Robert Eaglestone Research Articles

The Importance of Experience: Supporting Pupils’ Creative Writing About the Natural World

ABSTRACT The first part of this article considers the challenge of supporting pupils to write creatively about the natural world. It examines a text by a gifted young writer: Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty. It asks what the challenges might be for pupils who may be motivated to model their writing on McAnulty’s, but have limited experience of the natural world. Drawing on the scholarly work of John Dixon, Robert Eaglestone and others, the article highlights the importance of pupil experience in the formation of their writerly voice, thereby emphasising the need for writing pedagogies that deepen and enrich pupils’ experiences. In the second part, the authors present a series of interdisciplinary activities that are intended to enrich pupil experiences, and ultimately encourage creativity. The plan is aimed at pupils in Manchester in the north-west of England, but the activities can be adapted to work in other locations.

Literature: Why It Matters by Robert Eaglestone (review)

Literature: Why It Matters by Robert Eaglestone (review)

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

The Anatomy of Peace: A Reading of How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency

This paper aims to study the traumatic impact of violence in the late twentieth century Assam, caused primarily by the unresolved conflict between popular ethno-nationalist demands of an independent, ‘Swadhin’ Assam and retaliatory steps of the Centre. The short story anthology, How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency edited by Aruni Kashyap will be considered chiefly, to understand the deep-seated, sometimes ‘belated’ occurrence of trauma on people’s lives, which often resisted representation. Cathy Caruth argues that the belated occurrence of trauma may be linked to what remains unknown/unsaid in our actions and language. Robert Eaglestone mentions that our linguistic registers may prove inadequate to represent traumatic experiences. People’s trauma in Assam was worsened by the disciplinary actions imposed to restrain revolutionary acts. Foucault described ‘discipline’ as a “type of power, a modality for its exercise”. People lived in a panopticon, gradually becoming disillusioned about the cause. Between ideology and peace, they chose the latter. Thus, reading these polyphonic stories using the theoretical discourse of trauma will help to locate the phenomenon in the social, political and cultural history of Assam, to see how people emerged out of conflict by opting for relative peace.

Investigating Terminologies in Teaching Literature: A Corpus Study

<p>Regarding the literature subjects provided by the English Language Education Department, University of Muhammadiyah Malang, some students conduct researches on literature in their thesis. They find difficulties in doing the research as lacking of experience in discussing the thing and lacking vocabulary in describing terminologies. This research was designed to help the students whose major is English Education to maintain their study, especially on teaching English literature by finding out the terminologies in teaching literature books in terms of their frequency, example of their use, and meaning (in context). The objects of this research are <em>Teaching and Learning English Literature</em> by Ellie Chambers and Marshall Gregory, and <em>Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film</em> by Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langfor (Ed.) talking about teaching literature. The research method is document analysis. In number, there is no significant difference between them. No literary terminology that is more than 250 words. Beside, since they talk the same scope, the meanings of the terminologies are the same. Further, both present different use of terminologies. In some sentences, the terminologies are used to explain something closer to literature, yet in some other sentences, the terminologies are used to describe or explain the things related to teaching literature.</p>

Subject or Object? The Anti-Hero of the Allegory and the Hero of the Anti-Allegory

Referring to the British writers’ prompt reaction to the Brexit crisis, in developing what has already come to be known as BrexLit, Robert Eaglestone remarks the “cultural and emotional landscapes” created by such literary responses, which attempt to “humanize” major political dilemmas. Ali Smith, commenting on the same speed of writing books “pressed against the contemporaneous,” considers this as the result of history repeating itself with us failing to be aware of it, evidence of what we might call a community of unreliable remembers. The paper focuses on Ian McEwan’s 2019 The Cockroach, a novella offering a reversed Kafkaesque metamorphosis, a pretext to satirize Brexit and to meditate on how the antiheroic character caught in this allegorical transformation devolves from subject into object. I argue that this process of objectification (using Martha Nussbaum’s concept, derived from, but not limited to the feminist critique) contributes to the disembodiment and further relativization of memory.

The empire as the embodiment of modern intellect: a critical reading of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians through Levinas

This paper is an attempt to read Waiting for the Barbarians from the standpoint of an approach which is critical of modern intellect and its underlying foundations including the belief in universalism and foundationalism. Taking the Empire as the material and intellectual manifestation of the modern intellect, I will focus on the way foundationalism and universalism are likely to lead to totalization. As a result, modern intellect, despite its pretensions to holding liberal and universal views, has become inevitably reductive and exclusionary in relating to the other. The desire for boundary-drawing and closure is named ‘metaphysic of comprehension’, a term introduced by Robert Eaglestone who has been inspired by Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of ethics. I want to argue that Coetzee’s novel lends itself to a reading in which this yearning for comprehension is exposed and criticized. The question of representation, the pursuit of truth and the implementation of justice are areas which my analysis will be concerned with.

‘Powerful knowledge’, ‘cultural literacy’ and the study of literature in schools

AbstractThere is no doubting the influence of E.D. Hirsch and Michael Young on UK education policy and practice over the last ten years. Hirsch’s notion of ‘cultural literacy’ and Young’s idea of ‘powerful knowledge’ are the theoretical drivers of a national shift towards ‘knowledge‐led’ or ‘knowledge‐rich’ school curricula. Evidence of this shift is plain to see in the current iteration of the National Curriculum for England and in the mission statements of a growing number of schools and academy trusts across the country.According to Robert Eaglestone, however, there is a mistake under the floorboards of the new, knowledge‐rich curriculum. It is a mistake that damages and distorts teaching in a number of curriculum subjects, but Eaglestone ‐ a literary critic and theorist ‐ focuses on its disastrous impact on the teaching of literature. Both Hirsch and Young fall prey to scientism: they take knowledge in the natural sciences as a template for knowledge across the board. Eaglestone shows first how scientism is baked into the theories of ‘cultural literacy’ and ‘powerful knowledge’, then how the adoption of these theories in schools has disfigured and diminished the teaching of literature.Eaglestone’s argument is arresting, timely and compelling. For those tasked with planning and teaching English curricula in schools, his penetrating analysis of where things have gone wrong and how to put them right will be revelatory and transformative. And for those concerned with curriculum theory and education policy more generally, it will reinvigorate and reorient the debate about what is helpful and what is not in the work of E.D. Hirsch and Michael Young.

Mapping the Contemporary, Interview with Dan O'Gorman and Robert Eaglestone

Mapping the Contemporary, Interview with Dan O'Gorman and Robert Eaglestone

Book Review: The Broken Voice

How is it that the Holocaust, which ended more than seven decades ago, still remains such a powerful force in our culture? Why is it that Holocaust memory still speaks to us in such stirring tones? In "The Broken Voice," author Robert Eaglestone tackles question of ethics and genocide, literature and history, and power and evil, delving into the works of philosophers, novelists, and political thinkers to create his own insightful theories to answer these questions.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet: Myth, Migration and Identity in Salman Rushdie

The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie’s 1999 cult novel – stands as a very rich and complex cultural text, which today should be praised for the originality and intelligence of the author’s literary invention and for offer- ing a crucial key for the understanding of essential aspects of our present. In the novel the Anglo-Indian writer investigates such complex topics as myth, migration, identity and celebrity, through an extremely rich narrative, which mixes ancient mythology and contemporary pop culture. More specifically the novel represents a space in which ancient myths (namely, the myth of Orpheus) migrate into new forms – shaping complex identities – and at the same time a rich narrative about music and pop musicians as contemporary myths, or better metaphors, of migration. It might be argued that myth, migration and identity represent the main themes and discursive forces of Rushdie’s musical narrative; these very forces are, in our perspective, essential in order to understand and respond to the present moment of the globalised era. DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-108 Bibliography Albertazzi, Silvia. 2003. “Why do we care about singers?” Music in The Ground Beneath Her Feet . Elsa Linguanti & Viktoria Tchernichova eds. The Great Work of Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Pisa: ETS, 91-97. Auslander, Philip. 2006. Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bassi, Shaul. 2003. Orpheus’ Other Voyage. Myth, Music and Globalisation. Elsa Linguanti & Viktoria Tchernichova eds. The Great Work of Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Pisa: ETS, 99-114. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World (trans. H. Islowsky). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies . London: Paladin. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture . London-New York: Routledge. Browne, Harry. 2013. The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power) . London: Verso. Concilio, Carmen. 2003. “Worthy of the World”: The Narrator/Photographer in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet . Elsa Linguanti & Viktoria Tchernichova eds. The Great Work of Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet . Pisa: ETS, 117-127. Coupe, Laurence. 1997. Myth . London and New York: Routledge. Critchley, Simon. 2016. On Bowie . London: Serpent’s Tail. Cupitt, Don. 1982. The World to Come. London: SCM Press. DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. During, Simon. 2005. Cultural Studies. A Critical Introduction . London-New York: Routledge. English, James F. & John Frow. 2006. Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture. J. F. English ed. A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 39-57. Holmes, Su & Sean Redmond. 2010. Editorial. A Journal in Celebrity Studies . Celebrity Studies , 1, 1, 1-10. Kadzis, Peter. 2000. Salman Speaks. Michael Reder ed. Conversations with Salman Rushdie . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 216-227. Longhurst, Brian. 2007. Popular Music and Society. Cambridge: Polity. Malik, Kenan. 2013. Foreword. Robert Eaglestone & Martin McQuillan eds. Salman Rushdie . London: Bloomsbury. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening . New York: Fordham University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931-1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. A. Burks, C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss eds. Cambridge (MA): The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination . M. J. Valdes ed. Wheatsheaf: Harvester. Rollason, Christopher. 2006. Rushdie’s Un-Indian Music: The Ground Beneath Her Feet , http://www.yatrarollason.info/files/RushdieGFupdated.pdf (consulted on 15/09/2018). Rushdie, Salman. 2000. The Ground Beneath Her Feet . London: Vintage. Rushdie, Salman. 2002a. Globalization. Step Across This Line. Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002 . Salman Rushdie ed. London: Vintage, 296-298. Rushdie, Salman. 2002b. U2. Step Across This Line. Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002 . Salman Rushdie ed. London: Vintage, 102-106. Rushdie, Salman. 2017. The Golden House. New York: Random House. Sanga, Jaina. 2001. Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors . Westport-London: Greenwood Press. U2. 2000. ‘The Ground Beneath her Feet’. U2 et al . The Million Dollar Hotel . Music from the Motion Picture , Island (cd). Warden, John. 1982. Orpheus. The Metamorphoses of a Myth . Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press.

Robert Eaglestone, The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

Robert Eaglestone, <i>The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature</i>

“We Put Our Hands on the Trigger with Him”: Guilt and Perpetration in &lt;em&gt;Spec OPS: The Line&lt;/em&gt;

In “Beginnings of the Day – Fascism and Representation,” Gillian Rose proposes the creation of a film “which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointment and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him, wanting him to get what he wants” (50). At the same time, however, Rose also questions whether such empathy with an SS man is even possible, given that the audience would be aware of the identity of the protagonist from the start, and would therefore (in Robert Eaglestone’s words) be “unable to want what this evil man wants” (13). The solution, for Rose, is to withhold information from the audience regarding the true character of the protagonist, thereby allowing empathy to build for the character until the point when their villainy is revealed (as in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, after which Rose’s piece is named). This paper proposes a further solution to the question of how to encourage the audience to identify with the perpetrator’s perspective: making the audience complicit in the deeds perpetrated by the protagonist, through the use of interactivity in the videogame medium. I read Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line (2012) as a prime example of a videogame that manages to involve the player in the perpetration of atrocities through a slow process of coming to empathise with the character who commits them. Due to the interactivity which makes the game work as a game, the player must put their hands on the trigger with the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker, in order to proceed through the game, a fact which Spec Ops then holds up to the player as an example of their complicity in the game’s violence. Fascinatingly, by doing this the game essentially punishes the player for playing it, yet it remains compelling (indeed, it received near-universal critical acclaim among games journalism outlets) in spite of, or perhaps because of its attitude towards videogame violence. By demonstrating the extent to which a strong empathic link between player and perpetrator is possible, the videogame medium has the potential to radically alter our relationship with controversial memories of perpetration, working against the troubling, albeit understandable, tendency of memory studies to universalise the innocent’s perspective in the wake of violent conflict (Crownshaw).

Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone (eds), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (eds), The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing.

In her introduction to one of the most prominent foundational texts of trauma studies, and while offering her much debated reading of Tasso’s story of Tancred and Clorinda, Cathy Caruth wrote of the ways the traumatic experience can be voiced “not as the story of the individual in relation to the events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which one’s trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another” (8). In th...

Levinas on Art and Aestheticism: Getting “Reality and Its Shadow” Right

Levinas on Art and AestheticismGetting “Reality and Its Shadow” Right Richard A. Cohen (bio) 1. The Standard Misreading of Levinas on Art a. Introduction Much has been written in the secondary literature about Levinas and art and about Levinas and literature more specifically. In addition to Maurice Blanchot’s observations in The Writing of the Disaster, which is more a primary text than a secondary source, two exceptional studies — well-written, insightful, nuanced, erudite — in English on Levinas and literature are Robert Eaglestone’s book of 1997 entitled Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas and Jill Robbins’s 1999 book entitled Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature.1 No doubt there are other fine studies, but these two will be sufficient for our purposes. They are scholarly in the best sense, effecting to understand Levinas first of all, hence hermeneutically sympathetic, and at the same time taking critical distances, articulating reservations, basically unconvinced by Levinas’s claims. Unfortunately, given all their considerable virtues, these books are also hampered by a serious flaw, one that unhappily appears in all too much of the secondary literature on Levinas and art. [End Page 149] Despite their good will and intelligence, both books fundamentally misunderstand the relation of Levinas’s thought on and to art, and thus also his relation to literature more specifically, because they misconstrue the nature and the status of Levinas’s account of art within his philosophy. Surely this is serious and unfortunate. One aim of the present essay is to expose this flaw, despite its pervasiveness and entrenchment. Another aim, more positive and ultimately the means by which to accomplish the first, is to present a faithful account of what Levinas really has to say about art. Counter to the misgivings leveled against Levinas in the above two books, not to mention the many commentaries that repeat more or less the same things, the present article proposes two theses in his defense. To the charge that Levinas has misrepresented art, my first claim is that Levinas does not misrepresent art and, indeed, that he has a fine sense of it. To the charge that Levinas is hostile to art, my second claim is that Levinas is not at all hostile to art, one sign of which — noticed by both critics — is the literary and aesthetic references that abound in his own writings. That is to say, contrary to his critics, Levinas grasps quite well the nature and the value of art. His own literary practices, found throughout his own writings, some of them quite obvious, such as exegeses of Shakespeare and repeated citations taken from Dostoevsky and Grossman, not to mention a wealth of other references and allusions to artists and writers, and, of course, including explicit comments and discussions about art, all these are consistent with and help underwrite my larger claim that Levinas understands and values art and, indeed, that he understands it very well and values it highly. To be sure, and no one can mistake this, Levinas’s philosophy is ultimately an ethics and not an aesthetics. The ultimum verbum belongs not to aesthetics but to moral responsibility and the quest for justice. It is here, for those who would make aesthetics ultimate, that the rub lies, here that we find the spur and speculum for their distortion and darkening of Levinas on art. All the more necessary, then, are the two sides of the present essay: to understand properly what Levinas is saying by means of a careful reading of his one article devoted entirely to [End Page 150] art, “Reality and Its Shadow,” to discern in as unprejudiced a fashion as possible what Levinas actually has to say about art and its value, and by so proceeding to unmask the inadequacies of Levinas’s aesthetic critics. Getting Levinas right certainly does not foreclose criticism, by any means. It is, nevertheless, the first step to serious criticism or to acceptance. Getting him wrong, however, goes nowhere at all, because it has not even begun. Inasmuch as their mishandling of Levinas is in an important sense basically the same, in the following I treat Robbins’s Altered Reading and Eaglestone’s...

The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism ed. by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone (review)

Buelens, Gert, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, eds. 2014. The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. New York: Routledge. $125.00 hc. $43.95 sc. xviii+181 pp.As one of the most frequently recurring topics in literary and cultural studies, trauma has been analyzed for several decades from various perspectives and has included a wide range of horrific occurrences, from personal histories of abuse to the aftermath of war crimes and genocides. While the classic cases of large-scale studies on trauma, such as the Holocaust or Vietnam War, are gradually losing their pressing contemporaneity, the topic itself stays relevant to our times due to ever-new global waves of war, revolution, and social upheaval. This topical relevance is addressed by The Future of Trauma which comprises ten essays all contributing to the expansion of trauma studies in both its geographical scope and its theoretical boundaries. The editors' statement in the introduction that 'trauma theory' is perhaps less a field or a methodology than a coming together of concerns and accentuates the interdisciplinary approach of the volume (3). The contributing authors, coming from various disciplines within the humanities, stretch their arguments from sociology to psychology and philosophy, and in some cases make close readings of underacknowledged literary texts from around the world. While reviewing the volume in its entirety, this review will focus on three representative essays that highlight the general themes of the volume and outline its overall argumentative method in order to provide a concise insight into the book's approach and scope. Each starts by diagnosing a specific shortcoming in current theories of trauma, proceeds to elaborate it through brief close readings of literary texts, and concludes by offering suggestions for improving the theoretical framework under scrutiny.In the book's first essay, titled Knowledge, 'Afterwardsness,' and the Future of Trauma Theory, Robert Eaglestone embarks upon a metacritical evaluation of the recent moves in trauma studies, suggesting that has been some shiftin the language (at least) of the West, perhaps the world as a result of the constant awareness of trauma at a global scale (19). The kernel of Eaglestone's argument is that the ongoing production of books, essays, artworks, and films about trauma is not only a response to but also a symptom of a systematic change in our conceptual framework that results from trauma itself. In examining a memoir by the eminent Holocaust historian Otto Dov Kulka, Eaglestone notes how the historian turns away from artistic representations of the Holocaust while, in a seemingly paradoxical move, relying on Kafka to convey his complicated sense of suffering and salvage. Eaglestone's essay uses this case study to claim that, in responding to traumatic events, one should analyze not only the ways that these atrocities outrage the principles and virtues by which we live, but also the ways that they disrupt even how these principles and virtues come to be understood (19).Coming from a completely different viewpoint, Stef Craps explores the limits of a Western-based notion of trauma and the problematic prescription of therapeutic methods (as a universally valid practice) for non-Western in the third essay in this collection, Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age. Craps's essay offers a close reading of Aminatta Forna's novel The Memory of Love (2010), which is set in post-civil war Sierra Leone and follows a British psychologist who has volunteered to help the local health services. Through a critical reading of this novel, Craps argues that there is a need for a more comprehensive theoretical framework to study trauma that does not marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures (46). His essay reviews the ongoing objections to the hidden imperialism of Eurocentric concepts like mental illness, uncovering the veiled agenda behind an objective cloak of clinical practice. …

Testimony and Translation

This article discusses some recent critical approaches to the translation of Holocaust testimony, looking in particular at the way in which genre expectations may affect the translator's decisions about how to make the text readable as testimony in the target culture. Engaging with theories of testimony as genre by Robert Eaglestone and Eva Lezzi, the essay explores translators’ prefaces to works by Stefan Szende, Lucie Adelsberger, Miklós Nyiszli, Anatoli Kuznetsov, and others, showing how these documents give us an insight into the tensions inherent in translating a testimony text into a new context in which views about the relationship of text to experience may be quite different.

Crowfall by Shanta Gokhale

reviews established early, with flashbacks to bring him to the present. What is not brought to the present is an explanation for his anal-retentive habits. He was a youth with some extraordinary talents who has not achieved. Described as he is from the outside , thoughts and material activities named, often as catalog lists, Joseph Skizzen is known and unexplained, known and uninteresting. The lack of enduring personal relationships is troubling. As a professor at a small college, he should be in close contact with a number of students. Then there are the faculty and committee meetings and, often, expectedsocialeventswithcolleagues. Such encounters are almost completely absent. Possibly the academic sections are fantasized, which explains the lack of context while undercutting the ground for the shreds of satire that emerge. Referencing Candide calls attention to a difference. I speculate that William Gass, like Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point, was attempting a moderately musical structure to support a “novel of ideas.” The lectures certainly start and end with a main theme, framing digressive variations in the middle. Given the protagonist’s specialization in twelve-tone structure, perhaps it is not surprising that chapter events may reverse, flashing backward in time, sometimes to a dramatic scene leading to an event that has already concluded—and really of no consequence. Middle C ends up being a novel of scenes and topics, sometimes brilliantly performed, set within a lifeplot that has little energy. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Shanta Gokhale. Crowfall. Translated by the author. New Delhi. Penguin Books India. 2013. isbn 97806700866448 Shanta Gokhale’s Crowfall (originally in Marathi) starts with a paradox. Before she can begin telling her story, Anima, the central character, destroys the twelve volumes of her twelve-year-long chronicle of grief and nightmares that started with the mindless murder of her husband in the 1993 Bombay riots. “Free at last,” she mutters, after having shredded the pages. The diary had also become her solace as she linked her fate with the historic violence of the partition of India, the killing of the Sikhs in 1984, and the 2002 riots in Gujarat. These events become the backdrop to the 58 worldliteraturetoday.org Robert Eaglestone Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press Fiction is re-visioned in this concise exploration of the contemporary writing phenomenon. Using the novel as the art form that best speaks to this new worldly “unboundedness,” the literary community is shown to be “infinitely enlarged” through the recent influences of globalization and the expansion of critical thought by postnationalism. Marie Chaix The Summer of the Elder Tree Harry Mathews, tr. Dalkey Archive Press The Summer of the Elder Tree provides a raw autobiographical account of Marie Chaix’s tenyear literary hiatus following the death of her editor. In this menagerie of old journal entries, conversations, scraps of poetry, and poignant revelations, Chaix explores in elegant prose the events large and small that have made her the woman and writer she is. Nota Bene novel. In the foreground is a group of friends: Sharada, a musician; her husband , Shekhar; three painters, Haridas , Feroze, and Ashesh, who is Anima ’s brother; and a supporting cast of relatives, retainers, gallery owners, gurus, and others. A parallel setting to Mumbai is Surgaon, where Anima’s family home is located and where her ailing mother still lives, while her idealistic father has gone missing. It is also the home of the Warlis, and this is the time that “Mumbai’s art world discovered Warli art” and shamelessly exploited it. As a columnist and performing -arts critic, Gokhale speaks with authority on the city and its evolving culture. She speaks with no less empathy of the unique sensibilities of her characters. The nexus between artists, galleries, and art critics, a lucrative formula in the art world everywhere, is shown as a ringside spectator would see it. Vikram Shah, the business owner of Shosha, a suburban art gallery, intent on developing a hitherto neglected market, holds an art bazaar and seminars to educate the public, and lavish cocktails for the higher-ups. Gokhale achieves a fine balance between satire and appreciation of the genuine. She is equally at home in...

Interrupted Discourse and Ethical Judgement in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones

No text exists within a moral vacuum, and the considerable success of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones comes with serious criticism of its perceived ethical messages. This is unsurprising, given the subject matter: Littell’s first literary work is the story of Maximilien Aue, a fictional Nazi SS officer who escapes prosecution for participating in the mass murder of Jews, as well as for raping his sister and murdering his lover, his best friend and – as the novel implies – his mother and stepfather. Having taken a false French identity after the war and become a successful industrialist, Max narrates his memoirs as an older man, seemingly unrepentant for his participation in the Holocaust, which he puts into writing with over 900 pages of precise, disturbing detail. Written in French, American-born Littell’s detailed descriptions of extreme violence and sex have been labelled by some critics as ‘death porn’, and have invited comparisons to Sade and Georges Bataille. Andrew Hussey has called these French authors ‘controversial influences – it is possible to read both Bataille and Sade simply as advocates of extreme cruelty’ (Hussey 2007). In this paper, it is my intention to analyse the ethical considerations in The Kindly Ones to show what I believe is an intentional resistance to the reduction of specific characters and stories, the latter resulting in generalising ethical messages. I will take Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann as an example in order to investigate how The Kindly Ones simultaneously entertains and resists Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil as a paradigm for perpetrators in general, which creates a type of ethical confusion, similar to Robert Eaglestone’s interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas’s term “interrupted discourse”. I believe this constitutes Littell’s critique ofhuman moral systems and will argue that the interrupted discourse of The Kindly Ones, far from being an unethical text, allows for the emergence of a universal ethical perspective beyond flawed human judgement.

Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe by Andrew Baruch Wachtel (review)

716 seer, 86, 4, October 2008 particular, are brought to bear in the pieces by Robert Eaglestone and Amos Friedland, the former stressing the 'nature of the failure of choice and agency as aporia rather than either tragedy or redemption' (p. 48) in the works accessible to him inEnglish, the latter considering the issue of reconciliation through the problematic, nostalgic evocation inFatelessness of the 'beautiful' concentration camp and the hero's 'happiness' therein. A number of attempts are made to provide some literary(-historical) context for the oeuvre, Eniko Molnar Basa limitingherself to theHungarian side,while Paul Varnai is read able about itsplace inHolocaust literaturemore generally; Tamas Scheibner contributes a meticulous analysis ofKertesz's Jegyzokonyv(SwornStatement), with telling cross-cuts to Sorstalansdg. In fact, useful comparative remarks are fre quent throughout the collection and not only in the essayswith specific names in their tide (such as that ofDanilo Kis in the essay byRosana Ratkovcic and Jorge Semprun's in that byMarie Peguy): Julia Karolle looks at Fatelessness as historical fiction, and in an incisive essay that can be recommended to any newcomer one of the co-editors, Louise O. Vasvari, is persuasive about Sorstalansdgs parallels with Camus's Uetranger even as she positions Kertesz's 'daringly innovative text' as 'the ultimate Holocaust novel, which subvert [s] the rhetorical and narrative myths of itspredecessors through defamiliariza tion, irony,humor and elements of self-parody' (p. 268). There are also two pieces, one by the other co-editor, the other by Judy Young, on the depressing metacontext: the storm raised in theHungarian media and more generally amongst Hungarian readers by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to a Hungarian Jew whose topic appears to be exclusively the Holocaust and who, at least in 2002, was arguably better known and appreciated in Germany and in German translation than in Hungary. That an international award to a Hungarian can still, in the twenty-first century, cause a furore about the Hungarianness of a man who chose to remain in Hungary in order to write in his mother-tongue is a typi cal manifestation of the issues raised by Kertesz's work as a whole, with its claim that 'Auschwitz' stands for twentieth-century totalitarianism of any and every kind. Philip Roth's words, in an interview from the late 1980s, obvi ously bear repeating: 'We are all writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time that, however subdy or grossly qualified, constitute our hold on reality and are the closest thingwe have to the truth' (cited here by Barbara Breysach on p. 295). Department ofSlavic Languages andLiteratures Peter Sherwood Universityof North Carolina at ChapelHill Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. RemainingRelevant afterCommunism:The Role of the Writer inEastern Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL and London, 2006. viii + 233 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.00: ?18.50. Andrew Wachtel's aim in this study is to characterize different strategies adopted by East European writers in an attempt to remain relevant in the new REVIEWS 717 circumstances following the fall of Communism. These include abandoning literature for politics or themedia, becoming nationalist or 'internationalist', writing popular fiction or trying to represent the experience of the transition itself. Wachtel does not attempt an encyclopedic survey, but, after two contextualizing chapters, selects a few paradigms for each category. He hopes thus to provide an 'introduction to a transnational consideration of post communist literature' (p. 11) that will give specialists a framework and inspire interest inEast European writing. Besides his explicit thesis,Wachtel implicitly also explores how East European writers can remain relevant to theWest, perhaps especially Western students. With its straightforward structure and style, relatively friendly price and numerous caveats addressed to specialists, the book seems aimed essentially at the broader market of undergraduate and graduate students and interested non-specialists seeking a way into the subject. Consequently, Wachtel favours breadth over depth, working from the detail of ten country specific reports prepared by researchers to the over-arching conclusions of the final study. Croatian, Czech, Russian and Serbian writers are best represented, with some countries barely mentioned. Wachtel offers close commentaries on certain texts, but rarely lists other comparable pieces, thus requiring the...