Abstract This paper deals with the topic of the conversation with the dead, taken as a shorthand for the practice of literary history. In previous publications, Pieters tried to outline a number of important issues that can be subsumed under this topic, all of them revolving around the idea that literary texts are supreme sources… Continue reading Jürgen Pieters | The Powers of Fiction and the Conversation with the Dead
Month: June 2014
Evert Jan van Leeuwen | Public Similarity or Private Difference: Genre, and the Construction of Individual Identity in Jane Austen and Charles Brockden Brown
Abstract This essay responds to Richard Handler’s work on individual identity construction in Jane Austen’s novels. Handler describes the mode of identity construction in Austen as a process of public recognition of similarity to others in society, and argues that this was the dominant mode of identity construction in Austen’s time. An analysis of the… Continue reading Evert Jan van Leeuwen | Public Similarity or Private Difference: Genre, and the Construction of Individual Identity in Jane Austen and Charles Brockden Brown
David Herman | From Narrative Narcissism to Distributed Intelligence
Abstract This essay focuses on ways in which the final episode of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (sometimes called “the ricorso”) exhibits a deep, constitutive reflexivity. At issue is a propensity for self-characterization that surfaces in repeated specifications of Joyce’s text by the text itself. Despite the chapter’s reflexive (and more specifically recursive) profile, however, my… Continue reading David Herman | From Narrative Narcissism to Distributed Intelligence