Alexander Blok’s unfinished poem Retribution (1910–1921), regarded by the contemporaries as his spiritual testament, depicts the destinies of Russia as part of the total struggle between cosmic forces which was reflected in the historical catastrophes of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The essay uses the notion of the chronotope to analyze the structure of the poem. The time-space of the poem is the vast expanse of the Russian empire during the wars between East and West (the wars between Russian and Turkey, Russian and Japan, World War I). The chronotope of the poem reflect tensions between Westernizers and Slavophiles, as well as mythological historiosophical positions of such diverse thinkers as Vladimir Soloviev and Helena Blavatsky. Its mythical, epic, historical, and lyrical constituents seem to predict cosmic clashes; instead, however, the lyrical chronotope of the poem gains predominance and translates cosmic conflicts into the emotional turmoil and death of the lyrical hero.

The historical caesura of the Holocaust bisects the twentieth century, its horror effecting a kind of temporal doubling or fold in the psyches of survivors as well as a permanent damage on Enlightenment conceptions of the progressive march of time. The traumatic experience of a continual turning back inflects the twentieth-century novel and our readings of it, calling into question modernist tropes of redemption. This essay examines changes in the way that both the passage of time and the ghostly return of the dead are portrayed, first in a modern text, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which deals with World War I, and then in two postmodern works both of which inscribe a vain dream of the rectification of Holocaust trauma: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. My emphasis is on trajectories of plot and memory, trajectories that trauma distorts and the artistic impulse inclines to even out (as in Amis’s trope of the story told backwards, with genocide undone). While modernist experimentalism cannot help indulging in redemptive fantasies, it also incorporates its own critique of this conservative longing.

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.