This article argues that Oscar Wilde’s work employs location to blur the Victorian sense of morality. After surveying Victorian mapping practices as they relate to Wilde and ideas of moral topography, and defining Wilde’s interest in and flaunting of realism, the article shows how Wilde’s more specifically placed texts blur moral boundaries, while morally explicit texts provide only a vague sense of place.

March 2021: Kees de Vries is lecturer in English Language and Culture at the Department of English Language and Culture at the faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, where he specializes in Oscar Wilde and (neo-)Victorian literature, as well as the intersection between music and literature.

In Heshel’s Kingdom, Dan Jacobson explores the impact of the British Empire’s expansion on Lithuanian Jewry. His memoir constructs a “mattering map” of the experience of his family, after the death of his grandfather, Heshel. Like more than thirty thousand other Jews, the bereaved family moved to a welcoming South Africa.

            Heshel’s Kingdom is a split/screen account, alternating between Kimberley, South Africa, and Varniai, Lithuania. Their juxtaposition leads Dan Jacobson to chart the experiences of two Jewish communities, and construct a narrative map of familial and communal life. This split/screen account is not symmetrical. For the South Africa narrative, the narrator relies on familial and personal history. But for Lithuania he must tease out information from absence, seeking bits and remnants of the murdered Lithuanian Jewish community in order to find a purchase on which to reconstruct life in his grandfather’s Varniai, a small, Nazi-destroyed Lithuanian town.

            The narrator interrogates the images of the two communities: Jacobson addresses the jacket-cover photograph of grandfather Heshel as if it might speak to him, and thus help him discover details of the life of his Lithuanian grandfather, whom he never knew. Asking questions, Jacobson invites the reader to engage with him as if they were looking together at a family-album: familial-networks begin to emerge, and kinship relationships elaborate the family’s life in South Africa; once activated the narrator can tease it into continuing the search for family experience. But the questions about Lithuania do not elicit much in the way of answers, for that Jewish community was destroyed by the Nazis and their Lithuanian helpers. Following the narrator’s lead, the reader’s imagination works to construct a comparative account both of the Jewish immigration to South Africa and the Jewish catastrophe in Lithuania, defining a “mattering map” of modern Jewish experience.

Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World:  Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.

(Updated on March 20, 2016)

According to Vladimir Nabokov, exactness of detail in the composition and the reading of literary texts can yield “the sensual spark without which the book is dead”: one needs, for instance, to understand the topography of Mansfield Park in order to respond to Austen’s “stereographic charm.” Speaking after Stuart Gilbert’s chart of the episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses but before Gifford and Seidman’s maps in Ulysses Annotated, Nabokov protested against “the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings” and advised careful readers to “prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” Nabokov himself draws maps in his (posthumously published) lecture notes of the 1950s. This paper comments on the “stereographic” implications of his maps and then turns to Nabokov’s biography of Pushkin’s African great grandfather. Studying the possible origins of Abram Gannibal, Nabokov reads maps of Ethiopia. Though his essay is largely a matter of the critique of sources, the course of Ethiopian river-beds seems to give him “the sensual spark” which, despite his vexed insistence on the literal in Ulysses, follows Joyce’s novel in understated transmutation of stereographic detail into symbolism. 

March 2021: Leona Toker (English Department, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) 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 Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading (2019). She has put together the collection Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994) and has co-edited Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H.M. Daleski (1996) and Knowledge and Pain (2012). She is Editor of Partial Answers.

This essay argues that the temporal adverb “meanwhile” marks a series of key moments in Paradise Lost, in which an endless succession is built into the present moment. Hitherto overlooked by the critics, this duration is represented in the poem as a concrete, coherent, and intelligible form, which opens the possibility of transformation implicit in the monistic scale of “one first matter all.” Milton models this structure on Aristotle’s theory of the infinite presented in Physics III, yet he goes beyond Aristotle in representing the infinite as the distinctive feature of moral life. In the poem’s representation of hell or the postlapsarian condition, “meanwhile” serves as a mere indexical adverb, the function of which is to designate temporal or spatial shifts. The possibility of transformation, which “meanwhile” opens in the present moment, is reserved in Milton’s poem to the prelapsarian or repentant mind.

October 2020: Ayelet Langer is an assistant professor in the Department of English Literature at the University of Haifa. Her research interests are Early Modern literature with an emphasis on John Milton’s poetry and its intellectual sources and engagements. Langer published articles in Milton Studies, EMLS, Notes & Queries, and in Irrtum – Error – Erreur (Miscellanea Mediaevalia Band 40), ed. Andreas Speer and Maxime Mauriège; her new work is forthcoming in UTQ, Modern Philology, and Philosophy and Literature. Her current project is a book on Milton and time.

This paper is concerned with the intersection between ideological influence, epistemology, and Orientalism.  In 1913, an American named William Francis Mannix claimed to have edited a memoir based on the diary of the famous Chinese statesman, Li Hongzhang. The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang was a success in America and Britain, with expert sinologists praising its contributions.  When the memoir was exposed as a forgery, some readers struggled to explain its success by the perceived verisimilitude of the work.  By taking a closer look at Mannix’s book, this paper considers the concept of truth, knowledge construction and dissemination, as well as the role of cultural and ideological presuppositions that shape our understandings. 

October 2020: Amy Matthewson is Senior Teaching Fellow and Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.  Her research explores race relations through visual and material culture, specifically China’s relationship with the global community in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  She has a special interest in British and Chinese contact as well as the processes of ideology and epistemology. She can be followed on Twitter @Visual_Cultures or on her webpage (amymatthewson.com).

The play Elijah (1963), written by the philosopher Martin Buber in his twilight days, represents his diagnosis of the state of humanity at his time. I discuss this play as an allegorical drama, examining it against the background of Buber’s rejection of allegory, and demonstrating its implementation of the specific sense Buber gave to the allegoric in "Symbolic and Sacramental Existence in Judaism" (1934). Dramatic, allegorical multilayered agon enables Buber to express the idea of crisis and struggle between the principles of form and formlessness and between decisiveness and hesitation as enabling decision, that is, creation; it enables a simultaneous exploration of the political and the existential, the individual and the collective, as well as the validation of the affinity that Buber identifies between the individual inner struggle and the struggle embodied in history. In the frame of a Biblical play, Buber thus expressed his thoughts about Jewish society in the nascent State of Israel and about post-war Germany, his interpretation of the Cold War. The play renders his philosophical and theological concerns and his interpretation of history, including his own role in it.

October 2020: Einat Davidi, author of Paradiso as Pardes: A Contrapuntal Reading of José Lezama Limas’ Poetology and the Cabalistic Theory of Language and History (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012) and of several articles on Cuban Literature (José Lezama Lima, Guillermo Rosales) and Spanish Baroque literature (Calderón de la Barca, Antonio Enríquez Gómez) is faculty member at the department of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Haifa. 

Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once described The Swamp Dwellers as an exploration of economic displacement and cultural disruption resulting from the pillage of natural resources by colonial governments and international corporations. Soyinka set his play deep in the Niger Delta, a place of dense mangrove swamps and the folkloric Mami Wata—a half-human, half-fish seductress, to highlight the environmental degradation and lost livelihoods of the Yoruba, Ogoni, and other indigenous peoples. By focusing on a handful of characters who inhabit or pass through a small hut built by Makuri and Alu, an impoverished elderly couple eking out an existence in the heart of the swamp, Soyinka reveals how migration and acculturation erode traditional values and reshape identity in ways that encourage avarice and self-interest over family and community, promote political and economic corruption, and accelerate the replacement of indigenous belief systems with the depersonalized transactional values of commerce and trade.

October 2020: Mark S. Ferrara is associate professor of English at State University of New York College at Oneonta and author of several books including Palace of Ashes (2015), Sacred Bliss (2016), and American Community (2020).

This paper explores Varlam Shalamov’s representation of the fate of the Russian intelligentsia in the Gulag, his framing and reframing his idea of the writer’s duty. In Kolyma Tales, Shalamov not only bears witness to the Russian intelligentsia in the camps, but also establishes a dynamic relationship of common identity between the author and those about whom he writes. This relationship restores the erased identities of intelligenty and sheds light on Shalamov’s understanding of the writer’s duty to give voice to their otherwise lost experiences. Instead of declaring the Gulag the site of the death of the Russian intelligentsia in the 20th century, the Soviet camp experience becomes for Shalamov an opportunity to bring nuance to the multidimensional heritage of the intelligentsia and to affirm his belief in the immortality of the intelligentsia as an idea.

October 2020: Josefina Lundblad-Janjić is assistant professor of Russian in Monterey, California, and has worked as a lecturer at University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her doctorate in Slavic Languages & Literatures from University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on narratives of imprisonment and exile in the Russian literary tradition in general and on the prose and dramaturgy of Varlam Shalamov in particular.

Typical of Ian McEwan’s early “shock literature,” “Solid Geometry” has attracted much scholarly comment on the issue of the conflict between female emotionalism and male rationality. By contrast, this paper focuses on the mystery of character M’s disappearance and examines the story’s three impossible events in the conceptual system of unnatural narratology. Yet it goes beyond the current model of naturalizing readings vs. unnaturalizing readings: it shows how the methods of ethical literary criticism can combine with unnatural narratology to yield new insights into the story, especially with the help of the concepts of ethical identity and ethical choice.

October 2020: Biwu Shang is Professor of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is the author of In Pursuit of Narrative Dynamics (Peter Lang, 2011), Contemporary Western Narratology: Postclassical Perspectives (People’s Literature Press, 2013) and Unnatural Narrative across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). His work has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Literary Semantics, Neohelicon, Semiotica and Arcadia, among other journals.

The article analyses ideological and genre aspects of Joseph Brodsky’s work, associated with the imperial theme in Russian literature. By drawing on methods from comparative literature, historical poetics, and empire studies I claim that a concern with space is not only central to Brodsky’s work but also consistent with his imperial thinking. Brodsky’s verse maintains a direct dialogue with Classicist poetry and Acmeist poetry (particularly Osip Mandelstam), both of which dealt with the notion of empire through adoption of the “high” literary style. The Imperial theme in Brodsky's oeuvre also overlaps with the dismantlement of the Russian imperial subject at the end of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, I argue that he was, above all, the last Russian imperial poet.

October 2020: Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include: Russian literature, Modern Hebrew literature, and Poetics of Space in East-European context. He serves as senior lecturer at the department of literature, arts and language at The Open University of Israel. Rafi is the author of two books: Jewish Letters at the Pushkin Library:  Yosef Haim Brenner's work and its connection to Russian Literature and Thought (Bialik Institute, 2013, in Hebrew), and Wandering Heroes, Committed Writers: Nihilists and Nihilism in Russian Literature (Van Leer/Hakibutz Hameuhad, 2015, in Hebrew). Together with Natasha Gorodinsky he edited a special issue of Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature dedicated to representations of European metropolis in Hebrew literature.

This paper examines some of the ways in which olfactory representations can convey atrocities of the battlefield and their moral implications. Analysis of olfactory images and of their emotional and even physical affordance suggest the differences in the writers’ ethical and aesthetic stance. Some represent war in all its violence, cruelty, and horror; others leave the harsh reality only implied and stylized, according to the principle that “silence screams louder than words.” Seven Israeli writers are discussed: Yoram Kaniuk, Shulamith Hareven, Yuval Neria, Haim Sabato, S. Yizhar, Haim Be’er and Yitzhak Ben-Ner. Their use (or omission) of references to smell may be indicative of their attitude to war. This study shares the growing interest in the senses and their significance in Humanities and social sciences.

October 2020: Yael Balaban is a researcher of Hebrew literature and a lecturer at Beit Berl College, Israel. She holds a Ph.D. from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and was a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include sensory representations in literature, musical ekphrasis, and Modern Hebrew literature. She is author of Many Voices: Reading the Prose of Shulamith Hareven, Magnes Press, 2019 [Hebrew].

From 1938 to 1945, Shanghai was a temporary haven to more than 20,000 Jews originally from Europe. Most of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai survived to see the end of WWII. However, the Jewish settlement in Shanghai during WWII remains a little-known chapter of the history of the Holocaust. Recent decades have witnessed significant changes in this regard. In addition to historical studies, memoirs, and popular culture, the Shanghai experience of European Jews also found its way into literary fiction. Drawing on theories of cultural memory and media studies and based on readings of two novels—Marion Cuba’s Shanghai Legacy (2005) and Beila’s The Cursed Piano (2007, English edition 2017), this article argues that literary fiction contributes, albeit belatedly, to the collective efforts to preserve this important legacy, and may do so in a more compelling way than other media, through special perspectives, engaging storytelling, and broader accessibility.

October 2020: Junsong Chen is Associate Professor at the Department of English, East China Normal University. His areas of research include contemporary American literature, cultural memory studies, narratology, and comparative literature. Junsong Chen received his Ph.D. from Shanghai International Studies University (2010), and completed his postdoctoral research at Fudan University (2015-2018). He was a Fulbright visiting research scholar at Harvard University (2018-2019). Over the past decade, his work has been engaged primarily with issues concerning the interaction among literature, history, and politics. He is the author of Political Engagement in Contemporary American Historiographic Metafiction (2013), Cultural Memory of Post-War America in the Fiction of Don DeLillo (forthcoming), and the translator of Chinese editions of Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories and Samuel Beckett’s Proust. His papers have appeared in such journals as Foreign Literature, Foreign Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature, etc. Currently he is working on a book examining contemporary American literature through the lens of cultural memory, tentatively titled Reconstructing Postwar America: History, Literature, and the Politics of Memory.

Until the mid-1960s, two groups of readings of Melville’s Benito Cereno represented the implied author’s sympathies in opposite ways. According to one group of readings, the rebelling slaves and their leader Babo symbolize demonic evil. According to the other, the slaves are admirable freedom fighters. In the last generation, new interests and new interpretive methods have made the controversy obsolete. This article uses the controversy as an opportunity to attempt to explain what makes contradictory readings of an implied author’s attitude possible and what prevents them reaching a compromise.

This article, which is part of Daniel Avitzour's PhD research project, was accepted for publication just a couple of months before the author’s untimely death. Despite limitations imposed by a serious illness, Avitzour pursued his research, which offers an in-depth examination of conflicting interpretations of literary works. Avitzour's project is an important contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of critical controversies: the ways in which they emerge, evolve, and sometimes are either resolved or become irrelevant. I had the privilege of serving as the director of his PhD dissertation and, in that capacity, meeting a rare individual who combined a keen analytical mind – Avitzour held a PhD in mathematics and enjoyed a successful career as an engineer – with the sensitivity of a perceptive literary critic, attentive to the complexities of literary texts. I already miss our challenging and rewarding intellectual dialogue.

David Fishelov, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This article reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics, Oscar Wilde, from the angle of an increasingly influential conception of mimesis understood not as simple representation but as a conditio humana. Adopting genealogical lenses that trace continuities between ancient (Plato), modern (Pater and Nietzsche) and postmodern (Lacoue-Labarthe) accounts of mimesis, I argue that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde dramatizes an excess of affective forms of imitation whose implications are double, for mimesis has both a critical and theoretical side. I suggest that Wilde’s manifesto of anti-mimetic aestheticism continues to rely on a dramatic conception of mimesis that leads human lives to imitate Dorian, and thus, Greek models. A genealogy of mimēsis paves the way for contemporary theoretical concerns with performativity, affective contagion, and the power of fictional models to influence aesthetic lives. My wager is that once the two sides are joined, a new picture of Oscar Wilde will take form.

March 2020: Nidesh Lawtoo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and English at KU Leuven.  His work is located at the intersection of literary theory, continental philosophy, and political theory, with special focus on theories of mimesis, contagion, and identification. He is the editor of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought (2012), and the author of The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (2013), Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory (2016; Adam Gillon Award 2018) and (New) Fascism: Contagion, Myth, Community (2019). This article is part of a 5-year project on mimesis funded by the European Research Council, titled Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism.