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  • Literature and Its Dissolving Borders: Word and World
  • Paula Marantz Cohen

This issue of jml is entirely concerned with prose writing, principally fiction, as it is grounded in feeling, sensory perception, the body, and the social contexts of language.

Two essays—by Lewis Ward on W.G. Sebald’s narrative persona and by Annalee Edmondson on intersubjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—focus on empathy as it informs the narrative experience. Ward demonstrates how Sebald blurs the borders between fiction and biography, allowing for a more complex and personalized relationship to historical events in his novels. Edmondson argues that Woolf “narratizes” the world in Mrs. Dalloway in the same way Clarissa Dalloway does in linking her subjective viewpoint to those she encounters in the course of her day. This reading opposes the conventional public versus private dichotomy that is generally applied to Woolf’s writerly method. Margaret Jay Jessee, in her discussion of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, explores a related sort of boundary-crossing. She shows how Wharton uses binary oppositions to define her two principal female characters through the eyes of the male protagonist, Newland Archer, but that the indirect discourse in which the novel presents his viewpoint helps the reader transcend these reductive binaries—to bridge the gap between conventional social representation and reality.

Two other pieces on Woolf, by Maureen Chun on The Waves and by Kathryn Van Wert, also on Mrs. Dalloway, express the idea of connectedness between word and world. Chun, like Edmondson and Jessee, is concerned with traversing conventional boundaries. She argues that The Waves explores how language and consciousness are physical phenomena, and proposes that there exists, in Woolf’s novel, a continuity of people, words, and waves. Van Wert interprets references to the Great War in Mrs. Dalloway as a trope for a more universal trauma relating to language and otherness in the world.

The connection between body and language raised by Chun in her discussion of The Waves is central to Marco Caracciolo’s analysis of the difficult last chapter of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe. He shows how the patterns of the chapter resemble patterns of physical interaction with an environment. Robert C. Clark, writing [End Page v] about Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” focuses on sensory aspects of this work, maintaining that Carver’s Minimalist aesthetic carries forward the sensory-rich aesthetic of Impressionism.

Finally, Melanie Micir and Catherine Brown both deal with aspects of writing that exist out of reach of representation in a given historical moment or context. Micir discusses the late work of Sylvia Townsend Warner, who turned away from fiction to biography and memoir toward the end of her life. Warner’s biography of T.H. White and her documentation of her relationship with Valentine Ackland—the former with material omitted, the latter, unpublished until long after her death—were written with the awareness that a frank treatment of homosexuality would not be accepted in her lifetime but could eventually be made available to readers. For Brown, the focus is on the mistranslation of the Russian word for “soul” as it influenced twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, with special attention to the different ways in which Woolf and D.H. Lawrence understood and used the term.

A selection of book reviews, which complement the topics of the essays where possible, round out the issue. [End Page vi]

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