Contemporary authors of science fiction have taken up the challenge of imagining digital technologies whose functions and effects elude human awareness. Such technologies differ from earlier examples in their environmental aspect, brought on by networks that operate at levels “above” and “below” those of a human subject. Another way to describe environmental digital technologies is through the concept of assemblage, involving not only many forms of human labor and material resources, but also collectivities of entities performing cognitive acts, circulating information, interpretations, and meanings. While these collectivities obviously do involve human subjects pursuing different interests, the way that the assemblage functions as a whole does not correspond to human levels of behavior, perception, or scale.

In this article, we build on the idea of the environmental aspect of digital technologies to examine strategies used in science-fictional attempts to represent in narrative the effects of these technologies on both individual and societal levels. Our case studies, the novels Ancillary Justice (2013) by Ann Leckie and Autonomous (2017) by Annalee Newitz, employ more-or-less technological, individual actor-characters to guide readers to think about the effects of human-technical assemblages within the wider fictional worlds. These novels hinge on the literalization of three literary conventions in their attempts at representing these effects: omniscient narration, character-focalization, and mind-reading of fictional characters.

Through the actor-characters and literalizations, the environmental aspect of digital technologies and their effects are woven into the plots, worldbuilding, and narration of the novels. They are thus able, up to a point, to represent tensions between conscious actors and the various forms within which they operate. However, the novels also illustrate the limits of narrativizing environmental technologies in guiding the readers to think about human-technical assemblages and their effects through forms that remain human-centric in scope — including “gender play” as well as narratives of bildung, quest, and romance. In making the effects of digital technologies accessible for readers, the novels are unable to escape the constraints that the conventions and forms impose.

February 2022: Hanna-Riikka Roine (PhD, literary studies) works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by the Academy of Finland at the Tampere University and as an affiliated researcher in the consortium Instrumental Narratives. Her current research explores the ways in which our engagement with digital media affects, guides, and shapes our engagement with the possible. Roine is a co-editor of the book The Ethos of Digital Environments: Technology, Literary Theory and Philosophy (2021) and has published articles, for instance, on the ways in which narratological inquiry may be extended towards the machines of computational media. 

February 2022: Esko Suoranta is a Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Languages, University of Helsinki. Esko’s dissertation analyzes how contemporary speculative fiction might build affordances for thinking toward complex, systemic phenomena. His publications discuss power, agency, and transhumanity in the contemporary novels of William Gibson, cognitive assemblages and surveillance capitalism in Malka Older’s Infomocracy and Dave Egger’s The Circle, and utopian/dystopian dynamics in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Esko received the Alan Nadel Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper for his contribution to the 2019 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. He was co-editor-in-chief for Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research between 2019-2022, in which capacity he won the 2020 World Fantasy Award.

The limits of narrative are epistemological and ethical: what can be narrated and what should be narrated? Can we recount everything, and if we could, are there even so some things that we should leave in silence? We hear a lot about the duty to remember and the right to tell one’s story, but are there some stories that cannot and should not be told? Could forgetting play a role in the ethical project of memory? Trauma narratives pose these questions in particularly fraught terms. Survivor-witnesses have a story to tell, but they are also often intensely aware that their story defies narratability and intelligibility. It must be told and cannot be told; it demands and resists understanding. This article explores these questions with reference to a number of case studies: Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious” (1942), J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), and a sequence from Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah (1985). In each case, the right or need to narrate is mitigated by an intense realisation that not everything can or should be told.

February 2022: Colin Davis is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His research focuses mainly on connections between literature, film and philosophy, with particular interests in the modern French novel, ethics, ethical criticism, philosophical approaches to literature and film, hermeneutics, literary theory, cultural memory, trauma studies, and Holocaust literature.  He has published eleven monographs, the most recent being Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell (Stanford University Press, 2010), Postwar Renoir: Film and the Memory of Violence (Routledge, 2012), and Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing (Liverpool University Press, 2018). He also co-edited, with Hanna Meretoja, Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and Power of Narrative (Routledge, 2018).

In the context of overlapping anthropogenic threats to environmental knowledge and cultural memory, this article asks: what can the limits of narrative tell us about the endangered status of cultural memory and the archival relationships of contemporary literature? It argues that metaleptic moves in these narratives can be read as a historical response to material precarities in contemporary society. Read dialectically, these developments may be understood as a formal response to this precarity and a felt sense of the limits of literature to authenticate its intervention into the conditions it describes. This article draws on examples from James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Human Matter, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory, and short stories from Phenderson Djèlí Clark and Ken Liu. Reading across literary fiction, memoir, and speculative fiction, this article explores how the limits of narrative are turned into opportunities for further opening the text to the world.

February 2022: C. Parker Krieg teaches Exploratory and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Helsinki, affiliated with the Humanities program in the Faculty of Arts and the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science. He is co-editor of Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts, and his articles appear in Textual Practice, Studies in American Fiction, and A/B: Auto/Biography Studies.

This article debunks a myth that has for more than thirty years linked two political projects of forming the New Man in the Soviet Union and in Romania: Anton Makarenko’s re-education of delinquents in self-supporting orphanages (1917–1936), described in his books The Road to Life and Learning to Live, and a re-education program from a Romanian prison, engineered by a legionary inmate, Eugen Ţurcanu — a program known as the “Pitești Experiment” (1949–1952). Discussing why Romanian historians directly connected Țurcanu’s re-education to Makarenko’s, based on the discoveries of historian Mihai Demetriade, my own archival research, and the analysis of historical accounts and memoirs, I demonstrate that in spite of sharing a few methods, the two projects differed fundamentally. My secondary goal is to elaborate on the unexplored implications of Demetriade’s findings via a Nietzschean reading of both projects, enlisting the history of ideas to emphasize the gap between the two projects.

October 2021: Arleen Ionescu is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her major research and teaching interests are in the fields of literature, Critical Theory, Memory Studies, Holocaust Studies and Trauma Studies. She has published in reputed academic journals such as James Joyce Quarterly, Memory Studies, Oxford Literary Review, Parallax, Partial Answers, Papers on Joyce, Joyce Studies Annual, SLOVO, Style. She is joint-editor-in-chief (with Laurent Milesi) of Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Her books include Concordanţe româno-britanice (2004), Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality (2014), The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum (2017). She co-edited with Maria Margaroni (University of Cyprus) Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (2020). At present she is working on a book project on the Shanghai Ghetto.

The Gulag Archipelago has been treated consistently as a conservative indictment of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. When subsumed into his later writings, this perception has reinforced amongst progressives an enduring portrait of Solzhenitsyn-the-man as a backward-looking anti-modernist and reactionary. I advocate a return to the text itself in isolation from Solzhenitsyn’s corpus, and in a manner more cognizant of the political practices latent in its prose. In its style and structure, certain specific techniques can be found where the search for formal methodology has left previous commentators on the Left disappointed. The place of Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus in the history of political thought is here reassessed on the basis of its style, pointing to its potential contribution to critical theory and to its relevance for critical social analysis today.

October 2021: John Welsh is a researcher in politics and history at the University of Helsinki. This article is part of a research project into the “camp” as a recurrent political technology of social control, an agenda that attempts to bring memoir literature into a critically productive relation with both historical and contemporary problems of power, rationality, and social transformation. Recent and relevant work in this research can be found published in Contemporary Political Theory, Thesis Eleven, Cultural Critique, Contemporary Sociology, the International Journal of Politics, Culture, & Society, the European Journal of Social Theory, and forthcoming in Anthropological Theory.

The forum “Romanticism in the Age of World Wars” reflects the recent surge of critical interest in scholarship at the intersection of Romanticism, literature, and war. The chief aim of this Introduction is to outline and situate the most important recent and historical trends in this developing field. Proposing a historicist view on Romanticism which works towards an expansive conception of post-Romanticism, we also argue that Romantic-era literary and cultural production was actively shaped by the novel experiences of global and total war in ways that have persisted to the present day. Brief examples, taken from key critics and primary materials by Coleridge, Clausewitz, and Montgomery, are discussed to support this argument. The article concludes by surveying the five contributions that compose the forum, noting the connections between their arguments.

October 2021: Brecht de Groote is Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication, within the Research Group on Translation and Culture, at the University of Ghent. He previously held the Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Edinburgh, as well as (post)doctoral positions in the English Department at the University of Leuven. His research situates British Romanticism in its broad European context by studying translation, media and late style.

Ortwin de Graef, professor of English Literature at KU Leuven, is the author of two books on Paul de Man and has published widely on Romantic and post-Romantic writing ranging from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and George Eliot through Joseph Conrad, Isaac Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Pearl S. Buck to Hafid Bouazza, David Grossman, Alan Warner and A. L. Kennedy. His principal research interests are the Very-Long-Nineteenth-Century ideologies of sympathy, science and the State reflected and refracted through the transmission technologies of the literary.

Set in the 1790s, at the height of fears of French invasion, Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary aims to keep at bay the violence that threatens Scotland. Yet despite the novel’s efforts to resolve potential violence via the discursive, liberal institutions of the law and polite conversation, conflict and military power are never far from the surface. Drawing on Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of security, this article argues that the novel does not eliminate conflict but reimagines it as a version of militarized governmentality. The novel might excise war, in other words, but only in so far as the military is rendered into a force that transcends national conflict through its status as both protector and interpreter of the nation. Scott’s novel rewrites a history of war not only around a narrative of liberal progress but equally around a narrative of social administration and security.

October 2021: Dr Neil Ramsey is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and convenor of the Conflict and Society Research Group at UNSW Canberra. He works on the literary and culture responses to warfare during the eighteenth century and Romantic eras, focusing on the representations of personal experience and the development of a modern culture of war. His first book,The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835, was published by Ashgate in 2011. His most recent, a collection co-edited with Gillian Russell, Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture, was published by Palgrave in 2015. His second book, Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing is under contract with Cambridge University Press and due for publication in 2022.

In the 1970s Michel Foucault sought to develop a military model to understand the workings of society. His war schema, based on an inversion of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means, did not have sufficient analytical power, however, and he abandoned it. Much earlier, Honoré de Balzac’s fictional character Colonel Chabert, the protagonist of Le Colonel Chabert, had reached a similar impasse in his attempt to comprehend legal institutions and social relations through the prism of war. Charting the curiously analogous intellectual failures of Chabert and Foucault, this essay examines both the reach and the limits of war as a schema or grid of intelligibility for the nature and operations of civil society.

October 2021: Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the PhD program in Literature, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. Among other publications, he is the author of Empire of Chance. The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (HUP, 2015), the editor of Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genres (MIT Press, 2017) and of The Humanities in the World (U Press 2020), and he serves the general editor of the book series “Prisms: Humanities and War” with MIT Press.

Recent scholarship on the systemic militarism of post-Enlightenment Europe has complicated the traditional picture of Romanticism as the Age of Revolution, but relatively little attention has been paid the way in which the Romantics themselves understood the relationship between war and radical political upheaval. Focusing on Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, the first section of this essay asks why the very word “revolution” is curiously difficult to control, as if using the term were always a matter of pitting competing paradigms of change against one another. The second section considers Percy Shelley’s attempt, in A Philosophical View of Reform, to show that military programs were more consequential for the conflicts of his day than revolutionary ones. The final section describes the legacy of Romantic reflections on war and revolution in 19^th- and 20^th-century political thought.

October 2021: Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Reed College. He is the author of Crises of the Sentence (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Watching War (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Labors of Imagination (Fordham University Press, 2006). His recent articles explore a range of topics in Romanticism, Modernism, and critical theory. He has also published and lectured widely on the spectacles of the military-industrial complex. Mieszkowski is currently at work on a book about post-colonial botany. 

In the last endnote of her pacifist plea in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf illustrates her vision about the Outsiders’ Society by referencing three 19^th-century authors — S. T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. The first and longest quotation is from Coleridge’s The Friend. However, oddly enough, Woolf seems to misunderstand Coleridge’s intention or perhaps to creatively misuse his words. Taking this understudied detail as its pivot, this article explores Woolf’s view on war and community as it relates to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge’s.

Drawing on Woolf’s diaries and correspondence, as well as on Woolf scholarship, the first section of the article constructs a genealogy of the concept of the “Outsiders’ Society,” thus situating Three Guineas in the evolution of Woolf’s reflections about war as they come through both in her novels and in her non-fiction. The second section analyzes Woolf’s framing of the notion of romance in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, especially through her use of words such as “illusion” and “fact.” Zooming in on the connection with Coleridge, the last section contextualizes a Coleridge quotation in Woolf’s endnote by re-embedding it in the conceptual framework of The Friend; it also offers a broader overview of Coleridge’s own changing opinions on community and conflict, from “Fears in Solitude” to Letters on the Spaniards and On the Constitution of Church and State. The article points out differences between Woolf’s and Coleridge’s convictions yet also an affinity between them regarding the topic of education and its role in community-building. These converging opinions on education as an antidote to addictive tendencies such as greed, vanity, and pugnacity offer a key to Woolf’s gesture of returning to the Romantics in the final pages of her argument against war.

November 2021: Laura Cernat is a PhD candidate at KU Leuven, Belgium, working on a thesis about the representation of writers from the 19^th and 20^th centuries in recent biographical novels. She has published work on biofiction in the edited volumes Virginia Woolf and Heritage (Clemson UP/ Liverpool UP, 2017) and Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21^st-Century Conceptual Commons (Bloomsbury, 2021), and in the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (43:2/ 2020). She has presented her work at sixteen international conferences, including several editions of the ACLA and the MLA, contributed to the organization of four international conferences hosted by the KU Leuven English Literature Research Group, including a conference of which she was the main organizer: Biofiction as World Literature/ La biofiction comme littérature mondiale (Leuven &online, 15-18 September 2021).

In 1937, the English poet W. H. Auden travelled to China to report on the second Sino-Japanese War. His experience led to the writing of a sonnet sequence “In Time of War,” in which the poet reflects on this particular conflict while levelling a critique at Romantic theories of the aesthetic. In Auden’s critique, the present article suggests, the concept of the creature emerges as a site of reconciliation, a site where differences are allowed to co-exist. The co-existence of differences is also mimicked in the poem’s literary style: its language, its play with sound, and its manipulation of syntax create a paratactical aesthetic that joins disparate elements in a relational (rather than a hierarchical) structure. By attending to the vagaries of meaning and form, this inquiry concludes that “In Time of War” differs from other literary responses to aerial bombing by attempting to instill a cosmopolitan attitude in its readers.

October 2021: Frederik Van Dam is Assistant Professor of European Literature at Radboud University, Nijmegen. His research includes Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form (2016), The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope (2019), and an issue on literature and economics in the European Journal of English Studies (2017). He is the literature editor of the journal English Text Construction and has created a documentary about the literary critic J. Hillis Miller, The Pleasure of that Obstinacy. He is currently developing a project that will focus on literary contributions to the imagination of peace in the interwar period.