Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness: The Sorrows of Satan,Popular Fiction,and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kinds of contemporary fiction Corelli seeks to warn against. As a consequence, The Sorrows of Satan, while exiled from the canon, shows itself to be surprisingly representative of the image of fin-de-siècle literary culture constructed by its afterlife. Like so many 1890s fictions, it is a work of art about the work of art, and dramatizes such by now familiar late-Victorian tropes as: decadence, moral relativism, debates over literary taste, realism, post-Ibsen drama, the sexual double standard, the marriage market, the New Woman, motherhood, hysteria and female pathologies, degeneration anxiety, mesmerism. The Sorrows of Satan's status as forgotten best-seller, a ‘great bad book’, asks difficult questions about the relationship between literary criticism and literary pleasure.     

TO CATCH THE ECHO: RETHINKING ACTS OF WITNESSING TO THE SHOAH

In light of recent revelations about global ignorance and disbelief regarding the Holocaust, first‐hand testimonies acquire fresh significance. Two disparate books frame this discussion of how writings by survivors serve to deepen our understanding of the Shoah. Otto Dov Kulka's memoir, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, is a carefully crafted account by a professional historian who survived as a child in Auschwitz. Thomas Trezise's work, Witnessing Witnessing, is an analytical inquiry into the literary and epistemic issues that frame different genres of testimony ranging from video to poetry. Kulka's slender account is situated in the context of other works by survivors, including Saul Friedländer's When Memory Comes, Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After, and a more recent work by Joseph Polak, After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring. The emphasis in this discussion is upon the challenges that survivors face in articulating horror, especially to readers in the twenty‐first century. Trezise's more voluminous work is based upon the literary and philosophical theories of Adorno, Levinas, and Freud, among others. The question raised in this essay focuses upon which of these narrative strategies might work better to convey the complex meanings of the Shoah after the generation of survivors has departed from the historical scene. In the end, the halting words of those who went through the death camps is all we have to counter the ignorance and disbelief spreading around the world. Kulka's book, combining memories, dreams, and art works, fosters an imaginative encounter with inconceivable historical realities. Trezise's theoretical engagement with indexicality and with the phatic function of language helps us to understand the impact of testimonies within the scholarly literature. It does not, however, point a clear path toward conveying the importance of the Holocaust to the public at large. For this purpose, we need books such as Kulka's that enable the generation after the Holocaust to listen to silences embedded in survivor narratives. These silences must be carried forward in time, along with the ethical mandate not to forget the atrocities of the Shoah. If we can embrace this mission, we may be able to diminish the reign of hate running amuck today.     

STORY MAKES HISTORY,THEORY MAKES STORY: DEVELOPING RÜSEN'S HISTORIK IN LOGICAL AND SEMIOTIC DIRECTIONS

This essay will argue that the traditional opposition between narrative and theory in historical sciences is dissolved if we conceive of narratives as theoretical devices for understanding events in time through special concepts that abridge typical sequences of events. I shall stress, in the context of the Historical Knowledge Epistemological Square (HKES) that emerged with the scientization of history, that history is always narrative, story has a theoretical ground of itself, and scientific histories address the need for a conceptual progression in ever‐improved narratives. This will lead to identification of three major theoretical levels in historical stories: naming, plotting (or emplotment), and formalizing. We revisit Jörn Rüsen's theory of history as the best starting point, and explore to what extent it could be developed by (i) taking a deeper look into narratological knowledge, and (ii) reanalyzing logically the conceptual strata in order to bridge the overrated Forschung/Darstellung (research/exposition) divide. The corollary: we should consider (scientific) historical writing as the last step of historical research, not as the next step after research is over. This thesis will drive us to a reconsideration of the German Historik regarding the problem of interpretation and exposition. Far from alienating history from science, narrative links history positively to anthropology and biology. The crossing of our triad name‐plot‐model with Rüsen's four theoretical levels (categories‐types‐concepts‐names) points to the feasibility of expanding Rüsen's Historik in logical and semiotic directions. Story makes history, theory makes story, and historical reason may proceed.     

EXPERIENCE AND HISTORY: THE REACH AND LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO HISTORY

Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World presents the summa of David Carr's phenomenological approach to history. I acknowledge the value of this perspective, but I find it doubtful that a phenomenological account can replace the paradigms of memory and representation against which Carr pits it. The concept of historicity is, rather, complementary in that it alerts us to the prethematic presence of history. Phenomenologically, Carr's attempt to tie history closely to experience runs into problems as it is based on a questionable use of Husserl's notion of retention and risks blurring the distinct temporality of history. At the same time, the central concepts of Carr's approach, both experience and narrative, could be deployed in further ways. As literary scholars have come to emphasize, narrative triggers experiences in its readers. Thus, even if it is impossible to recreate the experiences of historical protagonists, narrative lends itself to giving readers a sense of the experiential dimension of the past. In this sense, narrative is not only a medium of representation, but also a means of presence.     

Going beyond the grid: literary mapping as creative reading

Drawing from the importance of narrative inquiry in contemporary geographical reasoning and teaching, this paper focuses on some practices set around the relationship between maps and literature. Reader-generated maps, maps produced starting from the reading of a literary text, are at the core of a reflection on the potentialities of literary mapping in higher education; relating maps and literature in an educational environment, I suggest creative reading and creative mapping as co-constructive practices that are able to guide students in addressing and internalising the complexity of spatial categories. Reflecting on the students’ literary mappings, I focus on the various ways that the literary map contributes to mobilising the space of the text, guiding students in approaching spatial issues from a different (and creative) perspective. Time, point of view and literary trans-scalarity are the key narrative concepts that guide and inform possible inductive ruminations on literary mapping as a learning strategy. Following the core question of “what literary mapping might be and do in the digital age”, I aim to resituate contemporary discussions on literary mapping in an educational environment.     

Between the General and the Particular: Reminiscences of Plato's Timaeus in Piotr Rawicz's Le sang du ciel

Piotr Rawicz's novel Le sang du ciel depicts a Jewish protagonist, Boris, who manages to escape the Nazi genocide and, as a result, doubts his own legitimacy to bear witness to the other Jews' fate during that period. His difficult relationships with the Jewish community find expression in an intertextual construction, founded on the ontocosmology developed in Plato's Timaeus. Boris uses—and sometimes perverts—Plato's world vision both to measure his own inauthenticity and to define new ways of creating a state of "fusion" with the "beings" surrounding him. Another technique to overcome Boris's inability to testify is the use of a frame narrative, which, moreover, sheds new light on the protagonist's identity as a witness.     

HISTORICAL AND LITERARY APPROACHES TO THE “FINAL SOLUTION”: SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER AND JONATHAN LITTELL

This article discusses together two recent prize‐winning works of epic proportions that have received much attention: Saul Friedländer's two‐volume historical study Nazi Germany and the Jews and Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), the former of which focuses on victims and the latter on perpetrators of the “Final Solution.” I provide a critical analysis of Littell's novel, especially with respect to its seemingly fatalistic mingling of erotic and genocidal motifs and its disavowal or underestimation of the difficulty and necessity of understanding victims of the Nazi genocide. My analysis raises the question of the extent to which the notoriety of the novel may be due to the way it instantiates influential approaches to both literature and the Holocaust in terms of an aesthetic of the sublime, excess, radical ambiguity (resolvable at best into irony and paradox), and fatalistic entry into an incomprehensible “heart of darkness.” Crucial here is the notion that an object (paradigmatically, the Holocaust) both demands representation or explanation and ultimately is beyond comprehension, narrative, or even words. I also reevaluate the bases for the justified praise accorded Friedländer's masterwork and question certain claims made on its behalf by commentators, especially with respect to literary and historiographical innovation. In so doing, I explore and defend the role of critical theory in relation to historical narrative.     

TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY

This essay reviews two books in the French Que Sais‐je? series by Charles‐Olivier Carbonell in 1981 and by Nicolas Offenstadt in 2011 on the topic of historiography. Offenstadt's volume is intended to bring Carbonell's up to date, but goes in very different directions. There is general agreement among historians that a fundamental reorientation has taken place in historical thought and writing in the past half century, about which quite a bit has been written in recent years in the West, including in Latin America, East Asia, and India. But this is not the theme of either of these volumes. Carbonell tells the history of history from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth‐century Annales; Offenstadt is not interested in examining major trends in historiography as much of the historiographical literature has done, but in analyzing the changes that the key concepts that guide contemporary historical studies have undergone. For Carbonell's chronological narrative of the history of historical writing, theory has no place; for Offenstadt, who proceeds analytically, history and theory are inseparable. He deals specifically with changes in conceptions of historical time, of the role of documents, of the place of history within the social sciences, of the centrality of narrative, and finally of historical memory.     

ET SI C'ÉTAIT PAR LA FIN QUE TOUT COMMENÇAIT? PEN BEFORE PLOT,OR TRESCH ON POE'S REVERSALS

This brief comment offers some reflections on John Tresch's “Compositor's Reversal.” Contrasting his approach with Gaston Bachelard's, I situate Tresch in the tradition of reading Edgar A. Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a riddle to be decoded. I suggest that Tresch's analytical emphasis on material composition practices rather than Pym's content opens up insightful ways of reading both Pym itself in terms of its composition, style, and narrative voice, and also Poe's well‐known programmatic Philosophy of Composition. The key achievement of Tresch's article beyond its engagement with Poe scholarship is its contribution to the study of writing practices and media studies more broadly. By demonstrating the tight connection Poe forged between natural theology and the material practice of typography, Tresch inserts the typesetting process as an important step in the historiographical trajectory between pen and typewriter. He shows that the mid‐nineteenth‐century context of natural theology marks a decisive difference in connotation between Poe's compositional play with questions of authorship and plausibility, of truth and appearance both described in and performed by his narrative, and later concerns with the apparatus and its potential for the production of an écriture automatique.     

Structural boundaries that effect the representation of gender and disability in works of fiction from the United States and United Kingdom

Abstract

Discussions of intellectual disability are found in medical journals, published biographies, and disability research. However, outside the realm of medicine or personal reminiscence intellectual disability struggles for spaces of social, historical, cultural and imaginative representation. This article addresses these struggles for space and specifically focuses on the imagined space of narrative fiction. Being imagined spaces they should easily be able to accommodate people with disability, and yet, very few characters with intellectual disability are represented or more importantly have agency in narrative fiction. Drawing on work from feminist geographies and literary geographies this article addresses the limiting narrative structures that have been used against fictional characters who have a disability and ways authors may move beyond these limitations. Reconciling feminist geographies and literary geographies allows new critical spatial knowledge around disability to emerge. It is not enough to write characters with disabilities into narrative fiction if the structures surrounding them remain limiting and prejudiced. This article discusses the three main limiting structures in narrative fiction: character representation, narrative voice and genre. Looking at narrative fiction through feminist and literary geographies reveals how these limiting structures function as power hierarchies, and importantly, shows how these imposed structures can be subverted and changed.     

Narrating urban assemblages—Chris Ware and Building Stories

This article takes up the recent interest in assemblage theory in urban geography and considers the potential for art to contribute to our narrations of urban assemblages. In particular, it uses Chris Ware's recent magnum opus, Building Stories, as not only an account of the urban as an assemblage, but to indicate more broadly the way in which comics might be used to narrate urban assemblages in ways that highlight their multiplicity and plurivocality. The article draws out three themes in its analysis of Building Stories: more-than-human subjects, the various temporalities of the city, and the way memory and narrative are emergent from urban assemblages.     

1. NARRATIVE FORM AND HISTORICAL SENSATION: ON SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER'S THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION1

Saul Friedländer's magnum opus, The Years of Extermination, has been received worldwide as an exemplary work of history. Yet it was written by a historian who in the last two decades has strenuously asserted the limits of Holocaust representation. At the center of this essay is a problem of historical writing: how to write a historical narrative of the Holocaust that both offers explanations of the unfolding events and also suggests that the most powerful sensation about those events, at the time and since, is that they are beyond words. I explore Friedländer's crafting of such a narrative by considering, first, the role of his attempt in The Years of Extermination to explain the Holocaust and, second, the narrative form of the book. The book is best seen, I argue, not primarily as a work of explanation but as a vast narrative that places an explanation of the Holocaust within a specific form of describing that goes beyond the boundaries of the historical discipline as it is usually practiced. This form of describing goes beyond the almost positivist attachment to facts that dominates current Holocaust historiography. By using Jewish individual testimonies that are interspersed in the chronological history of the extermination, Friedländer creates a narrative based on ruptures and breaks, devices we associate with works of fiction, and that historians do not usually use. The result is an arresting narrative, which I interpret by using Johan Huizinga's notion of historical sensation. Friedländer sees this narrative form as specific to the Holocaust. I view this commingling of irreducible reality and the possibility of art as a required sensibility that belongs to all historical understanding. And in this respect, The Years of Extermination only lays bare more clearly in the case of the Holocaust what is an essential element in all historical reconstruction.     

Nature in the Old Portuguese Lyric

The present article focuses on the role of paratextual elements—epigram, marginal notes, and musical partitures—in Juan Benet's Un viaje de invierno (1976), with special emphasis on their role in the reading process. Gérard Genette's work on paratexts will serve as a helpful entry to my analysis of the Spaniard's novel. When conceived as the components of a liminal space that mediates text and off-text, Benet's paratexts serve to explore and enrich the zona de sombras inherent to his narrative vision. This slippage situates readers on the thresholds of interpretation and underscores the indeterminate quality of aesthetic (re-)creation. The interconnected, and often contentious, “zones” of the work engender multiple readings, vitiate chronology, and reinforce several recurring themes such as alienation, death, and rebirth. The novel brings to the fore the reader's role in negotiating the highly indeterminant components of the text and the paratext. Through this process, Benet eschews the tenets of casticismo and highlights the role of enigma central to his literary theory and praxis.     

Strange associations: Elizabeth Bowen and the language of exclusion

Since The Last September was first published in 1929, the novel's style has been a major source of controversy amongst Elizabeth Bowen's critics, many of whom align the work with reactionary feeling among the Anglo-Irish community in early 1920s Ireland. This longstanding view ignores, I think, a complex but critically overlooked aspect not only of The Last September but also of Bowen's many opinions about the novel form: the author's fascination with the language of exclusion. In this essay I argue that Bowen's use of literary devices in The Last September that rely on exclusion – including ellipses, euphemism, rumour, overheard conversation, narrative digression, and lying – dramatise the ways in which war disorients figurative language and, in so doing, subverts and transforms the apparently stable metaphors through which the Anglo-Irish sought to reconcile events occurring in September 1920, that fitful last September of the Republic's colonial ties to England, with their historical role as settler-colonialists in Ireland. Further, Bowen's experimental style disorients the reader, thereby undermining any confidence in the legitimacy of Ascendancy protocol, or the morality of British colonialism, or the militant expression of Irish nationalism, and leads instead to an emergent, though ultimately unfulfilled, cosmopolitan vision of late modernist Ireland.     

Responsibility Ethics and Postliberalism: Rereading H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation

Abstract

Postliberals have hailed H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation as a harbinger of narrative theology. A careful reading of Niebuhr's argument, however, suggests a theological ethic that is at once attentive to the narrative formation of agency and yet distinct from postliberalism because of its attention to the divine object of Christians' stories. Niebuhr's theocentrism yields a view of narrative as opened from the inside because it requires appropriation of what he calls "external" narratives in order to do justice to the sovereignty of God. The result is a theological ethic which is sharply critical of modern conceptions of agency and yet continually sifted by contemporary insights and experience.     

Chronotope,Story, and Historical Geography: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Space‐Time of Narratives

Abstract: This article studies space‐time as revealed in narrative, especially narrative intended to validate truth claims. Narrative plot is uniquely suited to capturing truths about time, causal complexity, and space. Bakhtin's “chronotope” (space‐time), which bridges plot, narrated events, and the real world, is critical to understanding this capacity, whether in fiction, in histories, or in didactic stories, myths, and parables. The chronotope is underutilized in the social sciences, but disputes over indigenous land in Canada exemplify its potential applications. To fully capture these heteroglot (“many‐voiced”) conflicts, factual verification should not be the only test of a narrative's truthfulness.     

Meaning in a Changing Context: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach to Authorial Revision

Summary

In this article, I seek to develop a genetic/diachronic approach to the phenomenon of authorial revision, and to the interpretation of texts that exist in multiple versions. In all such cases, the reconstruction of textual meaning cannot be separated from the reconstruction of the process through which the text in its ‘final’ form came into being; furthermore, an understanding of the author's intentions in (re)writing cannot be entirely separated from an understanding of his/her motives for (re)writing. This article is divided into three sections. In the first section, I consider recent trends in editorial and literary theory that aim at characterising texts in terms of processes rather than products, in order to uphold the equal dignity of each version without losing sight of its connectedness to other stages in the history of the text. In the second section, I discuss how Quentin Skinner's views on meaning and context apply to cases of authorial revision, and I suggest that some key aspects of Skinner's contextualism need to be reconsidered. In the concluding section, I focus on a case study in order to demonstrate the operational value of such a genetic and motive-based approach to authorial revision: more particularly, I seek to show how a close examination of Jean Bodin's rewriting practices in the Methodus (1566–1572) and the République (1576) can throw new light on his shift from a concept of limited sovereignty to one of absolute sovereignty.     

Oracular Ventriloquism: Political Theology in The Female American

ABSTRACT

This essay scrutinizes a scene of colonial religious conversion that appears in the pseudonymous 1767 novel, The Female American. The protagonist's use of ventriloquism and indigenous technology to create the illusion of divine intervention is considered in the light of Carl Schmitt's suggestion that secular political power inherits and translates forms of pre-modern theological authority. The novel's dual investments in proto-feminist literary representation and Anglican missionary proselytism are in tension with one another and help to explain the central character's ambivalence toward her inventive mode of conversion. Hence, the novel dramatizes the Euro-colonial disavowal of theological and decisionist force while, at the same time, hinting at the democratizing potential of forms of fictional address.     

Beyond Nussbaum’s Ethics of Reading: Camus,Arendt, and the Political Significance of Narrative Imagination

The article contributes to current theoretical debates about the political significance of narrative imagination by drawing on Camus’s and Arendt’s existential aesthetic judging sensibility. It seeks to displace the prevalent tendency to probe literature for its moral-philosophical insights, and instead delves into the experiential reality of our engagement with literary works. It starts from Martha Nussbaum’s recognition of the literary ability to account for the fragility of human affairs, yet finds her reduction of narrative imagination to the role of furthering moral lessons wanting politically. Against this background, the article reclaims Camus’s and Arendt’s dialogical-representative judging orientation and its insight into the narrative ability to respond to the intersubjective character of politics. As such, their aesthetic sensibility reveals the potential political significance of literary imagination in its capacity to open a public space where the contradictions of our situated existence can be confronted through politics between plural equals.     

The reader as writer,the author as con artist: Nuala O'Faolain and the criminal narratives of Chicago May

Nuala O'Faolain seeks to revise the life story of May Churchill Sharp, an international con woman born in Ireland, in hopes of establishing a feminist identification with her. But O'Faolain's claim for her writing of a kind of authorial authenticity ultimately precludes an identification with Sharp, as Sharp's narrative – like all narratives – is a criminal narrative which renders feminist ‘authenticity’ impossible to achieve, something O'Faolain herself refuses to acknowledge.