{"title":"Mapping Dickens","authors":"Robert L. Patten","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper begins by assessing the work of Franco Moretti and his Stanford colleagues in using quantitative formalism for mapping nineteenth-century European fiction. My objection to applying this technology to the writings of Charles Dickens is that quantitative formalism and distant reading conspire with Benthamite calculations to erase the specific in favor of norms established by grossing up thousands of data points. Dickens's artistic belief in the importance of representing the individual and assessing its relationship to the mass overrides the strategies Moretti practices. Nonetheless, a number of issues raised by him may be amenable to a modified practice of distant reading. In the second half of the paper I propose that if such technology is applied to a single author, Dickens, and is careful to distinguish the times of composition, publication, and reissue of texts, a multi-dimensional interactive map of London, registering the geographic, administrative, and structural times, places, history, and references within his writing, could document both his journalistic realism and his imagination in new ways, and thus better evaluate his contribution to the century's aesthetic and conceptual achievements.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"31 1","pages":"211 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90268621","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":"Mapping Victorian Empires, Cultures, Identities: Introduction","authors":"Galia Benziman, Zoe Beenstock","doi":"10.1353/PAN.2021.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAN.2021.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This special issue of Partial Answers follows in the wake of a four-day conference on mapping and literature–\"Mapping Victorian Empires, Cultures, Identities.\" In May 2019, over 50 delegates from no fewer than 10 countries gathered in Jerusalem and Haifa to discuss long-19th-century, Victorian, and post-Victorian literary mappings, settings, journeys, and locales. Some of the speakers expanded their talks into the essays presented in this volume. The introduction asks what it is about maps that makes them literary, poetic, and symbolic texts. Maps are notoriously biased because of political and economic agendas and epistemological conventions, and they are inevitably skewed, even if only because they project a global object onto a flat page. Yet poetic maps, unlike scientific ones, acknowledge and savor this slanted gaze.The introduction analyzes fictional mappings as a poetic device and suggests that in works of literature, maps–commonly taken to provide access to a concrete physical reality–tend to serve as imaginary spaces for rethinking geographies, identities, and cultures. Poetic maps conceptualize geographical reality as an attribute of the mind, giving shape and structure to the interiority and establishing a critical distance from empirical conventions of space.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"70 1","pages":"201 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76605659","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 Book of Esther in Daniel Deronda: Between Metaphorical and Literal Mapping","authors":"Channah Damatov","doi":"10.1353/PAN.2021.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAN.2021.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article traces the place of the Book of Esther in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and argues that the biblical work can be seen as Eliot's primary \"map\" in her own project of literal and metaphorical remapping. Historical and cultural contexts, as well as close readings of the texts, suggest that the Book of Esther is especially relevant because it engages with the \"Jewish Question\" and the \"Woman Question\" in tandem; it offers a terrain for the novel's ideas on both issues, while precipitating a revised hermeneutic of the biblical text. Remapping the Book of Esther serves Eliot in advocating for a Jewish return and to the Land of Israel and in spurring discourse towards the depolarization of gendered traits, roles, and relations. However, while Eliot answers the Jewish Question with proto-Zionism, she leaves the Woman Question chillingly unanswered—as does the Book of Esther itself.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"16 1","pages":"305 - 329"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80530167","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":"Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy by Monika Fludernik (review)","authors":"L. Toker","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0010","url":null,"abstract":"T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination is an important contribution to Eliot criticism that will undoubtedly become essential reading for scholars of modernism in general and of T. S. Eliot in particular. Its straightforward and lucid language, accessible structure, and expert use of recent scholarship will appeal to a general Eliot readership as well. Like Brooker’s other books and essays, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination is a major achievement.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"58 1","pages":"192 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80841043","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":"Buber's Elijah as an Allegorical Play","authors":"Einat Davidi","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The play Elijah (1963), written by the philosopher Martin Buber in his twilight days, represents his diagnosis of the state of humanity at his time. I discuss this play as an allegorical drama, examining it against the background of Buber's rejection of allegory, and demonstrating its implementation of the specific sense Buber gave to the allegoric in \"Symbolic and Sacramental Existence in Judaism\" (1934). Dramatic, allegorical multilayered agon enables Buber to express the idea of crisis and struggle between the principles of form and formlessness and between decisiveness and hesitation as enabling decision, that is, creation; it enables a simultaneous exploration of the political and the existential, the individual and the collective, as well as the validation of the affinity that Buber identifies between the individual inner struggle and the struggle embodied in history. In the frame of a Biblical play, Buber thus expressed his thoughts about Jewish society in the nascent State of Israel and about post-war Germany, his interpretation of the Cold War. The play renders his philosophical and theological concerns and his interpretation of history, including his own role in it.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"68 1","pages":"35 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82609389","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":"Rethinking the Writer's Duty: Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales and the Russian Intelligentsia in the Gulag","authors":"Josefina Lundblad-Janjić","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper explores Varlam Shalamov's representation of the fate of the Russian intelligentsia in the Gulag, his framing and reframing his idea of the writer's duty. In Kolyma Tales, Shalamov not only bears witness to the Russian intelligentsia in the camps, but also establishes a dynamic relationship of common identity between the author and those about whom he writes. This relationship restores the erased identities of intelligenty and sheds light on Shalamov's understanding of the writer's duty to give voice to their otherwise lost experiences. Instead of declaring the Gulag the site of the death of the Russian intelligentsia in the 20th century, the Soviet camp experience becomes for Shalamov an opportunity to bring nuance to the multidimensional heritage of the intelligentsia and to affirm his belief in the immortality of the intelligentsia as an idea.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"9 1","pages":"100 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88583427","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":"Cui Malo? Cui Bono? Reflections on a Literary Forgery: The Case of The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang","authors":"Amy Matthewson","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper is concerned with the intersection between ideological influence, epistemology, and Orientalism. In 1913, an American named William Francis Mannix claimed to have edited a memoir based on the diary of the famous Chinese statesman, Li Hongzhang. The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang was a success in America and Britain, with expert sinologists praising its contributions. When the memoir was exposed as a forgery, some readers struggled to explain its success by the perceived verisimilitude of the work. By taking a closer look at Mannix's book, this paper considers the concept of truth, knowledge construction and dissemination, as well as the role of cultural and ideological presuppositions that shape our understandings.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"127 1","pages":"19 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85710996","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":"Genre and Politics: The Concept of Empire in Joseph Brodsky's Work","authors":"Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article analyses ideological and genre aspects of Joseph Brodsky's work, associated with the imperial theme in Russian literature. By drawing on methods from comparative literature, historical poetics, and empire studies I claim that a concern with space is not only central to Brodsky's work but also consistent with his imperial thinking. Brodsky's verse maintains a direct dialogue with Classicist poetry and Acmeist poetry (particularly Osip Mandelstam), both of which dealt with the notion of empire through adoption of the \"high\" literary style. The Imperial theme in Brodsky's oeuvre also overlaps with the dismantlement of the Russian imperial subject at the end of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, I argue that he was, above all, the last Russian imperial poet.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"152 1","pages":"119 - 143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77598812","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 Mystery of M's Disappearance: Unnatural Narrative in Ian McEwan's \"Solid Geometry\"","authors":"Biwu Shang","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Typical of Ian McEwan's early \"shock literature,\" \"Solid Geometry\" has attracted much scholarly comment on the issue of the conflict between female emotionalism and male rationality. By contrast, this paper focuses on the mystery of character M's disappearance and examines the story's three impossible events in the conceptual system of unnatural narratology. Yet it goes beyond the current model of naturalizing readings vs. unnaturalizing readings: it shows how the methods of ethical literary criticism can combine with unnatural narratology to yield new insights into the story, especially with the help of the concepts of ethical identity and ethical choice.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"106 1","pages":"101 - 117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80739077","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":"\"Meanwhile\": Paradisian Infinity in Milton's Paradise Lost","authors":"Ayelet C. Langer","doi":"10.1353/pan.2021.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2021.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that the temporal adverb \"meanwhile\" marks a series of key moments in Paradise Lost, in which an endless succession is built into the present moment. Hitherto overlooked by the critics, this duration is represented in the poem as a concrete, coherent, and intelligible form, which opens the possibility of transformation implicit in the monistic scale of \"one first matter all.\" Milton models this structure on Aristotle's theory of the infinite presented in Physics III, yet he goes beyond Aristotle in representing the infinite as the distinctive feature of moral life. In the poem's representation of hell or the postlapsarian condition, \"meanwhile\" serves as a mere indexical adverb, the function of which is to designate temporal or spatial shifts. The possibility of transformation, which \"meanwhile\" opens in the present moment, is reserved in Milton's poem to the prelapsarian or repentant mind.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"16 1","pages":"1 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84429184","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}