Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas最新文献

{"title":"Limits of Narrative: Introduction","authors":"Samuli Björninen, M. Polvinen","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The introduction to this forum lays out the background for the theoretical issues concerning the limits of narrative, and sets the individual articles in the context of that larger debate.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"29 3 1","pages":"191 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82731858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dancing with the Posthumans: Readerly Choreographies and More-than-Human Figures","authors":"Kaisa Kortekallio","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Drawing on feminist, enactivist and posthumanist theories of reading, the essay develops theoretical and methodological tools for bodily and reflective reading of fictional figures. It introduces the notion of “readerly choreography,” which stands for the iterative experiential patterns that fictional narratives suggest. The primary purpose of the notion is to provide a better grasp of readerly dynamics typical to genre-derived works of fiction — including the cases in which generic frames of expectation and experience are estranged and reconfigured. The essay’s contribution to theory is presented on the basis of a reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag” (2004). This short story plays on the conventions of action-adventure, exaggerating the toughness and physical capabilities of technologically enhanced, posthuman action heroes. Owing to this exaggeration, it becomes difficult for readers to continue to perform the habitual experiential patterns of excitement, action-derived pleasure, and identification with the heroic protagonist. In other words, “The People of Sand and Slag” estranges the readerly choreography of action-adventure narratives.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"147 1","pages":"277 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86660649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Russian Modernist Studies","authors":"Edward Waysband","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"82 1","pages":"357 - 365"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75745137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Narratives on the Large Scale: Historical Narrative Explanations in Popular Science Writing","authors":"Juha Raipola","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the recent past, narratives have been hailed as a promising instrument for improving the effectiveness of science communication to nonscientist audiences. Narratives play an important part in how individuals comprehend the world, and persuasive narratives may often be more successful in communicating complex scientific issues to the general public than evidence-based arguments. At the same time, however, narratives have the potential to perpetuate misinformation and inaccuracies about science due to their formal characteristics. Also, as narratives are not subject to the same truth requirements as scientific argumentation, they cannot be easily countered, which can lead to serious misconceptions about important scientific topics. In this article, the role of narratives and narrative explanations in science communication is discussed regarding the genre of popular science. The essay approaches the affordances and limits of narrative in this context with two primary examples representing recent popular-science best-sellers: Elisabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011).In theoretical literature concerning narratives in science communication and popular science, the concept of narrative tends to be applied rather loosely, encompassing everything from journalistic accounts of scientific research to sequential explanations of change in natural systems. As many of the discourse types of popular science involve representations of temporal change in the non-human natural world, they necessarily also create “narratives” that do not easily fill all the characteristics of prototypical narrative representations. This article takes a closer look at the narrative qualities of science popularization, focusing especially on popular scientific “histories” featuring human species as their main protagonist. The aim is to explore this topic further by a more comprehensive categorization of different kinds of narratives and narrative explanations in the selected popular scientific texts. With this theoretical emphasis, the article will contribute to a fuller understanding of the affordances and limitations of narrative in addressing scientific issues.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"50 1","pages":"209 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75948101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Strange Tools and Dark Materials: Speculating Beyond Narratives with Philosophical Instruments","authors":"Essi Varis","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Although Alva Noë’s Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015) makes no direct reference to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), these otherwise dissimilar works share an astonishingly similar and current view of the mind: both Noë and Pullman construe cognition as embodied action that extends and reflects on its own possibilities through various instruments and technologies. For Noë, the key technology aiding this reaching of the mind is art; making and engaging with art is a self-reflexive endeavor that makes our activities available for closer examination and evaluation. By extension, works of speculative fiction could be read as illustrations of or investigations into speculative, imaginative cognition.In case of Pullman’s trilogy, this is certainly true as it incorporates several explicit commentaries on John Keats’ notion of negative capability, which is closely linked to imagination and creative cognition. Moreover, Pullman illustrates his characters’ negative capabilities through very particular ”strange tools”: the Golden Compass, the Subtle Knife, and the Amber Spyglass. These imaginary instruments serve the dual purpose of, first, modifying affordances, i.e. the ways the characters can respond to their changing situations, and second, making these speculative cognitive processes more visible to the readers.Ultimately, the analysis of the trilogy suggests that skillful speculation entails at least two subskills: first, the ability to see as full a range of actionable possibilities as possible and, second, the ability to choose and act on the most suitable one. In the 4E framework, which views the mind as embodied, extended and action-oriented, speculation and imagination could thus be defined as especially extensive and flexible use of affordances. As such, speculation is something that always oveflows the limits of narrative. Like other forms of art, narrative is merely a tool for modifying and highlighting the affordances at its disposal.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"26 1","pages":"253 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74434758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Archival Earth: Endangered Testimony at the Limits of Narrative","authors":"C. P. Krieg","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the context of overlapping anthropogenic threats to environmental knowledge and cultural memory, this article asks: what can the limits of narrative tell us about the endangered status of cultural memory and the archival relationships of contemporary literature? It argues that metaleptic moves in these narratives can be read as a historical response to material precarities in contemporary society. Read dialectically, these developments may be understood as a formal response to this precarity and a felt sense of the limits of literature to authenticate its intervention into the conditions it describes. This article draws on examples from James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Human Matter, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory, and short stories from Phenderson Djèlí Clark and Ken Liu. Reading across literary fiction, memoir, and speculative fiction, this article explores how the limits of narrative are turned into opportunities for further opening the text to the world.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"9 1","pages":"337 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81053863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Recounting and Forgetting: The Epistemological and Ethical Limits of Narrative","authors":"Colin Davis","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The limits of narrative are epistemological and ethical: what can be narrated and what should be narrated? Can we recount everything, and if we could, are there even so some things that we should leave in silence? We hear a lot about the duty to remember and the right to tell one’s story, but are there some stories that cannot and should not be told? Could forgetting play a role in the ethical project of memory? Trauma narratives pose these questions in particularly fraught terms. Survivor-witnesses have a story to tell, but they are also often intensely aware that their story defies narratability and intelligibility. It must be told and cannot be told; it demands and resists understanding. This article explores these questions with reference to a number of case studies: Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious” (1942), J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), and a sequence from Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah (1985). In each case, the right or need to narrate is mitigated by an intense realisation that not everything can or should be told.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"115 1","pages":"321 - 336"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77913615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Ethical Vision of George Eliot by Thomas Albrecht (review)","authors":"Channah Damatov","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"17 1","pages":"371 - 374"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87927789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Error to Terror: The Romantic Inheritance in W. H. Auden's \"In Time of War\"","authors":"F. V. Dam","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"In 1937, Faber and Faber commissioned W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood to write a travel book about Asia as a sequel to Letters from Iceland (1937), which Auden had co-authored with Louis MacNeice. While the journey to the North had been driven by cultural and personal inclinations, the decision to visit the East was motivated by a public and political purpose. After his return from Iceland in late 1936, Auden had written to E. R. Dodds that he was “not one of those who believe that poetry need or even should be directly political.” At the same time, he recognized that “the poet must have direct knowledge of the major political events” (Mendelson 2017: 183). In his quest for such direct knowledge, Auden took part in the Spanish Civil War but failed to translate his experience into poetry.1 The second Sino-Japanese War offered a chance to atone for this failure: in China, he said, “we shall have a war of our own” (Isherwood 289). At first, this conflict proved elusive. Auden was continually delayed in his attempts to visit the front. Eventually he did come close enough to witness the destruction and danger that people on the ground were facing. The germ of his sentiments can be glimpsed in a recently discovered newspaper article for the Birmingham Gazette (Mendelson 2019), in which he discusses the plight of missionaries, with particular atten-","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"69 1","pages":"151 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77843392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Equal Outsiders: Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and Education in the Face of War","authors":"L. Cernat","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"In a passage from Three Guineas (1938), which rhetorically foreshadows Churchill’s famous June 1940 “we shall fight on the beaches” speech, Virginia Woolf prompts women to preserve and expand their ancestresses’ habit of thinking critically even while lacking some comforts. Joining the newly-available public sphere, women who had thought “while they stirred the pot” (2001a: 160) are now called to become more articulate:","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"23 1","pages":"121 - 149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88124456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}