This article discusses the challenges involved in the formation of a “genre” of Korean adoptee autobiographical writing. It provides a brief outline of the political and historical background of the phenomenon of Korean international adoption and discuss a text that frames some of the problems involved in defining the genre of Korean adoptee autobiography — namely Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s Somebody’s Daughter (2005). The author of this book was not adopted, and the book is a novel, a fictional text; at the same time, given the fact that half of the text is written in first-person — a Korean adoptee recounting her return to Korea — Somebody’s Daughter at times resembles an adoptee autobiography in an uncanny way. This resemblance is further enhanced by the fact that neither the text nor the paratext indicate whether the author is an adoptee or not. The book is indirectly offering the illusion of an “authentic” testimony of adoptee experience (it has indeed been used in academic contexts as an example thereof). But does it matter that the author was not adopted? Would it have made any difference — and for whom — had she been an adoptee? Is it even possible to speak of an “authentic” testimony of adoptee experience, regardless of whether the author is an adoptee or not? The article attempts to clarify some of these issues, while arguing that a novel like Lee’s challenges the genre of adoptee autobiography but also helps to define its potential.

Questions play a prominent role in W. B. Yeats’s mature work. This essay discusses the use of questions in three of Yeats’s most renowned interrogative lyrics: “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Among School Children.” By reviewing the critical discourse regarding these canonical texts and locating a key semantic commonality linking the three poems, the article posits that questions reveal a revolutionary approach to epistemology that distinguishes Yeats as a poet whose lyric form breaks the monologic mold. Yeats’s interrogative verse is ultimately shown to offer a new form of dialogic knowledge that addresses an interrogated other as a means of inquiring what wisdom poetry affords in a world beset by epistemic doubt.

In mid-nineteenth century America, science education was often presented as a panacea, capable of providing students with mental discipline, moral instruction, and useful knowledge.  In her 1871 novel, Little Men, Louisa May Alcott assesses the ability of science education to fulfill these aims, selectively embracing some of the beliefs, goals, and methods promoted by advocates of science education while critiquing others.  Unlike these advocates, Alcott highlights the differences between children and their diverse educational goals, presenting science education chiefly as a means to an end. Alcott’s investment in science education is tempered by her commitment to moral and domestic education. Through the character of Dan she demonstrates that increased scientific literacy does not necessarily lead to moral growth or future domestic happiness.  Instead, science and the domestic prove incommensurable throughout the novel: the students who most heartily embrace science, Dan and Nan, are also the most decidedly undomestic graduates of Plumfield, as their science education gives them access to alternatives to home life, for good or for ill.

Elie Wiesel’s Night, which first appeared in French as La nuit in 1958, may well loom as the archetypal Holocaust survivor narrative. But it was only in 1994, in his memoirs, that the author addressed the fact that Night is part adaptation, part translation, of a Yiddish work he originally published in Buenos Aires in 1956: …Un di velt hot geshvign (…And the World Was Silent). Critics have read discrepancies between the two versions in various ways: favorably, as resulting from appreciation for the distinct literary idiom of each language; provocatively, as the consequence of Wiesel’s desire to cast the Holocaust in Christian, rather than Jewish, terms; and disparagingly, as part of a strategy to hide ideologically unpalatable, ethnocentric attitudes from a wider audience.

This article reviews the merits and flaws of these interpretations of differences in versions of Night. Further, it offers a new approach that involves a re-examination of Wiesel’s relationship with François Mauriac, the towering writer who encouraged his entry into French letters.

The article explores the thematics of breathing in Paul Celan’s (1920–1970) poems and poetics. It is argued that in Celan breathing is a holistic phenomenon and an essential part of the poems’ materiality, a force that animates both the poetic and bodily corpus. Thus we ask here, by what poetic means written and oral word and respiration are connected. The bodily, temporal, spiritual, inspirational and interpretational aspects of breathing are addressed in order to understand how respiration as a bodily phenomenon becomes poetic and what kind of thematics are thus evoked. Exploring these thematics, including divine inspiration, asubjective experience, and non-causal temporality, Celan’s oeuvre is read in the context of Büchner, Heidegger, Mandelstam, and Abulafia.

Susan Fenimore Cooper’s slow-moving nature journal, Rural Hours (1850), is an education of the senses in which both author and reader learn where to look and how to look.  Her creative decision represent herself as a “gleaner” and to both use and subtly subvert the seasonal cycle (so that we may see more deeply, more intimately, more truthfully) is part of a larger critique of the paternalistic spirit that helped found the very place she writes about — Cooperstown, New York. More unobtrusively than Thoreau, Cooper develops her own sophisticated version of an “ecology of reading,” brilliantly anticipating recent attempts by ecocritics to imagine a “democracy of all life-forms” (Timothy Morton).

Developing in a specifically religious register a poetic epistemology, this essay argues for rehabilitating revelation as a model of knowing that challenges some of our modern and especially postmodern prejudices against striving to envision truth as a whole. It aligns these results with some of the recent advances in critical theory, for example, by Frederic Jameson, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Zizek, who likewise attempt to break through the confinements of strictly scientific epistemology. Extending the range of such contemporary critiques in directions suggested by Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and Blanchot, the essay exposes the deep roots in canonical and classical humanities tradition of such revisionary thinking of knowledge as finally a form of “revelation.” The kind of wholeness and the ideal of universality embodied in the epic and in humanities knowledge in general appear in a striking new light based not on the concept, with its inevitably exclusionary logic (A versus not-A) but rather on a negative-theological thinking of the not-All which involves, nevertheless, a relatedness to all without restrictions or exclusions.  This thinking-beyond-the-concept is shown to drive the dynamics of imaginative expression striving towards epic wholeness.

The narrative of Joseph Wright’s figures is eloquent and complex. In many ways, the sitters defined themselves and their cultural aspirations for posterity through clothing, posture and props. However, Wright subverts the tenets of eighteenth-century portraiture as he attempts to identify the physical markers that give the viewer a closer understanding of character. The painting of Thomas Day, for example, is far removed from the conventional portraiture of the wealthy gentleman. Its signifiers suggest the complexities of Day’s character. Most of what we know of the eccentric Day has come to us through Anna Seward’s unorthodox biography of Erasmus Darwin and his circle. This text is supplemented by letters between Seward and Walter Scott, which disclose the publishing censorship levelled at her memoir of Day when she attempted to find a psychological cause for his experiments with education and his rejection of wealth and luxury. Her private letters give an alternative view of the public figure that was part of her literary coterie, her “dear Quartetto.” This essay discusses the representation of character in Wright’s portrait of Thomas Day and decodes its cultural markers through a synthesis of painting and word-painting.