Fictional Biographies Research Articles

Climate change, planetary biographies, and symbiotic mobility

This paper critically discusses the biopoliticalisation of mobility biographies in the time of climate change with reference to Gi Chang Kim’s cli-fi trilogy. The dystopian work demonstrates how fiction can help us better imagine the lived experience of biopolitics (as theorised by Giorgio Agamben) at this critical juncture, as well as the possibility of an alternative future which resembles Timothy Morton’s notion of the ‘symbiotic real’. By focusing on the mobility biographies of selected characters within the text - those who live within the ‘dome’ and those who are forced to survive outside its walls - this article demonstrates how climate biopolitics aimed at sustainable survival will inevitably be at the expense of large sectors of the world’s population, while showing how everyone’s mobility will be impacted by a politics of adaptation, hence speaking to urgent debates on the topic of mobility justice as advanced by Mimi Sheller and others. Given the ultimately catastrophic consequences of such climate biopolitics, the trilogy’s alternative future prioritising ‘planetary biographies’ is equally crucial. In this way, the fictional biographies in Kim’s texts vividly demonstrate what is at stake in the real-world decisions currently being fought over by policymakers across the globe.

A Liquid Episteme: Roberto Bolaño, Fictional Biographies, and the Enlightenment

The lives that inhabit Roberto Bolaño's fiction serve as a contestation to the tenets of the Enlightenment. In this respect, water plays a key role in the author's poetics: a metaphor for defeat and madness which both reflects and muddies the horrors of Reason. By examining Bolaño's ability to create complex fictional biographies, this article identifies how these characters’ encounters with watery metaphors reveal the depths of Bolaño’s critique of the Enlightenment belief in an all-knowing and all-seeing Reason. To achieve our goal, we explore the lives of characters from four of his novels: 2666, Monsieur Pain, Amulet, and By Night in Chile. This article demonstrates how Bolaño conceives characters who are asked to take a stand in a world of diminishing certainties and changing tides. In doing so, he superimposes characters with minimal variations on the same backdrop of an ethically compromised world, like a scientist trying to pinpoint the exact moment that got us to where we now are.

“Truth! Truth! Truth!”: Image and Text, Fact and Fiction in Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando”

The use of photographic “evidence” was of particular interest to Virginia Woolf and it is well known that she included photographs in her real (though unconventional), as well as fictional biographies Roger Fry , Orlando and Flush . The use of such pictures, however, serves to problematise the reality of the photographic or biographical subject/object, the relationship between fact and fiction, and therefore the biographical genre itself. This essay focuses on Orlando (1928), a text through which Woolf wanted to “revolutionise biography in a night,” and where she undermined the supposed faithfulness of the form towards its subject by presenting false photographic evidence. In this mock biography both image and text are fakes, thus altering the purported adherence to facts which is a prerogative of the genre and highlighting the self-referentiality of both the photographic subject and the text. The combination of words and pictures determines the collapse of denotation and knowledge: concepts of “reality” and “meaning” fall apart, and a new idea of “truth” begins to evolve. Woolf’s creative construct of her subject through words and pictures shows that the photographic image is never neutral, thus reminding us of Susan Sontag’s claim that “although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.”

‘Fictional Biographies’: creative writing and the archive

This article considers the archive as a source of inspiration for creative writers, specifically focusing on how writing can highlight and expose silences within the archive. This is developed through a case study of a collaborative creative writing project at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), where students developed ‘Fictional Biographies’ from archive research and resources. The article looks at the history of creative writing in the context of archives; the article then focuses on the case study, drawing in theories of archival silences, after which we conclude by reflecting on outputs and learning outcomes of the project.

Le bio-bibliografie immaginarie di Bolaño e le biografie infedeli di Orecchio come approcci letterari alle verità della storia, della vita

Anche se Davide Orecchio non lo avesse dichiarato in modo esplicito, il fatto che sulla sua formazione letteraria abbia avuto un peso, tra altre letture, pure quella dell’opera di Bolaño viene suggerito dalle caratteristiche stesse del suo lavoro. Vanno in quel senso tanto una pratica della scrittura quale attività che cresce raccogliendo e travestendo altra scrittura (in un pullulare di richiami intertestuali), quanto un confrontarsi con la storia attraverso il frequente uso di documenti d’invenzione. A parte un riconosciuto debito di entrambi nei confronti di Borges, a legittimare un accostamento dell’opera di questo narratore contemporaneo italiano a quella di Roberto Bolaño, che è stato un autore culto per molti della generazione formatasi nell’ultima fase del XX secolo, non sono, del resto, solo alcune strategie narrative, ma anche un insistito sguardo sulla presenza del male nell’esistenza umana. Si tratta in ogni caso di punti di convergenza che non tolgono nulla a specifiche identità di stile e a precise posizioni di poetica.

Shakespeare’s Eternal Voice: Fictional autobiographies of the Bard

The paper focuses on two fictional works that strive to revive Shakespeare's voice, that is Christopher Rush's Will (2007), and J. P. Wearing's OThe Shakespeare's Diaries: A Fictional Autobiography (2007), which although significantly different in terms of form find common ground in employing the first-person narrative in order to depict Shakespeare's life. The author analyses the image of the Bard that emerges from the novel and the diary, and the way in which both works transform the facts known from certain documents or based on extensive research into a fictional narrative. He argues that although both works try to satisfy the curiosity of the readers, they belong to two different types of representations found in fictional biographies of the Bard, and therefore the images they create address different kinds of collective desires and fantasies of the mass audience.

Spanish Holocaust through Memory Representation: Fictional Biography of Neus Català

Spanish Holocaust through Memory Representation:Fictional Biography of Neus Català Ana Corbalán "No reivindicamos la verdad como unprivilegio, sino por justicia y reconstituciónde una parte histórica que arranca de 1.936;por el respeto a nuestras muertas, pordesagraviar a tantas mujeres olvidadas." (Neus Català, De la resistencia y la deportación 29) It is estimated that 15,000 Spaniards died in German concentration camps. However, the troubling reality that accounted for the repression experienced by the Spanish Republicans in occupied France and Nazi Germany during the Second World War has not been widely studied. Although not particularly well known, there are several testimonies, documentaries, and narratives that focus on the Spanish Holocaust.1 These narratives are especially traumatic because they describe the humiliations suffered by human beings who were stripped of their [End Page 368] dignity while detained in the Nazi camps.2 According to Michel Leiberich, these texts serve to explore key concepts such as: democracy, human rights, human values, human dignity, and freedom (118). Despite considerable scholarship about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, few publications explore the importance of Spanish women's roles during that time period, and scant attention has been given to the presence of female activists who fought against international Fascism.3 Recovering their silenced voices is the first step towards the rewriting of history, due to the scarcity of narratives that stress women's agency in the concentration camps.4 It is important to consider that the last survivors of the Spanish Civil War are currently in their nineties. Their advanced age means that little time remains to address, through retelling their stories, the damage suffered by exiled and deported women.5 By hearing these voices—from their memoirs, oral testimonies, and fictional biographies—we can understand their crucial role in the resistance against totalitarian regimes and how they protested the systematic violation of human rights that they endured during times of dictatorship and war. Thus, it is imperative that we [End Page 369] recover the missing information about women's activism in order to add their life accounts to the annals of history. One of these women is Neus Català, born in a small rural town in the province of Tarragona in 1915. She was politically active even in her childhood, due to her parents' affiliation with the Communist Party. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Català left Spain and joined the French Resistance until the Gestapo arrested her in 1943. Shortly after that, she was sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp where it is estimated that 92,000 people died. Her memory text, Cenizas en el cielo: La vida de Neus Català, written by Carme Martí in 2012, reconstructs this deportee's sufferings in Ravensbrück.6 At the time of the publication of this novel Català was ninety-six years old, and she felt the urgency of sharing her memories about her experiences in a concentration camp. The text recounts Català's most important life events: her childhood, her maturation, and her traumatic memories of war, repression, exile, and deportation. Using a female, feminist, and anti-fascist political lens, Cenizas en el cielo vindicates the memory of thousands of Republican women who experienced the humiliation of Nazi concentration camps. Consequently, Cenizas en el cielo reconstructs and reinterprets the forgotten history of the Spanish Holocaust through the eyes of a woman who suffered a systematic violation of her most basic human rights. The protagonist of the novel embodies an ostensibly real and historical figure. In a similar way, the fictional account of this witness in the camp allows the contemporary reader to understand the trauma suffered by millions of people who were detained in the Nazi camps. This text, alongside former testimonies from Spanish Holocaust survivors collected by Català in De la resistencia y deportación: 50 Testimonios de mujeres españolas, establishes an effective link to the study of women's historical memory, especially since, as Català's fictional narrative voice notes in Martí's novel, the deported women have been almost completely forgotten: "los deportados españoles son los grandes olvidados de esta historia, y nosotras somos las olvidadas...

The accountant as a nobody

The burden of this paper is to extract from a book called The Diary of a Nobody (Grossmith and Grossmith, 1892) what can be gleaned about the perception, both self - and external -, of the increasingly popular occupation of clerk/bookkeeper, towards the end of the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom. A discussion of the methodology adopted is first provided. The paper then proceeds to consider and discuss the complex but finely honed picture which emerges from the book itself. The first substantive part of the paper, therefore, argues that an effective, and possibly the most effective, way of researching into social and attitudinal aspects of the development of the accounting function and those involved in it, is through fiction and through works of art broadly defined. A number of illustrations and arguments are given to support this thesis. Given the lack of real biographies or autobiographies, we can use fictional biographies. A variety of other non-standard source documents are suggested. The remainder of the paper explores the chosen book in some detail. The picture that emerges is that the social role of the newly created army of clerks towards the end of the nineteenth century is confused and unclear. The self-perceived position of the (anti)-hero of the book is significantly more favourable than the general external perception would suggest. The role of a clerk in society was problematic. The approach adopted in this paper could and should be extended to other creative and artistic media, and to other countries and literatures. Considerable comparative insights should result from such developments.

Joanna McClelland Glass’ Mrs. Dexter and Her Daily and the Inter-play among Age, Gender and Class

Following the so-called revolution of longevity, which was initiated after the Second World War, and as a result of recent scientific and social changes, multidisciplinary studies of old age, aging and ageism have increasingly been regarded as a necessity in our contemporary developed -and aged- societies. Consequently, and together with gender, class and ethnicity, age has become a prominent social and cultural marker which is explored by different discourses both as an ever-changing site of identity, and as a potential source of social discrimination. Cultural representations of aging have changed throughout the last decades in order to accommodate the increasingly plural realities whereby old age can be recognized and categorized, thereby contributing to the transformation of ‘age’ as a construct and identity marker. Out of the various artistic and communicative channels whereby old age is constantly re-presented, the theater stands out as an especially enlightening medium through which the constructedness of aging and ensuing stereotypical visions of old men and women can be explored. This paper will analyze the re-presentation of aging and its intersections with the politics of gender and class in Joanna McClelland Glass’ Mrs Dexter and Her Daily (2010). As a naturalistic two-hander which constructs its protagonists through realistic psychological portraits, the last play that this Canadian-American playwright has published to date presents two female characters in their mid-sixties whose old age is not only submitted to “the double standard” through which women’s aging is measured, to borrow from Susan Sontag’s words, but also conditioned by their diverse social positions and distinctive fictional biographies. Using theater semiotics and the latest theories of cultural gerontology as the two main methodological frameworks for this particular case study, this paper hopes to demonstrate that the theater continues to be an invaluable source of inquiry with regard to significant aspects of human life. At the same time, it intends to highlight the centrality of the experience of aging in its interconnection with other identity markers such as gender and class, as well as in the discourses that are derived from them.

Де/ремифологизация образа Шекспира как драматического персонажа в биографической фантазии Дона Нигро «Успешные усилия любви»

<p>Находясь в самом центре западного канона, «Вильям Шекспир» давно превратился в один из его наиболее живучих культурных мифов. На рубеже столетий Шекспир — не только как великий художник, но и как активный «инициатор дискурсивных практик» (М. Фуко) — продолжает ощутимо присутствовать в нашей жизни, оказывая мощное воздействие на восприятие западной культурой наиболее фундаментальных категорий бытия. В эпоху постмодернизма распыленный шекспировский «текст», в состав которого входят, среди прочего, его научные и художественные биографии, играет заметную роль как в «высокой», так и в массовой культуре.</p><p>В статье исследуются стратегии, используемые американским драматургом Доном Нигро в его «художественной биографии» (Л. Эдель, И. Шаберт) Шекспира — пьесе-фантазии «Успешные усилия любви» (1981/1995), анализируемой в контексте распространенного ныне (под)жанра «автор как персонаж» (П. Франссен, Т. Хонселаарс, A. Фоккема, M. МакКеон и др.). В целом ядром обширной шекспирианы Д. Нигро выступает категория театральности во всем богатстве своих проявлений — от сцены как таковой до человеческой жизни, и далее — до мироздания, где художник/драматург приравнивается к Богу как демиургу.</p><p>В статье обоснована мысль о том, что, подвергая деконструкции традиционный миф о Шекспире как о романтическом Поэте, унаследованный от эпохи шекспиромании, Нигро заменяет его собственным мифом о Творце, раздираемом противоречиями между его человеческой и божественной природой.</p>

Time and Temporalities in Contemporary British War Plays – Roy Williams’s Days of Significance and Owen Sheers’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F.

This article investigates notions of time and history in two contemporary British stage plays addressing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, namely Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007) and Owen Sheers’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F. (2012). As the plays explore fictional biographies affected by war, it is the representation of individual temporalities that is especially relevant to this investigation. While Williams’s play already carries a sense of historicity in its title, time consciousness is an even more decisive characteristic of Sheers’s play. In both plays war can be read as a clash of time and temporalities. The characters’ experiences of war cause complex frictions in which temporal levels are suspended, blended and/or modified. What the individual initially experiences as unmanageable, is rendered accessible when embedded in trans-individual notions of the historical. The plays ultimately blend the time of war and the personal temporalities, resulting in modified versions of temporality under the impression of history.

John Banville and Benjamin Black: The Mundo , Crime, Women

John Banville and Benjamin Black: The Mundo, Crime, Women Carol Dell’Amico (bio) Using the pen name Benjamin Black, John Banville began writing crime fiction in 2006. By that time his career as a writer of prose fiction reached back over thirty-five years. Banville’s first published work was a collection of short stories titled Long Lankin (1970), after which two novels, Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973), followed. At this point Banville began writing novels in series, completing two tetralogies: the so-called “science” novels (1976–86) and the “art” novels (1989–97). The five novels published since the tetralogies (2000–12), while not presented as a series, also share key elements and dominant themes with his previous work, and each of the three series also contains a distinct trilogy. A novelist who has been writing in a series-within-series format for over three decades, Banville characteristically writes self-referentially by constructing texts out of canonical borrowings—some of which repeat across the fiction—and by using a form of mimicry. Indeed, most of Banville’s writing is profoundly intra- and intertextual, and the intertextualism is of a kind and extent that enables it to cancel the usual mechanism of allusion and to render the citations original in meaning and effect. Though Banville’s reputation has grown steadily over the years, his work has not lacked critics, especially those who have questioned the issues of gender the fiction has raised. This essay suggests that the highly successful work of Benjamin Black has not only secured for its author a prominent place among current writers of Irish crime fiction, but it also invites intertexual analysis as a form of engagement both with Banville’s earlier work and with those critics who have viewed negatively the author’s articulation of questions of gender in the novels. [End Page 106] The Fiction of John Banville Banville’s series begin with the science novels, which explore connections between science and art and focus on imaginative leaps of scientific discovery and artistic creation. The series opens with Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), fictional biographies of Nicolas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, while the third, The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), concerns an historian of science unable to finish his book on Isaac Newton. Mefisto (1986), the phantasmagoric concluding novel with a young prodigy as protagonist, is a bridging text to the series to follow. The trilogy embedded in Banville’s second tetralogy of art novels, so-called for the central place of paintings within them, shares a common protagonist: the books’ narrator, Frederick (Freddie) Montgomery, who murders a woman, is thrown into jail, and attempts to redeem himself and to atone for his crime.1 In The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995), Banville’s treatment of the imagination shifts from a focus on its “revolutionary” capacities to its susceptibility to fantasy, with Freddie’s crime following from a “failure of the imagination” and a failure to grasp the personhood of the woman he kills (215).2 That this crime underpins the trilogy points to the ethical content of the series as a whole, and has resulted in a new ethos-focused thread in the criticism of Banville’s work.3 The Untouchable (1997), the final work of the art tetralogy, is a fictionalized biography of Anthony Blunt, the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, who was unmasked in 1979 as the fourth Cambridge spy working for the Soviet Union. A bridging novel, like Mefisto it looks forward to Banville’s new exploratory focus on death, grieving, and loss through the Cleave characters that are present in the third trilogy (Eclipse, Shroud 2002, Ancient Light 2012) and in the other two books of the final series, The Sea (2005) and The Infinities (2009). The startling discipline of Banville’s work has elicited Violeta Delgado Crespo’s likening of Banville to Wallace Stevens, who thought of [End Page 107] his writing as his poetic mundo, a personal expressive system of modulating themes, symbols, and concepts that he developed over the course of his career (Crespo 306).4 Banville’s copiously plundered material—tropes, scenes, and voices—is adapted from canonical...

The Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 7–13 July 2013

The Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 7–13 July 2013 Gabriel Renggli (bio) The events of this year’s James Joyce Summer School in Dublin took place in the middle of a blazing heat wave (not too typical for that city) and an atmosphere of geniality (very typical of it). Clearly, the organizers — director Anne Fogarty, associate director Luca Crispi, and Fritz Senn, the school’s patron — could not have chosen a better time for the event, nor done a better job welcoming students and scholars from around the world to Joyce’s city for a week of lectures, seminars, and social gatherings. As in previous years, the academic programme consisted of lectures by a variety of guest speakers, which were held in the morning, followed by instalments of four week-long seminars, each focusing on one of Joyce’s major works, in the afternoon. And as in previous years, the lectures could profit from the ambience of a very Joycean location indeed: the Physics theatre of Newman House (home to University College Dublin when Joyce attended it there), where Stephen’s conversation with the dean about the words ‘tundish’ and ‘funnel’ in A Portrait is set. Although the school had no fixed topics, it was interesting to see that many speakers used the context of a summer school — open to newcomers to Joyce as well as experts and more advanced students — to address questions of [End Page 162] historical, political, cultural background, rather than more abstract issues. Many lecturers, though by no means all, talked about the contexts in which we can read specific characters or narratives. Professor Fogarty (UCD) opened the lecture series with an in-depth investigation of memory and history in ‘The Dead’, drawing our attention to the Battle of Aughrim (1691), which marked a failed attempt by the Jacobite forces to undo their defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The conflict is conjured up in Joyce’s story both through the song ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ and Gabriel’s anecdote involving the statue of William III on College Green. Fogarty suggested that the implicit presence of this moment from Irish history ties in with other spectres of the historical past that surface in ‘The Dead’, most importantly the appearance of Michael Furey, whose early death may be read as a symbol of traumatic history transcending personal loss. Dr Aida Yared of Vanderbilt University engaged us in a lively presentation on what, drawing on Umberto Eco’s theory, she termed ‘open works’. Yared’s case was for a balance between authorial originality and readerly engagement. Speaking of models for reading Ulysses, she proposed the analogies of the playground and of the (modern) art exhibition — two spaces in which your actions will make your experience different from other people’s, but within the limits already outlined. Developing the spatial metaphor in this way, Yared argued for a creative interaction that still seeks to respect a text’s uniqueness. As one example of such a playful and productive entrance point into the textual space and cultural context of Ulysses, she presented early twentieth-century postcards from her personal collection, some of which she very generously gave away to her audience. Dr Fritz Senn (Zurich James Joyce Foundation) spoke on the subject of the art of speech in Ulysses. Beginning with the observation that characters in Ulysses seldom express something in a straightforward way, he discussed figures of speech and lapses of speech in view of what he called ‘logodaedalia’, or the cunning use of words. By this he referred to the Irish oral culture that elevates speech acts — from the telling of an anecdote to the ordering of a drink — to the status of veritable public performances. This art of speech, Senn posited, complicates the relations in Joyce’s text between performance by the characters and performance by the episode’s other voices. The presentation by Dr Luca Crispi (UCD) centred on a twofold ‘biography’ or timeline: the fictional biographies of Molly, Leopold, and Milly Bloom; and the trajectory of the writing process that created these characters. Crispi gave a captivating introduction to genetic criticism by demonstrating how mapping [End Page 163] Joyce’s revisions...

Universal Salvation in a Universal Language? Trevor Steele’s Kaj staros tre alte

Abstract Extensive secularisation in Europe and several other parts of the world in recent decades has not diminished the attractiveness of Jesus as a theme in contemporary fiction internationally. Fictional biographies of him continue to appear in many languages. Among the novelists who have tapped their imaginations to fill in gaps in the canonical gospels and construct a Jesus who fits their own agenda is the Australian Trevor Steele. His work of 2006, Kaj staros tre alte, presents Jesus as essentially a supernaturally gifted healer but also as a teacher of universal brotherhood. Steele argues that the effectiveness of Jesus was severely limited by contemporary notions of Jewish apocalypticism and Messianism. Steele’s literary device for providing extra-biblical information about Jesus is a manuscript purportedly written by a Roman tax officer who was stationed in Caesarea approximately a decade after the Crucifixion. Discovered in 2001, this Greek text forms the fictional basis of Kaj staros tre alte.

Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama Debra Caplan Barbara Henry . Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. Pp. 229, illustrated. $70.00 (Hb); $35.00 (Pb). Jacob Gordin (1853-1909) was the central figure of New York's burgeoning Yiddish theatre culture at the turn of the twentieth century, a playwright whose efforts to "reform" the Yiddish theatre had a remarkable impact on [End Page 415] the development of the Yiddish stage around the world. He was also a Russian émigré, a political dissident, a would-be religious reformer, and an accomplished Russian-language journalist, theatre reviewer, and short-story writer. In Rewriting Russia, Barbara Henry offers a long-overdue and exceptionally engaging study of Gordin's career as a dramatist that, for the first time, positions Gordin's famous Yiddish plays within the larger context of his religious-reform efforts and his twenty-year career as a Russian author and journalist. Not only is Rewriting Russia the first scholarly monograph to treat Gordin's life and work, but within the context of Gordin's Russian activities, Henry's approach yields a rich and nuanced analysis that explains, fully and for the first time, the profound impact of Gordin's dramas on the development of the Yiddish theatre. Previous scholarship has tended to focus on Gordin's contentious position as a theatre reformer within the Yiddish-speaking immigrant community of New York (noting his famously bitter quarrels with the editor of the Forverts and powerful cultural arbiter Abraham Cahan) and to write off Gordin's dramas as simplistic translations or plagiarisms of renowned Russian and European plays, with little significance in their own right. Instead, Henry offers a compelling and thoroughly original perspective that draws upon Kristeva's notion of intertextuality to reframe Gordin's dramas as sophisticated literary adaptations. These plays, Henry argues persuasively, are best understood as "sustained critical dialogues with [Gordin's] source works, which assert Jewish continuity with European literature through its reinscription as popular Yiddish drama, while always subjecting that very generative process to scrutiny" (6). Juxtaposing Gordin's comparatively well-known Yiddish literary career with his lesser-known Russian political projects and literary output is no simple task and requires an extensive knowledge of the complex dynamics at play in both the Russian and Yiddish literary contexts of the period. Moreover, any effort to contextualize Gordin's plays is further complicated by the playwright's own largely successful efforts to obscure the details of his time in Russia via fictional biographies. Henry succeeds in overcoming both obstacles in this scrupulously researched study, which draws upon recently released records from the Tsarist police archives to dispel inaccurate rumours about Gordin's life and to clarify the details of the playwright's thirty-eight years in Russia. Chapter two, which deals largely with this material and provides a much fuller picture of Gordin's life in Russia than any other to date, stands out as among the most intriguing and surprising chapters in the book and lends substantial credence to Henry's argument and methodology. At the core of this book are Henry's close readings of three of Gordin's most successful plays: Der yidisher kenig lir [The Jewish King Lear] (1892), Di kreytser sonata [The Kreutzer Sonata] (1902), and Khasye di yesoyme [End Page 416] [Khasye the Orphan] (1903). Each of these plays fits perfectly into Henry's paradigm of a Gordin drama adapted from a Russian source text - in the case of these three examples, Turgenev's Stepnoi korol' Lir (1870), Lev Tolstoy's Kreitserova sonata (1889), and Turgenev's Asya (1858). While these detailed analyses offer a rich, comparative perspective on Gordin's process as a literary adaptor, Henry's argument would perhaps be better served by comparing these famous and successful adaptations to Gordin's less successful non-derivative dramas. Similarly, Henry might also have more thoroughly accounted for Gordin's adaptations of non-Russian source material (for example, his versions of Ibsen, Euripides, Goethe, and Hauptmann), which were often just as successful and popular as the three "Russian dramas" described in the book. At times, Henry's focus on establishing the...

Textual Criticism and Reception: The Case of Plut. Mor. 153f-154a

This paper aims to present a new methodology for the study of the ancient fictional biographies of the poets, which combines the resources of textual criticism with the approaches of reception studies. A useful case study to test this approach is the account of the story of the contest between Homer and Hesiod in the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi and in Plutarch, Dinner of the Seven Sages 153F-154A.This paper starts from the proposition that the fictional Lives of the poets reveal how the author was imagined, and how his works were received (e.g. Graziosi 2002, Hanink 2008, APA panel 2010). This paper uses this insight in order to question the principles used to reconstruct the texts of the Lives. It argues that variations in the manuscripts are often not the result of corruption, but reflect the innate flexibility of the biographical tradition. The Lives of the poets were used to reshape the figure of the author for specific purposes and readerships. Thus, although textual critics have tried hard to align different versions, and correct apparent contradictions and divergencies, this approach turns out to be unsatisfactory. A comparison between the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi and Plut. Mor. 153F-154A demonstrates this. In telling the same story, our two passages present many differences. These have either been ignored, or have been explained by arguing that Plutarch’s account is closer to the pristine version of the contest, and that the Certamen testifies to later developments (Richardson 1981). Far from being a pristine version of a lost Ur-text, this paper claims that Plutarch’s version is shaped by his specific concerns: for example, he depicts a contest between many poets, because the contest in Chalkis is meant to parallel the meeting of the seven sages.The role of Lesches as a contestant is textually disputed. The Teubner text (Paton, Wegehaupt and Pohlenz 1974²), following the majority of the manuscripts, reads: καὶ προύβαλe μέν, ὥς φασι, Λέσχης, ‘and Lesches, as it is asserted, proposed this [riddle]…’. However, Allen (1912) and (1924), Babbitt (1928), Kivilo (2000) and Koning (forthcoming) prefer the reading of manuscript O: προέβαλʹ ὁ μέν ὥς φησι Λέσχης, ‘and he –Homer – proposed this [riddle], as Lesches asserts’. Lesches thus becomes the narrator of the story of the contest. Some of the editors of the Little Iliad follow this reading, and claim that Lesches told the story of the contest in the Little Iliad, or even invent a second Little Iliad in order to accommodate the story of the contest (e.g. Evelyne-White 1914, Bernabe 1988). Lesches, then, becomes the Ur-author of the Ur-version of the Contest (Kivilo 2000).This paper argues that the reading in O is an ancient attempt to harmonise Plutarch’s version with the story found in the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, and that editors and critics should not suppose that Lesches played the role of narrator of the contest in Plutarch’s work – far less that a real Lesches included the story of the contest in the Little Iliad. Rather, Plutarch freely adapted the story of the contest so as to create an image of the poets which suited his purposes. He felt free to do so also because he considered the story of the contest a fiction in the first place (cf. Scholia to Hesiod’s Works and Days ad 650-659). This case study shows how ancient representations of the poets, because of their recognised fictionality, developed their own peculiar dynamic of reception and re-composition which deserves a textual approach able to account for their variability.

Augustine: A New Biography (review)

Reviewed by: Augustine: A New Biography Brent Shaw Augustine: A New Biography. By James J. O'Donnell. (New York: Harper Collins Publishers. 2005. Pp. xvi, 396. $26.95.) The subtitle of this new life of Augustine announces a biography. It is both that and rather more. Before O'Donnell's Augustine, there were two big standard works on Augustine's life. Peter Brown's now-classic Augustine of Hippo first appeared in the 1960's. It was a spectacular and pathbreaking work of genius written by a young man who was then only in his early thirties. Not without good reason does O'Donnell himself laud Brown as "Augustine's best biographer" (p. 73). Brown's Augustine appeared again at the turn of the millennium, with reconsiderations [End Page 132] that looked back on the author's original work from the perspective of a half-century of changes in which Brown himself had a large part. Then Serge Lancel's Saint Augustin appeared just before the turn of the millennium, first in French and then, within three years, in an English translation—a biography whose extraordinary quality was assured by the author's incomparable command of the whole range of ancient North African history. Whereas Brown's work set Augustine's life in the context of the development of Late Antique culture and thought, Lancel offered a more strictly biographical perspective that placed the man more firmly than ever in his African homeland and culture. O'Donnell's Augustine is not like either of these now-classic lives. His Augustine is not set in any context. Instead, the reader is taken for a sometimes breathtaking ride, invited to sense the forces involved in making the man from the inside out. The "more" that the reader gets is a postmodern rush. We feel the depression and anxiety, the rage and anguish of a man living his driven life of success and failure. Patently influenced by cybernetics, virtual and deconstructive currents, this Augustine is not a neat narrative retold in careful chronological order. It is a critical inspection that strives to break down the pieces of personality (p. 84). In the postscript that has appeared with the paperback version (2006, p. 7), the author confesses that he had toyed with the subtitle of "An Antibiography," much in the manner that my clothing has sometimes been derided as an Antifashion, I suppose. The result is anything but neat or intended to satisfy. O'Donnell's Augustine is a site of immense talent, huge ambition, and great frustrations whose self-fashioning, down to the center of the famous conversion, was deliberately constructed in his Confessions. Alert to the stratagems of deliberate amnesia and fiction, there is a constant drive to interrogate the subject. What is it that Augustine is not telling us? And why? In a man who was so attuned to his increasing celebrity, the tactic is useful and produces better insights. Moved by a hermeneutic of suspicion, O'Donnell is determined not to be seduced or hypnotized by his subject's words. In his prying apart, he does not shrink from imaginative reconstructions, fictional biographies, and counterfactual scenarios that might well make an Edmund Morris blush (e.g., pp. 51-52, 80-81, 171-172, 205-207, 230-231). He brings into the glare of his spotlight experiences that Augustine most wants us not to see—amongst others, his eleven (not nine, as he minimized) years as a devoted Manichee, and his beloved mother's involvement in the Donatist church. The personal story is set against a deep cultural background: the making of sermons, the writing of letters, the quality and knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Punic, and the complex and rapidly evolving template of late antique social relations. O'Donnell warns us, as we might expect, not to take the power of late paganism as gravely as it is presented to us: "Christian parody and polemic is taken too seriously" (p. 189). The fright of a great religious threat was needed in the forging of a new Christianity in the late fourth century. The polemics did serve one great end and personal success: "Augustine's part in shaping catholic identity was...

Aithôn, Aithon, and Odysseus

FROM the moment Odysseus awakens on the Ithakan shore until his final reunion with Laertes, the hero's return home is an exercise in disguise and revelation, in the course of which he equips himself with a number of fictional biographies and, twice, with false names. Eperitos, the name by which Odysseus introduces himself to Laertes, has been long recognized as significant and various interpretations of it have been proposed.1 The other false name, Aithon, has proved to be less fertile ground for interpretation, although it too has been seen as an intended nomen loquens.2 The general expectation that false names in the mouth of crafty Odysseus should be somehow meaningful is bolstered by the rarity of the name, and the importance of the narrative point at which it occurs. It is as Aithon that Odysseus faces Penelope for the first time after his long absence. The name comes only after a long build-up, and is twice requested by Penelope of her reluctant

SOME LITERARY AND POPULAR SOURCES FOR MRS HUMPHRY WARD'S THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE

IF Henry James had counted the publication of Robert Elsmere as a public occasion, the appearance of The History of David Grieve in 1892 was no less momentous; Macmillans, at any rate, paid out E7,000 for the work's American rights. The novel was issued in three volumes, a format already archaic, and this hint of traditionalism carries through into its aesthetic conception as well. The chances offered by this expansive medium for enriching cross references and the assembling of supportive thematic material were not neglected by Mrs Ward, and two years later she published Marcella, her last three-decker work. Though David Grieve is a long novel, it treats only of the childhood and earlier manhood of its hero. As in many Victorian fictional biographies, character is felt and imagined in a cumulative manner with lines of continuity and enquiry finely judged and pointed. Adult life takes up the larger portion of the work, and here the usual strains and anomalies which arise between a man's

Memory for proper names: Age differences in retrieval

Memory for proper names was investigated using (i) a questionnaire and (ii) an experimental task. Subjects ranging in age from 20 to 80 years recorded details of naturally occurring retrieval blocks for proper names. Age differences in the nature of the blocks were apparent. For the young and middle‐aged partial information about the target name was usually available and non‐target candidates were elicited during search for the target name. Elderly subjects more frequently experienced an ‘empty gap’, with no partial information about the target name and no candidate names. The experimental task required recall of names and descriptions from specially constructed fictional biographies. There was an age‐related deficit in recall of all types of information, but in all age groups memory for names of people was poorer than memory for names of places, occupations and hobbies. Some explanations for the difficulty of retrieving people's names and for the age effects are considered.