Problem Of Referentiality Research Articles

Hayden White and the Problem of Historical Referentiality in Markan Narrative

In his Story as History – History as Story, Byrskog applied the powerful explanatory model of oral history to the formation of the tradition and to the narrative projects of the evangelists. The model needs to be taken further to confront the view among Gospel narrative critics that narrative formation in the Gospel of Mark is such as to render its materials opaque to historical enquiry. Narrative criticism works with a schematic binary between Mark's raw historical source materials on the one hand and his meaning-bestowing imposition of a narrative emplotment upon them on the other. This has strong affinities to Hayden White's model for narrative history-writing. White regards narrative emplotment as the historian's imposition upon past events that taken in themselves constitute nothing more than an "ephemeral flow of events", awaiting the historian's impress of narrativity. Moral meaning is an ideological imposition upon a sequence of events by virtue of the narrative historian's emplotment of that sequence into a story. Powerful critiques of White by Paul Ricœur and Holocaust historians have called into question schematic distinctions between historical reality and its narrative representations. Not only are narrative representations grounded in memory; they are distinguished by a referential intention towards a real past.

Review: Women, Islam, and the Abbasid Identity, by Nadia Maria El Cheikh

Review: <i>Women, Islam, and the Abbasid Identity</i>, by Nadia Maria El Cheikh

The New Faces of the Historical Novel

This article analyzes the problem of referentiality in the historical novel, based on a comparison between its classic and contemporary forms. The first section addresses the “mixture of history and invention” that, following Alessandro Manzoni, was the foremost characteristic of the realist historical novel. The next section discusses how the meta-historical novel of the second half of the 20th century - for example, Disgrace (J. M. Coetzee) and El entenado (Juan José Saer)-eclipsed the problem of referentiality by assuming that the historical novel should operate by its own procedures, and not those of history. The following sections discuss the referential turn in 21st century literary narratives, focusing on three novels: El material humano, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa; K. Relato de uma busca, by Bernardo Kucinski, and Jan Karski, by Yannick Haenel. The article concludes that the inversion of these two poles—from non-referentiality to the predominance of referentiality—is an unexpected facet of the elasticity of the concept (and practice) of fiction, which by denying itself ultimately enriches itself.

“Theorizing in a Void”

This essay concerns black feminist theory’s experimentation with the disciplinary discourses of chaos theory and physics to investigate the trace effects of blackness and explore the limits of conceptualization and representation in light of the particular problem that blackness’s diffuse and immeasurable conditioning power poses to thought and representation. I argue that when considering the genealogy of black feminism, it is possible to discern a black feminist poetics that anticipates recent feminist materialism’s attentiveness to the mutually constitutive effects of discursivity and materiality. Said poetics approaches a shared worry over the problem of referentiality, not in representationalist terms, as recent materialists would suggest, but rather through a poetics attentive to the racializing and sexuating dimensions of an (anti) black sublime that conditions, exceeds, and potentially ruptures the scales of the empirical. Privileging performativity, gesture, resonance, and metaphor over the authority and purported veridicality of Western empirical science, the poetics of black feminism investigated here is instructive for a general theory of representation.

Trauma and Fiction:

Trauma involves a rupture in the temporal and symbolic orders at individual and collective levels. Fictional representation of trauma, therefore, is marked by a problem of referentiality, where mimesis fails and chronology breaks down. The article opens with a discussion on the disorientation in the co-ordinative links between the world, the self, and representational tools in the event of a traumatic experience, which results in the crisis of referentiality. The inadequacy of language as a representational medium on the one hand, and unacknowledgement of extreme events beyond “socially validated reality” on the other, constitute two of the major issues creative artists have to deal with. An extreme event leaves a mnemonic gap in the psyche of the traumatized individual, and the process of recovery involves the gap being filled in with narrative memory, suggesting an epistemological void. Narrative memory acts as the surrogate memory of the traumatic event, which is unavailable to willed recollection. This surrogate memory is compared to Jean Baudrillard’s third order of simulation, where a false presence conceals the absence of any basic reality. Recognizing the referential and representational crises at work in rendering traumatic experiences in fiction, the article goes on to explore the ways of bypassing them and discuss the idea of indirect representation in Michael Rothberg’s Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Rothberg believes that an oblique rendition of traumatic events in fiction may be an appropriate representational mode within the conflicting demands of the documentation of reality, meditation on the formal limits by the creative artist, and risky circulation of images in the globalized world. This leads to a deliberation on Anne Whitehead and Laurie Vickroy’s idea of the emerging genre of “trauma fiction” with its thematic and stylistic concerns. The article ends with a summary of the representational techniques likely to feature in fictions written on violent events.

Guest Editor's Introduction

Guest Editor's Introduction

Visual Studies in Byzantium: A Pictorial Turnavant la lettre

As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide the life and death of thousands. As this article seeks to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual differences, but also to iconic ones. The iconoclastic controversy (726–842 AD) arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental ‘iconic identity’, iconophile philosophy defends the idea of ‘iconic difference’. And while the reception in the Latin West of the controversies over the image as a mere problem of referentiality of the letter explains why its originality has remained underestimated for centuries, re-examining Byzantine visual thinking in the light of today’s ‘pictorial turn’ reveals its striking modernity.

The Diacritical Nature of Meaning

What we have learned from Saussure affirms Merleau-Ponty that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs. While it has often been stressed that Merleau-Ponty was arguably among the earliest philosophical readers of Saussure, the real impact of this reading on Merleau-Ponty's thinking has rarely been assessed in detail. By focusing on the middle period - the years between the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception and the abandonment of the book project The Prose of the World - a special interest in language and its ideality becomes all the more evident. Now this period is crucial for understanding the turn of the later years: similarly to Saussure, who shifted the problem of meaning from a problem of referentiality to an issue of self-differentiation of the linguistic field, Merleau-Ponty shifts his account of perception from a relationship based on sensory subjects and perceived objects to an immanent differentiation of the sensible world. The genesis ofan articulated world can be conceptualized with the experience of children's language acquisition and the phenomenon of deflation. At a certain point in her development, the child interrupts her incessant babbling and learns to shape pauses and silences, which are the precondition for meaningful sounds. Learning how to speak - as it were - would thus be learning how not to speak. The child may only enter a specific language by means of a phonematic restriction; to become a member of a language community is to lose the capacity to speak all languages.

The Self as the “Mittelpunkt”, the World as the “Hauptperson”. The “Super-Personal” Autobiography of Stefan Zweig

Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig’s posthumous autobiography, presents two particularities in its semantic and pragmatic aspects. On the one hand, the semantic core of the text is not the “I” of the author, narrator and main character, as Philippe Lejeune’s classic definition prescribes, but the “world” in which he lives. This is the reason why some critics have described it either as an “impersonal” or as a “super-personal” autobiography. On the other hand, the “world” Zweig projects in the text is quite different from that same world described by historians, so there is a lack of correspondence between the signs and their designata, that is to say, a problem of referentiality. This is the reason why it can thus be considered a very “personal” autobiography. There are two apparent contradictions: how can an autobiography be “super-personal”?, and how can it be considered “super-personal” in the narrative of the “I”, and, at the same time, very “personal” in the description of the “world”? The contradictions are not so if we realise that there is a connection between the “I” and the “world”, because it is not possible to explain the first without the latter, if we assume that the identity of certain individuals is constructed more with their impersonal relations (objects, ideas, work) than with their interpersonal relations. The construction of the “world” is the way to Zweig to reveal his personal “I”.

Südländisch: the borders of fear with reference to Foucault

This article examines the term ‘südländisch’ in the German news media's description of two suspected terrorists, whose images were captured on video surveillance cameras as they were planting bombs on two German trains in Summer 2006. Strictly untranslatable in just one word, the term südländisch is commonly used to designate anyone who appears to come from a ‘southern’ or Mediterranean country, or simply anyone who appears ‘brown.’ However, as this article discusses, the video surveillance footage was of such low quality that this description was almost arbitrary. The images of the suspects were not any ‘browner’ than those of the bystanders whose images were also captured on the video surveillance footage. This article uses the occasion of this medial incident to address the problem of referentiality in Michel Foucault's notion of ‘discourse,’ showing how the term südländisch functions as a discursive formation. Focusing on the borders of discourse as the constitutive moment of discourse, this article then turns to the multiplication and dispersion of borders within the European Union. It argues that the term südländisch serves as just one of many borders that have been unwittingly generated by the move toward political integration in the EU.

Inventing and naming America: Place and Place Names in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita1

In the afterword to Lolita, Nabokov claimed that in this book he had to invent both Lolita and America after having invented Europe in his previous fiction. This paper focuses precisely on the various ways in which Nabokov “invented” America in his best-known novel. This invention is first of all the result of the author’s evolving stance on the complexity of what he called “average ‘reality’” in his works. Through a survey of Nabokov’s statements on the choice and role of place in the forewords to his Russian works and in his critical texts, I show that Lolita is indeed considered by Nabokov to be a “recreation” of American reality, to a much greater extent than his Russian works had been recreations of a given milieu. I take the metaphor of the “crazy quilt” mentioned in Lolita to suggest complexity, chromatic exuberance, hybridity. The invention of America is also the result of a process of naming. Place names will be examined, not only those which make up Quilty’s “cryptogrammic paperchase”, but also Humbert’s choice of place names. The problem of referentiality is discussed and the way recent criticism has dealt with it. Finally, the interplay between one and many is emphasized, the way in which the diversity of the “crazy quilt” is counterbalanced by the uniqueness of the mastermind having produced it. The American motto “From many make one” could be reinterpreted as “From one make many”.

The politics of mood: Ádám Bodor and Eastern Europe

My reading of Ádám Bodor’s novel Sinistra körzet (Sinistra District, 1992) shows that the political dimension of literary production cannot be reduced to the problem of referentiality (the correct representation of an empirical reality in a realist or an allegorical narrative). In fact, Bodor’s fiction suggests that it is precisely the breakdown of the referential paradigm that is the privileged political moment in literature. As I argue, Bodor’s text suggests that beyond the political realism of historical referentiality we find a new kind of geopolitics based on a regionalist aesthetics of “mood.” In this regard, it becomes clear that the “Sinistra District” is not an allegorical representation of a historical reality (the world of totalitarian regimes) but a rhetorical figure which stages the ideological fantasy that structures that given historical realty.

Calvino and the problem of textual referentiality

Calvino and the problem of textual referentiality

Calvino and the problem of textual referentiality

Calvino and the problem of textual referentiality