Rachel Hollander | St. John's University (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Rachel Hollander

English in Africa, 2021

This article analyzes moments of queer hospitality in two novels by Olive Schreiner to argue for ... more This article analyzes moments of queer hospitality in two novels by Olive Schreiner to argue for new ways of understanding her complex views of race and gender. I focus on Otto Farber’s missionary ethics, in contrast to a competing model of imperialist domination, to show the beginnings of queer hospitality in African Farm. Otto’s disruptive Christian morality frames two of the few instances of African resistance in this early novel. While the unfinished later novel, From Man to Man, seems at first glance to embrace two classic Victorian domestic plots, those of marriage and of the fallen woman, I argue that Rebekah’s Cape Town home functions as a queer space that allows a radical rewriting of those plots. Her adopted mixed-race daughter, Sartje, and Bertie’s rebellious African maid, Griet, embody as-yet unfulfilled potential for women of colour in the novel. Rebekah’s redefinition of her own marriage and Bertie’s fall into prostitution create new spaces for women’s lives and allow ...

Journal of Modern Literature, 2015

Feminist Modernist Studies, 2019

ABSTRACT Focusing on the significance of the term “indifference,” I argue that in her 1938 essay ... more ABSTRACT Focusing on the significance of the term “indifference,” I argue that in her 1938 essay Three Guineas Virginia Woolf proposes strategies for resistance to fascism and war that anticipate Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of alterity. Starting with the issue of women's difference from men, Woolf develops a specifically feminist critique of enlightenment thought that stresses the potential of women as “outsiders,” and thereby challenges existing political positions. In this article, I trace the origins of indifference back to John Locke and other eighteenth-century thinkers to reveal the ethical and aesthetic potential of Woolf's call for women's critically disengaged response to the status quo. I emphasize the paradoxical nature of the “society of outsiders” to suggest that Woolf lays the groundwork for a queer and feminist modernist aesthetics, one that radically undermines the supposed split between progressive politics and high modernist form in the 1930s. Reaching beyond readings of Three Guineas that focus on the importance of affect, I argue instead for a full understanding of the political power of indifference.

1 hough few critics would still claim that the modernist novel privileges experimental form over ... more 1 hough few critics would still claim that the modernist novel privileges experimental form over engagement with social and political concerns, most literary histories have not succeeded in articulating how m odern ist developments in the style and content of the English novel reflect a transformation of the relationship between literature and politics. If the Victorian realist novel seems to rely on an understanding o f morality that values sympathetic identification and the possibility o f common inter ests, what forms the basis o f the ethical and political significance o f the novel when fragmentation and extreme skepticism have replaced faith in progress and comprehension? The poststructuralist rethinking o f ethics in terms o f responsibility for the absolutely other, associated most closely with Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, enables a more complex understanding of how modernism’s formal conventions reflect and extend a new conception o f literary representation and ...

1. "The ardent eighties:" Hospitality and realism at the end of the century 2. George E... more 1. "The ardent eighties:" Hospitality and realism at the end of the century 2. George Eliot leaves home 3. "This house from this moment is yours and not mine:" Unconditional hospitality in The Woodlanders 4. Unhomely ethics and radical intimacy in The Story of an African Farm 5. Homeless modernity in Jacob's Room Afterword: Hospitality of the "post-"

Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2005

... View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/10436920590914403 Rachel Hollander... more ... View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/10436920590914403 Rachel Hollander ... 11 Brantlinger, Lesjak, Linehan, Cheyette, Anderson, and Ragussis all focus on the novel&#x27;s multiple and conflicted perspectives towards Zionism, nationalism, and Judaism. ...

Joseph Conrad and Postcritique

Joseph Conrad is usually seen as politically conservative or indifferent. Reading his late novel,... more Joseph Conrad is usually seen as politically conservative or indifferent. Reading his late novel, Under Western Eyes, as an illustration of the relationship between ethics and politics complicates this assessment. Conrad establishes Russia as an abyssal space of otherness in his 1905 essay, " Autocracy and War. " Under Western Eyes (1911) stages the clash between Russia's non-viable political extremes (autocracy and revolution) and a Levinasian ethics of alterity. The end of the novel implies that, in the wake of complete political alienation, a new future for the nation can be imagined, one that acknowledges the self 's responsibility for the other. Using Levinas's rethinking of ethics to reinterpret Conrad's ambivalent cynicism opens up new ways of understanding the politics of modernist literature. E thical questions saturate the writings of Joseph Conrad and Emmanuel Levinas, and neither writer has a simple or clear relationship to politics. While the tensions between ethical and political realms are not identical in the proto-modernist novels of the former and the post-structuralist theory of the latter, both are concerned with the seeming incompatibility between real-world communities and absolute ethical demands. Placing Conrad's resistance to established political ideologies in dialogue with Levinas's understanding of ethics as responsibility for the other, I suggest that the tension between ethics and politics may be productive rather than paralyzing. Complicating existing readings of Conrad's politics, I hope to rethink modernist commitment more generally.

Though few critics would still claim that the modernist novel privileges experimental form over e... more Though few critics would still claim that the modernist novel privileges experimental form over engagement with social and political concerns, most literary histories have not succeeded in articulating how modern-ist developments in the style and content of the English novel refl ect a transformation of the relationship between literature and politics. If the Victorian realist novel seems to rely on an understanding of morality that values sympathetic identifi cation and the possibility of common interests , what forms the basis of the ethical and political signifi cance of the novel when fragmentation and extreme skepticism have replaced faith in progress and comprehension? The poststructuralist rethinking of ethics in terms of responsibility for the absolutely other, associated most closely with Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, enables a more complex understanding of how modernism's formal conventions refl ect and extend a new conception of literary representation and its relationship to the real. Focusing on its status as both structurally experimental and deeply engaged with questions of war, urbanism, and gender, I will suggest that Virginia Woolf 's Jacob's Room illustrates how the modernist English novel interweaves ethical, political, and epistemological concerns. In doing so I hope to clarify a contemporary understanding of the ethics of fi ction. Modernist fi ction is often defi ned as deeply opposed to the didac-tic, moralistic Victorian novel. I would like to propose, however, a more complicated story about the relationship between realism, modernism, and ethics.

Lit-literature Interpretation Theory, Jan 1, 2005

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan 1, 2007