À la table d'Apollon : de l'abondance à la modération dans Francion

The first edition of the Histoire comique de Francion by Charles Sorel (1623) contains numerous references to the eating and drinking. My study examines narrative sequences focused on a fluctuation between deprivation and abundance, frustration and jouissance. In addition to the domain of food, I consider allusions to sexuality and knowledge, insofar as they share the same narrative paradigm, and shed light on each other. This analysis also shows how Sorel relates ambivalent references to food to some of his moral claims, expressed through subversive uses of the tradition of comic fiction. The four books added for the 1626 and 1633 editions of Francion can be perceived as a wavering attempt to displace Bacchus, who presides over the protagonist’s birth and is emblematic of the various immoderations in the first edition.

Meandering musings on the comic fiction index: a peer review on Three men in a boat

The Society of Indexers recently ran a peer review exercise, via their online forum SIdeline, on indexing a section from the comic novel Three men in a boat by Jerome K. Jerome. The exercise was run by Melanie Gee and involved a group of indexers indexing the same text, looking at all the combined indexes, and discussing their thoughts on the process. Paula Clarke Bain reports on the insights and wisdom shared during these discussions, and considers the role and purpose of indexes in more unusual texts like novels and comic fiction.

Postmodern Slave Narratives

This chapter considers the representation of time in postmodern slave narratives. It argues they work through a style of black humour within which the politics of slavery are mediated in complex and ambiguous ways. Starting from the comic fiction of Ishmael Reed, it discusses how scientific discourses turn racial politics into a complicated affair in the novels of Octavia Butler. It finds a similar tension in the recursive fictions of Toni Morrison, where time frequently circles back on itself. This chapter’s second section considers how such inversions are played out in the films of Quentin Tarantino, arguing the disjunctive temporality of his historical films is marked by systematic invocations of antipodean space. Such strategic forms of anachronism and disorientation are associated with the politics of the Obama era, which combined traditional pragmatism with recognition of how transnational pressures were pushing questions about slavery’s historical legacy in a new direction.

Jewish Fictions

This chapter looks at the characteristic genres in which British-Jewish writers have worked in the post-war period. Beginning with the Jewish writers of the 1950s and 1960s, the chapter considers the ways that they use the form of the realist novel to document, mythologize, or lament social mobility. The impact of the Holocaust was increasingly part of public discourse from the 1970s. Jewish writers turned to satirical or comic fiction to confront the taboos and silences associated with this history. By the 1980s, when, for many Jews, links to Jewish history had been lost, Jewish fiction drew upon a new desire to recover the past, not in geographical but in genealogical terms.

Interview with Will Self

Will Self is a renowned British author, cultural thinker, journalist, broadcaster, and psychogeographer. He has authored ten novels, most recently Shark (2014) and Phone (2017); five collections of shorter fiction, and several volumes of nonfiction, most recently The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker (2012). Self has been translated into over 20 languages. His novel Umbrella (2012) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has frequently published in many periodicals including the Guardian, Harper's, the New York Times, the New Statesman, and London Review of Books. He is a regular presenter or panelist on BBC television shows and BBC Radio 4. His first book of short fiction, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He won the Agha Khan Prize for Fiction for Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998), and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for The Butt (2008).In 2007, M. Hunter Hayes published Understanding Will Self on the subject of his life and work. Self is Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, London.This interview was conducted at the bar of the India Club Restaurant, Strand Continental Hotel, London.

Novels of the 1750s

This essay offers a detailed overview of the full range of prose fiction produced in Britain in the 1750s. Beyond the handful of familiar canonical texts, this decade produced more than 200 now-forgotten novels, across an unexpected variety of genres. Recent expansions of the canon—most notably the feminist recovery project—still ignore most of these texts. Looked at seriously, they perturb some major preconceptions about mid-century fiction, including the importance of mimetic realism, the predominance of sentimentalism, and assumptions about the genre’s didactic functions. These questions come together, at the end of the essay, in a detailed discussion of episodic comic fiction that appeared in the wake of Fielding’s Tom Jones.

Alexandre Kojève’s Hegelianism and the Formation of Europe

Kojève once wrote in a reply to Leo Strauss that the philosopher who contemplates action faces a conflict that constitutes the only authentic tragedy left in the Christian or bourgeois world:[T]he tragedy of Hamlet and of Faust. It is a tragic conflict because it is a conflict with no way out, a problem with no possible resolution.One is inclined to add that the acting philosopher has a notoriously comic side, too, a side that has been exploited throughout the history of literature, from Aristophanes’ ‘The Clouds’ to the modern trope of the moronic impotence of the inept professor. But just as the comic fiction of Aristophanes’ ‘Clouds’ ultimately turned out to have had an actual tragic effect on Socrates’ life and death, so the modern depiction of the helpless philosopher is but a reflex on the troubled relation of philosophy and action.

Alexandre Kojève’s Hegelianism and the Formation of Europe

Kojève once wrote in a reply to Leo Strauss that the philosopher who contemplates action faces a conflict that constitutes the only authentic tragedy left in the Christian or bourgeois world: [T]he tragedy of Hamlet and of Faust. It is a tragic conflict because it is a conflict with no way out, a problem with no possible resolution. One is inclined to add that the acting philosopher has a notoriously comic side, too, a side that has been exploited throughout the history of literature, from Aristophanes’ ‘The Clouds’ to the modern trope of the moronic impotence of the inept professor. But just as the comic fiction of Aristophanes’ ‘Clouds’ ultimately turned out to have had an actual tragic effect on Socrates’ life and death, so the modern depiction of the helpless philosopher is but a reflex on the troubled relation of philosophy and action.