Just as Robert Browning repeatedly speaks through other voices in his poems, so does his admirer and critic A. S. Byatt in her fiction, ventriloquizing her characters’ poems, stories, letters, and even their academic work.  Such writing as Browning’s and Byatt’s can be understood as mediumistic, a channeling of the voices of the dead or the imaginary.  In turn both writers create mediums, Browning in “Mr. Sludge, the ‘Medium’” and Byatt in “The Conjugial Angel,” one of the two novellas set in Victorian England that form Angels and Insects.  Like Browning’s Sludge, Byatt’s mediums, Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay, function as figures of the creative writer.  Byatt has described Lilias as a “novelist manqué” and Sophy as poet-like.  Sludge is critically acknowledged to be a figure of corruption in art, and through him Browning explores the narrative artist’s inevitable negotiations between truth, fiction, and lies.  Sludge’s spiritualist activities are clearly aimed at the greater glory of Sludge.  Byatt’s mediums, however, are genuinely involved with the mourners and the mourned in the liminal world in which they move.  Lilias brings comfort to a bereaved mother, while Sophy transforms the life of Emily Tennyson Jesse, for this novella is based on the most famous case of protracted Victorian mourning, that for Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.  Browning condemns his character by implication for Sludge’s wish that other people should “participate in Sludgehood.”  Byatt represents Lilias and Sophy as intensely aware of others beside themselves.  Thus both through their acts of ventriloquism and through their narratives and characters, Browning and Byatt demonstrate a shared anti-solipsistic aesthetic in texts involving the writer as medium.  They turn in imagination to what is outside themselves and represent either negatively (through Sludge) or positively (through Sophy and Lilias) the value of such outward movement.

from Notes on Contributors June Sturrock Simon Fraser University   January 2009: June Sturrock is an Emeritus Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where she continues to teach occasionally in the Graduate Liberal Studies Programme.  Her publications include about sixty articles and book chapters, Heaven and Home:  Charlotte Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate about Women, and an edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.  Forthcoming are a book on nineteenth century domestic fiction and several more articles.

The essay explores Primo Levi's description of the Buna tower in If This is a Man as his indirect Midrashic commentary on the Tower of Babel. It shows how the Midrash helps to bridge between the two texts, with Primo Levi's memoir both drawing on and reinterpreting the Biblical story.

In these pages I present my interpretation of Iser’s model of emergence. I emphasize that what I am presenting is my understanding and exemplification of the relations among the chief terms in Iser’s model, namely, recursion, negativity, and emergence. At the same time, what I offer is, I believe, an extrapolation from what we know of Iser’s terms. I propose that the recursive relations and emergences traced by Iser in effect constitute an interactive experience of that which he called the “imaginary.” This recursive experience is a way of collectively taking part in the emergence of imagined being. This is to suggest that in his theoretical work Iser was moving from a theory of the individual act of reading to a theory of cultural and artistic transformation that is necessarily a shared activity. In its fully specified form I believe that this theory must have profound ontological implications, in other words, for how we participate in the being that, via negativity and the imaginary, we are presently helping to bring into being. Iser, I believe, had begun to explain how the greatest works of art and culture enact an interactive, transformative, and emergent way of being in recursion. The exemplifications of emergence that I analyze are from the works of Sophocles, Milton, and Kant.

If literary theory recently has undergone a fundamental change, the question arises: is it possible that the very nature of theory has itself changed?  This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” provides some strategies that allow us to take up this question. In order to make this clear, one must first bear in mind that Benjamin’s essay implies a new understanding of literary theory by stating that a general theory of understanding has to be designed by using the form of a translation theory that (in contrast to a simple translation) specifies the conditions that must be filled in order for the utterances of one’s own language to be seen as synonymous with those of a foreign language. Thus, like Donald Davidson after him, Benjamin had come to the conclusion that translation must be fused with the interpretational theory of translation in order to avoid infinite regresses. This, however, ultimately means that literary theory is — as pure or true language — the virtual goal, and not the precondition of any cognition that arises from the perspective of literary studies.

This paper discusses the challenges posed by the Holocaust and its representations to the practices of the Humanities. The nature of these challenges is brought through an examination of the German Historikerstreit and the French controversies surrounding Heidegger’s relation to the Nazis. The nature of historical representation and its relation to affect are examined in works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Humanities cannot appropriate the Holocaust but they cannot ignore it either. They face the daunting task of learning how to remember it.

As readers, we sometimes have the impression that texts “know” more than their authors ever did. The article refers to this type of (supposed) textual knowledge as latency. It argues that, if there is no direct, methodological, deductive or inductive way towards that which appears to be latent, the Stimmung (mood, atmosphere) produced by the text, as a maximally light and yet invariably physical environment, can become a symptom of what remains latent -- without transforming latency into a situation of open excess. Thus, for instance, in Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice” the detailed descriptions of the ever changing weather of Venice produce in the reader what is best described as a mood — a quasi-physical certainty of being in the presence of something latent, that will eventually reveal itself as a longing for death permeating the homoerotic desire that has overcome the protagonist.

In those cases where long processes of crystallization of latency do not lead to situations of evidence, the intervention of our judgment is required -- the intervention of a judgment that can make itself dependent on better or worse reasons but will never be regarded as exclusively true, or exclusively adequate.

Literary undertakings of the Faust legend have traditionally associated the fate of the overreacher with a thematized fragmentation. On the level of plot, Faust is torn limb from limb or threatened to be thus handled by a devilish cohort; stylistically, the tight drama that unfolds in the protagonist’s study spirals into a disjointed account of royal courts and sidekick pranks. In John Banville’s Mefisto this fragmentation is articulated in intertextual links that open up the text to a rich anteriority. Signification is consequently produced both horizontally and vertically, both inside and outside the novel. This paper traces the antecedents of the Faustian intertexts present in the novel and test the effects of such accumulation on the practice of hermeneutic deciphering. It shows that Banville’s intertextuality itself functions as a Mephistophilian figure, a playful abundance that creates an obstacle for interpretation. Such a stylized chaos does not allow for a teleological reshuffling or re-ordering of the text into a meaningful and cohesive pattern. The reader, then, is enjoined not to re-order the text but to performatively re-enact it, a creative process that will have us thinking not inside but outside the hermeneutic circle.

The essay discusses the way in which the eighteenth-century writer Anna Seward created an interface between literature and science by challenging the theories of a renowned astronomer through her poetry. No matter what their level of interest, women in the eighteenth century had little recourse to an education in science. Seward’s education was literary, and she paid little attention to the sciences until she attended a lecture in Lichfield given by the astronomer, Robert Evans Lloyd. He illustrated his talk with an orrery. Joseph Wright’s painting, The Philosopher giving that lecture on the Orrery, in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun (1766), demonstrates the prevalent fascination with astronomy. After the lecture, Seward wrote a poem on the same subject, “The Terrestrial Year, passing through the signs of the Zodiac,” but not before she had interrogated Lloyd on his presentation of the juxtaposition of Earth and the constellations, publicly questioning his theories. Although her knowledge of astronomy was founded on references to the zodiac in the poems of Milton and Thomson, she engaged with further scientific research and was able to prove that Lloyd’s system was flawed. Her findings inspired her to write her poem which, despite its origins, has more reference to classical literature than to science. An interesting part of the poem, however, is the introductory ‘Proem’ which gives the scientific rationale for the work, tracing Seward’s challenge and her educational progress. Her proem leads us into the poem and leaves us in no doubt that Seward’s exploration of the complexities of the solar system finds new poetic ground through her quest for scientific knowledge.

Is there a compelling normative case for value pluralism? Would we be better off in a world of irreducibly diverse and sometimes tragically conflicting values rather than one in which our values fit harmoniously together? This article identifies, examines and evaluates a normative argument for value pluralism suggested in Isaiah Berlin’s sessays on the history of ideas and particularly on Russian writers – that is, that deep conflicts of identity bound up with conflicting values sometimes contribute critically to the creation of great works of art, philosophy, and politics. Berlin attributes such deep identity conflicts to a range of important European historical figures, from Marx and Disraeli to Tolstoy and Turgenev to Hamann and Mill, and argues that their works of creative genius were motivated in part by the need to transcend their internal conflicts. On his interpretation, value conflicts appear to have been a necessary condition for their great works. In so far as we value these great creative works, it would then appear that we have a reason for embracing the underlying plurality of values that made them possible. But Berlin never linked these insights to his case for value pluralism or political liberalism. This article ends by evaluating those potential linkages.  It concludes that there is a good reason that Berlin did not explicitly build a normative argument for value pluralism on these great works: on careful examination the argument reveals a paradoxical quality that at least partially undermines his critique of monism. By consequence, the argument from great works does not lend support to Berlin’s famous defense of pluralist liberalism, but rather to a form of creative liberalism that does not need to choose between pluralist sensibilities and monist aspirations.