The novel and the nation: the case of David Grossman's see under: love

While Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is a crucial reference point in studies of the relations between the novel genre and the nation, it is often forgotten that he locates the link between the two in a particular "apprehension of time". The first part of this article returns to Anderson's thesis in order to show that, as different tendencies in contemporary literary studies have recognized, the critical potential of the novel genre lies in its ability to construct a different apprehension of time. The second part of the article applies this insight to the case of David Grossman's See Under: Love (1986). While Grossman's novel is routinely recognized as a major intervention in Israel's national imaginary, and especially in the way the nation related to the Holocaust, this reading underlines that such an intervention is made possible by its reorganization of the 'timing' of the nation. A close reading of the novel reveals that it stages and dismisses two different 'timings' of the nation, while it constructs a different temporality that affirms rather than dismisses or trivializes the paradoxical simultaneity of the past and the present. This operation is related to the tradition of so-called "secular messianism", which was famously instantiated in the work of Walter Benjamin. As Anderson's thesis on the link between novel and nation is itself explicitly indebted to this aspect of Benjamin's work, this reading of Grossman's novel demonstrates the continuing relevance of Anderson's thesis for an understanding of the novel genre's critical potential

David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and 'The Novel of Globalization': biopower and the Secret History of the Novel

David Mitchell's debut novel Ghostwritten (1999) not only depicts a globalized world; its peculiar formal organization also embodies the mode of relatedness that characterizes globalization. This article shows that the invisible, decentralized power that defines globalization can be understood as what Michel Foucault called biopower. As a novel of globalization, Mitchell's novel lays bare the hidden historical and theoretical affinities between the novel genre on the one hand and biopower on the other

McSweeney's and the challenges of the marketplace for independent publishing

In their article "McSweeney's and the Challenges of the Marketplace for Independent Publishing" Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen argue that the artistic projects of the US-American author, activist, and editor Dave Eggers are marked by a tension between the desire for independence and the demands of brand-building. The article offers a close analysis of the materiality and paratexts of one particular issue of McSweeney's, the literary magazine of which Eggers is the founding editor. Both the content and the apologetically aggressive tone of Eggers's editorial statements betray a deep unease with the inability to inhabit a cultural and economic position that is untainted by the compromises that publishing requires. Still, this disavowed complicity with the market in fact sustains Eggers's editorial practice in McSweeney's, which, in marked contrast to his explicit statements, thrives on a dynamic of commodification

Transatlantische Kontinuitäten: Eine Geopolitik der Literaturwissenschaft in der Nachkriegszeit

status: publishe

Upstaging the 'death of the subject' : Gertrude Stein, the theater, and the self-differential self

While Gertrude Stein is often celebrated as a proto-postmodernist whose formal experiments destabilize traditional notions of subjectivity, a reading of her little-discussed Lectures in America reveals that her poetics actually relies on the anxious suppression of the threat of the loss of a sovereign form of subjectivity. Following Rei Terada's distinction between subjects and "self-differential selves," it can be shown that Stein's theory of the emotions and her account of the emergence of her poetics theorize the theater as the site of an inescapable encounter with the self's difference from itself. By deploying an elaborate rhetoric of the uncanny, the lectures aim at containing the threat of the loss of a strong subjectivity by locating it in the theater alone

A dried blood spot assay for paclitaxel and its metabolites

After being used for decades in clinical screening, dried blood spots (DBS) have recently received considerable attention for their application in pharmacokinetic and toxicokinetic studies in rodents. The goal of this study was to develop and apply a DBS-based assay for a pharmacokinetic study of paclitaxel (PTX) and its metabolites in SCID/Beige mice. A fast and sensitive UHPLC-MS/MS method has been developed for the simultaneous determination of PTX, its three metabolites (6 alpha-hydroxy-paclitaxel, 3'-p-hydroxypacli taxel, and 6a,3'-p-dihydroxy-paclitaxel) and its stereoisomer 7-epi-p aclitaxel. The 10 mu L DBS sample was extracted with methanol for 20 min at 37 degrees C. After dilution of the extracts with water in a ratio of 1:1, the analytes were separated on a reversed-phase 2.1 mm I.D. column using gradient elution. The total run time was 2.5 min. The analytes were detected by use of multiple reaction monitoring mass spectrometry. The extraction recoveries of the compounds were all greater than 60%, resulting in a quantification limit of 1 ng/ml. The calibration curves ranged from 1 to 1000 ng/ml. The intra-day and inter-day imprecision (%CV) across three validation runs over four quality control levels were less than or equal to 14.6%. The accuracy was within +/-11.9% in terms of relative error. The described method is advantageous in terms of its ease-of-use and speed compared to other published PTX assays. The method's usefulness was demonstrated by applying it to a preclinical pharmacokinetic investigation of PTX and its metabolites in SCID/Beige mice with an intraperitoneal administration of 50 mg/kg Abraxane (R)