Literary Object Research Articles

Vozes ininteligíveis e silêncios orais: epistemologias do Sul em Rap global

Rap global (OESTE [SANTOS] 2010) é um livro de poemas publicado por Boaventura de Sousa Santos sob o pseudônimo de Queni N. S. L. Oeste. O meu intento nesse artigo é compreender, por meio da leitura e fruição desse objeto literário, como se dá o seu processo de instanciação e encenação enunciativa. Defendo que tal processo, na obra em foco, engendra a produção de geografias discursivas. A partir do exame de alguns trechos do rapoema de Santos pretendo evidenciar a relação de tais geografias com os conceitos cunhados pelo sociólogo, a saber, a “tradução intercultural” e a “ecologia de saberes”, ambos integrados às “epistemologias do sul”, do sociólogo português.
 Palavras-chave: Rap global. Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Encenação enunciativa. Geografias discursivas. Epistemologias do Sul.

Reading in the (post)digital age: Large databases and the future of literature in secondary English classrooms

ABSTRACT While “born digital” artefacts such as video games and e-books have been part of secondary school English in Anglophone countries for over two decades, databases of mass-digitised (hence “re-mediated”) literary texts are yet to have a significant presence in, or influence on, literary work in subject English. The authors contend that engagement with these digitised texts requires a postdigital “literary literacy”. They explore how “distant reading” – applying digital tools to large-scale data to identify patterns beyond the scale of human perception – offers a form of postdigital literary literacy that can be enacted alongside others, including productive reading and code switching. Using the example of the To be continued… database of fiction originally published in 19th and 20th century Australian newspapers, the article argues that postdigital literary objects offer new literary knowledge and new ways of thinking about literary study and teacher expertise in English in the 21st century.

Adding a digital dimension to fan studies methodologies

Digital fan fiction challenges the sovereignty of the literary object and necessitates a reevaluation of textuality. Fan fiction may be taken as a form of networked digital narrative that exists electronically and shares features with the printed book. With a focus on the paratext as a site of transaction between fan fiction writers and readers, it is possible to attend to a negotiation between work and text. By using computational methods—word frequency analysis, topic modeling, and decision trees—to analyze fan fiction paratexts as they are used on the online fan fiction repository Archive of Our Own, it is possible to reevaluate the fan fiction paratext and the notion of the fan fiction text.

Phenomenology, Literature, Dissemination

Abstract This article analyzes the complex relation of phenomenology and literature in the work of Husserl and Derrida. In the first part, I show that the limited ideality of the literary object necessarily situates it in a derivative region of phenomenology. In the second part, however, I problematize the regional status of literature by elaborating a brief but important footnote in which Husserl broadens the concept of literature to embrace all cultural products whatsoever. Yet, because even this broadened concept of literature ultimately remains secondary for the phenomenologist, it only redoubles and ratifies the submission of literature to the more ideal objectivities of mathematical disciplines like geometry. The third part, finally, mobilizes Derrida’s notion of “dissemination,” prepared in and unintelligible apart from his early engagement with Husserlian phenomenology, in order to broach a notion of literature that the phenomenologist can neither circumscribe nor describe.

A comparative study of Pearl S. Buck’s and Mao Dun’s Chinese rural works

Pearl S. Buck is famous for her novels about China. However, this American novelist receives much censorship from the Chinese intellectuals because they are convinced that Buck misrepresents China in her works. As one of the most outstanding figures in Chinese modern literature, Mao Dun composed a short story A Ballad of Algae (1936) specifically to confront Buck’s The Good Earth (1931). Taking a comparative analysis as the methodology and Chinese rural morality as the theme, the article argues that the essential reason for divergence between Buck and Mao Dun lies in their pursuit of different literary objectives. Buck’s cultural orientation and Mao Dun’s political orientation result in their different understanding of the moral problems in the Chinese rural regions.

Restoring Medieval Manuscripts in the Eighteenth-Century: Completing or Perfecting?

While today’s digital era raises new questions for the preservation of medieval manuscripts, the desire to preserve and transmit the literature of the Middle Ages is not new. Manuscript n°14 of Le Mans library (France) represents a telling example of these preservation attempts. The codex contains a peculiar version of La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin, an epic biography of the French constable written near the end of the fourteenth century. Although the text is complete, only half of the folios date from the Middle Ages. Additional parts were added to the text by an 18th-century Maurist monk, who decided to copy other medieval manuscripts of the Chanson in order to flesh out the fragments and rebuild an entire text for future readers. This reconstruction was the occasion for him to reshape, comment and annotate on the medieval codex as well as the copied text. As a result, arguably, he gave birth to a new literary object, similar to the original, yet still different. However, how did an eighteenth-century monk perceive what we now call restoration? How medieval is this literary object of the eighteenth century? Focusing on the manuscript’s description, this article seeks to answer these questions by trying to understand what practices can tell us about manuscript perceptions after the Middle Ages.

CHALLENGING INGARDEN’S “RADICAL” DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE LITERARY

Ingarden’s phenomenology of aesthetics is characterised primarily as a realist ontological approach which is secondarily concerned with acts of consciousness. This approach leads to a stark contrast between spatiotemporal objects and literary objects. Ontologically, the former is autonomous, totally determined, and in possession of infinite attributes, whilst the latter is a heteronomous intentional object that has only limited determinations and infinitely many “spots of indeterminacy.” Although spots of indeterminacy are often discussed, the role they play in contrasting the real and literary object is not often disputed. Through a close reading of Ingarden’s ontological works and texts on aesthetics, this essay contests the purity of Ingarden’s ontological approach and the ensuing disparity between real and literary object, particularly on the question of spots of indeterminacy. I do this by demonstrating the following five theses: 1) Ingarden’s claim that the real object has an infinitude of properties belies an epistemology, and we should instead conclude that ontologically the real object’s properties are finite. 2) Ingarden’s a priori argument that absent properties of real objects are ontologically determined is unsound. 3) The radical difference between the infinitude and finitude of givenness and absence of the real and the literary object ought to be relativised. 4) Indeterminacies within the novel are concretised in much the same way that absent properties of real objects are intended. 5) Literature makes claims that have a truth value that we can attribute to their author.

Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel by Natasha Hurley

Reviewed by: Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel by Natasha Hurley Jessica Floyd Natasha Hurley Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2018. xviii + 320 pp. Moby-Dick begins with the echoing and enduring statement "Call me Ishmael," which identifies the narrator and commands readers to consider his identity immediately. The opening imperative sets the stage for learning the character's inner workings, especially as he interacts with everything around him, and demands that the reader attend to a complex interiority as it is juxtaposed against the raging tides of the sea. In Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel, Natasha Hurley considers one of Melville's earlier novels, Typee, along with other late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American novels, short stories like Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "A New England Nun," letters like those passed between Charles Warren Stoddard and Walt Whitman, and the literary collection of Stoddard himself, as sites of world-making and identity circulation, especially gay and lesbian identities, with a focus on the same inner voice and circular relationship between self and world crystallized in the scene of Ishmael's call. Her argument is predicated on the idea that these cultural objects are the site of an emergent queer identity: that they capture a synergy between articulating a sense of self and actively shaping identity for the outside world. The key term throughout her analysis is circulation, and she threads this circularity both inside and outside the fictive worlds investigated. Circulation is paramount to her argument, which is that if we look closely at circulation, whether how narratives represent it or how texts are passed around, we can chart a slow emergence of queer identities that announce themselves as forcefully as Ishmael. Hurley's exacting inquiry provides an opportunity to contemplate the shaping of identity differently, to find the pulse of human interiority in circuits that hum across the narratives of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literature, eventually connecting together to make way for later, more concrete articulations of identity and personhood. Circulating Queerness challenges scholars "to queer the very ways we read texts" (xv) and produces a critical argument that contains the promise to [End Page 97] impact multiple fields, including Melville studies, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American studies, potentially early modern British and American literary research, and gender and sexuality studies. The book "track[s] the force of literary objects and representations as accumulated, interactive, side-by-side, engagements of texts with other texts that make it possible to conceive of queer subjectivity itself" (xi). Hurley attends to literature that has historically been earmarked as queer and argues that if scholars place such works along a continuum, a steady materializing of immanent queer identities comes into focus. Unlike other scholars who have explored queer identities in literature, she decided that "rather than take as my object of study the figure of the subject of sexuality as a matter of textual representation," she would "examine instead the textual conditions of its possibility" (xi). Queer lives develop in literature through a constant process of relation that is sometimes only historical and situational but is, just as often, born of what she presents as a subtle process of circulation both within and outside of cultural material that delivers it into contemporary consciousness. For Hurley, contemporary thought visits its theoretical frameworks onto literature but is also influenced by the worlds generated through literature. She ventures that "the gay and lesbian novel emerges at the intersection of two different, yet connected, processes of cultural development: sexual type evolution and the emergence of a subgenre for the novel" (14). She points to an embryonic queer identity, predicated on circulation, found in narrators and characters attempting to capture complex interiorities at odds with the world around them and, too, to novels in which queer identities and characters come to acquire queerness. Queer identities are those that are forever in the process of being shaped through relationships internal and external. Each chapter calls attention to particular novels, characters, or collectors. Typee, the archival papers of Stoddard, literature about the lives of old maids, The Bostonians, and the writings...

The Future of the Word: Banal Futurism and Portuguese Journalism

This article proposes a cultural history of a literary object, by describing the uses of the word futurism in the Portuguese public sphere during the 1920s and the 1930s. In this context, futurism became a meaningful referent in the experience of modernity, particularly of the massification and mechanization of sounds and images in the period. The first part of the article will guide us through the dominant representations of futurism by the literary intelligentsia, while in the second, we follow a specific group — a new generation of modernist journalists trying to secure a place in the canon of Portuguese modernism in the 1920s — in their creation of a true banal futurism, a ‘catchphrase’ used to negotiate dramatic historical transformations. Keywords. Futurism, journalism, mass culture, interwar period, intellectuals, literary canon.

Criticism and Judgment

Criticism and Judgment Robert S. Lehman In his seminal 1937 essay "Criticism, Inc.," the founder of the American New Criticism John Crowe Ransom describes literary criticism in the following terms: "Criticism," he writes, "is the attempt to define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature."1 This brief account of what we do, or ought or do, as critics appears in Ransom's essay very much in passing, in the context of an attack on New Humanist moralism.2 There is no reason to believe that Ransom means for it to be anything like a definitive statement on the aims of the discipline. And as the essay progresses, Ransom makes clear that the approach to literature that he is prescribing "shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject."3 Enjoyment, then, as well as those evaluative terms that convey enjoyment—"moving, exciting, entertaining, pitiful; great, if I am not mistaken, and admirable, on a slightly different ground; and, in strictness, beautiful itself"—these have no place in an objective criticism.4 Nonetheless Ransom's initial formulation deserves attention, not so much because in its brevity and offhandedness it undercuts loftier appraisals of our work, but because—like a perfect New Critical poem—it manages to pack into a relatively small linguistic container a remarkably complex ideational content. Again, criticism is the attempt to define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature. What Ransom has done here is bring together two conceptions of literary criticism (and, at least implicitly, two conceptions of the literary object) whose complementarity is easy to assume only so long as they are kept safely apart. First, there is the notion that to criticize is to define the characteristic values of literature; and, second, there is the notion that to criticize is to enjoy the aesthetic values of literature. The first task finds the critic doing to literature something very much like what Ransom is doing to criticism: dissecting it, figuring out how it works. The second task—which is probably better described as an invitation—locates the critic in the same position as the perhaps uncritical reader, who finds pleasure in the words on the page. In most metacritical writings, these two tasks—let's say the task of formal analysis, on the one hand, and the task of (or invitation to) aesthetic judgment, on the [End Page 1105] other—are distributed between distinct individuals or across discrete moments. So, we can tell a story in which judgment begets analysis, with the critic (or critic-to-be) struck by a poem, a painting, or a piece of music that he or she then labors to understand. Or we can tell a story in which analysis begets judgment, a story in which the fruits of critical analysis help the amateur finally to grasp, and so to enjoy, a particular work of art. At least in the aforecited epigram, Ransom steers clear of these stories; instead, he brings analysis and judgment together through that least narrative of all figures, chiasmus—define and enjoy / aesthetic or characteristic—the effect of which is further secured through the ambiguity of the culminating reference to literature's values. This gesture having been made, enjoyment is pushed out of "Criticism, Inc."—and out of New Criticism proper—as an instance of what will, a decade later, be termed "the affective fallacy."5 In what follows, I am going to focus on the relationship between formal analysis and aesthetic judgment, on why this relationship is problematic in a way that most contemporary critics fail to recognize (blinded, perhaps, by just-so stories or rhetorical slights-of-hand), and on what it would mean to bring analysis and judgment together in a way that might be productive for the discipline of literary studies.6 If I begin with Ransom, the reason is not that I take his work or the work of any of the New Critics to be a model of how to accomplish this task. The reason, rather, is that this work tends to be characterized—by its supporters, by its detractors, and occasionally by the New Critics themselves—as...

The Future of the Word: Banal Futurism and Portuguese Journalism

This article proposes a cultural history of a literary object, by describing the uses of the word futurism in the Portuguese public sphere during the 1920s and the 1930s. In this context, futurism became a meaningful referent in the experience of modernity, particularly of the massification and mechanization of sounds and images in the period. The first part of the article will guide us through the dominant representations of futurism by the literary intelligentsia, while in the second, we follow a specific group — a new generation of modernist journalists trying to secure a place in the canon of Portuguese modernism in the 1920s — in their creation of a true banal futurism, a ‘catchphrase’ used to negotiate dramatic historical transformations. Keywords. Futurism, journalism, mass culture, interwar period, intellectuals, literary canon.

TIME AND ITS INDETERMINACY IN ROMAN INGARDEN’S CONCEPT OF THE LITERARY WORK OF ART

The time of the literary work of art is a schematized aspect of the represented objectivities of the literary work. Roman Ingarden’s analysis of the time of the literary work extends upon Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness but nevertheless remains consistent with it, insofar as within a literary work as well as actuality, an objective time or literary objective time is constituted from an experience of temporal objects (or in the case of the work of art, represented objectivities). The time of the literary work of art is experienced through its represented objectivities and depends on an already existent concept of objective time. (We conceive of the time of the literary work of art as a variant of actual time.) The time of the literary work, however, gains an indeterminacy, as the author of the literary work is able to manipulate our experience of time within the literary work by predicting how the reader will concretize its events, characters, and objects with respect to time. I use Alain Robbe-Grillet’s representation of the centipede in La Jalousie as an example of the possible manipulations of time, explicable through Ingarden’s analysis of time in the literary work of art.

The Epigrams of Crinagoras of Mytilene: Introduction, Text, Commentary ed. by Maria Ypsilanti

Reviewed by: The Epigrams of Crinagoras of Mytilene: Introduction, Text, Commentary ed. by Maria Ypsilanti Kathryn Gutzwiller Maria Ypsilanti (ed.). The Epigrams of Crinagoras of Mytilene: Introduction, Text, Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 578. $130.00. ISBN 978-0-19-956582-5. More than a half century ago the field of Greek literary epigram was made accessible to a wider range of scholars and readers by two editions with basic commentaries: A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams (Cambridge 1965) and The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Philip and Some Contemporary Epigrams (Cambridge 1968). Scholarship made possible by these foundational collections has since advanced in two directions. One involves development of methods for reading epigrams as legitimate literary objects, particularly when treated in groups or in poetic contexts. The other involves publication of comprehensive commentaries on the epigrams of individual epigrammatists, which include textual issues and explanations of the finer points of poetry, as well as literary readings. The two approaches are complementary, and Ypsilanti's commentary on Crinagoras is an excellent example of blending traditional editorial subjects with literary interpretation. Crinagoras is a figure of note who should be better known to both Greek and Latin scholars. Inscriptions from Mytilene indicate that he belonged to a prominent family of Lesbos and that he made at least three trips to Rome on [End Page 233] official business between c. 48 and 25 bce. His literary output makes it likely he spent a significant amount of time in Italy, where he clearly received literary patronage from high-status Romans, including members of the imperial family. A fair number of his epigrams reflect these relationships, such as poems that accompany gifts (as later in Martial)—a silver pen, a toothpick, a bronze oil flask, and a garland of roses (3–6). Of particular interest are epigrams that concern a gift of Greek poetry: a box holding five books of Anacreon's poetry presented to Antonia (36 bce–37 ce) on a special occasion (7), and a copy of Callimachus' Hecale given to Marcellus, to encourage him to follow the example of the young Theseus (11), the latter epigram perhaps being Crinagoras' best known. The fifty-one epigrams that remain to us were preserved in Philip's Garland, intermingled with others of the Julio-Claudian era in a rough alphabetical order. Ypsilanti argues that Crinagoras' "preference for personal experiences and current events over the traditional topoi of the genre" led to a "'renovated' type of court-epigram" that breathed "new life" into the epigrammatic tradition (13). Although she does not say so, it is highly likely that Philip selected from a collection of epigrams made by Crinagoras himself, mirroring his own gifts of Anacreon and Callimachus. In her Introduction Ypsilanti presents the usual series of topics: life and work, language and style, meter, and manuscript tradition. Her presentation of the two main manuscripts from the Byzantine era is rather barebones, reasonably enough, however, since descriptions of these are available in other editions. She focuses rather on the lesser-known apographa of the Palatine Codex, manuscript copies of epigrams that were rediscovered at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Saumaise but first fully published only in Brunck's edition of 1772. The value of these apographa lies mainly in their marginal emendations, which have been but rarely acknowledged in modern editions. Ypsilanti's principal contribution to the topic is the attention she calls to Parisinus Coislinanus 352, which has escaped the notice of most other editors. She argues at length that this apographon, written c. 1633 and ascribed to Philaras, bridges the two branches of apographa, the French and the Dutch, and possibly derives directly from the famous lost copy made by Saumaise. Oddly, however, in her apparatus criticus she cites, in the traditional manner, the select apographa that were the basis for the first printed editions, when in my view it is better practice to cite the earliest apographon that contains a given reading. Quibbles with such a full and well-presented commentary are just that, and therefore I limit my examples. Three epigrams that are of doubtful authorship because of differing attributions...

Negritud, oralidad y carnaval en la narrativa afrodescendiente peruana del siglo XX (Gálvez Ronceros, Martínez y Charún-Illescas): hacia la conformación de un corpus autónomo

La presente investigación aborda la obra de los tres principales referentes de la literatura afrodescendiente producida en el siglo XX en el Perú: Antonio Gálvez Ronceros (Monólogo desde las tinieblas), GregorioMartínez (Canto de sirena) y Lucía Charún-Illescas (Malambo). Se propone analizar la obra en conjunto de estos tres autores con el objetivo de establecer los rasgos comunes que comparten. Se realiza un análisis comparativo de las estrategias discursivas y lingüísticas empleadas en estas obras que, en conjunto, comparten el objetivo común de problematizar las representaciones tradicionales del sujeto afroperuano por medio de una toma de conciencia lingüística de la naturaleza del objeto literario. Asimismo, se considera la importancia que tiene la tradición de la cultura cómico popular en las formas de la literatura carnavalizada descrita por Bajtín, en los universos fccionales de las obras de estos autores, y no solo en la obra de Gregorio Martínez, comotradicionalmente se ha afrmado.

From the Library to the Lab: Close Reading Rabbits as a Cross-Disciplinary Experiment

This article situates the practice of close reading within a cross-disciplinary context that moves beyond literary criticism and linguistic analysis to sociology and the history of science. A comparative approach to the practice of close reading adds to the toolbox of literary critics, who often focus on meaning rather than material. After a review of close reading from a literary point of view, I introduce Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) concept of microprocessing and Rheinberger’s (1997) concept of pragmatogony as equally valid forms of close reading from the disciplines of sociology and history of science. If a combination of these techniques can be applied to literary works, literary critics can analyze the epistemic value of literature, which requires experimentation with the material of a literary artefact, which in turn affects the author and critic. Through examples of engaging literary material in addition to representations, literary critics can experiment with and redefine the literary object as an epistemic object and the practice of close reading as undefined at the time of creation and interpretation. By way of metaphors and folklore about rabbits, a novel with a white rabbit, and genetically modified rabbits, this article offers three conclusions that appear when the practices of microprocessing and pragmatogony are applied to literary works. The reconceptualization of the practice of close reading, 1) transforms the author and reader into hybrid scientists-artists, rather than prophets, geniuses, or intellectuals; 2) transforms the literary object of study from a book to any material object; and 3) transports the practice of close reading from the library to the laboratory.

Kirjanduslikest linnauuringutest / On Literary Urban Studies

Kirjanduslikest linnauuringutest / On Literary Urban Studies

(Re)Staging the Postcolonial in the World: The Jaipur Literature Festival and the Pakistani Novel

Abstract This article reasons that the Jaipur Literature Festival between 2008 and 2011 attempted to institute via polemics, judgment, and celebration the category of the Pakistani novel in India by importing an alterity industry. By failing to contextualize alterity in a South Asian context, the festival reinforced a national, linguistic, and religious division between India and Pakistan. It produced a category like “Moonlight’s Children” as an “other” to an imagined Indian literature that is confused with a post–Salman Rushdie postcolonial and global anglophone canon. However, this analysis of the discourse produced at the festival by the discussants and the audience shows that a coconstituted South Asian literary history was consistently placed against a regionally competitive model. Importing alterity to produce an Indian or Pakistani literary identity was undermined by an attitude of disavowal toward the literary object and received categories like the global anglophone, postcolonial literature, and world literature. The author argues that this is not postcolonial resistance; rather, it is a trepidation to arrive at a conclusion, because to conclude is also to value, evaluate, and declare the existence of the “other” phantasmagoric literary identity and history.

Bibliofármacos: Subversiones Poéticas de la Medicina a través de la Palabra

Al hablar de libro, solemos referirnos a un formato específico, el del códex; sin embargo, este es solo uno entre muchos posibles. El auge del códex por razones prácticas condenó a la desaparición a una variedad importante de formatos textuales y homogenizó las formas de vehicular textos. Así, se relegó, e incluso se condenó a la desaparición, a una gran variedad de transmisores textuales. Este estudio vindica en primer lugar la inclusión en los estudios literarios de aquellos textos editados en formatos distintos al códice. En segundo lugar, centra el análisis en objetos-libro relacionados con la medicina. Tomando la palabra – logos – en su sentido clásico como remedio, propongo el término bibliofármacos para referirme a una serie de libros presentados en forma de medicinas – cajas de pastillas, botes de cápsulas, etc. – producidos y escritos por poetas y artistas españoles del siglo XXI. Su lectura tiene la intención de convertirse en una práctica terapéutica personal y social. Finalmente, se señala que el soporte de la escritura potencia las posibilidades de los usos de ese objeto-libro cargando de connotaciones el texto que transmite. Esa conjunción entre escritura, objeto y medicina crea una sinergia que ofrece al lector un singularísimo objeto literario.
 DOI: https://doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_7-1_10

Jerusalem in London: Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Diasporic World

Prompted by the publishing phenomenon of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem cookbook, this paper considers the discourse(s) of place elaborated by an emergent network of Middle Eastern chefs-in-diaspora. Focusing on Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s Jerusalem and Ottolenghi cookbooks, I argue that cookbooks can be productively analyzed as literary objects with an actor-network methodology. The particular story presented by Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s work is one in which distinctions are repeatedly raised and then dismissed in order to find common ground between Israel and Palestine. Ottolenghi may be an Israeli Jew and Tamimi a Palestinian Muslim, but both men are London expatriates and restaurateurs. The literary dimensions of their cookbooks attempt to harmonize personal narratives with the commercial forces at play in cookbook publishing: peace sells better than conflict, and diasporic nostalgia never goes out of style.

Introduction: ‘Who Could Ever Read This?’

In H.C. for Life, That Is to Say… Jacques Derrida describes his first reading of Helene Cixous’ writing as an encounter with an ‘unidentifiable literary object’ [objet litteraire non identifiable] ...