Volume 137, Issue 3

Against the backdrop of Victorian celebrity culture, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson conjure the literary trope of the magician in order to convey their poetic choices and to examine the relationship between the poet and his audience. Whereas Browning’s magician, “Pietro of Abano” of Dramatic Idyls (1880), is subversive, odd and persecuted, the Poet Laureate’s Merlin of the Idylls of the King (1859–1875) is acknowledged and well admired. This essay will explore Browning’s Pietro as a critical response to Tennyson’s Merlin, reflecting the complex personal relationship between the two poets, their stylistic differences and their dissimilar reception by their contemporaries.

Shifting the focus of attention from Nell to Trent opens new possibilities of reading Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop . Rather than telling the story of a little child’s journey towards death, the novel is about an old man’s failure to mourn that takes on the aspect of fetishistic disavowal. Trent is a split subject whose phantasmal formations open an abyss between knowledge and belief. His grappling with loss makes him crave for money, a projection which finds its ultimate embodiment in the character of Quilp. Dickens integrates this scenario into a symbolic web centred on the topos of fetishism, which provides the metaphorical medium of the novel while being its central theme. Objects and the subjects’ relation to them are thus placed at the crossroads between an anthropological, a Marxian, and a Freudian conception of fetishism. Dickens weaves his story around the unifying thread between these three facets of the fetishistic paradigm starting from his conception of the latter as a symptom accounting for what is wrong not only with individual lives but also with collective experience. Yet the spear that wounds can also heal, and that is why Dickens’s idea of salutary fetishism as a remedy to the maladies of the self and of society does not undermine his attempt at ‘defetishizing critique’ in The Old Curiosity Shop .

Samuel Beckett’s first published short story, “Assumption” (1929), is usually described as an apprentice work, “a piece of marginally interesting juvenilia” (Pattie 2000: 52), a beginner’s attempt toward a modernist short story in which the influence of James Joyce is clear. Indeed, it has been claimed that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the model underlying Beckett’s early foray into creative fiction. The current paper seeks to reassess the established critical appreciation of “Assumption”, that of being a parody of Joyce’s novel by a playful disciple; instead, I will argue that Beckett was in fact questioning the very principles of his master’s art. If Portrait is the epitome of the Künstlerroman , Beckett in his short piece debunked the myth of the young artist by consciously downgrading the aesthetic concerns of his protagonist and by disrupting the revered categories of modernist fiction. This essay is part of the research project FF I 2016-76477-P, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades and by AEI / FEDER. The author would also like to thank CEI Patrimonio (Universidad de Almería) for their support..

David Foster Wallace initially saw himself as a late postmodernist; indeed, he literally wrote a text in the margins of his copy of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse . Later on, probably under the influence of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence , he wanted to become one of those “strong poets” who need to commit a literary patricide so as to clear imaginative space for themselves. What has been more or less overlooked so far (or perhaps simply taken for granted, given the widespread recognition and influence of Creative Writing Seminars in the U. S.) is that Wallace used the model of teacher and student to create his own relationship between Author and Reader, turning the story into a battleground between them. This essay attempts to show that Wallace’s “homicidal” as well as “fawning” attitude towards Barth actually raises the status of the author he means to succeed.

This paper holds that J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Life and Times of Michael K , demonstrates how apartheid, in order to preserve its domination over the nonwhite population of South Africa, as with other authoritarian regimes, commonly encouraged dependency. Its various institutions and camps aimed precisely to create a culture of dependence and to fashion subjects utterly dependent on the state. A dependent subject is a powerless, exploitable, and controllable subject; this is the right kind of subject for colonizers. The black majority of South Africa, then, could only have a parasitic existence, completely dependent on their white masters. The novel narrates how dependence is created through the false generosity of the state. As Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed argued, false charity is a state strategy that serves to reproduce the relations of domination. Coetzee’s novel, thus, suggests that to undermine the structure of domination, the oppressed have to reject the culture of dependence and the parasitic subjectivity that arise from the false generosity of the state.