Volume 60, Issue 1

Early modern England had contradictory views about female virginity. While premarital virginity was almost fetishized as insurance of legitimate bloodlines, virginity as a life choice was disapproved of as an anomaly by Protestant moralists. However, the country was ruled for forty-six years by a woman whose vowed celibacy was celebrated in cultural representations. I claim that these contradictions stem from early modern patriarchy’s unconscious that saw virginity as a source of power. A virgin, who had not been penetrated by a man, was not seen exactly as a woman in direct contrast to the male first principle. Virginity denoted a genderless space where a woman could assume male attributes such as autonomy, articulateness, military valor, and political potency. A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects these discrepancies through its four virgins. It offers lifelong celibacy as a punishment for Hermia’s filial disobedience, yet idolizes the imperial votaress in Oberon’s tale. The play also enlists various tropes that manifest virginal power. Hermia and Helena display courage and outspokenness. Hippolyta, the virgin warrior queen, is a physical threat to men. Finally, the exaltation of the fair vestal (aka Elizabeth I) is linked to the English patriarchy’s need to unsex their monarch, who being a woman was unfit to rule.

Since antiquity, poets have regularly referred to the voyage, to shipwrecks, and to the danger of the wild sea. In that context, the dominant voices have been those of male writers, but female poets have equally been interested in and dedicated to this topos. Through a comparative analysis of the works of the late medieval French poet Christine de Pizan and the sonnets of the German Baroque poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, this study argues that the disastrous experience of a ship being crushed at sea and the notion of sailing itself served these women well when reflecting upon their uncertain and changing life destinies with all the implied catastrophes, conflicts, and challenges. This paper might well be the very first analysis of the texts by these two women poets in tandem who indirectly communicated with each other across the centuries and addressed very similar concerns by means of relying on the same or closely related metaphors. However, the purpose here is not to probe possible connections, such as Catharina perhaps having had available a copy of Christine’s writings, which might be rather unlikely, although the former was certainly well educated. Instead, the emphasis rests on the commonly shared topoi and tropes related to the ship, the voyage, and the dangers at sea, which proved to be relevant to these female poets since the metaphors associated with these themes served particularly well for deeper reflections on the problems in life. To undergird this argument, we can also draw from the evidence in some of the lais of Marie de France where the voyage brings about a fundamental change in the protagonists’ lives. Marie even includes the topic of the near shipwreck that mirrors the emotional catastrophe emerging at that moment.

While Franz Kafka‘s literary works might not intuitively seem to align with theoretical or sociological works on subjectivation, a deeper look reveals that many of his narratives are centered around questions of the subject. By narrating subjectivation as failing, his works are able to broaden the understanding of the complex processes of subject constitution. Ex negativo , productive elements of the constitution of subjects are focused, especially moments of social recognition and orientation. Since the narratives are literary texts, they furthermore are able to open genuine, new perspectives on that matter: They allow a look on the inside, the feelings and reflections of the becoming subject. Kafka’s literary reflections on the failing subject can therefore be considered a productive enrichment to the poststructuralist subject theories of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.

The necessity of thinking about Aufhebung in the face of increasing social suffering remains unbroken to this day. Nevertheless, social philosophy seems hardly capable of opposing precarious conditions with a critical enough thinking to name the societal imbalance. The problem could possibly be related to the understanding of language in philosophy, insofar as language in philosophical discourse is reduced to its normativity. This is especially evident in the current prominence of the philosophy of suffering. It is argued that normative approaches are limited in their ability to grasp suffering concretely enough to emancipate from it. In the current philosophical discourse, it becomes apparent how the exclusion of poetic language from the sphere of critique leads to a reduction of critique, resulting in suffering no longer being understood as an urgent problem. This finding can be exemplified primarily by confronting common philosophies of suffering with the literary criticism of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, in which experiences of suffering are always already framed in the dual movement of poetic language.

The present article traces the inevitable turn towards negativity of the idea of hope, following the literary-critical reflections of Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. This movement dates back to early modernism, where the transformation of absolute despair into its opposite was still supported by the religious-political climate of the Baroque period. However, according to the three literary critics, due to the impossibility of a positive metaphysics, hope, if it does not wish to become ideological – as false consolation or transfiguration – can only be formulated as an ‘inspite.’ This idea, impressively captured in Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics , found literary expressions that range from Baroque theatre to Samuel Beckett’s modernism. Negativity itself, in which these expressions are immerged, must not, however, be declared a meaning-giving, totalizing authority. Such ‘post-metaphysical’ interpretations can be prevented by critically reconsidering the insights of the three literary critics. They do not hypostatize a negative principle from which meaning is to be derived, but rather, in view of the desolate world, prefigure the possibility of a better one.

Imbolo Mbue’s experiential novel Behold the Dreamers narrates the story of African protagonists who embark on a journey to fulfill their aspirations of a better life promised through the American Dream but, as outsiders, are hindered from achieving it. Employing free indirect discourse and the experiential dual voice narrative technique, Mbue explores the nuanced dichotomy of the American Dream narrative as a tapestry of utopian ideals and a flawed Western construct. The present study aims to analyze Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers through Monika Fludernik’s ‘dual voice hypothesis’ based on which the author blends the authorial/narratorial voice with the characters’ perspectives through free indirect discourse narration. Moving beyond the cultural and contextual analysis of Mbue’s novel, the present study investigates how the author’s narrative technique bridges the gap between real-life experience and semiotic representations of the novel, allowing readers to have access to the experiences of the author and the characters. The main finding of the present study is that Mbue’s narrative technique serves to unravel a contradictory notion of the American Dream by shedding light on the complexities of American immigration policies which prevent outsiders from achieving that dream. The research concludes that this narrative technique enriches the readers’ understanding of the immigrants’ lives and offers valuable insights into human experience and the pursuit of dreams in a changing world.