Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2003"
TL;DR: The great novelists of modern times have tended to be those whose visions estrange us from our familiar world to bring us back to it with unique new perspectives and an expanded sense of the human domain this paper.
Abstract: The great novelists of modern times have tended to be those whose visions estrange us from our familiar world to bring us back to it with unique new perspectives and an expanded sense of the human domain.
32 citations
TL;DR: The Slaughterhouse-Five as discussed by the authors is an anti-war novel based on the author's own experiences in World War II, where he witnessed the bombing and complete destruction of Dresden.
Abstract: “That's the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.” Slaughterhouse Five 111 Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been widely discussed as an antiwar novel based on the author's own experiences in World War II. As a German POW, Vonnegut witnessed the bombing and complete destruction of Dresden, and Slaughterhouse-Five is the author's manifestation of what he called “a process of twenty years […] of living with Dresden and the aftermath” (Allen 163). Indeed, the words that describe the war, the Dresden events, and their effect on the people who experienced them did not come easily to Vonnegut. In an interview in 1974, he commented on the difficulties of articulating his experiences: “I came home in 1945, started writing about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and WROTE ABOUT IT” (Allen 163). This agony is echoed in the first chapter of the novel
30 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that the ascendancy of visual media, most notably cinema but also television, video, and photography, had eclipsed the novel as our culture's preeminent means for modeling and interpreting contemporary experience, and that the Internet, hypertext, and other new forms of electronic writing capable of combining text, sound and image had already made old-fashioned print-bound books, with their cumbersome physicality, increasingly unlikely to survive within the global village's electronic system of communication, with its bewildering proliferation of lingoes, databases, and channels.
Abstract: Remember those dire, premillennial pronouncements about the alarming marginalization of reading and writing in our increasingly visually oriented, digitalized Internet era? Or the claims that the ascendancy of visual media—most notably cinema but also television, video, and photography—had eclipsed the novel as our culture's preeminent means for modeling and interpreting contemporary experience? Or the related insistence that the Internet, hypertext, and other new forms of electronic writing capable of combining text, sound, and image had already made old-fashioned print-bound books, with their cumbersome physicality, increasingly unlikely to survive within the global village's electronic system of communication, with its bewildering proliferation of lingoes, databases, and channels?
26 citations
TL;DR: A kind of parallel history of victimisation, which would counter the history of success and victory, should be memorized for all of us at the end of this century.
Abstract: [Bertha is] necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry—offstage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage. (Jean Rhys, Letters 156) We need, therefore, a kind of parallel history of, let us say, victimisation, which would counter the history of success and victory. To memorize the victims of history—the sufferers, the humiliated, the forgotten—should be a task for all of us at the end of this century. (Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting” 10-11)
17 citations
TL;DR: Atwood's The Blind Assassin this paper is at once an intricately designed literary puzzle featuring a classic Atwoodian narrator and an unsettling cautionary tale that, like Atwood's other novels, focuses attention on the power politics of gender relations.
Abstract: Aptly described as “grand storytelling on a grand scale” and as a “beautiful puzzle,” a story-within-a-story-within-a-story in which “every piece fits” (Dirda, Puckett), Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is at once an intricately designed literary puzzle featuring a classic Atwoodian narrator—the elderly memoirist Iris Chase Griffen, who is a master storyteller and illusionist—and an unsettling cautionary tale that, like Atwood's other novels, focuses attention on the power politics of gender relations. At the center of The Blind Assassin, as Atwood has commented, is the “concept of human sacrifice—in Zycron, in Iris's behavior and in Laura's” (Sylge). In pointedly connecting the traumatic sexual sacrifice of the two sisters, Iris and Laura Chase, to the sacrifice of the virgin in “The Blind Assassin” science fiction tale, Atwood, through repetitive retellings of the story of women's sexual victimization, probes the cultural—and historical—repetition of sexual violence against women, showing t...
14 citations
TL;DR: The novels of J. M. Coetzee are increasingly recognized for their engagement with ethics as discussed by the authors. Yet, what ethics may mean in Coetzoe's novels is open to a variety of formulations, perhaps as is the term "ethics" itself.
Abstract: The novels of J. M. Coetzee are increasingly recognized for their engagement with ethics. Yet, what ethics may mean in Coetzee's novels is open to a variety of formulations, perhaps as is the term “ethics” itself. Lawrence Buell observes that although ethics “[has lately] become a more privileged term [in literary study … it] has also become an increasingly ductile […] one” (11). Coetzee's body of writings, despite its searching engagement with ethics, may ultimately resist being understood through a single model of ethics and may itself contribute to the growing amorphousness of “ethics” in critical theory.1
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that the novel's ironized ending, the "Historical Notes" shortcircuits any hope for political effectiveness that Offred's open-ended conclusion might hold out.
Abstract: Since its publication in the mid-l980s, some readers have objected to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale on political grounds. One version of this objection asserts that the novel is not simply dystopian but antiutopian in that the novel's ironized ending, the “Historical Notes,” shortcircuits any hope for political effectiveness that Offred's open-ended conclusion might hold out.
11 citations
TL;DR: The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience. (Slotkin 5) History and rhetoric—which is to say, conquest by arms and conquest by the word: the discovery of America is the modern instance par excellence of how these two kinds of violence are entwined; how metaphor becomes fact, and fact, metaphor; how the realms of power and myth can be reciprocally sustaining. (Bercovitch 71)
11 citations
TL;DR: The Last Orders (1996) was a new departure for Graham Swift, his first sustained attempt (except The Sweet Shop Owner; his debut novel in 1980) to represent a social milieu markedly different from the middle-class environment that he normally portrays.
Abstract: What costs humanity very dearly is doubtless to believe that one can have done in history with a general essence of Man, on the pretext that it represents only a Hauptgespenst, arch-ghost, but also, what comes down to the same thing—at bottom—to still believe, no doubt, in this capital ghost. To believe in it as do the credulous or the dogmatic. Between the two beliefs, as always, the way remains narrow. —Jacques Demda, Specters of Marx 175 Last Orders (1996) was a new departure for Graham Swift, his first sustained attempt (except The Sweet Shop Owner; his debut novel in 1980) to represent a social milieu markedly different from the middle-class environment that he normally portrays.
9 citations
TL;DR: Among Western women who have written about Africa, Margaret Laurence, in This Side Jordan, and Barbara Kingsolver, in The Poisonwood Bible, have both chosen to write of an African country on the eve of independence as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Among Western women who have written about Africa, Margaret Laurence, in This Side Jordan, and Barbara Kingsolver, in The Poisonwood Bible, have both chosen to write of an African country on the eve of independence. Laurence's novel, set in Ghana and drafted while she was living there in the late 1950s, was her first; though she went on to write five novels set in Canada, she continued to develop themes that grew out of her experiences in Africa.1 The African setting—the Congo—of Kingsolver's novel marks a departure from the American Southwest venue of her three earlier novels; yet this novel likewise draws on issues important in her earlier works. A key concern in both This Side Jordan and The Poisonwood Bible is the relationship between those in power and those subordinated to that power. Laurence explores the colonizer-colonized dichotomy from the perspectives of both sides, whereas King-solver focuses on America's abuse of its power in the subversion of Congolese independence.
8 citations
TL;DR: Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy as mentioned in this paper is set in a small Irish town at the beginning of the 1960s, a turbulent time in the world at large (as references to the Cuban Missile Crisis and potential nuclear war underscore) and more specifically in neocolonial Ireland.
Abstract: Patrick McCabe's novel is set in a small Irish town at the beginning of the 1960s, a turbulent time in the world at large (as references to the Cuban Missile Crisis and potential nuclear war underscore) and more specifically in neocolonial Ireland.1 The departure of the colonizer leads to a state of indeterminacy that is dictated by two conflicting impulses: to embrace the tenuous promise of prosperity left in the wake of the colonizer, or to “imagine” a unified past and reclaim a necessarily idealized “identity.”2 The struggles of Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy invoke both neocolonial Ireland's anguished residual relationship with the colonizer and its search for nationhood. Francie's ambivalent relationship with the community, his search for identity, his lack of a sense of history combined with an idealization of the past, his fascination with the life led by the Nugents as adopters and representatives of dominant culture values, and finally his own self-loathing all mirror the country's neo...
TL;DR: Kincaid as mentioned in this paper stated that "my whole upbringing had been devoted to preventing me from becoming a slut" and "the crucial thing was that I would not communicate with my family".
Abstract: […] my whole upbringing had been devoted to preventing me from becoming a slut. (127) —Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy The crucial thing was that I would not communicate with my family. Somehow I knew that was the key to anything I wanted to make of myself. I could not be with people who knew me so well that they knew just what I was capable of. I had to be with people who thought whatever I said went. (133) —Jamaica Kincaid, Interview with Kay Bonetti […] there are many barriers which sexual migrants have to overcome. (23) —Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex”
TL;DR: A new environmental awareness in world culture, emerging from a recognition of the complex symbiotic relationship between humanity and the earth's resources and a conviction that we must sustain "the fragile web" of our planet's diversity, has displaced the hitherto unquestioned conviction that nature exists for our exploitation as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: As inhabitants of an increasingly complex multinational space that challenges us with the immense “difficulty, if not impossibility, of extracting ourselves from the dominant cultural maps within which we live” (King 182), we have seen in the last few decades a growth of “complexity consciousness” in the general population. This new consciousness has constructively transformed some of the most dominant “maps” in late-twentieth-century industrial societies. A new environmental awareness in world culture, emerging from a recognition of the complex symbiotic relationship between humanity and the earth's resources and a conviction that we must sustain “the fragile web” of our planet's diversity, has displaced the hitherto unquestioned conviction that nature exists for our exploitation (“Biodiversity”).
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a double-voiced version of the opening chapter of Graham Swift's Waterland, where the narrative voice announces a split allegiance to its many venerated humanist interests.
Abstract: Throughout the opening chapters of Graham Swift's Waterland, the narrative voice announces a split allegiance to its many venerated humanist interests. Indeed, the narrative is, in the Bakhtinian sense, pervasively double voiced.
TL;DR: The reader of the detective novel comes metafictionally to identify with the detective, as both reader and detective are bound up in the metaphysical or epistemological work of interpretation, the work of reading clues and writing a solution or end as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: It was a wrong number that started it. —Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy One ought, probably, to make a start for oneself, but I think that on this point Jeffrey T. Nealon says it best The detective novel is often analyzed in terms of its metafictional and metaphysical appeal. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the genre comments upon the process of sifting through signs, and ultimately upon the possibility of deriving order from the seeming chaos of conflicting clues and motives. The unravelling work of the detective within the story mirrors and assists the work of the reader, as both try to piece together the disparate signs that might eventually solve the mystery. The reader of the detective novel comes metafictionally to identify with the detective, as both reader and detective are bound up in the metaphysical or epistemological work of interpretation, the work of reading clues and writing a solution or end. (91-92)
TL;DR: Whiteness Studies as discussed by the authors is a critical enterprise that has generated controversy among U.S. race scholars, but few would disagree that one of its continuing contributions to contemporary discussions of race is the insistence that the racial category of whiteness be demystified-that its hegemonic contrivances be made visible.
Abstract: Although the emergent critical enterprise loosely termed “Whiteness Studies” has generated controversy among U.S. race scholars, few would disagree that one of its continuing contributions to contemporary discussions of race is the insistence that the racial category of whiteness be demystified-that its hegemonic contrivances be made visible.
TL;DR: In this article, the presence of Japan in Vineland is explained by the principle of incongruous juxaposition, including that of American culture with Japanese culture (226).
Abstract: How can the presence of Japan in Vineland be explained? Western critics have been content either to take its presence for granted or to comprehend Japan as part of the purely formal or structural dynamics of cyberpunk. Thus, Brian McHale insists on cyberpunk's “principle of incongruous juxaposition”—including that of American culture with Japanese culture (226). His chapter on Vineland, which is a discussion of television in the novel, passes over the curiosity of why, in each of the two appearances of television in Gravity's Rainbow, Japan, of all countries, is chosen as the means for the representation.
TL;DR: Following the 1995 publication of Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, familiar comments about the author's much-debated stance on feminist issues once again appeared in book reviews.
Abstract: Following the 1995 publication of Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, familiar comments about the author's much-debated stance on feminist issues once again appeared in book reviews. For example, in the Yale Review, Lome Moore described the Baltimore of Tyler's novel as “a land and time unto itself, untouched by such things as feminism […] or politics of any kind” (141). Brooke Allen, in the New Criterion, lamented that Tyler's characters “seem eerily untouched by any of the revolutions, be they sexual or feminist, of the last forty years.” Additionally, Allen complained, “Not only do none of Tyler's wives see themselves as feminists, they apparently do not even acknowledge that such a creature exists” (33). Similar observations have greeted the debuts of many of Tyler's novels since the 1970s, when her negative reviews of a number of feminist works and her published remarks about novels by “liberated” women—“I hate 'em all”—unsurprisingly earned her the reputation of being unsupportive of feminist con...
TL;DR: For instance, this paper examined what it meant for Pynchon, already a reclusive figure, to publish in these popular magazines during the mid-1960s, or how we might understand these texts today after taking into account their original sites of publication.
Abstract: Any devoted Pynchon reader knows that “The Secret Integration” originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and that portions of The Crying of Lot 49 were first serialized in Esquire and Cavalier. But few readers stop to ask what it meant for Pynchon, already a reclusive figure, to publish in these popular magazines during the mid-1960s, or how we might understand these texts today after taking into account their original sites of publication. “The Secret Integration” in the Post or the excerpt of Lot 49 in Esquire produce different meanings in these different contexts, meanings that disappear when reading the later versions alone.
TL;DR: Shields's Swann provides fertile ground for an exploration of issues relating to literary production, particularly women's literary production as mentioned in this paper, and matters of sexual politics and the gendering of discourse figure prominently in the text.
Abstract: Carol Shields's Swann provides fertile ground for an exploration of issues relating to literary production, particularly women's literary production, and matters of sexual politics and the gendering of discourse figure prominently in the text. The novel has been read as a mystery; indeed, in various editions the full title appears as Swann: A Mystery or Swann: A Literary Mystery. It unravels the strange disappearance of not only all the volumes of poetry produced by the now dead Mary Swann but also everything connected with her literary production, the single clear photograph of her, and even the lectures and notes of two critics studying her poetry, Syd Buswell and Morton Jimroy. As in Antonia Byatt's Possession or Jane Gardam's The Sidmouth Letters, the research process is itself seen as a kind of theft—almost, Shields suggests, a form of “cannibalism” (231), as if the critics who fight over Swann's life and texts consume her body and soul.1
TL;DR: Anderson argues that the discovery of how our foremothers preceded and even anticipated us can help to assure us that, despite the evidence, we do in fact exist in the world; yet if we ignore how that existence is textually mediated we end up simply reconstituting reality as it is.
Abstract: Lost, nostalgic, man entrusts to woman his memory; he makes woman the keeper of his house, his sex (organ), his history. […] Scarcely does she know herself, scarcely does she begin to glimpse nostalgia for herself—her odyssey. (Irigaray Ethics 71) Women's time and the political implications for feminism of feminist historiography have spawned a wealth of writing in recent years. Accepting that linear time and history are inescapably patriarchal and work to exclude them has led women to attempt to rewrite history to provide the perspective that men deny. However, this rerecording and remaking of history is fraught with danger, as Linda Anderson argues The “reclaiming of history,” the discovery of how our foremothers preceded and even anticipated us, can help to assure us that, despite the evidence, we do in fact exist in the world; yet if we ignore how that existence is textually mediated we end up simply reconstituting “reality” as it is. (134)
TL;DR: In many novels, plays, and poems, the culture of 1980s Britain and its people are represented in terms of extremes: rich and poor, empowered and victimized, enlightened and ignorant, enthusiastic and embittered as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Perhaps no political era in twentieth-century Britain has yielded a more hyperbolic and vitriolic crop of literary rebuttals than the years under the Thatcher government. In numerous novels, plays, and poems, the culture of 1980s Britain and its people are represented in terms of extremes: rich and poor, empowered and victimized, enlightened and ignorant, enthusiastic and embittered. For the most part, the literary output of the period is marked by neither reticence nor subtlety: it reflects a time in which the more extroverted genres, such as black comedy, political allegory, and social satire, were most successful in making their voices heard. Regardless of its ideological position, much of the literature of the 1980s revels in outrage, both moral and mirthful, a stance that has produced works that differ widely in tone and tenor.
TL;DR: In the academy, intellectual skepticism and deconstruction are able to summon only a pale "positionality" compared to essentialist beliefs and values as mentioned in this paper, and openness to ambiguity seems to lack the power that fixed ideologies command.
Abstract: Those who respect diversity and genuinely open dialogue appear at a disadvantage compared to those who take “us against them” positions. Openness to ambiguity seems to lack the power that fixed ideologies command. Particularly in the academy, intellectual skepticism and deconstruction are able to summon only a pale “positionality” compared to essentialist beliefs and values.
TL;DR: Chai's 1996 novel Eating Fire and Drinking Water as discussed by the authors is a failed attempt to combine the personal stories of many characters and the political story of the Marcos military regime in the Philippines.
Abstract: Some reviewers of Arlene Chai's 1996 novel Eating Fire and Drinking Water have maintained that it suffers from a major flaw: that it is a failed attempt to combine the personal stories of many characters and the political story of the Marcos military regime in the Philippines. Patrick Gale in The (London) Independent writes: “The attempt to combine the personal and political results in Chai spreading her attention too thinly to satisfy” (14). Anderson Tepper, in the New York Times, criticizes Chai for using a “superficial vision of third world revolt” to “spice up” the novel (16). Rebecca Stuhr in the Library Journal complains that the many different stories in the novel “create digressions that slow its progress” (104). And the reviewer in Publisher's Weekly finds the novel's structure “confusing” and concludes that Chai's tendency to skip “from major to minor characters” results in a “muddle” (71). These critics have failed to recognize that in Chai's novel the personal stories and the politica...
TL;DR: The first day of my first visit to Mexico City, I decided not to show up for the court date, and rented an apartment in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City.
Abstract: I liked Mexico City from the first day of my first visit there. In 1949, it was a cheap place to live, with a large foreign colony, fabulous whorehouses and restaurants, cockfights and bullfights, and every conceivable diversion. A single man could live well there for two dollars a day. My New Orleans case for heroin and marijuana possession looked so unpromising that I decided not to show up for the court date, and I rented an apartment in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City. (Queer v) William Seward Burroughs wrote his final literary composition, an entry in his personal journal, three days before his death on August 2, 1997. Among the entries during the last months of his life is one that simply reads, “Last night sex dream of Marker. Ran my hands down a lean young male body. Woke up feeling good” (Last Words 154).
TL;DR: In this article, the authors chart ways in which Andre Dubus's short story "Graduation" articulates problems of telling and, even more fundamentally, of being-experienced by a young woman, Bobbie Huxford, in white, middle-class America of the 1950s.
Abstract: [N]arratives repeatedly speak of the problem of what there is to know and to tell, of the problematic boundaries of telling and listening, and of the process of transmission. (Brooks 221) As Peter Brooks observes, narratives speak of problems of knowing, telling, listening, and transmitting. While engaged in such speaking, narratives themselves are subject to the discourse of specific cultures and contexts that give them birth. That is, “what there is to know and tell” may vary markedly by culture, period, race, class, gender, and sexuality; similarly, those variables may affect processes of discriminating between telling and listening and processes of transmitting stories. In the first part of this essay, I chart ways in which Andre Dubus's short story “Graduation” articulates problems of telling—and, even more fundamentally, of being-experienced by a young woman, Bobbie Huxford, in white, middle-class America of the 1950s. Dubus's story opens with a statement of Bobbie's desire to narrate, a de...