Narrating the Dead in the Anthropocene Hesitation and Existential Pluralism in Karl Ove Knausgård’s Novel Series The Morning Star

Madame Bovary ranks among the world’s most famous and widely read novels, and has inspired numerous critical theories. First published in 1987, this study draws on both twentieth-century and traditional critical views to provide both students and scholars with a fresh analysis of the novel: its narrative techniques, social background, and underlying structures. By setting the novel in an historical context, and exploring the ways in which it offers a hinge between romanticism and realism, the book establishes a framework through which the reader can assess questions of narrative strategy, of symbolic patterning and most importantly, parody and pastiche. Throughout Madame Bovary, Rosemary Lloyd argues, a series of intertwining voices challenge assumptions about the nature of narrative and the relationship between reader and writer. This reissue will provoke and stimulate debate among students and lecturers in French and English literature, for whom Madame Bovary is a key text in the development of the novel.

The Cybernetic Victorians

The paper revises the traditional view at the travel writings of the era of Peter the Great. They are usually considered as naive works, and content of these works as identical to the biographies of it’s authors. The method of historical and linguistic research of V.M.Zhivov on the language of Russian writing is applied to the material of travelogues. The main purpose is to account for the pragmatics of the utterance in travel literature as in a phenomenon synthesizing heterogeneous features in principle and in the transitional Peter’s Era in particular. The paper is focused on the notes of the diplomat A.A.Matveev, compiled by him for himself as a result of his journey from the Hague to Paris (1705–1706). The narrative technique in Matveev’s text is examined (descriptions of the monuments of the French capital and the inscriptions to them in Latin), and it is shown that we should not reduce the function of Matveev’s work to purely diplomatic tasks of his actual journey. The descriptions recorded in Matveev’s text were politically charged: the author not only collected samples of inscriptions, but also demonstrated a new way for Russia to glorify the reigning monarch. This peculiar collection of Matveev is also considered in the context of cultural phenomena that were relevant at the beginning of the 18th century: private and court collections of rarities, embossing of commemorative medals, etc. The conclusion is made that borrowed elements change their function in the travelogue. In the historical and literary perspective, we must bring such works as Matveev’s notes out of the zone of marginal literary phenomena. In general, this allows us to see the key trends of the transitional period of the history of Russian literature. It is more appropriate to consider these processes not to state the Western European origin of individual elements of culture, but to analyze their pragmatics associated with the demarcation from the old Russian culture.

Robert Spaethling 345 Johann Wolfgang von Goedie: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Continuing Vitality, edited by Ulrich Goebel and Wolodymyr T. ZyIa. Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech Press, 1984. The ten essays gathered in diis volume, representing the proceedings of the Fifteenth Comparative Literature Symposium at Texas Tech University, are rich and varied testimony to the continuing vitality of both Goethe and American Goethe scholarship. The topics cover influences, translations, narrative techniques, Goethe's relationship to music and to literary theory. Stuart Atidns leads off by sharing his thoughts "On Translating Faust," a subject that has occupied this distinguished Goethean for fifty fruitful years. He begins with a brief history of Faust translations, quoting from Morgan, Fairley, Taylor, Hayward, MacNeice, Jarrell, Passage, Arndt, and others. The survey is thoughtful, often humorous, and concentrated on two issues: the perennial problems of translating Faust into English and Atidns' own most recent efforts in this direction: his new translation of both parts oÃ- Faust for die Suhrkamp/Insel Goethe edition in English. Atkins emphasizes metered verse over rhyme, linguistic accuracy over euphonious effects, preserving thereby the drama's important metrical variety while rendering it into idiomatic English. Wolodymyr T. ZyIa presents a related topic. By delineating Goethe's impact on Ivan Franko (1856-1916), "Goethe's Translator and Interpreter" in the Ukraine, he addresses problems concerning the art of translating as well as die Goethean presence in die creative world of one Ukrainian writer and in Ukrainian culture. The translation of foreign poetry, wrote Ivan Franko, is like building a "golden bridge" of understanding between distant cultures. In this presentation ZyIa himseff contributes greatly to such an understanding. David Delaura discusses the reception of Goethe's concept of "self-development "—Bildung—in nineteendi-century England. The term became a criterion for judging Goethe as an artist and tiiinker in the British Isles as well as in New England, and it served as a catalyst for such timely topics as individuaUty and ethics, "heroic egotism" and social responsibUity. Major contributors to the debate were Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart MiU, G.H. Lewes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margret Fuller. By examining previously unexplored materials (e.g. monthlies) DeLaura is able to demonstrate that Goethe's influence on English intellectual life was much more pervasive than is generaUy assumed. Two essays in the volume are on narrative structures in the Meister novels. Hans-Jürgen Schings gives a fascinating account of Goethe's use of archetypal tales ("Urgeschichten") as leitmotivic devices in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Thematically and structurally the tales (e.g. the story of the aUing prince and his cure) support the central symbolism of the novel, a "Symbolik des Glücks," by conveying images of growtii, pain, and happy resolution. In contrast to the Lehrjahre, says Alexander GeUey, Goethe's late novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, has no diematic or formal cohesiveness, no teleological purpose or progression. It is a loose assemblage of narratives whose meaning derives from intertextual dynamics. GeUey points to Mikhail Baldwin's definition of die 346 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA "dialogue novel" as a poetological reference point for the Wanderjahre, dius offering us a structuralist's refinement of the traditional view diat Goethe's late prose is based on a dialectical interplay of content and form. Two articles on the subject of Goedie and music widen our horizon in this often misjudged area of Goethean interest. John Neubauer deserves the gratitude of aU who seek objective and useful information about Goethe's theoretical knowledge of music. By pointing to die poet's annotations to his translation of Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau and to his fragmentary Tonlehre (intended as a pendant to his Farbenlehre), he draws our attention to significant sources for understanding Goedie's perception of "absolute" (instrumental) and "affective" (representational) music. Goethe's adopted creed that major and minor scales in music develop from one single "Tonmonade" is completely in accord widi his general view of totaUty based on archetypal polarities. Meredith McClain iUuminates Goedie's musical vitality in a more practical way. She examines one of die Mignon poems, "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," and traces it through seven different musical settings (notes included in the...

Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998). Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns - the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power - and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques. Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his modular working method as well as the evolution of his novels.

Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half-century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998). Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns—the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power—and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques. Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.


 
 
 In this essay, I intend to investigate some of the aspects of the resurgence of habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.
 I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by Modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.
 Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.
 
 

Kamen Rider

On January 23, 2010, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was privileged to see American Repertory Theatre's production of Gatz . In this approximately six-hour reading of The Great Gatsby , Jordan Baker is portrayed as a witty, observant, and humorous character who is much more credible and interesting than Daisy Buchanan, whose famous voice, sounded vapid and slightly hysterical, as well as full of money ( Gatsby 127). 1 was so intrigued by this characterization of Jordan and sheer number of scenes in which she is present, if often silent, that next day I turned to novel and its attendant scholarship in hope of discovering more about this tantalizing figure whom I had largely overlooked in my many encounters with The Great Gatsby in teaching and scholarship over past thirty years. Critics generally treat Jordan Baker as a plot device confidante or ficelle who supplies information about Daisy Buchanan's past with Jay Gatsby; who, with narrator Nick Carraway, forms a parallel couple to Daisy/Tom Buchanan and Daisy/Gatsby. She is often readily dismissed as part of the rotten crowd ( Gatsby 162) that Nick repudiates at end of novel (Allen 106, 110; Chambers 117-18; Long 148; Messenger 194; Pelzer 87; Stern 204, 209, 270). These readings are quite justifiable in that Fitzgerald does not really develop Jordan's character beyond its utility as a handy narrative technique or even a supplementary example of moral turpitude. While Daisy's nebulous quality as an ideal is suggested by emphasis on her voice with scarcely any physical details of characterization, Jordan has a corporeal presence in novel as well as an evocative, if sketchily presented, past that in some ways resembles Gatsby's. Patricia Pacey Thornton describes Jordan's conflict as between traditional and experimental views of womanhood (464) and between male and female aspects of herself (465). If we take a close look at Jordan in novel, we can see ways that, had Fitzgerald chosen to develop her character further, she could have supported and complicated at least two major themes associated with Daisy and Gatsby: changing and ambiguous roles of women and fate of romantic readiness ( Gatsby 6) or American Dream in accelerating modernity of early twentieth century.

As this study will attempt to alter a traditional view concerning John Wyclif, no better introduction suggests itself than Professor Knowles' statement: Probably no character in English history has suffered such distortion at the hands of friend and foe as has that of John Wyclif.' Wyclif must assume responsibility for some of this distortion. Not only is he at times obscure in his writing, even inconsistent,2 but the observation which a recent scholar made of Thucydides that everyone who worked intimately with his style seemed to emerge from the conflict in a state of vindictive gloom3 might as readily be applied to Wyclif. The principal reason, of course, why Wyclif and his views have so frequently been misrepresented is that he attacked doctrines which some scholars have held sacred and which others have abhorred. Much of this misrepresentation is now happily passing, not so much because more recent scholars have less personal concern about the justice of Wyclif's cause, but because they have learned to delve into the sources in a spirit of greater detachment, bent only on presenting as facts or probabilities that which the evidence reveals. Modern scholarship is ready to credit Wyclif with having laid down the broad lines of attack which future generations did little more than develop,4 although the actual link between his ideas and the events of the sixteenth century was a tenuous one. Thanks to a Reformation he did little or nothing to inspire and in effect everything possible to delay, he has been hailed for centuries as its Morning Star . . . .I Present opinion also inclines to the view that Wyclif never considered himself anything but an orthodox Catholic; that he never repudiated the papacy;6 that he was guilty of negligence in the care of the souls committed to his charge in two of his benefices;7 and that what saved him from the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities was not an aroused England but the strange friendship of John of Gaunt. (England never really became aroused over Wyclif before reading what sectarian writers like John Foxe had to say about him two hundred years after his death.8) Scholars are also in general agreement that the Peasant Revolt deprived him of any encouragement the aristocracy and London

«All the books speak to each other. They are only separate books because that’s how they had to be written. I see them really as one long continuous piece of work. I’ve said that the seven books make a cycle or a series, and I believe that they do from Oranges to The PowerBook. And they interact and themes do occur and return, disappear, come back amplified or modified, changed in some way, because it’s been my journey, it’s the journey of my imagination, it’s the journey of my soul in those books. So continually they must address one another» 1 . Winterson’s novels continually address one another. Just as she states in the interview, starting with Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit 2 we find themes ‘occurring, returning, coming back amplified or modified’ in her fiction. Among the themes that recur, an intense preoccupation with history is central. Yet none of her novels can be classified as historical in the traditional sense. In her own words, Winterson uses the past as an «invented country»; she «land[s] on some moment of history and re-discovers it». Theoretically speaking, she writes «historiographic metaficton» that blurs the line between fiction and history. Thus, her novels problematise the validity of history, as well as the validity of the traditional view that the historical and fictional are separate 3 . With the theory of historiography that Hayden White offered in the 1970’s, the separation of the once distinct realms of factual and fictional started to be questioned. The objectivity of historical knowledge seemed problematic. Realising that it was not the facts but the historian that speaks for the audience, White thought that the writing of history was then quite similar to the poetic process; thus he concludes that since historians are also preoccupied with the act of storytelling and with finding an appropriate narrative technique for