A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• The Girardian Event and the Literary Event: The Scapegoat and Revelation in Alice Munro's "Runaway"

  2024. Joakim Wrethed. Contagion 31, 53-70

  Article

  Girardian philosophical and theological thinking is founded on events. Mainly the two generic events of mimetic desire and the purifying sacrifice. However, in addition there is more nuanced cognition of evental structures that becomes highlighted not least when engaging with literary texts through Girardian concepts. It is my intent here to probe deeply into Girard’s evental layers through the engagement with Alice Munro’s short story “Runaway”. We shall more closely examine the literary event as such and what it may mean in Munro’s work, but then also bring relevant insights back into Girard’s evental framework to ponder some conceptual timbres in his thinking about the scapegoat and revelation. By means of Ilai Rowner’s outline of the literary event, Munro’s short story is shown to appropriate the scapegoat event and to hand it back to the opaque realm of myth that Girard extracted it from. In addition, there will be a more philosophical elaboration of the phenomenon of the event alongside the analysis of the literary event. This part will be mainly guided by the work of François Raffoul.

   

   

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• Conceptual and Performative Art in Tom McCarthy, Michel Houellebecq, and Don DeLillo

  2024. Joakim Wrethed. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Art, 480-491

  Chapter

  Peter Boxall’s recent study The Prosthetic Imagination stresses the status of the novel form as the principal prosthesis of the imagination. The Bakhtinian echo in Boxall’s title is highly relevant in our multimedia saturated times. The novel’s aesthetic expression provides us with an exceptional form that can encompass and explore different artforms such as painting, photography, and indeed, conceptual and performative art. The tension that can be scrutinised is basically the same aesthetic pressure that arises in ekphrastic endeavours generally and historically, that is, descriptive prose is not identical to colours and forms on a canvas or any pixelated surface. However, it is precisely this discrepancy that can be reflectively and even systematically incorporated in the prosthetic dimension of the literary mind. Even more profoundly formulated, the novel form explores mimesis as such while performing it. This aesthetic facet comes to the fore in sharp relief through the analytic triangulation of three works by prominent contemporary novelists. In The Making of Incarnation, Tom McCarthy continues his project of exploring the interface between reality and a digitalised and mostly visual counterpart, which seems to reproduce a given reality as well as produce an altered reality. A similar mimetic scrutiny—with obvious Baudrillardian shades—is performed by Michel Houellebecq in The Map and the Territory. Both novels examine the economized networks which art and the technology of representation are forced to adapt to. Partly in contrast, in The Body Artist Don DeLillo sets up the performative arena of the body as a liminal zone in which art and life interact as a near metaphysical force in the creative act itself. Through a careful analysis of these works, this essay explores the aesthetic dimension of the novel as a prosthetic device that in turn inspects the aspects of projection and imaging, while simultaneously making manifest art’s immanent core of affectivity that per definition cannot be transcended. The essay ultimately displays the way in which the novel form provokes aesthetic thinking in relation to conceptual and performative artforms.

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• Gothic Hauntology: Everyday Hauntings and Epistemological Desire

  2023. Joakim Wrethed.

  Book

  The study pursues the phenomenon of hauntology within the gothic genre. Hauntings in various forms constitute one of the defning features of the gothic category of fction from the very Walpolian beginning. Here, hauntology is mainly defined in accordance with Derrida’s central concepts of limitrophy, temporality and the presence of the past in the present. Hauntology is sought on a primordial level of experience in the characters of the narratives. Therefore, hauntology is generally seen as an inevitable affective and experiential phenomenon that highlights a fundamental human predicament. Fiction is an eminent tool for scrutinising such phenomena, which the selection of heterogenous works here emphatically demonstrates. The investigation moves from contemporary works by Atwood, Munro and Ajvide Lindqvist back to older canonised gothic fiction by Polidori, Poe, James and Lovecraft. Hauntology is shown to be a central force in these works in similar but also slightly different ways. By utilising the phenomenological concept of epistemological desire, which is set apart from the desire of needs, the analysis seeks to explicate the human striving for knowledge as a Sisyphus project and as an impossible desire for desire itself. By zooming in on details of experience, parts of the study move within the everyday spheres of the gothic and hauntology. In that way, the gothic and hauntology merge as a realistic force in any life lived and the paradox of absolute indeterminacy seems to constitute the only reasonable way of understanding life as an experiential movement. The gothic has always filled the function of reminding us of our vulnerability and to beware of rational and scientifc hubris. This study confirms that this is also the case in contemporary fiction.

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• Cancel Culture and the Trope of the Scapegoat: A Girardian Defense of the Importance of Contemplative Reading

  2022. Joakim Wrethed. Contagion 29, 15-38

  Article

  The article argues that contemporary phenomena such as cancel culture, presentism, and deplatforming enhance the escalation of violence and mimetic desire. Together with the dimension of ICT, and the acceleration of speed that comes with it, these phenomena tend to organise reality in such a way that carefully constructed arguments are wiped out beforehand. Moreover, the overall dominance of increased velocity, lack of deep attention, and decrease of the dominance of print culture, are seriously threatening the craft of slow and close reading. In turn, this decline actually changes the culture of the humanities fundamentally, since the younger generations of poor readers engage in various activities of cleansing. In addition, arguments are no longer neither carefully constructed nor carefully scrutinised. In the vein of cancel culture, the senders of certain arguments should rather be unplugged (deplatformed). History should be edited according to a set of contemporary moral principles, which even though they seem to be ethically sound, will actually only contribute to escalating violence. By means of a close reading of Christina Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio,” the article attempts to illustrate that the only way out of the destructive dialectics of mimetic desire is through the Christian concepts of agape and kenosis.

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• Charles Maturin Revisited

  2022. Joakim Wrethed. The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, 555-571

  Chapter

  This chapter looks at Charles Robert Maturin through his major literary achievement Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). By more closely analysing the Calvinist theology utilised as the required anti-Catholicism within the genre at the time, it argues that the gothic energy stems from a set of paradoxes and tensions. These can be seen biographically and as part of the Irish historical context, but more importantly, in terms of the fundamentals of the genre, the force mainly emanates from another central paradox: the attraction of the repulsive and voyeurism as an inevitable component of any moralising tale. The textual lacunae of the novel contribute to an implied problematisation of epistemological desire. By a brief analysis of the phenomenology of the eye, the chapter ends by concluding that Maturin essentially confirms the excess of desire while apparently trying to do the opposite.

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• Hjalmar Söderberg’s Stockholm

  2022. Joakim Wrethed. The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies

  Chapter

  The entry compares the flâneur in Hjalmar Söderberg’s debut novel to the one established by Baudelaire, which was later conceptually refined by Walter Benjamin. It is claimed that the flânerie is almost free-floating, sometimes tied to certain characters, sometimes not. The invisible extra-diegetic third person narrator comes to resemble a camera lens. Förvillelser also contains traits of precinematic media that further strengthen the link to the visual and cinematic qualities in a novel that was published almost simultaneously with the production of the very first film segments (1895).

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• Stockholm, Stora Nygatan, and the City Writing of August Strindberg

  2022. Magnus Halldin, Joakim Wrethed. The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies

  Chapter

  We here investigate the infrastructure of a particular street in Stockholm, Stora Nygatan, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We regard the city as a palimpsest of textual layers, which is also fully dependent on the economic development of the activities in the city. It is a presumption that the clusters of city writers are to some extent determined and also shaped by their authorships and journalism. In the city writing of August Strindberg, we see this intricate phenomenology at work, both in his real life in Stockholm and in the ways in which he decides to narrate the Swedish capital.

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• The Oil-Flower Unfurling Its Petals: The Phenomenological Aesthetics of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

  2022. Joakim Wrethed. C21 literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings 9 (1)

  Article

  The article analyses Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island as giving literary form to the aesthetics of materiality. Acknowledging the work’s function as philosophical cognition, the investigation utilises the concept of Einfühlung (empathy) as the ‘feeling-into’ of aesthetic experience, while concomitantly determining that ordinary empathy as fellow-feeling is lacking. Combining that ahuman aspect with Husserlian time constituting flow, underlying time consciousness, as another aspect of the ahuman, the thesis argues that the novel stages the mattering of matter and the patterning of patterns as surface phenomena that constitute the aesthetics of this particular fictional world. The aesthetics appears as a near-metaphysical phenomenon in manifesting an instantiation of Nietzsche’s concept of the human only being eternally justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. As such a phenomenon, the human amalgamates with matter and is dead. However, the world can be said to harbour ‘A LIFE’ in the sense of the Deleuzean concept of pure immanence. Moreover, as an avant-gardist artwork, the novel may provoke an ethical counter-reaction in the reader, inducing an ecocritically grounded ethics that would empathise with the planet earth as a manifestation of life itself.

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• Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as a Palimpsest of the Theories of Girard, Gans and de Andrade

  2021. Joakim Wrethed. Anthropoetics XXVII (1)

  Article

  Brett Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho may be seen as a literary attempt at creating the ultimate account of the nineteen-eighties yuppie era. As a broader statement on desire, capitalism and ritual, the narrative—probably partly subconsciously—opens up both a blatant and a more subtle critique of patriarchal dominance. The article analyses the novel by means of a hyper-theoretical space, which has three distinct but overlapping and co-existent layers. The Girardian layer conveys violence as mimetic desire and the quest for a scapegoat. In combination with Baudrillardian ideas about a sign taxonomy and commodity fetishism, this stratum funnels violence towards the protagonist identifying the scapegoat as one of his identical colleagues. The ritual means that Bateman tries to eliminate himself. In the Gansian layer, the narrative’s overall ambiguity in terms of what is “real” and what is “fiction” maintains the deferral of the appropriation of the appetitive object and preserves language/fiction/art as the sublimation of violence. The de Andradian layer presents anthropophagy as a vision of an escape from the enslavement of the conquered that would be the basis of a capitalist and hierarchised society.

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• Darklings of the World, Unite and Take Over

  2021. Joakim Wrethed. Populär poesi

  Article

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• Irish History, Ethics, the Alethic, and Mise En Abîme in John Banville’s Fiction

  2021. Joakim Wrethed. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 27 (2)

  Article

  A controversy within John Banville scholarship focuses on his seemingly ambivalent relation to his Irishness. The dominance of Banville’s philosophical topics has seemingly rendered the specifically Irish issues redundant. However, there are Irish traits that have significance for more subtle themes or motifs in certain novels. These passages often appear as side-paths in the eccentric protagonists’ meandering narration. In The Blue Guitar, Oliver Orme mentions that his “namesake Oliver Cromwell” attempted an attack upon the town in which his childhood home is situated, but eventually “the victorious Catholic garrison hanged half a dozen russet-coated captains” on the hill where the house stands and where “the Lord Protector’s tent” had been erected. Such casual remarks on violent historical incidents harbor a key to a particular Banvillean ethics. The frequently recurring prose structure of thematized mise en abîme and the mazes of signifiers indicate that no historical ontology in terms of a meta-narrative seems to exist. However, many of Banville’s novels revolve around the disclosure of a truth. This alethic element questions an all too convenient reliance on a completely constructivist understanding of history and thereby of Irish historical events appearing in the Banvillean oeuvre. 

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• Ireland

  2020. Joakim Wrethed. Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures, 313-332

  Chapter

  Irish literature can be said to have a complex relation to the concept of world literature. On the one hand, the region has a great number of writers who have established themselves as strong world literature authors. Indeed, Joyce constitutes a paradigmatic example. On the other hand, this fact is partly due to them writing in English, which is the language of the coloniser. It is argued that this state of affairs has provoked a set of strategies exemplified by the authors Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Banville, who all have successfully entered the world literature realm. Furthermore, it is claimed that the world of letters is a highly competitive field, which as any otherfield inevitably contains ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ contenders, as well as elements of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter itself illustrates this point by its own barring of other authors and types of literature from Ireland. However, it perceives positive potential in the new technologies for the general spread of world literature. This notion rests on a Deleuzean idea of absolute immanence (and immanence as transcendence).

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• “‘Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks": John Banville’s Aesth/ethics

  2020. Joakim Wrethed. ABEI - Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses [ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies] 22 (1), 183-196

  Article

  John Banville’s long career can of course conventionally be viewed as alinearity, but it would be better seen as a form of spiral. This spiral is the hermeneuticprocess and concomitantly the movements of eternal recurrence in the oeuvre. In accordancewith Nietzsche’s concept, these recurrences are not to be construed as returns of theidentical. Rather, this ethic and aesthetic dimension in Banville is explicated as anattunement to the overall force of becoming. In agreement with Wallace Stevens’ poetics,Banville’s aesthetic is seen primarily as process. Through the immediate access tometacognition and reflection in the intentional act, Banville, through his protagonists,maintains a sense of wonder as hope in a fictional world often permeated by loss,melancholy and despair. This fictional trait is argued to have been there since the debut upto Banville’s more recent creative work.

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• The Postmodern Genre

  2020. Joakim Wrethed. The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, 1123-1136

  Chapter

  Mark Z. Danielewski’s tour de force of literary fiction House of Leaves (2000) manages to perform a paradoxical feat. It undermines the gothic genre in most thinkable (and unthinkable) ways, but simultaneously the same artistic moves succeed in smoothly adding this piece of writing to the established gothic tradition. The novel deconstructs the gothic—and essentially the conventional conceptualisation of “the novel” as well—while also adhering to, and elaborating on, a number of central gothic themes. Danielewski’s tale could in many respects be used as a catalogue of post-modern features and ideas, but it concurrently functions as a perfectly readable modern gothic novel. This chapter traces the post-modern characteristics while also displaying exactly how the work fits into the gothic genre.

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• John Banville and Hugo von Hofmannsthal

  2019. Joakim Wrethed. John Banville and His Precursors, 146-162

  Chapter

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• John Williams's Stoner and Literature as Dark Matter in the Age of Educational Managerialism

  2019. Joakim Wrethed. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 25 (1), 151-160

  Article

  The tension between Bildung and more utility-oriented dimensions of education is nothing new. For instance, Friedrich Nietzsche addressed the issue in a series of lectures presented at the Basel city museum in 1872. The German philosopher particularly despised 19^th century tendencies to let education be controlled by external forces. The contemporary literature teacher may feel inclined to endorse some of Nietzsche’s sentiments. What is allowed to remain of the subject of literature in the age of massification, learnification, and criterion referenced teaching in secondary and tertiary education? Through an analysis of certain aspects of John Williams’ Stoner, the paper considers a few central questions: Why is the devoted literature teacher forced into a hypocritical position, pretending to do a set of stated things (learning outcomes), while actually doing (or wanting to do) something completely different? Is it not precisely what cannot be put into words that is the actual driving force of the study of literature? The paper suggests that this Gordian knot cannot be untied and that it should not be cut, but also that the attempts to untie the knot are in themselves vitalising forces that ought not to be neglected within literary studies and teaching.

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• Suffering as the Embodiment of the Sacred in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s "A Letter" and "Tale of the 672nd Night"

  2018. Joakim Wrethed. Anthropoetics 24 (1)

  Article

  In Eric Gans’s theoretical framework, the sacred may be seen as a ritualised re-enactment of the inaccessibility of the appetitive object. This set-up calls attention to more formalised situations in which the separation of the profane and the sacred are upheld. Drawing on the work of C. Jason Throop, as well as Gans, the present article attempts to trace the blurring of this distinction in terms of embodied suffering in two short stories by fin de siècle author Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Throop highlights the encounter with the sacred not only in terms of an experience of a limit or a zone of the unknowable, but also as a phenomenological transformation of aspect (what Wittgenstein called “aspect-dawning”). This experiential conversion in itself obscures a clear line of demarcation between the sacred and the profane. In Throop’s words, the instants focused on are “moments in which the reality of our singularity, vulnerability, and finitude is made manifest. The seeds for such forms of phenomenological modification are also found in more mundane, profane, and everyday experiences. This includes everyday experiences of pain and suffering”. The article analyses literary manifestations of phenomenological modifications that display the suffering of the lack of adequate language as manifestations of the sacred in the fiction of Hofmannsthal.

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• Afterword in John Banville, Motivet [trans. of The Book of Evidence]

  2017. Joakim Wrethed.

  Other

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• The Phenomenology of Representation, Ritual, and the Sacred in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

  2017. Joakim Wrethed. Anthropoetics 23 (1)

  Article

  It is here argued that Tom McCarthy’s Remainder may be read through Eric Gans’s anthropological hypothesis of the originary scene. The re-enactments the protagonist performs are seen as rituals, which posit the sacred as present in its absence. In that way Remainder investigates the limits of representation. The protagonist in the novel aims at making the ritual “real”, which leads to a collapse of representation and a reification of the sacred. Thereby the reader experiences a symbolic breakdown of human culture as we conceive it. However, the sacred re-introduces itself as an indestructible factor towards the end of the narrative.

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• ʻWhere danger is, there rescue growsʼ: Technology, Time, and Dromology in Tom McCarthy’s C.

  2017. Joakim Wrethed. C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century writings 5 (3)

  Article

  On one level, Tom McCarthy’s C comes out as a postmodern intertextual patchwork that borrows the form of the Bildungsroman. Accordingly, the protagonist Serge travels from birth to death in a forthrightly chronological narrative, but that journey is accompanied by the fact that the text’s modernist historical context is partly embedded in a posthuman and postmodern ontology. Technologically speaking, this version of modernity displays itself as technē, both in terms of artistic creation and as technology innovation (the radio transmitter, the car, the aeroplane, the cinema). Moreover, the novel equates technology with dromology (from Gr. dromos: race course) dealing with increasing speed as economic and political advantage, but it also reveals its human downside in terms of disaster (war, car crash, aeroplane crash). Through the protagonist, C forwards technology as death drive and the human as always already being ahuman (technē as primordial attribute of bios). In terms of time, the narrative seemingly incarnates the occidental obsession with teleology and eschatology. This article goes through these dimensions, but in addition it contends that there is another level at work in the narrative. Considered as artistically rendered philosophical cognition, the novel puts forth the Stoic apathea (equanimity), Husserlian flux, and anachronistic temporality as giving way to a peculiar kind of faith. This is closely tied to the artistic creativity of technē, including the activity of writing, which rescues a form of transcendence from conventional postmodern elimination. Dominant discourses of technology and time—apocalyptic and utopian—are challenged in this reading.

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• The Invisible Apocalyptic City

  2016. Joakim Wrethed. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 22 (2), 305-325

  Article

  This article investigates apocalyptic aspects of William Blake’s “London”, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, and Ivan Vladislavić’s The Exploded View. The analysis explores the suitability of the urban and suburban settings of these works as backdrops for religious, semi-religious, and secular versions of apocalyptic structures. Furthermore, the central argument utilizes a Heideggerian conceptualisation of desire in distinguishing between ontical craving (the striving for materialist security and pleasure) and ontological desire (the need of a spiritual life-dimension). These aspects reveal underlying affective layers of the primarily negative images of urban and suburban life in these three works. Moreover, the concept of desire is in DeLillo’s and Vladislavić’s works linked to the notion of speed (and lack thereof) in order to highlight modern dilemmas of ontical craving in capitalist urban settings. The investigation suggests that urbanity provides an adequate venue for apocalyptic narratives in three interrelated ways. Firstly, urbanity intensifies individual suffering, egotism, and alienation in a context which has the potential of providing the ground for collaboration, community, and fraternity. Secondly, it intensifies the affectivity of capitalist ruthlessness and speed in an environment that paradoxically supports and rejects these forces (hence the memento mori motif in all three literary texts). Thirdly, by presenting such a dark vision of fallen mankind it concurrently forwards a redemptive or cathartic perspective in the form of a literary response to materialist decay.

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• I am a place

  2015. Joakim Wrethed. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 7

  Article

  The article investigates the aesthetic and political power of Margaret Atwood’s 1972 novel Surfacing. It argues that the novel’s perennial vitality is partly explained by Jacques Rancière’s theory about the aesthetic regime of art that highlights the tension between art for art’s sake and art as a political instrument. By means of phenomenological methodology and concepts, mainly derived from Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the examination uncovers an experiential aesthetics intimately intertwined with the protagonist’s perceptions throughout the narrative. These perceptions and impressions are permeated by a sense of semi-religious revelation. But here they are primarily seen from an epistemological perspective through the dominance of immediacy (denoted by the Greek aletheia) over verificational dimensions (denoted by the Roman veritas). These predominantly sensory aspects of Surfacing make up the aesthetic nerve that is linked to the political impact of the work. Aletheia functions as a promise of emancipation since it transcends the political division of the sensory, that is, art for art’s sake and art as life. But, Atwood’s work also upholds this separation since aletheia is ultimately autonomous, which in turn sustains the autonomy of the novel. It is claimed that the persistent status of Surfacing—and thereby its sustained political impact—is ultimately due to its aesthetic integrity. The novel’s more explicit political concerns of ecocriticism and feminism are secondary in relation to the force of aletheia.

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• “‘A Momentous Nothing’"

  2014. Joakim Wrethed. The Crossings of Art in Ireland, 183-211

  Chapter

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• No immanence for old men: the art of acting in John Banville's Eclipse and Philip Roth's The Humbling

  2012. Joakim Wrethed. NIS 11 (1), 121-131

  Article

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• "Horribly, pleasurable transgression"

  2011. Joakim Wrethed. Beyond Ireland, 217-240

  Chapter

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• The Aesthetics of the Flesh in John Banville's The Book of Evidence, Eclipse and Shroud

  2010. Joakim Wrethed. NIS 9, 49-70

  Article

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• The infinities by John Banville

  2010. Joakim Wrethed. Estudios Irlandeses (5), 201-202

  Article

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• Chiasm, Epoché, and Synergy: The Metaphorical Style in John Banville's Art Trilogy

  2008. Joakim Wrethed. Nordic Irish Studies 7, 91-102

  Article

  My article is based on a theoretical hybridization of cognitive linguistics and phenomenology. I focus on three novels by the Irish writer John Banville: The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995). Their similar major themes about art and ethics have brought them together as the Art Trilogy or the Frames Trilogy. My article seeks to identify three interrelated aspects of metaphoricity in the literary texts. The first aspect concerns what I call chiasmatic oscillation. I argue that metaphoricity in the Art Trilogy is the central force that reveals how the imagery continuously reciprocates with what in familiar terms would be called literal or more ‘mimetic’ levels of the narratives. Furthermore, I claim that metaphoricity in the Art Trilogy is indicative of recurring cuts or reductions, in which existence is somehow intensified. These metaphorical epochés sometimes resemble epiphanic moments, where surprising affective-eidetic patterns break through the endless becoming without ruling it out. These moments are discussed in terms of synergy, which denotes the creative energy itself, the chora, the domain of child’s play, liturgy, science, and art; the primordial exhilaration that belongs neither to the subject nor to the world. Thus, I simultaneously try to discuss style as a very profound linguistic-experiential phenomenon.

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• The Experiential Motivation of Metaphors: On a Poem by Carol Ann Duffy, Phenomenology, and Cognitive Linguistics

  2008. Joakim Wrethed. Selected Papers from the 2006 and 2007 Stockholm Metaphor Festivals, 43-52

  Chapter

  The backbone of this paper is a close reading of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “The Grammar of Light” with focus on its metaphorical dimension. The poem is analysed mainly through concepts used in cognitive linguistics. Consequently, the paper highlights the ontology implied by the discipline of cognitive linguistics. In addition, the investigation examines the aforementioned implications by means of a phenomenological meta-analysis. After having determined the poem’s central conceptual metaphors that are combined and their experiential motivation, the paper attempts to investigate the experiential-cognitive roots of metaphors generally and more closely. What are the conditions of possibility for the understanding-A-through-B structure on this ontological plane? It is argued that experience involves an immediate access to eidetic intuition. The direct experience of a candle necessarily at every instant involves experiential ‘candleness.’ For Husserl, as well as for the cognitive linguist, perception is conception. The immediately accessible creative imagination is of crucial importance to metaphoricity. The paper also takes into consideration aspects of the literal dimension of the engagement with literature. Against the Nietzschean-Derridean line of thinking, it is argued that cognitive embodiment and certain general aspects of experience save the literary text from a complete loss of truth and straightforwardness.

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• Mnemonic air in John Banville's Science tetralogy

  2007. Joakim Wrethed. Recovering memory, 280-290

  Chapter

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