Fragmentary Form Research Articles

THOUGHTS, MAXIMS, CHARACTERS: FRAGMENTATION AS A PRINCIPLE OF MORAL NARRATIVE IN THE 17TH CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE

The article is devoted to the understanding of the aesthetic phenomenon of the 17th century French literature, which consists in the close connection of the fragmentary form with the ethical content of discourse. The corpus of aphoristic texts created in 1656–1697, i.e. the books “Thoughts” by Blaise Pascal, “Maxims” by François de La Rochefoucauld, as well as “Characters or Mores of the present century” by Jean de La Bruyère are chosen as the object of research. In the process of work we systematise the methods of analysing this phenomenon in the Western and Russian traditions: the “cratylist” approach (Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey and Jean Starobinski), the “medical” method (Louis Van Delft, Mariya Neklyudova), “new publishing schemes” (Emmanuel Bury), as well as “secular” (Robert Garapon). We note the influence of topics which has established itself as a method of scientific discourse and gnomic genres of a didactic nature. In the result, we show that the French aphoristic texts of the 17th century clearly differ from the previous tradition by an attitude towards anthropological aestheticism and the absence of a didactic purpose.

"Anything of Note": Recovering "Lost Life" in the Psychoanalytic Archive

Abstract: This essay engages with the hitherto embargoed letters, drawings and case notes of Stella Coomber ("Susan"), the subject of Marion Milner's case history The Hands of the Living God . Using these documents as a starting point, I decode the identities of medical staff, institutions, and contacts whose names are disguised in Milner's book, and reconstruct some of Stella's life behind the scenes of, and after, Hands . The letters disclose her project of writing an autobiographical companion volume to Milner's, a project which was never realized. In later letters Stella is increasingly despondent about her failure to write this book, feeling that her life has been wasted, for she has not produced "anything of note." The essay suggests that there is a way of reading her "notes" as themselves both autobiography and counter case-history. I approach Stella's correspondence as a piece of life writing: not a traditional narrative, but one whose fragmentary form gives expression to her complex and exemplary experience.

Norwegian, Danish—or French? A Scattered Missal and Its Provenance

Abstract: Most books that existed in medieval Norway and Denmark are now lost or exist only in fragmentary form. The fragment collections of the Norwegian and Danish National Archives and the Royal Library in Copenhagen hold thousands of remnants of manuscripts, an invaluable source of knowledge of medieval book culture. The entwined history of Norway and Denmark represents a potential methodological challenge, as fragments from the same manuscript can sometimes be found scattered among collections in the two countries. This article examines such a case, showing how a single fragment from a twelfth-century missal in the National Archives in Norway was matched with several fragments in the Danish collections. The identifications, which were rendered possible by increased access to digital images, provide new insights into the missal’s likely origin and medieval provenance, putting us on the trail of an important Danish scriptorium.

The divine and the open text: Five steps for reading Hölderlin's Homburger Folioheft

AbstractThis article deals with Hölderlin's Homburger Folioheft. It elaborates on the thesis that the question of God or the divine can contribute to exploring both the richness of the poet's extensive manuscript, which fans out in many textual stages, and its fragmentary form. I argue that, despite its fragile textual form, the collection must be perceived as a unity and that reading it means oscillating between the textual stages without privileging the last version. I show that the reference to the divine often can be found at the core of the poet's vast changes to the text. The absence and return of the divine introduces a transformative dynamic into the text, a dynamic about which Hölderlin himself reflects in some passages.

Anarchist Domesticities: From DIY Culture to DIY Politics in Consent Zines

Abstract Contemporary radical and anarchist movements have made the home a central site of political contestation in ways that mirror a return to domestic spaces in recent critical thought. This essay argues that an “anarchist domesticity,” which is marked by an awareness of violence’s omnipresence, finds its clearest expression in anarcha-feminist zines about responses to sexual assault and interpersonal violence. The essay reads these “consent zines” first as texts that reconfigure zines’ do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos as a DIY politics and thereby seek to intervene directly in political struggles; and second as texts marked by encounters with traumatic experiences, which provides an alternative explanation for their fragmentary form. As articulations of radical domesticities, consent zines are, I argue, literary texts that speak to vital contemporary political issues.

Critiques de Molière, de Rousseau à Baudelaire : idéologie, psychologie, esthétique

"Molière’s Critics, from Rousseau to Baudelaire: Ideology, Psychology, Aesthetics. This paper deals with a number of interpretations that have been given to Molière’s work, namely that undertaken by Rousseau in his Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles and those attempted by Baudelaire in fragmentary form in many of his writings. Rousseau’s and Baudelaire’s perspectives are ideologically divergent, but a closer reading reveals also psychological and aesthetic differences. The shifting perspectives between these authors are all the more surprising because Baudelaire was not only a critic of Molière but also a critic of Rousseau, yet he drew inspiration from the writings of both in his poems. The binary, linear hermeneutic is overcome here in favour of a triangular, or even plural, reading, as voices such as Sainte-Beuve’s or Nietzsche’s are occasionally summoned to diversify the possible points of view. Keywords: Molière, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Le Misanthrope, ideology, psychology, aesthetics."

Documenting Wordless Testimony

This article considers what it means to give plants a voice as witnesses to nuclear events. It examines two texts that attempt to represent the nonverbal testimony of irradiated plants through a hybrid approach of text and image: Sugihara Rieko’s Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees (Hibakuju junrei, 2015) and Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur’s The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (2016). Published a year apart, both texts focus on the afterlife of nuclear catastrophes: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Sugihara’s book is an account of the hibakujumoku – trees that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and continue to produce new growth to this day. Combining maps, photographs, interviews, and short essays, Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees is intended as an immersive guidebook to the nearly 170 irradiated trees located within a two-kilometer radius around Hiroshima’s ground zero. It presents these trees as “living witnesses” whose subsequent flourishing has provided human survivors with a conceptual figuration of destructive plasticity. Marder and Tondeur’s The Chernobyl Herbarium formally resembles Sugihara’s Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees, and likewise combines text (a combination of short theoretical essays and personal remembrances of the Chernobyl meltdown) and images (Tondeur’s photograms of plants grown in the exclusion zone) into a slim volume that calls for a rejection of language as the sole means of bearing witness. According to Marder, Tondeur’s photograms “bring out the testimony of the plant,” and yet the same procedure renders these plant witnesses “specimens,” full of radioactivity but devoid of life (something Sugihara’s book avoids through the medium of photography). The Chernobyl Herbarium is an attempt to capture, in fragmentary form, the limits of language in the conceptualization of plant life and in the proper conceptualization of the Chernobyl disaster. Ultimately, both texts are experiments to “think the unthinkable and represent the unrepresentable,” to borrow Marder’s words, through a deep, speculative engagement with the botanical realm. As wordless testimony is given voice through human–botanical intra-action, the plasticity of plant life (its capacity to adapt and change) is highlighted, and this allows us to locate moments of phytomorphism – the attribution of vegetal qualities to the human – in these two self-proclaimed “guidebooks.”

Popluna: una dea sidicina in vesti greche

In the territory of ancient Teanum, the sanctuaries of Fondo Ruozzo and località Loreto have returned in fragmentary form two cult statues which, at a distance of fifty years between them, offer different images of the Sidician goddess Popluna. In Fondo Ruozzo Popluna is represented as a Greek goddess with a pig according to the Demeter model (late 6th century BC), in località Loreto as a standing figure with children on her shoulders according to the local model of the kourophoros (mid-5th century BC). The diversity of the two images is generally explained through the evolution of the Sidician culture towards an increasingly autonomous indigenous identity. In contrast to the interpretation of cultural phenomena in an ethnic perspective, the article explores the possibility that the representation of Popluna in Greek guise testifies the will of the Sidician élite to extend its network of relationships in the direction of the Tyrrhenian coast controlled by the powerful Hellenic city of Kyme.

Work-life integration, job contentment, employee engagement and its impact on organizational effectiveness: a systematic literature review

PurposeThis paper aims to study the interlink between work-life integration, job contentment and employee engagement. The notion of how far work-life balance (WLB) policies have a throwback on employee engagement has been presented with shreds of evidence of previous studies carried out in the timeline of 2005–2021 in India. The purpose is to bring forward comprehensive studies together, which are available on piecemeal form in the fragmentary form, to draw a firm conclusion about work-life integration policies and their parallelism with job engagement and organizational effectiveness. Furthermore, this study intends to develop a theoretical framework using Dubin’s methodology on organizational effectiveness in relation to work-life integration, job contentment and employee engagement.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on systematic literature review of papers reviewed from across databases of Scopus, Emerald, EBSCO and Google Scholar. The keywords used for the search were WLB, work-life integration, job satisfaction, job contentment and organizational effectiveness and also a combination of these words was used to pull down the relevant papers. A systematic literature review was undertaken on the topics of work-life integration, employee engagement and organizational effectiveness. These articles were then read and scanned with the overview on abstract and further these articles were selected on the basis of relevance to the current study. Those articles which showed interconnectedness between the identified variables of organizational effectiveness in relation to work-life integration, job contentment and employee engagement as antecedents were reviewed and a theoretical framework model is put forth using first part of Dubin’s methodology (1978) for theory building. The posited Model named A4 on organizational effectiveness using deductive approach is built on constructs, interaction, logic and propositions (Whetten, 1989).The theory will be functional in nature. With the given wealth of evidence, the injecting effect of work-life integration on employee engagement and pouring impact on organizational effectiveness becomes more transparent and clear. The authors have proposed a model for better organizational effectiveness through work-life integration policies.FindingsOne of the essential ingredients for better employee engagement is work-life integration policies, and organizational effectiveness becomes the by-product of the same. Innovative and friendly WLB policies assist employees to be more productive, dedicated and committed, resulting in better employee engagement which in the long run benefits the company in terms of effectiveness. WLB policies help to flatter down the burgeoning impact of complex work life on employee productivity and engagement. This paper concludes on the healing effects of WLB policies on employee engagement and organizational effectiveness and also proposes a model at the end. The posited model presents the antecedents for achieving organizational effectiveness.Research limitations/implicationsBecause the study is conceptual in nature with the proposed model, more empirical-based studies by experts with relevant stakeholders will add more rationalization to the current study.Originality/valueOrganizational effectiveness is the key to survival in today’s complex and competitive world. The authors investigated how organizational effectiveness can be achieved with WLB policies, which can have a linear impact on employee engagement, and ultimately organizations can bear the flowerings of positive output. This linkage and coupling between WLB policies, job contentment, employee engagement and organizational effectiveness deserve attention which the authors have attempted to explore. The outcome and results of the study will contribute to the existing literature in a more meaningful manner and will assist human resource development and policymakers to achieve organizational goals with driving employees. Managers will gain insight into the identified theoretical framework model for its implementation in organization. Future researchers with empirical studies can test the proposed theory to determine its success at organizational level.

The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy

Reviewed by: The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy Lydia Heiss The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. Pp. vii + 345. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1-64014-046-2. The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century sheds light on current thematic and form-based developments in German-language short story writing and fills the void created by a lack of recent academic publications on the genre. Fifteen years lie between its publication in 2020 and that of the most recent edition of Leonie Marx's important theoretical work Die deutsche Kurzgeschichte. But what exactly constitutes a short story? This is a central issue the volume seeks to address. One of the masters of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe, defined the short [End Page 396] story in his famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) as a story to be read continuously without interruption achieving a "unique or single effect" (61). The editors of the volume, Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy, unfold their central thesis that the short story form is ever-changing and elusive in terms of a fixed definition. Instead, they advocate for a flexible framework for future research, in which any critical approach—be it thematic, form-focused, or based on a certain theoretical perspective—must be specifically tailored to the author, text, or collection at hand. Concerning the German-language short story, the matter of genre definition is further complicated historically and methodologically by terminology, i.e., the difference between Erzählung and Kurzgeschichte, and the delimitation against other German short prose genres like the Novelle. Furthermore, in the twenty-first century, the World Wide Web and digital media have especially impacted the creation and distribution of short stories. The contributions to the volume are grouped into three sections and address form, function, and theme in the works of both well-known and up-and-coming contemporary authors. The theme-centered part of the first section begins with Katharina Gerstenberger's reflections on the "odd" hybrid genre of Berlin short stories, which takes city literature's primary focus on place and blends it with the short story's focus on plot. The second contribution with thematic emphasis by Todd Herzog explores the close link between Poe's definition of the short story and S. S. van Dine's definition of the detective story and stresses the innovative aspect of short crime fiction. The first section's form-centered part presents the short story as a performative, ambiguous, and subjective genre with a tendency toward the political. Emily Spiers highlights that especially its "dialogic" quality and "fragmentary form" are what make the short story performative (51). Kate Roy's contribution focuses on the shortest form of short story writing, the short-short, stating that its extreme brevity underlines the importance of the implicated and the unsaid. Helmut Schmitz closes out the second part of the first section with his reflections on similarities and differences between the German Novelle and the American short story. The second section comprises eight author-focused essays. In the first contribution on well-known writer Clemens Meyer, Gillian Pye detects a lack of academic attention to his short fiction despite his many prizes and wide press coverage. By showing how it is precisely Judith Hermann's sometimes criticized minimalistic style that makes the reader's own reality "present" (139), Leonhard Herrmann presents more recent works of Hermann as underrated by critics. Heide Kunzelmann expands on Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig's tendency toward open-endedness, moments of crisis, and the uncanny in the Western capitalist world and highlights how he makes the disoriented reader complicit in their construction. Through the example of Swiss author Peter Stamm's publication of his collected short stories, Andrew Plowman explores different approaches to collections, their self-reflexivity and construction. Heike Bartel and [End Page 397] Elizabeth Boa investigate the work of Ulrike Almut Sandig and Sylvia Bovenschen. They find that in the digital age, a time of acceleration, these authors use...

Rané písně Antonína Dvořáka: literární předlohy, rukopisné fragmenty, nakladatelé

In his songs from 1865–1882, Dvořák used poems by Czech authors Adolf Heyduk, Eliška Krásnohorská, Karel Jaromír Erben, Serbian folk songs translated by Siegfried Kapper (Czech-German author), Vítězslav Hálek and poems from the Dvůr Králové Manuscript. Most of the texts were probably obtained through Jan Ludevít Procházka, the important figure of Czech cultural life, who initiated Czech song writing for the concerts he organised in Prague. Some of Dvořák’s songs and cycles have survived in fragmentary form (Rozmarýna, s. op. and Like the Moon in the Heavens, No. 12 from Evening Songs, s. op.), some in the two different versions (the song Bouquet from Songs on Words from the Dvůr Králové Manuscript, op. 7). For the purposes of the Simrock edition, the composer arranged the song for the mezzo-soprano Amalie Joachim. Shortly after Dvořák’s establishment of cooperation with the Berlin publisher Simrock, this important publisher released Songs on the Words of Serbian Folk Poetry and four of the Songs on the words from the Dvůr Králové Manuscript. The singer Joachim supported the publishing of these editions, which were also dedicated to her by Dvořák.

The View from the Other Side: Memory and Mourning in Kashmir

SummaryIn this autoethnographic photo essay, written from the perspective of the first author, we dwell upon the loss of his brother and explore how he came to new understandings of friendship, loss, and spirituality in Kashmir through the ensuing process of grief and mourning. The narrative is multifaceted and deeply personal; the text and the photographs spread across time and cities connected by disparate fragments of memory. The essay is presented in ways dictated by loss and grief and the memory of a person rather than as an afterthought. We preserve the jagged edges and fragmentary form of such emotions to reflect the affective and visual response to this loss.

On making Marvellous: A performance about old age and death made out of conversation, improvisation and distillation

Here we respond to the making of Marvellous (2021), a theatre work about ageing, and reflect on mothering and daughtering generally and our relationships with our own nonagenarian mothers in particular. Using autobiographical and life writing techniques in three voices we (the makers) develop the content of Marvellous to portray the intimacies of ageing and approaching dying, of memory and forgetting. We use this opportunity to contextualise Marvellous within each of our theatrical histories mirroring the fragmentary form of our theatre piece.

Queer Trauma in Caitlín R. Kiernan’sThe Red Tree

AbstractDespite winning numerous literary awards, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work has received little critical attention. Scholars have focused on Kiernan’s reworking of H. P. Lovecraft’s influential weird fiction and have discussed Kiernan’s pioneering work in New Weird fiction and short fiction. As astute as much of the critical work is, none of it addresses the cornerstone of Kiernan’s fiction: trauma. This essay considers Kiernan’s novel The Red Tree as a queer American gothic novel dealing with trauma and its lingering effects on its witnesses. Through its complex, fragmentary form and its use of dream sequences and unconsciously produced narratives, the novel invites readers to witness and consume Sarah Crowe’s trauma while loosely theorizing the relationship between trauma and queer temporality and spatiality.

Music Video Gothic: Fragmentary Form at the Dawn of MTV

This article argues that the modern music video at the dawn of the MTV era embraces a logic of the Gothic fragment. Mobilizing an archive of gothic archetypes of haunting and monstrosity, the music video of the early 1980s confronts anxieties about its unshaped aesthetic character and discursive placelessness and its strained connections to absent textual wholes, performance cultures, and marginalized histories. Through a close reading of four seminal music videos from this time period – The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star (1979), David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes (1980), Blondie's Rapture (1981), and Michael Jackson's Thriller (1983) – I argue that the early music video incarnates a tradition of production, circulation, and decoding that I want to call Music Video Gothic. This tradition expresses latent concerns about the music video's aesthetic borders and intertextual relations with cultural and career narratives.

Encyclopaedic Autobiography in Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes (1975) and Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2004)

Abstract This article examines two works of autobiographical literature that are structured in fragmentary form and that engage explicitly with the formal and conceptual model of the encyclopaedia. One of the works, Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) is by a literary theorist, and the other, Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2004) is by a popular mainstream columnist and broadcaster. Both works, despite a disparity of tone and material, display similar convictions about the utility of what I will call ‘encyclopaedic autobiography’ as a form. I argue that these autobiographical works allow us to reconceive not only of autobiography but of the question of what ‘encyclopaedic literature’ might be.

Об оценке состояния комплексной безопасности промышленных предприятий

Introduction. The article presents a methodically described, consistent algorithm for assessing the state of integrated safety of industrial enterprises that are classified as hazardous production facilities. A study was conducted in choosing a method that allows calculating the weighting coefficients of the estimated measures, the implementation of which is provided by services (structural divisions) performing labor functions to maintain the integrated security system of the enterprises under consideration at the required level. Goals and objectives. The main purpose of the article is to identify the causes of hazards in cases when the danger (accident or fire) occurs with the coverage of two or more departmental (industry) security subsystems that are part of the complex security of the enterprise. Reduction of hazards (accidents and fires) at industrial enterprises is carried out at the expense of resource investments directed to minimize (exclude) the conditions (prerequisites) for the occurrence of risky events that can be transformed into accidents or fires. However, due to the limitations of the resource allocated by the enterprise to ensure its comprehensive security, there is a need to identify those places (points) whose risk indicator is high (critical), requiring a response to them without delay. It is proposed to normalize each event included in the content of the checklist for checking the enterprise for both industrial and fire safety. Methods. The choice of the hierarchy analysis method is justified, the use of which, based on a pairwise comparison of factors and alternatives, allows us to determine a local priority indicator for each element under study. Results and their discussion. The algorithm of sequential actions presented in the article in the form of a detailed description allows you to set an indicator measured in the form of a quantitative value for each event held. Conclusions. An example is presented in a fragmentary form showing the order and sequence of obtaining local and global priorities, where the definition of local priorities indicates the weight of a characteristically described event that caused a hazard (accident and fire). Obtaining weighting factors in the form of global priorities is directly related to the services (structural divisions) performing labor functions to maintain the enterprise's integrated security system at the required level. Key words: complex security, hierarchy analysis, factor, evaluation indicator, expert, consistency ratio.

Gender Trouble's Afterlife in Chinese Studies

As anyone who has written a book can tell you, when you finally finish wrestling with it and it is confined between covers, or tucked away in e-book form, it goes on to have an afterlife, sometimes quite a complicated one, which the author may glimpse only in intermittent and fragmentary form. An original and provocative book such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble will travel to places its author never anticipated and become embroiled in conversations the author may not overhear. A book's influence on another field far from its point of origin is not best assessed by a citation index—though Gender Trouble's numbers are massive. To take the measure of the work that Gender Trouble has done for scholars working in Asian studies (itself a constructed and constantly morphing category, like gender), we should ask how the book traveled. Which pieces were taken up by scholars of Asia, and what conversations and challenges did the book enable, not as a blueprint but as an incubator of locally grounded thinking? How has it been adapted, pruned down to one or two insights, or expanded into new domains?

Time Lost, Time Regained: Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

This article discusses Billy Wilder's 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which, though not enthusiastically received by audiences at the time, has subsequently become a work highly valued by critics and cineastes. Radically cut from its original four-part structure by the studio, it has come to be perceived as a film about loss. This relates both to its themes – suppressed love, the vanished world of Holmes and Watson – and to the history of the film itself, whose missing episodes exist only in fragmentary form. The first part of the essay looks at the ways in which the film constructs an image of Sherlock Holmes (played by Robert Stephen), with a focus on the question of his sexuality, while the second part turns to the ways in which the film became an ‘obsession’ for one writer in particular, the novelist Jonathan Coe.

Mare magnum: the Romans and the Mediterranean Sea between myth and history in the early Latin epic

This article aims to illustrate the significant presence of images of the sea in the early Latin epic poetry as a mirror of the evolution of Roman society, which was originally founded on land and agriculture. This presence was mainly due to the first Punic War, which took place largely at sea, and was experienced by the poets themselves, Livius Andronicus and Naevius, and subsequently remembered by Ennius. A review of literary passages, which implicitly refer to the Mediterranean, shows (albeit in fragmentary form) the interest in the mare magnum between Greek myth and Roman history, changing from the dramatic representation of the sea as an enigmatic and hostile environment, to that of a pragmatic relationship between man and sea that offered new chances in peacetime and a wider perspective on the world.