Tatjana Jukić
Tatjana Jukić is Professor and Head of English Literature in the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, where she teaches Victorian literature and arts, and film studies. She also teaches on the doctoral programs of Comparative Literature and of Croatian Language and Literature, and has been invited to lecture on literary history and theory by universities and research institutes in Europe, Asia and the United States. Jukić is author of two books: Liking, Dislike, Supervision. Literature and the Visual in Victorian Britain (2002) and Revolution and Melancholia. Limits of Literary Memory (2011).
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It is with this distinction in mind that the editors Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby seem to have designed Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, a volume whose ambition is to reassess Pre-Raphaelite poetry at the present time, when the modern ideas of political collectivity and democratic writing are being radically reassessed.
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It is with this distinction in mind that the editors Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby seem to have designed Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, a volume whose ambition is to reassess Pre-Raphaelite poetry at the present time, when the modern ideas of political collectivity and democratic writing are being radically reassessed.
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Predgovor (7-9)
Uvod (11-71)
Politika i melankolija: Slobodan Novak , „Badessa madre Antonia“ (73-94)
Mazohizam i melankolija: Ivan Slamnig, Bolja polovica hrabrosti (95-197)
Dundo Maroje kao scena instrukcije: Šoljanov Držić (199-231)
Spleen gulaga: Danilo Kiš, Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (233-320)
Literatura (321-332)
Napomena (333)
Kazalo imena (335-341)
Tellingly, Erich Auerbach argues a similar line in Mimesis, when he writes that the French Revolution was when the “process of temporal concentration” began for Europe, “both of historical events themselves and of everyone’s knowledge of them,” resulting in “modern tragic realism based on the contemporary” (2003: 459, 458). To Auerbach this implies emphatic conscious engagement; he speaks of forceful “modern consciousness of reality” (2003: 459). That he should call this realism tragic, however, suggests that modern subjectivity is kept in the same kind of urgent psychopolitical check that Arendt has identified. That Auerbach – a preeminent philologist – should align tragic realism with the novel in the nineteenth century suggests that the novel at the time was tasked with shoring up narrative excess against the intelligence of tragedy.
Auerbach credits Stendhal with formatting the novel against this task. I propose to argue that the invention of the focalizing consciousness in the nineteenth-century novel, often attributed to Jane Austen, was how this task was first accomplished, leading up to the novel’s own self-reflection and the foregrounding of narrative theory, with Henry James. It is in this sense that Jane Austen may well be Aeschylus, or perhaps Sophocles, to James’s Euripides, or even Aristotle; Matthew Arnold comes to mind and his Victorian grasp of Greek antiquity. Important stepping stones were provided by Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Finally, if this means that the nineteenth-century novel carries the same critical weight as the mourning play of early modernity (to mention only the studies by Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt), I will also suggest that the invention of detective fiction, in the nineteenth century, may have been how the intelligence of the novel was negotiated against the formats of tragedy and the mourning play. For this I will consult research on form, process and transformation by Fredric Jameson, Caroline Levine, Anna Kornbluh and Jürgen Osterhammel, among others.
Danilo Kiš's The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983) exemplifies this proposition. It is a collection of stories that engages East-Central Europe, especially Austria-Hungary, as a synecdoche of the world whose peculiar narrative constitution reciprocates the rationale of modernity. Whatever aspires to world literature in or about this collection, however, seems confined to the conceptual demands of its title: to knowledge imagined in terms of an encyclopedia, and to the leak in this knowledge occasioned by the elision of death for the dead. While the dead in place of death is how Kiš still retains the relational imperative of literature even as it aspires to world literature, encyclopedia suggests that literature in modernity is always also betrayed for a conceptual apparatus other than itself, and that the intellectual situation of modernity is betrayed with it. Moreover, Kiš suggests that this betrayal may be integral to modernity—that modernity, as well as world literature, may be accessible to theory and philosophy only as a structure of betrayal.
I argue that Pride and Prejudice (1813) is critical in this sense, because it is in this novel that Austen mobilizes her focalizing consciousness not merely around the processing of narrative excess into education, but also around an insight that excess remains residual to education thus conceived, now as an excess in the very intelligence that is instrumental to this process. Austen’s title indicates as much: both pride and prejudice point to an excess in the intellectual processes and to an overvaluation of consciousness. This suggests that the subjectivation invoked by the novel does not coincide fully with the novel’s constitution, and that a narrative emancipation runs parallel to the invention of the focalizing consciousness. In other words, that which the focalizing consciousness suffers as an excess of intelligence registers in the novel as the intelligence of excess.
Co-Sponsored by Miami University and University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Wilk’s Auditorium | May 4, 2018
https://www.academia.edu/37296953/A_Narrative_Theory_for_the_October_Revolution_From_Maugham_to_Benjamin_and_Back_
(‘Ako romane Jane Austen doživljavamo kao ljubavne, manje smo moderni od same književnice‘)