Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas

27/05/2025

Call for Conference Presentations
"Tracing Topoi"

Scholars in different branches of literary studies often come across clusters of motifs or specific narrative plots that recur across the borders of genres, periods, and national literatures. Such recurrences, termed topoi after the Greek topos (place), do not merely function as stable locations or commonplaces to which authors may have recourse but undergo permutations and revisions. A topos (e.g., “star-crossed lovers,” “the last words of the dying,” “seduction,” “self-sacrifice for a loved one”) may be patterned on human conduct or, in turn, inspire people to reproduce or mimic it.
The international conference “Tracing Topoi,” to be held in the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities on May 18-20, 2026, will focus on the history of topoi in narrative genres, possibly taking into account drama, film, and the visual arts.
The academic committee invites proposals on specific topoi, discussing their meanings and tracing their emergence, dissemination, waning, subversion, and possible comebacks. The issues to be raised may include

 cultural shifts that account for the rise and fall of a specific topos,
 the inner dynamics of innovation in the history of a topos,
 topos and structural variations of literary imagination,
 networks of topoi (with variations in core motifs),
 the function of parody in the reworking of topoi,
 the movement of topoi between “high” and popular culture,
 ways in which the study of topoi can supplement literary historiography,
 the place of literary topoi in the history of ideas.

Selected papers from the conference will appear in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press (see https://partialanswers.huji.ac.il ), to mark the 25th anniversary of the journal.

Please send paper proposals (200 to 500 words) to Sima Daniel [email protected] and Leona Toker [email protected] by September 8, 2025.

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13/02/2025

Issue 23.1 of Partial Answers has come out electronically (see https://partialanswers.huji.ac.il/publications); print copies will follow soon. The materials are on open access because Johns Hopkins University Press has included this journal in its "Subscribe to Open" program.

11/07/2024

Here is the link to a Johns Hopkins University Press blog about our latest issue, the special issue on "The Literal Sense" in honor of Jon Whitman:

27/06/2024

Happy to report that the materials of Partial Answers 22.2, the special issue on "The Literal Sense," in honor of Jon Whitman's work, are now available on-line at Project MUSE. Below are links from Google Scholar.

The print copies of the journal will follow soon.

The authors of the articles on "The Literal Sense," in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and in Judaic, Christian, and Moslem cultures, are leading scholars in their fields: Rita Copeland, Robert Gleave, Mordecai Z. Cohen, Edward L. Greenstein, Jeremy Cohen, and Michael Kramer.

Our thanks go to Professor Sanford Budick who had organized the symposium on which this issue is based.

The issue also contains interesting book reviews and a review essay on Beckett by Laurent Milesi and Arleen Ionescu.

There will soon be a blog about this issue on the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

26/01/2024

Partial Answers 22.1 has already been published on line; print copies will be available soon. Issue 22.2 (June 2024), mostly in the preprint stage now, will be a special issue on "the literal sense," in honor of Prof. Jon. Whitman. It will include essays by Rita Copeland, Robert Gleave, Mordechai Cohen, Ed Greenstein, Jeremy Cohen, and Michael Kramer.
The issue will also include some book reviews and a review essay by Laurent Milesi and Arleen Ionescu on two Beckett studies.