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THE VICTORIAN MYTHOPOEIC AUTHOR George MacDonald once suggested that '[w]e spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed' (222). By this he did not mean to diminish the value of exercising [...]

Introduction 'Tutto, in tremila anni di storia letteraria e stato gia raccontato. Nonostante questo, quando ci si mette alla scrivania a scrivere, si racconta una storia sempre in modo diverso' [...]

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, I examine issues of orality and literacy, dialect and formal diction in relationship to identity in three Harlem Renaissance short stories--Dorothy West's 'The Typewriter' and Anita Scott Coleman's 'Cross Crossings Cautiously' and 'Three Dogs and a Rabbit.' These stories, written by women within a four-year period, use male voices to interrogate the sanctity of orality and the purported superiority of writing. Protagonists in these stories negotiate the reality of their dual existence, their black culture, their white environment, maneuvering through both worlds and both linguistic approaches. Survivors learn to balance past and present, oral and written cultures, literal and figurative discourses, since denying either category risks sacrificing heritage or political efficacy. Keywords: Dorothy West/Anita Scott Coleman/Harlem Renaissance/ Dialogism/Orality/Diction, Echoing W.E.B. DuBois's theory of double-consciousness, Susan Willis observed that African American texts are 'mulattoes,' struggling between two parallel discursive universes. (1) Scrutinized by critics and disdained by mainstream culture, [...]

THE fiction of Flannery O'Connor is known for grotesquery and ugliness, not for beauty. Yet her late story 'Parker's Back' centers on aesthetic themes and invites us to speculate on [...]

This article expands on literary critic Veve A. Clark's discussion of the marasa concept as a mythical theory of textual relationships based on the Haitian Divine Twins by connecting the concept to its African origins, itself a marasa, and exploring it in relation to three short stories from Haiti Noir (2011), an anthology of noir literature edited by Edwidge Danticat. Even though the narratives are firmly focused on the New World experience, I contend that the marasa's origins guide and shape the stories and are explicitly manifest in at least one of them. Thus, the short stories 'Which One?' by Evelyne Trouillot, 'The Last Department' by Katia D. Ulysse, and 'The Finger' by Gary Victor (in my own invocation of marasa twa) embody the marasa concept in the way that they explore its continued relevance in the Caribbean reality of contemporary large diasporas and international interventions, which is especially true of Haiti, that produce here/there, us/them, home/abroad dichotomies. Moreover, they illustrate the attendant third element/space/moment of resolution or completeness through creativity, the dosu/dosa, which is also integral to the marasa concept., INTRODUCTION In her essay 'Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness' (1991), literary critic Veve A. Clark argues for the development of marasa consciousness as a means of reading contemporary African [...]

This article examines Choukri's Al-Khubz al-Hafi in relation to the widely circulated Euro-American geo-literary imaginary of cosmopolitan Tangier. The paper highlights the political expediency of the Arabic text showing how Choukri challenges the rhetorical violence of silencing the Moroccans in European and American accounts by casting them in roles of natives/ Muslims outside discourses of citizenship in the modern city. Most fully, the following analysis illustrates how Choukri uses realist representation to engage with the city's spheres of monetary circulation and social indifference to unsettle totalizing representations of Tangier's cosmopolitanism. Finally, the paper reexamines dismissive Arab critics' reception of the text, arguing for the necessity of reimagining it in relation to discourses of the modern city., 'Paul Bowles, no doubt, likes Morocco but does not like the Moroccans' (CHOUKRI, PAUL BOWLES WA 'UZLAT TANJA 12) 'Tangier: the legend, yes, there is no denying it, but for [...]

This paper proposes an unnoted major link, between the Mesopotamian Etana legend and Genesis's Garden of Eden story by pointing to parallels between the two stories, apparent at different levels, [...]

I was caught in a loop, parsing and reparsing, obsessing over the minutiae. I could sense nested microcosms within macrocosms within microcosms, ad infinitum. After four days with fewer than [...]

The many discrepancies between the historical accounts in Deuteronomy 1-3 and the parallel accounts in Exodus and Numbers led classical scholarship to conclude that the author of Deuteronomy could not [...]

Style to the idea is like enamel to the tooth. --Victor Hugo, quoted by Edgar Allan Poe, 'Critical Notices,' Southern Literary Messenger (1835) (1) [R]eally valuable ideas can only be [...]

This article discusses how Verne mythologizes and poeticizes his fictional machines. More than just a means for solving problems and/or for providing access to exotic geographical locales, Verne's technology is portrayed as being intrinsically poetic. Bridging the worlds of the industrial and the artistic, Verne's machines constitute a new kind of objet d'art. Anthropomorphized to make them seem less coldly mechanical, these devices take on a life of their own and exist in a richly symbiotic relationship with their creators. Such machines transport the readers of Verne's Voyages extraordinaires beyond the mimetic, serving both as a means to build verisimilitude and as a stepping-stone to transcend the real., In the history of world literature, there is probably no writer whose reputation has been more associated with machines, technology, and the future than Jules Verne. From the 1860s to [...]

The story of Wilbur Mercer defies straightforward interpretation, and yet it is intricately woven into the fabric of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Mercer is, paradoxically, both marginal and central to the novel. This article suggests Mercer's story provides a template pattern of rise and fall that underpins and informs the main themes and helps to stitch together apparently disparate elements in the novel. In echoing Mercer's story, these themes are both enriched by Mercer's tale and help to explain the pivotal role he occupies., Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? contains a story-within-the-story. It is the tale of Wilbur Mercer's rise and fall. The tale's simplicity is deceptive: it is a [...]

It is tempting to position ER Eddison's first novel, The Worm Ouroboros, as a synthetic example of the Icelandic sagas he read and translated in his capacity as a dedicated amateur medievalist. Close examination casts serious doubt on this interpretation, however. The book contains many features--most of them obviously deliberate inclusions by Eddison--that are the precise opposites of the features Eddison claimed to admire as essential strengths of saga literature. Furthermore, biographical evidence exists to suggest that the characters and incidents of The Worm Ouroboros were present in Eddison's imagination before he most likely discovered medieval literature. It seems more likely, therefore, that his fantasies gave rise to his medievalism, rather than vice versa., British fantasist Eric Rucker Eddison constitutes an interesting conundrum. Possessed of an immensely active, colorful imagination, and capable of expressing himself in a remarkable prose style, Eddison nonetheless remains something [...]

THE LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION of the German writer W. G. Sebald is noted for its novelty and strangeness, even, and perhaps especially, by readers of the English translations (Long [...]

AS TO GHOSTS OR SPIRITS they appear totally banished from Canada,' wrote Catharine Parr Traill in what has become one of Canadian literature's most infamous statements. Here there are no [...]

Those of my children who doubt will be left in undesirable places, where they will be lost and wander around until they believe and learn the songs and dances of [...]

No, Lytton does not like Mrs Dalloway ... What he says is that there is a discordancy between the ornament (extremely beautiful) and what happens (rather ordinary--or unimportant). Virginia Woolf's [...]

The trope of space exploration that attracted so many writers during the 'golden age' of the genre remains an SF hallmark. We may, however, question its contemporary centrality after the waning of the intellectual climate that De Witt Douglas Kilgore labeled as 'astrofuturism.' Perhaps, just like David Hartwell argues in Age of Wonders, 'When it comes true,' meaning the Moon landing and other achievements from the American space program, 'it's no fun anymore.' This paper looks at the peculiar way Philip K. Dick embraced space exploration, anticipating its exhaustion and substituting in its place a more inner (perhaps 'virtual') approach., He was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of 'scientifiction,' in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, [...]

The dense, ornate composition of E. R. Eddison's Zimiamvia cycle has long obscured its ideological content, leading to errors in the scholarly reception of these books. Written with close reference to the working papers for the first Zimiamvian novel, Mistress of Mistresses, this article seeks to correct those mistakes. Although verbose, Eddison's novels are shown to have been anything but gratuitous, being composed in strict accordance with an extensive, dearly held, deceptively humane reworking of moral philosophy. Rather than being the reactionary hedonist some commentators have painted him as, Eddison is revealed to have been a very disciplined writer given to connecting thought and feeling in ways for which he has not yet been properly appreciated., In assessing E. R. Eddison's novel The Worm Ouroboros (1922), L. Sprague de Camp states that there is good reason to class it as 'the greatest single novel of heroic [...]

Terry Pratchett's novels Wyrd Sisters (1988) and Lords and Ladies (1992) are adaptations of Shakespearean plays. However, these adaptations do more than simply expand on Pratchett's usual habits of allusion; they also constitute significant revisions of Shakespeare's work and of Shakespeare's canonical status. In Wyrd Sisters Pratchett represents Shakespeare as Hwel, a playwriting dwarf who is inspired by voices from movies and modern plays. In Lords and Ladies, Hwel appears only very briefly. Instead, elvish glamour becomes a metaphor for Bardolatrous readings that freeze Shakespeare into place at the apex of human culture. In Lords and Ladies, as in Wyrd Sisters, Shakespeare's writing offers ways to challenge and undo the damage done by Shakespeare's Bardolatrous image, an image sustained by the magic of glamour. Where literary critics of the last thirty years have used historicist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive means of contesting Bardolatrous readings, Pratchett uses fantasy, not just to re-contextualize Shakespeare, but also to think about the connections between magic, language, and power, and how these elements come together in writing., What's Shakespeare doing in a place like Discworld? On one level, Terry Pratchett's fantasy novels Wyrd Sisters (1988) and Lords and Ladies (1992) ratchet up the level of intertextual allusion [...]

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend (1948) offers an apt perspective on the notoriously unmelodious developments in the classical [...]

Summary Paradox, which is one means through which conflict is resolved in Soyinka's works, also accounts for the difficulty in interpreting his works. Proverbs play a significant role as a [...]

Summary This article explores the epistemological implications of one of the most striking features in Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda ([1988]1997): its systematic frustration of the expectations of its readers. [...]

Theorists from various academic disciplines believe Western society has entered an age of excess and exacerbated modernity: all areas of life are affected by a will to be or do more at an always faster pace. This article focuses on French writer Claire Legendre's literary translation of hypermodernity, especially in her narratives published over the past decade. First, it examines her portrayal of contemporary individuality, marked by all sorts of excesses and especially by the imperative to make the most of oneself and one's life. This ideal being in itself excessive, her characters resort to extreme behaviors. However, they never fully manage to achieve the uniqueness or exceptionality hypermodernity entails. Then, the article reveals how Legendre's writing itself becomes hypermodern: she explores aesthetically some notions at stake in hypermodernity such as self-reflexivity, undecidability and intermediality. In her novels, they become literary techniques that question, among other things, autofiction or render any final interpretation of her narratives impossible. Finally, this study shows that, even if hypermodern ideals affect women and men alike, the former still remain subjected to discriminative gender politics. For Legendre, women still suffer from contradictory and sometimes exacerbated forms of physical or emotional violence., French writer Claire Legendre began her career in the late 1990s with her novels Making of and Viande 'Flesh.' Because of their graphic violence and sexuality, Legendre became quickly associated [...]

In 1841 Julia Ward visited the Perkins Institution for the Blind and was swept away by 'a noble rider on a noble steed' whose arrival claimed her attention (Howe, Reminiscences [...]

Edith Wharton's depiction of the socially ambitious Undine Spragg's peregrinations through New York and French 'society' suggests that The Custom oldie Country, like so many of Wharton's novels, is concerned [...]

Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold by its moral handle ... and that I confess, is its weak side; or it may [...]

This paper examines Zhu Xi's poetic composition chronologically and thematically. Whereas previous scholarship subjugates Zhu Xi's poetry to his literary criticism, and the latter further to his philosophy, this paper [...]

The past thirty years have witnessed the publication of an ever increasing amount of scholarship dealing with the Daoist revelations from the heaven of Highest Clarity (Shangqing), bestowed on and [...]

Though copied far less than the celebrated philosophical debate over poetics between Guido Guinizzelli and the Tuscan poet Bonagiunta da Lucca (Voi ch'avete mutata la mainera and Omo ch'e saggio non corre leggero), the tenzone (ca. 1265) between Guinizzelli and Fra Guittone d'Arezzo--[O] caro padre meo and Figlio mio dilettoso--has been the recent object of study and criticism. This study explores the poetics of a series of debates, or tenzoni, located in the thirteenth-century MS Laurenziano Rediano 9, among which is located the exchange between Guinizzelli and Guittone, demonstrating in particular that throughout the manuscript there exist multiple criteria for organizing tenzoni, and that Guittone's response to Guinizzelli differs technically and materially both from those tenzoni that surround the exchange from cc. 124v-l26r, and from the feigned debates with 'la Donna' and 'Maestro Bandino' that form part of Guittone's 'profane collection of sonnets' in the section preceding his canzoniere (cc. 105r-ll5v). The dynamics of the tenzone and its manuscript collocation indicate that its reception, principally via Dante's reading in Purgatory 26, remained unique among early interpreters of medieval Italian poetry, who did not copy the tenzone., Guinizzelli a Guittone O caro padre meo, de vostra laude non bisogna ch'alcun omo se 'mbarchi: che 'n vostra mente inrar vizio non aude, che for de se vostro saver [...]

The following essay is the presidential address delivered at the conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship at Loyola University, Chicago, on 8 March 2013. It is only slightly altered here, with the addition of some concluding remarks on literary study written for but not delivered on the night and also limited bibliographical notices. It retains its spoken-voice flavour. In particular it briefly revisits my work in Securing the Past (2009) and considers the musical and literary work's 'workhood' and the editor's complex but essential role in the relationship between material document and the meanings raised from it at any one time by readers., TODAY, AS OUR EDITORIAL EFFORTS ARE GRADUALLY BEING CHANNELLED into and more fully shaped by digital environments and their logics of storage, presentation and collaborative engagement, some old philosophical questions [...]

I AM CERTAINLY NOT THE FIRST SCHOLAR TO NOTICE Orientalist elements in Lord Dunsany's fantasies, (1) but I believe a focused study of the different kinds of Orientalism employed by [...]

Of the many haunting images in Gina Berriault's short stories, one in particular strikes me as a distillation of her work's peculiar power. It occurs toward the end of 'Bastille [...]

Describing the influence of literary techniques upon early filmmakers, Robert Richardson gives special attention to Sergei Eisenstein's account in Film Sense of the cinematic qualities of John Milton's Paradise Lost. [...]

Much of the scholarship on Philip K. Dick ignores Radio Free Albemuth, his first attempt to write of the 2-3-74 events, and accepts that a diegetic reality underlies the deceptions instituted by his characters. In the following article, I seek to rectify the first point and counter the second by reading the novel as a work of testimonial fiction. By relying on Jean Baudrillard's discussion of simulation and the hyperreal, I argue that not only does the assumption of an underlying reality not hold up but that the novel illustrates the necessary fictional characteristic of all testimonies., The last thirty years have seen Philip K. Dick's popularity grow from cult status to mainstream. This can be seen in popular culture in the ever-growing list of Hollywood adaptations [...]

Octave de Malivert, the Romantically despondent and rebellious protagonist of Stendhal's first novel, Armance 0827), has obvious affinities with the heroes of Byron's Romantic verse tales but exhibits more numerous, more profound affinities with Byron the man. This article investigates the latter affinities--and occasionally, where relevant, the former--particularly insofar as they serve to define the nature of Octave's relations with the woman he tragically loves, marries, and loses, Armance de Zohiloff. The article argues that Octave is psychologically identified with Byron and, through him, with Rousseau and Othello in being afflicted by a form of Romantic madness that involves, among other things, passionate, unreasonable unhappiness, social maladjustment, resistance to love, sexual jealousy, self-incrimination, intense remorse, and a consuming need for expiation. These traits render Octave incapable of success or happiness in love and doom him to a Byronically fatal marriage and a Byronically premature--but redemptive--death., Implicit in Stendhal's novel of apprenticeship, Armance (1827), is the Romantic notion that soulful, defiant suffering comprises a more noble vocation than pedestrian, conformist contentment, an idea Stendhal endorsed shortly [...]

This essay explores how a cognitive-literary approach offers valuable tools for interpreting multicultural poetry. By considering the poetry of Zehra Cirak through the lens of selected cognitive-poetic principles, it becomes [...]

C.S. LEWIS, LIKE HIS FRIEND J.R.R TOLKIEN, loved fairy tales, and in many ways they both chose to model much of their work on fairy tales. But they used fairy [...]

M. Night Shyalaman's Unbreakable may have departed too far from superhero film conventions to be successful in the box office, but the film nonetheless foregrounds why the superhero narrative itself carries such profound psychological appeal. Rather than relying on special effects and high action to merely replicate traditional comic book stories, Shyamalan juxtaposes self-reflexive discussions about the superhero mythos against a much more subtle diegesis that ultimately bears out that same fantastic narrative. In doing so, the film not only complicates the genre of the superhero film but offers a necessary reflection on the psychological significance of the superhero mythos and its promise of ideological stability for fractured, post-Oedipal subjects., 'Do you know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world. To not know why you're here.'--Elijah Price in Unbreakable Superhero stories constitute an elaborate [...]

Bruce Sterling recently criticized the fiction of Steve Beard as 'being based in quote, Theory, unquote' and that this academicism is ineffective for slipstream fiction. This article suggests that Beard's novel, Digital Leatherette (1999), is not slipstream fiction but rather an intervention in New Weird fiction. Beard employs the conceptual structure, the rhizome, formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as the diegetic framework for his novel. The result is an assemblage of fictions that refer to a constitutive narrative; yet, this unified diegesis remains eclipsed and unnamable. Digital Leatherette confronts H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror in an age where the 'inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents' is more of a formal axiom than aphorism., In March 2011, Science Fiction Studies published a special issue on slipstream fiction. In it, Bruce Sterling, who coined the term in his 1989 article 'Slipstream,' wrote a follow-up piece, [...]

S. Yizhar's 1949 'Hirbet Hiz'ah' contains a puzzling narrative frame, which is not closed at the novella's ending. This article analyzes Yizhar's interest in this device in light of a recently discovered, previously unpublished introduction to the novella written by Yizhar himself. I argue that Yizhar's incomplete framing device should be viewed as integral to his story. Read against his introduction, I claim that 'Hirbet Hiz'ah' is first and foremost about the rending of a harmonious ethical and Zionist identity in 1948, whereas the actual expulsion is a secondary concern. A translation of this introduction is included at the article's end. Keywords: S. Yizhar, 1948, Hirbet Hiz'ah, introduction, SYizhar's 1949 novella 'Hirbet Hiz'ah,' which details the planned conquest of a Palestinian village and the permanent expulsion of its residents during the first Arab-Israeli war, is widely considered to [...]

This article interrogates how citizenship and sacrifice are portrayed in Moshe Shamir's novel-turned-play He Walked through the Fields (1947). Arguing that the underlying aesthetic, emotional, and political sensibility of the play is 'tragic' in the classical sense, the article demonstrates how this tragic sensibility served to both portray and mask the fundamental contradictions of citizenship in the immediate post-statehood era. As a tragedy, He Walked through the Fields derives its dramatic effect precisely from the tension between the hero's seemingly self-willed actions and his casting as a scapegoat for the community. In denying his male protagonist autonomous thought and subjectivity and portraying his 'destiny' within the frame-work of the tragic, Shamir is able to resolve the conflict between national sovereignty and political heteronomy. Keywords: tragedy, citizenship, Moshe Shamir, Moshe Shamir's novel He Walked through the Fields was by far the most popular work of its time and to date remains the most powerful representation of early post-statehood society. [...]

Ce qu'on a de plus important a dire, on ne le proclame pas toujours a haute voix. On le confie au silence le plus intime. La page blanche est le [...]

Yotam Reuveny's novel Night Diary was one of the first texts in Hebrew literature that engaged with the issue of HIV/AIDS. This groundbreaking text defied basic social concepts and cultural conventions of the time and opened the door to much more complex public discourse about homosexuality and gay identity in a context in which homosexuality was still illegal in Israel. Although generally overlooked, Night Diary is a sophisticated and ingenious text, which employs allusions and other literary techniques in order to offer comfort and solace to oppressed people. The novel stages gay cruising as an empowering act in a time of HIV/AIDS., INTRODUCTION In the 1980s, when homosexuality was still illegal in Israel, the Israeli mass media dealt extensively with the HIV/AIDS pandemic. (1) As in many other countries, the 'dangerous plague' [...]

IN THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, Wayne Booth writes, 'Even the most unconscious and Dionysian of writers succeeds only if he makes us join in the dance' (xiv). All writers and [...]

In numerous articles, including three for The Oxfordian, E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza--Professors of American Political Institutions, and Mathematics, respectively, at Claremont McKenna College--have argued that the poetry of [...]

Introduction Accounts of Dickens's language highlight the variety of stylistic devices that can be found in his writings (cf. e.g. Stewart, Plummer). Ingham observes that Dickens 'deploys every available linguistic [...]