Volume 52, Issue 2

Parallels are discussed between the Biblical (Jewish and then Christian) use of ‘stumbling stone’ and Shklovsky’s thisworldly notion of estrangement – ‘making the stone stony.’ To Shklovsky’s esthetic salvation through estranged perception, Brecht adds value criteria from salvational politics, using, for example, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle a Marxist figuralism, which rationalizes the sensual body. However, estrangement as a formal device which doubts the present norms is ideologico-politically ambiguous: in the Brecht or Marxist wing it is ‘critical,’ but in other hands it may be ‘mythical’: Hamsun, Jünger, Pound, and the Iranian Ta’ziyeh play use it with a lay or religious proto-fascist horizon. The final section follows Timpanaro’s insistence on biological death as not fully reducible to politics in the usual sense, and juxtaposes stumbling, death, and creative eros as politics. In spite of Hegel’s insistence on death as a powerful negative, it is a blind spot in canonical Marxism. Even Ernst Bloch, positing hope as the central principle, does not fully engage with it, though I mention some initial useful leads from him, Brecht, and Jameson. We are left with the Freudian topology pitting eros against thanatos , and the essay closes on a discussion of Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress .

The German figura etymologica ‘Hausen außer Haus,’ as ‘dwelling’ or ‘housing outside the house,’ is developed in this paper as a specific figure of thought in two contemporary literary texts in which the respective protagonists’ outside ‘housing’ contrasts with the space of the houses they pass through, thus transforming them into transitory spaces through the reflection of the outside. This dialectical movement challenges the concept of the house as a definable space. In terms of literary-spatial theory, the protagonists are examined as transitory figures; their transgressions of inside/outside and up/down are identified in a topological analysis, and finally the argument is presented that the imagination of the protagonists functions as a transitory modus as they move within the narrative. Both texts show the ability of literature to reflect on space and enable a link to the spatial turn of 1980 s cultural studies. The innovative contribution of my argument occurs in rethinking the concept of the house as a definable space with reliable boundaries and in proposing a conception of the outside as a potential change to the inside. By providing new insights into the concept of the house, literature itself can be seen as a space of thinking ‘outside the house.’

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the ‘body not at home’ on the one hand and on the concept of the disturbing ‘foreign body’ (Fremdkörper) as deployed in various trauma studies on the other, this article explores how the traumatized body is to be understood as a disoriented and unstable body. Trauma, however, is not only something that leaves one restless. It also connects one with the trauma of another and leads to mutual understanding. Having been affected by the wound of another, a certain kind of communication among the wounded emerges, which makes traumatic memory accessible. How such an affective impact may look can be shown by examining Lutz Seiler’s award-winning novel Kruso (2014). Set on the isle of Hiddensee shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Seiler tells the story of two men, Kruso and Ed, both traumatized by the loss of a loved one. As both are East German castaways and equally affected by their loss, they develop an intimate relationship, one not void of suppressed desire, mistrust, and aggression. Only years after Kruso’s death is Ed able to come to terms with the past and find a place for burying the vanished dead.

When the Second World War ended, Samuel Beckett returned to his flat in Paris and set about writing. The experiences that he had gone through during the conflict (his subversive activities with the Resistance, his two-year period of hiding in Roussillon, his first-hand knowledge of the human cost of war as a hospital attendant in Saint-Lô) found their tortuous expression in the literary production that ensued. The Irish government’s official status as neutral over the previous five years was also a matter of concern for the exiled intellectual in Paris, and his opinions on this matter can be gleaned from a close reading of his nouvelles , particularly “The Calmative,” a narrative in which the blinding lights of the city of Dublin stand out as a disturbing element that demands an interpretation.

T. S. Eliot’s rarely discussed prose-poem “Hysteria” poses a riddle insofar as its title’s reference remains ambiguous: Both the male and female protagonist may be the locus of hysteria’s disturbing presence, as well as the text itself. This article tries to unravel the hysterical knot by taking recourse to psychoanalytic theory and elucidating the dichotomies manifest in “Hysteria,” in form as well as in content. The prose-poem is characterized by a divide between mind and body, male and female, symbolic and semiotic. Instead of complying with this disjunction and attributing the signs of hysteria to either side of the dichotomy, I suggest situating the origin of hysteria beyond it. Since hysteria’s characteristic is transgression and role-play, it may not be confined to one pole of a binary, to the man or the woman, body or mind, but always already transcends these binary structures. Indeed, as a social malady par excellence , I believe hysteria arises out of the void at the base of the male and female protagonist’s relationship and is thus a jointly produced and somatically encoded sign of distress.

The issue of ‘desire’ is one that is of deep interest to both Balzac and Cao Xueqin. The purpose of the article is to show that the focus and development of these two authors on the issue of desire present astonishing similarities and a common aim to show that there is no final solution. Instead, there is a similar approach that impacts the entire life of their heroes and can be considered as the cursed part of the human condition. Recognition of desire as the chimera that it is and renouncing the pursuit of its satisfaction could be one solution. Yet is not desire what constitutes being human? Renouncing it could turn out to be as chimerical as the original problem, the hope for its fulfillment.

In this analysis, I investigate the coexistence of the oral and writing in Texaco of Patrick Chamoiseau. I try first to explain how Chamoiseau arrived to a certain synthesis between the two registers. Then I examine the objective of the author to develop such a synthesis between oral and writing in the universe of a text. In the case of Texaco , it is not only a matter of two ways of expression but also of two languages and two states of civilization. This expressive and linguistic lining does not depend only on the exile of many intellectuals and some other historical factors, but on a certain cultural alienation. Indeed, the Martinican identity oscillates between two spaces and hesitates between two languages. By this coexistence of the creole oral mode and the French writing, Chamoiseau tried to create a new style in the world of literary texts. On the other hand, this meeting of the different languages and registers creates a certain composition of elements that do not stand in a relation of opposition to each other, but of a tangle in order to communicate a world vision and to assert the original identity.