Showing papers in "Contemporary Literature in 2015"

"Observed, Measured, Contained": Contemporary Fiction and the Science of Sleep

Abstract: This chapter examines a cluster of recent texts, including Jonathan Coe’s The House of Sleep (1997), William Boyd’s Armadillo (1998), Ralph Cohen’s Inspired Sleep (2002), David Foster Wallace’s ‘Oblivion’ (2004) and Alison MacLeod’s The Wave Theory of Angels (2005), that have taken inspiration—albeit often of a decidedly negative kind—from the discoveries, institutions, practices and discourses of contemporary sleep science. These texts are evidence of an emerging and indeed flourishing subgenre in contemporary fiction, one that we can call ‘sleep-science fiction’, a subgenre that despite its fascination with the hi-tech world of the sleep laboratory is conspicuously nostalgic for natural, pre-technological and ‘unplugged’ forms of human slumber.

"Against the Grand Project": Iain Sinclair's Local London

Abstract: The dust-jackets of Iain Sinclair’s books are laden with endorsements describing him as the preeminent metropolitan writer of London. Yet those same texts often re-inscribe specifically local and regional practices. A walk around the perimeter of the borough of Hackney, for example, is described, in terms invoking ancient parochial rituals, as “beating the bounds.” This article, focusing on one of London’s most prominent literary spokesmen as a regional or local writer, challenges the conventional binary relationship between metropolis and region. Sinclair’s work does not function under the aegis of this model but overlays competing mappings of the same space on top of one another. Drawing on the idea that London is only knowable as a series of villages, his texts focalize the specificity of particular locales and emphasize first-hand experience of their textures, chiefly through the practices of walking and interviewing locals. For Sinclair, the implications of this regionalism are to be found in defending the “obscurity” of locally-used places, and guarding against their being “overwhelmed by great public schemes.” I draw on examples from a number of Sinclair’s texts that rail against government-endorsed grand projects – the Docklands redevelopment, the Millennium Dome, the London Olympics – to assess their reassertion of regional concerns in the face of centralised (and commercially minded) planning. I argue that these texts oppose the view from central London that adjacent regions are blank spaces ripe for top-down rejuvenation, offering instead a more complex and detailed mapping of their status as regional places in their own right.

An Interview with Dave Eggers and Mimi Lok

Abstract: On 18 March 2015 we had the rare opportunity to publicly interview the celebrated American author Dave Eggers and Mimi Lok, co-founder with Eggers of the socially engaged oral history non-profit Voice of Witness, in front of a student audience at the Vooruit cultural center in Ghent, Belgium. The occasion for their visit was Eggers’s being awarded the 2015 Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University in recognition of his human rights work. The interview aimed to give the audience an overall sense of the various creative and charitable projects in which Eggers and Lok are involved and which have earned them widespread acclaim. This published version of it is an edited and condensed transcript. The interview consists of two parts. The first part deals with Eggers’s literary work, homing in on The Circle in particular. The second part focuses on Voice of Witness and on how this project relates to Eggers’s work as a writer.