Nina Straus

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Purchase College

This chapter, Erasing Memory in Kafka’s The Trial (1916) with its Crime and Punishment resonances, turns away from narrative realism toward the solitary Joseph K. under arrest for he knows not what. Kafka cancels the distinction between Joseph K.’s bodily reactions and the body politic. He represents a vision of how K.’s memory is erased by invisib...

This chapter examines two initiating moments in the history of literary scandals and rivalry, as well as the idea of neural diversity—Dostoevsky’s epilepsy and Tolstoy’s manic-depression. After Dostoevsky’s death Tolstoy was compelled to incorporate Dostoevsky’s narrative “pitch,” as James Joyce called it, into his The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) in an...

In this chapter, the question of gendered emotions complicates neuroscience’s idea of a “core self.” Kundera’s Nietzschean-inflected novel, discursively fragmented and paradoxical, represents an historical moment (1968) when the sexual revolution, Nietzschean influences, Cold War politics, and structuralist literary theories cohabit the same (white...

This chapter offers a selection of traditional literary terms (metaphor, narrative, etc.) that show how neuroscientific terms such as interoception and somatic marker ground these in neurology and bodily experience to expand the scope of literary theorizing.

In this chapter I argue that through metaphors and the interrelated sequences we call plot, novels offer us an intimate access to others through a verbal technology for emotional connection. From an affective point of view, what might be understood as the problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996) becomes the problem of the body—the way the body has...

In this chapter, the dialogue between neuroscience and fiction meets its racialized challenge. Do the generalizations of neurological research into brains and bodies, mainly produced by white men, answer questions about racial bias? Morrison’s homage to “flesh that weeps, laughs” enables understanding of the horror of racial injustice in relation t...

This chapter investigates the meaning of emotions when bodies are not composed of flesh, when an “artificial friend” powered by solar energy serves at the pleasure of a future elitist family. Even as Klara exhibits a human-seeming vocabulary, sensitivity, and mobility, Ishiguro triggers the reader to question her relation to the human “soul” which...

This chapter describes embodied emotions in relation to the British and Russian writers’ final novels (1876, 1881). That emotions are transformed neurologically through maturity and aging is rarely discussed in literary criticism. Elkhanon Goldberg’s contributions to the neural changes that come with aging in The Wisdom Paradox offer a missing conc...

Astrology has invaded literary fiction. Astrological references harrow the plot of Nobel Prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2019). The novel’s eccentric, zodiac-obsessed protagonist, Janina Duszejko, lives on the post-Soviet Czech-Polish border and uses astrological charts to track down the hunters who killed...

Why do Dostoevskian bodies throb, sob, and grimace in ways that seem so far from the civilized protocols of, for example, Henry James’ exhibitions of emotions? How precisely does the concept of unconscious motivation serve interpretation when complicated by neuroscientific ideas of “the body as ground reference,” of “the neural self” as a “repeated...

This interview with Joseph Frank—best known as the author of a five-volume biography of Dostoevsky (published 1976–2002) and of Spatial Form in Modern Literature (1945)—was conducted in 2012 at Stanford and is published here, shortly after his death at age ninety-four, as a memorial to him. The conversation highlights Frank’s representation of Dost...

With Miłosz’s The Captive Mind standing behind Cavanagh’s Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, which has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, there is a chance that Western critics’ interpretations of modern Russian and Polish lyric will at last undergo a correction and refinement. Cavanagh engages in a polemic with postmodern theory while...

What does W.G. Sebald mean by the doubling of his character Jacques Austerlitz with Ludwig Wittgenstein, a "poetic" philosopher who, although of Jewish ancestry, had little to say about the fate of the Jews during the Nazi period? Sebald's initiation of the reader into Austerlitz's life story through visual and verbal references to the philosopher...

In summa: so that man may respect himself he must be capable of doing evil. The following pages offer evidence that in The Trial Kafka invents characters who deploy a Nietzschean-sourced language of deconstruction related to what we now call theory; that in "Before the Law" Kafka's priest deconstructs The Law to which K. is subjected, and that Kafk...

Common Knowledge 12.2 (2006) 197-213 At midpoint in Demons—also titled The Possessed or The Devils in English translations of Dostoevsky—Pyotr Verkhovensky, the novel's master of terrorist ceremonies, expresses adoration of the mysterious Nikolai Stavrogin: "You are my idol! . . . You have the air of being everyone's equal—yet everyone is afraid of...

Common Knowledge 10.2 (2004) 353-354 Derrida's recent religious turn might have been predicted by a psychoanalyst. The forces waiting for his writings, as he puts it, parallel as a rhetorical gesture the forces that he sees as waiting for the messiah. Both ideas are linked to the "fracture or trauma" that he describes in The Post Card and to the co...

Common Knowledge 8.3 (2002) 555-567 —Václav Havel, quoted in Michael Novak, The Most Religious Century "I am addressing myself here to God, the only one I take as a witness, without yet knowing what these sublime words mean, and this grammar, and to, and witness, and take, take god. . . ." So remarks Jacques Derrida in "Circumfession" about his re...

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s fictional account of a journey up the Congo river in 1890, raises important questions about colonialism and narrative theory. This casebook contains materials relevant to a deeper understanding of the origins and reception of this controversial text, including Conrad’s own story ‘An Outpost of Progress’, together...

Dostoevsky's title (Besy), translated The Possessed or The Devils, suggests that the inhabitants of Skvoresniki are "possessed" by a modern revolutionary ideology dedicated to violence and separatism from ordinary community. Dostoevsky's attitude towards modern social problems, to his characters' discussions of "the incidence of robbery and violenc...

1. Donald Davidson, "The Myth of the Subjective," in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 163, p. 171. 2. Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Mildred Marmur (New York: New American Library, 1964). 3. Anna Karenina, trans. Joel Carmichael (New York: Bantam, 1960)....

1. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); hereafter abbreviated "FG." 2. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); hereafter abbreviated "DV." 3. See Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, eds., Feminism and Foucault...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249107753_Transforming_Franz_Kafka%27s_Metamorphosis

Argues that T. Mann's Doctor Faustus contains a playful and deliberate deconstruction through parody of Freud's most serious notions, clearer since so much feminist effort has revealed the disturbing nature of Freud's ideas. The book is seen not so much as a mathematical labyrinth as it is a homocentric, even homosexual labyrinth; part of what it...