We will revisit Kate Chopin's well-known novel, The Awakening, through a reconsideration of the apparently familiar notion of awakening. An encounter will be staged between the text of The Awakening and that of George Bataille's Inner Experience. Awakening will thus come to read "awakening-unto-death," awakening qua recognition and acceptance of the fact of death, the absolute limit of experience and knowledge. The moment at the very end of the novel, the moment Edna is ready to embrace the unknown of the sea, will be identified as the promise of this awakening. A last image this reading will risk will be that of an Edna beyond the novel, an Edna laughing while swimming. The events preceding and supposedly leading to this ending will be read as a story of intoxication, an intoxication meant to avoid or at least postpone the moment of awakening as awakening-unto-death.
In a queer-theory reading of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in the 2004 polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman relied on a narrow concept of reproduction as procreative heteronormativity anchored in heterosexual sex. He left untold the other story of reproduction: our daily reproduction in the service of capitalism. Marxist and materialist feminist theories of reproduction remind us that we all engage in reproductive work and that women have traditionally been considered natural providers of this work. A reading of J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man, in which a male protagonist depends on the domestic labor of a migrant woman, provides a counterpoint to No Future.
Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential study Rabelais and His World, a generation of scholars have thought of laughter as subversive—of norms, institutions, religion, gender. The literary canon, however, is ripe with situations in which characters refrain from laughing at certain objects.
This article is the authors’ response to the Transilvania journal special issue dedicated to Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). The issue (no. 10, 2022) featured articles and review articles on inter-imperiality and decolonial thought, alongside several pieces on world literature and cultural representations of Romania. In response to the critiques formulated by the contributors, Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă clarify some aspects and offer further insight into their theories. Since its publication, the book has attracted much deserved attention, being awarded the 2023 René Wellek Prize for best monograph from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) and the 2023 Barrington Moore Award from the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
n today's europe, the term eurosceptic often accompanies accusations of retrograde nationalism, irrational feelings, even fanaticism. When applied to Europe, skepticism, one of the critic's formative traits, acquires a bad reputation, as if it can only be an annihilating, rather than constructive, form of doubt. And yet skepticism is a muchneeded critical affect, particularly when it comes to Europe. If we need to be skeptical of anything, it is Europe. Today one hears claims about Europe having become postnational, postracial, even post-Europe. How else can the literary and cultural critic welcome such claims other than with a healthy dose of skepticism? 1 This essay is skeptical of Europe-the very idea that Europe is one.
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