Book Review: Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art by Peggy Karpouzou and Nikoleta Zampaki (eds.)
This article examines representations of crime in interwar Central European prose in which the causal link between a determinate act and culpability is broken or inverted. Drawing on Milan Kundera’s reading of Kafka and Paul Ricoeur’s typology of fault, it analyses four cases in which crime is represented as absent, manufactured, phantom or misrecognised, asking whether this reversal is unique to The Trial or belongs to a wider mesoregional repertoire. In Weiner’s “The Empty Chair,” an objectless offense is pursued and then withdrawn, leaving only a relationless offense. In Gombrowicz’s “A Premeditated Crime,” the narrator-judge constructs a murder from appearances and forces the son to mime it on an already dead body. In Hostovský’s The Arsonist, a village assembles a phantom arsonist from disparate acts and inscriptions. Finally, in Cholnoky’s Prikk’s heavenly journey and Thomas, the protagonists invent or misrecognize a homicide. Ricoeur’s distinction between realist sin and phenomenalist guilt supplies the analytic grid: who accuses, whether the named act occurs, and whether the resulting affect seeks amendment or only self-punishment. What is found recurring is a distinctly Central European reflection on the representation of crime as something to be sought, manufactured or misrecognized rather than simply punished – an interwar repertoire later displaced, in postwar absurdism, from interior imputation onto the institution.
This study examines how contemporary Irish writer Colm Tóibín revisits, reimagines, and rewrites Greek tragedy in his novel House of Names (2017), and shows how he creates a new representation of Clytemnestra. By drawing upon the old tradition of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Tóibín turns his novel into the echo chamber of a rich tradition of cultural mythology of murderous women: “Lilith, Adam’s first wife from Hebrew lore, dangerous and defiant; Medea, vengeful and jealous; the Maenads from Ancient Greece, frenzied and senseless; or Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, greedy, ambitious and mad” (Walker and Gill 1). I argue that Tóibín portrays a Clytemnestra who rises above the trauma of being tricked by her ambitious husband, Agamemnon, into bringing her daughter Iphigenia to slaughter. Before being a murderess, Clytemnestra is a victim of Agamemnon’s abusive and deceitful act. Unlike most killers in literature, both male and female, who kill in a rage, she carefully plans her exemplary killing for calculated effect. While examining the ins and outs of Clytemnestra’s contorted psychology, this study also explores its impact upon the reader by testing how Aristotle’s concept of ‘catharsis’ was transferred from Greek tragedy into the novel and how the paraphernalia (gods, divine intervention, hubris) of the old genre were transformed to suit the new genre.
This article examines the representation of concealed crime and dangerous interpretation in William Shakespeare and George Wilkins’s Pericles and the late-antique Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre. Beginning from the play’s corrupted marriage test at Antioch, it argues that Antiochus’s riddle is dangerous not because it is impossible to solve but because successful interpretation cannot produce the social outcome the contest promises. Drawing on J.L. Austin’s account of linguistic felicity, the article distinguishes between semantic success and pragmatic failure: Pericles and Apollonius understand the riddle correctly, but the ruler who establishes the interpretive procedure also controls the consequences of answering it. Interpretation therefore becomes accusation, and knowledge (of the crime perpetrated by the king) becomes politically dangerous. Read together, the two works suggest that restoring familial bonds after their criminal distortion, and preventing further criminality, depend not simply on recovering hidden truth, but on re-creating the conditions under which truth can be spoken and on constituting an audience properly disposed to recognize and act on it.
