Self In Literature Research Articles

Friedrich Schleiermachers Monologen und der Athenaeums-Kreis Wirkungsabsicht und Wirkungswandel einer frühromantischen Schrift

Abstract Schleiermacher’s anonymous Soliloquies of 1800 were written as a Supplement to his likewise anonymous book On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers of 1799. They are addressed to the circle of intellectuals around the early Romantic periodical Athenaeum, to the „Holy family“ (Friedrich Schlegel), and moreover to the despisers of Transcendental philosophy whose state of discussion is reflected. Thus they belong to the history of modern individual thought. The form of the book follows the contemporary imitation of classical poetic form (Hölderlin) which was prevalent among the Athenaeum Circle as well. Schleiermacher discusses the separation of philosophy and life (Fichte), the forming one’s self and the forming of artistic works (Goethe), i. e. the dichotomy of individuality and artistry. He confesses himself not to be an artist. Schleiermacher’s intention in Soliloquies was to give philosophical idealism a personal depth beyond intellectual speculation. Looking back in 1803 he realizes, in the draft of a poem, that he had idealized his empirical self in his literary self. Except for a few remarks by Schlegel, who at first did not umask the author‘s anonymity, there was no reaction whatever from the Athenaeum Circle. Soliloquies later became a popular Protestant book for spiritual edification.

TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE VERY SHORT STORY: A STUDY IN SELECTED MODELS

At every intellectual developmental stage, literary genres appear that find suitable soil for growth, in which they cultivate their path and entrust them with their characteristics and characteristics, in order to seep into the cosmic space quietly and smoothly. They undermine it, limit it, and diminish its status and importance. Like everything new, he must fight his war to impose his literary self, which the writer generated from the womb of reality. Perhaps the nature of this contemporary materialistic time that we live in, and the rapid change taking place in it, affected many aspects of our lives; He made technology invade every home in the world, and turned cities and villages on earth into a small spot where nothing is hidden, thanks to progress and development in means of communication and transportation. What afflicted our material life affected our literary and cultural life, so we witnessed the emergence of new literary genres in their techniques, so we saw the novel, the play, then the article, the thought, the biography, the short story, and finally the very short story. And if it is logical to establish a relationship between the novel and the short story, then it is also logical to establish a relationship between the short story and the very short story. However, the distinction between these races is not valid only by looking at the size criterion only; The circumstances of the emergence of each race differ greatly from other races as well

Border Tales: Against Cosmopolitan Pessimism

Border TalesAgainst Cosmopolitan Pessimism Stefano Evangelista (bio) Two writers. Two encounters on the border. Two tales of borders as zones of transformation and renewal. The first is Oscar Wilde, who landed on American soil in January 1882. After moving from Ireland to Britain, Wilde now seized the opportunity to extend his international reach: America was to launch his career as poet—something that, in the event, did not work out as well as he had hoped—but also as a cultural mediator and exporter of aestheticism across the Atlantic. It is at the custom check in New York that Wilde said one of the most famous things he might never have said: "I have nothing to declare except my genius."1 This aperçu set the tone for his use of America as a stage of literary and mediatic self-fashioning. Another writer who fully grasped the theatrical potential of the border was Christopher Isherwood. Many years later, speaking of his arrival in Germany in 1929, he claimed that, on being questioned about the purpose of his journey by the passport official, "he could have truthfully replied, 'I'm looking for my homeland and I've come to find out if this is it.'"2 Isherwood was fleeing the repressive atmosphere of 1920s Britain, where the Well of Loneliness (1928), and its author Radclyffe Hall, had just been put on trial. Crossing the German border marked the symbolic birth of the writer out of a repudiation of national identity. That both of these border tales involve a dose of fabrication seems only appropriate: borders are places where identities are tested and individual lives are slotted into official narratives. Here, officials are on [End Page 75] the lookout for untruths and illegal traffics. Subverting the questioning ritual, Wilde and Isherwood represent crossing the border as a decisive step towards the making of a new self—crucially, in their cases, of a literary self. In this respect, it is also significant that they are both queer writers: at this time of social and legal persecution of homosexuality, the marginalization of the queer subject sharpens the critical stance towards citizenship and normative categories of belonging. Wilde and Isherwood cast borders in an ironic light. But there is another side to their tales of privileged self-fashioning: borders are also sites of trauma, best represented by the enforced displacement of migrants and refugees. In the course of the nineteenth century, New York Harbor where Wilde docked in 1882 was the entry point into America for millions of immigrants, mostly from European countries including Wilde's Ireland—a phenomenon that the website of the Ellis Island Foundation describes as "the largest mass human migration in the history of the world."3 The same foundation now runs a large oral history project of what it terms the "immigrant experience" and invites visitors to search its passenger databases in an attempt to recover some of the stories of those that were funneled through this narrow space that marked for many the beginning of a new life. It hardly needs to be stated that the German border that Isherwood crossed buoyantly in 1929 would soon become a zone of conflict and fear, as Germany's aggressive contravention of the territorial boundaries established by the First World War settlement plunged Europe and large parts of the globe into another disastrous war. In Christopher and His Kind (1976), Isherwood later tells the story of trying to bring his German lover, "Heinz," into Britain in the years leading to the Second World War: he failed, as Heinz was turned down at the border in Harwich on suspicion of trying to enter the country as an illegal worker.4 Keeping Heinz outside of Germany meant saving him from conscription and from the brutalizing influence of Nazism, but also from the very concrete threat of the regime's vicious prosecution of homosexuals. These two tales that bookend the long fin de siècle illustrate the importance of the border as a vantage point on the complex dynamics that regulate the formation of literary identities in relation to international flows of people and ideas. Historians have long seen the decades [End Page 76...

Self-Fashioning and the Intersectional Self: Teresa de Cartagena by Teresa de Cartagena

Abstract This article examines the way in which Teresa de Cartagena builds and presents her literary self in her literary works, Arboleda de los enfermos and Admiración operum Dei. The examination of this literary self-fashioning (a concept based, but different from, the one coined under the same denomination by Stephen Greenblatt) of Teresa de Cartagena is conducted under the theoretical framework of intersectionality, which allows to see the multi-layered and dynamic complex nature of this author’s literary self, and the implications this has for the understanding of her work.

Finding the Social Life of Rural Non-Elites in Roman Italy

Scholarship generally places peasants on a spectrum of socio-economic independence and dependence. While opinions are shifting away from subsistence, self-sufficiency, and socio-political autarky as mainstays of the peasant condition, the conventional focus on hierarchical relations persists, leaving horizontal or ‘relational’ ones neglected. To address this imbalance, I first detail our need to deal with literary (self-) representations of rural non-elite life. I use Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean discourse to develop a non-exhaustive range of peer-level interactions including hospitality, reciprocity, and cooperative work. Archaeology can help unravel how these played out, but as site 9 from the Ager Lunensis shows, we need better evidence. Nevertheless, I offer tentative possibilities about veteran interactions and the dynamics between villa and small farm workers from site 154 from the Ager Capenas and Case Nuove from the Roman Peasant Project. I close by alluding to the potential of integrating horizontal social relations in broader historical narratives.

Addiction and the Reinterpretation of Desire in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy

In the Consolation of Philosophy, the philosopher Boethius represents his literary self as imprisoned literally and metaphorically. Even while he is literally incarcerated, the text argues that his psychological dependency on the benefits of wealth, power, and fame represents a graver threat to his wellbeing. The allegorical Lady Philosophy acts as Boethius's interlocutor and medical practitioner as she guides him through a therapeutic inquiry designed to make him more consciously aware of ways that his dependency undermines his autonomous selfhood. Lady Philosophy's dialectical treatment presents the modern reader with a productive therapeutic model for addiction that warrants attention at a time when addictive behaviors are on the rise and when researchers question the dominant disease model. Lady Philosophy affirms Boethius's capacity for self-transformation. She regards his addictive habits as learned behaviors and guides him both in recognizing their latent harm and in redirecting his desire toward meaningful goals.

A Man Completely Devoid of Falsehood?

Abstract Gregory of Nazianzus is an important case study for the development of autobiography, not only because he is one of the first Christians to write extended autobiographical texts, but also because he does so in verse. This paper addresses two interwoven questions: which strategies does Gregory employ in his autobiographical poems in order to create credibility for his literary self, and which of the motifs that he uses are innovative or specific to his autobiographical poetry? I suggest that Gregory constructs credibility mainly through his relationships with different entities (persons, objects, ideas …) represented in the poems. In some of the relationships (e.g., with his opponents) one can find clear parallels with pagan poets while in others, specifically Christian elements come into play (sometimes blended with pagan traditions). Gregory’s most original idea appears in his relationship with his medium of communication, where one can find a justification for poetic autobiography as a genre.

Ana Luísa Amaral Marinela FreitasDo corpo: outras habitações: identidade e desejos outros em alguma poesia portuguesa

Reviews 292 known song (“Sedia-m’eu na ermida de Sam Simion”)’ (p. 169). In a recent text, published in the magazine A Virada — Literatura e Crítica , I discuss the annotation in poetry (cf. ‘O ar lisbonudo e a poesia’). I believe that Sofia de Sousa Silva wisely knew how to transform the exercise of annotating Adília Lopes into a final essay, and that her lesson can be followed by future editors and translators. Here’s my balance is, in short, an anthology that reveals a part of almost all the books of a great author and that elegantly illuminates her verses. Ana Luísa Amaral and Marinela Freitas (eds), Do corpo: outras habitações: identidade e desejos outros em alguma poesia portuguesa (Porto: Assírio & Alvim, 2018). 344 pages. Print. Reviewed by Ana Filipa Prata (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia) Do corpo: outras habitações: identidade e desejos outros em alguma poesia portuguesa brings an entirely new perspective on Portuguese poetry of the twentieth century (and the first two decades of the twenty-first). Published by Assírio & Alvim, this anthology is organized and presented by Ana Luísa Amaral and Marinela Freitas, who have selected more than one hundred poems, by more than forty authors, all about the representation of non-normative identities. It invites us therefore to consider new interpretations for well-known poems and to read recent compositions within this specific framework and in dialogue with the tradition. This book goes beyond the traditional reception of poetic topoi such as love and desire, and stands out for its commitment to subaltern identities and alternative gender performances, as Amaral and Freitas emphasize in their introduction. This is a very significant issue indeed, and it can be considered one of the virtues of the publication, but it is not totally new. This book appeared in 2018 in the wake of the censored editorial project Antologia de Poesia Portuguesa Erótica e Satírica, organized by Natália Correia and published in 1966. We are clearly dealing here with different temporal and critical scopes: notions of identity, love and eroticism have changed over time. However, it is very interesting to note that both anthologies share similar social, political and poetic concerns. If identifying deviant experiences of love or groundbreaking discourses on the representation of the self in literature was revolutionary in the 1960s, it is nowadays still urgent and mandatory. Do corpo: outras habitações opens with Mário de Sá Carneiro’s ‘Feminina’ and closes with Golgona Anghel’s ‘Vocês até podem não concordar com tudo isto’ [You may not even agree with all of this]. Time and space between both poems become the stage for poetical expressions that release identities and bodies from subservience and domination. The first poem, ‘Feminina’, introduces main topics such as gender role play, identity as performance, eroticism and the female body; these are enunciated by a male subject who desires to be a woman: ‘Eu queria ser mulher...’ [I wanted to be a woman...]. One century later, Anghel’s Reviews 293 poem testifies to a contemporary generation of women who, not without violence, subverted conventions and raised their voices intending to be treated as equals. Good stories are for sale where reality is insufficient. This anthology draws on the creation of a female poetic tradition and, at the same time, on the need to resist conventions. It creates a place for enunciation, while emphasizing the process and not necessarily the product, since subjects continuously strive to be subjects, as suggested in Ana Hatherly’s verses, quoted in the introduction: ‘A gente | só é dominada por essa gente | quando não sabe que é gente’ [We people, | we are only dominated by those people | when we don’t recognize ourselves as people]. There are also several male poets or male fictional voices who contribute to place ‘num plano justo | e claro | uma razão’ [this demand in a fair and clear disposition] (p. 33). António Botto, Pedro Homem de Melo, Mário Cesariny, Armando Silva Carvalho or even Boaventura Sousa Santos, among others, all defy conventional masculinity and/or sexuality. Nevertheless, we still can count (fortunately) many more women than men within...

Some Current Publications

Some Current Publications Allison Y. Gibeily Restoration seeks compilers for "Some Current Publications." Those interested should send an email indicating interest to the editors at restorationjournal@umd.edu. Advanced graduate students are especially encouraged to apply. MARY ASTELL See ANNE KILLIGREW (Alexander) JANE BARKER See WOMEN WRITERS (Horesji) APHRA BEHN Alexander, Laura. Fatal Attractions, Abjection, and the Self in Literature from the Restoration to the Romantics. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. Focusing on select long eighteenth-century texts, Alexander offers a reinterpretation of works like Walter Charleton's The Ephesian Matron and Aphra Behn's The History of the Nun in the context of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as outlined in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). Alexander suggests that abjection causes a vacillation between fear of death, violence against self and others, and erotic fantasies (or actions) involving the dead. Tracing the close ties between discourses of mortality and sexuality, Alexander places abjection at the heart of the eighteenth-century questions of the self. Griffin, Megan. "Dismembering the Sovereign in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko." ELH, vol. 86, no. 1, 2019, pp. 107–133. Griffin opens her article with a discussion of Oroonoko's closing scene where the eponymous character is violently dismembered and killed. Like many critics, she is interested in the effects of these authorial decisions, particularly given Behn's royalist politics. Griffin's answer is twofold. First, she suggests that the scene's [End Page 99] discomfort lies in its disruption of hierarchical power structures, allowing for a king (Oroonoko) to be subjected to the form of punishment reserved specifically for regicides. Second, the way in which Oroonoko dies upsets the comfortable narrative of classical war-based slavery that British colonizers were peddling. The result, she argues, is anarchy and social chaos, two consequences that Behn portrays as more horrifying than physical mutilation itself. See also ANNE KILLIGREW (Alexander) JOHN BUNYAN See JOHN MILTON (Sauer) MARGARET CAVENDISH See PRINT & PUBLICATION HISTORY (Mulvihill), SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (Thompson), THEOLOGY (Cahill), TRAVEL LITERATURE (Hawes) CHARLES II See ANNE KILLIGREW (Alexander), SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (Komorowski & Song), THEOLOGY (Neelakanta, Pudney, Weimer) WALTER CHARLETON See APHRA BEHN (Alexander) COLLEY CIBBER Castro-Santana, Anaclara. "Henry Fielding's Last Bow at Colley Cibber." Studies in Philology, vol. 116, no. 4, 2019, pp. 784–810. Rooting her argument in the historical feud between Henry Fielding and Colley Cibber, Castro-Santana nuances the vitriolic exchanges between the two playwrights in the earlyto mideighteenth century. While many critics have focused on Fielding's better-known lampoons like Shamela, Castro-Santana follows the Cibberian lineage of what she calls Fielding's "bleakest, and seemingly least theatrical" work, Amelia (787). As Cibber rose in rank and respect, the aspiring new playwright Fielding repeatedly criticized the famous poet laureate and manager of Drury Lane for a lack of creativity and originality. Fielding disapproves of the way Cibber's later plays rehashed the same plots, characters, and even costumes of those in the late seventeenth century. Yet through this obsessive censuring of Cibber, Fielding becomes trapped by the works of the man he so loathes – a double-edged sword that inspires Castro-Santana's careful biographical and literary analysis. JOHN CROWNE See THEOLOGY (Neelakanta) WILLIAM DAVENANT Watkins, Stephen. "The Protectorate Playhouse: William Davenant's Cockpit in the 1650s." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 37, no. 1, 2019, pp. 89–109. In his four-part article, Watkins analyzes the physical space of William Davenant's Cockpit and its evolving political alignments from the Protectorate through the early Restoration. By first redefining what is considered "opera" in the mid-seventeenth century, Watkins imagines the Cockpit in Drury Lane as an epicenter of both theatrical [End Page 100] and political evolution. Following Davenant's changing loyalties in the years immediately before and after the restoration of Charles II, this article explores the tumultuous politics of this period through the lens of theater culture and commerce. JOHN DRYDEN Hackenbracht, Ryan. "Marvell, Dryden, and Commercial Fishing Propaganda during the Anglo-Dutch Wars." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 59, no. 3, 2019, pp. 485–506. Taking as his focus two main texts – Andrew Marvell's "The Character of Holland" (1652–53) and John Dryden's Amboyna: or...

Autoficção e experiência em O pai da menina morta, de Tiago Ferro

Resumo Com base nos conceitos de “experiência do fora” de Maurice Blanchot e “experiência interior” de Georges Bataille, neste artigo analiso o deslocamento do sujeito para o fora no romance O pai da menina morta, de Tiago Ferro. Embora Blanchot recuse o Eu que fala na obra literária e seu discurso pessoal, proponho, ainda assim, como chave de leitura, a autoficção, que se concretiza no texto não como recurso estilístico e crítico (como se observa com frequência na literatura contemporânea), mas enquanto deslocamento do eu empírico do escritor para outro, dando origem a um duplo que não mais remete a um real precedente e tampouco constitui uma cópia, cujo sentido só se concretiza com o leitor e sua experiência pessoal que preencherá os espaços vazios da narrativa. Objetivo demonstrar, portanto, como as duas leituras não são contraditórias, mas complementares na medida em que o centro da narrativa está no deslocamento, depois da experiência de perda vivenciada pelo personagem anônimo e sua necessidade de se ajustar diante da ausência. A partir de sua própria experiência, Ferro cria um romance lírico e fragmentado que, nascido da morte, busca pelo que ainda resta de vivo nesse sujeito que não quer, e nem pode, ser chamado de Eu.

Formulation and Evaluation of Microemulsion Based Topical Gel of Carbamazepine

Carbamazepine(CBZ) is a synthetic compound of the benzodiazepine class, used as an anticonvulsant and analgesic drug. Carbamazepine is relatively slowly but well absorbed after oral administration. Its plasma half-life is about 30 hours when it is given as single dose, but it is a strong inducer of hepatic enzymes and the plasma half-life shortens to about 15 hours when it is given repeatedly. Psoriasis is autoimmune disease in which genetic and environmental factors have a significant role. Carbamazepine was accidently discovered to have antipsoriatic properties. Carbamazepine was obtained as a gift sample from Lupin. Characterization of carbamazepine was carried out by melting point and IR. Carbamazepine has limited aqueous solubility so in literature Self microemulsifying drug delivery system (SMEDDS) have been reported. In the present study, a topical microemulsion based gel of Carbamazepine was prepared. The pseudo ternary phase diagram was prepared to find the microemulsion region. Various microemulsion gel formulations were prepared using carbopol-974 and poloxamer-407 in varied concentrations. Prepared formulations (FG1 to FG10) were evaluated for various parameters like color, appearance, consistency, pH, spreadability and IR. The microemulsion based gels were found to have good spreadability and pH within the range of skin pH and thus suitable to use on skin.

"Free to Sing My Liberty": Weaving and the Construction of the Literary Self in Gaspara Stampa and Louise Labé

"Free to Sing My Liberty": Weaving and the Construction of the Literary Self in Gaspara Stampa and Louise Labé

Art and Autobiography: A Study of the Self in Literature

In this paper, I have attempted to apply critical approaches of William C. Spengemann to study Oscar Wilde’s Salomé as an autobiographical work that involves a set of assumptions such as biographical information about the author and information about the work’s genesis, which should be given the secondary importance. Instead of the idea of defining autobiography as self-written biography, it is necessary to understand the ways in which different autobiographers write in different forms and at different times. So the main purpose of this paper is to explore the self in literature, i.e. Wilde’s Salomé. Essentially, how can a piece of literary work be considered as an autobiography that has been practiced in response to shifting ideas about the nature of the self?Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 19-28

A Systematic Study of M(bpy)₃z+ Complexes in Nafion: Concentration, Activity, and Electron Hopping

Cyclic voltammograms for six tris(2,2'-bipyridyl) complexes, M(bpy)₃z+ at Nafion® modified electrodes are shown [1]. Despite similar concentrations of M(bpy)₃z+ in the films, peak currents measure significant variations in film diffusion coefficients. Extraction of transition metal complexes such as M(bpy)₃z+ into Nafion from electrolyte solutions is highly favored. The concentration of M(bpy)₃z+ complexes in the hydrated domains of Nafion is sufficiently high that adjacent complexes approach contact distance. Because the distance between metal centers is small, electron hopping can enhance flux measured as current. The concentration of similarly -sized in charge redox probes in Nafion is fixed. The current enhancement due to electron hopping is reflected in the measured diffusion coefficient, Df, which is set as the sum of the physical diffusion coefficient Dp and the electron hopping of diffusion coefficient Det. From models of Dahms and Ruff, the electron hopping diffusion coefficient is related to the self exchange rate k₁₁ for electron transfer between the halves of a redox couple. M(bpy)₃z+ + M(bpy)₃(z±1)+ ⇌ M(bpy)₃(z±1)+ + M(bpy)₃z+ In the Nafion matrix, the self exchange leads to transposition between M(bpy)₃z+ and M(bpy)₃(z±1)+and this contributes to probe flux characterized by the diffusion coefficient. Df = Dp + Det = Dp + k₁₁cf *δ²/6 The concentration of the redox probe in the film is cf * and the diameter of the redox probe is δ, which for M(bpy)₃z+ is 1.36 nm. Here, cyclic voltammetry of Nafion films on electrodes for six probes, M(bpy)₃z+ where Mz+is Ru²⁺, Os²⁺, Fe²⁺, Cr³⁺, Co³⁺, and Co²⁺, is presented [1]. Several outcomes are reported. Df varies linearly with k₁₁H₂0, literature self exchange rates measured in water at or near infinite dilution.To allow charge compensation for electron transfer events, the matrix must provide sufficient dielectric constant to support ion formation. Electron hopping occurs in the hydrated domains of biphasic Nafion because the fluorocarbon phase does not support ion formation with the dielectric constant of ∼2.From the density of Ru(bpy)₃²⁺ exchanged Nafion (1.95 g/cm³) [2] and nominal equivalent weight 1100 g/mole of sulfonates, the volume of M(bpy)₃z+ is limited so that the concentration of M(bpy)₃z+ is insufficient to charge balance the available sulfonates.Electrolyte cations are needed to balance the anionic sulfonates.Concentration of M(bpy)₃z+ extracted into the film is invariant across electrolyte conditions common to voltammetric measurements.Measured Df are reported: 2 × 10⁻⁹ cm²/s for Ru(bpy)₃²⁺ and Os(bpy)₃²⁺; 1 × 10⁻¹⁰ cm²/s for Fe(bpy)₃²⁺ and Cr(bpy)₃³⁺; and 1.5 × 10⁻¹² and 5 × 10⁻¹² cm²/s for Co(bpy)₃²⁺ and Co(bpy)₃³⁺. Physical diffusion is estimated as Dp ≲ 10⁻¹² cm²/s.From the concentration in the film and measured Det, the self exchange rate in Nafion k₁₁Naf is proportional to values in water but lower; k₁₁Naf = 0.010k₁₁H₂O, consistent with higher ion concentration in Nafion.For Os(bpy)₃2/3, the self exchange rate in water is estimated as k₁₁H₂O≈ 4.5 × 10⁸/Ms. From these results, a sketch of the hydrated environment in Nafion exchanged with M(bpy)₃z+is presented.

“Thou wolt make … thyn hed to ake”:

Abstract Christine de Pizan worked carefully to construct her reputation as a scholar. However, in her poem Le Chemin de long estude, her literary self admits that she has been grappling with a mental condition directly linked to her studies. Already grief-stricken at her husband's death, her excessive reading and writing have aggravated her melancholy to the point of madness. I submit that Christine's persona seeks a remedy based in contemporary medical practice, but because she relies on the income generated from her writing, she cannot follow a conventional allopathic mode of treatment (cure by contraries) in the manner of Chaucer and other earlier writers. Instead, she establishes an isopathic mode of treatment (cure by similarities), seeking a remedy in the very activity that caused her mental instability. Her success demonstrates not only that the dominant model of humoral balance was not universally applicable but also that remedies could be self-prescribed.

‘There was One Man at Llyswen that could Conjure’: John Thelwall – Cunning Man

John Thelwall has emerged in recent years as a protean figure central to our conception of Romanticism as a literary and cultural phenomenon. Recent work by Judith Thompson, Yasmin Solomonescu and Steve Poole, among others, has built on crucial interventions by such critics as Nicholas Roe and Michael Scrivener to extend the narrative of Thelwall’s life beyond the fraught political theatres of the 1790s, revealing links between his multiple personae: reformer, ‘acquitted felon’, political theorist, demagogue, poet of sensibility and protest, novelist, historian, dramatist, political antiquary, professor of elocution and speech theorist. Moreover, critics have succeeded in revealing the nuances of Thelwall’s representations and reinflections of his ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves. As Damian Walford Davies remarks: ‘we’re dealing here not with a simple and (over-)familiar narrative of defeat and opportunistic bourgeois resurrection, but with acts of thoughtful and principled re-fashioning’. I suggest that we can meaningfully locate a ‘bridge’ between two distinct (if vitally interconnected) stages of Thelwall’s life and career in the three-year period (1797–1800) he spent in the Breconshire village of Llyswen: a fascinating transitionary ‘timespace’ that was so much more than a ‘parenthesis’ between two periods of political-intellectual activity. The foundations for a mapping of Thelwall-in-Wales were established by E. P. Thompson, and extended by J. Corfield and Chris Evans, Scrivener, Walford Davies and Thompson. My aim is to contribute to this project by examining Thelwall’s occult, and occulted, ‘Welsh’ identities and the ways in which the transition from metropolitan and English provincial culture to rural Wales manifested itself in a range of complex literary (self-)representations in his 1801 collection Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement. Here, Thelwall flirts with a variety of genres and forms, testing their applications and limits. The portal to the poetry is a ‘Prefatory Memoir’ –written, suggestively, in the third person. Here, Thelwall showcases his many identities: those of the past, those that were serviceable at Llyswen, and those that equip him for a return to provincial and metropolitan engagement. Dramatised (and advertised) are the poet, the husband, the father, the wronged radical, the philosopher and –most importantly for my purpose – the conjuror. Published at a time of political watchfulness, Poems was Thelwall’s attempt to re-enter the public arena – not in a depoliticised role, but at a

Righting the Self

This paper riffs on the pun, ‘writing’ and ‘righting’. I explore how essential instability is to balance, and how words, too, need to wobble in order to make sense. I describe how ‘writing’ and ‘righting’, ‘word’ and ‘body’, ‘meta’ and ‘matter’, cannot be separated but are intimately linked, and how the opposite of right might not be wrong but upside down. Along the way I will be using the story of my own metamorphosis from academic to trapeze artist to writer, the transformation of both my physical cells and literary selves.

Notes entre aujourd’hui et demain

In the late xxth and early xxist Century, how is it possible to conceive a “care for the future”, when the future is perceived as imminent and vaguely threatening? Starting from a general overview of contemporary French literature it becomes possible to understand what the “care for the future” has become nowadays. French literature experiences what Lionel Ruffel calls an “exhaustion” of future perspectives, compelling future and present to coincide in the literary imaginary and generating a loss of consistency in the literary Self. In this regard, new literary strategies are found, trying to restore the necessary distance between present and future. Three books will concur to bring the phenomenon to light: Pierre Guyotat’s Coma, Michel Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île (The Possibility of an Island) and Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Faire l’amour (Making Love).

Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (review)

Reviewed by: Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile Inela Selimović (bio) Ariel Dorfman , Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), ISBN 9780547549460, 332 pages. Ariel Dorfman's Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile unfolds into a palimpsest of sociopolitical, literary, and multicultural displacements, arrivals, and returns. At the core of the memoir, though, one might perceive a multifarious analysis of the writer's "inbetwixted" self. In the process of cutting open his literary self, Dorfman exposes his existential liminality between the homeland and the host societies. Feeding on Dreams exposes the Chilean political maladies since the military coup in 1973 to the present day democracy. Reading Dorfman's memoir leaves one contemplating on exiles' losses—but also growths—during complex, paradoxical and enduring cultural assimilation processes. Ariel Dorfman's compelling story in Feeding on Dreams inspired the following conversation in December of 2011.1 Q1: Feeding on Dreams allows readers to acquaint themselves with some of your most pressing hopes while in exile during the past several decades. In reading your recent memoir one might remember Zygmunt Bauman's [End Page 570] words in "Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer," that in "exile, uncertainty meets freedom. Creation is the issue of that wedlock."2 Your experience of exile broadens Bauman's perception of it in a very specific way. In your memoir you imply that exile nearly always led to literary and non-literary production, even if it did not always signify freedom. The lack of freedom though never stifled your creativity. Could you comment on this? A1: Bauman's words are right on target, though what is missing (from the quote, perhaps not from the context in which the ideas were expressed) is that all too often the uncertainty and the freedom do not lead to creativity. I know of many who were destroyed by exile—the suicide rate is probably the highest among any group in the world. In my own case, I started exile mired in silence. The memoir painfully and painstakingly narrates how I was unable to find even a sliver of literary expressiveness during the first two and a half years. I was disconcerted (uncertainty, about who you are, where you are going, why you were defeated, can lead to this). Nor did the freedom I enjoyed to be anyone I wished to be, to re-forge myself far from my land, the freedom I enjoyed from persecution and death ravaging Chile, liberate me, at least at first. Delving into Bauman's central image, the image of wedlock helps us, I believe, to understand this process: in the first encounters when uncertainty meets freedom few children are born. It takes time before the love affair turns into something more permanent. It is not a foregone conclusion that this meeting will lead to positive activities, political or literary. In my novel, Konfidenz, I explore how exile can undermine and devastate an exiled community. And my literature has been constructed out of an incessant struggle not to take that freedom for granted and, simultaneously, to understand the uncertainty not as a curse (as it first appears when everything around you in a foreign land feels alien and the ground is shifting under your very feet) but as a challenge. Thus, very slowly, exile "scoured" me (I use the exact word from the memoir), made me hit bottom, forced me to scrape despair as if it were rust—and only then was I ready for a rebirth that has, I hope, never ceased and that culminates, in some sense, in this memoir and in its prequel, Heading South, Looking North, both of them a way of fathoming how to survive while far from home, both of them not lying about the price we may have to pay for that survival. Q2: Certain segments of your memoir suggest that remembering Chile from and living in Chile during the 1970s is/was in itself an agonistic act. How do you protect yourself from reliving certain traumas while remembering and/or writing about them? Is protecting oneself even possible or desirable? [End Page 571] A2...

Nikolaj Frobenius's <i>Teori og praksis</i> in Theory and Practice

NIKOLAJ FROBENIUS'S 2004 novel, Teori og praksis (Theory and Practice (1)) instigated a passionate debate about the reputation of Rykkinn, the suburban planned community in which the novel is set. Although warmly received by literary critics, the book was viewed by many readers as a dishonest and disloyal portrait of a place that perpetuated negative stereotypes and damaged the reputation of the community. As a result of massive media attention, Frobenius subsequently appeared on a nationally televised debate about Rykkinn with comedian and fellow Rykkinn-native Harald Eia and participated in a tension-filled town meeting regarding his portrayal of the community. In this article, I explore some of the theoretical implications of this debate, particularly regarding the meaning of place in late modern identity construction and the conceptual gray area between fact and fiction, both of which are primary preoccupations in Teori og praksis. In order to do this, I focus on the relationship between three texts: the novel itself, historian Vidar Enebakk's critique of the novel published in the journal Arr, and Frobenius's reflections on the debate in the essay Rasende drabanter [furious satellites/henchmen], which was published the year after in the journal Samtiden. In addition, I will touch on the 2011 film adaptation of the novel, Sonner av Norge (Sons of Norway), for which Frobenius himself wrote the screenplay. I do so in order to examine the rhetorical strategies Frobenius employs the transformation of his text from individualistic artistic expression into a collective memorial through the course of the debate. I see this as a strategy that forces a previously hostile audience to re-evaluate Teori og praksis by appealing directly to their sense of a collective ethos in a way that the original text rather uncompromisingly refuses to do. The novel itself is a multi-modal artifact containing both reproductions of photographs and other documents as well as substantial paratextual material in addition to the diegetic narrative. It thus seems appropriate to consider the ensuing debate together with the novel as one interconnected multi-modal textual nexus. (2) The fact that Frobenius later collaborated on the film adaptation of the novel and indeed in a 2011 lecture explicitly described the novel and film as two components of one large mislykket [failed] project, (3) supports the notion that Teori og praksis is not just a discrete literary text, but rather an aesthetic and critical project that exceeds genre boundaries. TEORI OG PRAKSIS In this section, I will examine three of the most striking aspects of the novel, namely Frobenius's experimentation with literary self representation, the multi-modality of the text, and the primacy of place in the narrative. Frobenius opens Teori og praksis with a footnote to the word roman [novel], which appears on the title page as a genre designation. The footnote is, according to Frobenius, a bruksanvisning [instruction manual] for the reader, and ostensibly at least it portrays the author's state of mind at some point of crisis during a late stage in the writing of the manuscript. The author is referred to only in the third person (han [he]), and we are told that i flere uker (21 dager, snart 22) har han ikke klart a tenke pa annet enn dette: Hvor slutter selvbiografien ... og hvor begynner romanen? (5) [for many weeks (21 days, soon 22) he had not been able to think about anything other that this: Where does autobiography end ... and where does the novel begin?]. The reader rather quickly deduces that the protagonist of the novel (as well as the narrator of its extradiegetic material, which includes notes, prologue, and epilogue) is to be understood as a fictional version of the historical author Nikolaj Frobenius and that the narrator who describes the thoughts and actions of the fictional Frobenius is also to be understood as being (a version of) Nikolaj Frobenius. …