NEOHELICON最新文献

Abstract

The notion of chance epitomizes the limits and challenges of any theory’s struggle for control over itself as well as over its objects. Although contemporary literary theory has adapted its terminology and conceptual framework in line with the emergence of dynamic, “open forms” (Wölfflin in Principles of art history: The problem of the development of style in later art, Dover Publications Inc, New York, 1986), chance has nevertheless remained a highly problematic category to come to terms with. How can literary theory embrace chance? The paper approaches this question in three steps. First, it reconstructs three basic poetological propositions against whose backdrop contingency gains profile: the proposition of causal connections as a means to transform literature into a realm of necessity, the proposition of form as means to reduce arbitrariness, and the proposition of control as a means to protect the aesthetic object against the risks of external intrusions. The second part of the paper discusses a largely forgotten but highly relevant approach to the problem of contingency by Yakov Druskin. Druskin links the function of contingency in theoretical investigation with concepts of contiguity and proximity, first of all touch. His fragmentary sketch of a “law of heterogeneity” represents a paradoxical attempt to theorize contingent obstruction as a privileged systematic device to establish physical contact. The third part of this paper unpacks the implicit urge to rethink the traditions of theory formation itself through the “law of heterogeneity.” It argues that Druskin’s law introduces a different type of theory, one which is deeply indebted to the tactile, thus challenging the ocularcentrism of theoría.

The article focuses on two examples of female lives re-imagined as queer in screen biofiction: Daphne (Beavan, 2007) about Daphne de Maurier, and Shirley (Decker, 2020) about Shirley Jackson. These films are analysed as literary biofictions, that is, fictional revisions of biographies in which the protagonists share names and biographemes with well-known writers. The factuality of these biographemes is less significant in biofiction than the imaginary components that aim to reveal secrets, revise myths, or depict a relatable version of the characters and their lives. Thus, biofictions often offer a cultural commentary that is more relevant to the contemporary context than the historical one. The article focuses, first, on biographemes used as authenticating strategies and, then, examines the implications of the ways in which queer femininity is depicted in both mentioned screen biofictions, and how these renditions position themselves in connection to the stereotype of the age gap dynamics in lesbians’ relationships.

Though rarely compared, Beowulf and Ruodlieb are two medieval epics composed by speakers of West Germanic languages that exhibit a shared sequence of folktale motifs. In both works, a young man considered unpromising in his youth seeks adventure abroad, serves a magnanimous foreign king well, and returns to his homeland with wealth and wisdom in his possession. In Ruodlieb, the king’s wisdom is imparted to the hero in the form of a speech of counsels with unmistakable folkloric analogues. In Beowulf, it is argued, the king delivers a speech that derives from the same folkloric traditions but reflects the poet’s radical alteration of his source materials. In the Beowulf poet’s hands, the motif of the sapiential parting gift is shorn of its folkloric and demotic qualities and imbued with epic and aristocratic qualities instead.

Laura Frost’s The problem with pleasure: Modernism and its discontents has blazed a new trail and annexed the concept of pleasure to the notion of modernism in her reading of Jean Rhys’s fiction. For all her meticulously traced genealogy of pleasure, however, communal pleasure is conspicuously absent. This paper argues against a simplistic generalization of Rhys’s treatment of various kinds of pleasure. It is true that Rhys’s female protagonists all make choices that steer them away from pleasure and happiness, but a close-up look at the socio-historical contexts of their life shows that they are often forced to make such choices rather than doing so of their own accord. It is also true that they deserve sympathy, but this sympathy is not earned through their refusal to take part in collective pleasure, as Frost has claimed, but by their sufferings caused by mercenary men who take advantage of their poverty and dislocations, which reflect or refract such socio-historical factors as intense industrialization and globalized colonization. Each of Rhys’s novels contains some moments, however brief, that throw insight into her female protagonist’s genuine love for the pleasure afforded either in nature or in art whose appreciation cannot be achieved unless through taste. And they are capable of sharing such pleasure with people around, and even with strangers, which implies a sense of communal well-being and a yearning for communal feelings. Indeed, part of Rhys’s contribution to modernism is her redefinition of pleasure, but an integral part of that reconceptualization is her reshaping of communal pleasure.

Set in Jamaica and London in the 1820s, Sara Collins’ debut novel The confessions of Frannie Langton (2019) is a neo-slave historical novel par excellence. In it, Collins shapes and reshapes several subgenres of historical fiction, such as gothic fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery. Facing a trial based on the accusation of killing her master and mistress, Frannie Langton narrates her life story in the form of confessions to her lawyer as she endeavors to remember what happened on the night of the murder. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: Is Frannie trying to remember or to forget what happened? Why does Collins add strong gothic shades to her historical novel? How does she manipulate the historical whodunits of the crime in relation to Frannie’s memory? Why does Collins choose a lesbian relationship to feature the historical romance in the novel? The paper examines how a post-2000 historical novel manipulates its conventional subgenres by adhering to some and changing others, starting with the gothic, then the murder story and, lastly, the lesbian romance in telling a neo-slave story.

Abstract

As an almost exclusively female-dominated medium, the popular romance novel has, throughout its history, allowed women writers to “amplify their political voice” (Teo, 2016, p. 102), especially when they could not actively participate in politics. Commonly, writers fashion storylines that reflect and process concerns from the real world in a fictional context. Using the Regency Romance as an example and based on Jayashree Kamblé’s theory that romance novels have a shared DNA that evolves in response to social and cultural influences, this paper first defines the figure of the romance hero in the pre-Trump era to segue into analysing selected novels published by Tessa Dare in 2011 (A night to surrender) and Sarah MacLean in 2012 (A rogue by any other name). This figure is then compared and contrasted with the incarnations of the hero in these authors’ publications from 2017 (The day of the duchess by MacLean) and 2019 (The wallflower wager by Dare) to map how his phenotype has evolved to reflect a shift in cultural perceptions regarding sex and sexual power dynamics. As I intend to show, in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and the “#MeToo” movement, the new hero’s phenotype differs specifically in the expression of gendered power and sexuality. He is less forceful than his predecessors and places heavy emphasis on the heroine’s enthusiastic consent and pleasure.

Abstract

The relation between adventure and contingency is an ambivalent one. This ambivalence can be described by using a distinction of two aspects already tied together in âventiure (as a French foreign word in German), distinguished by Jacob Grimm as “begebenheit” versus “erzählte geschichte selbst,” rendered as ‘type of event’ versus ‘narrative pattern’ in the terminology of the Munich research group Philology of Adventure. On the one hand, it seems obvious that for an adventure, as a type of event, a contingent element is a crucial precondition. An adventurous agent must willingly expose himself to this contingent event and interpret it as a ‘Chance’ (using a French foreign word in German, again), i.e. as opportunity to gain by risking, be it simply capital—as in the economic usage of the word, from English ‘Merchant Adventurers’ to contemporary ‘Venture Capital’—, or be it fame or prestige—as in Medieval and Early Modern adventure epics and novels. On the other hand, adventure, as a narrative pattern, tends to reduce contingencies in order to ‘make sense’. Even if adventure tales tolerate and actually support episodic structures, these episodes must, after all, be motivated and integrated into a plot. In other words: Writing an adventure story always already implies to tame (or perhaps rather frame) the very contingency it is based on. Adventure stories are therefore typical cases of “eliminat[ing] the contingent part of the literary phenomena it deals with” (Duprat and Jordan, introduction to the present special issue). This tension is, however, rarely acknowledged in the history of literary theory—here taken in the longue durée, starting with Early Modern poetics. The present essay discusses some steps from the history of relevant theories, with a particular emphasis on Giorgio Agamben's recent eulogy of adventure.

One of the reasons that Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek remains very important to the environmental issues we face, even fifty years after its publication, is that it actively rejects the demonizing, anthropomorphizing, gendering, and ecophobic gestures that pervade so much of our understandings and representations of the natural environment. Dillard stresses the importance of seeing, and while some critics have characterized Pilgrim as disengaged and Dillard herself as ambivalent, if we stick to the facts, then we see something else?namely, a book that encourages its readers to broaden their view of nature and to dive deeply into the experience of it. We also see an author who is acutely committed to precisely that nature. The dive is not without risks, Dillard warns. We will see things that will unsettle our comfortable assumptions about the natural world. We will see that while we may congratulate ourselves on our understanding that our wasteful ways have led to enormous losses in the world and that our seemingly infinite desires simply don’t jive with a finite world, our behaviors may be less unnatural than they seem: we will witness, in short, “a crushing waste [in Nature] that will one day include our own cheap lives” Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. HarperPerennial, 1985, p. 160). We will see parasites in whopping numbers. We will see suffering victims. We will see beauty and life, slime and death. We will see that we are missing a lot and that what we do see we are seeing wrongly every time we impose our ecophobic templates. Pilgrim is the pause button on that ecophobia.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is man-made with the purpose of serving humans. An emotional machine is designed to meet the demands of human emotion. Science fiction and films provide many stories about the emotional development of AI/robots/androids/clones. This paper argues that there is an evolutionary emotional process for AI and that humans should finally accept the coexistence of humans and AI. Paolo Bacigalupi, in his novel The Windup Girl, provides clues regarding AI’s evolutionary emotions and subjectivity construction. The novel describes how one AI breaks away from rules designed to elicit obedience to develop herself as someone who knows the world in her own right. This paper explains the concepts of AI and its embodiment, concurs with emotional theorists in stressing the relationship between embodiment and emotion, and argues that there is an evolutionary emotional process in the character Emiko—the main character in The Windup Girl—in that it is bodily pain and a sense of humiliation that prompts her to fight back. She wrestles with the expectation of mere obedience rule and with her own hatred. Biopolitics, including patriarchy and anthropocentrism, eventually urges Emiko to become an independent entity. Finding and creating people like her enables Emiko to be a completely new and independent being. Inherited genes and an unjust social environment provide the impetus for Emiko to be the opposite of a human. My paper concludes with the view that accepting otherness is the key step for determining the relationship between humans and AI. To be just and caring toward others is the ultimate solution.

Abstract

Drawing inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of masochism as an obsession with a perfect form, this essay argues that masochism offers literary critics opportunities to reconsider questions of beauty and form in literature. I use John Keats’s “Lamia,” Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and James Joyce’s “The Dead” as case studies to examine how literary works incorporate masochism as a means of reflecting on their own creative processes—and how they would impact their readers. Masochism in literature first helps authors to conceive beautiful forms. The imperfections of these forms, in turn, allows the artists to re-create or revise those original forms to come up with better versions. In this process, texts about masochism open up complex affective dimensions of pleasure, pain, beauty, destruction, and slowness.