What is this soul then? Whence

Came it? It does not seem my own, and I

Have no self-passion or identity

—John Keats, Endymion (IV: 475-477)[1]

Poetry without egotism comparatively uninteresting.

—Coleridge, Notebooks (v. 1: 62)[2]

“one cannot help contrasting Keats with Wordsworth,—the one altogether poet; the other essentially a Wordsworth, with the poetic faculty added—the one shifting from form to form, and from style to style […] the other remaining always the individual”

Arguments regarding the potential for a representational model to approach or achieve reality date back to Plato and Aristotle, yet become increasingly relevant given literature’s preoccupation with assimilating and deciphering the impact of technological advancements and online communication. Written pre-Internet, thought experiments such as Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” argue for a distinct difference between the model and the reality on which it is based, presenting the former as inevitably failing in comparison to the latter.

In 1936, American expatriate writer Djuna Barnes published her fifth book, Nightwood. Set throughout Europe and America, Nightwoodfollows the lovers of Robin Vote as they attempt to comprehend the otherworldly woman and their attraction to her. Meanwhile, the transgender doctor Matthew O’Connor provides intermittent philosophical monologues detailing the nature of love, sleep, and death.

Introduction:

“Telling a half that has hardly ever been told.” (“Kei Miller”)

On May 15, 1918, Henry Johnson, a private in the all-black 369^th United States Infantry Regiment, armed with only a knife, protected both himself and a wounded comrade from a German attack on the Western Front of World War I. On June 2, 2015, nearly eighty-six years after Johnson’s death, President Barack Obama awarded him the Medal of Honor (“Medal of Honor: Sergeant Henry Johnson”). This award raises two questions: why was Johnson, the first American to receive the French Croix de Guerre (Nelson 107), not given military honors by his own country sooner?

Through the constant transformation and waning status of an intertwined English family, Mary Shelley’s 1826 post-apocalyptic novel The Last Mantackles the consequences of the Anthropocene and bears particular significance for modern questions of gender and nature. As the narrator, Lionel, recounts his story, he centers his relationship with the romantic, selfless hero Adrien, alternately idolizing and forgoing his own wife.

In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, a treatise on feminism that was regarded as a central fixture of the feminist movement for decades. The work sought to liberate women from the oppression imposed by male-dominated society, arguing against the categorization of women as “the Other,” the pure valuation of beauty, and the trend of defining the female identity based on feminine biology. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of films emerged that claimed to fulfill de Beauvoir’s conception of the liberated woman.

In novels such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, we meet unreliable narrators with traumatic pasts. As these novels develop, it is revealed that the narrators exclude important facts, feelings, and descriptions of characters and circumstances. This leaves us, as readers, to wonder why the narrator does not accurately depict themselves nor the world around them. Essentially, as we encounter unreliable narrators in fiction, we raise the questions of cause and effect.