David Lurie and the ‘Disease of Romanticism’: The Transnational and Transcultural Afterlives of Goethe and Kleist in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

My paper studies J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to understand the transnational, transcultural mutations of two key figures of German Romanticism: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist. Coetzee’s novels are reflections and reproductions of his extensive reading of politics and literature; these texts grant the lives and works of old masters a renewal, a re-introspection, and most importantly, a resurrection into contemporaneity. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace operates as a site of racial and sexual contentions. Through the character of David Lurie, Coetzee initiates a dialogue between the \u27visions\u27 of the former colonizer and the ‘revisions’ of the newly emancipated colonized. While the scholarship on the Romantic element in Disgrace (Beard 2007; Easton 2007; Hawkins 2009; and Cass 2013) is predominantly centred on the afterlife of British Romanticism, more particularly, on the roles Byron and Wordsworth play in shaping plot and action, I attempt to read the novel in the light of Coetzee’s critical prose to understand how he draws upon the German Romantic tradition. If Wordsworth and Byron are evoked to characterize the outer, more conspicuous texture of the novel, then the inner, hidden threads that stitch the form and content together are borrowed from Goethe and Kleist. I argue that Coetzee’s romantic sensibility is as much German as British. These two traditions are brought together in Disgrace to re-enact four major leitmotifs of Romantic literature—desire, transgression, punishment, and finally, salvation—in a transformed political dispensation

Dirty Waters: Urine, Waste, and the Shimmering Trans Body in Nånting måste gå sönder or Something Must Break (2014)

This article examines genderqueer writer/director Ester Martin Bergsmark’s film Something Must Break (2014) and the trans gaze created through the film’s disjunctive imagery. I argue the film’s aestheticization of polluted environments and trans bodies posits a queer alliance between transness and trash. Similarly, Something Must Break’s repeated imagery of urination and body fluids representationally relates transness, waste, and transgressive sexuality to a politics of marginality, which Bergsmark employs in Something Must Break to express these relationalities as sites for creative difference and possibilities of being that exist outside of heterosexual norms. I use post-structuralist and queer interpretations of perversion to reimagine the film’s polluted environments and abject fluids as sites/sights of creation and liveability for trans bodies. I find in the refractions of polluted waters, blood, saliva, and urine in Something Must Break the same cinematic fissures that Eliza Steinbock argues allows for a uniquely trans gaze in their theory of shimmering. In considering a cinematic transgender gaze, Steinbock describes a cinema that eschews the visual reveal and instead portrays a lived trans experience not defined by dualities, but by disjunctions; thus, the unsettled, the (un)becoming, the “shimmering” aesthetics of trans embodiment. I argue Bergsmark achieves a cinematic trans gaze in their imagining of a queer space where pollution, trash, urine, and blood are not symbols of abjection and shame, but embody an opening-up, a vulnerability: a becoming that molds new forms of relationships, new forms of love, and new forms of creation

Queering Sight: Visualising the Transversal Other in Josh Malerman’s Bird Box

The gaze has hitherto occupied a contentious position within theoretical discourse. While feminist and postcolonial approaches have succeeded in productively interrogating the unequal power dynamics produced by the gaze, purely naming and uncovering how these visual oppressions function do little to conceptualise possibilities of moving beyond sight’s vilification in identity formations. Unlike other physical senses such as touch and smell that have already been theorised as bases of ethical intersubjective relationality, sight has yet to be reclaimed as part of an affirmative politics to disrupt the exclusionary processes that undergird identity politics. This article is, therefore, concerned with queer interventions to rethink sight as a possible mode of transgression from restrictive binarisms within identity formation. It argues that sight instead possesses the potential to liberate bodies and constrained subjectivities from the coercive frameworks of visual objectification. By queering sight, the article positions itself as a rejection of dualistic paradigms by subversively envisioning identities as transversal processes of liberation and becoming. To this end, I will engage with Josh Malerman’s Bird Box (2014) where mediated acts of looking represent queer(ed) sources of danger and liberation. In its peculiar and particular denial of direct visual access, the novel’s aesthetics allow for productive possibilities of visualising the transversal Other

Never/Nor: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hartley Coleridge in Poetry’s Transfictional Worlds

This essay examines the poetry of father and son poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) with respect to the theme of transfictionality, a recent coinage in literary and especially fiction studies. While the term “transfictionality” has lately been used to refer to “the migration of fictional entities across different texts” (Ryan 365; Pearson 113), I suggest this term can also be applied more broadly to refer to texts that are at once mimetic and imaginary. Transfictional can also mean, I suggest, literary content that straddles the line between fact and fiction, i.e., between what is taken to be the \u27real world\u27 and an imaginary setting or ideal transmutation of apparently real content. The two Coleridges, Samuel Taylor and Hartley, both evidence a tendency to produce poetry that is transfictional in this sense, constructing Pantisocracy, an utopian intellectual colony in America, and Ejuxria, an imaginary kingdom based in the English Lake District, as examples of world-building activity that is not entirely based in either fact or fiction, but relies on the commingling of the two. By examining poetic writing that is transfictional as productive of both political and personal poetry, I hope to suggest in part both the transfictional nature of poetry\u27s idealising tendencies, as well as its potential to be a form of world-building writing that should be seen as generically similar to (but still distinct from) narrative forms like prose fiction (especially Sci-Fi/Fantasy) and video games

Gender Essentialisms and the Abject: Understanding Transgender Identity in Jackie Kay\u27s Trumpet

This article focuses on the tensions between essentialist and fluid conceptions of gender identity in Jackie Kay\u27s Trumpet (1998). Joss Moody, a Black Scottish jazz trumpeter who is posthumously revealed to have been biologically female, is constructed largely through external characterisations. The most significant of these narratives are his wife Millie\u27s and his son Colman\u27s. I first illustrate the importance of performativity in understanding gender identity through the work of Judith Butler. This provides context for my discussion of Millie and Joss, focused on the relationship between the pellicular and the sartorial. The narrative focus on skin and the body versus clothing serves to illustrate Millie\u27s understanding of gender as fluid and performative. In the second section of the essay, I outline the abject and address Colman\u27s expulsion of that which threatens his sense of self. Positing that his perception of Joss as a representative of the maternal that must be expelled in order to enter the Symbolic and constitute a self, his understanding of gender on binary terms is the key element in his internal struggle. Embarking on a journey to learn about his father\u27s life, Colman\u27s refocusing on personal, lived experience allows his views to align with Millie\u27s by the end of the novel. Thereby, Kay illustrates the tension between binary and nuanced understandings of gender in Trumpet, and the method by which this can be overcome: an inclusive understanding that undermines notions of a hegemonic masculinity from which non-conformants can be excluded based on bodily attributes

Asserting and Accompanying the Excluded Self: The Function of the Recorded Voice in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Rockaby

In Samuel Beckett’s plays Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Rockaby (1980), there is one character on stage, alone, accompanied only by the presence of his/her own recorded voice, played back to himself/herself. The recorded voice of each of the characters becomes a way of proving to themselves that they have existed before the present moment, and, at the same time, it becomes a companion, disrupting silence and aloneness. Finally, it is the recorded voice that allows the characters to fully exist while excluded from the company and comfort of others, as they fulfill their own needs through  their own voice

To Exclude or Not to Exclude? The Question of Nationality as a Category in Queer Studies

This paper will try to look at some of the problems of categorisation through the prism of my own reservations and concerns when researching the novel Babyji (2005) by Abha Dawesar. The paper will examine whether categories and classifications are capable of including all the exclusions that they purport to remedy. In particular, this paper will examine the usefulness of the term ‘queer’ and the category of the nationality ‘Indian’, as well as the simultaneous problems that arise from using the category of nationality in conjunction with queerness. Moreover, it does not implicitly entail that the more categories sprout in the world, the more inclusive the world will be toward queer individuals. The paper will therefore interrogate if there is a way out at all from this conundrum of labelling and binding oneself to these categories. This interrogation is done by challenging the idea that it is easier to think of Dawesar’s novel from a monolithic perspective of nationality, while the novel’s other facets are conveniently allowed to fade by critics and researchers. To think of Babyji as more than just a nationalistic novel, the paper applies Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “foreclosure” (“The Intervention Interview” 125). Spivak, borrowing the term from Lacanian psychoanalysis, differentiates foreclosure from exclusion and conceptualises the former “to mean the interested denial of something”. By using this term, the paper thus explores other interpretations of Babyji, concluding that thinking beyond categories (despite them being a necessary evil) is quite possible

Negotiating Power: Olive Schreiner and Racial Exclusion in New Woman Fiction

This article examines the contentious relationship between New Woman literature and the British empire. Olive Schreiner’s novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), and The Story of an African Farm (1883) demonstrate how New Women writers adopted exclusionary imperialist ideologies in order to promote their agenda of female emancipation in fin-de-siècle Britain

Transatlantic Exile and Othering in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a tale of transatlantic exclusion and differentiation depicting the Europeanized American Countess Ellen Olenska’s return to the capitalist and insular society of Old New York. This article examines the fundamental irony of what is a broadly cosmopolitan novel, permeated by differing degrees of hierarchy, racial and ethnic labelling, and immigrant activity. In this novel, Wharton shows how continental expatriation, which is the legacy of being American, is written out of the national narrative. Ellen’s status as the compromised and exoticized cultural ‘other’ becomes demonised as a corruptive force by the American elite, who fear that evidence of American cultural adaptability and cosmopolitan acculturation disproves the founding myths pertaining to exceptionalist notions of the New World’s racial distinction. By tracing the tribal savagery that the upper echelons of New York society display in response to Newland Archer’s and Ellen’s flirtation, this article demonstrates the inaccuracy of enforced hemispheric binarization. I argue that Ellen’s forceful and brutal eradication from New York society, although intended to reinstate the near compromised dignity of American ideals and future bloodlines, instead derives from self-conscious misjudgement concerning national insularity