The article suggests that the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of “universal poetry” provides an interesting approach to Dylan’s songs and artwork. In a famous fragment from 1798, Schlegel asserts that universal poetry unites the forms of art, philosophy and thought with the beautiful sigh and kiss that the creative child “exhales in its artless song.” It is hard to claim that Dylan’s voice has ever sounded like a child exhaling its artless song, but nevertheless Schlegel’s concept opens the way for new approaches to his oeuvre, and it can be combined with the sociologist Bruno Latour’s concept of the actors’ work-net of social phenomena. Dylan’s artwork can be described both as universal poetry in the sense of Schlegel and as a Dylan-work-net with numerous actors in the sense of Bruno Latour. The Copenhagen exhibition of The Brazil Series (2010) clarifies the relevance of Schlegel and Latour’s concepts to the discussion of the relations of artforms in Dylan’s work.

By channelling into his poetry the events of the Big Bang, Severo Sarduy made his writing break into endless pieces. His critical commentators have tended to conceptualise this fact as a catastrophe which irradiates melancholy into human existence. This article, however, will argue that the Big Bang in Sarduy’s imaginary works as poiesis. Challenging the reasons that have taken Sarduyan criticism to implement such a gloomy outlook on the function of the Big Bang in the Cuban’s author — mainly the mirroring of the primordial explosion with the other cosmological decentering postulated by Kepler in the 17th century—, it will be argued that Severo Sarduy’s poetics, in line with Deleuze, looks at the decentering caused by the explosion not as disenchantment of a wholeness lost but as the questioning of the grand narratives of the metaphysical being and the birth in geometrised space of paroxysm and endless metaphoricity.

This multidisciplinary study examines the discursive representation of vulnerability in Debbie Macomber’s bestseller, A Girl’s Guide to Moving On (2016). It is conducted in the light of the psychosocial theories focusing on self-others interaction and identity development of the selected heroines. Also, by applying Brené Brown’s theoretical understanding of vulnerability as a social work construct, Hubert Zapf’s cultural ecology theorization, and Foucauldian notion of power, the present paper elucidates the ways in which vulnerability concept can be used as a lens to look at its impact on identity development of the selected heroines. Given its negative and dark stance usually associated with notions of weakness, frailty, grief, despair etc., vulnerability is discussed as a result of a metadiscourse in sociocultural system which is created out of human intimate relationships and emotions such as trust and love. However, if being recognized and embraced, vulnerability can be seen as an imaginary counter-discourse which gains its potential only by self, interacting with the society. The analysis shows that the re-integrative interdiscourse as embodied in re-connection, results in love and belonging within the cultural reality-system. It concludes that how the proposed triad conceptualization of vulnerability traces the interpersonal relationships to reconstructing a new self.

The perplexing silence of Michael K continues to baffle readers. It is often argued that Michael’s rejection of food and his infatuation with gardening are interpretable as forms of resistance defying absorption into prevailing discourses. My argument here will follow the same line of reasoning but I will be using a different route. In the first part of this paper, I will focus on Michael’s ambivalence. In the second part, I will discuss the problematic of ambivalence in light of two conceptions of ethics and morality represented by modern and postmodern perspectives. The main difference between them, according to Zygmunt Bauman, revolves around their acceptance and rejection of ambivalence. I will argue that the conflict between modern and postmodern viewpoints ends in a crisis reflected in the medical officer’s obsessional thoughts about Michael. The situation is compounded by Michael’s nonsensical unresponsiveness which problematizes the relationship between the care-giver and the care-receiver. My argument would deal with the nature of this challenge and its implications for the moral self which I believe result in a moral crisis symbolically depicted as the reversal of positions between Michael as the care-receiver and the medical officer as the care-giver. This final section of my paper would be premised on the term ‘hostage’ borrowed from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of ethics.

Cultural hybridity is a burning issue in recent times especially for the postcolonial individual whose contemplation of culture and the creation of new cultural forms is characterized by a form of coercion to adopt western mores. This issue finds expression in postcolonial literature across the various continental and cultural regions. This paper is therefore an attempt to explore the cultural formations and expressions of the postcolonial individual to ascertain whether they result in a form of self-realization or perpetual conflict and dissatisfaction. In doing this, aspects of the postcolonial and psychoanalytic theories will be employed to the characters in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. The various stages from lack of confidence in indigenous culture, a preference for western culture, and a complete denial of indigenous culture will be explored as phases in the identity formation and expression of characters in the text, leading up to unbalanced hybridity. Consequently, an explication of these phases will result in the demonstration of psychosis of postcolonial individuals in a state of failed hybridity. In light of this, the paper presents as a major conclusion the idea that a postcolonial individual’s failure to incorporate in a balanced manner aspects of the dual cultures confronting him or her results in a conflicted identity which leads to dissatisfaction and in its highest state, could result in psychotic behaviour.

This study examines the opening and concluding passages of Robert Walser’s Jacob Von Gunten (1909) as they contain the essence of the novel. The novel follows the life of Jakob, a young man of supposed noble background, as he enrolls in the Institute Benjamenta to become a servant. Jakob’s lack of history and the failure of modernist ideals in him lead to a state of identity crisis, wherein he questions the possibility of any authentic sense of existence. By drawing on a conjunction of Existentialist and Marxist theories, it is claimed that subordination and domination that Jakob experiences is in effect, the metaphoric critique of bourgeois and modernism. Also these eventually lead the protagonist to an existential feeling of nothingness and alienation.

Carter’s novel revolves around two opposing characters and two opposing definitions of truth: Desiderio and Dr Hoffman. Dr Hoffman commits himself to destabilize all the givens in the ‘Enlightenment’ civilization of Desiderio by breaking the spatial and temporal moulds and demarcations and by destroying all the symmetries in its logocentric thinking. He aims to create a civilization without the chains and structures of reason in an alternative site of existence filled with mirages and elements of phantasy. Against the backdrop of the problematic relation of reason to unreason, he interrogates the nature and function of the rational acts. Proposing another mode of consciousness, Dr Hoffman indulges in a Cartesian thought experiment in a subversive fashion and rethinks a fundamental Cartesian problematic: the ontological status of reality and identity, thus, the disjunction between imaginary and symbolic registers. This essay aims to give a Lacanian hearing to Hoffman’s project which makes more sense from a Lacanian vantage point as he tries to open a gap in the symbolic register or create a disastrous disturbance in it, and tries to delete or distort the place of the shared Other, by creating a domain outside symbolization through imaginary distortions.

The aftermath of Indonesian 1965 political riots left deep consequences for the parties involved or those considered to have had political affiliation. The world was prospectively promising for a particular group but doomed for the other group of people. The previous group had the rights to determine whether members of the latter might stay alive or might not both literally and metaphorically. The latter group whose lives were in the hands of the previous had only two hard choices—if they were lucky enough: to stay or to flee. To stay means to be stigmatized as partisan of PKI (Indonesia Communist Party) for the rest of their lives and consequently alienated from social and political activities. To flee means to be stateless people with even more social, economic, and political hardships. Suddenly, they became paria. It is in the context of being exiles around which Leila S. Chudori’s Home is centred. The lives of the displaced people considered to be affiliated with PKI are recounted. The signification of “home” for the main character, Dimas Suryo, who lives miles away from his birthplace becomes the focus of this paper.

When Tiara Lestari posed naked in Spanish Playboy magazine in the August 2005 edition, only few people actually knew her. She had been working mainly abroad. However, the publication immediately created waves of controversy as she is not only an Indonesian but a Muslim too. The adverse resulting from the controversy was the impetus of Tiara Lestari’s blog. The blog eventually became the fetus of her auto/biography, Tiara Lestari Uncut Stories: Playboy, Ibunda dan Kafila. This paper investigates both forms of the life writing, namely the blog and the auto/biography as two interconnected works, which at times merge as one. As Tiara Lestari describes in her writing, she wished to be able to present the public with what is considered to be a more accurate representation of herself, particularly post-Playboy episode. This paper examines how the auto/biography is used to reconstruct Tiara Lestari’s life in a way that negotiates the local Indonesian and global construct of femininity and womanhood. It also argues that while Tiara Lestari has been portrayed to transgress the boundaries, through her auto/biography she managed to reconstruct her image and recreate a new self that embraces the more conventional notion of femininity and womanhood as a form of redemption following the nude pictures.

The present paper explicates some main characteristics of the function related to literary multilingualism in Indian Diasporic literary discourse. Literary multilingualism can be defined as a phenomenon where word groups whose structures and meanings cannot be derived from a single language directly as they occur in two or more languages. In particular, it focuses on selective multilingualism especially features of spoken discourse that authors like Amitav Ghosh, Chitra B. Divakaruni, Kiran Desai and Rohinton Mistry recurrently use in their novels, and generally which has not been accounted for within linguistic research. By collating Relevance Theory with the use of literary multilingualism, it is proposed that writers who adopt such an approach are dissolving the boundaries between spoken and literary discourse for multiple reasons. This claim will be elucidated through the analysis of the novels within the framework of the concept of a ‘cognitive environment’ as explicated by Sperber and Wilson in their discussion of Relevance Theory (2002 249). The paper explores functions of literary multilingualism in Indian Diasporic literary discourse thus adding a new perspective to the typologies which often have been set up mainly to account for multilingualism in spoken discourse.

Postmodernism has as its major tenet the eradication of master narratives in favor of marginalized voices. In so doing, it puts forward various strategies which, though different in methodology, are all critical of the dominant exclusionary discourses. Parodic mimicry is one of these subversive strategies which allows the anti-establishment artist to employ the discriminatory discursive practices and skillfully turn them on their heads. African American novelist Ishmael Reed adopts the postmodern technique of mimicry to severely criticize and puncture the racist structure of the United States. In his Neo-HooDoo slave narrative Flight to Canada (1976), he takes to task the traditional historiography, showing how a so-called anti-slavery novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin employs racial essentialism to reinforce the stereotypical representations of blacks and distort history to the benefit of white dominators. Through a parody of Stowe’s canonical work, Reed’s novel provides a space for the black consciousness to serve as an agentic subject and re-narrate the history of slavery, abolitionism and the Civil War. This paper aims to depict how Reed manages to rewrite the history of slavery in Flight to Canada via mimicking Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

This article is an introduction to the thematic monograph On Spatial Narrative in Fiction by Professor Fang Ying. The monograph begins with a brief overview of “the spatial turn” and recent studies on spatial narrative in both the West and the East, before devoting the bulk of its discussion to the major components of spatial narrative theory: spaces in literary narrative, the “spatialization” of fictional narrative, the time-space relationship in spatial narrative, and the expressive implications of the spatial narrative model in fiction. The article argues that Fang’s monograph plays a vital role in advancing narrative studies and fostering academic exchange between Western and Chinese literary traditions, as it offers a fresh and illuminating perspective on narrative theory. Consequently, Professor Fang’s work is considered an essential read for scholars interested in narrative theory in general and spatial narrative in particular.

Since the advent of the new millennium, unnatural narratology has raised an upsurge in Western academia, which reaps widespread attention and arouses enormous controversies. In Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters, Marco Caracciolo attempts to bypass the typology contest between “natural” narratology and “unnatural” narratology by putting forward the concept of “strange.” Caracciolo adopts the cognitive perspective of reader-response to explore unusual narratives in contemporary literary works, which offers a different picture of unnatural narratology and deserves scholarly attention.