This paper explores representations of the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca in two North African literary texts, Malek Bennabi’s Lebbeik (1947) and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux (2003). It considers the divergent ways in which pilgrimage is used to explore the place of both literature and religion, as well as their interrelation, when it comes to working out ethics and values on individual and collective levels in Bennabi’s late-colonial Algeria, and Khatibi’s postcolonial Morocco. Drawing on Alain Badiou’s notion of the event as an occurrence that is retrospectively determined to have disrupted the status quo, and contrasting this with Derek Attridge’s idea of literature as a disruptive event with indeterminate outcomes, I consider the different ways in which both the pilgrimage and the narratives representing it can be seen as events, implicitly imparting reflections and even teachings on life and how to approach it in both texts.
{"title":"Postsecular Pilgrimage in Malek Bennabi’s Lebbeik: pèlerinage de pauvres and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux","authors":"Sura Qadiri","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac056","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores representations of the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca in two North African literary texts, Malek Bennabi’s Lebbeik (1947) and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux (2003). It considers the divergent ways in which pilgrimage is used to explore the place of both literature and religion, as well as their interrelation, when it comes to working out ethics and values on individual and collective levels in Bennabi’s late-colonial Algeria, and Khatibi’s postcolonial Morocco. Drawing on Alain Badiou’s notion of the event as an occurrence that is retrospectively determined to have disrupted the status quo, and contrasting this with Derek Attridge’s idea of literature as a disruptive event with indeterminate outcomes, I consider the different ways in which both the pilgrimage and the narratives representing it can be seen as events, implicitly imparting reflections and even teachings on life and how to approach it in both texts.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138541876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"William Caxton, Multi-Mediator","authors":"A. Coldiron","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac055","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45162720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This introduction is concerned with the intellectual and cultural construction of comedy from the classical period to the present, with particular emphasis on comic afterlives. By afterlives, we mean the successive re-creation of its many forms, incarnations, inspirations and adaptations, pasts and futures. The introduction lays out the theory and critical history of comedy and its afterlives; it critically engages with the variety of comic forms, and it explains the rationale for the selection of essays in, and aims of, this Special Issue. Among the topics introduced here and covered in the issue are: the fortunes of the Spanish Golden Age theatrical comedy in English translation in the seventeenth century; the influence that classical and early modern theories of comedy had on the comedies of Ben Jonson and in turn his impact on Restoration comedy; the theatrical conditions of the Comédie-Française and Molière; the comedy of the German Enlightenment; the comedy of the Irish Revival; the meta-theatrical comedy of Luigi Pirandello; and queer elements in contemporary Arab comedy.
{"title":"Introduction: Comedy and its Afterlives","authors":"John H Cameron, Goran V. Stanivuković","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac040","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This introduction is concerned with the intellectual and cultural construction of comedy from the classical period to the present, with particular emphasis on comic afterlives. By afterlives, we mean the successive re-creation of its many forms, incarnations, inspirations and adaptations, pasts and futures. The introduction lays out the theory and critical history of comedy and its afterlives; it critically engages with the variety of comic forms, and it explains the rationale for the selection of essays in, and aims of, this Special Issue. Among the topics introduced here and covered in the issue are: the fortunes of the Spanish Golden Age theatrical comedy in English translation in the seventeenth century; the influence that classical and early modern theories of comedy had on the comedies of Ben Jonson and in turn his impact on Restoration comedy; the theatrical conditions of the Comédie-Française and Molière; the comedy of the German Enlightenment; the comedy of the Irish Revival; the meta-theatrical comedy of Luigi Pirandello; and queer elements in contemporary Arab comedy.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42069479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines modernist meta-theatre as a reconfiguration of classical tragedy. While many critics have rejected modernist aesthetics for emptying out the content of artistic representation, and accounts of modernist comedy frequently focus on its negative (even nihilistic) dimensions, this article argues that Luigi Pirandello’s theory of humour provides an alternative vision of how modernist theatre can transform comedy in a way that aligns with an ethics of compassion. This sets Pirandello apart from more reactionary contemporaries like the teatro grottesco and the Futurists as well as revolutionary contemporaries like Brecht. Pirandello’s compassionate humour is tied to modernist meta-representation, which for him, as for contemporaries like Edward Gordon Craig, is typified in the figure of the marionette; the marionette epitomizes the tragicomic situation of the modern subject. For Pirandello, modernist humour allows the self-aware subject to be decentred in a way that nevertheless maintains the value of the human being and human experience, opening to a shared understanding of suffering and an ethics of compassion.
{"title":"Meta-Theatrical Comedy: Pirandello’s Existential Humour and the Italian Avant-Garde","authors":"Michael Subialka","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac050","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines modernist meta-theatre as a reconfiguration of classical tragedy. While many critics have rejected modernist aesthetics for emptying out the content of artistic representation, and accounts of modernist comedy frequently focus on its negative (even nihilistic) dimensions, this article argues that Luigi Pirandello’s theory of humour provides an alternative vision of how modernist theatre can transform comedy in a way that aligns with an ethics of compassion. This sets Pirandello apart from more reactionary contemporaries like the teatro grottesco and the Futurists as well as revolutionary contemporaries like Brecht. Pirandello’s compassionate humour is tied to modernist meta-representation, which for him, as for contemporaries like Edward Gordon Craig, is typified in the figure of the marionette; the marionette epitomizes the tragicomic situation of the modern subject. For Pirandello, modernist humour allows the self-aware subject to be decentred in a way that nevertheless maintains the value of the human being and human experience, opening to a shared understanding of suffering and an ethics of compassion.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46186559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The dramatists of the Restoration stage reveal the guiding influence of Ben Jonson, giving his plays a strong comedic afterlife, particularly with respect to his construction of his plots and his sense of comedic design. This article explores that influence by first considering the influences on Jonson’s own concept of comic design, particularly as derived from Aristotle, and the late-antique grammarians Euanthius and Donatus. Jonson follows Aristotle’s distinction of comedy from tragedy on the basis of the ‘laughable’ moral quality of its characters. When paired with Jonson’s own didactic bent, this distinction shaped his ‘humours’-based approach to character, and his plots’ exposure and mockery of those characters. Daniël Heinsius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics show clear consonance with Jonson’s tight integration of his humorous characters into densely unified plots by way of the trickster characters’ hoaxes. Jonson also finds in Scaliger’s unique concept of catastasis, the penultimate movement of comic plot, a definitive tactic for achieving that integration and exposure. In the light of these claims, we look at three of Jonson’s plays, Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Volpone (1605) and Epicene, or the Silent Woman (1609), which depict his developing techniques of character, exposure hoaxes and catastasis. This leads to the later seventeenth century and John Dryden’s attentive analysis of Jonson’s comic plots, especially that of Epicene. We then show how the Jonsonian traits singled out by Dryden were used and adapted by William Wycherley in The Country Wife (1675) and William Congreve in The Way of the World (1700).
{"title":"‘This was the Better Way’: The Restoration Afterlives of Ben Jonson’s Comic Designs","authors":"John H Cameron, J. Goossen","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac038","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The dramatists of the Restoration stage reveal the guiding influence of Ben Jonson, giving his plays a strong comedic afterlife, particularly with respect to his construction of his plots and his sense of comedic design. This article explores that influence by first considering the influences on Jonson’s own concept of comic design, particularly as derived from Aristotle, and the late-antique grammarians Euanthius and Donatus. Jonson follows Aristotle’s distinction of comedy from tragedy on the basis of the ‘laughable’ moral quality of its characters. When paired with Jonson’s own didactic bent, this distinction shaped his ‘humours’-based approach to character, and his plots’ exposure and mockery of those characters. Daniël Heinsius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics show clear consonance with Jonson’s tight integration of his humorous characters into densely unified plots by way of the trickster characters’ hoaxes. Jonson also finds in Scaliger’s unique concept of catastasis, the penultimate movement of comic plot, a definitive tactic for achieving that integration and exposure. In the light of these claims, we look at three of Jonson’s plays, Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Volpone (1605) and Epicene, or the Silent Woman (1609), which depict his developing techniques of character, exposure hoaxes and catastasis. This leads to the later seventeenth century and John Dryden’s attentive analysis of Jonson’s comic plots, especially that of Epicene. We then show how the Jonsonian traits singled out by Dryden were used and adapted by William Wycherley in The Country Wife (1675) and William Congreve in The Way of the World (1700).","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46517482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article proposes a new understanding of Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle’s famous animal poems. While recent studies have identified an innovative non-anthropocentric perspective in the texts – vivid snapshots of brute existence, without deeper meaning – we find that these animals function in a more complex manner. Locating them throughout his poetry, beyond the ‘portraits’ most readers are familiar with, we find that they are highly figurative participants in his extensive depictions of human history, lending a more visceral quality to this series of tragedies – recurring scenes that, with their sacrificial violence and devoured victims, indeed suggest an unexpected connection with this literary genre, in its earliest form. Equally unexpected, this connection appears most tenable not in those texts where humans share the stage (as in his adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia), but where they are absent. Eliminating the figurative descriptions and impassioned dialogue of the historical and dramatic poems to focus on actual acts of predation, the poet allows the reader to experience these explosions of ‘purely animal’ violence as cathartic, tragic ritual.
{"title":"Greek Tragedy and Cathartic Violence in Leconte de Lisle’s Animal Poems","authors":"Scott Shinabargar","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac027","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article proposes a new understanding of Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle’s famous animal poems. While recent studies have identified an innovative non-anthropocentric perspective in the texts – vivid snapshots of brute existence, without deeper meaning – we find that these animals function in a more complex manner. Locating them throughout his poetry, beyond the ‘portraits’ most readers are familiar with, we find that they are highly figurative participants in his extensive depictions of human history, lending a more visceral quality to this series of tragedies – recurring scenes that, with their sacrificial violence and devoured victims, indeed suggest an unexpected connection with this literary genre, in its earliest form. Equally unexpected, this connection appears most tenable not in those texts where humans share the stage (as in his adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia), but where they are absent. Eliminating the figurative descriptions and impassioned dialogue of the historical and dramatic poems to focus on actual acts of predation, the poet allows the reader to experience these explosions of ‘purely animal’ violence as cathartic, tragic ritual.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42584227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay demonstrates the usefulness of ‘moral injury’ as a prism for comparative literary research, particularly between the post-National Socialist German and post-Stalinist Russian contexts. I outline a tendency in the study of post-atrocity fiction to focus on psychoanalytically defined notions of trauma. Subsequently, I explain how moral injury, which denotes the damaging psychological ramifications of transgressing one’s moral code, offers a productive lens for considering the literary thematization of morally ambiguous experiences that do not comfortably fit into the categories of victim and perpetrator, a position recently labelled the ‘implicated subject’ by Michael Rothberg. Comparing the West German author Heinrich Böll’s novel Billard um halb zehn and the Soviet writer Vasilii Grossman’s Vse techet, I show how these texts emphasize the importance of individually reckoning with one’s implication in historical violence as a matter of personal integrity. I propose that developing strategies for ‘reading implication’ such as moral injury can foster ethical forms of transnational comparison.
{"title":"Reading Implication: Moral Injury in Heinrich Böll’s Billard um halb zehn and Vasilii Grossman’s Vse techet","authors":"Oliver T Jones","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay demonstrates the usefulness of ‘moral injury’ as a prism for comparative literary research, particularly between the post-National Socialist German and post-Stalinist Russian contexts. I outline a tendency in the study of post-atrocity fiction to focus on psychoanalytically defined notions of trauma. Subsequently, I explain how moral injury, which denotes the damaging psychological ramifications of transgressing one’s moral code, offers a productive lens for considering the literary thematization of morally ambiguous experiences that do not comfortably fit into the categories of victim and perpetrator, a position recently labelled the ‘implicated subject’ by Michael Rothberg. Comparing the West German author Heinrich Böll’s novel Billard um halb zehn and the Soviet writer Vasilii Grossman’s Vse techet, I show how these texts emphasize the importance of individually reckoning with one’s implication in historical violence as a matter of personal integrity. I propose that developing strategies for ‘reading implication’ such as moral injury can foster ethical forms of transnational comparison.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48495445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The idea of ‘literature we can live by’ crystallizes the paradox of art: defined by its distance from life, it requires, at the same time, proximity to life. We turn to art because it offers a protected space of disinterested play – yet we are also profoundly interested in its ethical implications. In the words of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, the work of art – and through its Apollonian patron, literature in particular – tells us that we must change our lives. Ranging widely from antiquity to modernity while highlighting key moments in early modernity and the Enlightenment, this essay identifies a recurring tension between two visions of literature: to be able to comment insightfully on life, it must be apart from it; to be able to respond adequately to life, it must be a part of it. It is not just the metaphors we live by, in other words, but also the metonyms.
“我们可以赖以生存的文学”的概念具体化了艺术的悖论：它由与生活的距离来定义，同时要求与生活的接近。我们转向艺术是因为它提供了一个受保护的无私游戏空间——但我们也对它的道德含义深感兴趣。用里尔克的《阿波罗的古代托索》（Archaic Torso of Apollo）的话来说，艺术作品——尤其是通过它的阿波罗赞助人，文学——告诉我们必须改变我们的生活。本文从古代到现代进行了广泛的研究，同时强调了早期现代性和启蒙运动中的关键时刻，指出了两种文学视野之间反复出现的紧张关系：要能够深刻地评论生活，就必须与生活分开；要想对生活做出充分的反应，它必须是生活的一部分。换言之，它不仅是我们赖以生存的隐喻，也是转喻。
{"title":"On Purpose: Interest, disinterest and literature we can live by","authors":"B. Hutchinson","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac026","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The idea of ‘literature we can live by’ crystallizes the paradox of art: defined by its distance from life, it requires, at the same time, proximity to life. We turn to art because it offers a protected space of disinterested play – yet we are also profoundly interested in its ethical implications. In the words of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, the work of art – and through its Apollonian patron, literature in particular – tells us that we must change our lives. Ranging widely from antiquity to modernity while highlighting key moments in early modernity and the Enlightenment, this essay identifies a recurring tension between two visions of literature: to be able to comment insightfully on life, it must be apart from it; to be able to respond adequately to life, it must be a part of it. It is not just the metaphors we live by, in other words, but also the metonyms.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42019517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shaw, Matthew J.\u0000 An Inky Business: A History of Newspapers from the English Civil Wars to the American Civil War","authors":"Sandro Eich","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac035","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41426484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ford, Joseph. Writing the Black Decade: Conflict and Criticism in Francophone Algerian Literature","authors":"F. Mami","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac029","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49092004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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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