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"Despair Fiction."
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The Spread of Novels
Fiction has always been in a state of transformation and circulation: how does this history of mobility inform the emergence of the novel? The Spread of Novels explores the active movements of English and French fiction in the eighteenth century and argues that the new literary form of the novel was the result of a shift in translation. Demonstrating that translation was both the cause and means by which the novel attained success, Mary Helen McMurran shows how this period was a watershed in translation history, signaling the end of a premodern system of translation and the advent of modern literary exchange.
eBook
The sorrows of young Werther and selected writings
One of the world's first best-sellers, this tragic masterpiece attained an instant and lasting success upon its 1774 publication. A sensitive exploration of the mind of a young artist.
Book
A Chaos of Faces: Expressions of Despair in Tove Ditlevsen's Ansigterne
Loosened from their bodies, floating between Lise and the third-person narrator, these faces are not only symptoms of psychosis or side effects of the sleeping pills Lise takes to quell her anxiety, but are also visual markers of the fragile nature of her subjectivity. Ditlevsen, in fact, has repeatedly been placed \"outside the modernist project\" by her Danish contemporaries, and her writing continues to be seen as traditional and \"a little old-fashioned!\" (Midé 2005; see also Ravn 2017, 142).2 As the Danish author Olga Ravn suggests, this perception is no doubt linked to the overwhelming tendency to intermingle the life and works of female authors, a tendency that Ditlevsen parodied and despaired over throughout her authorship.3 While male authors' playful treading of lines between autobiography and fiction has been tied to formal, theoretical, and sociological ends, Ditlevsen's reception has struggled against the gendered confines of the \"male literary establishment\" (Brantly 1995, 260) on the one hand, and the \"pretty face . . . which she both lived up to and undermined in her writing\" on the other (Kjerkegaard 2016, 204).4 As I will argue, Ansigterne's faces engage this pervasive treatment of female authorship through their invocation of an earlier, expressionist trope of facial figuration. Rather, Ansigterne develops out of and in relation to a tradition of expressionist art production, which in turn provides the foundation for its critique of the gendered norms of its contemporary society and the \"male-defined masks and costumes\" that women, as authors and subjects within literary history, have been trapped behind and within (Gilbert and Gubar 2000, 19). [...]a number of critics have addressed Ditlevsen's interest in expressionist literature and the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke in particular.
Journal Article
Guide(s) for the Perplexed
This article compares science and the novel as different rhetorical strategies for representing relationships to the limits of knowledge and what seems unknown. I draw on Kenneth Burke's (1957) figure of “equipment for living” to revive the question of the value of knowledge and art for life, identifying the comparison between science and the humanities itself as a social phenomenon and focusing on the uses and rhetorical value of such disciplines and of literature for life in a period ruled by concerns for so-called applied knowledge and dreams of its transfer and dissemination. In this way, I try to escape from a notion of rhetoric limited solely to social interaction and the mutual persuasiveness of selves in order to develop, by linking rhetoric to subjectivity, a rhetorical approach to the consciousness of a subject conceived as relating to the limits of what can be known.
Journal Article
Fish in Exile
A couple loses their child in this poetic and devastating novel in which grief reaches \"enthralling and mysterious pleasures\" (Carol Maso). A couple named Catholic and Ethos struggle with the loss of their child. How? With fishtanks and jellyfish burials, Persephone's pomegranate seeds, and affairs with the neighbors. Fish in Exile spins unimaginable loss through classical and magical tumblers, distorting our view so that we can see the contours of a parent's grief all the more clearly. \"The result is a novel that forges a new vocabulary for the routine of grief, as well as the process of healing\" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
eBook
Five Fictions in Search of Truth
Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively as possible. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert, James, and Nabokov. She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memory as the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever its materials, for a true knowledge. In Salammb, Flaubert digs up Carthage; in The Ambassadors, James plumbs the examined life and touches at its limits; while in Lolita, Nabokov traces a search for truth that becomes a trespass. In these readings, form and style emerge as fiction's means for taking hold of reality, which is to say that they are as epistemological as they are aesthetic, each one emerging by way of the other. The aesthetic aspects of a literary work are just so many instruments for exploring a subject, and the beauty and pleasure of a work confirm the validity of its account of the world. For Flaubert, famously, a beautiful sentence was proven true by its beauty. James and Nabokov wrote on the same assumption--that form and style were at once the origin and the confirmation of a work's truth.
eBook
CONRAD'S LITERARY RESPONSE TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR
It is well known that the First World War had a profound effect on many writers. The tragedy of the war itself, and the fact that it ran so counter to the idea of the evolutionary progress that permeated Western civilization before its outbreak, brought about profound disillusionment. Conrad, however, appears to be among the few writers of the time whose work does not exhibit the same disillusionment as that of his fellow writers. This essay argues that Conrad, unlike his fellow writers, felt none of the optimistic spirit about the progress of Western civilization beforehand. Long before the war, Conrad felt the same skeptical disillusionment that began to appear in the works of Conrad's fellow writers after the war. The First World War merely reinforced Conrad's already profound skepticism regarding Western civilization.
Journal Article