Abstract: This article uses the repeated references made in John Banville's 2000 novel Eclipse to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a foundation for an intertextual reading of the two texts. Both the protagonists make elaborate attempts at self-imposed isolation. Through close reading and comparative analysis, the paper argues that while both Alex Cleave and Robinson Crusoe seek to establish autonomous subjectivity through separation from others (particularly women), Banville's novel critically engages with and ironizes this masculine literary tradition. The study demonstrates how Eclipse both inherits and subverts Defoe's legacy of the solipsistic male narrator, particularly through Cleave's failed attempt to achieve authentic selfhood through isolation. The novel's form becomes increasingly permeable to other voices despite Cleave's resistance and his aversion to others. By analyzing the parallels between Cleave's retreat to his childhood home and Crusoe's island exile, the paper shows how Banville's work both acknowledges and challenges the novel form's historically "violent relation to alterity," particularly in its treatment of female characters.
Abstract: The trauma of a returning soldier is a topos in war literature. Its exploration frequently relies on the semantic and semiotic negotiations between the war zone and the life back home. Mariette Kalinowski's short story "The Train" stands out among texts examining the struggles of returnees not only through its authorship — it belongs to the rather limited body of war literature by women veteran writers — but also because of the manner in which it projects the materialization of this exchange. Traumatic visions of a bomb going off in Iraq infiltrate and ultimately take possession of the protagonist's present-day reality. Homeland is devoid of a sense of belonging, and the material objects that populate it become both the repository and the integrators of the protagonist's traumatic war experience. By employing trauma theory and thing theory, this paper examines the representation of connections between home and the battlefield and looks into the transformation of objects into things that assist in the pursuit of ontological imperatives. To the vocabulary of trauma studies it adds the notion of nodal integrator in the analysis of Kalinowski's innovativeness in the handling of the topos.
Abstract: "A Letter that Never Reached Russia" has mainly been read as a nostalgic farewell to the narrator's first love who remained in the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, while he chose exile. Often the reason why the letter never reached Russia has been attributed to censorship, but, more likely, it never was sent because, in the process of composing his response to her letter, he realized that she, now a long-time citizen of the Soviet Union, would be unable to understand his complex feelings about living in Weimar Berlin. In spite of his being a lonely declassé stranger there he is also a happy flâneur whom nobody can order to be constantly optimistic, or reject foxtrot and shimmy, or how to react to a suicide, or in any other way subordinate himself to emotional and intellectual coercion. There is therefore no returning home, or first loves, not even in letters.
Abstract: In John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men , George and Lennie's repeatedly recounted dream of rabbits, land, and companionship drives the two men as they navigate their lonely working migrancy. Their recounting ritual emerges as an event within the novella, raising questions about the effects of nursing a private dream versus keeping a regular practice of speaking it. The rabbit dream finds powerful activation when understood as a performative speech-act which releases illocutionary force to construct new realities. These conditions include the identity built within George and Lennie at the time of speaking; the binding closeness the dream creates between them, which empowers other workers as well and defends them against external threats; and the preservation of Lennie's identity in the final scene, even as the dream collapses.
Abstract: Biofiction is fiction that names its protagonist after a real person. In the 1930s it became a dominant literary form among prominent German writers. For Thomas Mann, this genre could be used to provide readers with an existential map for moral living, but Thomas's son, Klaus, who was openly gay, believed that his father's commitment to morality led to mental illness. Klaus Mann authored biofictions that metaphorized the lives of real people to represent a possibility of a post-moral way of living that promoted better psychological well-being. In his novella, Barred Window , Klaus implicitly exposes his father's way of thinking as not just obsolete but also as dangerous.
Abstract: Beowulf features complex shifts in temporality, traditionally labeled "digressions," and a generally disjointed narrative structure, making it hard to follow for modern audiences. This article proposes a reframing of this much debated trait of the text by reading two episodes characterized by temporal entanglement and intense emotion, approaching them through the lens of cognitive literary study. Seen as cognitive blends within a specific mode of poetic production and drawing on a now partially lost tapestry of narrative traditions, such moments will be understood on their own terms as aesthetically pleasing and emotionally charged episodes rather than as haphazard interruptions to the main storyline.
Abstract: This essay situates Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta within the context of the Elizabethan "Stranger Crisis" and reconsiders the portrayal of Barabas in relation to the xenophobic sentiments directed at Continental immigrants. Rather than endorsing the prevailing stranger-as-threat reading, the essay argues that Marlowe exposes the precarious position of immigrant communities and reframes the alleged transgressions attributed to them. The essay further demonstrates how the play illuminates a scapegoating logic through which the host nation displaces responsibility for its own economic, religious, and political failures onto alien populations. The Jew of Malta prompts both its original audience and modern readers to confront not only the futility of such a strategy but also its haunting recurrence across historical cycles.
Abstract: Anton Chekhov contracted tuberculosis in his late teens; his sickness may have increased his capacity for empathy. His literary talent allowed him not only to internalize other people's suffering but to voice it, often creating new frameworks and vocabulary for the expression of fear and inner calamity. In "A Boring Story" (1889), a relatively young Chekhov renders the agonizing thoughts of the protagonist, a dying old man, an eminent professor of medicine, Nikolai Stepanovich. This article analyzes "A Boring Story" as an example of illness and end-of-life stories that have become the focus of narrative medicine. My purpose is to highlight some unavoidable limitations that a narrator such as Nikolai Stepanovich might have faced in the late 1880s. I argue that in presenting his old physician's thoughts, Chekhov started a discussion about the likelihood and usefulness of such concepts as a proper death and death with dignity, an important topic of today's debates.
Abstract: This article reads Borges's essays on Zeno's paradoxes through the lens of pataphysics — the "science of imaginary solutions" — to reinterpret his hybrid mode of reasoning that blends disciplines, as well as reason with unreason, order with chaos, and seriousness with humor. Drawing on Alfred Jarry's concept of pataphysics and Christian Bök's pataphysical reappropriation of Gaston Bachelard's "surrationalism," I argue that Borges's texts embody a form of pataphysics: a paradox-embracing, jocoserious reflection that challenges rationalism by exploring the "crevices of unreason" — exceptions that disrupt logic from within. Borges offers a playful yet rigorous framework for thought, suited to the contradictions and uncertainties of postnormal times.
This article demonstrates how Samuel Beckett's Endgame fleshes out the implausible entailments of a world premised on the emotivist understanding of the self-- on a noncognitivist conception of metaethical anti-realism, which is precisely the moral theory of meaning that Alasdair MacIntyre sets out to dismantle in After Virtue. I delineate an analogy between MacIntyre's critique of post-Enlightenment conceptions of obligation and Beckett's staging of moral incoherence and interpersonal manipulation parodied throughout Endgame.
Writing in the years before, during, and right after WWI, Christian Friedrich Weiser published scholarly and political-utopian works of planning for a German victory: Germany’s idealist philosophy, when realized as a political reality, would offer the world a beneficial alternative to the poverty of “Anglo-Saxon” pragmatism. To give imaginative shape to his plans, Weiser also wrote a novella, Die Hoffnung des Iren (1915). Translated into English as The Faith of an Irishman , it latches on to the Irish hatred of the English, the Irish for whom the “German Day” would also come as liberation. In his scholarly book, Shaft-esbury und das deutsche Geistesleben (1916), Weiser represents Shaftesbury as inspiration for German idealism. The utopianism in his pamphlets and his fiction is informed by his experiences as a returning immigrant: he believes that ethnic Germans outside the Reich must take the lead in realizing the “German Day.”
Naipaul’s final two novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds , revisit the question of what it means to lead a valuable life with a greater patience than he previously displayed for the possibilities of worthwhile belonging. This essay offers a different way through which the complexity and irresolution of these under-discussed novels might be approached by placing them in dialogue with the philosophical discussion of modern identity. Building upon the work of Charles Taylor and Kwame Anthony Appiah, among others, I argue that Naipaul’s late fiction reconsiders belonging and withdrawal as constituting a problematics of value. His late fiction takes seriously the difficulties of leading a life in relation to conflicting value systems, difficulties which are often overlooked in his own earlier writing and thinking.
In the spring of 1887, Chekhov embarked on a journey from Moscow, traversing the vast expanse of the southern Russian steppe with the intention of visiting his hometown Taganrog. Less than a year later, in February 1888, he completed his novella, Steppe: A Story of a Journey , widely regarded as transformative in his literary career. The present article delves into the innovative aspect of Chekhov’s novella by focusing on its pivotal moment of departure. Besides referring to the steppe journey that inspired the story, “departure” pertains to the literary departure of Steppe itself. Published a few decades after the introduction of trains in Russia and just before the advent of cinema, Chekhov’s Steppe , I argue, introduced an original literary “moving image.” By situating the emergence of this image in the broader context of the 19th-century revolution of seeing, I trace the existential charge of this aesthetic moment, which cast time itself as the vital and pivotal hero of Chekhov’s prose.
The essay points to an overlap between The Metamorphosis and Kafka’s early unfinished story “Wedding Preparations in the Country”; it highlights the theme of the incomplete metamorphosis as underlying the protagonists’ predicament. The theme of the incomplete transformation is then traced in a number of Kafka’s short stories, revealing its importance in Kafka’s world-view.
This essay analyzes Anthony Burgess’s “answer to Orwell” in his 1962 dystopia The Wanting Seed . It claims that the cyclical dynamic of liberal, oppressive, and conservative phases that critics have traditionally taken to be Burgess’s anti-Orwellian philosophy of history is balanced in the novel by an alternative picture of perpetual war, which may even be seen as the beginning of the Orwellian end of history. The text overlays these two interpretations, and it is not possible decisively to favor one over the other. The protagonist’s final existentialist insight is that we must “try to live” whatever world and history it is we live in.
This paper analyzes Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children within the framework of selected tenets of Karen Barad’s agential realism. With its focus on the inherent agency of matter and its uncanny creative power as well as intra-active entanglements among entities, Barad’s theory provides a context for a new reading of Rushdie’s magical realist novel. The project draws inspiration from quantum physics and points to the “spiritual” dimension of materiality while broadening the notion of agency to include all kinds of beings. Midnight’s Children exhibits a new materialist strand of the posthumanist perception of reality: the human body is depicted as embedded in intra-active connections with various kinds of entities, the human vs. animal opposition is questioned, and the non-human is appreciated. Most importantly, Rushdie accentuates the peculiar uncanny quality of matter. The paper argues that in Midnight’s Children human “magical” corporeality corresponds to the uncanny corporeality of the world.
This paper argues that the missing object, the titular moonstone, in Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel influences the characters and the circumstances, functioning as an overarching consciousness which I interpret as a Hegelian Consciousness. The loss of the diamond initiates the action of the novel; however, it is the overwhelming presence of the diamond inside the consciousness of the characters that causes their entanglement not only with one another but with the absent/present diamond as well. The diamond has a transformative effect on the characters, reaching deep down into their unconscious, and promoting self-discovery. Collins’s deployment of a series of symbolic triads, along with his combination of fragmented narratives, dismisses any attempt to assign a central position to any one character. In the absence of a center, and through the symbols of spirituality surrounding the diamond, oppositions are dissolved and the moonstone becomes the source of light that illuminates the problems concerning a sense of belonging, (im)perfection, marginalization, contradiction, and existence per se in a world that is divided more and more as individuality replaces collectivity in the name of modern progress. Collins posits a critical outlook towards this replacement.
This article discusses the changing understanding and practice of autofiction in the broader cultural context of the transformations of lived reality, the media landscape, and ways of writing and reading life stories. Originally defined as an autobiographical narrative breaking the conventions of classical autobiography, autofiction and its meaning change as notions of autobiography and the autobiographical loosen. The article suggests that a signaled autofictional intent and deliberate ambiguity of framing are important markers of contemporary autofiction. The second part of the article analyzes the strategies of such signaling in Czech writer Jan N & ecaron;mec's Ways of Writing about Love (2019). It demonstrates how this work underlines the performative nature of self-representation by commenting on the process of self-narration and self-invention as well as by enacting a patchwork identity through inserting other texts and playful touches into the narrative. By allowing new media to influence the form of the book and by transcending the boundaries of the text to continue his self-performance in other media, N & ecaron;mec probes the possibilities not just of "writing about love" but also of performing the self. The work thus exemplifies autofiction's tendency to respond to sociocultural developments, including changing patterns of life storytelling.
