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 20^th century.

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 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 19^th-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. 

This essay traces the history of the hot-air balloon as a figure for formalist approaches to reading poetry, and finds the most compelling and enigmatic investigation of the trope in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s mock-epic poem of 1797, “Washing Day.” Anticipating Nicholson Baker, Maureen McLane, and Helen Vendler’s modern uses of the hot-air balloon as a symbol for formalist literary analysis, Barbauld concludes her poem with the figure of the Montgolfier balloon as a “bubble” that is equated with the production of verse, a simile rife with anxiety about the relationship of poetics to the domestic labor of washing, but also to the manifold discourses implied by the Romantic-era balloon, such as political invasion, femininity, cosmopolitanism, and even madness. What emerges at the end of Barbauld’s poem, however, is not the dismissal of eighteenth-century women’s work (whether laundry or poetry) but a transhistorical model of poetic form as a technology to be operated by a close reader, an idea that subverts Cleanth Brooks’ metaphor of the “well wrought urn” through Margaret Cohen’s account of “craft.” Resisting Brooks’ notion that the poetic vessel is antiquarian, inert, and stable, Barbauld’s airborne vessel, like Cohen’s ships, is dynamic, labor-intensive, and buffeted by external currents. The transhistorical reach of the trope of the balloon through literary criticism that this paper traces brings into focus the reader’s relation to poetic form in a new way, to ask what treating formalism as technology might mean for the conception of close reading as labor.

June 2017: Arden Hegele is a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her book project investigates the formal intersection of Romantic literature and medicine; other interests include technologies of reading, writing by women, and the British colonial project.

According to UNESCO, a child is “ a person below the age of 18, unless the laws of a particular country set the legal age for adulthood younger” while childhood’s early years are said to be “decisive for human development.” This essay shows how childhood and children are depicted in two of Bellow's short stories, “By the St. Lawrence,” where a dying, elderly professor returns to his birthplace and sees himself as a child, and “Zetland’s : By a Character Witness,” where the treatment of childhood stages Bellow’s autobiographical memory of his relationship with Isaac Rosenfeld. Following Lewis Carroll’s structure, Bellow takes his adult characters down on a trip to the past childhood: his child characters are remembered; they continue to exist in the adult identity but are not represented in the fictional present; by contrast to child characters in Romantic literature, these children are not given a central position in these stories — they are remembered entities.

Questions play a prominent role in W. B. Yeats’s mature work. This essay discusses the use of questions in three of Yeats’s most renowned interrogative lyrics: “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Among School Children.” By reviewing the critical discourse regarding these canonical texts and locating a key semantic commonality linking the three poems, the article posits that questions reveal a revolutionary approach to epistemology that distinguishes Yeats as a poet whose lyric form breaks the monologic mold. Yeats’s interrogative verse is ultimately shown to offer a new form of dialogic knowledge that addresses an interrogated other as a means of inquiring what wisdom poetry affords in a world beset by epistemic doubt.

Amit Marcus is an independent scholar. He is the author of Self-Deception in Literature and Philosophy (2007) and fifteen articles on topics that include unreliable narration, “we” fictional narratives, narrative ethics, and clone narratives. He has held scholarships, funded by the Minerva and the Humboldt Foundations, at the Universities of Freiburg and Giessen in Germany.

Updated Sept. 15, 2016

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.

Updated July 29, 2011

Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982) has been described as having a culturally Japanese location and setting, reflected in its stylized narrative subtlety and indistinctness. However, the functional stage of the novel is not a physical place but rather the recollections and thought processes of the protagonist, Etsuko, as she attempts to come to an understanding regarding her daughter Keiko’s suicide. The historical fact of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and its repercussions for the city and the nation both ground and symbolize Etsuko’s thoughts, her acts of repression and evasion in response to her submerged sense of personal guilt for Keiko’s death through her emigration and remarriage. Ishiguro evokes Etsuko’s inner life through narrative, characterization, and imagery, particularly that of living space. In Etsuko’s memories of Nagasaki, repression is seen at the level of the community of survivors, in interpersonal relationships, and in Etsuko’s cognitive actions of recollection and representation, which often indicate symbolic interconnections or meaningful lacunae caused by psychological repression. While criticism has tended to focus on how Etsuko’s unreliable narration affects the “truth” of the story, the narrative focuses on the ways in which Etsuko’s mental processes reflect a conflict between desire, evasion, and resolution.

Antti Salminen is adjunct professor at University of Tampere, spezialized in philosophy of literature and historical avant-garde. He is editor-in-chief of the quarterly philosophical review niin & näin.

updated September 30, 2013

June 2011: Goldie Morgentaler is a Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, the author of Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like. London: Palgrave, 2000. Prof. Morgentaler has translated in English the works of her mother, the renowned Yiddish writer, Chava Rosenfarb: The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto. Book 1: On the Brink of the Precipice: 1939; Book II: From the Depths I Call You 1940-1942; Book III: The Cattle Cars Are Waiting, published respectively in 2004, 2005, 2006 by University of Wisconsin Press.

Rebecca West was a protean artist (author of, among other works, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon [1941]), a leading public intellectual, and a visionary commentator on the twentieth century. This paper shows the connection between her major philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas and her attitude towards exile. Following a brief historical overview of the main kinds of responses to the state of exile, from Ovid’s laments to modernist celebrations, I document Rebecca West’s fear of exile, so powerful that it could override even her dominant philosophy of process, her revisionist thinking, and her love of metaphor. Twentieth-century artists and thinkers tended to associated the state of exile with heightened artistic creativity, linking it with epistemological “privilege” (Simmel), or seeing it as instrumental to self-invention (Olsson). For West these ideas were not acceptable. Her patriotism, determinism, existentialism, and essentialism combined with her encounters with refugees during the 1940s and the 1950s to bring about a powerful conviction regarding the misery of exile, one that challenged other parts of her own belief system.

Just as Robert Browning repeatedly speaks through other voices in his poems, so does his admirer and critic A. S. Byatt in her fiction, ventriloquizing her characters’ poems, stories, letters, and even their academic work.  Such writing as Browning’s and Byatt’s can be understood as mediumistic, a channeling of the voices of the dead or the imaginary.  In turn both writers create mediums, Browning in “Mr. Sludge, the ‘Medium’” and Byatt in “The Conjugial Angel,” one of the two novellas set in Victorian England that form Angels and Insects.  Like Browning’s Sludge, Byatt’s mediums, Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay, function as figures of the creative writer.  Byatt has described Lilias as a “novelist manqué” and Sophy as poet-like.  Sludge is critically acknowledged to be a figure of corruption in art, and through him Browning explores the narrative artist’s inevitable negotiations between truth, fiction, and lies.  Sludge’s spiritualist activities are clearly aimed at the greater glory of Sludge.  Byatt’s mediums, however, are genuinely involved with the mourners and the mourned in the liminal world in which they move.  Lilias brings comfort to a bereaved mother, while Sophy transforms the life of Emily Tennyson Jesse, for this novella is based on the most famous case of protracted Victorian mourning, that for Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.  Browning condemns his character by implication for Sludge’s wish that other people should “participate in Sludgehood.”  Byatt represents Lilias and Sophy as intensely aware of others beside themselves.  Thus both through their acts of ventriloquism and through their narratives and characters, Browning and Byatt demonstrate a shared anti-solipsistic aesthetic in texts involving the writer as medium.  They turn in imagination to what is outside themselves and represent either negatively (through Sludge) or positively (through Sophy and Lilias) the value of such outward movement.

from Notes on Contributors June Sturrock Simon Fraser University   January 2009: June Sturrock is an Emeritus Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where she continues to teach occasionally in the Graduate Liberal Studies Programme.  Her publications include about sixty articles and book chapters, Heaven and Home:  Charlotte Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate about Women, and an edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.  Forthcoming are a book on nineteenth century domestic fiction and several more articles.