Search

This paper engages Cathy Caruth’s thinking about trauma, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, and Giorgio Agamben’s theorising of bearing witness to examine the affective performance of remembering in Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Reading the narrative as a postmemorial account of Japan’s internment of Australian POWs in Burma during the Second World War, I focus on the body as a site of both wounding and witnessing to show how the affective relays between pleasure and pain reanimate the epistemological drama of lived experience and highlight the ambivalence of passion as a trope for both suffering and love. Framed by its intertextual homage to Matsuo Bashō’s poetic masterpiece of the same name, the Australian narrative of survival is shown to emerge from the collapse of the referential certainties underlying the binaries of victim/ victimiser, witness/perpetrator, human/inhuman, and remembering/forgetting. In Flanagan’s ethical imagination, bearing witness calls for a visceral rethinking of historical subjectivity that binds the world to consciousness as a source of both brutality and beauty.

Q: Literary history, be it national, local, or regional, is perhaps the most conservative form of literary study, with many claiming that the method is outmoded. What can literary histories do to overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism? A: Framed as it is, the question may be read as appealing to ideas about agency—personal, disciplinary, and institutional—in the appraisal of cultural forms as objects of critical scholarship, especially the study of literature. But the guiding assumption about the nature of literary history or histories, as simultaneously an endangered and a dominant academic species in critical humanities, is itself worthy of consideration. The convergence of our sense of the outdatedness of teaching and studying literary history, on the one hand, and its entrenchment in institutional practices, on the other, it seems to me, has a structure of the uncanny in that it captures the intellectual and affective resonance of our current moment at the same time as it throws us back to critiques of postmodern sensibility, with Jean-François Lyotard diagnosing the postmodern condition as a disillusionment with grand narratives, Fredric Jameson lamenting the “weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private tempo­rality” (1991, 6), and Francis Fukuyama declaring the end of history consequent upon the victory of liberal democracy over the Soviet totalitarian regime. Yet, as the twenty-first century unfolds into its third decade, a number of these observations recede into doubt, whether through the durability of intellectually reflexive forms of art, like the historical novel (think of Linda Hutcheon’s reasoning about historiographic metafiction), or modes of entertainment, like genre fictions and blockbuster movies and TV series, or newly emerging geopolitical horizons of precarity, like global warming, international terrorism, racial, social, and climate injustice, nuclear imperialism, and war. There’s a haunting feeling that we have seen this before and one wonders if history has come back as a farce or as Feste’s prophecy in Twelfth Night about “the whirligig of time” which “brings in his revenges” (5.1.374).

This paper considers how Frances Itani’s Deafening imaginatively rethinks our understanding of the Great War in the age of postmemory. Seeing as the novel is set in Canada and Europe during the First World War and takes as its protagonist a deaf woman, the poetic attention given to the senses as a horizon of phenomenological experience magnifies the moral bonds that the characters establish in defiance of both deafness and death. Guided by the theoretical reasoning of Marianne Hirsch, Elaine Scarry, and Alison Landsberg as well as contemporary phenomenological thinking, most significantly that of Edward S. Casey, Steven Connor, Michel Serres, and Jean-Luc Nancy, this paper examines how the novel’s attentiveness to the materiality of the body in regard to the ethical collisions of sound and silence as well as life and death contributes to a poetics of resonance that generates prosthetic memories, turning the anonymous record of war into a private experience of moral endurance inscribed on the ear of historical legacy.

The present paper examines the tropological significance of miniature figures in Jessie Burton’s novel The Miniaturist. By highlighting the ways in which the narrative’s figural system negotiates the structural and conceptual dichotomies of human/doll, object/thing, interiority/exteriority, authenticity/artificiality, and mobility/stasis, this reading of Burton’s novel attempts to show how the literary text rethinks the social life of things and the ambiguity of subject-object relations in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Aligned with the commercial circuits of material culture, which underscore the moral ambivalence of the novel’s Dutch society, material objects are shown to exceed their decorative function and reveal their destructive purchase on human life.

Guided by Jacques Derrida’s observations about the aporetic logic of the archive, this reading of Peter Carey’s novel The Chemistry of Tears (2012) relies on contemporary philosophical discourse about the human-thing interface to examine the correlations between practices of mourning, memory, and museology as unfolded in the narrative. The central image of an automaton operates as an extended metaphor both for the metafictional feat of the novel, and imagination in its broadest sense, wherein we are reminded of the ethical obligations that things, especially technology, call for. Above all, Carey reveals the porosity of the boundaries between organic and inorganic substance, tethering matter to metaphysics, desire to detritus, and the present to the past.

Straipsnyje aptariamos pokolonijinių studijų tei­kiamos teorinės perspektyvos Kanados multikultū­rinės literatūros analizei ir interpretuojami lietuvių kilmės Kanados rašytojų du kūriniai – Antano Ši­leikos apsakymų rinkinys Gyvenimas išsimokėtinai ir Irenos Guilford romanas Glėbys. Suaktualinant kolonijinės kanadiečių istorijos patirtis, išryškina­mos multikultūralizmo diskurso vidinės priešta­ros – jo atvirai skelbiamas įsipareigojimas laikytis hibridinių tautinio tapatumo formų – ir latentinė, t. y. slapta, kolonijinės galios struktūrų nostalgija, per kurias kultūrinė kitybė Kanadoje paverčiama egzotikos objektu. Grožinėje literatūroje dėmesys kultūrinei egzotikai aiškinamas multikultūrinės es­tetikos samprata, nusakančia estetinį ir ideologinį meninės sąmonės santykį su multikultūralizmu kaip kanadiečių tautą aprašančiu ir disciplinuojančiu diskursu. Tad Šileikos apsakymų ciklo ir Guilford romano analizėje bandoma atskleisti ir apibūdinti naratyvines strategijas, per kurias šie du tekstai įsi­terpia į Kanados diskursyvinės steigties ir diaspori­nių tapatybių egzotizavimo procesą.

The present article addresses the problem of multiculturalism in Canadian literature. While focusing on the major concerns of Canadian critical discourse on multiculturalism and ethnic minority writing, this theorising of Canadian multicultural literature highlights three areas of research – the definition of the notion, studies of postcolonialism and postmodernism and the simulative character of literary politics – that have been instrumental in conceptualising our understanding of Canadian multiculturalism and its reflections in literary texts. Alongside the theoretical observations about the problematic nature of the dominant forms of literary criticism on Canadian multiculturalism, the article offers a hypothesis of the multicultural aesthetic as a system of recurrent tropes that construct our reception of multicultural writing. Eventually, to illustrate the ambivalences of the multicultural aesthetic in Canadian literature, the article provides a brief reading of Anita Rau Badami’s novel Tamarind Mem as an example of the simulated multicultural exotic.

Since its publication in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale has prominently secured its place among the most widely read novels of Canadian literature. The present article offers a reading of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a narrative built on intertextual relationships with other texts, which are directly or implicitly referred to in the novel. This analysis of the novel emphasizes reading as a dynamic semiotic process and employs Gérard Genette’s notion of transtextuality to look into the narrative’s semantic field from the perspective of its paratextual, intertextual and metatextual relationships. While focusing on the Bible as the major intertext that structures the semantic space of Atwood’s narrative, this intertextual reading of The Handmaid’s Tale also looks at the ways in which the biblical context of Atwood’s novel correlates with the paratexts of Jonathan Swift’s essay A Modest Proposal and sufi philosophy to delineate the dominant strategies of the reading and interpreting of Atwood’s text. Finally, the article analyzes the metatextual level of Atwood’s novel and points out the ways in which the writer ironizes the intertextual nature of her own text and fictionalizes its intertexts, thereby suggesting the impossibility of narrative and interpretative closure.