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.
