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Originally written in French in 1946 and translated by the author himself, Samuel Beckett's Mercier and Camier tells the story of a pseudo-couple wandering through an unnamed city. Despite the narrator's mocking tone, this quest narrative gradually reveals a search for meaning, punctuated by crises and revealed through the nonsensical dialogues between characters. By means of the disjunctions, verbal irrelevancies, and gaps in thought found in these dialogues, the narrative registers affective transitions and passages of feeling. This kind of narrative disjunction is determined, produced, and reproduced within a particularly affective milieu where social encounters become catalysts for emotional disorientation. This paper will examine how the novel's use of casual conversation explores affect's infiltration into ways of acting and speaking in everyday encounters. The novel's investment in an excessive amount of random talk solicits a host of questions around the idea of affect not only as state of mind but also as a narrative mood determining the conditions of meaningfulness. Focusing on theories of affect, I will explore the link between affective experience and verbal expression in Mercier and Camier, particularly in the absence of narrative logic and reflective coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article aims at a comparative analysis of the prefaces in Lim Hak-Su's translations of the Iliad. Lim published three translations of the Iliad, the first in 1940 during the Japanese colonial period, and later in North Korea in 1963 and 1989. The differences between the prefaces in these three editions are noteworthy. While the 1940 preface begins with high praise for the Iliad and the emotional and romantic tone is maintained until the end, the 1963 preface attempts to focus on an objective narrative. Lim defined Homer's Iliad as an "inmin epic." The most noteworthy point of this preface is that Lim cites Engels and Marx to support his evaluation of the Iliad. Finally, in the preface to the 1989 translation, the perspectives of Marx and Engels are gone and Kim Ilsung's teachings appear instead. Such changes show that the communism of Marx and Engels, which can be called a foreign ideology, had finally been overcome in North Korean society and that Kim Il-sung's Juche ideology had been established as the absolute state policy with the highest authority. The case of Lim's prefaces allows us to think about how literary criticism is influenced by national ideologies and what it means to study literature and humanities in North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Digital Studies / Champ Numérique is the property of Open Library of Humanities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the intellectual exchange and literary collaboration between John Garvin and Brian O'Nolan, exploring the dynamics of their relationship on three different levels. Professionally, Garvin was O'Nolan's superior when O'Nolan joined the Irish Civil Service in 1935, and he remained an influential senior figure in their department until O'Nolan left in 1953. On a literary level, Garvin read an early draft of the At Swim-Two-Birds manuscript and provided its epigraph (sourced from Euripides's Heracles), receiving editorial input from O'Nolan on his published writing on James Joyce in return. Socially, Garvin and O'Nolan belonged to an intellectual circle (including R. M. Smyllie, Alec Newman, Donagh MacDonagh, and Niall Montgomery) which brought together journalists, writers, and other Dublin professionals in the Palace Bar. This article argues for the significance of these collaborations by using first-hand accounts, letters, journalism, and critical work, including Garvin's 1976 book, James Joyce's Disunited Kingdom and the Irish Dimension. In doing so, the article reconstructs a dialogue that took place between bureaucratic methods of state administration and the aesthetic strategies of modernism, with Joyce at its centre, an exchange that shaped O'Nolan's poetics and exerted influence over his circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the relationship between Brian O'Nolan's writing and his career as a civil servant in the Irish Department of Local Government and Public Health. O'Nolan's references to local government and the ambiguity of the law in Cruiskeen Lawn and The Third Policeman are placed in their proper historical context. By examining the contradictions of the Irish local government and local justice systems (from the pre-independence era to the Free State and successive administrations) a portrait emerges of O'Nolan as a writer of Irish biopolitics, who is concerned with the paradoxical relationship between national government and local organs of power. Biopolitical themes of legal and bureaucratic aporia are situated in the context of recent scholarly writing about the law, sovereignty, and the body in O'Nolan. The article also gives examples of historical episodes that were likely formative influences on his narrative style of political critique. From local issues such as land appropriation, to O'Nolan's role as secretary to the tribunal of inquiry into a fire at St Joseph's Orphanage in Cavan, a new image can be constructed of the author as a critic of Irish justice and a theorist of biopolitical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]