Volume 128, Issue 2

Despite a consensus that literature has some positive relation to ethics, the precise nature of this relationship remains mysterious. This paper attempts to explain both the connection and the inability to specify it by positing that the ethical productivity of literature is necessarily indirect or coded; that is, we gain ethical knowledge from literature only when we do not know what, or even that, we are learning. The paper considers three ways in which literature can be ethically instructive: literary form, which accustoms us to ways of thinking that defy logical reduction but are essential to ethics; literary language, which awakens us to the morally pertinent fact that expression does not always conform to intention or register reality; and the literary representation of communal life, which reveals the limitations of the subject's moral autonomy and the philosophical theories based on that autonomy.

The words ‘fascination’, ‘to fascinate’ and ‘fascinating’ originate in black and white magic. They mean ‘to bewitch’, to cast a spell over someone. In contemporary critical jargon and (consumerist) culture the words have become extremely popular, suggesting unqualified approval. However, their cognitive potential for the description and analysis of specifically aesthetic effects has hardly been explored so far. This is precisely what the present paper attempts to do by first looking at examples of ‘metafascination’ (advertising, Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Staiger's poetics), and second by tracing the influence of the discourse of fascination on lyrical poetry (poems by John Clare, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge, and Lawrence's poem “Snake”). Unlike Immanuel Kant's notion of disinterested liking, which expects the recipients to coolly analyse and appreciate the formal qualities of the beautiful object, the aesthetics of fascination emerging after him focuses on the spell-binding effects of art, on its intensity. Thus the critic is caught in the tension between the work of art's powerful appearance and the possible meanings it may contain and provoke. The notion of pleasure propagated by hermeneutic aesthetics does not suffice to explain art's unsettling and powerful presence, its ability to stimulate the recipient's attention. Frequently the fascination represented in the text is bound up with the fascination of the text.

This article explores the connection between the figure of Medusa and concepts of fascination. Evoking both attraction and repulsion and embracing concepts of beauty as well as of terror, Medusa not only continues to be a fascinating image, but also emerges as a product, an agent, and an image of fascination. The way in which the Gorgon has been represented over time can shed some light on the ways in which ‘fascination’ in images and texts works as well as help conceptualize changes in what is perceived as ‘fascinating’ or even petrifying. Chosen images of the Medusa or Medusamorphoses from literature, art and popular culture ranging from Ovid, William Drummond, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sylvia Plath, and Annie Lennox are discussed to further explore the fascinating quality of this figure, which becomes especially apparent in the interplay between visual and verbal representations, as well as to examine its continuous presentness in contemporary culture and to analyze the changing qualities of what has been termed the ‘Medusa effect’.

Stressing the function of Renaissance tragedy as “an arena of ideological turbulence in which orthodox political, social and religious assumptions of the culture are reproduced, questioned or even contradicted” (Callaghan), this article examines to what extent “strong, central female figures” (Rose) exist in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy and why, even if they are endowed with political power, they often fail to adopt a non-ambivalent subject position. Especially in The Duchess of Malfi , which has been read “as a masculine wish fulfillment” (Jardine) while others have called its eponymous protagonist the “first fully tragic woman in Renaissance drama” (Whigham), ambivalent and mutually revoking structures abound. Not only is a ‘female prince’ an oxymoron personified, but in a curious double bind, female power, female economies and anti-patriarchal positions are initially foregrounded, only then to be annihilated all themore spectacularly. Ultimately, however, Webster's tragedy demonstrates on the level of its content as well as of its form that a ‘pure’ patriarchal system is haunted and finally deconstructed by precisely those elements it has vigorously struggled to exorcise and to expel. This leads to the question in how far the “self-contradictions” and “inadequacies” many critics claim to have detected in the play are less due to Webster than to the very ‘nature’ or economy of patriarchal discourses (tragedy included) and power structures.

This article argues that the Scotland and Scottishness of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley and Rob Roy are beyond beginning in that they are significantly textualised, i.e. implicated in processes of reading and writing. Since these novels at the same time present reading and writing as closely and inseparably entangled with one another, it follows that any hierarchical relation or clear-cut opposition between Scottishness as opposed to Englishness is hard to maintain. Moreover, the question as to where England ends and Scotland starts is equally difficult to answer as that which concerns the beginnings of a Scott novel: his books abound in dedications, introductions and notes and hence obscure the distinction between paratext and primary material. Rather than mark any absolute or abrupt beginnings, Scott's strategies of (para)textualisation blur and obscure supposedly hard and fast cultural as well as aesthetic distinctions. Waverley and Rob Roy undermine colonial power binaries of English domination and Scottish subordination, which is why this essay encourages a reading of Scott from a postcolonial perspective.

Popular culture has conveyed a narrowed image of Irish-Americans in respect to their ethnic, cultural, and religious roots: they are generally depicted as descendents of the Celts, as Catholics, and as victims of the Anglo-Irish (Protestant) landlords' insatiable greed for land, or of the Great Famine. It is true that the Catholic Irish immigrants into America of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, most of whom were unskilled labourers, were socially disadvantaged. The majority of Irish Catholics arriving in America in the second half of the 19 th century were confronted by the Protestant Irish with the same kind of colonial condescension as they had been by many Protestant landlords in Ireland. However, before the Catholics' mass-arrival in the wake of the Great Famine tens of thousands of Scots-Irish Presbyterians had set sail for America – their “Canaan” across the Atlantic – as early as at the end of the 17 th century. According to the latest U.S. Census, the great majority of today's American-Irish are Protestant. As mirrored in letters and literary texts, each population group looked critically at their Irishness – embracing, un-embracing or re-embracing it.