Ethical Limits and the Ends of Confession in Conrad's Under Western Eyes and "Poland Revisited" (original) (raw)
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Disclosing Structures: Scenes of Confession in "Pale Fire"
Nabokov Studies, 2023
In his foreword to Despair, written for the revised edition that was published in 1965 (a few years after Pale Fire) Nabokov mentions that the "rather grumpy Englishman" whom he had enlisted as a proofreader had refused to read beyond the first few chapters: "I suspect he wondered if it might not have been a true confession" (Despair 7). This passing remark raises an important question about Nabokov's confessional fictions 1-a category that includes Despair, Lolita, and Pale Fire, though there are pronounced confessional elements also in many of his other novels and short stories, as well as, of course, in Speak, Memory-that previous scholarship has not managed to answer. 2 What, precisely, is a "true confession," and how does it differ from what Alfred Appel, Jr., once called a "mock confession," in his seminal essay on Lolita ("Lolita" 223, emphasis mine)? Such definitional difficulties are not unique to Nabokov studies, of course, but rather reflect a more widespread uncertainty about the forms and functions of confession in Western culture and literature. 3 For the purposes of this essay, confession can be understood as a performative speech act through which the speaking subject seeks to form, transform, and reform him-or herself, and which is addressed to another who is called to bear witness to this transformation and to respond to it in the appropriate manner, for example by passing judgement, conferring recognition, or making a counter-confession. 4 1 The term "confessional fictions" is suggested by J. M. Coetzee in the essay "Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky," where he argues that Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata "can strictly be called confessional fictions because they consist for the greater part of representations of confessions of abhorrent acts by their narrators" (195; see also D'Hoker 33). My definition, outlined in the text, differs from Coetzee's in important ways, as does my reading of Pale Fire, which Coetzee also mentions briefly in his essay (see my note 18). 2 Early Nabokov criticism tended to identify intertextual allusions to confessional writing in Lolita and Despair but mostly refrained from probing deeper than was necessary for identifying the kind of reference, be it "a burlesque of the confessional mode," as Appel termed it ("Lolita" 12; see also "Notes" passim) or something else. Later analyses of confession in Nabokov's oeuvre can be found especially in Kuzmanovich 27-28, and in Connolly 18. For a longer analysis of confession in Lolita, see especially Breitenwischer and my own (unpublished) dissertation chapter on Lolita. 3 These difficulties have been noted for instance by Brooks: "The fact remains," says Brooks midway through his examination, "that our sense of what confession is and does hovers in a zone of uncertainty that has much to do with the multiform nature of confession and its uses for cleansing, amelioration, conversion, counselling, as well as conviction" (87). I will attend to these issues in more detail throughout the essay. 4 The definition is one that I develop in the introduction to my dissertation through readings of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology of confession in The Symbolism of Evil and Michel Foucault's genealogy of confession in Discipline and Punish and volumes 1-4 of The History of Sexuality, supplemented by poststructuralist
At the Crossroad of Confessions
Central European Cultures, 2021
The focus of my study is a mid-seventeenth-century Latin manuscript prayer book. Its most basic characteristics should attract the attention of scholars of the period since it was compiled by a Lutheran married couple from Prešov for their individual religious practice. In examining the prayer book, I was able to identify the basic source of the manuscript, which was previously unknown to researchers: the compendium of the German Lutheran author Philipp Kegel. The manuscript follows the structure of Kegel’s volume and also extracts a number of texts from the German author’s work, which mainly collects the writings of medieval church fathers. In addition to Kegel, I have also been able to identify a few other sources; mainly the writings of Lutheran authors from Germany (Johann Arndt, Johann Gerhardt, Johann Rist, and Johann Michael Dilherr). I give a description of the physical characteristics of the manuscript, its illustrations, the hymns that accompany the prayers, and the copyin...
Joseph Conrad S a Personal Record an Anti Confessional Autobiography
Częstochowa : Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Lingwistycznej, 2008
Joseph Conrad, as a well-known novelist, commencing to pen reminis cences about the beginnings of his nautical career and his first steps as an English writer, faced an essential dilemma.1 On one hand, the need to order and make meaningful the decisions and events from his past was so com pelling that it urged the writer to create his memoirs; on the other, Conrad's distrust of direct confession, unequivocal externalization of his intimate "self' made him choose the literary form of loose remembrances based on apparently chaotic associations referring to people and events from the past. The result was a collection of seemingly disconnected vignettes portraying different episodes from the author's days of yore. The aim of this paper is firstly, to establish to what extent Conrad's volume, A Personal Record, is an autobiography, secondly, to consider whether it is possible to create an anti confessional autobiography, and last but not least, to disclose the techniques that Conrad uses to reduce the confessional character of his recollections.
The question that the present paper addresses revolves around the aesthetic and critical implications generated by the radical recasting in postmodern fiction of the confessional mode in literary narrativity. The self-questioning tendency of firstperson narrative fiction (of all literature, according to DeMan), and the inescapable self-irony inherent even in confessional autobiography (as we learn from Rousseau"s canonical Les Confessions), are at the basis of my argument that the (pseudo)confessional mode in postmodern fictional narrativity is a further development in an already paradoxical literary form that has quite often challenged the frontiers, not only between fiction and autobiography, but also between the moralizing and the rebellious or sceptical tendencies of the novel genre. This paper aims at exploring the implications of the subversive quality that the confessional mode acquires in some of the postmodern narratives as they revisit the forms of life-writing (mainly the diary form and written confession) within the ironic mode. Through the discussion of Evan S. Connell"s The Diary of a Rapist and Kurt Vonnegut"s Mother Night, I mean to demonstrate that what I have called the "pseudoconfessional" mode is anchored in a postmodern aesthetics of surface that consecrates a deliberate problematization of literary meaning and of the ethical
The Outlooks on Confessional Poetry
2017
The main aim of this thesis is to present the Confessional school of poetry starting by introducing its historical and social background of the late 1950s and 1960s Cold-War America and continuing with the development of the Confessional mode in the literary history. Hence, it will be necessary to define the term and point out its central features. Apart from the theoretical part I will examine the four most prominent poets – Robert Lowell, Jon Berryman, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. What is more, their best-known collections will be used to demonstrate and analyze the outlooks on Confessional poetry discussed in the first section.
From the Abyss to the Mirror: Rubashov’s Confession through a Materialist Interpretation
Revista de Literatura, História e Memória, 2020
The use of History to comprehend literary texts is something relatively common. However, frequently, interpreters utilize a mere sequence of historical facts to explain only the context of a given work. The materialist approach, in addition to affirming that History is made of more than simple events, proposes that the text is to be interpreted by its material aspects, like the political and ideological structures of the period. In this paper, the novel Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, is studied through that perspective. The confession of the character Rubashov to counter-revolutionary activities echoes the story of several revolutionaries that sacrificed their lives on behalf of a collective, one that included their own executioner. That act can be incomprehensible if it is not seen through the lenses of the political struggles and the ideologies present at the time. Only through History it is possible to comprehend that more than pure confessions for the “I”, these were confessions for the “we”.