Volume 56, Issue 1

The present article aims to demonstrate how ethnography is present, discussed, and criticized in Stefano D’Arrigo’s novel Horcynus Orca (1975). Through a comparison with a passage from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955), the novel is shown to adopt and challenge central tenets of ethnography. D’Arrigo imagines the possibility of an ‘ethnographer from within,’ a member of a Sicilian fishermen community who, by virtue of his personal experience, possesses the necessary distance to report about his community of origin, yet cannot help but impact it significantly as he in turn brings along and into the community a different system of thought. The article exposes the multiple inversions and subversions that the novel operates with respect to the dichotomic pairs nature/culture, civilized/primitive, indigenous/foreign, as well as to ethnography itself by focussing on the occurrence of ethnographic documents in key passages of the novel. Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques and possibly to an even greater extent Horcynus Orca are concerned with the contradictions inherent in the study of humankind, its various manifestations, and its position in the world, without aspiring to resolve them in any univocal or definitive way.

This article foregrounds human epistemological disorientation in the Orlando furioso with a view to theological implications which, if not rigorously followed up by Ariosto’s verse (too supple to endure rigor), are nevertheless made possible by its discourse. Beginning with the recurring fantasy-inducing impotence of will (madness) that unite the narrator with the characters , the article examines the Furioso ’s own transition from romance to epic mode, aiming to highlight the survival of romance and its subversion of the epistemological exhaustiveness of the epic. By turning to the theological implications of the human epistemological condition that the Orlando furioso repeatedly evokes, it suggests how a functional agnosticism could begin to operate beneath the surface of theic humanist fictions and thought.

The article takes as its starting point a reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote , focusing on the first passage from Cervantes’ Quijote that is quoted verbatim in the text. An invocation of the river nymphs and the nymph Echo („las ninfas de los ríos, la húmida y dolorosa Eco“), it is singled out by the narrator as bearing the voice of Pierre Menard despite having never been attempted by him in his project of writing Don Quijote again. I argue that the invocation of Echo does not point to a duplication of the text. Rather, Echo’s early modern acceptation, that of a dialogue partner that not only answers, but answers back and says different things with the same words, encapsulates Menard’s project as such and, beyond that, a theory of literary resonance. Paul Valery’s poems and essays, to which Borges’ story variously alludes, underpin this reading of Echo as the patron saint of a theory of resonance that accounts for the necessary openness of literary texts to deviant interpretations, in particular those that could not have been foreseen or desired by their authors.

Thomas Mann’s Novel, The Magic Mountain , is characterized by the opposition of two distinct worlds. A comparative study of various novels that share the ‘two worlds’ motif demonstrates to us that the existence of the two worlds plays an essential role in the Bildungsroman. The experience with the new possibilities of life at the sanatorium has given Hans Castorp, the hero of The Magic Mountain , the access to the ideal world. Towards the end of the novel, Castorp has denied the material understanding of death, love and disease that constitutes the world of reality and has thus attained an inward transcendence, which, as Ying-shih Yü argues, characterizes the Chinese intellectual world. Mann’s conception of Bildung as pointing to socialization, which is exemplified by Castorp’s transformation, is apparently opposed to the notion of Bildung as individualization. What is implied in Castorp’s integration into the historical context, the war, is far from a failure of the Bildung, but the noblest form of its triumph.

The paper reads Alfred Döblin’s novel Amazonas (1937/1938) in the context of current debates about world literature. It argues that these debates not only refer to a certain group of texts or to a literary system, but concern problems of reading and representation, namely how to read literature beyond the paradigms of national and comparative literature and how to represent a world, especially the modern globalized and secularized world. Döblin’s novel refers to different meanings of ‘world’ that are implied in these questions: It depicts the ‘discovery’ and violent colonization of the ‘New World’ both from the perspective of the indigene people and the Europeans, as well as the ‘Jesuit republic’ as a different project of colonization with an utopian aspect. Written in exile, it also uses the detour via an exotic setting to diagnose a crisis of Europe. Finally it tries to develop a narrative form beyond the novel, using different forms of mythic but also topographic narration which are figured as the materiality of the Amazonas-‘stream.’