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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.
This paper argues that the dialogical analysis provides a potent and fruitful methodology for understanding the very process of scientific creativity, as well as for interpreting both scientific and literary texts. Contra Bakhtin, who considered scientific activity and its products as a prime example of monologism, the author argues that a scientific article, “populated” by many invisible interlocutors, is best perceived as rich polyphony of addresses and responses to the "other.” Bakhtinian concepts “the word with a loophole” and “the word with the sideward glance” point to the basically addressed nature of our intellectual and emotional life in a particularly apt way.
Mara Beller (1945-2004), Barbara Druss Dibner Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Hebrew University, is the author of Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution and of numerous articles in history, philosophy, and sociology of science.
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 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.
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.
