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January 2018: Alexander Ullman is a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies 20th-century literature.
Despite the output of scholarship in the field of sound studies over the past three decades, relatively little work has been done on sound and translation. By engaging the translation theories of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Naomi Seidman, this essay takes an interdisciplinary approach in arguing that sound functions as a productive obstacle in translation. The essay situates sound within current frameworks of translation theory, considers the role of sound in late modernist experimental works that use translation as a generative mode of literary composition, and surveys the performative aspects of sound in contemporary translations of liturgical Hebrew poetry known as piyutim.
If the yearning for the Absolute — the unconditioned — initiates and to a large extent defines the Romantic gesture, then post-Romantic imagination seems to stretch this yearning towards the Absolute to such a degree that it could readily destroy any unity of the concept, including that of the Absolute itself. Skeptical of any immediate relation between word and object, Celan in his early stage was deeply involved in what could only be described as a “striving” against Hegelian discourse that aims to crown the concept through dialectics. Celan’s effort at permanently doubling and overflowing the Idea has arguably launched a strange, perhaps the strangest, poetic project since Romanticism — a poetics that cuts off the self-relation of the object, turns sense certainty against itself, and puts the phenomenal world in a nearly unintelligible order (yet not chaos). In a hidden dialogue with the works of Hegel, Novalis, and Hölderlin who postulated and sought the Spirit as the Absolute, Celan’s early work opens doors to those modes of being that manifest themselves as the destructive aporia of the concept of the Absolute rather than its sublime or beautiful representations.
June 2018: Feng Dong is Associate Professor of English at Qingdao University, China. He is particularly interested in finding out how poetry helps us access alternative realities (possible modes of being) by working through both Freudian and Heideggerian versions of the uncanny toward a new conception of the poetic, which is based on continuous, deep transactions with psychic and political potentials of the contemporary subject. He has published essays on Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, and W. S. Merwin. He is the author of Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwin’s Poetry (2017). At present, he is working on a book on Paul Celan’s poetics and its epistemological and ethical consequences.
Modern forms of travel allowed Victorian women and their afterlives in neo-Victorian fiction to redefine gendered spaces and gender roles, in the metropolis as well as in the empire’s peripheries. The Introduction to the forum surveys issues pertaining to the relationship between female modernity, travel, and the subversion of imperial roles as explored by the papers of the forum.
Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World: Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.
This paper teases out the intersections of list-making as an everyday experience and the incorporation of lists and enumerations in literary texts. Drawing on cognitive literary theory and the notion of experientiality, I argue that lists evoke our sensorimotor experience (the practice of writing lists) as well as our capacity to structure and organize the world (using and making sense of lists). When we as readers encounter lists in literary texts, such as the shopping lists in Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, our experience of making lists ourselves is evoked and thus leads to an experiential response that cannot be explained by Monika Fludernik’s definition of experientiality as a “quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience.’” This is due to the nature of lists and the practice of making lists, which combines physical with cognitive experience.
June 2018: Eva von Contzen is junior professor of English literature at the University of Freiburg and the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Lists in Literature and Culture.” She is the author of a monograph on medieval hagiography (The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration; Manchester 2016) and pursues her interest in narrative theory and medieval literature in the interdisciplinary network “Medieval Narratology.” She is the co-editor of a handbook of historical narratology (with Stefan Tilg). Currently, her main project is devoted to lists and enumerations in literary texts from Antiquity to postmodernism.
The premise of Monika Fludernik’s “natural” narratology is that all narratives, including the most “artificial” literary narratives, ultimately rely on the basic cognitive parameters of naturally-occurring, spontaneous conversational narrative. We naturalize texts by narrativizing them. Fludernik attributes this idea of naturalization, correctly, to Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975), where it modestly masquerades as a synthesis and rationalization of ideas already current in the Formalist-Structuralist tradition. More than merely a synthesis of precursor concepts, however, Culler’s naturalization actually offers something like a unified theory of literary convention, underwriting a profoundly demystifying account of the literary — one that is arguably incompatible with Fludernik’s narrativization, while it also undermines some of the claims of the unnatural narratologists.
Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. A co-founder of Ohio State’s Project Narrative, which he directed in 2012–2014, he is also a founding member and former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). He was a vice-president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2014–2015, and president in 2016. He is the author of four books on postmodern literature and culture, including Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015). He has co-edited five volumes on twentieth-century literature, experimentalism, and narrative theory. Since July 2015 he has edited the international journal Poetics Today.
Though the literary figure of engineer-inventor George Stephenson epitomized Samuel Smiles’s “self-help” ideal of the “manly” liberal subject enabled by laissez-faire policies, Stephenson himself advocated for parliamentary intervention during the heated Railway Regulation debates of the 1840s. This essay deals with women writers’ engagement in those debates and their recognition that improved safety standards for railway travel depended on the inventor and vice versa. In City and Suburb (1861), Charlotte Riddell stylizes passages to mimic the dramatic cross-examinations of the Railway Regulation debates, effectively putting anti-regulation on trial. I argue that Riddell reworked Smiles’s Stephenson narrative in her fiction to promote thoughtful regulation that would enable rather than hamper innovation. Because women themselves sought recognition as part of the larger network of central decision-making, women writers such as Riddell saw the advantage of regarding the inventor not as an isolated hyper-masculine figure but rather as part of the integrated network of contingencies that defined Victorian modernity.
Kathryn Powell is a post-doctoral Lecturer and Assistant Director of the Writing Center at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests are in Victorian literature with special emphases on 19th-century cultures of technology, mobility, progress, and affect. Her dissertation, completed August 2017, is titled, "Railways and Regret: Revising Mobility Myths in Literature and Culture, 1857–1891." An article on a related topic: “Engineering Heroes: Revising the Self-Help Narrative in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis,” Gaskell Journal 29 (2015).
In Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, there are two different conceptions of experientiality, one broader and the other more nuanced, the coexistence of which is an ingenious design and one necessary for the book both to make the powerful cognitive impact on the field and to show how readers use different frames to interpret different types of narratives. Similarly, we can find two different conceptions of “narrativity” which, though distinct from each other, together form a balanced cognitive-textual equilibrium. This paper analyzes the features, functions, advantages, and disadvantages of the different conceptions, pointing out their different roles in the 1990s and the present day.
June 2018: Dan Shen is Changjiang Professor of English Language and Literature at Peking University. She is on the advisory or editorial boards of the American journals Style and Narrative, the British Language and Literature, and the European JLS: Journal of Literary Semantics. In addition to six books and more than one hundred essays in China, she has published Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots with Routledge and numerous essays in North America and Europe in stylistics, narrative studies, and translation studies.
January 2018: Jacob Hovind is Assistant Professor of English at Towson University. He has published articles on figures as diverse as Alice Munro, Erich Auerbach, and Samuel Beckett. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, on the ontology of character in the modernist novel.
While it has become a commonplace among Beckett’s critics to read his novels as inquiries into the unstable nature of selfhood and identity, this tendency takes for granted the novelistic specificity of these works. Beckett consistently maintained his works’ generic specificity, and as his interested in contemporary philosophy was ambivalent, his work demands critical reappraisal not through the lens of philosophy but through that of the works’ ongoing conversation with their own literary inheritance. This article begins by exploring what kind of questions might arise from reading the “novelness” of the prose works. What do they have to tell us about the work of fiction as such? And more specifically, what may they tell us about this unique kind of novelistic being, the literary character? Framing Beckett’s fiction not within philosophical discussions of selfhood but within literary-critical analyses of character’s uniquely fictive mode of being, I analyze the characters of his novels not as people but distinctly as literary characters and ultimately argue that Beckett’s characters gain their fictive semblance of life, their illusion of personhood, by reference not to extratextual subjects but to other literary characters. Reading the role of literary-historical allusions in the creation of Molloy’s protagonist, the article suggests that Beckett offers us something like a theory of its mode of being, a means of considering this uncanny way in which character lives as a uniquely fictional entity, one whose existence amounts to the invention of something out of nothing.
Storytelling is not just a human practice, but a practice that reflects the physical and cognitive make-up of human beings. This is the intuition at the core of Monika Fludernik’s notion of “experientiality.” One of the upshots of this idea is that narrative struggles to come to terms with realities (such as natural evolution or geological history) that are not human-scale. In light of recent discussions in posthumanism and ecocriticism, one may ask if and how narrative can overcome this anthropocentric bias. This essay addresses this question through a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), a novel set a million years into the future, when humanity has evolved into a radically different species. The essay explores formal strategies and affective impact of Vonnegut’s novel, using it as a springboard to rethink narrative’s experientiality in the face of a more-than-human vantage point.
Marco Caracciolo is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” Marco's work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (De Gruyter, 2014); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers' Engagement with Characters (University of Nebraska Press, 2016); and A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt; Ohio State University Press, 2016).
In her response to the essays, Monika Fludernik concentrates on tackling two major points of critique: the question of the natural and the term experientiality. She also engages with Shen Dan's complex remarks about narrativity and its relationship to experientiality and with Maria Mäkelä's remarks on diachrony in the context of models of reader response. As for experientiality, she welcomes both Jonas Grethlein's and Marco Caracciolo's extensions of the term, though signaling some caution about a conflation of experience and experientiality.
June 2018: Monika Fludernik is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is also the director of the graduate school Factual and Fictional Narration (GRK 1767). Her major fields of interest include narratology, postcolonial studies, “Law and Literature,” and 18th-century aesthetics. She is the author of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993) and the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996). Among her several edited volumes are Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Literature (1998) and Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor (2011). She is currently co-editing the Handbook Narrative Factuality with Marie-Laure Ryan.
In her book Towards a Natural Narratology, Fludernik defined narrativity through the notion of experientiality. This essay argues that, despite the success of Natural Narratology, the significance of experience has not yet been fully charted out in narratology. A look at philosophical discussions shows that experience need not be pitted against plot. The phenomenological tradition in particular has highlighted the temporal dimension of experience. Encompassing the temporal dynamics of narrative as well the role of consciousness, the concept of experience may help overcome some of the shortcomings of approaches that focus on fictional minds and tend to downplay plot.
June 2018:
Jonas Grethlein holds the Chair in Greek Literature at Heidelberg. His monographs include Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity (Cambridge UP 2017); Die Odyssee (C.H. Beck 2017); Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge UP 2013); The Greeks and their Past (Cambridge UP 2010); Littells Orestie (Rombach 2009).
Monika Fludernik’s Toward a Natural Narratology (1996) develops a detailed historical account of how the textual structures of experientiality identified in the theoretical framework have developed in English fiction since the 17th century. According to Fludernik’s account, the English novel gets progressively better at matching the cognitive schemata underlying such experientiality. The present article argues, however, that such an understanding of the historical dimension of experientiality is an instance of “the curse of realism,” that is, of discussing early modern texts in light of the expectations established by 19th-century realism. It proposes an alternative model for engaging with the historical dimension of cognitive narratology, which is rooted in embodied cognition and predictive processing.
June 2018: Karin Kukkonen is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. Her most recent project investigates how stylistic and narrative changes in 18th-century prose writing in England and France contributed to the immersive, embodied qualities of the novel. She has published widely on cognitive and transmedial narratology, with articles in journals like Style, Paragraph, Anglia, Orbis Litterarum, and Substance, as well as the monographs Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013) and A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel (2017).
This essay argues that in Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, Herman Melville draws on the 19th-century reading public’s repugnance towards infanticide to both construct his narrative and inspire readers’ emotions to critique capital punishment. The connections between child murder and the execution of Billy in Billy Budd emerge out of the transatlantic literature and culture of capital punishment reform, which includes, significantly, George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede. A reading informed by the literary and cultural history of child murder reveals that Melville’s critique of sovereign power draws on the emotional dynamics of the infanticide narrative. Billy embodies elements of both the infanticidal mother and the murdered child, while Captain Vere exhibits a parental sympathy that might be associated with 19th-century sentimental reformers. Dramatizing how Vere’s personal connection with Billy ultimately supports the aims of sovereign power, Melville provides a compelling enactment of the corrosive effects of biopolitics on human relationships. Beyond that, Melville’s use of the infanticide topos ultimately likens Billy’s execution to a coolly rational infanticide by the state
June 2018: Emer Vaughn is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation examines trans-corporealities in mid-19th-century American nature writing.
