The Eye of the Text: Two Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

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Epistle to the Europeans (On Not Reading Kipling)

In 1897, on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Rudyard Kipling wrote what was set to become one of his most effective compositions as the Empire's uncrowned poet laureate. "Recessional" not only caught the British imagination by employing the grateful Biblical trope of the chosen people, but did so by twisting this trope in ways that remain unread to this day. Reading "Recessional" today reminds us that the literary formation of collective identities is successful to the extent that it manages to elude reading.status: publishe

Browning born to Wordsworth: intimations of relatability from recollections of early monstrosity

Afdeling Engelse literatuur.status: publishe

'A Common Humanity Is Not Yet Enough": Shadows of the Coming Race in George Eliot's Final Fiction

It has been said that without George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), "the state of Israel might not exist." In the novel itself, at any rate, the state of Israel only appears as a hazy hypothesis entertained by its narratorial consciousness from within the confines of an implicit European regionalism predicated on English common sense. In Eliot's final fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), the sinister anxieties affecting that common sense in the face of a lurid fantasy of judaeo-techno-capitalist "alienism" of its own making bleed back, generating complications of voice and vision, challenging Eliot's authorship and authority, and straining her text into rhetorical reaction formations indicative of a new crisis in the imagination of human community that all her writing had worked to refine. © 2010 Project MUSE®.status: publishe

Nudes Gibbering; Isaac Rosenberg Entrenched

Death in the trenches in France cut short the career of Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) as a painter and draughtsman and as a poet. While what remains of his visual work is impressive, his literary legacy is increasingly recognised as exceptional. Harold Bloom has hailed him as the most distinguished Jewish poet writing in English in the 20th century, though he added that Rosenberg’s real strength resided not in his famous trench poetry but rather in the quasi-Biblical prophetic fragments reminiscent of his precursor artist-poet William Blake. Yet it is as a trench poet that Rosenberg is chiefly remembered, to the point that even poems not set in the trenches are read as if they were.status: publishe

Spectre Disorder: Neuro-Marxism and the State of the Soul

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“I Know He Knows I Know He Knows I Am”: Suspension of Disbelief in A. L. Kennedy

Sampling Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief” in her 1995 novel So I Am Glad, A.L. Kennedy invites us to read this “disbelief” as skepsis not about some supernatural set-up or other but about the other-than-natural fictions humans live by—pre-eminently the fictions of love. Niklas Luhmann’s ambitious historico-sociological account of the reconfiguration of intimacy in modernity as a “normal improbability” offers a helpful frame for an articulation of the critical thrust of Kennedy’s re-invention of love. By matching her twentieth-century mindblind protagonist with the seventeenth-century libertine Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, Kennedy increases the unlikelihood of love and grants us an experience of the unreadability of the other not as a pious trope but as a fact that we must preserve even as we learn to disbelieve it through the material neurotechnics of mindreading. Resisting the privatization of sentiment diagnosed by Luhmann, So I Am Glad also seeks to release love as care for the world, but realizes such release requires suspending the disbelief in death bodies in love are blessed with against their better knowledge.status: publishe