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.

This paper posits that Esther Syiem’s poem, “To the Rest of India from Another Indian” (2013) engenders a subnational discourse that, by interrogating the national status of a privileged pedagogy, opts for a confederal political imagination of multiple and equal centers. It fosters this desire by modulating a counter imagination in two strategic ways — foregroundong its strangeness and implanting its own subnational pedagogy which constitutes its imagination. The subnational discourse, then, homogenizes the national imagination, and sets it in binary opposition to the modulated counter imagination which is also homogenized. It proceeds, after setting up a binary opposition, to contradict, delimit, and alienate itself in order to be recognized as another authentic and central entity parallel to the pedagogy that is deemed to be national. This paper concludes that Syiem’s subnational discourse, considered as a form of minority discourse, goes against the grain of Homi K. Bhabha’s view of minority discourse.

October 2019: 

Muthukumar Manickam is a Research Scholar working on Nationalism with a focus on the representation of the North-East. He studies the points of intersection between Nationalism and Subnationalism. He has published an article titled “Historicising the Banal: Media Representation of India’s North-East as Discriminatory Pedagogy Begetting Subnational Discourse” in Archiv Orientalni, Published by Oriental Institute Czech Academy of Sciences

Vinod Balakrishnan teaches Creative Writing and Communication. He is a motivational speaker, practising poet, and yoga enthusiast. He reads on Life Writing, Nation, Indian Writing in English, Cultural Representation. He has published articles in journals such as a/b, Pragmatism Today, Journal of Somaesthetics, Dharmaram University Journal of Religions and Philosophies, Journal of Creative Communication, and Lit Crit. He has also contributed chapters in various edited volumes published by Springer, Bloomsbury, and Brill.

The critics have noted that Thomas Pynchon’s work tends to center around attempts to unravel mysteries, yet, these  would-be etective plots have generally been associated with epistemological or ontological quest narratives rather than with crime fiction. However, Pynchon’s two most recent novels, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), engage directly and openly with the conventions of the hardboiled. This paper explores Pynchon’s use of the form, examining contributions that it has made to his recent work — a strong narrative framework, access to a set of powerful yet flexible generic tropes, and an anti-authoritarian interest in systematic corporate and governmental corruption. Pynchon’s hardboiled, I conclude, is an elegiac yet radical fictional mode highly suitable for his critical analysis of American history.

October 2019: Eric Sandberg completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, and is currently an Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong and a Docent at the University of Oulu. His research interests range from modernism to the contemporary novel, with a particular interest in the borderlands between literary and popular fiction. His monograph on Virginia Woolf appeared in 2014; he co-edited Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige for Palgrave in 2017, and edited 100 Greatest Literary Detectives for Rowman & Littlefield in 2018. He has published essays in numerous edited collections, and in journals including Ariel, The Cambridge Quarterly, the Journal of Modern Literature, Critique, and Neohelicon.

References to Vladimir Nabokov’s texts are frequent in the works of contemporary British writers, but it is John Banville who seems to be engaged in an unceasing conversation with Nabokov. As this essay will argue, in Banville’s comments on Nabokov’s sophisticated structures the readers can glimpse a hint of Banville’s own practice. The essay discusses Banville’s celebrated ethical thriller, The Book of Evidence, which not only resembles Nabokov’s Despair and Lolita in its theme and structure, or borrows phrases and images from these books, but also creates intimations of a hidden story, which remains decipherable though not conclusive, thus reproducing Nabokov’s textual model. Using a heuristic comparative approach, this essay treats Despair as a case study of Nabokov’s method of concealment of a storyline beneath flamboyant narration, and then studies Banville’s novel with particular attention to the signals of unreliability, which, keeping in mind the deceptions of Despair, can be seen as evidence of untold story. The essay proposes a reinterpretation of the plot in The Book of Evidence by analogy with Despair, as well as a rereading of Despair under the influence of Banville’s novel.

October 2019: Irena Księżopolska, PhD, graduate of the English Studies at the University of Warsaw, is author of the monograph The Web of Sense: Patterns of Involution in Selected Works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov (2012) and of articles in books and journals on the topics connected with textual studies, culture and film, She has co-edited a collected essays Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory (2019). She teaches British and American literature and culture at Vistula University, Warsaw. She is currently working on the monograph on Ian McEwan, which will include the results of her research as Kościuszko Foundation scholar in McEwan’s archives at Harry Ransom Center in February-May 2019.

Why might Philip Roth, in 1980, have published a revised edition of The Breast (1972), and what do many of his emendations have to do with recent scholarly disclosure of the existential concerns of the original narrative?  How, moreover, in the second edition, does de facto co-authored narrative technique pertain to Sartre’s tenet that consciousness arises as an upsurge of nothingness amid the dross substance of non-reflective Being? I conclude that in the revised edition Roth imbues David Kepesh, his once-autonomous narrator, with levels of authorial cognizance that subordinate Kepesh’s early outlooks to the consciousness-usurping intrusion of the author — now the author-narrator. That act of domination may dramatize Sartre’s description of the existential “look,” which stands to usurp the consciousness of “the Other.” The act of thus revising an already existential narrative illustrates the flight of the Sartrian “For-Itself” toward “the higher functions of consciousness.”

October 2019: James Duban is Professor of English and an Associate Dean in the Honors College at the University of North Texas. The author of books about Herman Melville and the Henry James family; he has also published in Philological Quarterly, Philip Roth Studies, Philosophy and Literature, Harvard Theological Review, Literature and Theology, and The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, among others. His current research centers on Philip Roth, Arthur Koestler, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He has recently, as well, turned attention to delineating the contrast between the heroic past and the conspiratorial present in James’s The Ambassadors.

updated in November 2019

At first glance, nothing seems to relate Jean Genet’s play “Les Nègres” (“The Blacks”) to Maurizio Cattelan’s exhibit “Not Afraid of Love.” The two works belong to separate conceptual mediums, yet they share the dynamics and effects of the mask-function, concealing the individual donning the mask while revealing a compound identity, experienced by all spectators. Vestiges of sacred rituals, masks are used here as profane icons, strangely animating inanimate artifacts, thereby generating a sense of wonder and unease. While metaphors require neither visibility nor animation, the interaction between exhibit/actors and spectator/s conjures up an almost tangible metaphor. Not all metaphors are masks, but all masks are powerful visual metaphors, whose impact alters not only those who don them but also those who participate in their display. In both media, the effect of the mask on the spectator/s is one of transformation from subject to object, by means of the gaze, inadvertently a simultaneous, two-sided activity.

October 2019: Nourit Melcer-Padon is senior lecturer and head of the English ESL department at the Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem. Her research interests include comparative literature and literary theory, cultural studies, the interrelationship of history and literature, and social Jewish history.

Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is more than a tribute to life at sea, but the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of a multi-national group of physical laborers paid a meager wage, living in harsh conditions, and performing repetitive and physically debilitating work, is significantly understudied. The present article considers Conrad’s compelling representation of the life of British merchant sailors for a middle-class literary audience. I demonstrate how Conrad makes his readers listen to the voice of the sailors, reflect on the value of their work, and appreciate the importance of seemingly menial, physical labor — such as serving coffee during a storm.

October 2019: Johan Adam Warodell has published articles on Conrad and Melville in The Cambridge Quarterly, Conradiana, The Conradian, English, Leviathan, Notes & Queries, and the Yearbook of Conrad Studies. His writing has won prizes from the Joseph Conrad Societies of Britain and America. He was most recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He is presently completing a monograph on Conrad.

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. 

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 18^th-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.

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."

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).

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.