Narrative Consciousness Research Articles

Itihasam of/as Legend: Time, Space, and Narrative Consciousness in The Legends of Khasak

Truth is light splintered through a prism and that gave me the idea of the astrophysicist who turns away from the outer universe to the space within. V. Vijayan, ‘Afterword’, The Legends of Khasak The Legends of Khasak (1969) by O.V. Vijayan has enjoyed a cult readership in the Indian subcontinent. The dominant critical or scholarly strain has been to read it as a literary symptom of the postcolonial imaginary. However, this has restricted the thematic potentialities of the text. While it employs the conventional postcolonial contestation between modernity and tradition as its framework, it far exceeds the binary in the forging of a novel consciousness and form. Using this as the theoretical springboard, the paper will attempt an exploration of Vijayan’s revisioning of the postmodern novel through the reconfiguration of the coordinates of time and space. This reconfiguration occurs through the lens of magic realism in so far as the experience of space – or Khasak as a site of the legendary – is conditioned by the experience of time. The aim of the paper is to look at the protagonist Ravi and his experience of the liminal boundary between history and myth, and the concomitant form of the novel through its reconceptualization of the Eurocentric theoretical paradigms of novelistic and epic time. This anticipates the emergence of a new spatio-temporal and narrative consciousness symptomatic of the fragmentary postcolonial condition.

Environmental crises and narrative consciousness in Maja Lunde's the History of Bees

Literature plays a crucial role in raising consciousness and promoting a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness between human nature and its surroundings. However, there is widespread debate in academic discourse about how contemporary narratives depict environmental crises using narrative consciousness. Therefore, the current study aims to explore the narrative consciousness of environmental crises in Lundy's novel The History of Bees through the lens of Cheryll Glotfelty's ecocritical conception, addressing the need for a deeper understanding of how literature depicts environmental issues and encourages an ethical engagement with nature. Drawing on Glotfelty's principles of heightened environmental consciousness, depiction of consequences, and ethical engagement, the study examines how Lund's novel embodies these concepts in its depiction of declining bee populations and their ecological importance. The study thus discusses how the novel raises consciousness of the interconnectedness between humans and nature, addressing the consequences of human actions on the environment, and calling for engagement and moral action to accept nature's beings. Through the narratives of three characters in different time periods, the essay highlights the interconnectedness between humans, bees, and the natural world, emphasizing the need for a more sustainable relationship with the environment. The article contributes to a deeper understanding of Lundy's novel's efforts to raise consciousness of profound environmental topics and enhance the discourse on ecocriticism and contemporary environmental literature.

KRAJIŠKI EGZODUS U ROMANU „DOZIVI KROZ OLUJU“ KOVILjKE TIŠME JANKOVIĆ

In this paper, we present the main values of Koviljka Tišma Janković’s novel Summons Through the Storm, a literary work that lies within the thematic framework of the Krajina war novel which deals with a significant point in the newer European history – the mass-exodus of Serbs from Croatia in 1995. The examined novel contains values that can be used as a basis for confirming the artistic positions on which the entire novel lies. Firstly, we notice that the novel uses the narrative consciousness to refuse the acceptance of truthfulness of any ideology and accepts only the truths of victims, casualties, and refugees. In situations after the exodus, victims are faced with boundaries of living in their homeland, as well as the bounda- ries of their vernacular, which can only be reconstructed through memory. However, memories are also inhabited by traumas, which causes the associative organization and fragmentation of the narrative. The narrator keeps trying to reconstruct the past, but they are facing various obstacles: either no authority could confirm the accuracy of these reconstructions, or one can never fully rely on the mechanisms of memory that are the mechanisms haunting the narrator’s thoughts. The paper also recognizes the vital, yet concealed presence of the elements of folklore and oral literature. This also includes the ancient motifs through which the matriarchal principle is made present in the novel. By revealing the listed values, the paper reveals the need for further readings, both of this novel and other Krajina war novels.

“Large fat sighings” of a “large bulky figure”: Identity-building and formation of new order in Persuasion

This essay provides a multifaceted analysis of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion through the lens of narrative consciousness, rhythm and sexual anxiety. Drawing on Lacanian theory, it examines the selfidentification processes of the heroine Anne Elliot and Mrs Musgrove against, and with relation to patriarchal norms. By analyzing the dynamics presented in Mrs Musgrove’s “large fat sighings”, the essay explores the effect of incongruity between the human body and spirit; and it further examines Mrs Musgrove’s Sphinx-like figure, who inspires desire and inhibitions in the Oedipus-like Captain Wentworth with a significant impact on the formation of community and order. The essay investigates long-neglected subjects presented in Austen’s novels and enriches the complex portrait of Mrs. Musgrove as both Mother and Sphinx.

Another Look at Retrospection: The Backward Movement of the Narrative Unconscious

Abstract This essay proposes that understanding a text in narrative terms is based on the reverse causality of what it calls the narrative unconscious. The argument revisits literary and critical treatments of retrospection as a phenomenon of narrative temporality. It considers retrospection from a thematic angle, from the cognitive perspective of mind time, and from a reader-response motivation to fill gaps in the story, arriving at a necessity to postulate “invisible” reverse causality. The backward logic of the narrative unconscious, defined here as consolidation, works hand in hand with the conscious, forward-oriented operation of narrative thinking that appears to us as cumulative and anticipatory. In other words, narrative thinking or narrative processing oscillates between the forward direction of anticipation and backward direction of consolidation. Although we do not have access to the anti-intuitive workings of reverse causality, we can thematize this oscillation on a performative level as the interplay between the narrator's and narratee's perspectives, which are looked at collectively as the two foci of narrative consciousness. Finally, and while leaving the important question of practical application still open, the article considers the relevance of this supposition to the literary field of narratology and suggests that the concept of the narrative unconscious is a productive way to explain the aesthetic narrative effects of “oscillatory” and affective nature.

“We will continue our struggle for success”: French Canadian students, narrative, and historical consciousness

ABSTRACT Recent theories of historical consciousness focus on the role narration plays in contemporary people’s attempts to give meaning to the past and orient their practical life as citizens. This article examines the need for probing students’ historical ideas and for developing narrative competence as a way to engage them critically in contested memories of the collective past so as to expand their historical consciousness beyond memory and cultural traditions. Relying on a narrative approach, this study surveyed 635 French Canadian students from different regions of Canada. Canada, a multicultural state made up of nations-within (French, English, Indigenous), represents an interesting case for studying young citizens’ representations of the collective past in a highly diversified society. This study offers new results on how these learners think about national history in the 21st century, and it discusses the implications for the development of narrative competence as a way to bridge the divide between the “cultural curriculum” and “historical thinking.” We argue that history educators need to take more seriously students’ narrative ideas if they truly want to have a lasting impact on their historical learning.

Testaments Betrayed: A Response to Those Wishing to Preserve Roth's Private Papers and Make Them Readily Available to Researchers

Testaments BetrayedA Response to Those Wishing to Preserve Roth's Private Papers and Make Them Readily Available to Researchers James Duban (bio) Well before he died, philip roth relied on litchfield, connecticut, resident Russ Murdock—friend; stonemason; property caretaker; later, power-of-attorney holder over part of Roth's land and home; and ultimately Roth's gravestone sculptor—to burn "piles of pages […] in big bonfires in his backyard." Murdock did so faithfully, without, he reportedly said, even having "snuck a peek at what Roth brought him" (Zax). Such was friendship; such was integrity. Estate executors Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier should now similarly honor Roth's directive to destroy the personal papers Roth made available to Blake Bailey for the purpose of researching and composing Philip Roth: The Biography (2021). Although contrary opinion exists in calls for document preservation and scholarly access, Golier and Wylie might well grant Roth's wish: "There is a good chance we will destroy them. […] Andrew and I will decide when the time comes" (qtd. in Shephard). My own call for the destruction of the papers pertains—in the current absence of documentation to the contrary—to Roth's explicit wish for their destruction (as quoted below), and to the heretofore unnoted thoughts about "testaments betrayed" by Roth's longtime friend and fellow author, Milan Kundera. One might first dispel the claim that "[i]t's unclear what Roth's actual directives were" (Atler and Schuessler), along with passive-voice speculation that Roth's executors "are interpreted to be under Roth's direction to destroy archival material after it was seen by Bailey" (Helmore). To the contrary, Roth was unequivocal: "Once Blake Bailey has got what he needs, I've asked my executors—my agent, Andrew Wylie, and a friend who's a psychoanalyst, to destroy them after my death. I don't want my personal papers dragged all over of the place. No one has to read them" (qtd. in Kaprielian). [End Page 84] Little matter to some. As if multiple wrongs make a right, scholars cite precedent for ignoring the mandates of authors to destroy their papers: witness Virgil, Kafka, Hardy, Nabokov, and Larkin. Equally predictable in the world of polite scholarly discourse is the much-quoted lament that Roth's disposition prevents "access to these materials to add layers to the conversation" ("Statement"; see also Alter and Schuessler, Helmore). Roth, however, clearly favored monologue, not dialogue. Indeed his 2012 statement (above) from the Paris Review came in response to the explicit question, "How have you started to prepare your archives for after your death?" Roth's response contained no ambiguity. Even less compelling as a rationale for access—as pertains to Bailey's possible surrender of intimate material—is the accusation that Roth constructed "a deeply control-oriented arrangement" (Kelly). Perhaps he did; but what of it? What injunction concerning intellectual property or selective confidentiality does not do the same? And if such resolve is a disappointment to some, then more's the credit to an author who, fearing post-mortem ransacking by biographers, turns the tables on their invasion and leaves them to lament that "[d]arkness is never the proper condition for scholarly work, and in this case the glance has been cast back to the interpreter" (critic qtd. in Helmore). Checkmate! Game, Roth. Postmortem narrative consciousness at its best (see Parrish 127-28; Helmore). As suggested, however, and with recourse to the writings of Milan Kundera, more is at stake than Roth's "ghosting" home invaders. His championing of Kundera, and other writers from the Soviet-dominated "other Europe," is well known. Moreover, many books by Kundera have ended up in the Philip Roth Personal Library of the Newark Public Library. Among them is the British edition and translation of Testaments Betrayed, which has pertinence for the ultimate fate of Roth's personal papers. An apt introduction to Testaments Betrayed are the outlooks of Roth's close friend Bernard Avishai and of Roth scholar Timothy Parrish. The latter, in response to the fate of Roth's personal papers, has recently remarked, "the less we know of Roth's life the better his books seem"; hence, "Roth...

Leaving hypnosis behind?

ABSTRACT Our consciousness and our practice of hypnosis co-evolve. From earliest civilizations to the present, we can think of the source of our abilities and knowledge, along with our self-awareness, as progressing from external and imperative to internal and autonomous. This perspective aligns with Jaynes’ thesis on the origin of consciousness and its trajectory from a bicameral mind, to increasing self-efficacy, and on toward higher consciousness. With the ongoing emergence of our subjective and narrative consciousness comes shifting and multiplying resources for rational, shared, compassionate, and creative self-determination. However, the formal practice of therapeutic hypnosis – especially within reductive and diagnosis-based biomedical and psychological models – has lagged behind the evolution of consciousness. Most of the history of hypnosis has adhered to the bicameral paradigm. We have reserved a place for the authority of an externalized, revered entity whom we credit nonconsciously with our innate and extraordinary abilities. The creative applications of hypnosis by Erickson and the expansion of that work by Rossi signaled a fundamental emergence from that paradigm that encourages self-authorization and moves hypnosis practice toward a more evocative, systematic, and numinous horizon.

Social neuroscience and narrative consciousness

Bien que la sociologie ait pour objet l'analyse du comportement humain, elle a toujours eu une attitude ambivalente avec certains concepts clés pour ce genre d'analyse. L'un des exemples les plus significatifs est celui de la conscience. D'une part, la centralité de ce concept pour l'analyse sociologique est démontrée par la diffusion de son utilisation, tant chez les auteurs classiques que chez les auteurs contemporains ; d'autre part, une définition claire et partagée de celui-ci est considérée comme hors de question, car il ne peut être réduit aux méthodes empiriques de scientificité qui prévalent encore dans la sociologie contemporaine. L'essai propose une approche alternative possible qui, stimulée par l'influence des neurosciences et des sciences cognitives, peut conduire à une nouvelle approche de l'étude sociologique de la conscience

"Cause that's the way the world turns": John Edgar Wideman's Sent for You Yesterday and the Mnemonic Jukebox

"Cause that's the way the world turns":John Edgar Wideman's Sent for You Yesterday and the Mnemonic Jukebox Jürgen E. Grandt (bio) In 1959, shortly before commencing a prison stint for violating the Mann Act by allegedly transporting a minor across state lines for illicit purposes, Chuck Berry released his hit single "Back in the USA" on the legendary Chess label.1 Reportedly (and ironically) inspired by the plight of the Aborigines Berry had witnessed during a tour of Australia earlier that year, the song kicks off with his signature guitar lick and expresses his relief at being "jet-propelled back home, from overseas to the USA" (Collis 92, 94; Pegg 111). Now that his yearning for the skylines of New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago—and, of course, for Berry's hometown of St. Louis—has been stilled, he is "[l]ooking hard for a drive-in, searching for a corner café,/Where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day—/Yeah, the jukebox jumping with records like in the USA." The rock 'n' roll tumbling out of the speakers of the jukebox signifies unmistakably that Berry is home, finally: "Yes, I'm so glad I'm living in the USA./Anything you want, we got right here in the USA." In many ways, John Edgar Wideman's Sent for You Yesterday, the final installment in the Homewood trilogy, describes a homecoming, too—or, rather, several different homecomings. Doot is the novel's central, organizing narrative consciousness (Beaulieu 84–88; Bennion 145–46). Twenty-nine years of age, college-educated, and a new father, Doot has returned to the East End neighborhood of Pittsburgh that lends Wideman's Homewood series its title. Meeting on a Friday night with his uncle Carl French and Carl's on-again, off-again girlfriend, Lucy Tate, in the Velvet Slipper, a neighborhood bar and social institution, Doot is listening to their stories, hoping to reconnect with his past (42). As he listens to Carl and Lucy's reminiscences about Homewood, the three of them are engulfed by the sounds emanating from the Velvet Slipper's jukebox. The call and response within and between the various stories Doot processes in his mind is echoed, embellished, and even initiated by an antiphonal soundtrack, ranging from the big band jazz of Count Basie to the soul music of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles. As Doot, Carl, Lucy, and the others recollect, recreate, and reimagine urban Homewood [End Page 234] and its denizens, inspired by the music that they hear, they ultimately re-member from mnemonic fragments how Doot's nickname and past are both intricately intertwined with recorded sound. Recorded music resonates within a suspension of time—or, more precisely, the spiral grooves of records revive a past event in the present, a repeatable action that riffs, however briefly, upon the (ostensibly) linear progression of history. This dialectic is also intimately related to the storytelling of Wideman's characters as well as the structure of the novel itself. When Lucy accuses Carl of "talking in circles," his defiant reply is: That's right. Cause that's the way the world turns. Circles and circles and circles inside circles. Don't you understand nothing, woman? Doot don't make me feel old. Don't make me feel young neither, sitting there with children when I remember him in diapers. Point is I can see him back then just as plain as I see him now and it don't make no difference. Just a circle going round and round so you getting closer while you getting further away and further while you're getting closer. (118) This seemingly paradoxical dynamic of Carl's circular storytelling, simultaneously compressing and distending time and distance, delineates also the structure of the novel as a whole. Moreover, the narrative spins are analogous to the path of the needle in the groove of the record rotating inside the Velvet Slipper's jukebox during this very conversation: the further away the needle gets from the edge of the record, the closer it moves to the center. But what resides at the center of the record that the needle inexorably approaches...

An Analysis of Kanthapura by Raja Rao: A Postcolonial Study

This study focuses the ‘Kanthapura’ to analyze the construction of historical consciousness in narratives and this fiction is used as literary aspect of nationalist ideology. Particularly, this work examines the political representation of women in Indian national movement in 1930 by using the theory of nationalism by Bhabha (1990). The study demystifies this novel to find out challenges of stereotypical Indian women and how they become solidified in the building process of Indian national identity. Kanthapura (Delhi Orient) is very much concerned to focus on the construction of Vedic Hindu ideal for women and the reason of writing true and authentic history to investigate the women’s issues they face during the colonial period of India. The study sheds light on imagined and true nature of nationalist discourse and its effect on women in postcolonial India. It is not concerned with those doctrines of nationalist sentiments which are generalized through religious stereotypes rather it is paradoxical in nature that begins to assume identification with European accounts of India so it explores the idea of political desirability that shapes and constructs the ideology and as well as it allows for the presentation of unified identity of India.

SLIKA ŠUMADIJE U SRPSKOJ KNjIŽEVNOSTI NA KRAJU 19. I POČETKOM 20. VEKA

This research highlighted the space as an ambience that reflected the destiny of literary heroes and types of narrative consciousness. Šumadija’s villages and mountains in Milan Milićević’s stories stood out as humanized spaces of human will and imagination, Prince Miloš’s political power and community creative power, as spaces that participated in crea- tion a future Serbian cultural and historical identity. In Radoje Domanović’s rural tales, the narrative oscillation between idyllic and anti-utopian Šumadija revealed the narrator’s desire for vanished past and childhood. In Svetolik Ranković’s novels, the mountain was doubly marked, as a scene of real bandit events and as an ontological space of dreamed freedom, which mediated a literary turn in the experience of space – from mythopoetic to historical and psychophysiological perception of space. Since Čačak and Belgrade, as toponyms of psycho- physiological spatio-temporal intersection, expressed the irreconcilability of the heroes’ travel lines, Milutin Uskoković’s narrative in the novel Čedomir Ilić outlined a deep break in being and traces of homelessness within the modern subject. Šumadija became a point of discomfort and strangeness that needed to be overcome. Directing the interpretation towards the literary representation of Šumadija in Serbian prose of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth cen- turies, we noticed that the geographical and political-historical center of Serbian people did not coincide with Serbian literature and cultural topography: the center imaginatively eluded.

Back by Inscrutable Demand: Ali Itır’s Multilingual Return inBerlin Savignyplatz

This essay builds on previous work on Ören’s figure of Ali Itır from the point of view of multilingualism on the one hand and critiques of neoliberal literature on the other. I argue that <i>Berlin Savignyplatz</i> attempts to disavow and abandon an iconic sign in this character of Itır that has become pernicious for the author’s own narrative consciousness in the years between 1983 and 1993. On the basis of close readings of passages in both the German and Turkish versions of the novel, without preferencing either, I suggest that Ören merits wider consideration as a literary theorist intervening in many of the same domains of conceptualization as 1990s luminaries like Derrida and Ricoeur, and Şenocak in German Studies particularly. I read Ören’s <i>Berlin Savignyplatz</i> novel in its/their Turkish-and German-language versions with a view to the differential relationality between them, as a philosophical fiction or multilingual poetics, epitomized by the figural sign Ali Itır itself. I further argue that it is Ören’s ambivalence toward literary monolingualism in Germany that obstructed his broader uptake as such a theorist. (DG)

Virginia Woolf in the River: The Intersection of Eastern Philosophy and Western Modernism in Mrs. Dalloway

The modernist period ushered forth numerous scientific and philosophical theories that had a notable influence on art, literature, psychology, and philosophy. Discoveries such as Einstein’s general theory of relativity inspired theologians, philosophers, and psychologists to focalize new concepts of self, identity, time, reality, and human experience. These shifts in contemporary human understanding developed in concurrence with increased global travel and intellectual exchange between Western and Eastern countries. As a result, writers, philosophers, and artists became more interested in Buddhism and other Eastern philosophical beliefs. Virginia Woolf, while being a self-proclaimed atheist, was deeply influenced by Eastern philosophy and well versed in contemporary scientific theories. Drawing on literary and biographical criticism of Virginia Woolf, I trace the intersections of Eastern philosophical beliefs and Western scientific theories through the stream of consciousness narration of Mrs. Dalloway by analyzing both what and how things are experienced by individual characters. In the novel, the integration of each character's stream of consciousness fabricates a dissonant medium in which singular moments in the present time are experienced through the minds of multiple characters, while they simultaneously navigate past spans of time within their individual narrative consciousness. Through the analysis of narrative form and narrative consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, it is possible to track the impact of Eastern philosophies and Western scientific theories in the novel’s exploration of external and internal perceptions of reality.

A Feminist Review of John Dramani Mahama’s My First Coup D’etat: Memories from the Lost Decades of Africa

This essay examines the portrayal of women in John Dramani Mahama’s My First Coup D’etat: Memories from the Lost Decades of Africa (2012). The essay contends that subtly My First Coup D’etat expresses ideas of patriarchy, misogyny and masculinity. A feminist reading of work pays attention to images, themes, expressions, motifs and many other factors that are embedded in the text. An examination of the portrayal of women in male narratives is a worthwhile exercise as it helps establish gender ideologies for female empowerment. A paper like this stretches the dimension of psycho-critical literary studies which pays attention to the interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness in life narratives. Life narratives is an accumulation of layered propositions, interpretation of which are discernible by critical literary studies, like this research paper.

『청성잡기(靑城雜記)』의 협객(俠客) 형상에 나타난 성대중(成大中)의 서술 의식 연구

본고에서는 『청성잡기』에 협객으로 형상화된 인물을 분석하고 성대중의 서술 의식을 살펴보았다. 먼저 협객의 연원 및 조선 후기에 시정에서 협객으로 숭상된 자들의 특성을 고찰하고, 이를 바탕으로『청성잡기』에 협객이 언급된 일곱 편의 글을 검토한 결과 협객에 대한 성대중의 상반된 인식을 확인하였다. 또한『청성잡기』에 실린 이야기 중 그의 상반된 인식 및 태도를 드러내는 다른 일화도 고찰하였다. 그래서 성대중이 특정 대상 및 현실에 대한 상반된 인식을 드러낸 요인을 추론한 결과, 그것은 지배 세력 및 이념을 옹호하는 이상적 자아와 서자라는 신분으로 차별받는 현실적 자아 사이에서 갈등한 성대중의 주체 분열 때문이었다. 이러한 성대중의 주체 분열은 현실과 이상 간의 괴리를 극복하지 못한 서자 지식인의 현실적 모습이었고, 그가 벼슬살이를 포기하고 은거를 선택하여 신념을 포기하려는 고뇌는 조선의 신분적 차별이 야기한 병폐 중 하나였다. 끝으로 성대중이 협객을 상반된 인식으로 서술한 것은 협객에 대한 인식의 혼란을 야기할 수 있다는 한계가 있지만, 그러한 서술이 성대중 개인의 신념 체계를 구성하는 가치관이 합리적이지 않음을 뜻하지는 않았다. 그것은 성대중의 욕구와 현실의 간극이 그만큼 컸음을 입증하기 때문이었다.

Two Books on the Representation of Consciousness in Narrative

Two Books on the Representation of Consciousness in Narrative

LAS DEVELACIONES GENEALÓGICAS EN ROBERTO BOLAÑO

The essay analyzes the genealogical articulation of literature, madness and violence present in La literatura nazi en America and 2666 by Roberto Bolano, with the aim to understand how these recurring problems in his work are reworked by literary mimesis. Also, this dimension shows the performance of a narrative consciousness that uses the genealogical articulation as a critical way of approaching reality. Consequently, both novels show a worldview that finds by genealogy signs that explain the historical processes of the global phenomenon of violence.

A travel in the narrative turn of the consciousness of a diaspora ghost in The Hounding of David Oluwale

Abstract There is a sense in which African Diasporic contemporary narrative-centred drama helps in the reconceptualization of images, identity and the perception of ‘self’ against the ‘others’ within the totality of the experiences of the individual that form the sum of his/her consciousness. And, if we agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that consciousness is intentionality, it means that such images, identity, conceptualization and perception are prompts for narrative performance action and counter-action. In essence, narrative consciousness is not a mere dormant awareness and recreation of a state of being; it is perhaps an agent provocateur of crisis that often motivates characters to destructive actions. This is what we see in the recreation of Oluwole’s life in The Hounding of David Oluwale. The tragic end of Oluwole appears to have a link to the consciousness of his black ‘self’ against that of the white ‘others’, and this seems to, even now, underscore the uneasy life of the new African Diasporas in their host communities. It appears that there is an inherently sustained overt and covert conflict in the relationship between the Diasporas and their host. It is for this reason that one feels that the understanding of the narrative consciousness of the playwright and that of the characters in the play in existential dialectical terms is necessary as we continue to engage with the challenges of the life of the African Diasporas. This article, therefore, analyses the consciousness of the African Diaspora ‘selves’ against the ‘others’ of their hosts as reflected in the play.

The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading. John Lurz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. iv+199.

Lurz nicely exposits Woolf’s drive to depict the important activity of the solitary mind turned toward things and events, yet participating in a community of voices, in the chapter on The Waves. Through three males and three females, we follow the variety of ways characters experience the flow of existence and try to give it some order. Regrettably, Lurz does not mention experiments by the Romantics a hundred years earlier (regardless of whether there may be any direct filiation) when he describes Woolf as envisioning a new kind of hybrid novel that mixes articulated stories and fragmentary pieces. The lead figure Bernard criticizes standard narrative form in his closing monologue as not commensurate with how we experience, in contrast to music, and senses a “deeper, nonlinguistic level of life” (144). The traumatic intrusion of death with the loss of Percival brings “deepened awareness of time’s passing” (152). Just as the friends each previously occupied a distinct temperamental or philosophical position vis-à-vis life, so their awakening to their own materiality and to the world varies. It can eventuate in finding oneself “alone in emptiness” (152), but in the case of Bernard it brings intensified attention to things, with a non-subject-centered account of experience, including influence of other minds and their works, realization of the suffering of others. A dissolution of subjectivity is sensed in changing aspects of the seascape and as a dispersal of self into the human community, while cosmological dimensions, too, impose “radical finitude” (157). A kind of victory occurs insofar as Bernard can split off his narrative consciousness and see himself or a friend as an object and challenge death by his altered attitude, which Lurz correctly sees as analogous to the endings of Recherche and Finnegans Wake.