Abstract: When James Joyce uses a Dantean model, Paradiso 31, for Stephen Dedalus's "Parable of the Plums" in the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses, Stephen's tale marks a turning point in the character's development from earnest poet to ironic storyteller. In Dante, the Pilgrim and St. Bernard gaze up at the Rose of Heaven; in Stephen's story, two "Dublin vestals" gaze up at the statue of the "onehandled adulterer" Horatio Nelson. By structuring his profane story on an inversion of Dante's sacred one, Joyce has Stephen parody both Irish nationalism's rhetorical use of Moses' story, and the sexual repressiveness of Catholic orthodoxy. Stephen thereby accomplishes a creative breakthrough toward the mature author's Dantean polysemic aesthetics. He learns to merge imagery of contemporary Dublin with a classic narrative structure, and this makes his parable the crux of Joyce's larger Dantean pattern in the novel.
Abstract: In Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the state is ever present without being directly accessed or placed at the center of attention. In fact, despite being set in Westminster and featuring official architecture, government policy-making, state functionaries, and official personages, Woolf's novel consistently decenters the state. The play with perspective and exploration of questions of perception and cognition that characterizes much modernist fiction here proves a highly dynamic means of not only carefully describing but also forcefully contesting what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the "symbolic violence" of the state. Leveraging the symbolic power of the novel to undermine that of the state, Woolf foregrounds her characters' private responses to state symbols and representatives while also weaponizing the conventions of the novel against the prestige of the state.
Abstract: Both admirers and critics of the Pulitzer-winning international bestseller The Goldfinch (2013) by Donna Tartt invariably comment on its "Dickensian" quality, the former approvingly and the latter disparagingly. What some see as a refreshing return to traditional narrative others regard as a frivolous pastiche that indulged in the Victorian era's worst excesses. This attitude originates in a misreading of the novel's relationship to the Victorian tradition. The novel reflects instead a self-aware engagement with Dickens and his contemporaries. Reading The Goldfinch as part of the neo-Victorian tradition allows us to recontextualize some of its arguable failures as part of the novel's thematic interest in aesthetic integrity and in a wider reassessment of Victorian form.
Abstract: From The Voyage Out (1915) to The Waves (1931), and all the way up to Between the Acts (1941), the novels of Virginia Woolf are formally and thematically embroiled in communication breakdowns. Even such poignant scenes as Clarissa and Peter Walsh's tête-à-tête in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) are full of misfires and infelicities that hamper interpersonal connection. This article examines the general communicative difficulty that permeates Woolf's works, in which intersubjectivity skirts the verbal and alternative, paradiscursive channels of communication emerge. Ranging from the atmospheric to the telepathic, these "strange communications" organize Woolf's fiction and charge it with a distinctly modernist tension between social critique on the one hand and utopian vision on the other.
Abstract: Rachel Cusk's Outline (2014) and Claudia Rankine's Just Us: An American Conversation (2020) both offer ethnographies of the one-to-one conversation. Rankine presents conversations between white and Black Americans as encounters between subjects who are determined by incommensurate histories, but nevertheless conditionally capable of reflecting those differences through ongoing, open-ended dialogue. Throughout the Outline trilogy, Cusk presents the conversation—usually, between white and well-heeled Europeans—as an ahistorical and patriarchal scene of gathering, in which subjects may claim for themselves a contingent sense of narrative identity. These two approaches to the conversation are complementary: Cusk shows the everyday means by which patriarchal, individualistic architectures of whiteness are tacitly constructed in speech interactions, whereas Rankine writes toward a deferred counter-imaginary of these constructions. Both Cusk and Rankine find literary forms to archive conversations and the inequities that conversations reproduce.
Abstract: In Between the Acts (1941), Virginia Woolf's intermedial approach to Greek ritual constitutes a modernist reconstruction that anticipates key features of what Hans-Thies Lehmann would later theorize as "postdramatic theatre." An analysis of Miss La Trobe's pageant reveals three postdramatic principles: the parataxis of theatrical elements that dismantle traditional hierarchies, the transformation of representation into event-based presence through modernist rupture aesthetics, and the irruption of the real that intertwines art with life. Through these intermedial strategies, Woolf's avant-garde theater-fiction reshapes our perception of the world in ways that align with Jacques Rancière's notion of aesthetic "dissensus." Her politics of aesthetics thus works through formal innovation rather than didactic content, demonstrating how aesthetic form itself can function as political interventions during times of intense social crisis.
Abstract: "Ambros Adelwarth," from The Emigrants (published in 1992 and translated into English in 1996), is one of W.G. Sebald's richest narratives for English-language readers and not least for how it converses with two great practitioners of the short story who were both remarkable prose stylists in English: James Joyce (1882–1941) and D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930). "Ambros Adelwarth" resembles Joyce's "The Dead" (1914) and Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (1926). Such resemblances may or may not be deliberate for Sebald, but they are still telling and significant in that they show his general kinship with two modern precursors. Joyce and Lawrence help us read "Ambros Adelwarth" productively by revealing Sebald's investment in the modernist short story form in English. Sebald's unusual method of incorporating photographic and textual references in his fiction reveals a commitment to pre- and postwar modernist developments in the English language short story: in "Ambros Adelwarth," Joyce offers a counterpoint to Sebald's concept of epiphany, whereas Lawrence underwrites the spiritual despoliation and loss engendered by an impersonal, materialistic modern world. Sebald's use of literary form is deeply informed by practitioners of literary modernism; and as fictional biography, "Ambros Adelwarth" signals the limit of both literal hermeneutics and modernist poetics.
Abstract: In Elizabeth Costello (2003), J.M. Coetzee repudiates Salman Rushdie's "the Empire writes back" credo. The recuperative view of rewriting attributed to Coetzee and to post-colonial novelists writ large is, in fact, heavily contested among them. Against a scholarly consensus that views Coetzee as a proponent of postcolonial rewriting, I view him on the contrary as an agnostic whose faith in the practice has faltered due to its potential "parasitism." I theorize Coetzee's critique using Michel Serres's concept of the parasite and show how postcolonial rewriting is contrasted with historical fiction in Elizabeth Costello . By accusing a leading historical novelist, Paul West, of exposing readers to "obscene" reenactments of historical events, Costello attempts to reestablish the credibility of postcolonial rewriting. Ultimately, however, Coetzee has lost faith in the premise of postcolonial rewriting and what Ariella Azoulay calls the project of "unlearning" the postcolonial past.
Abstract: Yoko Tawada critiques European Orientalism in The Naked Eye through the lens of a Vietnamese high school student in Europe. Most readings of the text focus on the protagonist's migrant subjectivity and assumed passivity, but the novel exposes the workings of European Orientalism through how other characters see and register the novel's protagonist. The protagonist uses the 13 films starring Catherine Deneuve that structure the novel to attempt to create a subjectivity that is not defined by the European Orientalist gaze, but in the final instance is unable to do so.
Abstract: Critics have long compared William Carlos Williams to Daniel Boone, arguing that both abandoned European models to engage with the American landscape on its own terms. As evidence, scholars typically cite passages from In the American Grain (1925) that appear to praise Boone for his submission to the wilderness. However, Williams offers a subtle critique of westward expansion and of the language used to lionize frontier figures in popular histories. A year later, Williams developed his thinking further in a little-known prose poem that describes Boone as a symbol of the violence inherent to frontier exploration. Read alongside Spring and All (1923), these works reveal the poet's preoccupation with how American history is narrativized. In both prose and verse, Williams questioned national myths by exploring the imagination's ability to sustain, obscure, or critique violent histories.
Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" presents an abortion narrative saturated with an affective atmosphere of ambivalence. While this ambivalence may seem like an apolitical alternative to pro-or anti-abortion rhetoric, "Hills" reveals how ambivalence both makes visible the serious limitations of current political rhetorical frameworks regarding abortion (which often seek to erase or ignore the ambivalent), and offers more expansive narrative opportunities for comprehending and understanding abortion experiences. Ambivalence, then, is not an obstacle to the production of knowledge, but instead makes visible the highly specific knowledges and ideas about abortion voiced by Hemingway's characters.
H.D.'s poem "The Master" (1934-1935), which works through her ambivalence about having been Sigmund Freud's analysand, has long been viewed as challenging his theories of castration and penis envy. Although the speaker's repeated statement that "woman" is p"erfect" has justifiably led scholars to read "The Master" as revaluing "woman " over and against her diminishment by early psychoanalysis, the poem also inscribes non-binary subjectivities. It foregrounds a "woman . . . beyond women" who "is" the "dart andpulse of the male," and imagines a future in which "men" such as Freud will embrace transfemininity's insights to "feel / what it is to be a woman." In so doing, "The Master" shows that by leaving H.D. "free . . . to prophesy"-to invent new forms of gender subjectivity-the analysis created a space well beyond Freud's initial premises in which H.D. could figure the subjectivities of both analysand and analyst as nonbinary.
Rudolph Fisher was notjust a prominentHarlem Renaissance figure, he was also a medical doctor, a distinction literary critics neglect. In his short story "Skeeter" and detective works, The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem and J"ohn Archer's Nose," Fisher advanced a holistic understanding of the Black body that developed out of his radiology practice. Fisher positions the Black body as capable of greater insight than the X-ray and related medical devices. Though Fisher does not fully dismiss medical technologies, he advocates a bodily empiricism over a technological empiricism. At the same time, in his detective fiction, Fisher creatively harnesses the X-ray, using its contrasts of dark and light-black and white-to produce a modernist aesthetics and compare theories of African American subjects. By introducing the X-ray to meditate on Black subjectivity, Fisher repurposes the detective genre and proposes afresh epistemology.
The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature marshals many of the field's most brilliant and influential scholars in order to construct a queer American literary history from as many sharp-eyed perspectives as possible. It spans multiple modes of historiography, attends to manifold configurations of gender and sexual non-normativity as well as racial and ethnic identities, and demonstrates a plethora of methodological approaches. In bringing together these multifarious strategies and focuses, the volume magnificently accomplishes its ambitious goal of representing the queer history of American literature. Yet it is also a refreshingly queer narration of that history, juxtaposing accepted versions of the stories it tells with cutting-edge provocations, canonical figures with those deserving of more attention, and standard notions of what counts as literary with understudied genres. For scholars of modern literature, it is a particular boon, with the majority of its chapters attending to queer American literature since 1900.
Critics have noted the "cathexis" (Lytle Shaw)Frank O'Hara produces among his readers. By presenting the raw data of the self-the names of lovers, friends, artists and associates-O'Hara activates a desire to know the speaking subject, an unearned familiarity that mirrors that the poet's parasocial invocations of female stars. But our identifications give rise to disidentification: the cited names start to decohere into the discursive patter of cultural capital. Our readerly investments in O'Hara make him the poet par excellence of queer white habitus. As demonstrated though a revisionist reading of "Having a Coke with You" and an intertextual poetic conversation with Amiri Baraka, O'Hara's poetics explores the erotics of class desire. By his late masterpiece "Biotherm," O'Hara dramatizes the collapse of the bourgeois ego under the pressure to curate society and the self.
Se & aacute;n Hewitt's 2024 collection Rapture's Road intentionally centers queer joy. Queer desire unabashedly takes up space in the work, and queer personhood is represented, at least at times, as a state of ecstatic abundance. This is not to say that Hewitt minimizes queer suffering; Rapture's Road repeatedly asks us to bear witness to mourning and violence. Joy becomes, here, a p"ractice of survival"-not an effort to banish sorrow, but an affect that "effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks" (Gay 10, 4). The volume arrives at this affective orientation by enmeshing the human with the natural world: Hewitt's queer speakers offer us new ways of looking at nature, and nature reflects back felicitously on queer personhood. Its unselfconscious animal and botanical impulses illuminate the candor of desire, displacing shame and humiliation to make space for queer joy.
Philip Roth's last novel Nemesis enacts a literary construction of healthy body that is both biopolitical and hermeneutical in nature. By juxtaposing Michel Foucault's and Hans-Georg Gadamer's theoretical analyses of health and their divergent understandings of the function of language as it enables access to the body and lifeworlds of physician and patient, I argue for the pertinence ofa hermeneutical reading ofthe intersubjective encounter between fellow polio sufferers Bucky Cantor andArnie Mesnikoff,positioning the achievement of equilibrium as a therapeutical move beyond the dead repetitions of trauma and the eudaemonic potentialities of narrative as manifested in dialogue between the two characters. Foucault's biopolitical emphases allow for significant critical attention to the ideological markers of societal normativity that come undone under epidemiological circumstances, but it is Gadamer who evokes the healing potentialities of narrative as it integrates the narrated self with future ethical possibilities made possible by a balanced self-understanding. Nemesis employs an artful narrative structure to create an objectified equilibrium bringing together the language of health and the health of language.
In a neglected fragment on the Ballets Russes in one of her Mrs. Dalloway notebooks, Virginia Woolf draws an important distinction between ballet's austere classicism and the popular appeal of the English variety stage. This tension informs her response to Diaghilev's company as a modernist enterprise, both in its pre-war seasons at Covent Garden and its post-war migration to the music hall. Fokine's ballet Le Spectre de la Rose (1911), made famous by Nijinsky's nostalgically idealized jet & eacute;, operates as a model for Woolf's balletic imaginary and her evocation of pre-war social rituals in Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and The Years (1937). Woolfcontrasts moments ofself-enclosed aesthetic rapture, encoded in Mrs. Dalloway's movement aesthetics, with the narrowly conceived national character of the music hall, prescribed as a tranquilizing remedy that encourages states of collective sedation.
What is the role of genre in the fictional representation of animals? Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's collection Understudies (1901) demonstrates how regionalist conventions are extended into nonhuman domains. Understudies attempts to do for nonhuman creatures what regionalist writers had long done for marginalized human groups: nudge them into the circle ofsocial and moral concern by demonstrating their kinship with "us" while preserving a modicum of untranslatability that allows them to retain their integrity and independent value as "other."By bringing genre studies to bear on historicist explorations ofanimal representation, this essay demonstrates how form shapes the literary depiction of human and nonhuman subjects alike.
Ballet adaptations of modernist literary works have been thriving in the last twenty modernist literature as well as its continuing relevance in the twenty-first century. ballet brings into strong relief the corporeal creativity and performance that are as much a part of Gregor's transformation as horror and social exclusion are. Pita's choreographic reading prompts us to think not only about the ways in which contemporary ballet straddles abstraction and narration, but also about the resonance of Kafka's text to the study of disability. It shows how dance takes a prime position in the articulation of the renegotiation between bodies and their environments both in these two texts and beyond.
