Abstract Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian Formalism were all facets of a larger phenomenon called Postimperial Formalism. The shared postimperial heritage is epitomized by the Polish-Russian-Ukrainian Siberian school that emerged among exiled populist revolutionaries in the 1880s and 1890s as well as in the linguistic work of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay. The author reconstructs the ways in which the imperial situation in general, and the Siberian school and Baudouinian linguistics as its instantiations, made possible the Formalist theory of poetic language as a universal phenomenon across cultures (and not restricted to higher cultures entitled to dominate more “natural peoples”). Language is conceived as necessarily divided into distinct communicative and poetic currents, and poetic language always appears alien to its natives. Thus, aesthetic autonomy, and consequently the autonomy of the subject who experiences its own freedom in art, has a translinguistic character, since “estrangement” always operates in relation to communicative language. The strangeness of poetic language coincides with the problematic relationship between sound and meaning prompted by the tension between energy expenditure and austerity. This common situation also sheds light on other otherwise inexplicable and seemingly whimsical qualities of Formalism in the successor states of the Russian Empire, most importantly the role that the Formalist idolaters of the autonomy of the “literary series” played in the Soviet political strategy of nativization and, to some extent, in the Polish politics of regionalism.

Abstract This article applies Jean-Paul Sartre's proposition in Being and Nothingness of “the Look” (le regard) to the context of fiction, offering a phenomenological perspective on why bibliophiles sense they inhabit the world of the text. Contributing to an Other-centered ethics identified in contemporary narrative theory, the author argues that Looking through the eyes of the narrator affords textual encounters that prioritize the experiences of Others to produce ethically involved readers. Through the Look, Sartre theorizes a commonly accepted dyadic structure of human relations that alienates self from Other. He proposes that a mutual process of objectification occurs when we hold each other's gaze, which prevents us from knowing the Other. However, the imaginative displacement inherent in reading first-person fiction resolves this standoff, allowing us to say I and yet mean another. Applying the Look to reading, the author analyzes Nina Bouraoui's intersectional novel Garçon manqué (Tomboy: A Novel; 2000), whose narrator is Othered as Algerian French, queer, and gender nonconforming. The strategic use of narration devices induces reader experiences of the Look and invites embodiment of the I-figure, activating reader consciousness, a sentient engagement with the narrating Other, for whom the reader develops a Levinasian sense of responsibility.

Abstract This article proposes a reconceptualization of the narrative form that Ian Watt saw as constitutive of the novel as it emerged in the eighteenth century: its “circumstantial view of life.” Elaborating on the structural similarity between the Aristotelian peripeteia and Roland Barthes's, Paul Ricœur's, and Frank Kermode's theory of narrative as an operation that transforms chance into destiny, the article argues that the circumstantial view of life is what constitutes the narrative peripeteia in the novel. The author explores what this means for our understanding of the function of narrative transformations in the novel through examples from the eighteenth-century German novel and the theoretical discussion surrounding it.

Abstract Recent narrative theory has generally treated fictionality as a feature of writing that serves a rhetorical, communicative purpose. This article argues for more attention to the continuities between literary and nonliterary fictionality, such as we encounter in law, contracts, and credit. Drawing on Charles Yu's novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, it explores Clifford Siskin's theory of novelism and work on fictionality and economic systems in the eighteenth century to show how the novel navigates the space between literary and “infrastructural” fictionality.

Abstract The contemporary era has raised new demands for fictionality studies, and the emergent rhetorical approach to fictionality provides a promising framework. However, beneath their shared perception of fictionality as a rhetorical resource, scholars of this approach still disagree as to whether fictionality communicates (a) open deviation from literal truthfulness or (b) suspension of the criterion of literal truthfulness. This article puts these two conceptions to the test of Lauren Slater's unconventional “memoir” Lying (2000). It asks: Do the two conceptions lead to different interpretations of the same text? If yes, is one interpretation better than the other? A detailed analysis shows that both conceptions illuminate how Lying challenges the generic boundary between fiction and nonfiction but in different ways. Under the first conception, Slater's liminal use of fictionality can be described as “blanket signaling”: she acknowledges her use of invention but refuses to divulge where exactly invention is deployed. Under the second conception, Slater's use of fictionality can be seen as “tenorless metaphor”: she indicates that, to some extent, her apparent account of epilepsy may serve as an indirect means of self-representation. While the former conception highlights authorial ingenuity, the latter better captures the ethical crux of Lying and similar works of autofiction.

Abstract What are the relationships linking memory, literature, and the different minds that write and remember in literature? This article explores how recent research on memory within cognitive science can provide us with new ways of understanding these interconnections as they play out in Lydie Salvayre's novel Cry, Mother Spain (Pas Pleurer). First, drawing on work within the study of extended cognition and the reconstructive nature of memory, the article presents the epistemological argument that Salvayre's novel makes up an integral part of a real extended process of remembering. Second, the article explores this process through the perspective of collaborative remembering. Drawing lines between this research and other work on the fluent and interactive nature of memory, the article investigates how the mother and the narrator come together to reconstruct the former's experiences during the Spanish Civil War in their full historical, political, and personal significance. This extended process of remembering spans different minds, texts, and the novel itself. Finally, the article suggests some implications of these findings for the study of literature and memory.