Lisbon holds a special place in Fernando Pessoa’s corpus because this text, uncharacteristically not signed by a heteronym, undertakes a quest for identity which fully coincides with that of his city. Lisbon establishes a reflexive relationship between the poet and his work, in so far as his meticulously evoked image extends over the most developed area of his poetics, that is, his personal mythology. The Portugese capital emerges as a personified city to which Pessoa gives a voice for the sake of constituting it as a language being, like Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague. Lisbon signals the temptation of encyclopedic literature, which relates back to the impossiblity of capturing the other in any way but as visions coming across names of places.

This paper deals with three kinds of poetical nihilism: the annihilation of the poetic subject in Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic writing; the apophatic definition of the divine demiurge and its repercussion on the poet considered as a substitute of the demiurge in Paul Celan’s poetry; and the gradual disappearance of the poetical word in Edmond Jabès cycle “The Book of Questions.” It is an attempt to connect this three-fold process of annihilation with cultural-contextual (mostly linguistic) factors in the case of Pessoa; with philosophical-pragmatical principles in Paul Celan’s work, and with the poetics of the blank and silence in the case of Edmond Jabès. In spite of this compartamentalization, some overlapping between the nihilist paradigms may occur: Jabès occasionally indulges in a kind of parodic heteronymy, whereas Pessoa’s subjective nihilism reaches an objective dimension through a metaphoric equation between the void of the poetical Self and the non-existence of the Book.

The laws and the literature of a society both express and influence the attitudes and norms of its members. The law, however, has a conservative function, while literature can work to change opinions and, in the longer run, legal systems. This essay argues that legal discourse possesses an inherent narrative potential, giving rise to fictional stories that serve to investigate and expose the effects of particular laws. Like many other novels, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda seems to construct its plot on the basis of the reiterated question “But what if…?” exploring social and moral implications of inheritance law, in particular the principle of primogeniture. The two major strands of Eliot’s double plot, with Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda as the protagonists, together with the subplots involving a series of minor characters, embody four areas concerned with this theme: gambling; the duties that come with heritage; illegitimacy; and the conditions of women associated with a system based on privileging a male heir. By pressing the aesthetic effect of thematic recurrence as well as an element of readerly unease into the service of the ethical, this novel makes a powerful statement on the subject of inheritance. It may have contributed to social and political change, and counteracted the preserving effect of the law.

The ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche – in particular the will to power – are patent in the psychology and writings of Álvaro de Campos, who was supposedly born on the philosopher’s birthday, October 15th. Prose pieces such as “Notes for a non-Aristotelian Aesthetics,” with its definition of art as “a struggle to dominate others” and its notion of an aesthetics founded on power rather than on beauty, and the “Ultimatum,” with its explicit invocation of the Superman, make the naval engineer read at times like a Pessoan Zarathustra. I propose, however, that Nietzsche’s influence is more pervasive, informing Fernando Pessoa’s entire literary project, concerned as it was with personal transformation, on the one hand, and domination of other people – namely us his readers – on the other. Self-enlargement and self-proliferation were an ontological as well as aesthetic program, both realized and theorized by the creator of heteronyms.

The Dybbuk, written by An-sky in Russian, triumphantly staged by Vakhtangov in Hebrew (Moscow, 1922), subsequently a seminal work of the Israeli national theater, often attracted harsh criticism and was a subject of many controversies. While under fire from Jewish Communists for its choice of “bourgeois” Hebrew rather than “proletarian” Yiddish Habima became a cult with the Russian intellectual audience not only  out of reverence for the language of the Bible but also  in the face of the Bolshevik persecutions of religion. It was natural for the artistic public to feel solidarity with the spiritual drama on the stage, made universal by the genius of Vakhtangov — given that was the only place in Moscow where one spoke of the spirit at all. And yet it was not without reservations that the play was received by fellow actors and directors. One piece of evidence to this is a parody review that originated in Moscow Art Theater’s First Studio. This paper is an attempt to interpret the review and explain what in the  production of The Dybbuk could irritate fellow Russian artists.

This paper attempts to draw a parallel between Fernão Mendes Pinto, the sixteenth-century adventurer, explorer and writer who spent twenty-one years travelling in the Middle and Far East, and Fernando Pessoa, the twentieth-century poet who spent his working life at the desks of commercial firms in downtown Lisbon. In Pinto’s case, the voyage was the actual physical movement from one place to another, through dangers and adventures, while in Pessoa the voyage was a immobile journey through the inner self. It is argued that Pinto’s book Peregrinação and Pessoa’s book Livro do desassossego can be read as entering a dialogue with each other.

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.

Wordsworth’s investment in a moving subject is well established, whether one is considering accounts of his own European rambles or his many portraits of people in motion.  In his most famous developmental narrative in “Tintern Abbey,” however, he brackets and discards the “glad animal movements” of his earliest years. Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia, read by Wordsworth during the composition of Lyrical Ballads, provides a context for both the phrase “animal movements” and Wordsworth’s own thoughts about the meaning of motion. With his four-fold schema of animal motion, embracing perception, cognition, and bodily processes as well as voluntary motion, Darwin depicts an animal organism for which motion is definitive, providing the foundation for the later development of a stable subject and its will. Wordsworth, by contrast, often evacuates motion from the subject in order to create a stable viewer in dialectical relation to an environment experienced as a landscape prospect, as exemplified by two episodes in “The Two-Part Prelude.”

Taking up leading threads from a response by Kent Puckett to the author’s previous essay in this journal on the syntactic figure of syllepsis in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, this article rounds out the exchange by pursuing the continuing literary force of such split grammar — long after Dickens, or the new examples here from Austen and Poe — as it appears in contemporary writers as different as John le Carré and Toni Morrison.  In answering Puckett’s call for an engagement with the mode of doubleness analyzed in William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral, it clarifies previous claims regarding an ethics of ambiguity in sylleptic grammar in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s work at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and poetics.  In the process, this response extends the philosophical reverberations of this marked syntactic trope to include the Wittgensteinian line of thought in J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, not only in their comments on “ordinary language” but in the sylleptic turns of their own writing.