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.

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.

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.

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 20^th-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.

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.