Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2001"
TL;DR: McEwan's writing especially worthy of attention is the way in which his experimentation with time and narrative is interlinked with the rethinking of gender identity as discussed by the authors, and his early stories First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1979) contained troubled and claustrophobic examinations of emergent masculinity.
Abstract: For a generation of well-established postmodernist writers in Britain, the exploration of narrative as the containment and control of temporal experience is of central importance. What makes Ian McEwan's writing especially worthy of attention is the way in which his experimentation with time and narrative is interlinked with the rethinking of gender identity. The early stories First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1979) contained troubled and claustrophobic examinations of emergent masculinity. However, his novels from the 1980s onward contain an increasingly confident investment in gender as the cetral problematic through which the agency of the male writer can be reimagined in relation to both time and social space.
26 citations
TL;DR: In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin applied the symbolic hierarchical inversions of medieval carnival to literature and galvanized intellectual interest in carnival as an analytic, literary, and political model for transgression as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin applied the symbolic hierarchical inversions of medieval carnival to literature and galvanized intellectual interest in carnival as an analytic, literary, and political model for transgression. For Bakhtin and those influenced by his theory, carnival provided an ideal setting for what he termed the “dialogic imagination,” because it involved a temporary suspension of official order that allowed for a creative and therapeutic admixture of the symbolic forms of cultural life. As Wilson Yates succinctly explains in The Grotesque in Art and Literature, this heterogeneous festivity also served as a “revolutionary vision and understanding of a new world freed from both bourgeois and totalitarian cultures” (22). In the postmodern era, carnival's liberatory vision has been used to counter hegemonic notions of stable identity, gender, language, and truth in the contemporary work of such authors as Ishmael Reed, Angela Carter, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon...
22 citations
TL;DR: One of the defining features of postmodern art and theory is a pervasive suspicion of Enlightenment philosophies as mentioned in this paper, and the positivist championing of science and technology has been a persistent source of anxiety.
Abstract: One of the defining features of postmodern art and theory is a pervasive suspicion of Enlightenment philosophies. In particular, the positivist championing of science and technology, which remains an influential belief system today, has been a persistent source of anxiety. Among other concerns, scientific and medical discourses have a history of conveying sexist ideologies. Since the nineteenth century, at least, they have served as a crucial legitimizing basis for the power disparities between men and women.
17 citations
TL;DR: The pages kept falling. […] And the resplendent products, how the dazzle of a Packard car is repeated in the feature story about the art treasures of the Prado as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The pages kept falling. Baby food, instant coffee, encyclopedias and cars, waffle irons and shampoos and blended whiskeys. […] And the resplendent products, how the dazzle of a Packard car is repeated in the feature story about the art treasures of the Prado. It is all part of the same thing.
16 citations
TL;DR: A surprising number of reviewers have panned Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled as mentioned in this paper, and a smirky piece in The Yale Review captures the generality of negative reviews.
Abstract: A surprising number of reviewers have panned Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. So far the novel has received little to no significant commentary. A smirky piece in The Yale Review captures the gener...
13 citations
TL;DR: The existential implications of Coetzee's Foe have been discussed by as mentioned in this paper, who add to the existing feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern readings of Foe an existential critique that addresses important aspects of the novel left unexplored by these readings.
Abstract: Critics of J. M. Coetzee's Foe have focused their scholarly attention on Susan Barton, Friday, and Foe, but Coetzee's Cruso has been largely ignored. Although many scholars have given cursory acknowledgement to the Camusian echoes in Coetzee's portrayal of Cruso, their existential implications remain to be discussed. My aim is to add to the existing feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern readings of Foe an existential critique that addresses important aspects of the novel left unexplored by these readings. In many ways, existentialist thought has anticipated those late-twentieth-century theoretical models, particularly in rejecting absolutes, in privileging existence, freedom, and self-determination, and in analyzing ideology, language, and the gaze.
11 citations
TL;DR: One group valorized the catharsis of suppressed emotions leading to a resynthesis of mind, whereas another emphasized the recall of the repressed scene and a conscious reintegration of the dissociated memory into the patient's history as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: During World War I, the neuroses developed by soldiers in combat played a significant part in refashioning the categories, tenets, and techniques of English psychiatric practice, splitting its aims and hysterizing it, as it were, relentlessly driving it to convert symptom into the signifying elaboration of language. Faced with a panoply of hysterical and neurasthenic disorders–paralysis, mutism, blindness among regular soldiers and nightmares, insomnia, dizziness, and depression among officers–analysts debated over the most efficacious therapeutic approach. One group valorized the catharsis of suppressed emotions leading to a resynthesis of mind, whereas another emphasized the recall of the repressed scene and a conscious reintegration of the dissociated memory into the patient's history.1 The different methods entailed varying degrees of participation by the subject in the curative process, but both solicited a participatory rather than a coercive model of treatment. The symptom was recognized a...
11 citations
TL;DR: In Generation Ecch!, a popular satire of contemporary youth culture, Jason Cohen and Michael Krugman excerpt the promotional blurbs from several recent coming-of-age novels to uncover an intriguing trend as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In Generation Ecch!, a popular satire of contemporary youth culture, Jason Cohen and Michael Krugman excerpt the promotional blurbs from several recent coming-of-age novels to uncover an intriguing trend. One critic describes Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984) as a “Catcher in the Rye for the M. B. A. set.” Another labels Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero (1985) “an updated Catcher in the Rye.” Cosmopolitan's book editor proves such a Catcher fan that she compares not one but two Douglas Coupland novels to that classic. “Having called Coupland's first book [Generation X (1991)] a Catcher in the Rye for our times,” she writes of his second, Shampoo Planet (1993), “i repeat myself (97)”.
10 citations
TL;DR: Barthes declared that the Author was dead, that works had been transformed into texts, that any notion of finding the author within the text was kowtowing to an outdated sense of reverence and authority that would soon have no place in the burgeoning scheme of poststructuralism as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In 1968 Roland Barthes declared that the Author was dead, that works had been transformed into texts, that any notion of finding the author within the text was kowtowing to an outdated sense of reverence and authority that would soon have no place in the burgeoning scheme of poststructuralism. Seeking to break away from an “image of literature […] tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life” (143), Barthes was an early critic of the Romantic and modernist schools of thought that positioned the author as a God-like creator who leaves no room for the reader.
9 citations
TL;DR: McCarthy's novels have always centered around the figure of the isolato, the man alone in a naturalistically indifferent and shockingly violent world, trying to keep flesh and soul together in the face of existential doubt and terrible tribulation and suffering as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Cormac McCarthy's novels have always centered around the figure of the isolato—the man alone in a naturalistically indifferent and shockingly violent world, trying to keep flesh and soul together in the face of existential doubt and terrible tribulation and suffering. That world in which McCarthy sets his lonely characters is thoroughly postlapsarian and thoroughly undifferentiated; the same unpleasantness is everywhere, and whether in Kentucky or New Mexico is largely a matter of detail.
9 citations
TL;DR: Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) as discussed by the authors is a seminal work in the history of feminist utopian fiction, and it has also evoked frequent extended comparisons with other feminist utopian novels of the 1970s.
Abstract: Discussions of Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) have tended to focus on the striking characteristics of the utopian future she portrays—appropriately enough, for Piercy has commented, “What I was doing was taking all my favorite ideas out of the various movements for social change that were around and attempting to give them as concrete a form as possible so it would seem real” (Gifford 15). The novel has also evoked frequent extended comparisons with other feminist utopian fiction of the 1970s. Critics have gained historical perspective on the novel by looking to the tradition of utopian writing, in particular Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915).
TL;DR: Martin Amis has been something of a puzzle to most critics since the publication of his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973 as discussed by the authors, which was a social satire, comparing Amis to Jonathan Swift and Angus Wilson.
Abstract: Martin Amis has been something of a puzzle to most critics since the publication of his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973. Initial reviews of the novel were mixed and contradictory. London Magazine celebrated his inaugural novel as social satire, comparing Amis to Jonathan Swift and Angus Wilson (Mellors 1331, whereas Encounter found The Rachel Papers to be “teeming with characters who are about as appealing as bacilli on a [washcloth]” (Jordan 64). Another reviewer admonished Amis to stop showing off his cleverness and find a subject worthier of his outrage (Moritz 20). Ironically, Amis answered the demand to find a subject worthier of his outrage through exploiting his cleverness. He did exactly that by mastering the art of postmodern prose: his style, with multiple layerings of fiction upon fiction, and a deluded narrator imbedded somewhere in the middle, is itself a story.
TL;DR: The White Hotel as mentioned in this paper performs a subversive critique of twentieth-century versions of instrumental reason and the dominant discourses it grounds while at the same time textually reinforcing an authority that is heir to instrumental reason's ideological underpinnings.
Abstract: The White Hotel engages in a double movement that complicates any simple political reading. D.M. Thomas's novel performs a subversive critique of twentieth-century versions of instrumental reason and the dominant discourses it grounds while at the same time textually reinforcing an authority that is heir to instrumental reason's ideological underpinnings. By reminding its readers that, in recent history, instrumental reason has been linked at times to violence in the forms of sexism, racism, and mass genocide and by creatively juxtaposing a variety of texts in ways that work to subvert any one static or privileged interpretation, The White Hotel produces a radical indictment of certain twentieth-century discursive practices. Yet, the novel remains unable to extricate itself completely from a dependence on an authoritarian rationalistic framework, in the form of framing texts that carry marks of authorial control and of sympathy toward the very modes of thought that the novel critiques.
TL;DR: The field of Don DeLillo studies should not limit itself to these well-traveled and, arguably, still fertile critical grounds as mentioned in this paper, and there are signs that critics are beginning to move into other areas of inquiry.
Abstract: To deepen and expand the study of Don DeLillo, we need to acknowledge the role gender plays in his work. Since William Burke's “Football, Literature and Culture”—the first literary criticism on DeLillo—was published in the Southwest Review twenty-five years ago, scholars of DeLillo have addressed topics as diverse as postmodernity, historiography, systems theory, technology, film, and literary Naturalism. Work in these areas has been and may continue to be necessary, but the field of DeLillo studies should not limit itself to these well-traveled and, arguably, still fertile critical grounds.1 Fortunately, there are signs that critics are beginning to move into other areas of inquiry.
TL;DR: DeLillo's White Noise as mentioned in this paper is a technological novel that includes allusions to cybernetics, information theory, and chaos theory, including the feedback loop, a mathematical function into which an integer is fed; the resulting integer is then fed back into the function to yield a new iteration; this repetitive process of iteration and reiteration results in feedback loops that occur over time.
Abstract: The scientific concepts in White Noise, a technological novel by Don DeLillo, include allusions to cybernetics, information theory, and chaos theory. The feedback loop, important in cybernetics, information, and chaotics, is a mathematical function into which an integer is fed; the resulting integer is fed back into the function to yield a new iteration; this repetitive process of iteration and reiteration results in feedback loops that occur over time. This concept of feedback informs the narrative structure in White Noise as well as the figuration of consumer culture and the mental processes of the characters, especially Jack Gladney, for whom time has both frightening and nostalgic associations.
TL;DR: For instance, my father asked me a series of questions that made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Once for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known. “You like to tell true stories, don't you?” he asked, and I answered, “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.” Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?
TL;DR: DeLillo's Moo II as mentioned in this paper is based on a Warhol silkscreen that also adorns the cover of the novel; in the novel, DeLillo's characters look at Warhol's work in museums and offer theories about the work's power.
Abstract: Andy Warhol appears in two of Don DeLillo's novels, Mao II and Underworld. Moo II takes its title from a Warhol silkscreen that also adorns the cover of the novel; in the novel, DeLillo's characters look at Warhol's work in museums and offer theories about the work's power. Warhol is less of a factor in Underworld. He appears only once, in the chapter describing Truman Capote's Black and White Ball—“Andy Warhol walked by wearing a mask that was a photograph of his own face” (571)—but this brief appearance highlights some important connections between Warhol and DeLillo.
TL;DR: World's Fair seems to be one of E L Doctorow's least political novels as discussed by the authors, where the radical figures and the political engagement are absent from the book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Luke.
Abstract: World's Fair seems to be one of E L Doctorow's least political novels Gone are the radical figures and the political engagement central to Doctorow's project in The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Luke World's Fair even seems to be an exception to conservative reviewer Carol Iannone's charge that Doctorow's novels have “the ideological attitudes of the Left, attitudes that pervade and, finally, compromise everything he has written” (53)1 In fact, Carol Harter and James Thompson claim that “only the most determined social critic will wrench this novel into political statement” (118) World's Fair seems to abandon the political concerns of Doctorow's earlier novels for what is alternately seen as an autobiographical Bildungsroman or as a new portrait of the artist as a young man
TL;DR: DeLillo as discussed by the authors uses his characters to contradict the post-structuralist claim that language constitutes subjectivity as well, that language “subjects” the self.
Abstract: Most of his critics assume that Don DeLillo is writing from a given set of post-structuralist assumptions about reality, language, and subjectivity.1 His novels reveal a deep distrust of the metaphysics of presence, of ultimate meanings, of stable formulations of self. They clearly assert the primacy of language, its power to order experience and to constitute reality. Most of his characters exhibit the same destabilization and dispersion that mark postmodern characters. It is all the more surprising, then, to find that DeLillo uses his characters to contradict the poststructuralist claim that language constitutes subjectivity as well, that language “subjects” the self.
TL;DR: In this paper, Johnson's first novel, Angels, the lawyer whose client is about to be executed for murder experiences a revelation about his future career and, ultimately, his identity.
Abstract: At the end of Denis Johnson's first novel, Angels, the lawyer whose client is about to be executed for murder experiences a revelation about his future career and, ultimately, his identity. He recognizes that he is still young enough to be the elected official “to something or other” that he had assumed he would eventually become, but he realizes that his client's death has changed him. Instead of achieving respectable political office, he knows that he will “probably continue the rest of his life as a criminal lawyer because, in all honesty, a part of him wanted to help murderers go free” (209). Although there is reason to believe that his client's character has been transformed into a redeemable soul during his brief jail term, the moment is nonetheless disturbing because we are unsure whether Fredericks identifies with his client's potential redemption or with the act from which his client must be redeemed. The moment is an emblematic one in Johnson's fiction, revealing an almost obsessive int...
TL;DR: The authors argued that for Duras the imaging of the child in the gold lame heels does not represent fiction, but the faithful projection of self, a projection of Duras's younger self at a crucial moment.
Abstract: Marguerite Duras's novel The Lover seems to play on the difference between the genres of fiction and autobiography. The Lover is especially beguiling because even though it claims to be a novel, it presents events and episodes that may have occurred in Duras's life. Readers may be tempted to view The Lover as both autobiography and fiction, possibly viewing much of what seems to be “imaginary” as the fiction of the novel. Conversely, this essay argues that for Duras the imaging of the child in the gold lame heels does not represent fiction, but the faithful projection of self, a projection of Duras's younger self at a crucial moment, at a crucial time in Duras's life.
TL;DR: Denis Johnson is the poet laureate of the pathology of addiction as mentioned in this paper, and his fictional landscape is peopled by lost souls, the misfits, the desperate, waiting for a perpetually postponed salvation in a haze of alcohol and heroin.
Abstract: Denis Johnson is the poet laureate of the pathology of addiction. His fictional landscape is peopled by lost souls—the sinners, the misfits, the desperate—waiting for a perpetually postponed salvation in a haze of alcohol and heroin.1 Johnson's distinctive vision finds its most spectacular expression in the short story collection Jesus' Son, eleven interlocked tales narrated by an addictive consciousness simultaneously clouded and yet rendered startlingly lucid by chemical dependency. This poetic fiction has inspired some readers to ecstatic hyperbole: “it seems sometimes as if Rimbaud returned from Abbysinia and spent a few years driving around America, hanging out with the riffraff who ended up in ‘Drugstore Cowboy’” (Crimson 3).
TL;DR: The Name of the Rose as discussed by the authors contains a site plan and a floor plan for a medieval abbey, as well as the number of steps in a spiral staircase and the arrangement of the abbey.
Abstract: As every intro-to-lit student is taught, a novel's setting is crucial; yet I know of no novel other than Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose that so emphasizes its setting as to include a site plan and a floor plan. In his “Postscript to The Name of the Rose,” Eco says that in preparation for writing this historical novel he spent a year on “the construction of the world.” During this research time he “conducted long architectural investigations, studying photographs and floor plans in the encyclopedia of architecture, to establish the arrangement of the abbey, the distances, even the number of steps in a spiral staircase” (513). The resulting drawings are one more sign system among many, another kind of code.
TL;DR: Connie May Fowler's essay "No Snapshots in the Attic: A Granddaughter's Search for a Cherokee Past" as mentioned in this paper, which serves as a companion to her second novel, River of Hidden Dream (1994), explains Fowler's search for information about her deceased grandmother, Oneida Hunter May, and her frustration in finding no letters, no documents, incomplete and incorrect public records, inaccurate and biased history.
Abstract: Connie May Fowler's essay “No Snapshots in the Attic: A Granddaughter's Search for a Cherokee Past,” which serves as a companion to her second novel, River of Hidden Dream (1994), explains Fowler's search for information about her deceased grandmother, Oneida Hunter May, and her frustration in finding no letters, no documents, incomplete and incorrect public records, inaccurate and biased history—in short, huge voids in available information that virtually erase her grandmother's life. Ultimately, she tells us, she turns to family stories as the only viable corrective to the failure of history and public record to preserve any part of her grandmother's life story. She deals more metaphorically with this same situation in her novel—narrator Sadie sitting in as granddaughter and Susannah Motherwell, nee Sparrow Hunter, as grandmother.
TL;DR: Although Schneider's Vati (Daddy) caused a literary scandal at the time of its appearance in 1987, it has provoked only a modest number of academic responses since then as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Although Peter Schneider's Vati (Daddy) caused a literary scandal at the time of its appearance in 1987, it has provoked only a modest number of academic responses since then.1 Almost all of those scholarly comments concentrate on the text's critical reception, debating whether its initial rejection by press reviewers was warranted.2 Only the contributions of Colin Riordan and of Peter Morgan stray from that pattern by offering a more thorough reading of the disputed text itself. In this essay, I attempt to add to their analyses.
TL;DR: This paper pointed out that the focus of most Arabic language critical studies of the Arabic novel has been largely historical, national, or thematic, however, to Western feminist critics, gender has been a central topic of interest for some time and is likely to continue to be (132).
Abstract: In 1995 Roger Allen stated that the focus of most Arabic language critical studies of the Arabic novel has been largely historical, national, or thematic. He points out, however, that to Western feminist critics, gender has been a central topic of interest for some time and is likely to continue to be (132). Indeed, writings by Middle Eastern and North African women have been the subject of numerous works by both Western and Eastern critics, most notably Miriam Cooke's War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1988) and Evelyne Accad's Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World (1978) and Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (1990).
TL;DR: Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published in 1984, the prophetic Orwellian year when “Big Brother is watching.” Although Kundera has expressed a low opinion of Orwell, calling him a mere “philosophical writer” rather than a “novelist,” there are similarities with Kunderda's own rather philosophical text in which characters are mercilessly exposed to a panopticon gaze that takes away their privacy as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published in 1984, the prophetic Orwellian year when “Big Brother is watching.” Although Kundera has expressed a low opinion of Orwell, calling him a mere “philosophical writer” rather than a “novelist,” there are similarities with Kundera's own rather philosophical text in which characters are mercilessly exposed to a panopticon gaze that takes away their privacy.
TL;DR: This article explored the ways in which the book Body gives an idiosyncratic slant to many of the important issues in current debates about the body and analyzed how Crews writes about one of the more exotic and extreme fields of bodily training and representation, body-building.
Abstract: This exploration of Harry Crews's novel Body outlines the ways in which the book gives an idiosyncratic slant to many of the important issues in current debates about the body and, in particular, analyzes how Crews writes about one of the more exotic and extreme fields of bodily training and representation, body-building. Underpinning the novel's detailing of the obsessions within bodybuilding and bodybuilding competition for muscularity and vascularity is a clear sense of the extremes to which the modern body may be subjected in contemporary social and political contexts.
TL;DR: The theme of moral judgment that is implicit in Mordecai Richler's early novels is explicit in St Urbain's Horseman Unlike Noah Adler and Duddy Kravitz, Jake Hersh faces more than metaphorical conviction on figurative moral charges He stands before judge and jury, family and friends, media and audience charged with indecent assault, possession of cannabis, and aiding and abetting sodomy Significantly, readers are virtually excluded from the court proceedings: only on the last day of trial are they permitted unmediated access to the Old Bailey, and only at Jake
Abstract: The theme of moral judgment that is implicit in Mordecai Richler's early novels is explicit in St Urbain's Horseman Unlike Noah Adler and Duddy Kravitz, Jake Hersh faces more than metaphorical conviction on figurative moral charges He stands before judge and jury, family and friends, media and audience charged with indecent assault, possession of cannabis, and aiding and abetting sodomy Significantly, readers are virtually excluded from the court proceedings: only on the last day of trial are they permitted unmediated access to the Old Bailey, and only at Jake's sentencing do they learn the specific charges laid against him