{"title":"The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond by Galin Tihanov (review)","authors":"D. Gorman","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"4 1","pages":"196 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72677309","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:Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once described The Swamp Dwellers as an exploration of economic displacement and cultural disruption resulting from the pillage of natural resources by colonial governments and international corporations. Soyinka set his play deep in the Niger Delta, a place of dense mangrove swamps and the folkloric Mami Wata—a half-human, half-fish seductress, to highlight the environmental degradation and lost livelihoods of the Yoruba, Ogoni, and other indigenous peoples. By focusing on a handful of characters who inhabit or pass through a small hut built by Makuri and Alu, an impoverished elderly couple eking out an existence in the heart of the swamp, Soyinka reveals how migration and acculturation erode traditional values and reshape identity in ways that encourage avarice and self-interest over family and community, promote political and economic corruption, and accelerate the replacement of indigenous belief systems with the depersonalized transactional values of commerce and trade.
{"title":"The Lone Hut: Migration, Identity, and Twinship in Wole Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers","authors":"M. Ferrara","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once described The Swamp Dwellers as an exploration of economic displacement and cultural disruption resulting from the pillage of natural resources by colonial governments and international corporations. Soyinka set his play deep in the Niger Delta, a place of dense mangrove swamps and the folkloric Mami Wata—a half-human, half-fish seductress, to highlight the environmental degradation and lost livelihoods of the Yoruba, Ogoni, and other indigenous peoples. By focusing on a handful of characters who inhabit or pass through a small hut built by Makuri and Alu, an impoverished elderly couple eking out an existence in the heart of the swamp, Soyinka reveals how migration and acculturation erode traditional values and reshape identity in ways that encourage avarice and self-interest over family and community, promote political and economic corruption, and accelerate the replacement of indigenous belief systems with the depersonalized transactional values of commerce and trade.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"66 1","pages":"61 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73377309","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":"T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination by Jewel Spears Brooker (review)","authors":"Kinereth Meyer","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"6 1","pages":"189 - 192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85754284","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:From 1938 to 1945, Shanghai was a temporary haven to more than 20,000 Jews originally from Europe. Most of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai survived to see the end of WWII. However, the Jewish settlement in Shanghai during WWII remains a little-known chapter of the history of the Holocaust. Recent decades have witnessed significant changes in this regard. In addition to historical studies, memoirs, and popular culture, the Shanghai experience of European Jews also found its way into literary fiction. Drawing on theories of cultural memory and media studies and based on readings of two novels—Marion Cuba's Shanghai Legacy (2005) and Beila's The Cursed Piano (2007, English edition 2017), this article argues that literary fiction contributes, albeit belatedly, to the collective efforts to preserve this important legacy, and may do so in a more compelling way than other media, through special perspectives, engaging storytelling, and broader accessibility.
{"title":"Jewish Settlement in Shanghai during WWII in Fiction and Other Media of Cultural Memory","authors":"Junsong Chen","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:From 1938 to 1945, Shanghai was a temporary haven to more than 20,000 Jews originally from Europe. Most of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai survived to see the end of WWII. However, the Jewish settlement in Shanghai during WWII remains a little-known chapter of the history of the Holocaust. Recent decades have witnessed significant changes in this regard. In addition to historical studies, memoirs, and popular culture, the Shanghai experience of European Jews also found its way into literary fiction. Drawing on theories of cultural memory and media studies and based on readings of two novels—Marion Cuba's Shanghai Legacy (2005) and Beila's The Cursed Piano (2007, English edition 2017), this article argues that literary fiction contributes, albeit belatedly, to the collective efforts to preserve this important legacy, and may do so in a more compelling way than other media, through special perspectives, engaging storytelling, and broader accessibility.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"17 1","pages":"171 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73584412","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 examines some of the ways in which olfactory representations can convey atrocities of the battlefield and their moral implications. Analysis of olfactory images and of their emotional and even physical affordance suggest the differences in the writers' ethical and aesthetic stance. Some represent war in all its violence, cruelty, and horror; others leave the harsh reality only implied and stylized, according to the principle that "silence screams louder than words." Seven Israeli writers are discussed: Yoram Kaniuk, Shulamith Hareven, Yuval Neria, Haim Sabato, S. Yizhar, Haim Be'er and Yitzhak Ben-Ner. Their use (or omission) of references to smell may be indicative of their attitude to war. This study shares the growing interest in the senses and their significance in Humanities and social sciences.
{"title":"\"A Violence of Smell\": The Smell of War in Israeli War Fiction","authors":"Yael Balaban","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper examines some of the ways in which olfactory representations can convey atrocities of the battlefield and their moral implications. Analysis of olfactory images and of their emotional and even physical affordance suggest the differences in the writers' ethical and aesthetic stance. Some represent war in all its violence, cruelty, and horror; others leave the harsh reality only implied and stylized, according to the principle that \"silence screams louder than words.\" Seven Israeli writers are discussed: Yoram Kaniuk, Shulamith Hareven, Yuval Neria, Haim Sabato, S. Yizhar, Haim Be'er and Yitzhak Ben-Ner. Their use (or omission) of references to smell may be indicative of their attitude to war. This study shares the growing interest in the senses and their significance in Humanities and social sciences.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"16 1","pages":"145 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86516518","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:Milan Kundera laid out his concept of Central Europe in "The Tragedy of Central Europe" (1984) with unprecedented force and conviction. His defense of the region's political identity and cultural uniqueness as well as its West European connectedness sparked heated polemics among leading intellectuals of the day. Kundera stood solidly at its very center, both as an intellectual and fictional writer. Retrospectively, this prominent role turned out to be short-lived. Central Europe, as a cultural and geographical concept, has all but disappeared from his work and, contrary to expectation, not because of the post-1989 realities but rather because of his artistic goals and ambitions, which have expanded well beyond the borders of Europe. Kundera's novel L'Ignorance (2000) attests to this re-evaluation. It offers a new perspective on the region, no longer privileging its central location but redefining its state of in-betweenness as that of geographic, cultural, and linguistic fluidity. To trace Kundera's development of his concept of Central Europe is to reimagine the once enclosed territory but also to reinvent the adventure that lies ahead of the European novel.
{"title":"The Labyrinth of Central Europe and the World Paradise in Milan Kundera's Ignorance","authors":"Hana Píchová","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Milan Kundera laid out his concept of Central Europe in \"The Tragedy of Central Europe\" (1984) with unprecedented force and conviction. His defense of the region's political identity and cultural uniqueness as well as its West European connectedness sparked heated polemics among leading intellectuals of the day. Kundera stood solidly at its very center, both as an intellectual and fictional writer. Retrospectively, this prominent role turned out to be short-lived. Central Europe, as a cultural and geographical concept, has all but disappeared from his work and, contrary to expectation, not because of the post-1989 realities but rather because of his artistic goals and ambitions, which have expanded well beyond the borders of Europe. Kundera's novel L'Ignorance (2000) attests to this re-evaluation. It offers a new perspective on the region, no longer privileging its central location but redefining its state of in-betweenness as that of geographic, cultural, and linguistic fluidity. To trace Kundera's development of his concept of Central Europe is to reimagine the once enclosed territory but also to reinvent the adventure that lies ahead of the European novel.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"18 1","pages":"303 - 313"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87101074","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:Translated into French as La Méprise and into English, with revisions, as Despair, Vladimir Nabokov's seventh Russian novel Otchaianie (1932–1936) reveals the novelist's evolution as an international author. This narrative, whose version in English circulates as a "Vintage International," started out as the work of an author with no solid national attachments. In a sinister twist on Nabokov's cultural/linguistic fluidity, Otchaianie focuses on a Russo-German narrator, the unreliable Hermann, and his memoir of a murder plot gone awry. Hermann imagines that his book can be an international success, with distinctive attractions for French and American readers, among others. A key scene for each audience features creative parodies expressing Nabokov's position on Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's importance for fiction, then at its height. Otchaianie strongly favors Tolstoy, but a dismissive review of La Méprise from the internationalist wing of French literary opinion, in the person of Sartre, was blind to the polemical force of these parodies, to the point of missing Nabokov's rejection of Dostoevsky.That rejection sharpens in Despair even as Nabokov's admiration for Tolstoy reaches new heights. In general, his career shows that, given his total estrangement from Soviet Russian literature, he turned to French and Anglophone centers of literary authority. Nabokov did not respond to the broader internationality implied by Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's differing visions of world literature.The essay evaluates Nabokov's addition of "national" to a key passage in the French and English versions of Otchaianie, addresses variations in the significance of his intertextual practices, and calls for a revaluation of this novel as an expression of free-speech authorship in peril.
{"title":"Nabokov's Otchaianie, La Méprise, Despair: Tracking a Would-Be International Novel","authors":"J. Foster","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Translated into French as La Méprise and into English, with revisions, as Despair, Vladimir Nabokov's seventh Russian novel Otchaianie (1932–1936) reveals the novelist's evolution as an international author. This narrative, whose version in English circulates as a \"Vintage International,\" started out as the work of an author with no solid national attachments. In a sinister twist on Nabokov's cultural/linguistic fluidity, Otchaianie focuses on a Russo-German narrator, the unreliable Hermann, and his memoir of a murder plot gone awry. Hermann imagines that his book can be an international success, with distinctive attractions for French and American readers, among others. A key scene for each audience features creative parodies expressing Nabokov's position on Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's importance for fiction, then at its height. Otchaianie strongly favors Tolstoy, but a dismissive review of La Méprise from the internationalist wing of French literary opinion, in the person of Sartre, was blind to the polemical force of these parodies, to the point of missing Nabokov's rejection of Dostoevsky.That rejection sharpens in Despair even as Nabokov's admiration for Tolstoy reaches new heights. In general, his career shows that, given his total estrangement from Soviet Russian literature, he turned to French and Anglophone centers of literary authority. Nabokov did not respond to the broader internationality implied by Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's differing visions of world literature.The essay evaluates Nabokov's addition of \"national\" to a key passage in the French and English versions of Otchaianie, addresses variations in the significance of his intertextual practices, and calls for a revaluation of this novel as an expression of free-speech authorship in peril.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"303 1","pages":"239 - 258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73605764","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":"Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson ed. by Mark C. Long and Sean Ross Meehan (review)","authors":"Shira Wolosky","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"44 1","pages":"355 - 357"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86783342","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:William Gibson's 2014 novel The Peripheral belongs to a body of worka that make the case for sympathy as an effective and affective social strategy. This article maps out a net of relations that links three key issues in respect to Gibson's novel: the strategy of metonymy, the exploration of sympathy, and the rethinking of realism. Despite the well-rehearsed laments about the bleak future and uncertain fate of the novel, in particular, and of the humanities more broadly, by turning to speculative fiction I hope to celebrate the possibilities that still lie in both the literary form and the scholarly endeavor. The growing turn to enhanced realities as well as speculative and alternative realisms can be critically and productively understood through the mechanism of metonymy and through a mode of sympathy
{"title":"\"Something so deeply earned\": Sympathy in William Gibson's The Peripheral","authors":"Keren Omry","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:William Gibson's 2014 novel The Peripheral belongs to a body of worka that make the case for sympathy as an effective and affective social strategy. This article maps out a net of relations that links three key issues in respect to Gibson's novel: the strategy of metonymy, the exploration of sympathy, and the rethinking of realism. Despite the well-rehearsed laments about the bleak future and uncertain fate of the novel, in particular, and of the humanities more broadly, by turning to speculative fiction I hope to celebrate the possibilities that still lie in both the literary form and the scholarly endeavor. The growing turn to enhanced realities as well as speculative and alternative realisms can be critically and productively understood through the mechanism of metonymy and through a mode of sympathy","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"17 1","pages":"335 - 348"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81750921","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 reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics, Oscar Wilde, from the angle of an increasingly influential conception of mimesis understood not as simple representation but as a conditio humana. Adopting genealogical lenses that trace continuities between ancient (Plato), modern (Pater and Nietzsche) and postmodern (Lacoue-Labarthe) accounts of mimesis, I argue that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde dramatizes an excess of affective forms of imitation whose implications are double, for mimesis has both a critical and theoretical side. I suggest that Wilde's manifesto of anti-mimetic aestheticism continues to rely on a dramatic conception of mimesis that leads human lives to imitate Dorian, and thus, Greek models. A genealogy of mimēsis paves the way for contemporary theoretical concerns with performativity, affective contagion, and the power of fictional models to influence aesthetic lives. My wager is that once the two sides are joined, a new picture of Oscar Wilde will take form.
{"title":"The Excess of Mimesis: Reframing The Picture of Dorian Gray","authors":"N. Lawtoo","doi":"10.1353/pan.2020.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2020.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics, Oscar Wilde, from the angle of an increasingly influential conception of mimesis understood not as simple representation but as a conditio humana. Adopting genealogical lenses that trace continuities between ancient (Plato), modern (Pater and Nietzsche) and postmodern (Lacoue-Labarthe) accounts of mimesis, I argue that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde dramatizes an excess of affective forms of imitation whose implications are double, for mimesis has both a critical and theoretical side. I suggest that Wilde's manifesto of anti-mimetic aestheticism continues to rely on a dramatic conception of mimesis that leads human lives to imitate Dorian, and thus, Greek models. A genealogy of mimēsis paves the way for contemporary theoretical concerns with performativity, affective contagion, and the power of fictional models to influence aesthetic lives. My wager is that once the two sides are joined, a new picture of Oscar Wilde will take form.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"110 1","pages":"213 - 238"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80551909","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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