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Publications

2020
Zilleruelo, Art . 2020. The Play of the Line: 'Presence Effects' and the Voice of the Latent in Wordsworth’s Prelude. Partial Answers 18(1): 25-49. . Publisher's VersionAbstract

There is a tradition of Wordsworth criticism that begins with William Empson in 1951, continues with Christopher Ricks in 1971 and Isobel Armstrong in 2000, and concludes with Anne-Lise François in 2008, which considers the disruptive effects of the poet’s blank verse lines upon his poetry’s semantic or rhetorical function. I seek to revive this tradition by invoking Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s articulation of the relationship between what he calls “presence effects” and “meaning effects” to emphasize instances where individual lines in Wordsworth’s Prelude produce disruptions or ambiguities that subvert the governing rhetoric of the verse structures in which they reside. I revisit several of the poem’s most iconic passages to explore how certain suggestive lines and line breaks form an affective and material counter-rhetoric that undermines the poem’s narratives of personal growth and redeemed trauma. I also consider the extent to which these disruptions may represent the presentification of “the latent” as Gumbrecht defines it.

October 2019: Art Zilleruelo is Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Penn State Schuylkill.  He is the author of the poetry chapbook Weird Vocation (Kattywompus Press, 2015) and the poetry collection The Last Map (Unsolicited Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Western Humanities Review, and other journals. His literary criticism has appeared in Joyce Studies Annual

 

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He, Xiyao . 2020. Jonathan Swift’s Metaphorical Conceptualization of Nature as a Woman and His 'Aesthetic' Critique of Science. Partial Answers 18(1). . Publisher's Version

This article relates Swift’s critique of science to his view of women by resorting to Lakoff and Johnson’s theory on the function of metaphors in human conceptualization. Through the overarching conceptual metaphor NATURE IS A WOMAN, the gap between these two areas in Swift studies, which have remained largely isolated so far, is bridged. The analysis shows that Swift’s strange aesthetic view of and peculiar attitude toward women were, through the conceptual metaphor, extrapolated to nature, which can explain his condemnation of science as not only “unaesthetic” and “indecent” but also futile and morbid.

October 2019: HE Xiyao received his PhD from Hong Kong Baptist University and is currently a lecturer at the School of English Studies, Zhejiang International Studies University. His research interests include 18th-century English Literature, Chinese myths and legends, and Pre-1949 Chinese Maritime Customs. He has recently published an article on the criticisms embedded in Chinese myths and legends, and is now working on the collation and translation of historical files from Pre-1949 Maritime Customs in Zhejiang Province, China.

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2019
Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna . 2019. Whose Story? Whose History?: The Conradian Hetero-text of Latin American Fiction. 17(2): 363-381. . Publisher's Version

The article offers a discussion of two Latin American fictional historiographies: the short story “Guayaquil,” by Jorge Luis Borges (1970), and The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2011). Both these fictional historiographies are intertextually related to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), and both may be read as inscriptions of a Postmodernist sensibility, but their respective engagements with the earlier fictional historiography offer very different versions of the relations of story, history, and historiography, highlighting some significant, albeit often-overlooked aspect of their hetero-text.

 

May 2019: Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan is Professor of English, currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of Haifa University Press and Academic Head of the Haifa University Library. She is the author of Graham Greene's Childless Fathers (Macmillan 1988) Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (OUP 1991), The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (1999), Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject (Stanford University Press, 2013), and numerous articles on literary modernism and continental philosophy. Her recent research project is provisionally titled "Hetero-biographies."

Armstrong, Charles I. . 2019. Trauma in Michael Longley’s War Poetry of the Troubles. 17(2): 349-362. . Publisher's Version

Michael Longley’s poetry has responded to the Northern Irish Troubles with great skill and sensitivity. This article approaches his Troubles-related work from a trauma perspective. It reads this poetry as functioning as a form of palimpsest, whereby different conflicts and wars are transposed onto one another. Longley’s relationship to his father is given special focus, as it relates Longley’s Troubles verse to the memory of World War 1 through a prism of postmemory. Other contexts are important for Longley, though, and an interpretation of “Ceasefire” concludes that Longley’s acts of multidirectional memory cannot simply be defined as instances of historical witnessing but also involve imaginative and mythical manoeuvres.

 

 

May 2019: Charles I. Armstrong is a professor of English literature at the University of Agder, in Norway. Among his publications are Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the co-edited volume The Legacy of the Good Friday Agreement: Politics, Culture and Art in Northern Ireland after 1998 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

 

 

Waysband, Edward . 2019. In Job Dulder’s Balances: Petr Guber and Russian-Polish-Jewish Relations during World War I. 17(2): 319-347. . Publisher's Version

Providing the literary and philosophical comparative context of Petr Guber’s short story “Job Dulder (A Variation on the Old Theme)” (1923), the essay analyses a pre-Holocaust literary treatment of the Book of Job, enacting the collision of the traditional (Judaic) worldview of East European Jews with disastrous sides of modernity in Word War I and its aftermath. The paper juxtaposes two major actualizations of the Book of Job in modernist texts — (1) its appraisal in In Job Balances (1929) by Russian-Jewish existential philosopher Lev Shestov as a basis for his distinction between European rational philosophy and metaphysical belief and (2) a self-consciously anti-cathartic literary re-enactments of the Job story in Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples (1922), Guber’s story, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Job” (1970). The essay shows in what historical and ideological contexts these post-metaphysical subversions of the biblical proto-text are rooted. In these terms, “Job Dulder” presents an important variant of the Modernist thematization of the Job story. It situates the Jewish predicament between the hammer and the anvil of both Russian and Polish nationalisms during WWI. I argue that this representation of the precariousness of Russian-Polish-Jewish relations was generated by a specific historical and ideological situation in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s.

 

 

May 2019: Edward Waysband received his PhD in Russian Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2010. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Linguistics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg. His research interests encompass Russian and European Modernism; Russian-Polish-Jewish nexus; literature and identity (including the contexts of diaspora and exile); and postcolonial, nationalism, and minority studies. He has published articles on these issues in academic journals. He is currently writing a monograph on Vladislav Khodasevich.

 

 

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Toker, Leona . 2019. Testimony and Fictionality in Georgy Demidov’s Gulag Stories. 17(2): 299-318. . Publisher's Version

Georgy Demidov’s Gulag stories were published belatedly, in the new millennium, and have acted as a timely reminder of the suffering and death of great numbers of innocent people in the camps. This article attempts to explain the literary qualities of Demidov’s Kolyma stories as well as the way in which, despite their fictionalized plots, they can be read as works of testimony. Comparing Demidov’s narrative techniques with those of his contemporaries, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, whom the sad history of the manuscripts had turned into his precursors, I focus on the significance of Demidov’s choice of extraordinary rather than typical characters and plots, his ample use of narrative commentary, and his gearing up narrative time to cognitive rather than experiential response of the audience. Judging by an implicitly autodescriptive touch in a story devoted to an artist who perished in the camps, the use of fictionalization in attesting to camp experience was not a calculated choice on Demidov’s part but a genuine product of the workings of his literary imagination.

 

 

May 2019: 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 (forthcoming). She is Editor of Partial Answers.

 

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Hawthorn, Jeremy . 2019. History, Fiction, and the Holocaust: Narrative Perspective and Ethical Responsibility. 17(2): 279-298. . Publisher's Version

This article argues that fictional accounts of the Holocaust that include historical characters and events face special ethical challenges. In particular, the presentation of the inner lives of characters representing real people (such as their private thoughts and emotions, their inner speech) is seen to be especially problematic, especially in the case of victims. The article focuses on three fictional accounts of an actual event that took place in the Auschwitz death camp: the shooting of an SS officer named Josef Schillinger by a female prisoner awaiting gassing. These accounts are “The Death of Schillinger” by Tadeusz Borowski (first published in Polish 1959 and in English translation in 1967, but written shortly after Borowski’s release from Auschwitz in 1945 and before his suicide in 1951), “Revenge of a Dancer” by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk (which came out in English translation from the unpublished Polish manuscript in 1985, but was written before 1967 when publication in Poland was denied), and A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova by Arnošt Lustig (published in Czech in 1964 and in English translation in 1973). While Lustig’s novel presents the reader with the female victim’s thoughts and feelings, the two shorter works do not, and the article explores the ethical ramifications of this difference.

 

March 2019: Jeremy Hawthorn is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His book The Reader as Peeping Tom: Nonreciprocal Gazing in Narrative Fiction and Filmwas published by Ohio State University Press in 2014. He has published three monographs and many articles on the fiction of Joseph Conrad and is presently co-editing a volume in the Cambridge University Press Edition of Conrad's works. The fourth edition of his A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory was published in 2000, and the seventh edition of his textbook Studying the Novel by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017.

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Ionescu, Arleen . 2019. The “Differend” of Shoes: Van Gogh, Beckett, Wiesel, Levi, and Holocaust Museums. 17(2): 255-277. . Publisher's Version

Focusing on the representation or presence of shoes in several literary texts and war memorials as metonymies of the Holocaust, this article will rely on Jean-François Lyotard’s call for (impossible yet necessary) linkages “after Auschwitz” to make connections between these various textual and museological scenes. As a point of departure, I revisit Jacques Derrida’s notion of “restitution” in his critique of the debate between Martin Heidegger and art critic Meyer Schapiro on the origin of a pair of shoes in van Gogh’s eponymous painting. While being sensitive to Derrida’s economic argument in The Truth in Painting, I attempt to make a case for the necessity of rehabilitating “restitution” in works of representation and commemoration, across literature, visual arts, memorials and museums.

 

May 2019: 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 20th-century fiction, especially Modernist prose, as well as Critical Theory, Holocaust Studies, Translation Studies and, increasingly, Memory and Trauma Studies. She has published widely on James Joyce and other related aspects of modernism, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida in James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual, Parallax, Partial Answers, and Scientia Traductionis. She is co-general editor for Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Her books include Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality (Peter Lang, 2014) and The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is currently working on a book (co-edited with Maria Margaroni) entitled Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield in 2020).

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Erll, Astrid . 2019. Homer, Turko, Little Harry: Cultural Memory and the Ethics of Premediation in James Joyce’s Ulysses. 17(2): 227-253. . Publisher's Version

This article addresses narrative ethics from a media and memory studies perspective. It discusses the ethics of premediation in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Premediation is a forward-facing, generative dynamic of cultural memory: the medial preformation of imagination, experience, storytelling, and action. I first explore Ulysses’s mimesis of premediation, showing how in the Calypso episode, Bloom’s imagination is premediated by Orientalist stereotypes, and how in the Ithaca episode, Stephen’s ballad of Little Harry Hughes exposes the premediating power of age-old anti-Semitic narratives. Both episodes reveal the ethically problematic dimension of premediating schemata, which often operate non-consciously. But they also hint at the possibility of critical reflection, of “turning around upon one’s schemata” in the psychologist Frederic Bartlett’s sense. In a second step, I discuss the novel’s references to the Odyssey as a case of premediation, showing how new concepts of memory and mediation can elucidate this famous case of intertextuality. I argue that the particular presence of Homer in Ulysses — not as remediation, but as premediation — marks modernism’s new temporal regime, where tradition is used to tell new stories and thus turns into a future-oriented and enabling resource. Discussing the dynamic of premediation both on the level of narrative representation and in the novel’s intertextual relations, this article explores the potentials of a memory studies concept for the fields of (ethical) narratology, Joyce studies, and classical reception studies.

 

 

May 2019: Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt (Germany) and founder of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform (FMSP). Her research fields include memory studies, narratology, media studies, and transcultural studies. Erll is general editor of the book series Media and Cultural Memory (with A. Nünning, de Gruyter) and author of Memory in Culture (Palgrave, 2011). Recent publications are Audiovisual Memory and the (Re)Making of Europe (Image & Narrative 2017, ed. with A. Rigney) and Cultural Memory after the Transnational Turn (Memory Studies 2018, ed.with A. Rigney). In her current research project, she studies the afterlives of the Odyssey.

 

 

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Phelan, James . 2019. Jakob Lothe: An Appreciation. 17(2): 201-208. . Publisher's VersionAbstract

Writing in the genre of “Letter to an old friend,” James Phelan offers an appreciation of the deep interconnections between the character and the scholarship of Jakob Lothe, to whom this issue of the journal is dedicated. Phelan contrasts T. S. Eliot’s dictum about the desirable separation between the “man who suffers and the mind which creates” with his own experience of Lothe. Phelan finds that in Lothe the man who suffers is inseparable from the mind that interprets and theorizes and that this continuity between “man” and “mind” contributes to the superior quality of each.

 

 

May 2019: James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State University. His research has been devoted to developing a viable account of narrative as rhetoric. He has written about style in Worlds from Words; about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots; about voice, character narration, ethics, and audiences in Narrative as Rhetoric; about the rhetoric and ethics of character narration in Living to Tell about It; and about narrative judgments and progression in Experiencing Fiction.  He has taken up the relationship between literary history and rhetorical analysis in Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010 (2013), and he has further extended the conception and consequences of his rhetorical approach in Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017).  In 2020, he and Matthew Clark will publish Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. He has also engaged in direct scholarly give-and-take in Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates co-authored with David Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol (2012). In 1991, Phelan brought out the autobiographical journal Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor

In addition to publishing well over 100 essays, Phelan has edited or co-edited seven collections of essays, including the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (with Peter J. Rabinowitz, 2005), Teaching Narrative Theory (with David Herman and Brian McHale), and After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (with Susan R. Suleiman and Jakob Lothe, 2012).  With Gerald Graff, he has edited two textbooks for the classroom, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (1995, 2004), and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (2000, 2009)

Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. Since 1993, he has been co-editor, with Peter J. Rabinowitz (1993-2018), Robyn Warhol (2012-2016), and Katra Byram (2017--), of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.

June 2006: Born in Flushing, NY, James Phelan received his BA from Boston College (1972) and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1977). He began as an Assistant Professor at Ohio State in 1977, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1983 and to Professor in 1989. He served as Department Chair from 1994-2002; in 2004 he was awarded the University's Distinguished Scholar Award. Phelan's work focuses on theoretical issues or problems in narrative. He has written about style in Worlds from Words; about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots; about voice, character narration, ethics, and audiences in Narrative as Rhetoric; and about the rhetoric and ethics of character narration in Living to Tell about It.  He has also published the autobiographical journal Beyond the Tenure Track and has edited, with Peter J. Rabinowitz, Understanding Narrative, and, with Gerald Graff, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy.

            Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature and winner of the 1993 CELJ Award for Best New Journal. Since 1993, he has been co-editor, with Peter J. Rabinowitz, of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.

 

Toker, Leona, and Jeremy Hawthorn. 2019. LITERATURE AS TIME'S WITNESS: SPECIAL ISSUE IN HONOR OF JAKOB LOTHE. INTRODUCTION. 17(2): 125-200. . Publisher's VersionAbstract

After decades of research writing, literary critics are often moved to write not “about” literature but “the real thing” — poems, fiction, or memoirs. Jacob Lothe of Oslo University, author of four books and editor or coeditor of several collections of collaborative literary research, was moved to collect oral testimony about the Holocaust. In 2006, with Anette Storeide, he published narratives by concentration-camp survivors — Tidsvitner: Fortellinger fra Auschwitz og Sachsenhausen (Time’s Witnesses: Narratives from Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen). This book records the ordeals and survival of eight men who were victims of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, as told by themselves. It was followed in 2013 by Lothe’s collection of narratives by ten women who survived concentration-camp incarceration, translated into English as Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust (2017). The title of the present special issue, Literature as Time’s Witness, salutes these two books while responding to a large part of Jakob Lothe’s research interests, including his concern with the ethics of narrative. The articles collected in this issue in his honor do not advocate reading literary works as documents of historical periods but recognize the multifunctionality of literary works and discuss the relationship between the art and the attesting potentialities of fiction and poetry in addition to factographic writing.

Koppen, Randi . 2019. The Work of the Witness: Leonard Woolf, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism. 17(2): 209-226. . Publisher's Version

 

 

 

Starting from an interest in witnessing as a set of conceptual and narrative operations that also involve comparison as a fundamental cognitive practice, this essay examines the work of the witness at two historically entangled moments. In the “multi-directional memory” (Rothberg) of the British Jewish writer and political activist Leonard Woolf early 20th-century colonial trauma connects with the rise in racial persecution and absolute power in Europe of the 1930s. Woolf’s experience as a colonial administrator in Ceylon is given fictional form in his 1913 novel The Village in the Jungle; an analysis of the condition of colonialism that is enabled by his complex and contingent position as a witness. Strikingly, the novel’s comparative operations and conceptual tropes reappear in his historiography of “the origins of totalitarianism” in Barbarians at the Gate (1939). For Woolf, the extreme events of the 1930s spur an almost compulsive historicism that leads back to the history of European imperialism and to his own colonial encounter, bringing together different temporal and spatial coordinates in a manner that is at once prescient and familiar. Not only is this an anticipation of Hannah Arendt’s famous “boomerang thesis” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); more generally Woolf’s narrative offers a historical perspective on recent transnational and global approaches to comparison where network- or other horizontal and lateral models dominate and where connections among coordinates can only appear tentative and fractured. Like Arendt’s, Woolf’s grand narrative was composed with the urgency of the witness to extreme events, illuminating the potential, as well as the risks, of cross-temporal comparison.

 

 

May 2019: Randi Koppen, professor of British Literature at the University of Bergen, has published on various aspects of modernist literature and culture, including fashion and body culture, popular science, sound technologies and broadcasting. Her work has appeared in leading journals such as New Literary History and Modern Drama, and with international publishers such as Edinburgh University Press and Bloomsbury Academic. Her book Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), explores the modern fascination with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice, demonstrating how Woolf’s work provides illuminating examples of all of these aspects. Professor Koppen’s current research centres on the interwar writing and activism of Leonard Woolf, especially its advancement of international collaboration, solidarity and justice.

 

Wolloch, Nathaniel . 2019. Edward Gibbon’s Autobiographies and the Historicist Critique of Enlightenment Historiography. Partial Answers 17(1): 1-22. . Publisher's Version

This article examines the manner in which Edward Gibbon attempted to mould his public image for posterity, while writing and rewriting the various versions of his autobiography. It highlights Gibbon’s attempts to anticipate the critical reading of his memoirs and fashion his public image, not least regarding his attitude toward religion. It also discusses, in this context, his views on the proper manner of writing history, and how they developed throughout his intellectual career, specifically in relation to his great historical work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This assessment of Gibbon is then used to criticize the “historicist” critique of Enlightenment historiography, which has blamed Gibbon and other Enlightenment historians for being improperly subjective in discussing past eras. In contrast with this view, the modernity of Enlightenment historiography is emphasized.

 

February 2019: Nathaniel Wolloch is an Israeli independent scholar. He is an intellectual historian of the long 18th century, and the author of numerous articles and three books, Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture (2006); History and Nature in the Enlightenment: Praise of the Mastery of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Historical Literature (2011); and Nature in the History of Economic Thought: How Natural Resources Became an Economic Concept (2017).

 

Mildorf, Jarmila . 2019. Autobiography, the Literary, and the Everyday in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior. Partial Answers 17(1): 125-140. . Publisher's Version

This article explores the idea that autobiographical texts can also become sites of withdrawal, where the seemingly personal is offered on the surface of the text but also immediately recedes into the background. Paul Auster’s autobiographical text Report from the Interior, which is a companion piece to the earlier Winter Journal, is a case in point. In this text, the literary and the everyday intersect in intriguing ways. The book features lengthy descriptions of (pop)cultural artefacts which influenced the young Auster’s mind. Auster further contextualizes his life by referring to historical moments and political issues. I argue that readers’ expectations of an introspective stance and a personal and idiosyncratic view of the author’s (special) life are thwarted to a degree since the Report in fact “exteriorizes” Auster’s inner life through the use of the everyday and thus turns it into a common experience that other people growing up under similar circumstances in the 1950s may recognize and identify with. His use of you-narration as a means of self-address can be interpreted as either a means of self-distancing or of creating a sense of intimacy. It thus also serves as a projection screen for readers’ own memories of the past and of life experiences they may have shared with Auster.

 

 

February 2019: Jarmila Mildorf received her PhD in sociolinguistics from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and is now a Senior Lecturer of English language and literature at the University of Paderborn (Germany). She is the author of Storying Domestic Violence (2007) and has co-edited six collections of essays: Imaginary Dialogues in English: Explorations of a Literary Form (2012), The Writing Cure: Literature and Medicine in Context (2013), Magic, Science, Technology, and Literature (2nd ed. 2014), Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy (2014), Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative (2016) and Dialogue across Media (2016). She was also a guest co-editor of a special issue on Narrative: Knowing, Living, Telling (Partial Answers 6.2). Her research interests are dialogue studies, conversational storytelling, second-person narration, the medical humanities, and radio drama.

 

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Toikkanen, Jarkko . 2019. Intermedial Experience and Ekphrasis in Wordsworth’s 'Slumber'. Partial Answers 17(1): 107-124. . Publisher's Version

Comments on William Wordsworth’s much-debated poem “A slumber did my spirit seal” (1800) fall into two interpretive positions: “shock” readings and “non-shock” readings. The poem can be understood in a new way through the concept of intermedial experience and the rhetorical device of ekphrasis. I call for a kind of visual reading that does not let the intermedial experience of poetry be reduced to an interpretive position, as there always remains an excess of experience, something that is not part of the interpretation and cannot be exhausted by offering another interpretation. Becoming involved with the excess and reflecting on it can yield insight into how intermedial experience is constituted. In the readings of “Slumber,” it has consistently been the empty space between the poem’s two stanzas that has appeared to generate such excess. I discuss the images readers have seen in reading the poem, the narrative they have used to describe them in their own words, as well as the effect of the empty space on their responses. Who is the source of the significance of the poem’s visual images, the reader, the poetic I, or Wordsworth himself, and what does the reading come to in terms of the selves involved? I argue that interpretive positions such as the “shock” and “non-shock” readings of “Slumber” can be viewed as ekphrases in which the reader verbally describes the images of the poem with the consequence of narrative appropriation. In doing so, the intermedial experience of poetry is reduced to an interpretive position, and the reading process subjectively closed off into a private sphere. Studying the device of ekphrasis shows how reading, understood as intermedial experience affected by empty space in “Slumber,” both maintains and disrupts this sense of subjective closure.

 

Jarkko Toikkanen (PhD, docent) currently works as university researcher at the University of Tampere for the Academy of Finland consortium “The Literary in Life” in which he heads the work package “Intermedial Experience and Affectivity.” Toikkanen has been developing the concept of experience within the field of intermediality research in literary studies for nearly a decade now. His main objective has been to study how reading literature is experienced in terms of the visual or auditory images that literature makes the reader imagine seeing or hearing. Methodologically, he has applied specific rhetorical devices (ekphrasis and hypotyposis) through which images that demand interpretation can be distinguished from images that appear simply to be seen or heard.

 

Jin, Hengshan . 2019. The Meaning of Liberation: From The Joy Luck Club to Face and Saving Face. Partial Answers 17(1): 65-80. . Publisher's Version

The film The Joy Luck Club (1993) adapted from Amy Tan’s novel of the same title is considered a classic in the representation of Chinese Americans, especially Chinese American women in the past few decades. In many ways, two other films, Face (2002) and Saving Face (2004), share a similar theme with The Joy Luck Club, in terms of the conflict between mothers and daughters as well as between Chinese culture and American culture. The conflicts are eventually resolved to some degree, to everyone’s satisfaction, to the satisfaction of the Chinese audience in particular. It is important, however, to see the films as a window to American life and society: the theme of liberation presented in the films is to be understood in the context of American topoi, namely, the pursuit of the self and the search for the value of life in a multicultural society. To a large extent, the three films address the American audience rather than the Chinese audience. While they tend towards the promotion of the social status of the Chinese community in America and engage in the representation of the different Chinese cultural features, the films endow the contemporary Chinese Americans with a prominent national identity that is American rather than Chinese.

 

 

February 2019: Hengshan Jin is professor of English and American Studies at the School of Foreign Languages in East China Normal University. He obtained his Ph.D from Peking University in 2004. He is the author of John Updike and Contemporary American Society (2008) and The Rooted Print: The Cold War Mentality and American Literature and Culture (2017). He has also published more than 40 academic articles covering a diverse range of American literature, culture as well as contemporary Chinese literature. He was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Duke University from 2010-2011.

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Keskinen, Mikko . 2019. Narrating Selves amid Library Shelves: Literary Mediation and Demediation in S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. Partial Answers 17(1): 141-158. . Publisher's Version

This essay focuses on the various forms of narrating, mediating, and interpreting selves within and around a book object, the novel S. (2013) by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The novel S. is an experiment in producing a deceivingly realistic replica of a maltreated library book object, but its discursive practices also rely on familiar literary forms, harking back to epistolary commonplaces, as well as to marginalia, both ancient and modern. The book object S., which carries the text of the novel-within-a-novel, the readers’ multilayered markings, and paraphernalia, forms an archive dramatizing the workings of memory, thought, and emotion. That archive also demonstrates how the characters collect, organize, and process data from a variety of media sources. S. also problematizes narration, mediation, and the representation of textual selves through its data overkill verging on unreadability. Modifying Garrett Stewart’s notion, the essay considers the possible significances of narrative “demediation” in experiments with the nearly dysfunctional book form. The very act of demediating signifies conceptually, by its very presence, as conceptual art customarily does. In the case of S., it conceptualizes textual communication and minds in interaction even to a degree of confusion, not-reading, or veritable library silence in reception.

 

February 2019: Mikko Keskinen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is the author of Response, Resistance, Deconstruction (Jyväskylä UP, 1998) and Audio Book: Essays on Sound Technologies in Narrative Fiction (Lexington Books, 2008). He has published articles on narrative theory, contemporary literature, and experimental writing in Critique, Journal of International Women’s Studies, PsyArt, Romanic Review, Imaginaires, Image [&] Narrative, and Frontiers of Narrative Studies. His book chapters have appeared or are forthcoming in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (Continuum, 2006), Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction (Continuum, 2010), Theory of Mind and Literature (Purdue UP, 2010), and Reconfiguring the Non-Human (Routledge, 2019).

 

Andersson, Greger . 2019. Narrating Selves and the Literary in the Bible. Partial Answers 17(1): 87-105. . Publisher's Version

This article discusses how features in a narrative generate an understanding of its purpose and how this understanding affects our attitude when reading and interpreting a text. It focusses on biblical texts that aspire to be historical but still contain elements that are generally thought to belong to the realm of fiction, as well as on texts with an assumed argumentative purpose and traits that create a sense of literary art. The four texts are Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, the book of Nehemiah, autobiographical sections in Paul, and third-person narratives in the books of Samuel. The article suggests that our understanding of the frame determines the function and meaning of the forms; yet it also argues that the presence of certain forms might challenge conventional assumptions about the frame, that is, the purpose of some narratives.

 

February 2019:

Greger Andersson is Professor in Comparative Literature and head of the research environment Narration, Life, Meaning at Örebro University, Sweden. He has published on narratology and the application of narratology as an analytical method in biblical studies. At present he is working with the theme of sameness or difference in narratology.

 

Hyvaerinen, Matti, Mari Hatavara, and Jarmila Mildorf. 2019. NARRATING SELVES FROM THE BIBLE TO SOCIAL MEDIA: INTRODUCTION TO THE FORUM. Partial Answers 17(1): 81-86. . Publisher's Version

 

 

This introduction to the forum “Narrating Selves from the Bible to Social Media” contextualizes the theme by taking recourse to philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s reflections on self-narration. MacIntyre poses the question about personal continuity in spite of the necessary change. With his concept of “character,” he makes explicit the connection to literature, thus emphasizing a degree of creativity when people tell their life stories. The contributions to the forum explore this aspect by also highlighting the role of the everyday and the media through which selves are portrayed.

 

Gomel, Elana . 2019. Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Age, by Lisa Vox. Partial Answers 17(1): 190-193. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
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