Volume 60, Issue 4

This article provides a re-investigation of the war fiction of Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence, focusing on their short fiction. It proposes to read the war-related short stories of both writers as displaced autobiographical writing used to negotiate the impact of their war experiences. The texts discussed are placed in the context of critical assumptions in dealing with modernist war writing, challenging the notion that modernist writers opted primarily for indirect, impersonal treatment of the war in their work. Comparing the military perspective of Lewis to Lawrence’s civilian outlook, this article shows that straightforward literary treatment of the First World War was not restricted to the canonical soldier-writers, and that modernist war writing does not necessarily limit itself to allusion, metaphor and oblique stylistic experimentation to address the experience of armed conflict. It traces a profound disillusionment commonly associated with the work of the ‘trench-poets’ in the short fiction of these two disparate modernist/avant-garde writers and explores its impact on Lewis and Lawrence’s respective cultural theory and philosophy.

Several attributes have been used to label or legitimize the graphic novel as a relative of the comic book family. However, as single attributes, they are generally too blurry to cogently categorize certain long-form graphic works. The attribute ‘complexity’ bears enough potential to do so in the form of a typology, a graph functioning on two axes: horizontally, through a scalar continuum with the traditional (and possibly lengthy) comic book on the one extreme end and the graphic novel on the other; vertically, through a total of seven parameters which represent single aspects specifying graphic works by degree. Such a typology allows exclusive category assignments (e.g. ‘graphic novel and not comic book’) as well as differentiating assessments (‘rather/not a traditional comic book/graphic novel’).

This paper deals with the narrative treatment of an obsessive theme in Alice Munro’s fiction: the mother-daughter relationship. There are two problematic sets of interrelations: the first one refers to the young daughter’s inability to deal with her mother’s neurodegenerative disease, the second one concerns the adult daughter, especially her revisiting of traumatic childhood experiences. Drawing on recent developments in psychoanalysis and developmental psychology this paper analyzes the way Munro presents family relationships, offering deep insights into her characters’ psychological development and discussing the causes of the adult daughter’s apparent failure to come to terms with her past.

Thanks to technological developments that allow controlled, scheduleindependent, and repeated attentive viewing, dramatic television series have substantially increased narrative and thematic complexity, both within the individual episode and season, and within the multi-season arc. Lost and Battlestar Galactica , which opened with a single cataclysmic event determining their storyline over several seasons, did so by reflecting on the trauma of 9/11 and its long aftermath. Each series also spoke to the political question how long national identity can, or should, be determined by historical trauma, and in what manner this trauma itself is to be written into the national record. In their specific ways of aligning their own narrative closure with the Bush administrations’ exit from office in 2008, Lost and Battlestar Galactica pursued a historical allegory of transcending trauma and achieving national renewal.

Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin (2009) is one of the rare responses to 9/11 which displays not a falling man but, quite the opposite, someone who manages to keep their balance. This paper reveals how the concept of network functions to enhance such a different reaction to the terror attacks, expressing a sense of coherence, balance, and reconciliation within the novel. As opposed to former network representations, such as in postmodern fiction, this novel no longer depicts human inability to cope with complexity, but rather partakes in re-defining cultural trauma while re-gaining national identity at a time of crisis. The idea of network portrayed and constructed within the narrative and symbolic level of this novel is optimistic, presenting the network as a figure of thought that transcends the dehumanizing tendencies of complex systems, foregrounding its potential for creating stability and meaningful relationships. The novel thus returns to a more traditional concept of network, one which carries the image back to the level of the individual, thereby installing an ultimate hope in man’s ability to cope with complexity, while at the same time evoking a traditional notion of human identity that grants the subject the chance to acquire autonomy, albeit in interdependence with and according to the rules of the network.