This essay focuses on the various forms of narrating, mediating, and interpreting selves within and around a book object, the novel S. (2013) by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The novel S. is an experiment in producing a deceivingly realistic replica of a maltreated library book object, but its discursive practices also rely on familiar literary forms, harking back to epistolary commonplaces, as well as to marginalia, both ancient and modern. The book object S., which carries the text of the novel-within-a-novel, the readers’ multilayered markings, and paraphernalia, forms an archive dramatizing the workings of memory, thought, and emotion. That archive also demonstrates how the characters collect, organize, and process data from a variety of media sources. S. also problematizes narration, mediation, and the representation of textual selves through its data overkill verging on unreadability. Modifying Garrett Stewart’s notion, the essay considers the possible significances of narrative “demediation” in experiments with the nearly dysfunctional book form. The very act of demediating signifies conceptually, by its very presence, as conceptual art customarily does. In the case of S., it conceptualizes textual communication and minds in interaction even to a degree of confusion, not-reading, or veritable library silence in reception.

Comments on William Wordsworth’s much-debated poem “A slumber did my spirit seal” (1800) fall into two interpretive positions: “shock” readings and “non-shock” readings. The poem can be understood in a new way through the concept of intermedial experience and the rhetorical device of ekphrasis. I call for a kind of visual reading that does not let the intermedial experience of poetry be reduced to an interpretive position, as there always remains an excess of experience, something that is not part of the interpretation and cannot be exhausted by offering another interpretation. Becoming involved with the excess and reflecting on it can yield insight into how intermedial experience is constituted. In the readings of “Slumber,” it has consistently been the empty space between the poem’s two stanzas that has appeared to generate such excess. I discuss the images readers have seen in reading the poem, the narrative they have used to describe them in their own words, as well as the effect of the empty space on their responses. Who is the source of the significance of the poem’s visual images, the reader, the poetic I, or Wordsworth himself, and what does the reading come to in terms of the selves involved? I argue that interpretive positions such as the “shock” and “non-shock” readings of “Slumber” can be viewed as ekphrases in which the reader verbally describes the images of the poem with the consequence of narrative appropriation. In doing so, the intermedial experience of poetry is reduced to an interpretive position, and the reading process subjectively closed off into a private sphere. Studying the device of ekphrasis shows how reading, understood as intermedial experience affected by empty space in “Slumber,” both maintains and disrupts this sense of subjective closure.

Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently she is running two research projects, Dangers of Narrative (2017–2020) and the research consortium Instrumental Narratives (2018–2022). In 2018, she is Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Fictionality Studies, Aarhus University. She is co-editor of Narrative, Interrupted (De Gruyter, 2012) and Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (Routledge, 2015). She has published on consciousness, voice, and realism across media, the literary tradition of adultery, authorial ethos, and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.

updated on September 26, 2018

Thomas Pynchon’s interest in music is audibly reflected in the rich intertextual environments of his works such as Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel which includes numerous allusions to musical pieces, descriptions of performances, and song lyrics. The latter stand out from prose narrative as they introduce new diegetic dimensions to the novel by offering playful commentary on its plot and characters. The present study examines the novel’s acoustic background, pointing to the formal structure of songs and its role in locating singing human voices in opposition to noises emitted by technological devices such as V2 rockets. A classification scheme shows how Pynchon’s formal experimentation juxtaposes written and oral variants of language, thus connecting songs to one of the novel’s thematic centers — problematics of order. This function of songs is examined in an episode of Vaslav Tchitcherine’s mission of promoting literacy among oral tribes of Kazakhstan, that serves as a commentary on the conventional character of writing systems and their ability to transform the poetic quality of language into a systematic structure.

Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky’s texts of the 1920s offer compelling examples of the tensions endemic to aesthetic modernism and inherent in Jewish nationalist discourse during the interwar period. This essay discusses Jabotinsky’s Atlas (1925), his unproduced film script A Galilean Romance (1924–1926), and his anthemic poem “Two Banks Has the Jordan” (1929). While the ideological value of the works examined is self-evident, the artistic features of Jabotinsky’s work have received scant attention. This essay reveals Jabotinsky’s indebtedness to themes and techniques identified with early European literary modernisms and their associated socio-political contexts. The article concludes that scholars can profitably locate Jabotinsky’s creative output of the 1920s within the nexus of early aesthetic modernism and collectivist nationalism.

Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) eludes generic categorization by crossing the boundaries between dystopian fiction, fantasy novel, life writing, and fiction marked by magic realism. In postmodern fashion, it plays with spatiotemporal frameworks and narrative order, shifts narrative voices, and perspectives and uses a multiplicity of presentational modes including dialogue and scholarly text commentary with encyclopedic annotations. In its “Epilogue,” the novel features metalepsis when it introduces the author, who talks to his protagonist about his work. The question arises how the novel’s radio play adaptation, first broadcast by the BBC on 1 November 2014, translates this playfulness into its own semiotic system. This paper particularly focuses on the narratological category of “voice” and explores what happens when narrators’ and characters’ voices are actualized in radio drama, how the radio play uses voice-over narration, voice qualities and the doubling of parts to create a recognizable as well as surprising aural storyworld. It also analyzes how sound techniques and music are employed to create narrative structures. Because of their medial instantaneousness and evanescence, radio plays arguably have to rely on disambiguation to make themselves accessible to a listening audience. However, as this paper shows, they also have a range of radiophonic techniques at their disposal to create narrativity on their own terms.

This paper discusses the reinvention of the humanist ideas and values in the Soviet post-World War II and post-Stalinist culture (the 1950s and the1960s) with the help of Renaissance plots and images in Soviet semi-official art, the main examples being Pavel Antokolsky’s poem Hieronymus Bosch (1957), the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God (1963), and Grigory Kozintsev’s films based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970), as well as David Samoilov’s poem Bertold Schwarz: A Monologue, set in the late Middle Ages. The paper isolates an aesthetic movement that developed in the Soviet culture of those decades; I propose to call this movement “posttraumatic humanism.” It was based on the new aesthetic idiom of “gloomy Renaissance,” including images of conflagration, ruins, violence. The works of this movement did not use the Aesopian language — or, at least, did not use it as a primary or only tool. Rather, it involves a covert comparison of the Soviet present with the European pre-Enlightenment past and aesthetical valorization and sublimation of 20^th-century catastrophic experience. Images of “gloomy Renaissance” conveyed the erosion the Soviet belief in progress and moral modernization as inevitable consequences of Bolsheviks’ revolution. One of the earliest mature works of posttraumatic humanism in Soviet culture was Vasily Grossman’s essay The Sistine Madonna (1955). Alexei German Sr.’s film Hard to Be a God (2013) can be regarded as the concluding and summarizing work in this movement.

June 2017: Ilya Kukulin received his PhD in literary theory at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. His monograph Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (Moscow, 2015, in Russian) was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize. He has co-edited six volumes focused on topics from the history of schooling in the 20^th Century Eastern Europe to the cultural practices of the internal colonization in Russia. He is also the author of a number of articles on Russian literature, unofficial social thought in 20^th-century Russia, and political discourses of the Russian social media, published in Russia, Germany, Norway, China, Lithuania, Armenia, and the USA. At present he is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow), Senior Researcher at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences (HSE), and Senior Researcher at the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow).

This article analyzes Proust’s listening by placing it in the contexts of French reception of late Beethoven in Proust’s era.  At stake are questions of perception of and through the work of art, of music as the figure of something greater than love or desire in Proust.  Thinking music and silence together, through the framework of “modern” listening, allows us to see how Proust seeks new definitions of time within subjectivity.  By bringing together Beethoven’s era, Proust’s, and our own, we can articulate how both Beethoven and Proust push the limits of tonality and temporality in order to hear what had never before been sounded and to which their work gives voice.

In 2014 New Perspectives Theatre Company staged the first adaptation on the stage of a short story by Saul Bellow, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth.” The changes made to the story in its adaptation for the stage inform our understanding of the comic effect of the story, particularly in relation to the different endings involved. The dynamic of the story depends upon the deployment of two different concepts of comedy — as the expression of an aggressive, materialistic society (Freud, The Joke in Relation to the Unconscious)  or as a means of reforming society in green comedy (Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism). The story focusses upon the legitimate irresponsibility of comedy, and on the relation of comedy to freedom, defending it as a social and even a sacred good. The one-liners uttered by the hero exemplify comedy of a corrective nature, offering a healthy critique of social behavior, particularly in terms of the relation of art to money, and contest Freud’s theory as tainted by its social context and economic basis.

This article reads Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as a rewriting of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s assumption, which interprets In Search as a complex exercise in decoding signs, the article claims that Fun Home stages the attempt of its protagonists, Alison and her father Bruce, to understand the truth about each other. In particular, it addresses the issues of sexual identity, spatiality, and death as some of the crucial motifs in In Search that Bechdel retrieves in Fun Home. The protagonists’ “experiment in decoding” turns out to be a failure, due to the impossibility of understanding and deciphering the signs of each other’s intimate truths.