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.
