Burning “Between Two Fires”: The Individual under Erasure in Hassan Blasim’s “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting article which uses psychoanalytic concepts to interpret the short story in relation to contemporary discourse around multiculturalism. Most of the references are not contemporary (Fanon, du Bois, Freud etc.) but the discussion around multiculturalism brings the argument up to date and is pertinent to political debates in many countries. 

Minor revision only.

Author Response

Please see the attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The abstract should be rewritten, as things are not clear as they stand. After reading the paper, I understand why, the paper itself being unclear in its ambition. 

Before writing “Du Bois’s Double Consciousness”, I believe an introduction is needed. 

Although I understand the use of Du Bois’s “double Consciousness” here, I would like the author to explain why she or he decided to use this theory in particular as Du Bois launched this concept in another context. Other writers, closer to Blasim, expressed this idea as well: diasporic writers, for instance, from Nigeria (the author later mentions Oyeyemi), or countless others. The author does refer to other writers/theoreticians like Fanon, but one may wonder why this needs a whole page to express what is already something that is very well-known, part of the foundation of postcolonial studies for instance. 

The first part of the paper deals with the issue of multiculturalism. The problem is that the analysis of the short story at the heart of the paper is constantly delayed. This is also something that can be found in the paper as a whole, and this is a major issue. The discussion is admittedly interesting, but the author only starts analysing the short story on line 229, which is far too late. These reflections, akin to digressions, on the concept of multiculturalism could be integrated within the paper in another way: one thing is sure, the author should try and focus on the short story per se right from the very start of the paper. There is way too much context, admittedly interesting, but this is way too long and not what we can expect in a paper.

From 229-320: although this is interesting, the problem is that this is plain paraphrase. No concept is brought to the fore, apart from Freud towards the end, and not a precise reference to him at first (this comes later). This should be rewritten maybe to include close-reading, concepts, elements of analysis and not just simply a summary of what the short story is about.

There’s a whole part dealing with dreams (Freud and others) from a theoretical standpoint but this fails to more clearly articulate these reflections with the study/analysis of the text itself: by this I mean that language should be analysed, the literary genre as well (the short story vs. the novel: what does it change to write a short story about the crisis of identity for the character? Compared to a novel?). The impression is that theory is imposed onto the text that is studied while it certainly should be the other way round. 

The reference to Spivak (541) should be more emphasized. This is way too direct to mention the term subaltern and explained that it was defined by Spivak. What text? + does the author therefore consider this piece of fiction as postcolonial?

Overall there is a huge amount of work to provide in order to make things clearer and focus on the literary quality of this text. I'm all for interdisciplinary approaches, but the literary quality of the text should not disappear from the author's analysis. 

Some typos that the editors will probably spot. 

Author Response

Please see the attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf