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Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl” is a literary analysis of fascination. Situating the story in the history of fascination, the article highlights how it repeats well-known themes from this history. Cortázar’s short story also shows how authors have been able to use fascination as a productive force. I argue that Cortázar’s fascination is intimately connected to temporality, especially the time structure associated with reminders. As such, the fascinating story of a man’s obsession with an axolotl suggests that fascination became a major aspect of cultural reproduction and reconfiguration during the 20th century.
February 2019:
Torbjörn Gustafsson Chorell is professor specializing in intellectual history, including historical theory, at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University (Sweden). He currently works on the history of fascination and the impact of theories of secularization in modern historiography.
The article presents a new method for the analysis of short-form on-line storytelling by assuming an aestheticizing point of view on an everyday narrative practice. It examines the expressive affordances of Facebook status updates with the help of three prominent concepts derived from literary narratology and sociolinguistics: experientiality, simultaneity, and tellability. Conventions of the novel such as the epistolary form are juxtaposed with social media narration, in order to highlight both the intentional artistry and accidental aesthetics of status updates. The article supplements sociolinguistic studies by exposing the existentialist, self-consciously non-communicative facet of Facebook storytelling.
Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently she is running two research projects, Dangers of Narrative (2017–2020) and the research consortium Instrumental Narratives (2018–2022). In 2018, she is Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Fictionality Studies, Aarhus University. She is co-editor of Narrative, Interrupted (De Gruyter, 2012) and Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (Routledge, 2015). She has published on consciousness, voice, and realism across media, the literary tradition of adultery, authorial ethos, and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.
Due to the popular misperception of Robert Frost (1874–1963) as a “court” or “presidential” poet, critics have largely failed to acknowledge his lifelong preoccupation with the notion of treason as sometimes a commendable act. As a result, we do not understand adequately the intellectual roots of his ambivalent adherence to the poetic form and of his special kind of irony.
By analyzing his numerous remarks on treason and some of the many books he read on political traitors, one can develop a whole typology of loyalists and renegades crowding his imagination. These types mark out Frost’s field of reflection on the question of excessive belonging to both the state and the poem. The essay reconstructs the poet’s understanding of the political and psychological profiles of Aaron Burr, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Benedict Arnold, and Shakespeare’s Brutus. If Frost was disgusted with the shallowness of Burr and the overly rigid loyalism of Lee, he was also entirely taken with the various modes of disloyalty or betrayal exemplified by the other three figures. These five profiles shed light on some of the more difficult motifs of his imagination and, most importantly, on his tonal reserve, as is shown on the example of his poem “The Pasture.”
Grzegorz Kosc is Associate professor of American studies at the American Studies Center of the University of Warsaw. He is the author of two books Robert Lowell: Uncomfortable Epigone of the Grands Maîtres (2005) and Robert Frost's Political Body (2014). Recently, his articles have appeared in Wallace Stevens Journal and Papers on Language and Literature. He is co-editing, with Steven Gould Axelrod of the University of California, Riverside, a new edition of Robert Lowell’s prose for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Against the background of the traditional scholarly portrayals of Aemilia Lanyer’s "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" as the religious gesture of a woman writer in early 17th-century England, whether sincerely spiritual or socially motivated, this essay complicates the understanding of the poet’s range of intentions and stock of concepts for the expression of her ideas. Lanyer’s conceptions of sympathetic sight and communion-based vision are presented as a probable poetic interaction with contemporary male-centered discourses of objectivity. In the context of early 17th-century philosophical disputes over the nature of vision and optics — with the publication of Johannes Kepler’s Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena in 1604 and of Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius in 1610 — Lanyer’s poetry presents sight in religious terms as the glorious means through which a woman could aspire to gain an essential understanding of things and acquire a clear perception of Christic truth. While Kepler and Galileo promoted a model of vision which separated the physical perception of things from their subjective understanding, making the act of seeing imprecise at best and deformed at worst, impersonal and absolutely unrelated to the observer’s consciousness, Lanyer’s religious poetry presents sight as the means for the reader to internalize the perceived and attain a state of Eucharistic communion with it. While vision was becoming the passive and impersonal reception of light rays, and the mind’s conceits of things were believed to be the result of a deception of the sense of vision, Lanyer wrote and published her poetry as a moment of Eucharistic perception: the perception of Christ’s “perfect picture,” hidden behind the aenigmata of her poetry, was attainable, for Lanyer, solely through the “eie of Faith.”
Yaakov Mascetti is lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. His work focuses on metaphysical poetry, early-modern conceptions of sight and cognition, the role of occultism in the rise of modernity, and definitions of femininity in early-modern English literature. He recently completed his first book on Humanist sign-theory and Protestant sacramentalism in early-modern English religious lyrics, and is now working on a new project on shifting conceptions of truth and sight in early-modern and enlightenment England.
The premise of Monika Fludernik’s “natural” narratology is that all narratives, including the most “artificial” literary narratives, ultimately rely on the basic cognitive parameters of naturally-occurring, spontaneous conversational narrative. We naturalize texts by narrativizing them. Fludernik attributes this idea of naturalization, correctly, to Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975), where it modestly masquerades as a synthesis and rationalization of ideas already current in the Formalist-Structuralist tradition. More than merely a synthesis of precursor concepts, however, Culler’s naturalization actually offers something like a unified theory of literary convention, underwriting a profoundly demystifying account of the literary — one that is arguably incompatible with Fludernik’s narrativization, while it also undermines some of the claims of the unnatural narratologists.
Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. A co-founder of Ohio State’s Project Narrative, which he directed in 2012–2014, he is also a founding member and former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). He was a vice-president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2014–2015, and president in 2016. He is the author of four books on postmodern literature and culture, including Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015). He has co-edited five volumes on twentieth-century literature, experimentalism, and narrative theory. Since July 2015 he has edited the international journal Poetics Today.
This article examines the view of the Brazilian Jewish author Clarice Lispector on the triangular relation between Jewishness, the Shoah and the chosenness of the Jewish people by combining biographical evidence with a close reading of her short story “Perdoando Deus.” Through an analysis of allegorical motifs, “Perdoando Deus” emerges as a historical, philosophical, and personal (anti)theological process. As such, this short story, mostly overlooked due to its obscurity, marks a watershed in Lispector’s oeuvre in terms of the recognition of her Jewishness — which she defines not as a religion but as an ethnic category and a collectivity of survivors.
June 2018: Sebastian Musch is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at Osnabrück University, Germany. He wrote his dissertation on Jewish Responses to Buddhism in German Culture 1890-1940 at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg. He has held fellowships at the University of Haifa, UC Berkeley, and the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College, among others. His research focuses on German-Jewish culture and intellectual history of the 20th century.
June 2018: Bieke Willem is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. In 2016 she was a postdoc at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American literature and visual culture, especially of the Southern Cone. Her first monograph, El espacio narrativo en la novela chilena postdictatorial, was published in 2016 by Brill.
If the yearning for the Absolute — the unconditioned — initiates and to a large extent defines the Romantic gesture, then post-Romantic imagination seems to stretch this yearning towards the Absolute to such a degree that it could readily destroy any unity of the concept, including that of the Absolute itself. Skeptical of any immediate relation between word and object, Celan in his early stage was deeply involved in what could only be described as a “striving” against Hegelian discourse that aims to crown the concept through dialectics. Celan’s effort at permanently doubling and overflowing the Idea has arguably launched a strange, perhaps the strangest, poetic project since Romanticism — a poetics that cuts off the self-relation of the object, turns sense certainty against itself, and puts the phenomenal world in a nearly unintelligible order (yet not chaos). In a hidden dialogue with the works of Hegel, Novalis, and Hölderlin who postulated and sought the Spirit as the Absolute, Celan’s early work opens doors to those modes of being that manifest themselves as the destructive aporia of the concept of the Absolute rather than its sublime or beautiful representations.
June 2018: Feng Dong is Associate Professor of English at Qingdao University, China. He is particularly interested in finding out how poetry helps us access alternative realities (possible modes of being) by working through both Freudian and Heideggerian versions of the uncanny toward a new conception of the poetic, which is based on continuous, deep transactions with psychic and political potentials of the contemporary subject. He has published essays on Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, and W. S. Merwin. He is the author of Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwin’s Poetry (2017). At present, he is working on a book on Paul Celan’s poetics and its epistemological and ethical consequences.
Monika Fludernik’s Toward a Natural Narratology (1996) develops a detailed historical account of how the textual structures of experientiality identified in the theoretical framework have developed in English fiction since the 17th century. According to Fludernik’s account, the English novel gets progressively better at matching the cognitive schemata underlying such experientiality. The present article argues, however, that such an understanding of the historical dimension of experientiality is an instance of “the curse of realism,” that is, of discussing early modern texts in light of the expectations established by 19th-century realism. It proposes an alternative model for engaging with the historical dimension of cognitive narratology, which is rooted in embodied cognition and predictive processing.
June 2018: Karin Kukkonen is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. Her most recent project investigates how stylistic and narrative changes in 18th-century prose writing in England and France contributed to the immersive, embodied qualities of the novel. She has published widely on cognitive and transmedial narratology, with articles in journals like Style, Paragraph, Anglia, Orbis Litterarum, and Substance, as well as the monographs Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013) and A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel (2017).
This paper teases out the intersections of list-making as an everyday experience and the incorporation of lists and enumerations in literary texts. Drawing on cognitive literary theory and the notion of experientiality, I argue that lists evoke our sensorimotor experience (the practice of writing lists) as well as our capacity to structure and organize the world (using and making sense of lists). When we as readers encounter lists in literary texts, such as the shopping lists in Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, our experience of making lists ourselves is evoked and thus leads to an experiential response that cannot be explained by Monika Fludernik’s definition of experientiality as a “quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience.’” This is due to the nature of lists and the practice of making lists, which combines physical with cognitive experience.
June 2018: Eva von Contzen is junior professor of English literature at the University of Freiburg and the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Lists in Literature and Culture.” She is the author of a monograph on medieval hagiography (The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration; Manchester 2016) and pursues her interest in narrative theory and medieval literature in the interdisciplinary network “Medieval Narratology.” She is the co-editor of a handbook of historical narratology (with Stefan Tilg). Currently, her main project is devoted to lists and enumerations in literary texts from Antiquity to postmodernism.
The paper deals with the nature of the genre of Flamenco known as Petenera, which in the past was erroneously attributed a Jewish origin. The comparative analysis of multiple variations of texts produced for this genre suggests that it subsumes within it the memory of a historical trauma related to the vanishing and absence of Jews since the end of the 15th century and that this memory is expressed both in performative aspects of the genre and in folkloric perceptions of it. The image of the Jew is present in collective consciousness and manifests itself as part of the system of textual conventions of an art form that has a folkloric component and folkloric origin. Within the conventions of this genre, expressions of the attitude toward the Jewish “ghost” are welded to a gendered layer — the bearer of this image is a woman, and the analysis shows that the texts embody different variations of the same recurring themes and features: eros, sin, guilt, remorse, and a touch of morbidity. The argument here is that palo (Spanish for “a genre of Flamenco”) contains a literary-textual component, an element of content, and not just musical components. These folkloric texts should be given a closer reading; the analysis perfomed in this paper is one way of doing so.
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.
Modern forms of travel allowed Victorian women and their afterlives in neo-Victorian fiction to redefine gendered spaces and gender roles, in the metropolis as well as in the empire’s peripheries. The Introduction to the forum surveys issues pertaining to the relationship between female modernity, travel, and the subversion of imperial roles as explored by the papers of the forum.
In her book Towards a Natural Narratology, Fludernik defined narrativity through the notion of experientiality. This essay argues that, despite the success of Natural Narratology, the significance of experience has not yet been fully charted out in narratology. A look at philosophical discussions shows that experience need not be pitted against plot. The phenomenological tradition in particular has highlighted the temporal dimension of experience. Encompassing the temporal dynamics of narrative as well the role of consciousness, the concept of experience may help overcome some of the shortcomings of approaches that focus on fictional minds and tend to downplay plot.
June 2018:
Jonas Grethlein holds the Chair in Greek Literature at Heidelberg. His monographs include Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity (Cambridge UP 2017); Die Odyssee (C.H. Beck 2017); Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge UP 2013); The Greeks and their Past (Cambridge UP 2010); Littells Orestie (Rombach 2009).
In addition to broadening the range of examples with which narratology deals, Monika Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology draws on cognitive theory to describe the ways in which readers process language to make even highly anomalous texts narrative –an important contribution. But her emphasis on readers’ success in “naturalizing” the apparently deviant or nonsensical makes it difficult to find ways of resisting critical misreadings that conceal the potential force of disruptive elements. Naturalization is not a wholly benign operation.
June 2018: Jonathan Culleris Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, author of Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, and numerous books on critical theory. His Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction has been translated into 26 languages.
Storytelling is not just a human practice, but a practice that reflects the physical and cognitive make-up of human beings. This is the intuition at the core of Monika Fludernik’s notion of “experientiality.” One of the upshots of this idea is that narrative struggles to come to terms with realities (such as natural evolution or geological history) that are not human-scale. In light of recent discussions in posthumanism and ecocriticism, one may ask if and how narrative can overcome this anthropocentric bias. This essay addresses this question through a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), a novel set a million years into the future, when humanity has evolved into a radically different species. The essay explores formal strategies and affective impact of Vonnegut’s novel, using it as a springboard to rethink narrative’s experientiality in the face of a more-than-human vantage point.
Marco Caracciolo is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” Marco's work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (De Gruyter, 2014); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers' Engagement with Characters (University of Nebraska Press, 2016); and A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt; Ohio State University Press, 2016).
