...Nathan K. Hensley This article suggests that by viewing world-historical situations recursively, we disclose links between apparently separate but structurally similar historical conjunctures and the cultural forms that mediate them. By examining three late-imperial texts—Robert Louis Stevenson's...

...Dierdra Reber Given the cultural ascendance of visuality, what is the place of the written text within visual culture? Are there ways in which written narrative strategies privilege image over word? This essay studies how three Latin American texts move generationally toward the current era...

... in a media culture where a network of people, things, and texts intermingle in commercial society. Working through the epistemology of possessive individualism, sentimental fiction tends to question whether individuals really own their feelings. The form of the novel mirrors this concern to challenge...

...Cindy Weinstein “Heaven's Tense” is about Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's best-selling nineteenth-century text, The Gates Ajar, which was published in the aftermath of the Civil War for the emotional benefit of the immense number of women who had lost their loved ones in the conflict. The overwhelming...

...Nicholas Dames With the birth in Britain of a widespread culture of novel reviewing in the nineteenth century came a practice that has been ignored or derided since the Victorian period ended: protracted excerpting, or the printing of long tranches of the text under review. This is not only...

... power of belief in fiction. But belief is not a monolithic term in Coetzee's late work, nor does his disposition toward it remain static. This article examines two texts that display a related yet evolving concern with faith and belief— Elizabeth Costello (2003) and The Childhood of Jesus (2013...

... incompatibility of modernity and tradition, the West and the rest. This is best seen in his inability to narrate the story of those “unconscious pilgrims of an exacting belief” that occupy the absent center of his text, precisely those subjects who are the focus of Ghosh's story of a repurposed slave ship...

... directly, without the mediation of representative texts such as the novel, autobiography, and personal memoir, they challenge the very representative status of such literary texts. In short, it is not just the shift from print to digital media that has challenged the novel as a dominant form for social...

... invested in an ideological interpretation of the end of the Cold War as a victory for the West. The complex narrative demands that the reader embrace history's lost causes and not just the victor's truth. However, the text's complexity involves risks. There is a danger that the novel's expansive...

... qualities of the media system, in what sense do paper books remain active components of this system and in what sense do they appear within it as old media, spoken for by the electronically mediated texts that represent them? Or have novels become comments on this in-between state of being no longer quite...

... of the genre's biographical pattern) culminates in a surreal encounter that Coetzee's readers have claimed limns a restorative justice or a utopic futurity. But these interpretations ignore the text's insistence on a silence that overwhelms language, the specter of mass death, and a summative darkness...

... is a structural approach that aims to document the “structure of philosophy” that remains after a text has been subjected to certain analyses. This essay describes Malabou's vision of plastic reading as a living relation to texts in which metamorphosis regulates the metabolism between stasis and aleatory change...

...Aarthi Vadde This short piece argues that the demands of reading globally should change how we approach conversations about the ethical reading of minoritarian literature. Rather than assume a stable relationship between the imagined reader as subject and the text as object, we should consider how...

...Barbara Herrnstein Smith The forum's question might be interpreted more broadly and evoke a broader set of answers than found in these essays. For example, we might recall that, for many people over much of recorded history, the texts that have been the central objects of reading activities have...

... common to the objects of architecture and text, one that accommodates both scientific and aesthetic ends. The acoustic hermeneutic marks the convergence of oft-estranged listening practices—one that apprehends the silent materiality of the text as if it were an audible room and, conversely, one...

... the contemporary African literary novel, as a form, registers a response to the historical degradation of Black lives under the colonial matrix of power, which, while often sympathetic with the analytic framework of Black Lives Matter, does not always cohere with it. Reading a broad range of texts , the essay...

... as something like amateur social scientists touring in the colonies—called not for further detachment but for new forms of productive reengagement, such as curiosity. Attentive to the settings and visual metaphors of space and structure that abet irony's role in these texts, this essay finds that curiosity's...

...Kate Marshall This essay makes the case for a reconsideration of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy within the history of the modernist novel and its medial legacies by attending to the complex relationship enacted throughout the text between material forms and structures of interiority...

... traveler. More than rhetorically similar, both texts, I argue, dramatize epistemological crises that precipitate a renewed sense of life's contingency. Both Defoe and Hume employ Puritan spiritual autobiography, and in each case this literary mode's questionable referential status reproduces...

... of the imagination, literary critics sought to emphasize the palimpsestic nature of text by pointing to the unsayable and the indeterminate, and they devalued that which appeared mimetic, no matter what the text itself looked like. I explore the question of genre or narrative mode with special attention to realism...