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Shaked, Gershon . 2004. “After the Fall: Nostalgia and the Treatment of Authority in the Works of Kafka and Agnon, Two Habsburgian Writers”. Partial Answers 2(1): 81-111. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244542. Publisher's Version
Volume 2, issue 1 Literature and Ideology Topoi
Abstract
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The essay discusses parallels in the work of Franz Kafka and Shmuel Yosef Agnon as writers whose rebellion against tradition and authority was complicated by ambivalent nostalgia for the harmonies of God and Kaiser.

 

 

 

Born in Vienna, Gershon Shaked (1929-2006) was Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading experts on Hebrew literature. 

 

Major works:

   in Hebrew
      Between Laughter and Tears (on Mendele Mokher Sefarim), Tel-Aviv, 1965
      The Hebrew Historical Drama, Jerusalem, 1970
      A New Wave in Modern Hebrew Narrative Fiction, Tel-Aviv, 1971
      The Narrative Art of Agnon, Tel-Aviv, 1973
      Hebrew Narrative Fiction  1880-1980 (Five Volumes) Tel-Aviv, 1977-1998

  in English
     The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers, Philadelphia,1987
     S. Y. Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist, New-York,1989
     Modern Hebrew Fiction, Bloomington, 2000

      The New Tradition: Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature, 2006

  in German
     Die Macht der Identitaet, Frankfurt, 1986
     Die Geschichte der modernen hebraeschen Literatur, Frankfurt, 1996.

updated in January 2007

 

Rosenfeld, Natania . 2004. “Turning Back: Retracing Twentieth-Century Trauma in Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis, and W. G. Sebald”. Partial Answers 2(2): 109-137. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244555. Publisher's Version
Volume 2, issue 2 Narrative as a Way of Thinking Topoi
Abstract
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The historical caesura of the Holocaust bisects the twentieth century, its horror effecting a kind of temporal doubling or fold in the psyches of survivors as well as a permanent damage on Enlightenment conceptions of the progressive march of time. The traumatic experience of a continual turning back inflects the twentieth-century novel and our readings of it, calling into question modernist tropes of redemption. This essay examines changes in the way that both the passage of time and the ghostly return of the dead are portrayed, first in a modern text, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which deals with World War I, and then in two postmodern works both of which inscribe a vain dream of the rectification of Holocaust trauma: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. My emphasis is on trajectories of plot and memory, trajectories that trauma distorts and the artistic impulse inclines to even out (as in Amis’s trope of the story told backwards, with genocide undone). While modernist experimentalism cannot help indulging in redemptive fantasies, it also incorporates its own critique of this conservative longing.

 

June 2004: Natania Rosenfeld teaches in the English Department of Knox College in Illinois, USA. She is the author of Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton University Press, 2000) and a published poet. Two of her personal essays are forthcoming in prominent literary journals, and she is at work both on a collection of essays and on a book dealing with English Modernism, Diaspora, and the Holocaust, tentatively entitled "The Haunting of English Modernism."

 

Wardi, Eynel . 2004. “On Place and Space in Shirley Kaufman's 'Sanctum'”. Partial Answers 2(2): 175-201. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244558. Publisher's Version
Volume 2, issue 2 Topoi
Abstract
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The essay examines the relation between place and space in local art (in Israel) through a reading of Kaufman’s “Sanctum” and two environmental sculptures which it addresses, James Turrell’s Space That Sees (the Israel Museum) and Micha Ullman’s Sky (Tel-Hai Museum).  Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s concepts of “spatialization” and “cultural inhabitation,” among others, the essay traces Kaufman's attempt to clear an imaginative and psychic space beyond the constraints of the conflict-ridden place in which she lives and writes, i.e. Israel, and ultimately to find — or create —  her own place in it.

 

 

Eynel Wardi is a senior lecturer in the English Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Once Below a Time:  Dylan Thomas, Julia Kristeva, and Other Speaking Subjects (2000), and of several articles on Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her current research interests are “inhabitable spaces" in literature and Ecopoetics.

updated in March 2019

 

Kearful, Frank J. . 2003. “Circling American Poetry”. Partial Answers 1(2): 125-157. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244533. Publisher's Version
Volume 1, Issue 2 Literature and the Ideas of Space Topoi
Abstract
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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.

 

Updated July 29, 2011

 

Hunter, Dianne . 2003. “Poetics of Melancholy and Psychic Possession in Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters and Other Haunted Texts”. Partial Answers 1(1): 129-150. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244521. Publisher's Version
Volume 1, Issue 1 Topoi
Abstract
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Read intertextually with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1938 story “Ligeia” and other gothic accounts of melancholy and spousal mourning, Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters evinces ancestral haunting and literary vampirism. “Ligeia,” Hughes’s Birthday Letters in their biographical context, and the aftermath of the death of Eva Peron exemplify Abraham and Torok’s concept of how family histories communicate, via psychic crypts, a sense of possession by the dead. Insofar as intertextuality reveals how texts are lodged within one another and can be thought of as eating one other, literary history reveals itself as a vampiric tale.

 

January 2003: Dianne Hunter is Professor of English at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, Editor of Seduction and Theory (University of Illinois,1989); author of essays in American Imago and The Psychoanalytic Review.

 

 

 

Read intertextually with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1938 story “Ligeia” and other gothic accounts of melancholy and spousal mourning, Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters evinces ancestral haunting and literary vampirism. “Ligeia,” Hughes’s Birthday Letters in their biographical context, and the aftermath of the death of Eva Peron exemplify Abraham and Torok’s concept of how family histories communicate, via psychic crypts, a sense of possession by the dead. Insofar as intertextuality reveals how texts are lodged within one another and can be thought of as eating one other, literary history reveals itself as a vampiric tale.