Author: Jamie Gaston Flat / Round In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster defines “the hidden life” as those components of character that the reader cannot know from “external signs or history.”[1] Information concerning another person’s innermost thoughts and feelings, which would remain inaccessible to us in the course of standard social interaction will be disclosed to the readers of a (modern) novel. On this basis, Forster divides fictional… Read More »Hidden Life
Author: Rachel Tay Rhythm and Whole In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster defines “rhythm in fiction” as “repetition plus variation.” It is not the melody itself, he proposes, but that which is suspended within and goes on to be sustained beyond. Forster also designates rhythm as the “whole” of the “symphony,” since it is the centre of gravity around which notes compose themselves and melodies are harmonized in synchrony… Read More »Networks
Author: Muyun Zhou In the realm of novels, “the subject” is not a ready-made “thing” to be named but rather a processual “voice” that acquires being in the process of speaking. Although we tend to imagine such a voice issuing from a source prior to the process of speaking itself, we cannot grasp it through some act of discovering its origin, intact and pure. For one thing, the speech act… Read More »The Subject in Motion
Author: Anvita Budhraja Space, real and imaginary, materializes the subject as a social identity. The subject acquires a social identity, according to Althusser, as it is hailed into a category that assigns it the place it occupies in the given socioeconomic order. The subject may be hailed into numerous such spaces at once physical and imaginary, material and constructed, resulting conflicts within their inner world, or subjectivity. The modern novel… Read More »The Spatial Subject
Author: Jessica Ginocchio What is Heteroglossia? The simplest definition of heteroglossia (raznorechiye) in Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” is “the social diversity of speech types” (263). What does this mean? In the early sections of this essay, Bakhtin explains the unique quality of artistic prose, particularly when it takes the form of a novel: The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform and speech and… Read More »Heteroglossia
Author: Brendan Chambers In “The Brown Stocking,” the final chapter of his seminal work, Mimesis, Eric Auerbach analyzes a short selection from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In this novel, the protagonist Mrs. Ramsay measures a stocking intended for the lighthouse keeper’s boy, using her own son, James, as a model. The “action” of the scene is obviously minimal: Mrs. Ramsay holds the stocking up against James, scolds him twice… Read More »Form and Network
Author: Ejuerleigh Jones Aura is a theoretical concept that Walter Benjamin coined and developed in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). He defines it as an intrinsic element common to both natural objects and art objects, which Benjamin also considers historical objects. He begins his development of this concept through art objects. Aura, in his view, is embedded in art objects by their physical existence,… Read More »Aura
Author: Tatiana González Buonomo The term “anachronism” is derived from the Greek prefix ana- meaning “against” and the Greek word chronos which means “time” and it is generally used to refer to a thing found in a period in which it does not belong, oftentimes a thing that is old-fashioned. Jacques Rancière expands the concept of anachronism in compliance with the principle that “belonging to a time is strictly identical… Read More »Anachronism (2)
Author: William Williamson IV The meaning of anachronism varies with the discourse where it occurs, but these meanings share in common a preoccupation with the chronology of relationships in time. In criticism and philosophy, an anachronism is generally regarded as an error, but for historians, says Jacques Rancière, it is an “unforgivable sin (21). For historians and critics, it entails the intrusion of another, usually contemporary, framework within a time… Read More »Anachronism (1)
