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.

Translated into French as La Méprise and into English, with revisions, as Despair, Vladimir Nabokov’s seventh Russian novel Otchaianie (1932–1936) reveals the novelist’s evolution as an international author. This narrative, whose version in English circulates as a “Vintage International,” started out as the work of an author with no solid national attachments. In a sinister twist on Nabokov’s cultural/linguistic fluidity, Otchaianie focuses on a Russo-German narrator, the unreliable Hermann, and his memoir of a murder plot gone awry. Hermann imagines that his book can be an international success, with distinctive attractions for French and American readers, among others. A key scene for each audience features creative parodies expressing Nabokov’s position on Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s importance for fiction, then at its height. Otchaianie strongly favors Tolstoy, but a dismissive review of La Méprise from the internationalist wing of French literary opinion, in the person of Sartre, was blind to the polemical force of these parodies, to the point of missing Nabokov’s rejection of Dostoevsky. 

That rejection sharpens in Despair even as Nabokov’s admiration for Tolstoy reaches new heights. In general, his career shows that, given his total estrangement from Soviet Russian literature, he turned to French and Anglophone centers of literary authority. Nabokov did not respond to the broader internationality implied by Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s differing visions of world literature. 

The essay evaluates Nabokov’s addition of “national” to a key passage in the French and English versions of Otchaianie, addresses variations in the significance of his intertextual practices, and calls for a revaluation of this novel as an expression of free-speech authorship in peril.

March 2020: John Burt Foster, Jr., is a University Professor in the English Department at George Mason University in Virginia, where he teaches European and world fiction. He holds a doctorate from Yale in comparative literature and has published widely in that field. His books include studies on Nietzsche and modern fiction (Heirs to Dionysus), on Nabokov’s art of memory in relation to European modernism, and on the “transnational” Tolstoy. With his colleague Wayne Froman he edited Thresholds of Western Culture and Dramas of Culture for the International Association for Philosophy and Literature. From 2010 to 2016 he was an executive officer for the International Comparative Literature Association.

It might seem intuitive to say that attention is a matter of looking really closely at something, zeroing in on a particular object. In contrast to such an understanding of attention, it is here argued that attentive understanding of particular persons, things or events can only be apprehended by means of attending to the world in which they belong.

          Iris Murdoch’s example of M and D is often described as a clear illustration of what “attention” is. I argue that the example is rather unhelpful, precisely because we get no description of the work of attention. There is, therefore, a hole in the argument. The strategy of this paper is to fill that hole by means of a reading of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Here a clear view of another person is attained by attention to the world together with unearthing one’s own prejudices — a view shared by Murdoch but missing in the reception of her thought.

March 2020: Niklas Forsberg is Head of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, Department of Philosophy, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic; and Docent (≈ associate professor) in Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, and in Philosophy at University of Helsinki, Finland. A large portion of Forsberg’s research deals with problems found at the intersection between theoretical philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. He has written papers about Austin, Cavell, Coetzee, Collingwood, Emerson, Murdoch, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, discussing various topics such as pain, sin, love, language, and literature’s relation to philosophy and philosophical argumentation. He is the author of Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013 [pbk. 2015]).

This article examines the collocation of the Dersim Rebellion (1937–1938) in Eastern Anatolia and Turkey’s entry into the Korean War (1950–1953) in Erendiz Atasü’s 1995 autobiographical novel Dağın Öteki Yüzü (The Other Side of the Mountain, 2000). Atasü writes in her “Letter to the Reader” that the protagonist Vicdan is based on her mother, who in 1935 climbed Mount Uludağ in Bursa with her brothers to celebrate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s foundation of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923. Vicdan’s unnamed daughter-narrator, however, idealizes neither her Kemalist mother, who supports the armed conflict in Dersim, nor her veteran uncles (Burhan, Reha, and Cumhur): Burhan’s guilty conscience connects the causalities of the Korean War to his murder of the rebels in Dersim; Reha remembers the woman he raped in Dersim; the disabled Cumhur suppresses his anger at the government that forsakes lives in Korea for NATO membership. Atasü’s circular narrative that travels backward and forward in time portrays history not as progressive but as repetitive due to Turkey’s involvement in war. The Other Side of the Mountain narrates the silenced “other side” of the Republic by recalling Turkey’s entry into the Korean War and the armed conflict in Eastern Anatolia.

March 2020: Ayşe Naz Bulamur is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has articles on the works of British, American, and Turkish writers, such as Margaret Fuller, Hannah W. Foster, A. S. Byatt, Elif Şafak, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Martin Amis. She is the author of Victorian Murderesses: The Politics of Female Violence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Her research focuses on postcolonial theory, urban theory, feminist criticism, and nineteenth-century and contemporary fiction.

Milan Kundera laid out his concept of Central Europe in “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1984) with unprecedented force and conviction. His defense of the region’s political identity and cultural uniqueness as well as its West European connectedness sparked heated polemics among leading intellectuals of the day. Kundera stood solidly at its very center, both as an intellectual and fictional writer. Retrospectively, this prominent role turned out to be short-lived. Central Europe, as a cultural and geographical concept, has all but disappeared from his work and, contrary to expectation, not because of the post-1989 realities but rather because of his artistic goals and ambitions, which have expanded well beyond the borders of Europe. Kundera’s novel L’Ignorance (2000) attests to this re-evaluation. It offers a new perspective on the region, no longer privileging its central location but redefining its state of in-betweenness as that of geographic, cultural, and linguistic fluidity. To trace Kundera‘s development of his concept of Central Europe is to reimagine the once enclosed territory but also to reinvent the adventure that lies ahead of the European novel.  

March 2020: Hana Pichova is Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Recently, she published a book, The Case of the Missing Statue: A Historical and Literary Study of the Stalin Monument in Prague, in which she documents the history of one of the largest Stalin statues ever built and explores narrative accounts of this event as meditations on the function of monumentality, aesthetics, and power. 

The paper traces the quest of Max Aue, the perpetrator-narrator of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, for his lineal origin, sexual identity, and wholeness through an “inner experience” à la Bataille. This quest, and his attempts at merging with the Other by producing a pristine unity with his sister or by obliterating others, is futile. The paper demonstrates, on the one hand, the subversive ways in which alterity returns in the novel, and on the other hand, the ways in which Aue’s claims to a unique identity are undermined: Aue’s character, which on the first reading may seem homogenous and univocal, turns out to be built upon inter-texts and quotations that bring heterogeneity to the fore. Conversely, his endeavors to distinguish himself from other Nazi perpetrators are invalidated either on the plot level and or the narrative level by comparisons, repetitions, and paraphrasing. Unable to reach unity and identity by erasing alterity, Aue remains in a maze where he can only deteriorate morally and psychologically in an endless cancrizans.

March 2020: Orit Yushinsky Troupin holds a PhD in General and Comparative Literature from the Hebrew University. She is currently an independent scholar and teaches Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and cultural theories in different clinical institutions. Her main interests are Lacano-Marxism, French thought and letters, ethics and political philosophy.

William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral belongs to a body of worka that make the case for sympathy as an effective and affective social strategy. This article maps out a net of relations that links three key issues in respect to Gibson’s novel: the strategy of metonymy, the exploration of sympathy, and the rethinking of realism. Despite the well-rehearsed laments about the bleak future and uncertain fate of the novel, in particular, and of the humanities more broadly, by turning to speculative fiction I hope to celebrate the possibilities that still lie in both the literary form and the scholarly endeavor. The growing turn to enhanced realities as well as speculative and alternative realisms can be critically and productively understood through the mechanism of metonymy and through a mode of sympathy.

March 2020: Keren Omry (University of Haifa) is the author of Cross-Rhythms: Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature (Bloomsbury, 2008). Her more recent work has appeared in journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa , and The New Centennial Review, on topics ranging from gender and posthumanism, through hip hop aesthetics in speculative fiction, to Israeli/Palestinian futurisms. She currently serves as the President of the Science Fiction Research Association, and she is writing a book on Alternate Histories.