{"title":"Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values by Shana Rosenblatt Mauer (review)","authors":"Ira Robinson","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916707","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"27 1","pages":"203 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139455178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma ed. by Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni (review)","authors":"Balázs Berkovits","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916706","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"24 5","pages":"199 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139456109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dispersing the Devil’s Stench: Shifting Perceptions of Sulfuric Miasma in Early Modern English Literatures","authors":"Andrew Kettler","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916698","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: From approximately 1500 to 1650, English references to sulfur’s stench focused on sensory indications of hell, demons, and wickedness in worldly environments. Thereafter, most English references to the pungent rock turned proportionately to technics, medicine, and progress. The increasing presence of sulfuric miasma within secularizing applications for fumigations, gunpowder, and industry led to a limiting of the role of sulfur as a signifier of hell within English environments. Due to economic incentives, supernatural discourses on brimstone atmospheres faced semantic dispersion, as sulfur took on a growing number of connotations instead of remaining a significant environmental signifier of the scent of the devil and his toadies. These shifting literary associations for sulfur exemplify the fluctuating powers of the market, religious voices, biopolitical networks, and the state to define what is matter out of place , or what can be considered too environmentally toxic for economic consumption. Revising the prominence of synchronic work in Early Modern Studies that critiques the dis-enchantment thesis, and redeploying theory from Douglas, Jameson, Greenblatt, Eagleton, and Rancière, this essay highlights connections between the History of Ideas, Environmental Studies, and literary criticism through asserting that the sheer abundance of sulfuric substances in the environment, caused by increased uses for the rock in the coal-fired furnaces of the 18th century, added to a literary dislodgment of mystical definitions of sulfur’s smell as signifying evil. As the Industrial Revolution stuffed chimneys with additional sulfur compounds, material encounters with brimstone became common. Continuously taught that sulfur meant profit and purity, reformed English noses found less sin in the smell of acrid sulfur smoke. This analysis portrays that within literatures that included associations to sulfur, the impending Anthropocene was tested, greenwashed, and approved by the masses of the disenchanting English public sphere.","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"6 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139396130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creative Work Ethic and Autofiction: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?","authors":"David Hadar","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916705","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The rise of autofiction in the 2010s can be partially explained by the genre’s reflection of the contemporary work ethic, specifically its demand to use personal life as part of people’s work. Readers can recognize their tendency to use life for work in the way autofiction writers utilize their experience to write. This paper argues that Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010), one of the primary examples of contemporary autofiction, deals with the idea of using life for work in the context of the increased expectation of employers that their workers do so. At first, social engagement and writing are presented as competing for the protagonist’s attention. Then through the development of her friendship with the painter Margaux and tape-recording their conversation, life turns into a resource for writing. Sheila hopes that the new relationship with a friend, mediated and preserved through recordings, will save her writing project. It is not just that life is an inspiration for writing, but that it actively contributes to work by providing a text that will be part of the novel we are reading. Then as the novel progresses, problems with this new arrangement come up, and we are asked to question the viability of subordinating personal relationships to work. By its end, a temporary truce between work and life is presented, one that may be satisfying to readers but does not subvert the contemporary work ethic.","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139396157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The (Not-So-)Private Mind: Why Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury Is and Is Not a Failure","authors":"Daniel Schwartz","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916700","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury attempts to represent first-person experience in a radical fashion. In what I call (paradoxically) “free indirect discourse in the first person,” Faulkner ostensibly presents both thought thought and thought below the level of awareness together in one stream of text. The Quentin section in particular relies on an idealistic picture of language as meaningful in itself, apart from any intersubjective context or significant use, as though we could bypass communication and look inside Quentin’s head, finding not the brain but the “exact language” of his conscious life. I consider this temptation by way of Wittgenstein’s critique of the privacy of the mental. Wittgenstein’s aim, I argue, is not to deny or demote interiority, but rather to impugn a certain picture of how “the inner” must look — a realm composed of private objects to which the “I” alone has access. I thus suggest that we think of Quentin as an experiment, an appeal. Faulkner tries to reveal a mind in the brutal fullness of its suffering without forcing that mind to address us: to tell us that they suffer. I contend that this appeal fails, and in failing reveals the manner in which the (not-so-private) mind is essentially embedded in a shared, intersubjective world.","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"51 6","pages":"71 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139456343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Mirror and the Icon: A Theological Perspective on Nabokov’s Pale Fire","authors":"Erik Eklund","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916702","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The search for the author(s) of Nabokov’s Pale Fire arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem of repetition and its relation to the question of origins, temporal and timeless. For insofar as an origin is a thing ( res ) that is not always already in the movement of repetition (identical or otherwise), however distantly removed from its source (finite or otherwise), there can be no finite or immanent origin in the book or in the world. There is only its sign, which incorporates and refracts within its generative gaze all the temporalities and identities as non-identical repetition. In Pale Fire such as sign is represented by St. Sudarg of Bokay’s triptych of bottomless light.","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"15 3‐6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139396131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creativity — Narrativity — Fictionality: A Critical Genealogy","authors":"Paul Dawson","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916697","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The term “narrative” has become ubiquitous in public discourse, but to date little work has been done to explore how vitally it is related both historically and theoretically to another contemporary buzzword: creativity. By addressing this lacuna this essay seeks not only to illuminate the popularity of narrative as a mode of knowledge, but to shed new light on its relationship to another core concept in the field: fictionality. The essay argues that the narrative turn and the contemporary boom in instrumental storytelling have been facilitated by a lexical and semantic shift from narrative as artifact to narrative as process, and that this shift is the result of ongoing historical intersections with new secularized and democratized theories of creativity as a human faculty. By tracing this shift we can better understand the contested history of fictionality, particularly in relation to debates about the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, and bring a new approach to the epistemological underpinings of the narrative turn in the academy and the subsequent popular appeal to personal storytelling in the networked public sphere.","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":" 102","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139396110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Excluding the Rural Girl Student: Rural-Urban Divide, Knowledge Transmission, and Female Homosociality in Xiao Hong’s “Hands”","authors":"Lang Wang","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916701","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the early 20th century, the figures of both the peasant woman and the “New Woman” caught the attention of Chinese writers. While the “New Woman” has been the subject of considerable scholarship, the representation of peasant women has not received much scholarly attention. This essay examines the peasant woman as represented in modern Chinese literature to complement the existing understanding of Chinese modernity. It focuses on the rural girl student, as she signifies the clash of two worlds: the rural family as her point of provenance and the modern school as her entry into the urban. Relying on Xiao Hong’s short story “Hands” in the context of historical accounts, I argue that hygiene becomes a type of biopower that punishes the rural girl student for her class origin and racializes her as a barbarian, the process capturing a rural-urban divide. The modern school that expels the protagonist, Wang Yaming, is not an institution that promotes upward mobility but a tool to perpetuate class privileges. Although the narrator shows occasional sympathy with Wang Yaming, under the influence of class difference female solidarity is not achieved.","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"26 7","pages":"115 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139455218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Listening and Failure: Roger Laporte with Marcel Proust","authors":"Joseph Acquisto","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916703","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay reads Roger Laporte’s Une voix de fin silence (A voice of fine silence), the second volume of his idiosyncratic work Une vie (A life), in dialogue with the early volumes of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). A constellation emerges from the analysis that allows us to consider the interrelations and interdependence of Laporte’s text, his work as a critic on Proust, and the Recherche itself. The essay argues that Laporte’s textual engagement with Proust allows us to re-evaluate notions of literary failure so as to redefine what counts as the success of a literary project conceived as a writing about writing and becoming a writer. Both Proust and Laporte practice a literary writing that evokes mental experience while never being synonymous with it because, as their texts demonstrate, mental and literary experience can never coincide perfectly. Laporte labels the writer’s search a “listening,” a precarious activity which, like failure, is impossible to summon on command and which can only be recognized as such in retrospect as a motor of literary creation.","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"11 4","pages":"141 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139456136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color by Anissa Janine Wardi (review)","authors":"Yongchao Wen","doi":"10.1353/pan.2024.a916708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2024.a916708","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":516166,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":" 29","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139396118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}