The rise of autofiction in the 2010s can be partially explained by the genre’s reflection of the contemporary work ethic, specifically its demand to use personal life as part of people’s work. Readers can recognize their tendency to use life for work in the way autofiction writers utilize their experience to write. This paper argues that Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010), one of the primary examples of contemporary autofiction, deals with the idea of using life for work in the context of increased expectation of employers to do so. At first, social engagement and writing are presented as competing for the protagonist’s attention. Then through the development of her friendship with the painter Margaux and tape-recording their conversation, life turns into a resource for writing. Sheila hopes that the new relationship with a friend, mediated and preserved through recordings, will save her writing project. It is not just that life is an inspiration for writing, but that it actively contributes to work by providing a text that will be part of the novel we are reading. Then as the novel progresses, problems with this new arrangement come up, and we are asked to question the viability of subordinating personal relationships to work. By its end, a temporary truce between work and life is presented, one that may be satisfying to readers but does not subvert the contemporary work ethic.

August 2023: David Hadar teaches English literature at Beit Berl College and Kaye College, Israel. His work has appeared in journals such as Narrative and Studies in American Jewish Literature. His book Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature was published in 2020.

In the early 20^th century, the figures of both the peasant woman and the “New Woman” caught the attention of Chinese writers. While the “New Woman” has been the subject of considerable scholarship, the representation of peasant women has not received much scholarly attention. This essay examines the peasant woman as represented in modern Chinese literature to complement the existing understanding of Chinese modernity. It focuses on the rural girl student, as she signifies the clash of two worlds: the rural family as her point of provenance and the modern school as her entry into the urban. Relying on Xiao Hong’s short story “Hands” in the context of historical accounts, I argue that hygiene becomes a type of biopower that punishes the rural girl student for her class origin and racializes her as a barbarian, the process capturing a rural-urban divide. The modern school that expels the protagonist, Wang Yaming, is not an institution that promotes upward mobility but a tool to perpetuate class privileges. Although the narrator shows occasional sympathy with Wang Yaming, under the influence of class difference female solidarity is not achieved.

August 2023: Lang Wang has received her doctoral degree in comparative literature from Purdue University. She is currently an assistant professor in English and Comparative Literature at Beijing Institute of Technology. She specializes in French and Chinese women's literature, feminism, gender studies, and ecocriticism. Her publications have appeared in The French Review, French Studies Bulletin, International Comparative Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and are forthcoming in Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” most inhabitants of the imaginary town fare well, but only on the condition that an unidentified child imprisoned in a dark room suffers: the well-being of most is founded on depriving the child of the inherent right to equality. Such an allegorical image of the suffering child embodies the hierarchical oppositions between adults and children, employers and employees, rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged. This paper analyzes the art of Le Guin’s story and its functioning as a testing ground for ethical theories.

March 2023: Hawk Chang is Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. His research has appeared in journals such as Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, English Studies, Children's Literature in Education, The Explicator, ANQ, Journal of English Studies, Neohelicon, Changing English, Tamkang Review, Wenshan Review, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature, and CLCWeb, among others. His monograph Traditions and Difference in Contemporary Irish Short Fiction: Ireland Then and Now was published by Springer in February 2021.

In their memoirs female Holocaust survivors recount the systematic misogynic attack of the female body in Auschwitz. The various literary figures that render, or rather testify to, a scene that is in every way repugnant to humanity in its violence, and the emphasis on the brutal physical aggression inflicted on women in Auschwitz underscore the resulting epistemological malaise.

From the memoirs of Eva Edith Eger (The Choice), Livia Bitton-Jackson (I Have Lived a Thousand Years), Rena Kornreich Gellisen (Rena's Promise), and Erna Rubinstein (The Survivor in Us All), there emerges a collective portrait of the subversive Jewish woman who resists the heavy weight of the Nazi power. Through a close reading of female Holocaust survivors’ memoirs, this essay shows how the brutal assault on gender gave birth – against all odds – to a new Jewish woman who not only overcomes the shock of being despoiled of her basic cultural and gender assets but uses this deprivation to rise above her condition and eventually to write her own self through what Helene Cixous calls “a language of revolution.”

March 2023: Steiner Liliane, Ph.D. Summa cum laude from Bar-Ilan University, is Senior Lecturer in Hemdat Hadarom College of Education. She specializes in comparative literature, gender studies, Holocaust studies, children's literature, philosophy, languages. She is the author of The Interaction between the Sexes, the Post-abjection of the Archaic Mother (Resling, 2014) and Between Breastfeeding and Exams (Mofet, 2019), both in Hebrew. Also in Hebrew she has published three children’s books: Hila's Choice (Sefer Lakol, 1995), Bittersweet Chocolate (Contento, 2014), and The Two Overseers of the Synagogue (Gefen, 2017).

This article is grounded in ideas about defining commitment and the development of self that stem from the writings by Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s view that the self develops in relation to three existential stages or “realms” — the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious sheds light on Nicole Krauss’s novels The History of Love (2005) and Forest Dark (2017). Leo Gursky in the former shares the commitment to romantic love of the young swain in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling; but for Krauss’s character this commitment is displaced in favor of a commitment to writing itself. In Forest Dark the notion of writing as defining commitment reemerges through the character Nicole. A transition from the esthetic to the ethical dimension occurs in Jules Epstein’s newfound commitment to the dead. Ultimately, however, Krauss’s characters in these two novels are characterized as lacking the “inwardness” that in Kierkegaard’s writings is necessary for becoming a self that is able to access the religious realm.

March 2023: Nicholas O. Pagan is a visiting professor of English at the University of Malaya. He specializes in literary theory and writes about literature (particularly American literature) in relation to philosophy, mind, and spirituality. His publications include Theory of Mind and Science Fiction (2014). He has also published in journals including Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal; Religion & Literature; Literature and Theology, Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture; and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory.

This essay reconsiders the view of George Eliot as the vanguard secular novelist through the tension between her early, yet sustained, commitment to the evangelical belief that joy is a providential reward for suffering and the later complications as she depicted a world appearing to lack divine justice or mercy, without promise of an afterlife. I argue that the novel Adam Bede is not a humanist translation of Christian doctrine but a revision of theodicy both from within and from without Christian tradition, representing the mystery of “human sorrow” and suffering as embodied in Jesus Christ. The novel works through to a belief that such suffering awaits all, rather than some, created beings and to the conviction that joy will never banish suffering — that it co-exists with it, taking the form of love. This revision preserved the Christian primacy of suffering while seeking to equalize it and face its demands.

September 2022: Ilana M. Blumberg teaches at Bar Ilan University. She is the author of Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels; Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American; and Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman among Books. She is currently working on the project "Post-Secular George Eliot," supported by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation.

This study argues that Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, published when the feminist revisionist myth-making movement was influential, is a paradigm-shifting narrative prefiguring the theory of gender as performance, which later gained popularity in the canon of contemporary women’s writing. Like the writer’s other subversive texts, it is a heterodox novel that anticipates the main lines of Judith Butler’s gender theory and provides fictional avatars for subsequent women writers. The key theme in Carter’s fiction is the loss of the sense of the norm regarding known sexual categories and traditional gender boundaries. Accordingly, the paper examines gender identity construction in terms of performativity and gender transitivity in The Passion of New Eve by interrogating the process of Evelyn’s forced sex transformation and Tristessa’s iconic characterization as a Hollywood “beauty queen,” to show how the author questions essentialist conceptions and authenticity of gendered subjectivity through her “self-contradictory” and gender-blurring characters.

December 2022:

Mustafa Kirca is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Çankaya University in Ankara. He holds a PhD in English literature from Middle East Technical University, Turkey. His research focuses on translation and comparative studies, contemporary literature, metafiction and parodic re-writing in contemporary fiction. He recently co-edited Mapping Cultural Identities and Intersections: Imagological Readings (2019).

Sıla Erkılıç has been working in Central Bank of Republic of Turkey at Governor’s Office since 2012. She holds her BA in Translation and Interpretation from Hacettepe University (2010) and her MA in English Literature and Cultural Studies from Çankaya University (2016). Her research interest includes twentieth century women’s writing, contemporary fiction, and translation.

Sampling Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief" in her 1995 novel So I Am Glad, A. L. Kennedy invites us to read this "disbelief" as skepsis not about some supernatural set-up or other but about the other-than-natural fictions humans live by - pre-eminently the fictions of love. Niklas Luhmann's ambitious historico-sociological account of the reconfiguration of intimacy in modernity as a "normal improbability" offers a helpful frame for an articulation of the critical thrust of Kennedy's re-invention of love. By matching her twentieth-century mindblind protagonist with the seventeenth-century libertine Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, Kennedy increases the unlikelihood of love and grants us an experience of the unreadability of the other not as a pious trope but as a fact that we must preserve even as we learn to disbelieve it through the material neurotechnics of mindreading. Resisting the privatization of sentiment diagnozed by Luhmann, So I Am Glad also seeks to release love as care for the world, but realizes that such release requires suspending the disbelief in death that bodies in love are blessed with against their better knowledge.

This essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf's much-debated claim that "on or about December 1910, human character changed," reassessing its import not as the provocation to her contemporaries that seems to have been intended, or as a statement of originality, but in a historical envelope that encompasses Woolf's own fictional oeuvre within a tradition of representing women in fiction. This tradition is essentially rhetorical and literary rather than essentialist; it engages with representations and associations rather than directly with psychological or philosophical questions about personality or identity. As such, "character" should be understood as involving a series of recognizable codes or tropes played through new contexts, with Shakespeare's representations of women as a constant touchstone or reference point. A pioneer of "stream of consciousness" prose and Modernist fiction, Woolf is normally read for her innovations in representing selfhood; this experimentalism, I suggest, is built on a bedrock of familiar imagery that reveals her involvement in a continuing literary tradition of character representation. Her interest in late nineteenth-century and contemporary developments in depth psychology notwithstanding, Woolf's revolutionary prose style shows evidence of her careful reading of previous literary evocations of character, particularly the characters of women. What is at issue, then, is not primarily existential questions about whether character "is" innate, self-fashioned, or merely linguistic, but rather critical or representational issues of how literary character has been evoked so as to create certain responses in readers. In the process, however, the larger existential questions are implicitly invoked, and shown to be not novel concerns of modernist psychology but continuing issues in literary understandings of the concept of "character" itself, at least as far back as the seventeenth century. In addition to a range of Woolf's own critical and creative writing, the essay considers works by Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Walter Pater, Henry James and Oscar Wilde.