circle and the sphere as images of perfection in western thought and art and comments on their fate in modern and postmodern American poetry. Detailed attention is given to poems by Wallace Stevens, Amy Clampitt, and Rita Dove.

Jim Dixon, the protagonist of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, is a historical type associated with the post-World War II agenda of broadening the class basis of the British education system. Yet this character also generates meaning through the prism of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau points out that the resistant relationship between individuals and systems of power in their societies often can be glimpsed through the private individuals’ consumer practices and the spaces in which these practices occur. Jim Dixon lives in---and resists---the hegemonic structure of the University at which he is employed yet where he is made to feel that he does not belong to the various spaces he occupies. He functions as a figure of resistant aliened otherness in the spaces and temporal zones that the book has constructed for him. The novel explores the avenues through which Jim subverts authority, ultimately inviting the reader to resist as well.

The paper examines Joyce’s rethinking of inter-subjective space, focusing on a series of syntactic and metaphorical transactions constitutive of the Wake’s transgressive “langscape.” These transactions may be seen to correlate with the Wake’s thematization of mourning, and with the processes of inclusion, exclusion, and oral assimilation which regulate the constitution and preservation of subjective identity in the work of mourning. The paper attempts to account for these processes in terms of Abraham and Torok’s theories of incorporation and endocryptic identification. It adopts the notion of cryptic mourning as a theoretical framework within which to interpret the figure of the “fadograph” in Joyce as an image of radical and originary forgetting. Such an image – the negative of a mnemonic imprint – is seen to exemplify the possibility of including an unnameable or unimaginable place, secret and radically exterior to subjective memory or discourse, yet contrasted, in the Wake, with overt investment in a subjective and all-encompassing “here.”

This essay is an attempt to apply some of the notions of ecology to the imagined worlds of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.  The premise is that each writer’s choice of physical settings has an important effect on his less tangible themes and concepts.  The effects examined in this essay are not primarily social and conventional (systems of meaning), but rather quasi-physical. Tolstoy tends to set his stories along horizontal (though often somewhat irregular) planes, whereas Dostoevsky relies more on vertical planes (walls). These tendencies are reversed in scenes with a strong religious component, as if the authors required a foreign spatial orientation to convey otherworldly themes.

This essay contends that in his effort to develop a poetics, Joyce intuits in his writings Levinas’s ethical swerve from Heidegger. By making the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses “dramatic” according to his own terms, Joyce presents a relation that exists prior to, or sets the stage for, the ordinary representational plane of the novel. Although the limits of language necessitate a spatial show, Joyce makes the show “dumb,” altering the relation between knowledge and responsiveness by taking deferral, the usual condition for knowledge, out of the equation. Joyce’s effort is towards the creation of a certain messianic time, or time without space, and his presentation of a non-appearing, non-reciprocal relation delineates the passion, or responsiveness independent of the need for knowledge, by which the chapter moves. By effectively staging responsibility as an infinite desire for the other as such, Joyce begins in “Ithaca,” as in Levinas, are the sound without echo and the journey without return.

This paper argues that the dialogical analysis provides a potent and fruitful methodology for understanding the very process of scientific creativity, as well as for interpreting both scientific and literary texts. Contra Bakhtin, who considered scientific activity and its products as a prime example of monologism, the author argues that a scientific article, “populated” by many invisible interlocutors, is best perceived as rich polyphony of addresses and responses to the "other.” Bakhtinian concepts “the word with a loophole” and “the word with the sideward glance” point to the basically addressed nature of our intellectual and emotional life in a particularly apt way.

This essay has two main arguments, the first of which proposes a model for understanding narrative beginnings that focuses on both their textual dynamics (designated by the concepts of exposition and launch) and their corresponding readerly dynamics (designated by the concepts of introduction and entrance) and then uses that model to analyze Austen’s atypical beginning and its consequences in Persuasion. The novel’s exposition and launch do not invite the audience to feel that they have entered a comic world, one in which the protagonist’s eventual happiness is assured. Instead, Austen delays these assurances until the setting of the novel shifts to Lyme. As a result, Austen interjects into her comedy some striking new elements: unmerited suffering by the protagonist without any promise that it is only temporary; an awareness that the happy outcome could have been achieved by way of a much less painful route; and a corresponding awareness that, despite the happy outcome, the painful past has permanent effects. The second argument contrasts this view of Persuasion’s form and ideology with the account of both offered by Mary Poovey. Where Poovey sees the form papering over tensions in the ideology of romantic love, this essay sees the novel’s attitude toward love as more realistic than romantic. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that, in the effort to connect form and ideology, critics are likely to be better served by starting with form and then working out toward ideology rather than starting with ideology and working back toward form.

The term “humanistic discourse” designates a dual operation: on the one hand, it views the function of the humanities from a contextual perspective, and on the other it feeds its assessment back into these contextual realities. This two-sidedness is a hallmark of humanistic discourse, which is meant not only to grasp the significance of its subject matters, such as literature and the arts, from a stance outside themselves, but also to channel this into what originally conditioned the viewing. Humanistic discourse becomes an interface between contextual realities and humanistic subject matters. Contextual realities provide frames, thus setting parameters for the humanistic discourse through which literature and the arts are conceived. The nation-state and personality formation (Bildung) were prominent frames in Western culture, whereas currently we witness a large-scale politicizing of the humanities. The oppositional discourses thus evolving do not call themselves “humanistic” any longer, as such a label represents what they are fighting against. However, the function of these discourses remains the same; it is still an interface between a frame, i.e. politics, and what is left of humanistic subject matter. There is still the canon as a frame, although it has changed its status: it is no longer considered as an assembly of canonical authors but is seen as cultural capital which is either coveted by different groups or augmented by elevating the literary products of minorities to canonical status. Recently the “market” has become a new frame, and what the latter demands is “cultural competence,” not least, as globalization requires an expertise in foreign cultures on a great many levels. The burgeoning “area studies” try to meet such a demand; the humanities are thus confronted with the task of utilizing the knowledge produced in order to intervene in social life. As to their future, frames are not as stable as they used to be in the past. Humanistic discourse may not be able to establish frames, but will still link up with a world outside literature and the arts by charting the extent to which the world of archives may counterbalance the losses incurred by a scientifically-based culture. For this reason, humanistic discourse has to undergo another change of self-definition, as it has done ever since it entered the stage. Changing self-definitions are an essential feature of the quest for validity.

The term “humanistic discourse” designates a dual operation: on the one hand, it views the function of the humanities from a contextual perspective, and on the other it feeds its assessment back into these contextual realities. This two-sidedness is a hallmark of humanistic discourse, which is meant not only to grasp the significance of its subject matters, such as literature and the arts, from a stance outside themselves, but also to channel this into what originally conditioned the viewing. Humanistic discourse becomes an interface between contextual realities and humanistic subject matters. Contextual realities provide frames, thus setting parameters for the humanistic discourse through which literature and the arts are conceived. The nation-state and personality formation (Bildung) were prominent frames in Western culture, whereas currently we witness a large-scale politicizing of the humanities. The oppositional discourses thus evolving do not call themselves “humanistic” any longer, as such a label represents what they are fighting against. However, the function of these discourses remains the same; it is still an interface between a frame, i.e. politics, and what is left of humanistic subject matter. There is still the canon as a frame, although it has changed its status: it is no longer considered as an assembly of canonical authors but is seen as cultural capital which is either coveted by different groups or augmented by elevating the literary products of minorities to canonical status. Recently the “market” has become a new frame, and what the latter demands is “cultural competence,” not least, as globalization requires an expertise in foreign cultures on a great many levels. The burgeoning “area studies” try to meet such a demand; the humanities are thus confronted with the task of utilizing the knowledge produced in order to intervene in social life. As to their future, frames are not as stable as they used to be in the past. Humanistic discourse may not be able to establish frames, but will still link up with a world outside literature and the arts by charting the extent to which the world of archives may counterbalance the losses incurred by a scientifically-based culture. For this reason, humanistic discourse has to undergo another change of self-definition, as it has done ever since it entered the stage. Changing self-definitions are an essential feature of the quest for validity.