From the Editor

The present issue, published jointly with a series of essays on narratives of trauma in the journal Literature and Medicine, is dedicated to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Founding Director of the School of Literatures of the Hebrew University (the sponsor of Partial Answers), on the occasion of her retirement. Rimmon-Kenan is one of the leading contemporary narratologists, a critic and literary theorist who has exerted a major influence on the shaping of this field.

Narratology, the theoretically-oriented study of narrative, may be intradisciplinary or interdisciplinary. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's earliest work, starting with her doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Frank Kermode and published in 1977 as The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James (University of Chicago Press), was largely of the former kind, though aided by categories provided by philosophy (in particular, logic) as well as literary criticism. This was followed by a number of analytic studies of different writers, such as Beckett, Borges, Faulkner, Morrison, and Nabokov. At this point the methodology was that of descriptive poetics: a system of structural concepts was used to shed new light on specific texts, further refining the system itself as a result of that process.

In her second book, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (Methuen, 1983), Rimmon-Kenan systematized, complemented, and amended the best up-to-date achievements of the study of narrative. The book became required reading in fiction and theory courses throughout the scholarly world. It has been translated into Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Finnish, and Czech, and repeatedly reprinted. In 2002 an expanded edition was published by Routledge, as one of the ten best-sellers of the New Accents series.

The mid-1980s saw a crisis of descriptive poetics—due to a variety of internal and external reasons. Rimmon-Kenan was one of the first to realize that a way to deal with this crisis could be by exploring other disciplines in which narrative acts play an important role, such as law, historiography, and psychoanalysis. She turned to interdisciplinary literary research, in which the narratives studied are affiliated with one discipline while the methodology and the system of concepts used are based on another branch of learning. In 1987, the research project that she conducted within the framework of the Center for Literary Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem led to the publication of a collection of essays, Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature (Methuen/Routledge), which she edited.

The courses that Rimmon-Kenan taught and the graduate work that she supervised since the mid-eighties were devoted to the intersection of literary studies and other fields. Her 1996 book, A Glance beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity (Ohio State University Press) is an epistemological approach to narrative, also opening up to ethical issues. It was largely this approach that gave rise to the project "Narrative as a Way of Thinking," represented in this issue and dealing with the ways in which narratives think and render operative (rather than think about and negotiate) cultural realia, psychological states, and philosophical principles—or else serve as anchors, or as pilots, for the reader's cognitive quest.

In the late nineties, stimulated by her own health problems and by illnesses among friends, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan translated her concern with ideological aspects of disease and healthcare issues into a literary investigation. In recent years her research has concentrated on illness narratives. A number of articles in the present collection deal with literary representations of individual engagement with illness and death.

If in the beginning was the word, it was followed by an emerging narrative. The essay by Wolfgang Iser, which opens this issue, discusses the emergence of narrative in tandem with, and in consequence of, its negation. The essay discusses Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing and Mahne Dies; it demonstrates, among other things, how these narratives think nothingness and make it perceptible through its inroads into what is; how they negate nothingness in its turn and defer their own preoccupation with the end by engaging what has been anterior to themselves.

Another narrative of a dying character—Chekhov's "A Boring Story"—is discussed in the paper by Pekka Tammi, which...