Volume 54, Issue 3

This article is based on the observation of a discrepancy: The tradesman, arguably one of the most important figures of eighteenth-century society, is astonishingly absent in most portraits of this century. It will be argued that such omission is more than welcome to the individuals in question. The public task of the tradesman is to a,ct as the medium of trade, and in order to perform such function he has to be as unobtrusive as possible, as if producer and consumer were dealing with each other directly. Obviously, no tradesman is without an agenda of his own, but to fulfil the position society expects from him, he has to present himself just as if he were not there. To function as a medium, the tradesman himself has to be, and, most importantly, look medium, that is: middling, average, normal, and inconspicuous. The tradesman then becomes the model of a modern individual: the man without qualities. Women, on the other hand, are denied such a place in modern, functionally differentiated society

In the late nineteenth century, urban spaces attracted increasing criticism. Against the backdrop of environmental pollution, the miserable housing conditions of the poor and fears of degeneration, the metropolis came under close examination. Late Victorian writers responded to this discussion in particular. The essay investigates the representation of urban disorders in the works of Richard Jefferies. As a critic of industrialized society, Jefferies powerfully articulated a possible future of London in some of his shorter prose fiction and in his novel After London; or, Wild England (1885). Whereas his short story "Snowed Up" (1876) and the fragment "The Great Snow" (1876) portray a temporary 'death' of the city resulting from tremendous snowstorms, After London presents a complete overthrow of urban structures. Jefferies's pessimistic outlook on the future of the city will be analysed and brought within the context of other fictional texts of the period, which also focus on the future of London.

This essay focuses on 20th-century portrait photography, and argues that the facial portrait has become one of the most productive conventions in the history of the medium. It considers the social documentary work of Lewis Hine, as well as Dorothea Lange's and Walker Evans's government-sponsored photography of the Depression. Portraits by Robert Frank and Richard Avedon created in the context of, but also independently from, The New York School of Photography are discussed subsequently. The images considered here have in common that they mobilize the viewer's affective response, while at the same time they negotiate the shifting relationship between the photographer, his or her subject, and the viewer. Finally, Avedon's project In the American West, 1979-1984 is presented as a basis to question the (conventional) position of the human subject as the object of the photographer's look, as Avedon conceives of photo portraiture as an essentially mutual, performative act.

Criticism of British postmodern realist fiction has long been marked by an almost'total disregard for ethics. The reason why critics investigating the antirepresentational strategies characterizing the work of such writers as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift have for the most part remained silent about its ethical status is the widespread belief that ethics is incompatible with a questioning stance towards representation. The few academic critics who (claim to) have discovered some sort of ethical value in the self-reflexive, theoretically sophisticated fictions produced by these writers are liberal-humanists working in the ArnoldianLeavisite tradition, who, in their search for moral truths, appear to be oblivious to specifically postmodern textual practices that block easy access to meaning. Taking its cue from the deconstructive type of ethical criticism that came to the fore in the 1990s, this article suggests an alternative to both the textualist neglect and the liberalhumanist misrecognition of the ethics of British postmodern realism. Through a reading of Graham Swift's 1992 novel Ever After, it shows that postmodern realist fiction has an ethical dimension qua' postmodern realist fiction; an ethical dimension that cannot be reduced to the promulgation of traditional moral values but rather has to be conceived as the elaboration of a post-humanist, non-foundational ethics of alterity.

This article first discusses the new medial literary form of hyperfiction in terms of an exchange with and between the 'old' media of film and print literature and their respective theoretizations by Joachim Paech and the hypertheorists of the 1990s. The calculated failure of the discussion leads, in the second part, to a new framing of literary texts and their criticism that pivots on Niklas Luhmann's systems theory and his medium / form distinction in particular. The writings of Thomas Pynchon and the criticism of the so-called Pyndustry will help exemplify this model, which conceptualizes hyperfictions and their reading / criticism from a new angle. At the same time, the article demonstrates that Gravity's Rainbow, a novel which critics have frequently read in terms of - or even as - film, can equally be focalized not only as prefiguring hypertextuality, but as a case in point for a hypertextual-like collaborative enterprise on the level of its criticism.