The K-Effect

Christopher GoGwilt is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. He is the author of The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (Oxford, 2011, winner, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize), The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock (Stanford, 2000), and The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford, 1995).

Introduction: Conrad's "timely appearance in English" 1 The K-effect, 6 * Conrad's "timely appearance in English," 13 * The K-effect circa 1911, 21 * Overview of the Book, 25 1 The English Case of Romanization: From Conrad's "blank space" to Joyce's "iSpace" 31 Defining Romanization: The Oxford English Dictionary and Joseph Conrad, 32 * Conrad's Accusative Case: Lord Jim and Nostromo, 51 * Joycean "iSpace" and the Conradian "blank space," 59 2 The Russian Face of Romanization: The K in Conrad and Kafka 72 Language, Script, and Reform in the Russian Empire, 77 * Under Western Eyes, A Personal Record, and "Prince Roman," 83 * Kafka and Conrad: The Character and Function of K in Central Europe, 102 3 The Chinese Character of Romanization: Conrad and Lu Xun 117 The Chinese Script Revolution and Romanization, 118 * Conrad's Chinese Characters: Almayer's Folly to Victory, 127 * Conrad and Lu Xun: The Interface of Chinese and Roman Characters, 144 4 Sanskritization, Romanization, Digitization 157 Sanskritization, 165 * Sanskritization and Romanization in the OED and in Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 174 * Digitization, 179 Acknowledgments 191 Notes 195 Bibliography 217 Index 227

Christopher GoGwilt's The K-Effect is timely and significant. Falling into the study of global modernisms, it engages in a comparative examination of romanization, which for GoGwilt includes not only the spread of Latin script across the globe but also the way that different texts, writers, and languages interact with transliteration into and within Latin script.-- "Modernism/Modernity" In an exhilarating exploration of the letter K and other micro-textual details across a range of writing systems, GoGwilt reexamines the history of romanization and its entanglement with Arabic, Chinese, and other major scripts. A fascinating range of modernist texts converge to form a powerful archive of exile, encounter, conflict, and transformative shifts in modern global history. A bold experiment in comparative method.---Lydia H. Liu, author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious No one has ever drawn, from the history of romanization and the shifting norms of transliteration, such subtle insights into the linguistic, social, and aesthetic forms of modernity as Christopher GoGwilt, and across so vast a world of scripts and languages. He has given us a truly innovative, eye-opening book.---Sheldon Pollock, Columbia University