Adrian
GARGETT
Reading War with Nietzsche and Reading Nietzsche
with Kant, Rimbaud, and Bataille
Abstract: In his paper, "Reading War with Nietzsche and Reading Nietzsche
with Kant, Rimbaud, and Bataille," Adrian Gargett discusses the aspects of poetry,
communication, and notion that the apparition of Nietzsche manifested in Bataille
is not a locus of secular reason but of necromantic religion: a writer who escapes
philosophical conceptuality in the direction of unidentified zones, and dispenses
with the "thing in itself" because it is an article of intelligible representation
with no importance as a vector of becoming/of travel. Necromancy resists the
transcendence of death opening territories of "voyages of discovery never reported."
Against the strain of inert and superficial phenomenalism that typifies Nietzsche
readings, Bataille pursues the fissure of abysmal scepticism, which passes out
of the Kantian noumenon (intelligible object) through Kant and Schopenhauer's
"thing in itself" (stripping away a layer of residual Platonism) and onwards
in the direction of a-categorical, epochal, or base-matter that connects with
Rimbaud's "invisible splendours": the immense death-scapes of a "universe without
images." Matter cannot be allocated a category without being reclaimed for "ideality"
and the Nietzschean crisis with the Ding an sich was not its tangible
dogmatic materialism, but rather that it anticipated "an ideal form of matter"
as the transcendent (quarantined) scene of primary truth, a "real world." Materialism
is not a dogma but a journey, a break from socially regulated belief. It is
"before anything else the obstinate negation of idealism, which is to say the
very basis of all philosophy." Exploring a-categorical matter guides thought
as chance and matter as chaos, beyond all parameters. It yields no propositions
to ascertain, but only routes to discover.
Paolo
BARTOLONI
Translation Studies and Agamben's Theory of the
Potential
Abstract: In his article, "Translation Studies and Agamben's Theory of
the Potential," Paolo Bartoloni discusses the interstitial space of translation
by drawing on literary and philosophical preoccupations, especially Giorgio
Agamben's notion of "potentiality." The first part of the article is devolved
to defining and discussing "potentiality" and the significance that it has for
a general re-thinking of translation theory. Bartoloni moves on to ask what
would happen if the focus of translation shifts from the final product, or from
the relation between the original and the translation, to the process of translating,
that is the middle ground, the in-betweenness where two distinct languages and
cultures meet without superimposing one's own values onto the other. This section
is occupied by a dialogue with a series of postcolonial texts, especially Pratt's
Imperial Eyes and Bhabha's The Location of Culture. Bartoloni's
main interest and purpose in this article is to point to a new hermeneutic and
epistemological zone from which a new reflection on translation as well as literature
and subjectivity can commence.
Edward
J. LUSK and Marion ROESKE
The Horlas: Maupassant's Mirror of Self-Reflection
Abstract: In their co-authored paper, "The Horlas: Maupassant's Mirror
of Self-Reflection," Edward J. Lusk and Marion Roeske present a comparative
analysis of three works of Maupassant: Lettre d'un fou, Le Horla of
1886, and Le Horla of 1887. The authors argue that these works form a
trilogy by which Maupassant expresses his struggle to resolve the issues that
seem to haunt him during the time that he pens the Horla trilogy. This introspective
search is crafted around the failure of a mirror to provide a reflected image
and the assessment of the likelihood that the strange events presented in the
trilogy are caused either by hallucinations or by a menacing force called Le
Horla. Further, to understand the way that Maupassant has developed the story
lines as his mirror of self-reflection, Lusk and Roeske examine, in detail,
four aspects of Maupassant's life that provide the context for the Horlas: his
struggle with syphilis, the relationship he has with Flaubert, the novel of
his maternal uncle Alfred Le Poittevin called Une Promenade de Bélial
and finally, the intense personal relationship of Flaubert and Alfred Le Poittevin.
Mabel
LEE
Nobel in Literature 2000 Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics of
Fleeing
Abstract: In her paper, "Nobel in Literature 2000 Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics
of Fleeing," Mabel Lee explores the aesthetic dimensions of Gao Xingjian's play
Taowang (Fleeing 1990), and its significance in establishing the
recurring motif of "fleeing" in Gao's later writings on literature. Lee argues
that the intensely emotional times during which Gao wrote Fleeing were
comparable to those seventy years earlier confronting May Fourth writers. Urging
his compatriots not to be "bystanders," Lu Xun, the most influential of May
Fourth writers, had chosen to allow his creative self to suicide, as shown in
the prose-poems of Yecao (Wild Grass 1927). For Gao Xingjian,
however, such heroic gestures are anathema. He is prepared to be a "bystander"
and he refuses adamantly to sacrifice his creative self. Although the play is
undeniably an aesthetic appraisal of a specific political event, Fleeing
is resoundingly a declaration for literature that is unburdened by politics.
Sára
MOLNÁR
Nobel in Literature 2002 Imre Kertész's Aesthetics
of the Holocaust
Abstract: In her paper, "Nobel in Literature 2002 Imre Kertész's
Aesthetics of the Holocaust," Sára Molnár discusses aspects of
Nobela Laureate Imre Kertész's reception in Hungary. In her
analysis, Molnár discusses aesthetic features of the author's use of
language. Molnár's study illuminates the problem of authorship and questions
relating to intersections of fiction and autobiography in Kertész's oeuvre.
Molnár's argument is that although the author's personal history is indeed
important in his texts, this "author" should not be identified with Kertész
himself and that although Kertész's themes and subjects appear to be
autobiographical, not even his diaries should or can be interpreted as autobiographical
documents. As it appears in discussions about Kertész's texts in Hungarian
media and scholarship -- the latter very limited to date -- an autobiographical
interpretation represents a simplification and neglect of the fictional characters
called into life in the author's narratives. Further, Molnár suggests
that Kertész, influenced by other texts in holocaust literature such
as texts by Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Jean Améry, or Paul Celan,
has found a language and an aesthetic to present holocaust literature authentically
where his writing is also relevant to issues and problems of our time.