Konturen: Vol 10 (2019)

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/24443

Re-Thinking Gender in Reading

This issue edited by Sabine I. Gölz

This special issue of Konturen calls for renewed attention to the study of reading, long neglected in literary studies. It calls for a re-conceptualization of our interactions with writing, texts, and literary language—for a radical reorientation of what we read for. As we wake up to our difference from the text, we rediscover possibilities that we have habitually overlooked. Some central assumptions emerge: Writing is an apparatus that harnesses its readers – us. We may think that we use it, but the reverse is just as true: it uses us. Especially important are figurative, rhetorical, and mostly subliminal dimensions by which literary language interpellates us, lines us up according our identifications, and lures us into mimesis, into mechanically conforming to the constellations it prefigures. Gendered signals are central to this, because they elicit particularly mechanical and predictable responses. Writing promotes its own interests—not ours. But writing is also fundamentally incomplete. It needs the living to reproduce itself. This realization is profoundly liberating: if we read ourselves as not in the text, as the very site of the incompletion of writing, we abandon the failed project of representation and wake up in (and to) the Spielraum (space for play, leeway), in and as the ground of language. Here and now, we can begin to work towards re-configuring the language we have inherited.

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    Introduction: Against Assimilation
    (University of Oregon, 2018) Gölz, Sabine I.
    This special issue of Konturen calls for renewed attention to the study of reading, long neglected in literary studies. It calls for a re-conceptualization of our interactions with writing, texts, and literary language—for a radical reorientation of what we read for. As we wake up to our difference from the text, we rediscover possibilities that we have habitually overlooked. Some central assumptions emerge: Writing is an apparatus that harnesses its readers – us. We may think that we use it, but the reverse is just as true: it uses us. Especially important are figurative, rhetorical, and mostly subliminal dimensions by which literary language interpellates us, lines us up according our identifications, and lures us into mimesis, into mechanically conforming to the constellations it prefigures. Gendered signals are central to this, because they elicit particularly mechanical and predictable responses. Writing promotes its own interests—not ours. But writing is also fundamentally incomplete. It needs the living to reproduce itself. This realization is profoundly liberating: if we read ourselves as not in the text, as the very site of the incompletion of writing, we abandon the failed project of representation and wake up in (and to) the Spielraum (space for play, leeway), in and as the ground of language. Here and now, we can begin to work towards re-configuring the language we have inherited.
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    Apostrophe's Double
    (University of Oregon, 2018) Gölz, Sabine I.
    “Apostrophe’s Double” is part of a larger research project studying the (often subliminal) strategies by which literary language writing controls its readership. Part I of the essay argues that the rhetorical trope “apostrophe” functions as one such interpellative apparatus that partitions our world and splits our practices. The trope’s operational distinction between authorized speakers / readers vs. ‘dummy’ addressees / targets sets in motion a hierarchical and divisive logic that empowers some and disqualifies others. Part II argues that there is a second version (or ‘turn’) of the figure of apostrophe that has been neglected altogether, one in which the ‘target’ responds not by turning to the interpellation but by turning away instead. This turn away is key to the poetics of certain strong women poets. Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem “Anrufung des großen Bären” (“Invocation of the Great Bear”) provides a lucid model of the transition from one to the other. Apostrophe is thus double: one establishes the apparatus, the other deconstructs it. Part III contrasts two radically divergent uses of language corresponding to these turns: Bachmann’s “Frankfurt Lectures” enact the radical change towards which her poem leads us. Jonathan Culler’s seminal article “Apostrophe” exemplifies the relation to language Bachmann frees herself from. Two subject positions emerge in the wake of this double apostrophic, each with its own constraints: one is empowered by the apparatus yet must remain subservient to it. The other reclaims sovereignty as a living being from the apparatus, on the condition of radically unrepresentable.
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    "She couldn't simply write a letter." Scenes of Reading in Ingeborg Bachmann's The Book of Franza
    (University of Oregon, 2018) Boos, Sonja
    This article contends that Ingeborg Bachmann’s The Book of Franza anticipates and significantly advances feminist critiques of writing and authorship by exposing and effectively deconstructing scenes of reading as the site where discursive power is exercised and significations are enforced by using “her” as a universal signifier. But it also performs a refusal to impart to the reader a subject that could be pinned down, identified, and hence objectified. Eluding containment by the patriarchal law, the subject has the chance to come into a law of its own as it vanishes and subsequently returns as a reader with a new type of leverage.
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    War in Peacetime: Authorship between Bachmann and Ungaretti
    (University of Oregon, 2018) Agnese, Barbara
    The following reflections contribute to an exploration of the "peacetime crimes" in Ingeborg Bachmann's work by offering an analysis of an episode in her novel Malina. Tracing a hitherto unnoticed allusion to a poem by Ungaretti, the analysis also contributes to a discussion of Bachmann's poetics of citation. The subtle web of intertextual play and citation that pervades the whole novel de-emphasizes the role of the author in literary history and opens instead a reading space where literature as textual memory, again and again, comes to be actualized.
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    Moderne Spiele: Play and Gender in Walter Benjamin's "Berlin Chronicle"
    (University of Oregon, 2018) Brown, Patrick
    This essay performs a reading of Walter Benjamin's “Berlin Chronicle” to show that what is at stake in this work is the question of male sovereignty as it relates to the modern city and the modernist text as spaces of play. This autobiographical sketch draws and, in its form, explores an analogy between the ways city spaces are organized and the way writing organizes a life’s memories into spatially distributed groupings of signs. Its fragmentary, reflexive structure purports to challenge the linearity of standard autobiographical writing, subjecting them to the play of associations and the casual stroll of the flâneur. Given Benjamin’s emphasis, here as well as elsewhere, on a method of composition that reflects the “surface play” of 20th-century modernity, it would seem that the reader is also invited to stroll like the flâneur, or play like the gambler, through the text. The city and the essay become analogous to each other as spatial constructs the reader is invited to circumnavigate—they create Spielraum, or room-for-play. However, Benjamin’s game is deceptive, as he strategically entraps the feminine—represented by the rather Oedipal coupling of Benjamin’s mother and a variety of lovers and prostitutes—within this space. On a closer reading, gendered difference becomes the protocol by which a textual-urban network operates in “Berlin Chronicle,” making it exemplary of the ways in which playful modern media and spaces condition and position subjects within their games.
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    [it] shakes my whole breathing being: Rethinking Gender with Translation in Anne Carson’s “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways”
    (University of Oregon, 2018) Rose, Adrienne K. Ho
    Anne Carson’s “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways” expresses new possibilities for the contemporary retranslation of ancient Classical texts. My article argues that Carson’s powerful, ground-shifting retranslation enlists significant procedural constraints to offer a progressive re-reading of the heteronormative, conventionally gendered garden in Ibykos Fragment 286. Carson retranslates Fragment 286 six times using only vocabularies from selected topical and literary source texts with contexts remote from the original. As a result, vocabularies and scenarios shift—from Romantic love to microwave operations—but the structural and rhetorical gestures of the fragment are retained. Conventional gender roles are not merely reversed nor is the garden simply transformed. Carson’s six versions transcend the emphasis on gendered textual signals by leaving gender aside to investigate performative reading and translation practices more closely.
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    Eva Meyer, Legende sein
    (University of Oregon, 2018) Volkening, Heide
    Review Essay.
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    Carol Jacobs, Sebald's Vision
    (University of Oregon, 2018) Klebes, Martin
    Review Essay