Project MUSE®: Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2003) through current issueLatest Articles: Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of IdeasTWOProject MUSE®Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas1936-92471565-3668Latest articles in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Towards Unity: Diamond as Consciousness in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978286
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The diamond in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) serves as a compelling metaphor which, in the course of the narrative, transmutes the conventional dichotomous outlook of the novel’s characters into one of altruistic unity. By establishing a correlation between Western science and Eastern philosophy, Collins underscores the significance of uniting progressive modernity with a spiritual collectivism, which is an idea that would resonate with the contemporary reader since an individualistic materialist outlook is still pervasive. The philosophical discussion that underlies the narrative pits a divisive materialistic worldview against a unifying altruistic stance. My aim here is to reveal how Collins dissolves
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallTowards Unity: Diamond as Consciousness in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone2025-12-19text/htmlen-USTowards Unity: Diamond as Consciousness in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®717042026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Chekhov’s Time Is Coming: On Steppe’s Moving Image
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978287
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During the first decade of his active life as a writer, Anton Chekhov remained relatively unknown on Russia’s literary scene. A provincial youth from the southern town of Taganrog and a student of medicine, he was then still a newcomer in Moscow, struggling to make a living for himself and his family. Publishing his early satirical stories under the comical pseudonym “Antosha Chekhonte,” he had to settle for their commercial success in the daily press. Only toward the end of the third decade of his life did Anton Chekhov, the author behind the pseudonym, come into view. Gaining increasing appreciation from publishers, fellow writers, and readers, he was consistently urged to write a “major work” (Chekhov 1974–1982
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallChekhov’s Time Is Coming: On Steppe’s Moving Image2025-12-19text/htmlen-USChekhov’s Time Is Coming: On Steppe’s Moving Image2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®666682026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Kafka’s Unfinished Metamorphoses
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978288
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Franz Kafka believed that The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, the two novellas written in the autumn of 1912, marked the beginning of his “serious” literary work. Following the sleepless night of September 20, when he wrote The Judgment at one go, Kafka recorded in his diary that “only in this way can writing be done, only with such cohesion, with such complete opening of the body and soul”; yet he also noted his “confirmed conviction”: “with my novel writing I am at disgraceful lowlands of writing” (2022: 242). The harsh words target The Missing Person (also called Amerika), which Kafka was writing in 1912, as well as, doubtlessly, pieces begun in previous years, such as Richard and Samuel (in collaboration with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallKafka’s Unfinished Metamorphoses2025-12-19text/htmlen-USKafka’s Unfinished Metamorphoses2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®806292026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Much Obliged: Beckett, MacIntyre, and the Emotivist Endgame
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978289
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A seemingly unlikely pairing, Samuel Beckett and Alasdair MacIntyre share at least two noteworthy compulsions: a brooding preoccupation with the issues of modernity and a fascination with chess. Beckett’s passion for the game began in childhood under the tutelage of his uncle Howard, who earned a reputation in Dublin during the 1920s for his chessboard prowess, once even beating the Cuban grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca y Graupera in an exhibition match (Knowlson 48; cf. Cronin). It would turn into a lifelong obsession. For MacIntyre, chess serves a more heuristic function, a kind of dioramic stand-in for what he calls standards “internal to a practice,” an idea crucial to his larger critique of modernity. He
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallMuch Obliged: Beckett, MacIntyre, and the Emotivist Endgame2025-12-19text/htmlen-USMuch Obliged: Beckett, MacIntyre, and the Emotivist Endgame2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®1203392026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19A Partial “Answer to Orwell?”: Philosophies of History in Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978290
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Geoffrey Aggeler once wrote about the lesser known of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 dystopias, The Wanting Seed, that it is “a major contribution to the subgenre known as the dystopian ‘novel of ideas’” (1987b: 113). Indeed, Burgess likewise wrote in the second part of his autobiography about the novel that “the idea was more original than many critics wished to believe” (1990: 64). Elsewhere in his autobiography, he writes that “this playful theory” of his, “perhaps not so playful, was meant to be an answer to [George] Orwell” (33). Ideas mattered to Burgess, and with The Wanting Seed he created a testing ground for his own philosophy of history, a thought experiment intentionally set up against the Orwellian model. This
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallA Partial “Answer to Orwell?”: Philosophies of History in Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed2025-12-19text/htmlen-USA Partial “Answer to Orwell?”: Philosophies of History in Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®896002026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19The “Magical” New Materiality of the World in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978291
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Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children has gained global recognition for its remarkable way of engaging with the problems of post-colonialism, cultural identity, postmodernism, and politics. This paper, however, is devoted not to these issues — although no study of the book can do without reference to them — but to the representation of the materiality of the diegetic world. I highlight the way in which the borders between the individual and the global as well as between the material and the spiritual are blurred in the novel: the narrative speaks for the inherent interconnection between entities of various kinds.1 New materialist insights provide the analysis with the theoretical framework of reference
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallThe “Magical” New Materiality of the World in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children2025-12-19text/htmlen-USThe “Magical” New Materiality of the World in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®739532026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19What One Is Worth: Leftovers of Identity and Value in V.S. Naipaul’s Late Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978292
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How does one lead a valuable life? That question, or rather that problem, runs throughout V. S. Naipaul’s final novels, Half a Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004). Is a valuable life one that is politically efficient or one that resists that kind of instrumentality? Is it one that proceeds according to agreed social values or one that transgresses codes? By what measure do we evaluate a life? Rather than seeking answers from various moral vocabularies or discussing the objectivity of value, I begin from the idea that an individual life today proceeds within an unresolved imaginative nexus of competing moral codes.1 It is from this awareness of the incompleteness with which each system of moral value attempts to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallWhat One Is Worth: Leftovers of Identity and Value in V.S. Naipaul’s Late Fiction2025-12-19text/htmlen-USWhat One Is Worth: Leftovers of Identity and Value in V.S. Naipaul’s Late Fiction2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®877362026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality by Marco Caracciolo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978293
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The tension between the tangible nature of material objects and the intricate concept of their materiality has been a focal point for scholars across various disciplines. Marco Caracciolo’s Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality, the inaugural volume of De Gruyter’s Ecocriticism Unbound series, contributes to this discourse. Utilizing the concept of the “spectrum of materiality,” a visualization of the diverse meanings that things can take on (4) and employing the narrative negotiation framework, Caracciolo endeavors to showcase the significance of narratives in reconceptualizing materiality and enhancing audiences’ comprehension of the negotiation of materiality, thereby revealing the richness of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallContemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality by Marco Caracciolo (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USContemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality by Marco Caracciolo (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®144262026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’s Graphic Narratives by Victoria Aarons (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978294
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As the title suggests, Victoria Aarons’ new book engages the recent flurry of graphic novels published by Jewish women. Drawing on the work of Hilary Chute, who has argued that graphic novels reward the sort of sustained critical scrutiny that previous generations of readers accorded to the work of Philip Roth or Franz Kafka, Aarons brings out the cultural and aesthetic depths of these autobiographical narratives. Throughout, she identifies “an anxious sense of Jewishness” that reveals a deepening insecurity about the narrator’s connection to the Jewish past, present, and future (9).In Sarah Lightman’s The Book of Sarah (2019), the past is the family, and it is as old as the Biblical Sarah. With Bernice
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallMemory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’s Graphic Narratives by Victoria Aarons (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USMemory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’s Graphic Narratives by Victoria Aarons (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®139432026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19The Immigrant’s Turn: Weiser, Shaftesbury, and the “German Day,” 1911–1919
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978329
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In 1915, Christian Friedrich Weiser published the novella Die Hoffnung des Iren; the same year it was translated into English as The Faith of an Irishman. The story is set in the United States during the 1899 Samoan crisis, a stand-off between Germany, on the one hand, and England and the United States, on the other, over the pacific islands of Samoa. This moment of crisis looks to Weiser in hindsight as foreshadowing the war that by 1915 had broken out but with the United States still on the sidelines.The narrator of the story is a German-American on a train.1 Newspapers he sees speak of the “divine mission of the Anglo-Saxon race” (8). In disgust, he lays the papers aside and picks up a German book. A fellow
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/376/image/coversmallThe Immigrant’s Turn: Weiser, Shaftesbury, and the “German Day,” 1911–19192025-12-19text/htmlen-USThe Immigrant’s Turn: Weiser, Shaftesbury, and the “German Day,” 1911–19192025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®940752026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19