Frances L. Restuccia

Joyce and the law of the father

Restuccia (English, Boston College) discusses Joyces masochism, his Catholicism, and his currently debated feminism. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

A Messianic Aesthetic: Lily Briscoe's Vision

This essay reads To the Lighthouse through the lens of Giorgio Agambens Pauline conception of messianic time and suggests that we reconsider the genre of modernist novels in light of such a “messianic aesthetic.” Insofar as To the Lighthouse presents chronological time impregnated by apocalyptic time, it reveals a coinciding of chronos and the eschaton to produce “the time of the now.” Rather than compensate for loss (the dominant reading), Virginia Woolfs novel reflects Agambens conception of time by situating salvation in the place of deterioration or the unsavable, celebrating caducity. Woolf presents a contraction of time, through the pulsating rays of the Lighthouse, that carries time to fulfillment and then falls back into potentiality/impotentiality. Lilys eventual embrace of her paintings inevitable destruction underscores the notion that creation and decreation are salvifically coextensive. On the political level, Lilys artistic vision neutralizes Mr. Ramsays sovereignty by putting his linear journey to a new, playful use—a pure means without end. Given that Agamben laments the scission in the Western cultural tradition between philosophy and poetry, it seems germane that his theory be fleshed out through poetic art. Agamben reveals messianic temporality and its political effects in Woolf, just as Woolfs poetic prose gives to Agambens ideas a representational bloom. By offering To the Lighthouse as a paradigm, this essay illustrates how Agambens work may be used for literary interpretation—a brand-new and exciting area, as his writings have not yet been invoked to interpret literary texts.

Sebald's punctum awakening to holocaust trauma in austerlitz

This article takes up W.G. Sebalds melancholic preoccupation with the missing origins of memory. Sebalds repetitive melancholic style facilitates his engagement with modern German history as trauma. In particular, it is Sebalds focus on Austerlitzs quest for his origin that situates Sebald in the place of the historical trauma of the extermination of the Jews during World War II. Sebalds intimate relation to Austerlitz enacts Caruths idea that ones own trauma is always imbricated with the trauma of another. Austerlitz approaches the mOther, his lost Thing, his constitutive lack and thereby guides the Sebaldian narrator to the real history of Germanys persecution of the Jews. This encounter is the result of a transmission of Austerlitzs melancholic tale, established around an inherent impossibility, that the narrator then conveys to us, as it is engorged with the reality of Nazi atrocity, in a style suffused with the message of Barthess ‘that has been!’ In a double Agambenesque move, Sebald thereby locates Nazi atrocity in a non-site between the living and the dead and, yet, simultaneously avoids mystifying it. Austerlitz enables a transfer of Holocaust atrocity, an intimate transfer in Kristevan terms insofar as the novel transmits – from its central character to the Sebaldian narrator and in turn to its reader – death, timelessness, and the Negativity necessary to renewal.