General Henning’s Yekaterinburg: An Attempt at Reading the “Urban Text”

The author of this article attempts a semiotic interpretation of the features of the architectural and planning system of early Yekaterinburg (1723–1734). The method is based on an improvisation on Michel de Certeau’s ideas about the city as a complex text, which results from the simultaneous and inconsistent creativity of its founders and administrators on the one hand and ordinary people on the other. Another source for the author’s improvisation is the ideas of some representatives of the French school of genetic criticism, more particularly, the concepts of avant-text and text. From these positions, the author considers the activity of V. I. Henning (Rus. transcription: Gennin), the founder and first head of Yekaterinburg and a general in Russian service. The main milestones of his career, the accumulation of experience as an engineer and administrator, and the formation of a worldview before his Ural period are evaluated as work on the avant-text, while Yekaterinburg becomes the actual text. The author proves that Yekaterinburg was created by Henning not just as a large mining and metallurgical enterprise. General Henning’s Yekaterinburg appears as a manifesto city, a material text that embodies the aesthetics of the Baroque and the postulates of cameralism in its layout and execution. The city became a symbol of Petrine empire building on the border with Russia’s Asian possessions.

Of Epicene Particles and Other Misleading Tricks

“Carta perdida en un cajón” [Letter lost in a drawer] is a paradigmatic example of simultaneous ambiguities at work in Silvina Ocampo’s fiction (1903–1993). In this short story published in 1959, pronouns and shifters, as well as endings that mark gender cooperate to erase certainties and make the reader actively seek clues to understand the exchange the short story sets up. By scrutinizing its manuscript, I examine Ocampo’s writing and revision strategies and elaborate on some of her creative processes in her search for ambiguity. Through five key compositional moves I have identified in her manuscripts, my essay focuses on how Ocampo revises and ramps up the writerly effect of gender ambiguity that allowed the construction of queer identities in her fiction. I argue that the insertion of epicene particles and insults — which are less common in Spanish than gendered ones — , added at later stages of revision, demonstrate the intentional pursuit of a reading marked by confusion around the depiction of a non-normative desire. Genetic criticism allows us to reveal the painstaking process by which queer desire nudges its way into expression.

Virginia Woolf and Poetry

Virginia Woolf’s career was shaped by her impression of the conflict between poetry and the novel, a conflict she often figured as one between masculine and feminine, old and new, bound and free. In large part for feminist reasons, Woolf promoted the triumph of the novel over poetry, even as she adapted some of poetry’s techniques for the novel in order to portray the inner life. Woolf considered poetry the rival form to the novel. A monograph on Woolf’s sense of generic rivalry thus offers a thorough reinterpretation of the motivations and aims of her canonical work. Drawing on unpublished archival material and little-known publications, the book combines biography, book history, formal analysis, genetic criticism, source study, and feminist literary history. Woolf’s attitude toward poetry is framed within contexts of wide scholarly interest: the decline of the lyric poem, the rise of the novel, the gendered associations with these two genres, elegy in prose and verse, and the history of English Studies. Written in clear and lively language, the book maintains a narrative drive as it traces Woolf’s reading and writing over her lifetime, including her response to poets and critics in her circle such as J. K. Stephen, Julian Bell, Vita Sackville-West, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden. Virginia Woolf and Poetry makes three important contributions. It clarifies a major prompt for Woolf’s poetic prose. It exposes the generic rivalry that was creatively generative to many modernist writers. And it details how holding an ideology of a genre can shape literary debates and aesthetics.

Decomposing the asylum in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies: Genetic criticism and the author

This article focuses on Samuel Beckett’s use of the asylum in his novel Malone Dies to explore the role of non-textual elements in genetic criticism (the study of a writer’s creative process through the analysis of their compositional manuscripts), as well as the function of the author in genetic analysis. Taking as its starting point Iain Bailey’s challenge to genetic critics to account for the biographical author which underpins the discipline’s study of written traces in authorial manuscripts, the article contends that genetic criticism must be used in tandem with other approaches such as historicism when studying spaces like Beckett’s asylums. Though Beckett took a scholarly approach when integrating such material into earlier work, making research notes which can be regarded as part of the genetic dossier, the asylum in Malone Dies – based on Dublin’s Saint John of God Hospital – leaves no such trail of textual breadcrumbs. Therefore, we must pay particular attention to the historical function of Saint John of God’s in order to understand how the asylum works in composition and reception. In doing so, an author existing beyond the written traces they leave behind can retake their place in a necessarily incomplete empirical field over five decades after Roland Barthes prematurely declared their death.

A POET ON THE OTHER BANK: POETICS OF AFFECT IN THE PROSE BY BOHDAN IHOR ANTONYCH

The is the second paper of the two-part study examining the ‘unwritten novel’ “On the Other Bank” by Bohdan Ihor Antonych, a notable Western Ukrainian writer of the interwar period. Known primarily for his poetry, Antonych did not finish this novel-in-progress, leaving behind only draft notes, that offer a glimpse into the very process of his writing. Analyzed from the perspective of genetic criticism, Antonych’s manuscripts are treated as an avant-text, demonstrating a ‘scenario of writing’ in the transition from the novel of action to the novel of state. In contrast to his image-based poetry Antonych’s prose rests on the technique of description. Depicting nature or the urban environment, the author conveys a certain emotional and psychological condition. Paying special attention to qualitative adjectives, he appeals to the sensory experience of the reader. Despite the fact that the plan of the novel indicates the main events of the plot, the author mainly captures the emotions of the characters. Dialogues also play an unusual role in the text, as their function is expressive rather than a communicative one. Since the dynamics of the text is based on emotional and psychological movement, and not on the sequence of events or judgments, it is considered to be an example of affective poetics in Ukrainian modern literature. Affect appears in Antonych’s text as force and tension. It shapes the human personality and at the same time challenges it. Affect goes beyond discursiveness and captures the body; its intensity is expressed through the voice and speed. Antonych’s characters share a common transpersonal experience in their childhood and a common object of desire after becoming adults. Moreover, the transfer of emotions into the sphere of interpersonal relations gives the affect not only a psychological but also an ethical dimension. Analyzing Antonych’s manuscript, the author of the paper focuses on the dynamics of writing, not on the one of the plot, and finds grounds for conclusions about the affective nature of Antonych’s prose. It is evident that in the ‘unwritten novel’ “On the Other Bank” Antonych depicts the modernist type of literary character as homo sentiens, who perceives the world in a subtle way and experiences it deeply.

Digitized Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Self-Translation Praxes Mediated through Digital Technology

The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) brings together digital facsimiles of the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett’s works – documents currently held in over thirteen libraries and archives in Europe and North America – with the aim of furthering genetic criticism. Incorporating three of the eight modules available for researchers engaging with the BDMP website as of August 2020, together with one forthcoming monograph study whose corresponding digital module has yet to be made live on the site, this article will, in effect, make use of three novels and one novella, all in both their French and English iterations, in order to present concrete examples of the ways in which the exposition of idiosyncratic features of Beckett’s œuvre is being facilitated by this nascent digital archive.

Alfonsas Aldonis: Writing a Soviet Poem

The article studies the genesis of poems by one of the most famous Lithuanian poets of the Soviet era Alfonsas Maldonis (1929–2007). It follows the methodology of genetic criticism and compares versions of manuscripts and texts of poems that have already been published. The main attention is given to poems “Awakening from Sleep”, “White Mountains”, “Morning Wind”. The poet’s first manuscripts are usually more ordinary, containing everyday realities and even open critique of Soviet life. While editing the manuscripts, the author sometimes only deletes or replaces some words with neutral ones (names of religious holidays, realities reminiscent of Soviet repression), but more often, the image is fundamentally redesigned, the particulars are replaced with abstract images, creating a multifaceted reading. The original ideas do not disappear but seem to be taken into the poem’s underground layer. The manuscripts’ analysis reveals how Maldonis created his distinctive poem and how an internal censor is involved in the process, suggesting which words would never be printed in a book published by an official publisher. Rarely, but there are also opposite cases where Soviet symbols are inserted into an ideologically neutral text. Maldonis’s poetry, however, contains signs similar to what Czesław Miłosz called the “captive mind”. It is difficult to say whether those few sovietisms stem from internal conviction or external ideological pressure to write bright, optimistic texts.