Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Volume 57 Issue 2

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Volume 57 Issue 2

Contents
Journal Overview

Fiction, the Law, and the Docile Body: The Uncanny Presence of Kant and the Marquis de Sade in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Ralph Pordzik March 15, 2014 Page range: 109-123

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Abstract

The essay compares Sade’s narrative Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu (1789) to Shelley’s Frankenstein in order to show that both seek to identify modern justice as an instrumental force turning the individual into an object - a docile body fit to be disciplined according to the rules and routines laid out by an abstract and universalising view of justice. Enlightenment philosophy, propelled by the growth of investigative and evidential processes in jury trials, and the increase of popular participation in judicial proceedings, had put stress on the need for a universal moral law underpinning all judicial acts, a law ever-present to the mind yet also mysteriously ungraspable. The servant Justine, in Frankenstein, is turned into a popular victim of this transcendental concept of law, thus embodying the writer’s critique of jurisprudence in a supposedly secularised, enlightened culture. Frankenstein, like the writings of Sade, exposes the shortcomings of rationalism by showing how abstract Kantian law has failed to make excuses for the concrete historical circumstances in which modern individuals find themselves situated

“Stand Still, True Poet that You Are!”: Remembering the Brownings, Imagining Memorabilia

Benjamin Kohlmann March 15, 2014 Page range: 125-137

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Abstract

This paper draws on Robert Browning’s poetry and on late-Victorian celebrity magazines to consider some of the ways in which dead poets and the objects which belonged to them are remembered. The paper then focuses on the 1913 sale of the so called Browning Collections - of almost all of Robert and Elizabeth Browning’s former possessions. The auction signified a climax of the Victorian cult of the poet as hero, as it quite literally allowed bidders to buy into the famous poets’ commodified lives. However, the sale also raised wider questions about the right kind of literary afterlife, as well as about the right sort of (posthumous) popularity. The selling of a dead poet’s effects can easily look like a disgraceful dismantling of his or her life. By contrast, I want to consider the ways in which bidders at the Browning auction managed to create meaning out of the vast array of items offered up for sale

Dorothy M. Richardson’s “The Garden” as an Amplification of a Recurrent Epiphanic Moment in Pilgrimage

María Francisca Llantada Díaz March 15, 2014 Page range: 139-152

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Abstract

This paper analyses Dorothy Richardson’s short story “The Garden” (1924) as an amplification of the recurring epiphanic garden scenes in Pilgrimage. “The Garden” could be considered a close-up of the episode recreated in the Pilgrimage garden memories seen through the eyes of a small child. In this short story there are no epiphanic implications, only the ordinary perceptions of a small child on a common day. However, when the protagonist of Pilgrimage remembers the childhood episode when she contemplated the flowers in the garden by herself, it is so full of significance and poetry that it becomes a symbol, a recurrent epiphanic motif that is a source of meaning and peace

At the Frontiers of Narrative: James Joyce’s Ulysses

Wolfgang Wicht March 15, 2014 Page range: 153-175

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Abstract

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a fictional text that dismantles the classical constituent elements of ‘narration’ and ‘narrator.’ For this reason, the (pre-)structuralist theoretical premise that narrative representation is stable and determined calls for a radical rethinking. As the brief and telescopic examination of different episodes attempts to show, the novel particularly disrupts the traditional commanding role of the narrator in three different ways. The opening chapters replace the narrator, albeit he is still residually present in a number of passages, with a compound of free indirect thought and selfsustaining textual organisation. In chapters 12, 13 and 16, different types of narrators are introduced, and explicitly parodied. Finally, drama, question-and-answer catechism and interior monologue displace the diegetic mode. This iconoclastic undermining and generic undoing of familiar, recognisable models raises epistemological doubt about the substantiality of narrating and the narrator. Formal categories such as ‘arranger,’ ‘interpolator’ and ‘superordinate narrator’ appear to be redundant. The focus is on both the creative instance of the text-producing writer and the (represented and actual) readertext relationship. Decentring the subjective authority of the Realist and Romantic narrator the text also fragments a coherent master-narrative. On the cognitive level, the employment of particular narrative and non-narrative modes imparts to the reader that any practice aiming to produce correct narrative discourses, free of contradictions, is unattainable. In this way, Ulysses leads us to assess fictional, political and cultural narrative practices known to us

Constructions of Fascism in British Cultural History: From Fancy-Dressers to Missing Links

Claus-Ulrich Viol March 15, 2014 Page range: 177-193

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Abstract

This article traces the historical development of how images of the fascist or right-wing radical have been constructed in British culture, trying to assess what social functions these constructions have served. It shows that, apart from largely tending to be denied, inter-war fascism was and is constructed as the upper classes dressing up, while the post-war radical right was and is constructed as the underclass dumbing down. Both constructions, it argues, are used to ‘other’ and exclude radical tendencies and the groups they are ascribed to from the middle-class consensus of British culture, and serve to avoid confronting the complex web of motivations behind radical-right behaviour. In so doing, both constructions are used to stabilise dominant versions of British national identity, in particular the myth of Britain’s/England’s essentially moderate and freedomloving character. Drawing on a wide range of cultural examples, the article also seeks to make a theoretical point about the necessity to approach the phenomenon of British fascism from a cultural studies/history angle, which will put the discussions and findings of previous political and historical research into perspective (and locate them all in the moving equilibrium of society)

Buchbesprechungen

March 15, 2014 Page range: 195-211

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Bucheingänge

March 15, 2014 Page range: 212-212

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Die Autoren dieses Heftes

March 15, 2014 Page range: 213-213

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About this journal

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA) is a peer-reviewed journal that traditionally reflects the entire spectrum of English and American language, literature and culture. Particular attention will also be paid to the new literatures in English, the development of linguistic varieties outside Britain and North America, the culture of ethnic minorities and the relationship between anglophone and neighbouring cultural areas. The journal also welcomes contributions which examine theoretical and interdisciplinary issues in literary, linguistic and socio-cultural research. Thus, ZAA invites contributions concerning a wide range of research on current issues, survey articles featuring recent developments in the fields of culture, literature and language, research reports as well as proposals concerning new directions within the discipline. For two of the journal’s four annual issues articles may be submitted in the field of literary and cultural studies; the remaining two issues will be reserved for special topics, one in literature and culture, the other in linguistics.