...Daniel Feldman This article addresses the pervasive articulation of nothing in the poetry of Paul Celan and Dan Pagis. The essay ties nullification in speech to cancellation of self in Celan and aims to understand his attestation of a form of subjectivity reconfigured by the Holocaust as negative...

...Stanley Corngold Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and the Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe. By Charles Bernheimer. Edited by T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 228 p. University of Oregon 2004...

...Ilya Kliger Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject . By Erdinast-Vulcan Daphna . Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2013 . 260 p. © 2015 by University of Oregon 2015 Works Cited Bakhtin Mikhail . Art and Answerability: Early...

... the emotive interiority of the feeling subject in medieval literature. The focus of the essay is thus on the modern reader's engagement with the medieval textual object d'art and the unique representation of medieval literary creativity as both a physical artefact (the manuscript) and an act of vocal...

...Davide Stimilli Affecting Grace: Theatre, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist . By Calhoon Kenneth S. . Toronto : University of Toronto Press , 2013 . 279 p. © 2016 by University of Oregon 2016...

... to describe it. In particular, it questions the widespread tendency to adapt the metaphysical polarity subject-object to the interpretation of plays that, while making ample use of it, encourage readers and playgoers to dismiss such polarity as existentially ineffective. Only by tentatively adhering to a post...

...Ross Knecht This essay seeks to refine the debate on subjectivity in Petrarch's Rime sparse by arguing that while the poems do present a distinct subject position, it is a position thoroughly compromised by passivity. The essay places the poems in the context of Aristotelian and Scholastic theory...

... poetry. It suggests that Benjamin's conception of allegory cannot adequately be addressed without first registering the impact that the allegorical dimension of poetic language exerts upon fundamental philosophical concepts such as subjectivity, experience, and historicity itself. If Benjamin insists...

...Sunny Xiang This essay tracks the discourse of “Oriental writing” in Ha Jin’s fictional Korean War memoir War Trash and the autobiography of Wang Tsun-ming, an actual Korean War POW. “Oriental writing” designates a racialized ambiguity between a self-present subject and an automatized mechanism...

... up in the Eastern borderlands of the Habsburg Empire, in the Crownland of Galicia, which was inhabited by Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles. A third figure with a distinctly Habsburg imperial biography, Sigmund Freud, provides both techniques for reading and serves as a subject of analysis in his own right...

... on the importance of openly subjective critical response is founded on a post-Nietzschean understanding of Kant and is concerned with the condition of the individual in modernity. Adorno's and Barthes's respective investments in the aesthetic realm have often been viewed unfavorably. Challenging such views...

... to trace the evolution of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature — from the ontologic instability of modernist prose to the ontologic plurality of postmodernist prose — with the focus on how this shift affects the formation of the subjectivity of the reader. The author proposes that Freud's...

... lead to the loss of the subject’s ontologic wholeness. Krzhizhanovsky offers this insight as literature’s corrective to idealistic philosophy’s treatment of language and a foundation for a new, intersubjective ethics that takes the splintered subject as a given. This essay argues that reading the story...

... a space where they are co-productive of each other. Writing in this sense—feminine writing—sidesteps the subject/object split and explores subjectivity as uniquely textured formations of continuous meaning-mattering. Or : in the opening chapter, the narrator notes that she receives a “letter” from...

...Kiene Brillenburg Wurth This essay explores how and why the “old” medium of paper has come to function as the matter of a “new” posthuman subjectivity in contemporary fiction (since 2005). Paper, paper-based writing, and the book have long been involved in the cultural construction of “humanness...

... not yet been plotted. The purpose of this essay is to stake out some parameters for such a study by establishing Homer's Iliad as an exemplary text. I then extend my inquiry into the relationship between doubt and portrayals of subjectivity and to two plays, Sophocles' Philoctetes and Shakespeare's...

...JAMES RAMEY Although the vast differences in scale, style, economy, and subject between Borges's and Joyce's work argue against a positive flow of Joycean ideas through Borges's work—Borges was no parasite of Joyce—in this essay I argue that the “death of the novel” theme Borges seems to have...

... language that is its ostensible ground, while at the same time arguing, through a specific theory of the art object, against the stability of the perceiving subject. The poem thus critiques the concentric circles of identity, nation, and culture by positing a transnational world literature built upon...

...” (represented here by Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek). The essay initially understands New Criticism as focused on formal traits, (post)structuralism as concerned mainly with epistemology, New Historicism/Cultural Studies as privileging history, and the New Vitalism as seeking the realization of the subject...

... and The Emigrants through parataxis and paralipses leaves the colonial migrants in the grip of an unresolved past. Yet these same devices also operate on a wider textual register to shift readers' focalization from realism's gaze, which disjoins observing subject from observed object, suturing readers and colonial...