clcweb contents 3.1 (2003)

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 Nobel in Literature 2000 Imre Kertész's reception in Hungary. In her analysis, Molnár discusses the poetical features of the author's use of language and the problem of authorship in his oeuvre where she focuses on questions relating to intersections of fiction and autobiography. Molnár's argument is that although the author's personal history is indeed important in his texts, this "author" should not 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 texts. As it appears in discussion of Kertész's texts in the Hungarian media and scholarship -- the latter very limited to date -- an autobiographical interpretation reprsents a regrettable simplification and neglect of the fictional characters called into life in the author's narratives. Further, Molnár suggests that Kertész, influenced by other authors of holocaust literature such as Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Jean Améry, or Paul Celan, has found a language to present holocaust literature authentically thus writing in fact about many actual issues and problems of our time.

And the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature Goes to Imre Kertész, Jew and Hungarian

Abstract: In his paper, "And the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature Goes to Imre Kertész, Jew and Hungarian," Steven Totosy de Zepetnek presents an introduction to the recepient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, Imre Kertész, and his work. Totosy places Kertész's work in the context of Central European culture and within that in the genre of Central European Jewish memoir literature. In Totosy's opinion the cultural and social relevance of Jewish memoir writing today is of particular importance precisely for the same reasons Kertész articulates when he says, "I am a survivor. There are few of us left, we guard the memory of the Holocaust. We slowly disappear and die. And we disappear" (13 October 2002). The relevance of Kertész and his writing is acute because of the yet again growing of anti-Semitism in contemporary Central and East Europe. The paper is written with view of the lack of knowledge in the English-speaking world about Kertész, Central Europe and Central European culture, Hungarian culture and literature, and the history of the Hungarian Jewry.