Whistling Lillabullero

Ng, Julia. 2024. Whistling Lillabullero. Modern Language Notes (Comparative Literature Issue), 139(5), pp. 925-936. ISSN 0026-7910 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

In a universe populated by singularities, is there room for accompaniment? Departing from Sam Weber’s discussion of Kafka’s story “Josefine the Songstress, or the People of Mice,” in which “whistling” figures at every turn against interpretive expectation and at every overturning of conventional accounts of sociability and representational discourse, this essay explores the ground and consequences of literary singularity in and for broader claims about collectivity and impermanence, vulnerability and separation. To do so, the essay recovers the traces of another “whistling” that, as Weber reveals in a recent interview, “has accompanied [him] throughout [his] life”: Uncle Toby’s “whistling Lullabullero,” which in Tristram Shandy meets any attempt to “pin things down” or extract general conclusions with the anti-performative and the absurd. Frustrating conventional divisions between voice, speech and discourse, Josefine’s “fricative” whistling exposes the conventions of sociability as “situationally relative” and unable to fully erase their alternatives. Coyly attuning the interpretive process to the force of ambiguity, Toby’s whistling musters another thinking altogether on the situational and the social, one that unsettles the settled for the sake of the ungrounded and keeps language and code alike constantly open to revision.

Item Type:

Article

Additional Information:

Copyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press

Related URLs:

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

English and Comparative Literature
English and Comparative Literature > Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought

Dates:

DateEvent
19 February 2024Accepted
1 May 2025Published Online
December 2024Published

Item ID:

35101

Date Deposited:

04 Mar 2024 11:02

Last Modified:

20 May 2025 10:45

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35101

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