Publications by Type: Book Chapters

2023
טוקר, לאונה. “צופן:אדמע כרומן מודרניסטי.” In חידת ק.צטניק: חייו ויצירתו, 381–92. חיפה: ערכים דינה פןרת עם יוחאי עתריה. פרדס, 2023.
Toker, Leona. “"To Define is to Distrust": Intertextual Ambiguity in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and James Joyce's Ulysses.” In Strategies of Ambiguity, 291-305. Ed. Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker. New York: Routlege, 2023. Publisher's VersionAbstract

In the final episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom recollects how, in response to a priest’s question “where,” she returned an answer not about a part of her body but about a geographical location. This alludes to an episode of similar cross purposes of Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The interplay between the two texts is associated with the positive valorization of ambiguity on the part of the narrator of Tristram Shandy. In Sterne’s novel, legal and contractual definitions which seek to eliminate all ambiguity are, like Uncle Toby’s fortifications, a temptation for the forces of entropy: instead of shielding the characters from the intrusions of chance, they expose Tristram to serio-comic catastrophes. In Ulysses disambiguation is not a defensive but an offensive weapon (“Unsheathe your dagger definitions”; 238). In both cases, but particularly in Ulysses, the valorization of ambiguity in discourse is parallel to structural ambiguities that give rise to diametrically opposite readings. Ambiguity emerges not just as a matter of narrative rhetoric but as a feature of the creative impulse behind the story worlds, and as a challenge to the ethics of reading.

Toker, Leona. “Not Typical but Typifying: Varlam Shalamov's 'A Piece of Meat'.” In Witnessing the Witness of War Crimes, Mass Murder, an Genocide, 239-248. ed. Manuela Consonni and Philip Galland Nord, Berlin: de Gryuter, 2023. Publisher's Version
2022
О ценностях и о цене" ["On Values and on the Price"]. Foreword to vol. 3 of the 6-volume edition of Georgy Demidov's works.” In Любовь за колючей проволокой (Собрание сочинений Георгия Демидова в 6-ти томах), 3:10-16. Moscow: Gulag History Museum / Ivan Limbach, 2022.
אחרית דבר [Afterword].” In אדה: כרוניקה משפחתית [Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle], by Vladimir Nabokov; trans. Daphna Rosenbluth, 547-555. Jerusalem: Carmel, 2022.
2021
Toker, Leona. “The Issue of “Softening” and the Problem of Addressivity in Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov.” In The Gulag in Writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, ed. Fabian Heffermehl and Irina Karlsohn, 271-288. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
Toker, Leona. “Israel.” In Philip Roth in Context, ed. Maggie McKinley, 150–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Toker, Leona. “Urban Intelligentsia in A Tale of Two Cities.” In Critical Insights: A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Robert C. Evans, 79–92. Ipswich, MA: Salem House, 2021.
2019
Toker, Leona. ““Student Years, 1968–1973” [a memoir].” In Anglų kalbos slėpinių pavilioti: Prisiminimų kaleidoskopas, 271-92. Ed. Inesa Šeškauskienė and Jonė Grigaliūnienė. Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2019.Abstract

Reminiscences of student days at Vilnius University

Toker, Leona. “Nabokov’s Factography.” In Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory, 21-50. ed. Irena Księżopolska and Mikołaj Wiśniewski. Warsaw: Fundacja Augusta hr. Cieszkowskiego, 2019. Publisher's VersionAbstract

 

Nabokov’s fictional retrospective first-person narratives rely on the “perfect-memory” convention, which is, however, sometimes laid bare or even subverted. This convention makes no inroads in Nabokov’s factorgraphic narratives, such as Speak, Memory and “Abram Gannibal.” This paper discusses the narrative techniques that replace the “perfect-memory” convention in the “childhood-adolescence-youth” part of Speak, Memory, and the way these techniques relate to Nabokov’s view of the workings of memory, in the context of some his literary and philosophical precursors.                                   

 

Towards a Literary History of Concentration Camps: Comparative or ‘Entangled’?.” In Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival , 13-29. Ed. Anja Tippner and Anna Artwinska. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019.
2017
“Пересмотр понятия «героизм» в рассказах Шаламова [A Reconsideration of the Concept of Heroism in Shalamov’s Stories].”.” In «Закон сопротивления распаду». Особенности прозы и поэзии Варлама Шаламова и их восприятие в начале XXI века., 69-78. Ed. Lukasz Babka, Sergey Soloviev, Valery Esipov, and Ian Makhonin. Prague : Národní knihovna České republiky, 2017.
“Слово о голодном воздержании. «Голодарь» Кафки и «Артист лопаты» Шаламова.” Trans. D. Subbotin,.” In Shalamovskii Sbornik 5, 378–95. ed. V. V. Esipov. Vologda: Common Place, 2017.Abstract

An updated translation of ch. 10, “Discourse of Lent: Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist' and Shalamov's 'The Artist of the Spade,'" of L. Toker Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010).

Varlam Shalamov's Sketches of the Criminal World.” In Born to Be Criminal: The Discourse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Union, 233-45. Ed. Riccardo Nicolosi and Anne Hartmann. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017.
The Sample Convention, or, When Fictionalized Narratives Can Double as Historical Testimony.” In Narration as Argument, 123-140. Ed. Paula Olmos. Berlin: Springer, 2017. Publisher's Version
Bellow on Israel:To Jerusalem and Back.” In The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow, 134-45. Ed. Victoria Aarons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
2016
Afterword (in Hebrew).” In In Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, Hebrew translation by Edith Sorer, 517-28. Tel Aviv: The Armchair Publishing House / Modan, 2016.
Rereading Varlam Shalamov’s ‘June’ and ‘May’: Four Kinds of Knowledge.” In (Hi)stories of the Gulag: Fiction and Reality, 193-203. Ed. Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal and Karoline Thaidigsmann. Heildelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016.
Bergson and the Modernist Novel: Joyce and Beyond.” In 1914: Ruptures et continuités, 125-37. Ed. Caroline Bérenger and Álvaro Fleites Marcos. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2016. Publisher's Version
2014
Bernard Harrison on the English Novel.” In Reality and Culture: Essays on the Philosophy of Bernard Harrison, 81-96. Ed. Patricia Hanna. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014.

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