Abstract:References to Vladimir Nabokov's texts are frequent in the works of contemporary British writers, but it is John Banville who seems to be engaged in an unceasing conversation with Nabokov. As this essay will argue, in Banville's comments on Nabokov's sophisticated structures the readers can glimpse a hint of Banville's own practice. The essay discusses Banville's celebrated ethical thriller, The Book of Evidence, which not only resembles Nabokov's Despair and Lolita in its theme and structure, or borrows phrases and images from these books, but also creates intimations of a hidden story, which remains decipherable though not conclusive, thus reproducing Nabokov's textual model. Using a heuristic comparative approach, this essay treats Despair as a case study of Nabokov's method of concealment of a storyline beneath flamboyant narration, and then studies Banville's novel with particular attention to the signals of unreliability, which, keeping in mind the deceptions of Despair, can be seen as evidence of untold story. The essay proposes a reinterpretation of the plot in The Book of Evidence by analogy with Despair, as well as a rereading of Despair under the influence of Banville's novel.
{"title":"Nabokov and Banville: Hidden Stories in Despair and The Book of Evidence","authors":"Irena Księżopolska","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:References to Vladimir Nabokov's texts are frequent in the works of contemporary British writers, but it is John Banville who seems to be engaged in an unceasing conversation with Nabokov. As this essay will argue, in Banville's comments on Nabokov's sophisticated structures the readers can glimpse a hint of Banville's own practice. The essay discusses Banville's celebrated ethical thriller, The Book of Evidence, which not only resembles Nabokov's Despair and Lolita in its theme and structure, or borrows phrases and images from these books, but also creates intimations of a hidden story, which remains decipherable though not conclusive, thus reproducing Nabokov's textual model. Using a heuristic comparative approach, this essay treats Despair as a case study of Nabokov's method of concealment of a storyline beneath flamboyant narration, and then studies Banville's novel with particular attention to the signals of unreliability, which, keeping in mind the deceptions of Despair, can be seen as evidence of untold story. The essay proposes a reinterpretation of the plot in The Book of Evidence by analogy with Despair, as well as a rereading of Despair under the influence of Banville's novel.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"310 1","pages":"101 - 124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76499762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The critics have noted that Thomas Pynchon's work tends to center around attempts to unravel mysteries, yet, these would-be etective plots have generally been associated with epistemological or ontological quest narratives rather than with crime fiction. However, Pynchon's two most recent novels, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), engage directly and openly with the conventions of the hardboiled. This paper explores Pynchon's use of the form, examining contributions that it has made to his recent work—a strong narrative framework, access to a set of powerful yet flexible generic tropes, and an anti-authoritarian interest in systematic corporate and governmental corruption. Pynchon's hardboiled, I conclude, is an elegiac yet radical fictional mode highly suitable for his critical analysis of American history.
{"title":"Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and Thomas Pynchon's Hardboiled","authors":"Eric Sandberg","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The critics have noted that Thomas Pynchon's work tends to center around attempts to unravel mysteries, yet, these would-be etective plots have generally been associated with epistemological or ontological quest narratives rather than with crime fiction. However, Pynchon's two most recent novels, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), engage directly and openly with the conventions of the hardboiled. This paper explores Pynchon's use of the form, examining contributions that it has made to his recent work—a strong narrative framework, access to a set of powerful yet flexible generic tropes, and an anti-authoritarian interest in systematic corporate and governmental corruption. Pynchon's hardboiled, I conclude, is an elegiac yet radical fictional mode highly suitable for his critical analysis of American history.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"114 1","pages":"125 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79238888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Why might Philip Roth, in 1980, have published a revised edition of The Breast (1972), and what do many of his emendations have to do with recent scholarly disclosure of the existential concerns of the original narrative? How, moreover, in the second edition, does de facto co-authored narrative technique pertain to Sartre's tenet that consciousness arises as an upsurge of nothingness amid the dross substance of non-reflective Being? I conclude that in the revised edition Roth imbues David Kepesh, his once-autonomous narrator, with levels of authorial cognizance that subordinate Kepesh's early outlooks to the consciousness-usurping intrusion of the author—now the author-narrator. That act of domination may dramatize Sartre's description of the existential "look," which stands to usurp the consciousness of "the Other." The act of thus revising an already existential narrative illustrates the flight of the Sartrian "For-Itself" toward "the higher functions of consciousness."
{"title":"Existential Revision in Philip Roth's The Breast","authors":"James Duban","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Why might Philip Roth, in 1980, have published a revised edition of The Breast (1972), and what do many of his emendations have to do with recent scholarly disclosure of the existential concerns of the original narrative? How, moreover, in the second edition, does de facto co-authored narrative technique pertain to Sartre's tenet that consciousness arises as an upsurge of nothingness amid the dross substance of non-reflective Being? I conclude that in the revised edition Roth imbues David Kepesh, his once-autonomous narrator, with levels of authorial cognizance that subordinate Kepesh's early outlooks to the consciousness-usurping intrusion of the author—now the author-narrator. That act of domination may dramatize Sartre's description of the existential \"look,\" which stands to usurp the consciousness of \"the Other.\" The act of thus revising an already existential narrative illustrates the flight of the Sartrian \"For-Itself\" toward \"the higher functions of consciousness.\"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"1 1","pages":"83 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85418667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article relates Swift's critique of science to his view of women by resorting to Lakoff and Johnson's theory on the function of metaphors in human conceptualization. Through the overarching conceptual metaphor NATURE IS A WOMAN, the gap between these two areas in Swift studies, which have remained largely isolated so far, is bridged. The analysis shows that Swift's strange aesthetic view of and peculiar attitude toward women were, through the conceptual metaphor, extrapolated to nature, which can explain his condemnation of science as not only "unaesthetic" and "indecent" but also futile and morbid.
{"title":"Jonathan Swift's Metaphorical Conceptualization of Nature as a Woman and His \"Aesthetic\" Critique of Science","authors":"He Xiyao","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article relates Swift's critique of science to his view of women by resorting to Lakoff and Johnson's theory on the function of metaphors in human conceptualization. Through the overarching conceptual metaphor NATURE IS A WOMAN, the gap between these two areas in Swift studies, which have remained largely isolated so far, is bridged. The analysis shows that Swift's strange aesthetic view of and peculiar attitude toward women were, through the conceptual metaphor, extrapolated to nature, which can explain his condemnation of science as not only \"unaesthetic\" and \"indecent\" but also futile and morbid.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"6 1","pages":"1 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81685182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Narrative Faith: Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer by David Stromberg (review)","authors":"M. Mrugalski","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"34 1","pages":"186 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86369807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:At first glance, nothing seems to relate Jean Genet's play "Les Nègres" ("The Blacks") to Maurizio Cattelan's exhibit "Not Afraid of Love." The two works belong to separate conceptual mediums, yet they share the dynamics and effects of the mask-function, concealing the individual donning the mask while revealing a compound identity, experienced by all spectators. Vestiges of sacred rituals, masks are used here as profane icons, strangely animating inanimate artifacts, thereby generating a sense of wonder and unease. While metaphors require neither visibility nor animation, the interaction between exhibit/actors and spectator/s conjures up an almost tangible metaphor. Not all metaphors are masks, but all masks are powerful visual metaphors, whose impact alters not only those who don them but also those who participate in their display. In both media, the effect of the mask on the spectator/s is one of transformation from subject to object, by means of the gaze, inadvertently a simultaneous, two-sided activity.
{"title":"Visual Mask Metaphors in Jean Genet and Maurizio Cattelan","authors":"Nourit Melcer-Padon","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:At first glance, nothing seems to relate Jean Genet's play \"Les Nègres\" (\"The Blacks\") to Maurizio Cattelan's exhibit \"Not Afraid of Love.\" The two works belong to separate conceptual mediums, yet they share the dynamics and effects of the mask-function, concealing the individual donning the mask while revealing a compound identity, experienced by all spectators. Vestiges of sacred rituals, masks are used here as profane icons, strangely animating inanimate artifacts, thereby generating a sense of wonder and unease. While metaphors require neither visibility nor animation, the interaction between exhibit/actors and spectator/s conjures up an almost tangible metaphor. Not all metaphors are masks, but all masks are powerful visual metaphors, whose impact alters not only those who don them but also those who participate in their display. In both media, the effect of the mask on the spectator/s is one of transformation from subject to object, by means of the gaze, inadvertently a simultaneous, two-sided activity.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"33 1","pages":"67 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88514032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This paper posits that Esther Syiem's poem, "To the Rest of India from Another Indian" (2013) engenders a subnational discourse that, by interrogating the national status of a privileged pedagogy, opts for a confederal political imagination of multiple and equal centers. It fosters this desire by modulating a counter imagination in two strategic ways—foregroundong its strangeness and implanting its own subnational pedagogy which constitutes its imagination. The subnational discourse, then, homogenizes the national imagination, and sets it in binary opposition to the modulated counter imagination which is also homogenized. It proceeds, after setting up a binary opposition, to contradict, delimit, and alienate itself in order to be recognized as another authentic and central entity parallel to the pedagogy that is deemed to be national. This paper concludes that Syiem's subnational discourse, considered as a form of minority discourse, goes against the grain of Homi K. Bhabha's view of minority discourse.
摘要:本文认为，Esther Syiem的诗歌《从另一个印度人致印度其他地区》(2013)引发了一种次国家话语，通过质疑特权教育学的国家地位，选择了多元和平等中心的邦联制政治想象。它通过两种战略方式调节反想象力来促进这种愿望——突出其陌生性和植入自己的次国家教育方法，这构成了它的想象力。于是，次国家话语将国家想象同质化，并将其与同样被同质化的调制反想象二元对立。在建立了二元对立之后，它继续自我矛盾、界定和异化，以便被认为是与被认为是民族的教育学平行的另一个真实的中心实体。本文的结论是，Syiem的次民族话语作为少数民族话语的一种形式，与Homi K. Bhabha的少数民族话语观背道而驰。
{"title":"Subnational Discourse as Counter Imagination in Esther Syiem's \"To the Rest of India from Another Indian\": Towards a Confederal Political Assumption","authors":"Muthukumar Manickam, Vinod Balakrishnan","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper posits that Esther Syiem's poem, \"To the Rest of India from Another Indian\" (2013) engenders a subnational discourse that, by interrogating the national status of a privileged pedagogy, opts for a confederal political imagination of multiple and equal centers. It fosters this desire by modulating a counter imagination in two strategic ways—foregroundong its strangeness and implanting its own subnational pedagogy which constitutes its imagination. The subnational discourse, then, homogenizes the national imagination, and sets it in binary opposition to the modulated counter imagination which is also homogenized. It proceeds, after setting up a binary opposition, to contradict, delimit, and alienate itself in order to be recognized as another authentic and central entity parallel to the pedagogy that is deemed to be national. This paper concludes that Syiem's subnational discourse, considered as a form of minority discourse, goes against the grain of Homi K. Bhabha's view of minority discourse.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"17 1","pages":"149 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73674350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form by Fiona Sampson (review)","authors":"Ruben Weiss","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"9 1","pages":"178 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76170940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:There is a tradition of Wordsworth criticism that begins with William Empson in 1951, continues with Christopher Ricks in 1971 and Isobel Armstrong in 2000, and concludes with Anne-Lise François in 2008, which considers the disruptive effects of the poet's blank verse lines upon his poetry's semantic or rhetorical function. I seek to revive this tradition by invoking Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's articulation of the relationship between what he calls "presence effects" and "meaning effects" to emphasize instances where individual lines in Wordsworth's Prelude produce disruptions or ambiguities that subvert the governing rhetoric of the verse structures in which they reside. I revisit several of the poem's most iconic passages to explore how certain suggestive lines and line breaks form an affective and material counter-rhetoric that undermines the poem's narratives of personal growth and redeemed trauma. I also consider the extent to which these disruptions may represent the presentification of "the latent" as Gumbrecht defines it.
{"title":"The Play of the Line: \"Presence Effects\" and the Voice of the Latent in Wordsworth's Prelude","authors":"Arturo Zilleruelo","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:There is a tradition of Wordsworth criticism that begins with William Empson in 1951, continues with Christopher Ricks in 1971 and Isobel Armstrong in 2000, and concludes with Anne-Lise François in 2008, which considers the disruptive effects of the poet's blank verse lines upon his poetry's semantic or rhetorical function. I seek to revive this tradition by invoking Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's articulation of the relationship between what he calls \"presence effects\" and \"meaning effects\" to emphasize instances where individual lines in Wordsworth's Prelude produce disruptions or ambiguities that subvert the governing rhetoric of the verse structures in which they reside. I revisit several of the poem's most iconic passages to explore how certain suggestive lines and line breaks form an affective and material counter-rhetoric that undermines the poem's narratives of personal growth and redeemed trauma. I also consider the extent to which these disruptions may represent the presentification of \"the latent\" as Gumbrecht defines it.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"1 1","pages":"25 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75827680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The article offers a discussion of two Latin American fictional historiographies: the short story “Guayaquil,” by Jorge Luis Borges (1970), and The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2011). Both these fictional historiographies are intertextually related to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), and both may be read as inscriptions of a Postmodernist sensibility, but their respective engagements with the earlier fictional historiography offer very different versions of the relations of story, history, and historiography, highlighting some significant, albeit often-overlooked aspect of their hetero-text.
{"title":"Whose Story? Whose History?: The Conradian Hetero-text of Latin American Fiction","authors":"D. Erdinast-Vulcan","doi":"10.1353/PAN.2019.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAN.2019.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article offers a discussion of two Latin American fictional historiographies: the short story “Guayaquil,” by Jorge Luis Borges (1970), and The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2011). Both these fictional historiographies are intertextually related to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), and both may be read as inscriptions of a Postmodernist sensibility, but their respective engagements with the earlier fictional historiography offer very different versions of the relations of story, history, and historiography, highlighting some significant, albeit often-overlooked aspect of their hetero-text.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"17 1","pages":"363 - 381"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75360492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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