Nicole Rizzuto

... analysis of this novel focuses on an angle different from Esty's important reading of Lamming's ... only who speaks to whom, but also whether speech is dialogue or monologue, internal or ... transitions between col-umns, one finds either absence (blank space) or rupture (the arrival ...

Through the framing narrative of an English witness, Conrad's 1911 novel, Under Western Eyes, depicts the underground dealings of administers and challengers of the Russian state as they travel across various geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic terrains of Europe. Suggesting the central role testimony will play in this text, Conrad places readers before the law in the first sentence. The novel commences with a confession sealed by the novel's narrator, an English teacher of languages: "To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor--Kirylo Sidorovitch--Razumov" (3). By disclaiming possession of these gifts, the narrator confesses that he cannot take responsibility for the narrative that follows. He cannot claim authority for the events about to unfold, and therefore cannot guarantee the story will be a truthful or accurate account of the personality on which it centers, or a faithful rendering of the common nouns to which that man's proper name refers: the Russian language, particularly writing (Kirylo, or Cyrillic), and reason (Razumov, or son of reason). Confessions of this sort repeat throughout the novel, insisting that the work we are reading is not an original text but a transcription of one that already exists. The English work, recites the narrator, "is based on a document; all I have brought to it is my knowledge of the Russian language." This document, the novel's central embedded narrative, is a confessional writing composed by the Russian student-turned-spy-turned double-agent, Razumov. The opening confession, testifying that the text that follows is a record of a confession authored by Razumov, is paradoxical in its form however. The narrator's signature, a gesture of responsibility before the law, also refuses responsibility before the law. The English narrator performs an act that at once guarantees, assumes, and produces authority--signing--to claim his lack of authority, intimating a tension and even discontinuity between witnessing and truth. By framing the narrative to follow, a true "story of Russia," in this way, Conrad suspends the novel between responsibility and irresponsibility, and truth and fiction. This is exemplary of how confession operates throughout Under Western Eyes. It is an exercise in regulating even as it reveals the madness that structures the novel from within. In this essay, I explore how two of Conrad's later works employ confession to manage the crisis of being haunted by revolutionary and colonial pasts, while also challenging this endeavor in their formal staging. By subjecting confession not merely to criticism, but critique in the Kantian sense, (1) these writings question an act generally enlisted to provide both narrative closure and moral redemption. Such an analysis of Conrad's elaboration of confession illuminates the genealogy of a discursive form that persists beyond the modernist moment, as Peter Brooks has shown, and comes increasingly to dominate literary, political, and cultural narratives throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Confession as a historical and literary phenomenon, then, did not end with the modernists, or for that matter with Augustine, Rousseau, or Dostoevsky before them, signaling a predicament internal to its narrative mechanism, an inherent perversion of its law of enunciation. This internal perversion, marks a problem of bringing things to an end--no small issue, for in confession lies the hope tot only of discovering hidden truths of personal and historical pasts, but in achieving expiation for them, setting the moral balance right. Secular confessions inherit principles of both juridico-legal and religious traditions that attempt to redress wrongs of the past, calling them to closure. And Conrad's writings shed light on epistemological and ethical limits of these traditions and their iterations in literary, political, and popular culture. …

By generating friction with the concept of expansion, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 intervenes in debates shaping comparative literature studies today. Analyzing the work that friction performs in this book sends us beyond the provocative and nuanced readings contained within its pages and sets it in conversation with critical and literary writings it does not address. Miming the ethos and using the practices of Chimeras of Form by expanding its trajectory, I show what frictions and itineraries of inquiry might emerge from its theorization of literature in a global age.

Despite the rise of eco-critical approaches to Woolf's writing and a thriving debate as to whether her 1931 novel perpetuates or challenges colonialist axiomatics, The Waves has not inspired an extended, focused investigation of its articulation of aqueous nature and the latter's reshaping under imperial maritime power. This essay examines how a critique of maritime modernity emerges from The Waves' modernist orchestration of the seas. I contend that the work sets a conventional representation of the waters as facilitators of national and imperial progress against a counter-articulation that formally challenges it. The novel thus allows us to place it in the context of inscriptions of the seas by techno-sciences and international law during high imperialism and re-organizations of the seas as the empire contracts. Viewed in relation to the maritime recoding of the planet's hydrosphere, and the perceptual modes, narratives, and ethos of mastery it engenders, The Waves elucidates an alternative vision to a life-world made uneven by this recoding. Concentrating on waters, I conclude, allows us to glean a textured view of an understudied but persistent feature in Woolf's fiction.

Despite the rise of eco-critical approaches to Woolf's writing and a thriving debate as to whether her 1931 novel perpetuates or challenges colonialist axiomatics, The Waves has not inspired an extended, focused investigation of its articulation of aqueous nature and the latter's reshaping under imperial maritime power. This essay examines how a critique of maritime modernity emerges from The Waves' modernist orchestration of the seas. I contend that the work sets a conventional representation of the waters as facilitators of national and imperial progress against a counter-articulation that formally challenges it. The novel thus allows us to place it in the context of inscriptions of the seas by techno-sciences and international law during high imperialism and re-organizations of the seas as the empire contracts. Viewed in relation to the maritime recoding of the planet's hydrosphere, and the perceptual modes, narratives, and ethos of mastery it engenders, The Waves...

Nicole Rizzuto's work is important because it builds bridges. The debate between feminism and “theory” remains unresolved. It still emerges on more fronts than we can count. This is Rizzuto's first bridge. Her work is plangent with feminism. Nothing of it is compromised by ...

... analysis of this novel focuses on an angle different from Esty's important reading of Lamming's ... only who speaks to whom, but also whether speech is dialogue or monologue, internal or ... transitions between col-umns, one finds either absence (blank space) or rupture (the arrival ...

FORDHAM “Insurgent Testimonies wrenches modernism out of its fixed description as an offshoot of the ‘World’ wars in their European definition. It wrenches postcolonial theory from its current focus on migration and de-territorialization. It redoes our thinking on testimony. Stunning readings of noncanonical texts by canonical authors, and significant texts away from the mainstream. Attention to historical detail combined with creative command of theory. An indispensable book.”

I. What are the conditions of possibility of arousal, an awakening from slumber, an excitation of intellectual interest, in the context of colonial insurgency? I investigate this question by reading a work that centers on the limits and conditions of arousal through an allegory of reading and seeing. This is Herman Melville’s 1855 novella, “Benito Cereno.” Through a spectral rhetoric, this text formally challenges the opposition it thematically establishes between arousal and slumber. It indicates that arousal is difficult, if not impossible, to verify, calculate, or calibrate, because it evades the order of the visible/invisible. In so doing, Melville’s writing opens itself to autocritique and questions the demarcation between colonial and postcolonial textualities.

Abstract:Absent from prodigious critical scholarship about the seas is a discussion of modernism between the wars. Yet this period is rife with writing set on the waters. This essay argues that it is in their orchestrations of the waters as dead zones that such works revitalize seafaring literature and broaden our understandings of modernism generally. By way of illustration the essay examines the British author James Hanley's 1938 novel Hollow Sea, which centers on a merchant ship turned troopship during World War I. In its staging of maritime technologies and infrastructures, Hanley's text ironizes the literary trope and geopolitical concept of the "free sea" from an interwar perspective. The novel's particular mode of hydro-criticism manifests in its formal challenges to both the war optics of the British state and the optics of a major modernist writer of the seas, Joseph Conrad.

By generating friction with the concept of expansion, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 intervenes in debates shaping comparative literature studies today. Analyzing the work that friction performs in this book sends us beyond the provocative and nuanced readings contained within its pages and sets it in conversation with critical and literary writings it does not address. Miming the ethos and using the practices of Chimeras of Form by expanding its trajectory, I show what frictions and itineraries of inquiry might emerge from its theorization of literature in a global age.

This essay is launched from critiques that the rhetoric of global flows and imagery of unbroken links shaping narratives of globalization misrepresent the situation of African postcolonies under neoliberal and neo-imperial restructurings of the globe and planet. Somali author Nuruddin Farah offers an alternative to this rhetoric and imagery in his novel Crossbones. Crossbones registers the global and planetary through a formal enactment of static and noise that gluts communication networks and systems. It thereby counters dominant figurations of globalization and challenges models of world literature and globalization that enforce them.