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The essay examines some of the fascinating ways in which islands have inspired writers, and especially poets, into acts of symbolization in which an island provides the pretext for a variety of compulsive themes that range from the love or fear of solitude, isolation, and the need to escape to or from an island. The recurrent figures of this allegorical mode include Crusoe, Caliban, Odysseus, and The Man Who Loved Islands.
January 2004: Professor of English and author of The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An Interpretative Study (CUP, 1985); eo-editor of Complicities: Connections and Divisions-Literatures and Cultures of the Asia-Pacific Region (Peter Lang, 2003) and Institutions in Cultures: Theory and Practice (Rodopi, 1996); Guest Editor of The European Legacy 7.6 (December 2002). “Benjamin and Bakhtin: The Possibility of Conversation.” Journal of Narrative Theory 33.1 (Winter 2003): 12-32. Author of numerous articles, including “Adorno and the Postcolonial,” New Formations 47(Summer 2002): 133-43; “Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and the Postcolonial City,” Diacritics 40.4 (Winter 2000): 3-14.
The paper explores the relationship between a language and its environment. It focuses on Chinua Achebe’s experimentation with English as a suitable language for depicting the African landscape in Anthills of the Savannah. Since landscape was an imperial fascination, it was inevitable that with the expansion of the British Empire the English pictorial rhetoric would be exported to the colonies. This export brought out visual and psychological disparities between the changeable African landscape and the invariably picturesque English language. The conventions of picturesque description encoded in the language were imposed on the landscape, implicitly affirming and naturalizing the values of the colonialist, but failing to do justice to a genuinely African world-view. Achebe believes that despite its colonial bias English can still be a useful tool for African writers to capture and promote their ancestral heritage; nonetheless he questions whether it can lose enough of its own cultural past to be made suitable for an African discourse.
June 2004: Paoi Hwang holds a PhD degree from the University of London, Royal Holloway. She is teaching in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, National Taiwan University. Her fields of interest are contemporary British writers, African writers, and postcolonialism.
Alexander Blok’s unfinished poem Retribution (1910–1921), regarded by the contemporaries as his spiritual testament, depicts the destinies of Russia as part of the total struggle between cosmic forces which was reflected in the historical catastrophes of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The essay uses the notion of the chronotope to analyze the structure of the poem. The time-space of the poem is the vast expanse of the Russian empire during the wars between East and West (the wars between Russian and Turkey, Russian and Japan, World War I). The chronotope of the poem reflect tensions between Westernizers and Slavophiles, as well as mythological historiosophical positions of such diverse thinkers as Vladimir Soloviev and Helena Blavatsky. Its mythical, epic, historical, and lyrical constituents seem to predict cosmic clashes; instead, however, the lyrical chronotope of the poem gains predominance and translates cosmic conflicts into the emotional turmoil and death of the lyrical hero.
Nina Segal (Rudnik) teaches Russian and Comparative Literature in the Russian Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published books and articles on 20th-century Russian literature in the comparative framework. Present research interests include Russian and European Symbolism in literature, philosophy, and culture (Kandinsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Fedor Stepun).
In recent years, focus on issue of the spatial has increased exponentially. Briefly charting this rise in its various theoretical forms, we may locate a common theme within many of the positions taken up in response to the spatial: a concern with turmoil and oppression, and with a shifting of both physical and political boundaries. Nowhere is this concern more explicit than in the post-colonial response to what may be seen as the most violent violation of space: the colonial appropriation of land and territory as part of the various imperial projects of previous centuries. In post-colonial writing the colonial space is acknowledged, rejected for its inauthenticity and then re-made. A detailed reading of a particular text – Ben Okri’s Infinite Riches – and of a particular space within this text – the city – allows us to exemplify some of the narrative strategies by which such a powerful reclaiming of space may be asserted by the post-colonial author.
June 2004: Sara Upstone is an AHRB-funded research student at Birkbeck College, where she also teaches. She is working on transformations of space in the postcolonial, magical realist novel. She has published articles on subjects ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien to Toni Morrison. Her research interests include postcolonial, twentieth-century and contemporary literature, cultural and spatial theory and popular culture.
The paper presents a reading of the architectural settings of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela and [first name] Kukor’s film Gaslight in terms of the new valorization of privacy reflected in the “vertical arrangement” of the Georgian terrace houses.
June 2004: Kay Young is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy, a study of narrative intimacy and happiness. Currently, she is writing a book called Coming to Consciousness: Mind, Body, Emotion and the 19th-Century English Novel.
This essay contends that in his effort to develop a poetics, Joyce intuits in his writings Levinas’s ethical swerve from Heidegger. By making the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses “dramatic” according to his own terms, Joyce presents a relation that exists prior to, or sets the stage for, the ordinary representational plane of the novel. Although the limits of language necessitate a spatial show, Joyce makes the show “dumb,” altering the relation between knowledge and responsiveness by taking deferral, the usual condition for knowledge, out of the equation. Joyce’s effort is towards the creation of a certain messianic time, or time without space, and his presentation of a non-appearing, non-reciprocal relation delineates the passion, or responsiveness independent of the need for knowledge, by which the chapter moves. By effectively staging responsibility as an infinite desire for the other as such, Joyce begins in “Ithaca,” as in Levinas, are the sound without echo and the journey without return.
The essay traces the development of the circle and the sphere as images of perfection in western thought and art and comments on their fate in modern and postmodern American poetry. Detailed attention is given to poems by Wallace Stevens, Amy Clampitt, and Rita Dove.
Frank Kearful is Professor of English at Bonn University, where he has taught since 1974. He has been a visiting professor at Tübingen University and Hamburg University, and before moving to Germany in 1972 he was an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He has written numerous articles on twentieth-century American poetry, is editor of The Robert Lowell Newsletter, and since 2003 he has written the annual chapter on American poetry since the 1940s for American Literary Scholarship.
The paper examines Joyce’s rethinking of inter-subjective space, focusing on a series of syntactic and metaphorical transactions constitutive of the Wake’s transgressive “langscape.” These transactions may be seen to correlate with the Wake’s thematization of mourning, and with the processes of inclusion, exclusion, and oral assimilation which regulate the constitution and preservation of subjective identity in the work of mourning. The paper attempts to account for these processes in terms of Abraham and Torok’s theories of incorporation and endocryptic identification. It adopts the notion of cryptic mourning as a theoretical framework within which to interpret the figure of the “fadograph” in Joyce as an image of radical and originary forgetting. Such an image – the negative of a mnemonic imprint – is seen to exemplify the possibility of including an unnameable or unimaginable place, secret and radically exterior to subjective memory or discourse, yet contrasted, in the Wake, with overt investment in a subjective and all-encompassing “here.”
Ruben Borg is Senior Lecturer in English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His articles on Modernism have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetics Today, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative andJournal of Modern Literature. Since 2003 he has served as associate editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. He is the author of The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida (2007) and of Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite (2019).
Jim Dixon, the protagonist of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, is a historical type associated with the post-World War II agenda of broadening the class basis of the British education system. Yet this character also generates meaning through the prism of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau points out that the resistant relationship between individuals and systems of power in their societies often can be glimpsed through the private individuals’ consumer practices and the spaces in which these practices occur. Jim Dixon lives in---and resists---the hegemonic structure of the University at which he is employed yet where he is made to feel that he does not belong to the various spaces he occupies. He functions as a figure of resistant aliened otherness in the spaces and temporal zones that the book has constructed for him. The novel explores the avenues through which Jim subverts authority, ultimately inviting the reader to resist as well.
June 2003: Casey Clabough, a 2005 Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Assistant Professor of English at Lynchburg College (USA), is the author of the books Elements: The Novels of James Dickey and Experimentation and Versatility: The Early Novels and Short Fiction of Fred Chappell, as well as a broad range of essays in journals such as Contemporary Literature, The Sewanee Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
This essay is an attempt to apply some of the notions of ecology to the imagined worlds of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The premise is that each writer’s choice of physical settings has an important effect on his less tangible themes and concepts. The effects examined in this essay are not primarily social and conventional (systems of meaning), but rather quasi-physical. Tolstoy tends to set his stories along horizontal (though often somewhat irregular) planes, whereas Dostoevsky relies more on vertical planes (walls). These tendencies are reversed in scenes with a strong religious component, as if the authors required a foreign spatial orientation to convey otherworldly themes.
June 2003: Born in Tucson, Arizona, Tim Langen is Co-editor of Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays; author of The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely's "Petersburg" (forthcoming). Current fields of interest: Russian literary and intellectual history.
The paper suggests that in autobiographical writing issues of geography are no less important than those of history. It surveys several theoretical tools for the study of the geographical aspects of life-writing and tests them against John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
January 2003: Frédéric Regard is Director of English Studies at the École Normale Superieure des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, formerly “Fontenay/Saint-Cloud” recently relocated in Lyons. Born in Algeria. Educated at ENS Saint-Cloud; awarded the agregation in British Literature, wrote his thesis under the supervision of Helene Cixous. Author of books on William Golding, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf and of an essay on the notion of feminine writing in English Literature. Published a History of British Literature with the Presses Universitaires de France. Current field of research: the production of national identity through life-writing (mainly auto/biography, and narratives of exploration).
The paper suggests that in autobiographical writing issues of geography are no less important than those of history. It surveys several theoretical tools for the study of the geographical aspects of life-writing and tests them against John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
