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2018
Franchi, B. . 2018. Written in the Stars? Women Travellers and Forgers of Destinies in Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. Partial Answers 16(1): 125-143. . Publisher's Version

 

 

How do women travelling the colonial frontier create a feminine, and potentially less hierarchical type of modernity? And how does Neo-Victorian fiction explore gendered and racialized types of modernity through the use of travel? Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) represesnts the quest for a postcolonial and feminine modernity through the trope of the woman traveler, worker, storyteller and entrepreneur. In particular, protagonists Anna Whetherell and Lydia Wells oppose the highly racist and sexist societies of gold rush frontier towns of the 1860s New Zealand through solitary travel on foot, by sea and across textual layers. This paper argues that such independent solitary women travelers stand for a new representation of white women in colonial contexts and challenge traditional categories of Victorian femininity, such as the dichotomous opposition between the Angel in the House and the fallen woman. By shifting across white femininity and queer Chinese identities (in Anna’s case), and by embracing a masculine, capitalist model (for Lydia), Catton’s heroines survive, on their own, as members of a minority in the communities of white, male miners. The two women thus embody new types of femininity and, while placing themselves outside the colonial hierarchy, they question the social structure, the exploitation of the Other (the woman, the Chinese) and set an example for a more viable and more equal society born out of colonial settlement. Finally, while shaping modernity through their female gaze and a free way of travelling the peripheries, the two women also accomplish their own Bildung process and, forgers of their own fortunes, symbolize the shift from masculine, imperial modernity to a feminine, neo-Victorian, postcolonial paradigm.

 

 

January 2018: Barbara Franchi obtained her doctorate in English from the University of Kent (UK) in 2017, with a thesis on intertextuality in A. S. Byatt’s fiction. Her further research interests include contemporary Anglophone writing, Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, the novel form, feminism and queer theory. Her publications include chapters on A. S. Byatt’s neo-Victorian novels, in Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea (ed. Charlotte Mathieson, Palgrave: 2016) and A. S. Byatt, before and after Possession: recent critical approaches (ed. Armelle Parey and Isabelle Roblin, PUN-Editions Universitaires de Lorraine; forthcoming, late 2017). She is currently co-editing Crossing Borders: Spaces, Nations and Empires in Victorian Travel (with Elvan Mutlu. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2017). Barbara teaches English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University.

 

Mäkela, Maria . 2018. Toward the Non-Natural: Diachronicity and the Trained Reader in Fludernik's Natural Narratology. Partial Answers 16(2): 271-277. . Publisher's Version

 

 

The article traces the theoretical reader position implicitly constructed in Fludernik’s natural narratology. Fludernik’s diachronic method assumes a conceptual reader figure trained by the texts she encounters while making her way in diachronic succession from oral to the written, ending up with literary deconstruction of language and narrative. Along the way, she gains the required reading strategies and cognitive parameters, finally being able to make narrative sense of — narrativize — (almost) any representation. I claim that this non-empirical (and as such, “non-natural”) reader position marks the cornerstone of postclassical narratology, suggesting a necessary departure from the synchrony of “natural” cognitive parameters. Eventually I will ask if diachronic narratology, as originally initiated by Fludernik’s book, has the potential to deal also with the synchronicity of narrative sense-making through its manifestly non-natural reader construct.

 

 

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.

updated on September 26, 2018

 

Vaughn, Emer . 2018. The Specter of Infanticide in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor. Partial Answers 16(2): 181-204. . Publisher's Version

This essay argues that in Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, Herman Melville draws on the 19th-century reading public’s repugnance towards infanticide to both construct his narrative and inspire readers’ emotions to critique capital punishment. The connections between child murder and the execution of Billy in Billy Budd emerge out of the transatlantic literature and culture of capital punishment reform, which includes, significantly, George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede. A reading informed by the literary and cultural history of child murder reveals that Melville’s critique of sovereign power draws on the emotional dynamics of the infanticide narrative. Billy embodies elements of both the infanticidal mother and the murdered child, while Captain Vere exhibits a parental sympathy that might be associated with 19th-century sentimental reformers. Dramatizing how Vere’s personal connection with Billy ultimately supports the aims of sovereign power, Melville provides a compelling enactment of the corrosive effects of biopolitics on human relationships. Beyond that, Melville’s use of the infanticide topos ultimately likens Billy’s execution to a coolly rational infanticide by the state

 

 

June 2018: Emer Vaughn is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation examines trans-corporealities in mid-19th-century American nature writing.

 

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2017
Escott, Angela . 2017. British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Teresa Barnard. Partial Answers 15(1): 197-200. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Levin, Yael . 2017. Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense by Maurice Ebileeni. Partial Answers 15(2): 393-397. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Shapira, Yael . 2017. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic, by Diana Wallace. Partial Answers 15(1): 189-192. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Fuchs, Dieter . 2017. Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes by Patrick O’Neill. Partial Answers 15(2): 391-393. . Publisher's Version
Marcus, Amit . 2017. Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory, by Yugin Teo. Partial Answers 15(1): 193-196. . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Book Review
Wendel, Deanna . 2017. Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule by Elana Gomel. Partial Answers 15(2): 397-400. . Publisher's Version
Frischmuth, Agatha . 2017. Being Silent, Doing Nothing: Silence as a Symbol of Peace in Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov and Ha Jin's Waiting. Partial Answers 15(1): 99-115. . Publisher's Version

 

While many pre-modern narratives conventionally feature active protagonists, the transition into modernity has seen an increase in inactivity as a literary motif. The prominent European examples of this trend, such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, or the plays of Samuel Beckett, however, exclude speaking from the list of negated activities, instead depicting voluble characters. This paper proposes that silent inactivity may be an Eastern (and Eastern European) notion, and offers two exemplary readings of this motif in Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov and Ha Jin’s Waiting. Drawing from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Roland Barthes, it argues that silence, despite denoting an absence of signs, is meaningful and hermeneutically versatile. A distinction is made between communicative silence and natural silence, the first of which signifies the absence of speech in an interactive situation whereas the latter signifies verbal silence notwithstanding context and — importantly — includes natural soundscapes (as caused by weather, animals or touching objects). Through a number of close readings, natural silence is shown to function as the semantic core of the inactivity motif in that it is a central part of the strategy to attain peace, repose, and contentment. In addition, in both novels the desire for a peaceful way of life dominates the soundscape of romantic relationships. Although the protagonists fall in love with passionate women, they ultimately reject them due to the noise and upheaval they cause. The paper concludes that in connection to the motif of inactivity the notion of silent companionship outweighs that of love (associated with speech). This indicates the existence of culture-specific sound preferences which represent a field of possible future study within audionarratology.

 

January 2017: Agatha Frischmuth is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow at the Peter Szondi-Institute for Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin. She has won a three-year scholarship for her dissertation project on the narration of inactivity in 20th and 21st century prose, in which she focuses on Polish, German, French, and Serbian literature. Her research considers the changing status of the literary “event” from early modern times to postmodernity as well as its dependence on perception and action. Her work combines narratological analyses with phenomenology as well as theatre and film studies to examine techniques of dramatization and literary visuality. She has recently published a study on the precarious event in Andrzej Stasiuks Przez rzekę in Wiener Slawistischer Almanach

 

 

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Shapira, Yael . 2017. An End to Wandering? Jonas B. Phillips and Mary Shelley's "The Evil Eye". Partial Answers 15(2): 217-239. . Publisher's Version

 

 

The essay focuses on Jonas B. Phillips (1805–1869), a largely forgotten author, poet, and playwright who was one of the first Jews to enjoy literary success in early 19th-century America. Phillips won his fame mainly by writing popular stage melodramas that did not openly explore Jewish themes, causing him — like other Jewish writers of his time and literary interests — to be excluded from histories of Jewish American writing, since his work has been seen by scholars as neither “Jewish” nor “literary” enough. The essay argues that Phillips’ play The Evil Eye (1831), an adaptation of a short story by Mary Shelley, gives covert expression to the challenges of early Jewish American citizenship by reworking the image of the Wandering Jew, a mythic figure that had recently been revitalized in Romantic and Gothic literature. Though he is never identified openly with the Wandering Jew, the hero of Shelley’s story and of Phillips’ play bears striking similarities to the famous wanderer, and in Phillips’ adaptation he comes to represent the menacing foreigner who is miraculously recognized as kin and welcomed back into the family. Offering an allegory for the Jews’ homecoming in the newly established United States, the play also reflects lingering fear of anti-Semitism in its efforts to tone down the wanderer’s Gothic “otherness.” A later, uncompleted attempt by Phillips to make a villainous Jew into the hero of a new melodrama points to his lingering interest in Gothic iterations of the Jew, while also suggesting the danger that such demonized figures presented to Jewish authors in the young Republic. 

 

Yael Shapira is a lecturer in the English Department of Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests include eighteenth-century English fiction and cultural history, the Gothic and the history of popular publishing. She is currently completing a book on the representation of the dead body in the eighteenth-century English novel and beginning a new research project focused on forgotten female Gothic novelists of the 1790s.

Updated on September 15, 2016. 

 

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Duban, James . 2017. Existential Kepesh and the Facticity of Existential Roth: The Breast, The Professor of Desire, and The Dying Animal. Partial Answers 15(2): 369-390. . Publisher's Version

 

 

The article argues that Philip Roth’s Kepesh saga — The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1997), and The Dying Animal (2001) — dramatically morphs, with regard to sexuality and imaginative flight, Sartre’s account, in Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant, 1943), of the origins and possibilities of consciousness and their relation to desire. Indeed, desire, the dominant theme of Roth’s trilogy, corresponds to Sartrian outlooks on transcendent possibility or existential freedom. In Being and Nothingness, moreover, Roth appears to have located, identified with, and artistically transformed outlooks on consciousness and artistic creativity. Roth’s inspiration for imagining a character who exists as a breast, sans body, may also have emerged from Sartre’s treatise, the outlooks of which allow for better appreciation of the concerns and fictive possibilities suggested by The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal.

 

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 published, as well, 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, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Photo by Acree B. Carlisle

Updated in March 2017

 

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Kukulin, Ilya . 2017. In a Muddy Land, Wearing a Historical Costume: Posttraumatic Humanism in Post-Stalinist Soviet Culture. Partial Answers 15(2): 341-368. . Publisher's Version

 

 

This paper discusses the reinvention of the humanist ideas and values in the Soviet post-World War II and post-Stalinist culture (the 1950s and the1960s) with the help of Renaissance plots and images in Soviet semi-official art, the main examples being Pavel Antokolsky’s poem Hieronymus Bosch (1957), the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God (1963), and Grigory Kozintsev’s films based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970), as well as David Samoilov’s poem Bertold Schwarz: A Monologue, set in the late Middle Ages. The paper isolates an aesthetic movement that developed in the Soviet culture of those decades; I propose to call this movement “posttraumatic humanism.” It was based on the new aesthetic idiom of “gloomy Renaissance,” including images of conflagration, ruins, violence. The works of this movement did not use the Aesopian language — or, at least, did not use it as a primary or only tool. Rather, it involves a covert comparison of the Soviet present with the European pre-Enlightenment past and aesthetical valorization and sublimation of 20th-century catastrophic experience. Images of “gloomy Renaissance” conveyed the erosion the Soviet belief in progress and moral modernization as inevitable consequences of Bolsheviks’ revolution. One of the earliest mature works of posttraumatic humanism in Soviet culture was Vasily Grossman’s essay The Sistine Madonna (1955). Alexei German Sr.’s film Hard to Be a God (2013) can be regarded as the concluding and summarizing work in this movement.

 

June 2017: Ilya Kukulin received his PhD in literary theory at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. His monograph Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (Moscow, 2015, in Russian) was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize. He has co-edited six volumes focused on topics from the history of schooling in the 20th Century Eastern Europe to the cultural practices of the internal colonization in Russia. He is also the author of a number of articles on Russian literature, unofficial social thought in 20th-century Russia, and political discourses of the Russian social media, published in Russia, Germany, Norway, China, Lithuania, Armenia, and the USA. At present he is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow), Senior Researcher at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences (HSE), and Senior Researcher at the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow).

 

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Rovner, Adam . 2017. Jewish Geographies: Jabotinsky and Modernism. Partial Answers 15(2): 315-339. . Publisher's Version

 

 

 
 

 

Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky’s texts of the 1920s offer compelling examples of the tensions endemic to aesthetic modernism and inherent in Jewish nationalist discourse during the interwar period. This essay discusses Jabotinsky’s Atlas (1925), his unproduced film script A Galilean Romance (1924–1926), and his anthemic poem “Two Banks Has the Jordan” (1929). While the ideological value of the works examined is self-evident, the artistic features of Jabotinsky’s work have received scant attention. This essay reveals Jabotinsky’s indebtedness to themes and techniques identified with early European literary modernisms and their associated socio-political contexts. The article concludes that scholars can profitably locate Jabotinsky’s creative output of the 1920s within the nexus of early aesthetic modernism and collectivist nationalism.

 

Adam Rovner serves as Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. He is the author of In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel (NYU Press, 2014). He has published numerous articles for both scholarly and general interest audiences in the US and abroad. More information is available at www.adamrovner.com .

Updated in March 2017

 

 

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Reichel, A.Elisabeth . 2017. Musical Macrostructures in The Gold Bug Variations and Orfeo by Richard Powers; or, toward a Media-Conscious Audionarratology. Partial Answers 15(1): 81-98. . Publisher's Version

Audionarratology is enmeshed in the current trend toward media-consciousness in narratological debates. This article connect audionarratological concerns with the (trans- or inter)medial extensions of narratology offered by scholars such as Marie-Laure Ryan and Werner Wolf. It focuses on Richard Powers’s earliest musical novel, The Gold Bug Variations (1991), and his to-date latest novel Orfeo (2014), zooming in on their musical macrostructures, the musical forms and techniques that inform the narrative arrangement of the texts. Having positioned the narrative analysis of macrostructural musical elements within the research scope of a media-conscious audionarratology and having explored The Gold Bug Variations and Orfeo for such musical macrostructures, I reflect on the functions of imitating music in this way.

 

January 2017: A. Elisabeth Reichel holds an M.A. in Anglophone literary and cultural studies from the University of Mannheim, Germany. In her M.A. thesis, titled “Fictionalizing Music, Musicalizing Fiction: The Integrative Function of Music in Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing,” she examined the political functions of music from a perspective informed by sound studies as well as word and music studies. Currently, she is writing a Ph.D. thesis on “Sounding Primitives, Writing Anthropologists: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict” as a member of the interdisciplinary research project “Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity” at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She has taught at the universities of Basel, Berne, and Mannheim. In her publications and presentations, she investigates literary constructions of sonic and musical alterity, writing as a colonial technique, and the intersections between literary studies and the history of cultural anthropology.

 

 

Mildorf, Jarmila, and Till Kinzel. 2017. NARRATING SOUNDS: INTRODUCTION TO THE FORUM. Partial Answers 15(1): 61-67. . Publisher's Version

 

 

 

This introduction reflects on the links between sound, voices, music, and literature. It also delineates the main tenets of audionarratology, a branch of postclassical narratology which focuses on the interfaces between sound and narrative. The forum explores presentations of sounds, silence, and music in fiction and explores voices and soundscapes in audio drama.

   

 

Kinzel, Till . 2017. Narrativity and Sound in German Radio Play Adaptations of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. Partial Answers 15(1): 151-165. . Publisher's Version

 

 

In line with the strong emphasis on visuality in the wake of the “visual turn” in literary and cultural studies, graphic novel adaptations of literary texts have recently been the objects of scholarly study and narratological theory building. Much less attention, if any, has been accorded to radio play adaptations of novels like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. An analysis of radio play adaptations acquires a special significance in the case of this highly enigmatic work, which makes a seriously playful use of postmodern narrative strategies. It is perhaps above all this feature which made the adaptation of the novel’s first instalment, City of Glass, into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazucchelli so successful. While the graphic novel visualizes characteristic features of its mother text, this paper explores the different modes of narrative sound in three German radio play adaptations of Auster’s novel. Alfred Behrens’ Stadt aus Glas, Katharina Bihler’s Schlagschatten, and Norbert Schaeffer’s Hinter verschlossenen Türen employ narrative devices like voices in both German and English, the evocation of city soundscapes, the narrative uses of music as well as issues of the simultaneity and/or difference of story and discourse time. The narrative auralization of Auster’s novels in the radio plays under discussion can be shown to foreground non-visual aspects of the pre-texts and to add further dimensions for interpretation that underline the usefulness of audionarratological analysis for adaptation studies. 

 

January 2017: Till Kinzel received his Dr. Phil. (2002) and Habilitation (2005) from the Tech­nical University of Berlin. He has published books on Allan Bloom (Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika; 2002), Nicolás Gómez Dávila (2003, 4th enlarged ed. forthcoming), Philip Roth (Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens, 2006) and Michael Oakeshott (2007). Most recently, he has edited writings by J. J. Eschenburg (Kleine Geschichte des Romans von der Antike bis zur Aufklärung, 2014) and Edward Gibbon and co-edited Imaginary Dialogues in English (2012) and Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy (2014) and Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative (2016; with Jarmila Mildorf), as well as books on the reception of Edward Gibbon in Germany (2015) and on the poet and translator Johann Arnold Ebert (2016). Current research interests include dialogue poetry as well as the literature and philosophy of the German and British Enlightenments.

 

 

Petermann, Emily . 2017. New Modes of Listening: The Mediality of Musical Novels. Partial Answers 15(1): 69-79. . Publisher's Version

A recent development in literature’s engagement with music involves the role played by emerging technologies and the way they not only transmit musical content to the listener, but very strongly condition the form the music takes and the way we listen. While music is still often considered ephemeral and transcendent, there is a new recognition of it as an object and a commodity, whether an LP record or a file to be downloaded from itunes. Technologies coexist; records are now collected and venerated in a nostalgic mode while music moves into the digital sphere of downloads and participatory cultures of online sharing. Contemporary literature can tell us not only about the idealization of music as a non-referential and thus “higher” art, but about the way music is mediated by technologies. The present paper focuses on two recent musical novels that foreground the mass media of musical expression, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995) and Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You (2009). Both celebrate songs — incorporated as records in the former and digital files on an ipod in the latter — as symbols of taste, carriers of memory, means of establishing interpersonal connections, and media that condition our thinking. Songs also exist in relation to others, demonstrated by the protagonist’s fixation on lists modeled on radio’s top-forty rankings in High Fidelity and on juxtaposition of songs on the ipod’s shuffle mode in The Song Is You. The comparison of these novels in terms of their focus on different musical technologies leads to an exploration of modes of listening as characters experience their lives through the lens of popular music.

 

January 2017: Emily Petermann is a post-doc in American Studies and junior faculty member of the Literature Department at the University of Konstanz. She is a founding member of the Word and Music Association Forum (since 2009) and co-editor of the volume Time and Space in Words and Music (Lang 2012). Her monograph, The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception, was published by Camden House in 2014. She is currently working on a postdoctoral book project on “Strands of Nonsense in American Literature.”

 

 

Harrison, Bernard, and John Gibson. 2017. The New Propositionalism. Partial Answers 15(2): 263-289. . Publisher's Version

 

 

This essay explores the philosophical foundations of the concept of literary humanism: the idea, roughly, that works of literary fiction offer a distinct form of epistemic insight into social and cultural reality. We develop our account by way of a critique of Richard Gaskin’s recent defense of literary humanism, according to which literary works achieve their cognitive significance by referring to linguistically structured propositions that provide the link to truth and reality. Against this, we urge a broadly Wittgensteinian model of literary humanism that rejects the metaphysics of the proposition and in its place casts literature as having special ability to reveal the irreducibly cultural grounds of meaning. We conclude with a reading of W. B. Yeats’ “A Prayer for my Daughter,” which illustrates the claim central to a Wittgensteinian model of literary humanism: in certain works of literature we gain insight into the nature of those sense-bestowing cultural practices in virtue of which we make our world meaningful.

 

 

June 2017: Bernard Harrison is currently Emeritus E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy in the University of Utah and an Emeritus Professor in the University of Sussex. He is one of a number of analytic philosophers, more numerous now than formerly, whose interests include literature and its relationships with philosophy and the history of ideas. His literary work includes Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Chatto, 1975), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Yale University Press, 1991), What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana University Press, 2015), and numerous papers. His more strictly philosophical writings include work on epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language. His most recent book on such topics, Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2004), co-authored with his Utah colleague Patricia Hanna, offers a systematic rethinking, with implications, among other things, for literary studies, of the philosophy of language, as it has developed since Russell and Frege, on the basis of a new reading of Wittgenstein. He is currently (2017) at work on a study of the nature of anti-Semitism, and the continuity between its traditional and contemporary forms, under the title Blaming the Jews: The Persistence of a Delusion. It develops and carries further some of the ideas proposed in his The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

June 2017: John Gibson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville, where he directs the Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society. He works on topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, and he is especially concerned with connections between these areas and central issues in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of the self. He is the author of Fiction and the Weave of Life and is currently writing book titled Poetry, Metaphor & Nonsense: An Essay on Meaning.

 

 

 

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Arteel, Inge . 2017. Non-Sovereign Voices in Friederike Mayröcker's Aural Texts. Partial Answers 15(1): 135-150. . Publisher's Version

 

 

Austrian neo-avant-garde authors excelled in literary forms that foregrounded the acoustic quality of voices. Their concern was not to establish the voice as a disembodied medium of pure emotionality; rather, they experimented with the corporeal materiality and technical mediality of voice and speech, and explored the ethics and aesthetics of non-sovereign, “impure” voices. After some introductory remarks on the work of Ernst Jandl, this essay argues this stance in regard to selected texts by the Viennese author Friederike Mayröcker. In a striking awareness of the cultural history of the voice, her texts present playful parodic rewritings of traditional vocal pathos genres such as the lyrical elegy, the opera aria, and the echolalic lament. They demonstrate the appealing quality of heteronomous, dispossessed speaking or singing voices, an appeal that is well worth listening to.

 

January 2017: Inge Arteel is lecturer of German Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research focuses on post-1945 Austrian literature and drama – with a particular interest in experimental writers (esp. Jelinek and Mayröcker), on text and theatricality, the radio play, and gender studies. Recent publications:

 

Arteel, Inge, and Stefan Krammer, eds. 2016. In-Differenzen: Alterität im Schreiben Josef Winklers. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.

Pewny, Katharina, and Inge Arteel. 2016. “Ritual Failure Remains? The Inaccessibility of the Dead (Corpse) in Antigone and in Contemporary Post-Conflict Art.” Forum Modernes Theater: 177–88.

Arteel, Inge. 2014. “Jelinek on the Dutch-speaking stage: From Marginal Attention to Dramaturgical Success.” Austrian Studies 22: 43–58.

Arteel, Inge. 2012. Friederike Mayröcker. Hannover: Wehrhahn.