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Inspired by a blend of narrativity studies and cognitive narrative theory, and based on an updated conception of the epistemic plot, this paper sets out to investigate how fictional cognition propels narrative progression from the earliest compositional stages of Henry James's tales as documented in his notebook synopses. Placed in a wider context, moreover, and given James's conviction of the storyness of the representation of consciousness, this paper also invites debate on his role as a remote harbinger of the narrativity of the mind, so characteristic of contemporary cognitive approaches to the fictional genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of linguists have recently suggested that the distinction between the kinds of phrasings we regard as "nativelike," or "natural," and those that strike us as jarring, stilted or just plain wrong, has more to tell us about language than the time-honored opposition between grammar and vocabulary. In the light of these trends, my paper revisits Coleridge's critical claim that "it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare [... ] without making the author say something else, or something worse, that he does say." The paper argues that the strange sense of naturalness Coleridge is evoking in this metaphor, and in the Biographia Literaria 's theorization of poetic diction more generally, can be clarified by that recent linguistic work, and discusses the writings of linguists Bybee, Goldberg, Hoey, Hopper, and Pawley and Syder to this end. The paper concludes by suggesting that the Biographia Literaria can contribute to those linguists' discussions in turn, by illuminating the cognitive processes through which new language is coined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman , or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can we learn about a manuscript that was probably lost at sea? How can such an elusive text help us to historicize transatlantic reading practices? In this paper, I trace the reception of a book we famously cannot read or recover: Margaret Fuller's history of the Italian Revolution. In July 1850, Fuller drowned with her husband and son when the Elizabeth wrecked within sight of Fire Island, New York; she was returning to the United States after traveling as an international correspondent for the NYDT. Like her body, her book never surfaced. While many believe the manuscript drowned or was looted by pirates, many others believe it never existed, that Fuller never finished or even started writing it. Literary surmising about Fuller's manuscript survives in wide-ranging archives, which I study as interconnected critical responses: powerful interpretations of Fuller's historical sensibilities as a revolutionary journalist-activist. Fuller's manuscript persists, then, in literary histories that are transatlantic in the most real sense of the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though the future of work has become a significant public concern, political theory has not yet considered work to be a central concept within the discipline. The five papers in this symposium provide a range of perspectives on what it means to take work seriously within political thought. This introduction will give an account of why work should be considered as important by political theorists, contextualize the broader landscape into which these papers intervene (characterized by the issues of automation, precarity, and social reproduction), and situate them within existing writing on work within political theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jason Reynolds's Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (2020) joins a centuries-long tradition of adapting adult books for children. This paper argues that Stamped is an antiracist text that raises important, interconnected questions about adaptation, purpose, and audience. Like many history texts about Black experiences in the US such as Julius Lester's To Be a Slave (1968) and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), Stamped reveals the line between children's and adult literature is fabricated, as racism is not restricted by age, and racism impacts Blacks and non-blacks across generations. While To Be a Slave and The Fire Next Time are among a number of possible precursors, Stamped aligns with these two nonfiction texts because just as Stamped was written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the other two were also born out of significant social movements and can be read as antiracist texts. Reynolds's style, storytelling techniques, and formatting transforms Kendi's history book, Stamped from the Beginning , to a text with a broader audience and purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intricate relationship between precarity and coloniality. It argues that discussions and experiences of precarity—defined as the increased vulnerability to exploitative working and living conditions—are historically steeped in colonial and racial violence. It stages a critique of the recently-emerged scholarship on the future of work that tends to both trivialize the experience of precarity as the deprivation of futurity, and ignore the racialized dynamics through which these experiences are distributed. Through a meditation on the anti-work politics of Autonomia and the armed struggles of the Zapatistas , the argument concludes that it is only by reconnecting the resistances to precarity to the project of decolonization as one against dehumanization that discussions of precarity will find their resonance, strength, and efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether there are reasons to be worried about two controversial expansions to the concept "work" —sex work and emotional labor. It asks, through the lens of Sally Haslanger's ameliorative conceptual analysis, what happens when an activity is described as "work" and examines the political and theoretical implications of such conceptual creeps. It argues that when an activity is claimed as "work," a claim is simultaneously made about "work." It concludes that we need not be pedantic about the application of the "work" to new areas, but that careful attention should be paid to semantic shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT If experimental literature consistently challenges us to think through the relations between language and the social, how might experimental electronic literature likewise challenge us to think through those relations within the context of the digital in particular? What unique critical purchase might the experimental dimensions of electronic literature provide on the political, and moreover on the politics of the digital? In this paper I pursue these questions through Shelley Jackson's Snow, an ongoing work consisting of images that Jackson has posted to the social media site Instagram since 2014. Each photograph in Snow (of which there are 428 at the time of this writing) documents a single word carved in snow by Jackson; taken together, these words form the beginning of an as-yet-unfinished story, thus far largely comprised of a girl's monologue describing different types of snow. I suggest in this essay that Snow is a slow-media intervention into the temporal dynamics of technology and ecology. Jackson's slow publication of the text subverts the normative temporality of social media, locating and implicating it within the longue durée of geologic time. Collapsing text and image, her multilayered inscriptions take snow as both message and medium, and as suggested by the gaps, pauses, and delays in her feed—moments where there is no snow to write in and photograph—the project's implication of social media is not only narrative but also material and ecological. On one hand, these images capture and preserve a series of profoundly ephemeral inscriptions, words written in snow that are otherwise deeply subject to the contingencies of local and global climate change. Yet viewed in light of the increasing ecological impact of data centers built by major technology corporations, this digital preservation is itself an ecologically fraught practice. In an uncanny double bind of the digital archive, the preservation of snow within Jackson's project—every image, every like, every comment—cannot be separated from the ecological depletion of that same snow. I situate Snow at the intersection of critical thinking about ecological change, electronic literature, media studies, and experimental writing, arguing for the ways in which the inscription that Jackson's work exemplifies serves as a critically productive means for thinking through ecomedia aesthetics and the stakes of the Anthropocene. At the overlap of these multiple complementary practices, Snow stages an urgent engagement with the relations between text and image, heat and cold, nature and infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article traces the extent of Sylvia Plath's engagement with the Irish modernist, James Joyce. It contributes to a significant strand of Plath scholarship by increasing knowledge of the literary networks Plath and her work engages. It does so by first examining the evidence extant in her published work and archive. It establishes Plath's long-standing interest in Joyce's writing, and traces in her notes and marginalia a consistent focus on Joyce as artistic example. It then establishes a relationship between Plath's reading of Joyce and the künstlerroman genealogy that Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Bell Jar share. This article shows that The Bell Jar self-consciously performs Joyce's influence, with his Finnegans Wake featuring prominently in The Bell Jar as an alienating canonical authority. Finally, in showing The Bell Jar 's departure from the linearity and self-assuredness of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it identifies Plath's künstlerroman as superseding the modernist conventions performed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This paper thus traces the twin imperatives of Joyce's influence identifiable in Plath's reading and writing; a recursive tendency, emphasizing Plath's literary tradition, and a focus on the past, and a heuristic tendency, advocating for Plath's own innovation, looking to the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay shows that despite the psychoanalytic critique of the human search for happiness as futile and illusory, there can still be a positive contribution to the question of happiness from psychoanalysis. To that end, the paper turns to Lacan’s Seminar VII, and more specifically, to the Lacanian “sublimation” as “the happy satisfaction of the instinct.” Whether we can achieve a non-illusory kind of happiness through sublimation or we stay trapped in the pursuit of an illusory happiness depends on the extent to which we succeed or fail in the following two issues: 1. asking whether we have ceded on our desire and 2. accepting that no object of desire can ever be completely satisfying. Lacan offers two examples of a problematic relation to desire: these of Creon and Antigone; Creon fails to ask the question about his desire altogether, while Antigone asks the question but fails to accept that she cannot have it all. A critical reflection of these two cases can allow us to find a positive and sustainable version of happiness in psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the ethical dimensions of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, in spite of--indeed, because of--the play's apparent negation of all positive talk of human value and community. In the first part of the paper, I examine Stanley Cavell's suggestion, put forward in his Carus Lectures of 1988, that Beckett's play can be read as a work that embodies and develops the idea of Emersonian moral perfectionism. In part two, I turn the tables somewhat. After demarcating some of the social limits of Cavell's ethical outlook, I then ask what it might mean to rediscover perfectionism in a more politicized form, something that I attempt to do via an exploration of the tragic dimensions of Beckett's play. While retaining some important features of Cavell's "thematics of perfectionism," this approach aims at the same time to move beyond it in order to grasp how Endgame might, in Beckett's own words, provide "an inkling of the terms in which our [human] condition is to be thought again." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]