Textual Wanderings

"Digression is a crucial motif in literary narratives. It features as a key characteristic of fictional works from Cervantes and Sterne, to Proust, Joyce and Calvino. Moving away from a linear narrative and following a path of associations reflects how we think and speak. Yet an author's inability to stick to the point has often been seen to detract from a work of literature, somehow weakening it. This wide-ranging and timely volume seeks to celebrate narrative digressions and move towards a theoretical framework for studying the meanderings of literary texts as a useful and valuable aspect of literature. Essays discussing some of the possibilities for approaching narrative digression from a theoretical perspective are complemented with focused studies of European and American authors. As a whole, the book offers a broad and varied view of textual wanderings."

This wide-ranging and provocative study traces Gertrude Stein's production of avant-garde texts that radically disrupted traditional notions of how fiction should be defined, valued, and read. The book combines feminist and postmodern perspectives to illuminate new facets of Stein's novels and to situate them within an expanded definition of the postmodern. The author argues that if we fail to consider the contexts within which postmodern innovations occur, and if we subsume all formal disruptions under a generalized postmodern mode, we obscure important differences among authors and distort the notion of the postmodern itself. The study expands our understanding of Stein as a novelist and a narrative theorist, repositions her work within a revised notion of literary history, and thus clarifies points of relation and divergence between modernism and postmodernism. It also assists in the historicizing of the postmodern literary emergence by insisting on the centrality of gender as a category of analysis. Finally, it argues for the importance of constructing definitions of postmodernism that will allow space to consider the complexity and diversity of its cultural practices. Curved Thought and Textual Wandering will be welcomed by scholars of modernism, of Gertrude Stein, and of feminist and narrative theory and postmodern culture.

Guiding readers through the disorienting dreamworld of James Joyce's last work, Kimberly Devlin examines Finnegans Wake as an uncanny text, one that is both strange and familiar. In light of Freud's description of the uncanny as a haunting awareness of earlier, repressed phases of the self, Devlin finds the uncanniness of the Wake rooted in Joyce's rewritings of literary fictions from his earlier artistic periods. She demonstrates the notion of psychological return as she traces the obsessions, scenarios, and images from Joyce's "waking" fictions that resurface in his final dreamtext in uncanny forms, transformed yet discernible, often to uncover hidden, unconscious truths. Drawing on psychoanalytic arguments and recent feminist theory, Devlin maps intertextual connections that reveal many of Joyce's most deeply felt imaginative and intellectual concerns, such as the self in its decentered relationship to language, the elusive nature of human identity, the anxieties implicit in mortal selfhood, the male subject in its opposition to the female sexual "other." She suggests that the Wake records Joyce's implicit interest in the psychological counterpart to Vico's theory of historical repetition: Freud's theory of the insistent internal return of earlier narratives. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.

A Return to Aesthetics confronts postmodernism's rejection of aesthetics by showing that this critique rests on central concepts of classical aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic discourse. The author argues for the value of these concepts by recovering them through a historical reinterpretation of their meaning prior to their distortion by twentieth-century formalism. Loesberg then applies these concepts to a discussion of two of the most significant critics of the ideology of Enlightenment, Foucault and Bourdieu. He argues that understanding the role of aesthetics in the postmodern critique of Enlightenment will get us out of the intellectual impasse wherein numbingly repeated attacks upon postmodernism as self-contradictory match numbingly repeated defenses. Construing postmodern critiques as examples of aesthetic reseeing gives us a new understanding of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment.

This book proposes a reading of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost in relation to four novels by the contemporary novelist Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fury and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In such a reading, terms such as influence and inheritance will, inevitably, come up. Rather than bypass them, the book refines such terms in order to meet some of the challenges posed by contemporary critical theory in the field of comparative studies. In this more nuanced comparative reading of these texts, which looks beyond a linear paradigm, Jacques Derrida’s term destinerrance is taken up as a means for thinking how the work of this “successor” (Rushdie) dialogues with Milton, conferring on the epic an elusive kind of afterlife. Destinerrance will be taken here to signal an ongoing process of re-signification of texts that does away with the notions of adhesion or similarity to an original, central point. In the case of Milton and his “successor”, the fictional work of Salman Rushdie will be seen as constituting sites in which collaboration and contestation in relation to the epic are simultaneously and continually staged. Rushdie can, then, be seen to interweave Miltonic images of Eden, of the fall and a Satanic discourse of transgression to write territories and characters constituted in the crossings of domains of difference, territories in which colonial past and contemporary cultural formations and power structures are continually questioned and negotiated. In this way, his work enacts a re-signifying of Milton’s text, mediating, in these deviations, the way it reaches us today.

W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) is the most prominent and perhaps the most enigmatic German-language writer of recent decades. His books have had a more profound impact outside the German-speaking world than those of any other. His innovative approach to writing brings to the fore concerns that are central to contemporary culture: the relationship between memory, history, and trauma; the experience of exile and our relation to place; and the role of literature (and photography) in the remembrance of the past. This collection of essays places travel at the center of Sebald's poetics and shows how his appropriation of travel in its myriad historical and cultural forms -- tourism, the pilgrimage, the walking vacation, travel as escape -- works to craft intertextual narratives in which the pursuit of individual life stories is mapped onto a wider European cultural history of loss and destruction. Following these cues, the contributors wander the various modalities of travel in Sebald's writing in order to discover how walking, flying, sojourning, and other kinds of peregrination inform the relationship between writing, reading, memory, and place in Sebald's work. At the same time, the essays uncover in innovative ways the affinities between Sebald and literary travelers like Bruce Chatwin, Franz Kafka, Adalbert Stifter, Christoph Ransmayr, and Joseph Conrad. Contributors: Christian Moser, J. J. Long, Carolin Duttlinger, Martin Klebes, Alan Itkin, James Martin, Brad Prager, Neil Christian Pages, Margaret Bruzelius, Barbara Hui, Dora Osborne, Peter Arnds. Markus Zisselsberger is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Miami, Florida.

The first comprehensive study on the pattern of guilt and wandering in literature, this book examines the relationship between the two complex concepts as they appear in twentieth-century novels, positing its methodological premises on archetypal criticism and both close and distant reading, but also drawing on psychology, anthropology, mythology, and religion. This research deciphers a common paradigm and literary representation whose archetype within Western literature is found in the biblical figure of Cain, while presenting a critical framework valid for boundary-crossing comparative approaches. From Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, to Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome and Ōoka Shōhei’s Fires on the Plain, this book is not merely a thematic study, but an analysis of the literary phenomena that appear in those novels where the sense of guilt is controversially subjective, or so collective as to be perceived as universal, as is often the case with war and postwar literature. Di Gennaro goes beyond the analysis of explicit rewritings of the story of Cain, in order to uncover the monomyth through its rhetorical structures and mythical methods. The wasteland with no religion; the lost, abandoned garden; the classical and religiously-corrupted city; and the tropical, cannibalistic island at war are the respective settings of these narratives, where the issue is neither homelessness nor journeying, but, rather, the desperate and futile movement toward self-consciousness, or self-destruction. After the Second World War, much was silenced rather than left unsaid. This study retraces those silent cries over history through the powerful literary marks of myths.