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.

The paper investigates the possibility of an aesthetics of the unaesthetic, and partly thereby, an ethics of the unethical. Taking its departure in contemplations of the function of the ugly, both historically and from a more contemporary position, the argument moves via examples of ugly and abject art towards an elucidation of how the unaesthetic can be regarded as a crucial constituent of any aesthetic contemplation. Using Kant’s aesthetic theory as a general background and a linchpin, the reasoning moves towards a suggestion that the unaesthetic creates awkwardness and even anxiety in the beholder. These affective effects resemble the core functioning of avantgarde and provocative artforms. In neuroaesthetic terms, the unaesthetic incites the components of aesthetic and cognitive dissonances so that the hermeneutic subject—and even the brain itself according to neurologists—try to harness these distortions into understanding and into experiences formulated in ‘rational’ language. The ghostlike ontology of the unaesthetic paradoxically helps shaping the aesthetic cognition of beauty and the sublime. In addition, unaesthetic and unethical contemplations challenge the bogus-ethics emerging out of the neo-puritanism of the culture wars.

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.

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.

Strindberg’s and Yeats’s relations to the literary Nobel Prize must be construed as a strict opposition. The whole spectacle of the Strindberg feud and his antagonism towards Heidenstam and the Swedish Academy appears in bright contrast to Yeats’s own pleasure of receiving the prize and his praise of Sweden in the essay “The Bounty of Sweden”. However, anyone may also immediately recognise aspects that do not set these prominent authors apart, for example as regards the influence of figures such as Craig, Maeterlinck, Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky. In addition, we can think of the famous Yeatsian account of his meeting with a silent Swede—that turns out to be Strindberg—who according to Yeats seems to be looking for the Philosophers’ Stone, which actually also was one of Strindberg’s main occupations at the time of the encounter. Alchemy was a type of material elevation Yeats saw as an analogy to artistic creation in “an endeavour to condense as out of the flying vapour of the world an image of human perfection”. Moreover, in terms of their general attitude towards occultism and ghosts, there are a number of significant similarities. Though a huge amount of scholarly work has been done on pinpointing the existence of such phenomena in these authors’ creative work, there has been less written on the actual aesthetic function of the textual prominence of occultism and spectrality. This paper will tentatively outline a hauntological aesthetics that serves to radically distance both artists from the ontic—i.e. hypostatised (falsely) given reality in the Heideggerian sense. This type of aesthetics instead moves towards a spectral dynamics that I argue is essential in substantial parts of the two authors’ respective ouevres. In Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, it is stated that the student, the clairvoyant Sunday child, “can see what others cannot see”, which I understand as a major distinction. In Yeats’s work, the poet’s outlook is completely dependent on belonging to those who truly see: “A ghost may come; / For it is a ghost’s right, / His element is so fine / Being sharpened by his death…”. This exquisitely fine material shapes the transcendental spectral aesthetics in both authors’ writings by opening up a vaster domain of creative possibilities.

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.

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.

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).

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.