Literary Encounter Research Articles

Samuel R. Delany as Genre Flaneur: Encountering Science Fiction in Dhalgren

ABSTRACT: Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975) moves through different genres and styles of literature in much the same way that Walter Benjamin's flaneur moves through the spaces of the city. Delany as a writer makes contact with any number of other traditions outside of science fiction, but he expresses no radical desire to revolutionize sf or move it into mainstream literature. Delany does not assimilate or synthesize outside influences into his work so much as he encounters them. In Starboard Wine (1984), his book of sf criticism, Delany defines "encounter" in literature as the interpretation of a text associated with one genre through the reading protocols associated with another. I argue that "encounter" is analogous to "contact," a concept from Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) that relates to the real, physical interaction of individuals in an urban environment. Nowhere is this convergence of literary encounter and urban contact clearer than in his novel, Dhalgren. Dhalgren uses the city as a conceptual framework for encounters among a diverse array of influences including myth, poetry, autobiography, and literary modernism. These types of encounters are also plentiful in Delany's earlier work, but Dhalgren pushes them to a point where even sf itself is decentered and becomes just one more thing to be met in the space of the city.

Witnessing, Trans-“Species” Trauma Testimony, and Sticky Wounds in Contemporary Australian Poetry

Literary trauma theory has traditionally been a humanist concern, and the concept of witnessing, so central to the theorization of trauma, has focused on human experience and relationships. This article stages an interdisciplinary intervention by conceptualizing trans-“species” trauma testimony as a literary encounter involving a double-layered witnessing; the human artist witnessing nonhuman animals’ witnessing to the failings and crises brought about by human society. Focusing on a selection of contemporary Australian poems, a view emerges of poetic witnessing and testimony that exceeds and complicates the sub-genre lenses of old such as “nature poetry,” “ecopoetry,” and “protest poetry.” I propose a new conceptual category that testifies to traumatic structures and consequences of human practices. I explore how this testimony proceeds through a two-way channel of witnessing in which nonhuman animals are active witnessing agents and not merely witnessed by humans. I concentrate on witnessing as primarily experiential, as a corporal, affective operation in which the senses figure centrally. I argue that when poets witness nonhuman animal experience in poetry, testimony advances as an ethical engagement in an act of solidarity and advocacy. Poetry offers productive potential in this respect due to its affinity for engagement with the senses, its capacity to communicate heightened affect, and its scope for expression, articulation, and evocations of meaning outside of conventional sense-making and the limits of rational understanding.

Un début dans la vie par Mathieu Bermann

Reviewed by: Un début dans la vie par Mathieu Bermann Ann Williams Bermann, Mathieu. Un début dans la vie. P.O.L, 2022. ISBN 978-2-8180-5521-2. Pp. 176. Questioning one's own perspectives is never easy but is necessary, as human interactions show time and time again. Un début dans la vie reminds readers of this from the outset and quickly pulls us out of complacency and into self-reflection. Readers soon discover that the narrator is a writer himself and quite introspective, and they realize that this novel will not simply guide them through a Balzacian plot or character development (despite the hommage in the title). There will be much more. The intertwined stories of all the characters focus on a provincial French family drama, with at its heart, Malo, a horrid child. At four and a half years old he already has a vile reputation that has reached even the narrator, a close friend of Valentin, the creature's uncle. In the hands of a less-gifted writer the rather banal plot twists would not excite. The real richness of the book, however, resides in the questioning of perspectives that Bermann proposes throughout. At first glance, it seems he is giving us permission to judge his characters quite harshly. In the first chapter, "La barbarie," he sets up Valentin as the gossiping and somewhat unkind uncle responsible for the narrator's negative preconceptions of the little boy (whose actions, nonetheless, deserve the criticism they receive). He gives little quarter to Marie, Malo's mother, narcissistic and inattentive to her two children, and in the second chapter, aptly entitled "Disparaître," she does just that; she runs away, leaving her parents to watch over her children. But here's the rub: the author-Bermann does not let the narrator-author-maybe-Bermann get off scot-free. Malo, Marie, and all the characters have redeeming qualities, reasons for being who they are. And the narrator sees that he can't just go with what he's been told. And so, neither can we. By the time we get to chapter four, "Le roman de Malo," we know that there is a self-reflexive writer in charge of this book, and we see that he's taken over the literary encounter we're having. The somewhat disconcerting switch from the first-person narrator to an omniscient one was heralded by the chapter title, but we do have to pause to adjust as we read Malo's story and follow him through episodes in his life unknown to our initial narrator. In chapter five (and at this point, readers are sincerely grateful for the chapter divisions), our first narrator returns, and we relive moments, even with similar wording, from the beginning of the novel. But, and here's where Bermann excels, we cannot help but have a different perspective. In a sense, we know too much. The narrator-author takes responsibility for writing this life and even proposes a series of ninety-nine numbered optional events that Malo might live. The novel's last chapter explores the question "Pourquoi écrit-on?" (167) and the effect that writing has on reader and writer alike. One certainty? In writing this book a very real author takes us on a literary adventure that we will not soon forget. [End Page 220] Ann Williams Metropolitan State University of Denver (CO), emerita Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Queer Disabled Bodyminds in the Fairy Tales of Dinah Mulock Craik and Oscar Wilde

Abstract: The potential influence of Dinah Mulock Craik on Oscar Wilde's fairy tales has been often remarked but seldom analyzed. This article suggests that Wilde enters a dynamic engagement with Craik's literary fairy tales, particularly in their shared critique of nineteenth-century notions of deviance and wholeness. Locating these texts at the intersection of disability studies and queer theory, this article uses Margaret Price's conception of bodymind to read Craik's The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak (1875) and Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (1891) as a complex literary encounter that subverts ableist assumptions regarding "a sound mind in a sound body."

Buried in the desert and lost in the city: Gothic spaces in Egyptian feminist writing

ABSTRACT This article considers the non-diasporic Egyptian feminist literary encounter with modernity through Gothic spaces. The dissociative relationship to fearsome spaces demonstrates that there is no symbolic place for women in Egypt’s (patriarchal) modernization. Egypt is often depicted as a woman, and Al-Samman’s work on the wa’d al banat motif – the daughter who is erased through burial – is used here to explore Egyptian feminist texts’ rejection of the conflation of space and subject in the patriarchal symbolic order. These spaces are read as Gothic through what Luce Irigaray calls “dereliction” and the Warwick Research Collective’s theorization of “combined and uneven development”. The article considers Gothic “bewildered” spaces in the palatial home and the city in Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze, a forest in Nawal El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam, and Bedouin estates and the desert in Miral Al-Tahawy’s novels The Tent and Gazelle Tracks.

California Treason: Halldór Laxness and Upton Sinclair

ABSTRACT Years before he attained international acclaim, the Icelandic author Halldór Laxness spent almost three years in the United States; however, few scholars in American studies have delved into Laxness’s pivotal experience in California or his consequential literary encounter with Upton Sinclair. Using American and Icelandic sources, this article maps Laxness’s travels through a transnational California culminating in an incident of political suppression that reveals the risks of radicalism during the 1920s. Foregrounding how Laxness confronted economic inequality and disparaged nativist patterns in American society through his book Alþýðubókin, a collection of essays published in 1929, this article also situates Laxness’s work in a broader tradition of left-wing dissent, while also revealing the influence of the muckraking style on Laxness’s politics and prose.

‘Witnessing the Violence of the Settler State in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song’

A Canadian literary scholar based in Australia, I read “Aboriginal/Indigenous” Australian and Canadian literatures in English as sites where the ways in which we perceive racial and cultural violence might be re-configured. Cognizant of the role that literary studies discourse has had and continues to have in these nations as a tool for the maintenance of official, state-recognised ‘reconciliation’ narratives, my work looks instead to the literary encounter itself as a potential site for registering, or witnessing, the violence that the settler state attempts to screen off behind the scenes of its official attitudes towards reconciliation. This article will explore the concept of literary witnessing in an archive of trans-Indigenous literature across settler colonial states, linking award-winning authors Alexis Wright (Waanyi, writing in Australia) and Lee Maracle (Sto:lo, writing in Canada). Analysing Wright’s Carpentaria and Maracle’s Celia’s Song, I trace how these novels enact and inspire, but also complicate, witnessing in Canada and Australia (both of which maintain official policies of inclusion and multiculturalism, but are actually held up by a regime of continuing racialized violence). I also examine how these works of literature model ignorance and choosing to turn away as a form of violence and a roadblock to justice. Finally, I ask how these novels might provide models for subjectivity and justice that subvert the judiciary systems of these settler states, dislodging ‘witnessing’ from its place in discourses of state-authorized “justice”, and placing it in the realm of Indigenous law and the potential of an ethical (literary) encounter.

Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England

Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England

Translating Trakl: James McAuley’s Encounter with the Cultural Other

Translation theorist Laurence Venuti has written how a translator, in “a Romantic transcendence” can lose “his national self through a strong identification with a cultural other.” TS Reader, 20) Australian twentieth-century poet James McAuley’s reading and translation of the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl presents a significant literary encounter. Cosmopolitan by nature, McAuley, as a young poet, had been drawn to, and translated, the German language lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Few of McAuley’s translations of Trakl are included in his Collected Poems(1971 and 1994); they appear in a separate posthumous collection (1982) and in his essay “The Poetry of Georg Trakl” (1975). This article offers a literary appreciation of McAuley’s translations and his commentary on Trakl’s imagery, prosody, symbolism and world view which McAuley described, borrowing Baudelaire’s term, as “a landscape of the soul.” It considers the hypothesis of translation as travel. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s theory of influence it examines McAuley’s encounter with Trakl in his late work, translations and poetic dedication (“Trakl: Salzburg,” 1976) written after visiting Salzburg in 1973. A comparatist approach traces Trakl’s influence, the discovery of affinities or parallel paths with the earlier poet who might be considered, in Bloomian terms, to be McAuley’s “gnostic double.”

Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange by Nan Z. Da

Reviewed by: Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange by Nan Z. Da Hsuan L. Hsu Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange. Nan Z. Da. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $75.00 (cloth); $74.99 (eBook). A Chinese translation of "Rip Van Winkle." A speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson honoring the Burlingame-Seward treaty. A translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" inscribed on a Mandarin fan. The autobiography and poetry of Yale's first Chinese graduate, who founded a school for Chinese exchange students in Hartford. Judging by the stature of the figures and institutions involved, we might expect that the archive of nineteenth-century literary encounters between China and the United States would have generated lasting networks of influence. However, as Nan Z. Da demonstrates in Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange, these transnational, cross-cultural events were characterized not by cross-pollination but by intransitivity: they were "simultaneously momentous and superficial," exchanges in which nothing is exchanged (2). Although this quality of intransitivity, wherein the content of communication "slides like water off a duck's back," might appear to minimize the value of these Sino-U.S. encounters, Da makes [End Page 587] the persuasive, counterintuitive argument that the very "formality" of these occasions enables us to understand the distinctive way in which literature mediated Sino-U.S. communication (28, 1). Writing against a core assumption of many transnational literary scholars, Da argues that foreign literature was mobilized not for the transmission of new ideas but "as a conceptual shortcut that eased social projects and political enunciation" (3). Rather than take at face value the multitude of diplomatic, historical, and literary historical celebrations of moments of cultural transmission, Da argues that we should attend to the lightness and ephemerality of cross-cultural contact. By closely analyzing the formality and intransitivity inherent in some of the nineteenth century's most frequently cited episodes of transpacific literary encounter, Da models an empirical approach to the study of literary exchange—one that is sensitized to the myriad ways in which other people's literature was mobilized without any investment in transpacific cultural or political transmission (whether in the form of lasting literary influence, cultural assimilation, or political reform). Intransitive Encounter develops a historicized method of reading that blends "surface reading"—with its close attention to material and linguistic surfaces rather than a search for deeper hidden meanings—with clearly articulated insights drawn from sociologists of communication such as Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Bruno Latour. Each of the book's six chapters considers a fascinating and carefully curated instance of Sino-U.S. literary encounter. Drawing on an impressive knowledge base that spans theory, sociology, China studies, American studies, Asian American studies, and book history—as well as her unusual (for an Americanist) capacity to rigorously interpret texts as they flow between English and Chinese translations—Da provides compelling accounts of the historical context and theoretical stakes underpinning each of these encounters. Drawing on China's role as a site of intransitivity in Western historiography, Washington Irving's writings about China, and an unattributed Chinese translation of "Rip Van Winkle," chapter one reframes Irving's tale of historical insularity as a staging of unsociability set in a counterfactual "Chinese-Dutch America." Chapter two coins the term "reformality" to resolve the apparent contradiction between the late Emerson's disassociation from political reform and his appearances as a speaker uttering "rote niceties" at public events dedicated to rehearsing Sino-U.S. formalities (64). Da articulates the theorization of influence as an ephemeral transfer of energy that shaped Emerson's thinking about both literary influence and reform (63). Continuing to examine the idea of "mutually reinforcing reform projects" energized by Sino-U.S. encounter, chapter three turns to the figure of Yung Wing: at once "the first Chinese to make a career out of Sino-U.S. relations and institutionalized cultural exchange" and a writer who "had surprisingly little to say about the cultural exchange [he] actually enjoyed" (102). Reading Yung's autobiography alongside his Chinese-language poems, Da offers a nuanced corrective...

An emergent sense of the literary: Doing children’s poetry translation in the literature classroom

This article brings together findings from translation theory, the poetics of children’s poetry, and the pedagogy of translation, in an attempt to theorise the practice of poetry-translation in the literary classroom. I argue that translating children’s poetry in the context of translation workshops mobilises skills, and encourages ways of thinking about poetry, that espouse particularly well one of the complex challenges of literary education: namely, triggering in learners an emergent sense of the literary. Poetry-translation, I contend, allows for profoundly experiential engagement with some of the most sophisticated, and least easily articulated, aspects of the aesthetics of literature – prominently, the resistance of the literary text to paraphrase, the lack of a clear content-form dichotomy, and the embodied aspects of the literary encounter. Because translating is never just writing, but always already writing one’s reading, the translation of poetry in the literary classroom requires pupils to capture, experience, and take ownership of their encounters with literature, in order to re-express them. I first explain the practice of literary translation in the classroom; I then talk about contemporary poetry translation theory and its deeply phenomenological approach to text. I next show why the particular poetics of children’s poetry situate that kind of text ideally for a pre-semantic, intuitive approach to poetry translation. Finally, I look at the writing process as a way of turning the pupil into what Roland Barthes calls a poéticien, a person whose poetry-writing does theoretical work.
 Key words: children’s poetry, translation, literary education, aesthetics

Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett. Lesley Larkin

Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett. Lesley Larkin

Arthur Schnitzler and Scofield Thayer: A Literary Encounter between Viennese Modernism and America

Already in his lifetime, Arthur Schnitzler enjoyed international popularity. Especially in the United States, Schnitzler was translated, often staged and even filmed, and, as a representative of the European avant-garde, he also influenced American modernism. The determinants of this transatlantic cultural transfer are elucidated in a case study examining Schnitzler's contact with Scofield Thayer, the influential publisher of a periodical that was central for American modernism, The Dial. A review of their hitherto unedited correspondence reveals the roles that Thayer and Schnitzler played in the intercultural exchange between two important centres of modernism, Vienna and New York, in the period between the two World Wars. The article thus highlights the importance of Schnitzler as an intercultural mediator as well as a transferred authorial persona.

Arthur Schnitzler and Scofield Thayer: A Literary Encounter between Viennese Modernism and America

Arthur Schnitzler and Scofield Thayer: A Literary Encounter between Viennese Modernism and America

Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett by Lesley Larkin

Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett by Lesley Larkin

The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary CriticismRace and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett

The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary CriticismRace and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett

What Are the Chances? Psychoanalysis, Telepathy, and the Accident

This article argues that Freud introduces the question of occultism in order to exclude the accident from the internal, psychical domain. The accident must be evacuated, for it is only by isolating a domain into which external randomness no longer penetrates that psychoanalysis gives itself a chance to be a science. And yet, as this article shows, the difference that makes all the difference when it comes to distinguishing science from superstition hinges on, and is determined by, chance — and a literary encounter.

Cross-channel cavaliers

ABSTRACTCavalier poetry has often been regarded as quintessentially English: a product of the Caroline court, a fervent aspect of Civil War royalism and a very English version of amorous classicism. This article argues a contrary case: that in significant ways Cavalier verse was indebted to continental poetry in one or other of the European vernacular languages, defined by continental culture and recognized by contemporaries for these qualities. I explore poetry writing in relation to the activities of Cavalier poets in Europe before, during and after the British Civil Wars, either as diplomats, other kinds of political agent, soldiers, tutors, exiles, merchants or just as simple travellers. European poets also came to England, and, while firmly preoccupied in their own business, also directly confronted English matters and people, and wrote poetry about their experiences that may be seen as an integral part of English courtly, literary and royalist identity. I draw on two French examples and one Dutch example, all kinds of libertine verse. English Cavalier verse was strongly, distinctly and enduringly marked by this international literary and experiential encounter, and in some continental poetry we have a new category of Cavalier verse to acknowledge and explore.

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine

Rebecca Harding Davis, Tillie Olsen, and Working-Class Representation

The literary encounter between Tillie Olsen and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, which Olsen rediscovered in her 1972 Feminist Press edition of Davis's work, is a landmark event in working-class studies. Olsen's criticism of Davis's work resists the ghettoization and dismissal of working-class literature that still persists in contemporary literary studies, balancing concerns of class and of gender without devaluing either. Historical scholarship demonstrates that Davis mischaracterized the working-class culture of iron workers and other skilled workers, failing to understand the pride and strong sense of autonomy those workers maintained; Davis often represents workers as victims and uses racial metaphors to describe oppression. Olsen also misread some aspects of nineteenth-century working-class culture as represented in Davis's work. Nevertheless, Life in the Iron Mills is, as Olsen claimed, an important critique of the ideology of capitalist America.