Editorial [PDF]
Elsa Fiott, Aaron Aquilina: University of Malta, Lancaster University
Off with his head! [PDF]
Joseph Fletcher: Edinburgh College of Art
This essay explores the multiple significations of the term Acéphale within the work of Georges Bataille. Developing a reading of Bataille’s philosophy from the position of the Acephalic character, the text argues that Bataille’s well-known wish to perform a human sacrifice was intended to create the Acephalic figure itself. In perverting the reading of Bataille’s gesture, the text aims to elucidate other ways in which the Acéphale journals engage with Bataille’s thought. Central to this problem is the illustrated series of images by André Masson that run throughout the Acéphale journals: these images develop a narrativised account of Acéphale’s existence in the celestial world. Claiming that these images function as a form of interrupted myth, Bataille’s work is explored in relation to the problems of myth and community that sit at the heart of Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of Bataille.
The Afterlife in Chicano Literature: Children as Priests and Totemic Animals in Bless Me, Ultima and ‘The Moths’ [PDF]
Isabel Gil-Naveiro: University of Oviedo
The concept of the afterlife and the relation with the dead varies from one culture to another. In this sense, from the years of the Civil Rights Movement onwards, Chicano literature has re-appropriated Mesoamerican and Native-American beliefs that differ from those of Catholics and Anglicans alike. Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless me, Ultima and Helena María Viramontes’s short story ‘The Moths’ share an atmosphere full of myths, beliefs and mysticism where the main characters—a boy, a girl and their grandmothers—establish a strong connection with the natural and the unnatural. Unlike most criticism, which focuses on the rites of passage from childhood into adulthood and the helping role of the grandmothers, this paper analyses the rite of passage of the grandmothers to the afterlife, emphasising the deconstruction of the ontology of life and death. Through two main mechanisms—the role of the children as priests and the relation that exists between the grandmothers’ souls and their totemic animals—this article highlights how the authors address the cyclical component of time and history and stress the connection between the death passage and rebirth for the Chicano community.
‘Borne again in repetition’: Reincarnation, Afterlives, and Cultural Memory in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome [PDF]
Soumava Maiti: Visva-Bharati University
The present article reads the social and cultural afterlives of a particular marginalised group in colonial Calcutta in Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel The Calcutta Chromosome, and seeks to examine how these reconstructions of afterlives are linked with the ancient Indian philosophy of rebirth and reincarnation. This study seeks to understand the significance of body and ghost in reconstructing the afterlives and analyse the role of cultural memory throughout that process.
Answering the Question: ‘What is Life?’ [PDF]
Mathelinda Nabugodi: University College London
The present paper offers five approaches to the question of life as it is posed in the intersection between Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’ and Jacques Derrida’s reading of it in Living On/Border Lines. After a brief overview of the circumstances of the poem’s composition, it explores (1) the relation between historical fact and figuration; (2) the afterlife of literary texts as theorised by Derrida and Walter Benjamin; (3) the responsibility of critical writing on life and figuration; (4) the difference between survival and immortality as well as Shelley’s conception of poetry’s eternity; and finally (5) the possibility that it is living on that destroys life.
The Unbearable Trauma of Being: Death, Hope, and (in)Humanity in the work of Cormac McCarthy [PDF]
Kelly Dent: University of Malta
For as long as the self-christened homo sapiens has roamed the Earth, various mythologies and their respective afterlives have followed without fail. Through the work of Cormac McCarthy, this article seeks to explore the connections (if any) between mortality, hope, and the intrinsically human need for narratives of the afterlife. The term “after(-)life” is understood to denote not simply the realm that supposedly awaits us after physical death; throughout this essay, the after-life is also investigated as that mode of being which occurs follow a point of trauma, be it physical, mental, spiritual, or epistemological in nature. Three of McCarthy’s most pivotal novels (The Road, Child of God, and Blood Meridian) will be discussed in relation to the question of trauma, hope, and inhumanity, and what it means to be after the human experiences a distinct collapse in meaning. Finally, this paper endeavours to discuss such questions as “why this human need for hope?”, “how does hope persist in the face of inhumanity?”, and “is it this resilience that makes us human?”
Nell Gwyn’s many after-lives: Taming ‘the Protestant Whore’ in 21st century popular fiction [PDF]
Laura Martínez-García: University of Oviedo
Ever since her supposed self-fashioning as ‘the Protestant Whore’ in the 1660s, Nell Gwyn has become a figure of fascination, revamped and reinterpreted in a multitude of ways along the years: from the black and white films of the 1930s, the story of this Restoration orange seller turned Royal concubine continues to excite the imagination of not just film makers, but of novelists, artists and even jam makers nowadays, as much as it inflamed Restoration audiences. The aim of this article is to analyse the discourse that lays at the basis of three modern-day reconstructions of Nell Gwyn’s figure in an attempt at drawing a connection between celebrity, pop culture and historical fiction so as to explain the reimagining of this actress as an innocent strumpet, a scheming shrew, a dignified lady and all things in between; this paper takes ideas on celebrity and historical fiction as the theoretical basis upon which to build the criticism of these revampings of Nell Gwyn to better understand the survival of her figure three centuries after her death.
Survival of the Most Memorable: Darwin’s Textual Afterlife Through Rhetoric in On the Origin of Species [PDF]
Samuel Head: The Ohio State University
The unassuming Charles Darwin did not invent the theory of evolution. However, one reason why Charles Darwin specifically appears as the figurehead for evolution, and not somebody else, comes from his rhetorical endeavour to create a textual afterlife for himself. Creating a personal afterlife for yourself within your written works is a trait that scholars have observed as a goal within many literary poets, authors, and scholars of the 19th century. Darwin, apparently, also imbued himself into his writings, especially On The Origin of Species, to create his own textual afterlife, one that would survive the other evolutionists of his era. Darwin survived by creating his own textual afterlife through the rhetorical elements of identification with his audiences and transcendence, concepts theorised by the 20th Century rhetorician, Kenneth Burke, strategies that Burke argued were the most fundamental to persuasion. I will show how Darwin survives the other evolutionists by creating his own textual afterlife that would connect to and exist in the collective memory of not only his contemporary Victorians, but also generations of people who would come cross Darwin and his theory of evolution.
‘The Face of Evil’: Gothic Biofiction and Figures of Enduring Terror in a Post-9/11 World [PDF]
Mary Ross-Volk: La Trobe University
In this article, I show that the Gothic’s preoccupation with appearances is a rhetorical and narrative device that can be traced throughout the immediate post-9/11 period and the military campaigns that followed in both non-fiction and fiction texts. Through my analysis of two works of fiction by Martin Amis and Judith Thompson, I argue that physical appearance was employed as a marker of evil intent in order to obscure the political and territorial intentions of the Bush Administration and the American military in Afghanistan and Iraq. Further, I contend that the persistent effect of two “faces of evil” is evident through the ongoing American preoccupation with the appearance and capacity of the Other to inflict terror, which becomes an unconscious act of self-recognition.
