Greek Literature and Christian Doctrine in Early Christianity: A Difficult Co-Existence

Journal Description

Literature

Literature is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on literature and cultural studies published quarterly online by MDPI.

Open Access— free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.
Rapid Publication: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision is provided to authors approximately 31 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 6.2 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the first half of 2023).
Recognition of Reviewers: APC discount vouchers, optional signed peer review, and reviewer names published annually in the journal.

Imprint Information Journal Flyer Open Access ISSN: 2410-9789

Latest Articles

Open AccessArticle

The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”

Carolin Jesussek

Literature 2023, 3(3), 327-341; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3030022 - 30 Aug 2023

Abstract

This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado restages her experience of queer intimate partner violence in the form of a gothic fairy tale as “The Queen and the Squid”, reminiscent of the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife. By including gothic fairy-tale elements in the autobiographical text, Machado blurs the boundaries between the fictional and non-fictional realm, between her story and that of Bluebeard’s latest wife, thereby rewriting the tale for a queer context. The annotation of the memoir using Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature further superimposes the fairy tale onto Dream House. Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” is a gender-aware inversion of “Bluebeard”. The reappearance of the tale throughout Machado’s work reveals the persistence of abusive behavioral patterns in relationships to the present day. Machado’s intertextual storytelling blurs the lines between autobiographical events and the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife, creating a shared narrative universe of experiences of women who have dealt with their own iteration of Bluebeard. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present)

Open AccessArticle

Media as Metaphor: Realism in Meiji Print Narratives and Visual Cultures

Jonathan E. Abel

Literature 2023, 3(3), 313-326; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3030021 - 15 Aug 2023

Abstract

This article begins with the assumption that the specificity of metaphors used to discuss narration and mediation matter for understanding them. For instance, arguing for a paradigm shift in literature concomitant with the visual revolution of Meiji, critic Maeda Ai saw Mori Ōgai’s famed early work of realism “Dancing Girl” (Maihime) as translating the effects of the panorama hall into literature. By the end of his career, Mori Ōgai’s narrator of Wild Geese (Gan) compares his own storytelling to stereoscopy. These two different visual medial affordances suggest two different techniques. However, I argue that it is in a third visual medium (one that draws on the marketing of panorama and the visual techniques of stereography) that we may find a metaphor suggesting a continuity between these two modes of realism, between Ōgai’s early career and his later opus, between Maeda’s medial understanding and Ōgai’s own. This third metaphor for understanding Ōgai’s narration implies his mode of narration is never flat, always polyphonous, and advertising one aesthetic on the surface while providing another within. In the end, this view suggests a modernist realism that understood and expressed its own limitations and was, therefore, all the more realistic. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print (circa 1910–1990))

► Show Figures

Figure 1

Open AccessArticle

Greek Literature and Christian Doctrine in Early Christianity: A Difficult Co-Existence

Roberta Franchi

Literature 2023, 3(3), 296-312; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3030020 - 05 Jul 2023

Abstract

This paper traces the complex relationship between classical literature and Christian doctrine in the first four centuries. In the earliest period of Christianity, we can identify two attitudes of Christians towards Greek literature: the hostile attitude shown by Tatian, Theophilus, and Tertullian, and the openness to Greek culture and philosophy demonstrated by Justin the Martyr, Athenagoras of Athens, and Minucius Felix. A notable change happened in the Alexandrian milieu when Clement of Alexandria and Origen started considering Greek classics the embodiment of an authentic Christian spirit. In keeping with Origen, Basil of Caesarea realized a good synthesis between Greek thought and Christian faith. Noting germs of divine revelation in ancient Greek thought, Christian authors took the tools of Greco-Roman criticism and ancient philosophy to develop their doctrine. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Greek Literature and Society in Late Antiquity)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

Open AccessArticle

A Virtual You: Reading Kurahashi Yumiko’s Kurai Tabi through Virtuality

Jason M. Beckman

Literature 2023, 3(3), 278-295; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3030019 - 25 Jun 2023

Abstract

Within literary criticism, the second-person narrative is frequently read within the conventions of the modern realistic novel, tackling the narratee/protagonist as a narratological problem. Such an approach, however, overlooks a core component of what second-person fiction aims to do: that is, draw the reader into the narrative and experience the world of the text firsthand. Seeking instead to theorize the ways in which second-person narratives involve the reader in the text and invite the act of perspective-taking, I turn to virtual reality, which is deeply invested in the cognitive mechanisms through which a sense of presence is produced and in questions of how the mediated experience of virtual reality can influence human thought and behavior. Examining Kurahashi Yumiko’s Kurai Tabi (1961), one of the earliest examples of the literary form in Japanese literature, I consider how the reader can experience presence during moments in the text, and how the text drives the reader’s identification with the “you” who is the target of the narration. Analyzing the second-person narrative as a virtuality provides a new avenue for understanding the reader’s cognitive engagement and experience of second-person fiction. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print (circa 1910–1990))

Open AccessArticle

Artificial Flesh: Rights and New Technologies of the Human in Contemporary Cultural Texts

Samir Dayal

Literature 2023, 3(2), 253-277; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020018 - 12 Jun 2023

Abstract

My essay explores challenges posed to the discourse of rights from new technologies of the human as these are represented in a range of cultural texts—Spike Jonze’s film her, Marie Kondo’s The Magic of Tidying Up, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. These works share a concern with the implications of a relationship, a shared or co-produced world, in which both humans and nonhumans have agency. I conclude by revisiting the bifurcated discourses of antihumanism, especially through a brief consideration of an Afropessimist critique of the category of “Man”, to ask: What status, affordances, and rights, should be extended to nonhumans: robots, anthropomorphized commodities, humanoids, AIs, or human adjacents, or to those excluded or abjected from the category of “the fully human”? Full article

Open AccessArticle

From Havana to Cádiz in the Imaginary of Women Writers of the Last Decades

María del Mar López-Cabrales

and

Inmaculada Rodríguez-Cunill

Literature 2023, 3(2), 242-252; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020017 - 15 May 2023

Abstract

In this essay, we intend to demonstrate how the cities of Havana and Cádiz became mutable literary subjects that accompany the female characters of the narratives of female writers of the past decades from Havana (Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Ena Lucía Portela, and Mylene Fernández Pintado) and Cádiz (Ana Rossetti and Pilar Paz Pasamar). The ironic and delusional visions of a ruined life due to the special period, economic crisis, and political xenophobia in Cádiz will be illustrated by Cuban-Spanish mapping of the analyzed authors’ works. Our hypothesis stems from the idea that there is a clear relation between the representation of the city and political, cultural, and patriarchal transgression that is quoted in these texts (Bataille), which relates to the experience of scarcity/poverty lived on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Our bibliographic search has focused on the literary expression of the experience of these cities from the point of view of female writers and protagonists. We concluded with a universal understanding of the experience of the space marked by literature and the gaze of women. Full article

Open AccessArticle

New Paradigms in French Historiography, or the Same Old Ones?

Monica Martinat

Literature 2023, 3(2), 231-241; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020016 - 26 Apr 2023

Abstract

This article presents some recent trends in French historiography that concern the relationship between history and literature. Among the recent developments are “experiments” carried out by a few historians, which are characterized by an explicit determination to focus on narrative, along with a willingness to share one’s own historical subjectivity. By going through some of the examples from this approach, this article highlights how these literary reflexes make important contributions. However, it also points out the weakness of this proposed method of making history on epistemological grounds. That is, it abandons the form of historical writing that requires distance and an appreciation that history’s vocation is to propose solid but uncertain propositions (to paraphrase Zemon Davis). By insisting on emotional and sensitive understanding, the knowledge gained from these experiments only questions the scientific aspects of history and history itself. This recent trend is not exactly new, as it evidently links up with some of the consequences generated by the linguistic turn. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemologies in 20th Century French Literature and Thought)

Open AccessArticle

Dirty Windows and Troublesome Things: The Problem of Object-Orientation in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie

Andy Zuliani

Literature 2023, 3(2), 217-230; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020015 - 17 Apr 2023

Abstract

This article investigates the representation of objects in La Jalousie (1957), a novel in the nouveau roman tradition written by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the ‘new novel’ sought to render the material world with objective clarity, and positioned itself against traditional fiction, with its reliance on metaphor, allegory, and other ‘projections,’ this article argues that such an aesthetic program is undercut by its own assumptions about the power of description and the primacy of the visual. In an analysis which hybridizes three separate strands of criticism—object-oriented ontology, Heideggerian phenomenology, and the models of ‘resonation’ proposed by Brian Massumi—I will argue that such a treatment of objects, with its exclusive reliance on visual description, measurement, and enumeration, ends up depriving objects of the vitality and dynamism that would justify such a fictional project in the first place. However, traces of this dynamism do survive the flattening sweep of Robbe-Grillet’s narration, and indeed offer from the cracks and fissures of the novel’s otherwise smoothly controlled style the possibility of an alternate ‘object-orientation’—one, I will argue, which suspends its cool optical detachment to allow, however briefly, the eruption of a messy, entangling register of touch. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemologies in 20th Century French Literature and Thought)

Open AccessArticle

Books to the Masses! An Investigation of Russian WWI ‘Dime Stories’

Luca Cortesi

Literature 2023, 3(2), 201-216; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020014 - 08 Apr 2023

Abstract

The impact of WWI on Russian society was immediately disruptive. This effect affected every sphere of social and cultural environs. Although previous research has established that WWI was a major topic of the cultural discourse of that time, the way in which WWI literature, and in particular consumer literature, contributed to the representation of war among the mass population deserves further research. By drawing a parallel with the phenomenon of the American dime novel, this study is grounded on the analysis of the style, content, structure, and even of the ‘mere’ appearance of some 1914–1916 ‘mass’ publications aimed at the broader public. The goal of this article, therefore, is to stimulate a consistent re-evaluation of this strand of ‘consumer’ war literature and to focus on its importance as a culturological tool to have a better understanding of the cultural environment of that time. Full article

► Show Figures

Figure 1

Open AccessArticle

The Codex Visionum and the Uses of Greek Christian Poetry

Laura Miguélez-Cavero

Literature 2023, 3(2), 159-200; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020013 - 23 Mar 2023

Abstract

A systematic socio-cultural study of the uses of Christian poetry in the late antique Greek-speaking Mediterranean is still lacking. Most literary overviews restrict themselves to an overview of the extant texts and some programmatic reflections in the poetry by Gregory of Nazianzus. This paper seeks to address this matter by a combined reading of the best-known poetic forms (including the programmatic reflections by Gregory) and the poems copied in the Codex Visionum (now in the Bodmer Collection). Since the edition of the latter was completed in 1999, they have often featured in studies on the origin of monasticism and are well known in papyrological circles, but have received insufficient attention from literature and cultural historians. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Greek Literature and Society in Late Antiquity)

Open AccessArticle

Crisscrossed Identities and Black Feminist Perspectives in Lucía Mbomío’s Novel Hija del camino (2019)

Betsabé Navarro

Literature 2023, 3(2), 145-158; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020012 - 23 Mar 2023

Abstract

Some claim there is a lack of attention to black studies in current literary and academic fields in Spain. Even though there is an emerging wave of Afro-Spanish writers in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, many of them denounce the struggle they experienced to see their stories published and state that Afro-Spanish literature is absent from Spanish universities’ curricula. Among the recent black voices that have achieved recognition in Spain is journalist and writer Lucía Mbomío, who condemns, in her debut novel Hija del camino (2019), the traumatic experiences that black women undergo with racism and sexism in Spain. With the aim of giving representation to the literature of Afro-Spanish women writers, the present article analyzes Mbomío’s novel from the perspective of black studies, black feminism, and cultural studies. Full article

Open AccessArticle

Projected on the Dusk: Seeking Cinema in 1910s and 1920s Japanese Poetry

Andrew Campana

Literature 2023, 3(1), 133-144; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010011 - 07 Mar 2023

Abstract

In this article, I explore a set of poetic works from early 20th-century Japan that took cinema—films, movie theaters, screenings, sets, and a variety of cinematic technologies—as their main subject. An enormous range of poets, including some of modern Japanese poetry’s most canonical figures, took a diverse set of approaches to the subject matter, but all were less interested in portraying films themselves, and more in how poetry could use “cinema” and the “cinematic” to grapple with questions of memory, media, ecology, the body, and social change. Looking at these works—most of which appear here in English for the first time—we can find a new archive of early cinematic thought and sensation not bound to the screen. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print (circa 1910–1990))

Open AccessArticle

Sound, Smell, Objects, and the Discursive Space of Nagai Kafū’s 1920s Fiction

Gala Maria Follaco

Literature 2023, 3(1), 123-132; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010010 - 23 Feb 2023

Abstract

Throughout his life, Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) tackled crucial issues of modernity, such as the urban experience and conflicting notions of selfhood. This article explores some aspects of his narrative practice that enrich our understanding of his literary output while suggesting new avenues for future research on space-time representation in twentieth-century literature. I focus on passive senses such as hearing and smell, and on material objects and physical sensations as narrative devices employed by the author in order to broaden comprehension and enrich the experience of objective reality. In particular, I examine Yukidoke (Melting Snow), a 1922 short story understudied thus far but that offers useful insights as regards the author’s intent to defy superimposed notions of affect and space. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print (circa 1910–1990))

Open AccessArticle

“That Day Does Not Belong to Our Generation”: Komatsu Sakyō’s Affective Futurities

Baryon Tensor Posadas

Literature 2023, 3(1), 112-122; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010009 - 16 Feb 2023

Abstract

Commentary that observes the frequency of the appearances of images of disaster pervades much of the discourse surrounding postwar Japanese popular culture, and especially Japanese science fiction. Against such approaches, I argue that it is more productive to read these narratives of disaster through the critical lens of the genre’s engagement with the problem of futurity. My contention then is that these narratives of disaster do not merely function as imaginative repetitions or re-enactments of past events, but also take on an anticipatory quality, affectively preparing and the ground for and pre-empting responses to future events. I examine the work of Komatsu Sakyō (1931–2011) in particular, whose writing makes for an illustrative test case for articulating the premediative dimension of disaster narratives in postwar Japanese science fiction. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print (circa 1910–1990))

Open AccessArticle

The Rhythm of Breath in Natsume Sōseki’s Recollecting and Such

Matthew Mewhinney

Literature 2023, 3(1), 94-111; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010008 - 08 Feb 2023

Abstract

This article examines Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) memoir Recollecting and Such (Omoidasu koto nado; 1910). I argue that Sōseki invites the reader to imagine breath through his literary representation of both physiological and metaphysical experience and the rhythm of the narrative’s experimental poetic form. In concert with the theme of this special issue, I show how Recollecting and Such self-reflexively restores and evokes the corporeal experience of sensation beyond just visual perception: the narrative reveals itself as a poetic form of measurement and its first-person narrator a “rhythmanalyst”, someone who listens to the internal rhythms of his own body and then to that of the external world (Henri Lefebvre). The narrator’s awareness of the duration, frequency, and intensity of sensation as well as his regular compositions of metered verse—haiku and kanshi (traditional Chinese poetry as practiced in Japan; Sinitic verse)—are ways that the narrative measures the limits of life, memory, and sensory experience. The oscillation between prose and poetry in the narrative generates an organic rhythm, simulating the long and short breaths of a convalescing body, which invites the reader to breathe together—“to conspire” in the literal sense—with the text as a form of sympathy. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print (circa 1910–1990))

Open AccessArticle

Aristotelian Time, Ethics, and the Art of Persuasion in Shakespeare’s Henry V

Christopher Crosbie

Literature 2023, 3(1), 82-93; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010007 - 31 Jan 2023

Abstract

In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences, that is, to imagine themselves in the future, understanding the present as part of their own history. Henry’s invocation of an imagined future that understands the present as a theoretical past betrays a surprising indebtedness to Aristotle’s notion of time as “a measure of change with respect to the before and after.” Drawing on Aristotle’s theory that time depends upon a perceiving mind and that those unconscious of change mistakenly “join up the latter ‘now’ to the former and make it one,” this essay argues that Henry succeeds in altering his auditors’ behavior, and thus generating the history he desires, by merging their shared, lived present with his own fictive temporalities. A mode of persuasion famous in its ethical ambivalence, Henry’s rhetoric reveals how the very ontological assumptions governing perceptions of time may be manipulated, for good or ill, amid audiences who fail to critically envisage their own counterbalancing, imaginative histories. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Times They Are A-changin’: Temporal Shifts in Early Modern Drama)

Open AccessEditorial

Acknowledgment to the Reviewers of Literature in 2022

Literature Editorial Office

Literature 2023, 3(1), 80-81; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010006 - 16 Jan 2023

Abstract

High-quality academic publishing is built on rigorous peer review [...] Full article

Open AccessArticle

Henri Bergson’s Haunted Epistemology: Consciousness Unframed

Adam Lovasz

Literature 2023, 3(1), 66-79; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010005 - 09 Jan 2023

Abstract

In his main work, Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson presents a panpsychist ontology which cuts through the Gordian knot of the mind vs. matter problem. Taking this age-old philosophical topic, Bergson pushes the dualism of mind and matter beyond breaking point. Matter is reconceived as the sum of all images. Bergson introduces the dual concepts of cosmic “perception” and cosmic “memory”. Matter itself is reinterpreted as a continuum of all possible intensities of perception and memory. Bergson’s ontology has important epistemological ramifications. There is no sharp dividing line between consciousness and matter. In light of these insights, I propose a reading of Bergson’s relatively lesser-known lecture, “‘Phantasms of the Living’ and Psychical Research”, presented at the Society for Psychical Research in 1913. Here, Bergson elaborates upon the implications of his image-ontology for the possible post mortem fate of consciousness. In my concluding remarks, I suggest that Bergson’s observations may be of help in constructing an anti-reductionist and indeterministic epistemology. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemologies in 20th Century French Literature and Thought)

Open AccessArticle

A Register-Based Study of Interior Monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Volker Gast

Christian Wehmeier

and

Dirk Vanderbeke

Literature 2023, 3(1), 42-65; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010004 - 06 Jan 2023

Cited by 1

Abstract

While fictional orality (spoken language in fictional texts) has received some attention in the context of quantitative register studies at the interface of linguistics and literature, only a few attempts have been made so far to apply the quantitative methods of register studies to interior monologues (and other forms of inner speech or thought representation). This article presents a case study of the three main characters of James Joyce’s Ulysses whose thoughts are presented extensively in the novel, i.e., Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Making use of quantitative, corpus-based methods, the thoughts of these characters are compared to fictional direct speech and (literary and non-literary) reference texts. We show that the interior monologues of Ulysses span a range of non-narrative registers with varying degrees of informational density and involvement. The thoughts of one character, Leopold Bloom, differ substantially from that character’s speech. The relative heterogeneity across characters is taken as an indication that interior monologue is used as a means of perspective taking and implicit characterization. Full article

► Show Figures

Figure 1

Open AccessArticle

The Misfortunes of a Genre: Prins by César Aira as an Allegory of the Gothic

José Mariano García

Literature 2023, 3(1), 30-41; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010003 - 03 Jan 2023

Abstract

The gothic genre in Latin American literature has been the object of fashionable interest in recent decades and seems to absorb all the elements of the politically correct agenda; however, in the current trend of absolute presentism that seems regular in the critics, it is not taken into account that there exists a previous tradition more or less connected with its European sources but in search of its own cultural character. I would like to comment on some specifically gothic novels published in Argentina between the 1980s and the 1990s, as well as a recent one by the prolific writer César Aira. Prins can be analyzed as an ambiguous culmination of the gothic tendency, as well as a symptom of the disorientation of a genre that threatens to become a label as broad as it is empty. Full article