Volume 65, Issue 1

Vischer’s Shakespeare studies not only provide valuable insights into the bard’s plays, they also advance the type of positivist approach later practised by Bradley and others. This study focuses on Hamlet , the play most prominent in nineteenth-century German Shakespeare criticism. Two aspects are of particular interest: (1) Vischer’s nationalist approach, placing Shakespeare solely into a Northern European, Germanic environment. (2) Vischer’s primary concern with character studies. By removing Hamlet from the idealised pedestal on which the Romantics had placed him, Hamlet is no longer seen as the philosopher prince, tormented by moral scruples, but as caught in a net of adverse circumstances which he has to overcome in order to fulfil his father’s command. Vischer thereby liberates Shakespeare criticism from the constraints of domestic tragedy and its bourgeois morality.

Over the last decades, literary scholarship has increasingly recognised the importance of Henry James’ fiction for an understanding of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century dynamics of genders and sexualities. In his writing, James repeatedly demonstrates how modern patriarchal masculinities fail to establish themselves as stable identities. On a textual level, he employs a ‘queer rhetoric’ that allows for readings beyond the normative axes masculine-feminine/homosexual-heterosexual. In this paper, I discuss how James, in his tale “The Aspern Papers” (1888), turns traditionally gendered power relations upside-down: while the patriarchal home is the domestic centre of the narrative, it is two women who are in control of its secrets. The male protagonist, a nameless editor, has to rely on the women’s willingness to let him in on their secret, allow him access to the letters of the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern, which he assumes to be in their possession, and, hence, let him face his own unspeakable secret in a ‘closet’ that is not his own.

In the early days of Modernism, numerous Swedish artists and intellectuals paid visits to the salons of the Steins in rue de Fleurus and rue Madame in Paris. The Steins did not pay them much attention, however. In contrast, many of the Swedes recorded their impressions of the Steins and their art exhibits in articles and memoirs. These impressions and analyses have so far not been discussed in a comprehensive way. This article analyzes the Swedish response to the Steins and their salons, shedding new light and complementing the reactions of visitors from other nations. It further highlights the significant roles played by, for instance, Carl Palme, Isaac Grünewald, and David Edstrom. Most importantly, the article presents for the first time a long paraphrase of an exposition on modernist art by Leo Stein, recorded in 1909 by Tor Hedberg, the future member of the Swedish Academy.

This essay submits David Foster Wallace’s major work Infinite Jest , famous for its vehement critique of postmodern culture, to a thoroughly dialectical method of analysis. In contrast to many previous studies of Wallace’s novel, a dialectical approach conceives of postmodernism not as a ‘style’ of writing available among others to an individual author like Wallace but as a socio-cultural dominant to which the text is indissolubly and actively connected. The essay attempts such a ‘totalizing’ reading of Infinite Jest and an assessment of the text’s difference from postmodernism by moving through two distinct horizons of historicizing interpretation. First, the analysis aims to demonstrate that on the level of content the text is governed by a semantic opposition between freedom and value that can be read in terms of the novel’s structuring ideological system. Second, on the level of form, Infinite Jest is analyzed in terms of a formal conflict between postmodern spatiality and a latent utopian impulse mediated by the novel’s incorporation of science fiction elements.

Genres are not simply carriers of meaning – they generate meaning themselves. By intertextually evoking the genre of the travelogue, Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief re-members a genre and its practices of not only portraying but also creating the Other. By ways of openly using but at the same time misusing the main characteristics of the imperialistic travelogue – such as the discourse of negation and visual practices – Every Day is for the Thief highlights entanglements that destabilize any fixed boundary between the past and the present as well as between the colonizer and the colonized. Disappointing the reader’s expectations raised by the generic conventions, the generic intertextuality asks the reader to reconsider the wider memory context that the genre is placed in. Neither conforming to the traditional travelogue nor to the postcolonial travelogue, Every Day is for the Thief questions these firm categorisations, positioning itself in the in-between and asking for a thinking beyond binary divisions and, most of all, a linking of the past and the present.

This paper sets out to address larger questions about the relationship between postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism from a stylistic analysis of the spatial and temporal dynamics of Teju Cole’s Open City . While cosmopolitan place is projected as stable, time is a more open category in the novel, both in terms of the order of narrative discourse and the temporal explorations into the colonial past that the focalizer/protagonist repeatedly offers. This allows for the often invisible postcolonial actors that both uphold the city in the present and enabled its material manifestation in the past to constantly seep into the text. Its eventual construction of postcolonial coevalness does not derive from a modernist sense of vertigo but from a cosmopolitan awareness that eventually manifests itself in spatiotemporal co-presence. Such insight into the destructive forces of historical movements is the condition of possibility for what Homi Bhabha has referred to as a vigilant global ethics of ambivalence, but always also gravitates towards political hesitation and communal aversion of which recent cosmopolitan novels have been accused.