Current Issue

Subscription Information

Submission Information

Archives

Editorial Staff

Advisory Board

Back Issue Order Form

English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

Devjani Roy
Negotiating Money in The Wanderer: Lessons from Behavioral Economics

Jeffrey Meyers
The Double Lives of Felix Krull

Idit Einat-Nov
Esthetic Qualities, Conventions and Aspect-Switching: Medieval Hebrew Poetry Considered in the Perspective of Modern Theories of Reading

Wout Dillen
Stretching the Boundaries of Narrativity on Stage: A Narratological Analysis of Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz and Hot ‘N’ Throbbing

Joseph Carroll
Correcting for The Corrections: A Darwinian Critique of a Foucauldian Novel

Devjani Roy. “Negotiating Money in The Wanderer: Lessons from Behavioral Economics.” / 25
I read Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814) through the lens of theoretical models borrowed from behavioral economics, a discipline that remains largely undiscovered by literary scholarship. I argue that instead of drawing solely from contemporary cultural discourses about credit, Burney makes a simple yet profound argument: money and human behavior are connected, and when we understand men and women better, our economic choices also tend to become smarter. I explore a range of frameworks also used by behavioral economists: the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” from game theory, the concept of intertemporal choice, negotiation theory, economic research on trust, among others. Ultimately I claim The Wanderer is a key text for understanding English society in the 1790s for two reasons: the narrative offers a sophisticated yet accessible version of financial didacticism—an authorial strategy I read as a skillfully packaged and culturally acceptable form of political agency.
back to top

Jeffrey Meyers. “The Double Lives of Felix Krull.” / 44
After completing the Germanic and pathological Doctor Faustus and The Black Swan, and returning to Europe from exile in America, Mann wrote a humorous, picaresque novel with cosmopolitan settings in France and Portugal, satirizing the old social stratifications that had existed before World War I. Like his hero Felix Krull, Mann had led a double life, losing his status in Germany and regaining it in America, where he’d also performed for a living on the lecture circuit.
back to top

Idit Einat-Nov. “Esthetic Qualities, Conventions and Aspect-Switching: Medieval Hebrew Poetry Considered in the Perspective of Modern Theories of Reading.” / 55
The article focuses on a double reading of one short poem, Shmuel Hanagid’s “God Blesses Old Age,” which belongs to the genre of Hebrew philosophical poetry written in medieval Spain. Dan Pagis made a revolutionary distinction between two types of poetry in this genre, “poems of admonishment and faith” that provide an affirmative and constructive perspective on the human condition, and “dark poems of fate” that express a pessimistic and nihilistic approach. A prominent theme in this poetry is youth and old age, which is developed in two opposing directions: some poems praise old age and condemn youth (these may be considered poems of admonishment and faith) while others, to the contrary, condemn old age and praise youth (and may be counted among the dark poems of fate). In the present article we analyze Hanagid’s afore-mentioned poem which gives simultaneous expression, using the very same linguistic units, to both mutually contradictory perspectives (praise and condemnation of old age as well as praise and condemnation of youth; this poem can thus be read as both a poem of admonishment and faith and a dark poem of fate at one-and-the-same time). The main claim in this article is that the double reading is made possible by the poem’s metaphors, each of which can be interpreted in contradictory ways. This is not a hypothesis that can be made lightheartedly with respect to Hebrew poetry in Spain, one of whose poetic principles being, according to Dan Pagis, that “each trope has an unambiguous referent.” I argue that because this is indeed the case we must be more sensitive to cases in which a Hebrew poem from Spain does allow for an ambiguous perception of its components, and that the general principle should not be taken as absolutely denying the possibility of ambiguity in the interpretation of a metaphor, even if such ambiguity is not typical of the poetry of the times. At the end of the article I link this claim to Ross Brann’s words on “cultural ambiguity in Muslim Spain” and its effects on the thoughts and lives of that period’s poets.
back to top

Wout Dillen. “Stretching the Boundaries of Narrativity on Stage: A Narratological Analysis of Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz and Hot ‘N’ Throbbing.” / 69
Approaching narrative from a transgeneric perspective, this article provides a thorough narratological analysis of two of Paula Vogel’s most experimental plays. Its hypothesis is that such an analysis can offer a better understanding of those plays as well as demonstrate how Vogel first evokes narrative dimensions on stage, to then exploit or even completely overturn them. In the first chapter, the relation between narrativity and drama is investigated alongside some of the key concepts that will be used in chapters two and three, each of which will concentrate on experiments with “mimetic” and “dramatic narrativity” in one of the plays.
back to top

Joseph Carroll. “Correcting for The Corrections: A Darwinian Critique of a Foucauldian Novel.” / 87
In The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen creates fictional images of himself and his parents. Through those images, he gives fictive form to symbolic components of his own psyche and also constructs an ideological critique of late capitalism in the twentieth century. I encompass Franzen’s Foucauldian perspective within the perspective of biocultural critique. After comparing biocultural and Foucauldian perspectives, I summarize the story line of the novel, give an overview of its thematic and tonal structure, and offer textual evidence supporting my chief interpretive contention—that the central organizing principle of the novel consists in Franzen’s effort to invalidate a patriarchal conception of authority by depicting a patriarch, Alfred, from a Foucauldian perspective. In the concluding sections, I reflect on Franzen’s conception of the author’s role in society. 
back to top