Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2004"

Rewriting Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lanchester

Abstract: (2004). Rewriting Woolf@quot;s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lanchester. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 363-382.

Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Postmodern Artistic Re-Presentation

Abstract: ow that Michael Cunningham's The Hours has been made into a film representing yet another echo of Woolf's Mrs. DaUo\va\\ it is worth investigating just how the later novel conceives its relation to its predecessor. Because The Hours directly lakes the role of literature as one of its subjects, it may provide a model for considering postmodern artistic representation more generally. Such re-telling or re-presentation o f an earlier work o f art i s rife i n postmodernity, and not just in fiction. Consider Stoppard's Rosemrcmtz and Guildenstem are Dead. Smiley's A Thousand Acres. Hwang's M. Bulleifly, Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost, John Madden's Shakespeare in Love, the rock opera Rome and Jewels, or the gospel version of Messiah. Too Hot to Handel as a random sampling from a long list. Although this kind of postmodern re-presentation has been condemned as pastiche or ironic parody.' the practice is nothing new. The notion that art must be brand-new, a kind of large-scale urban renewal project forever starting lrt)m scratch is mostly drawn from modernism. Many earlier art forms acknowledged their predecessors and borrowed liberally from both the structure and content of earlier models. One has only to consider the various versions of Fausl or the models for Shakespeare's plays or Palladio's borrowing from classical forms or the later borrowing from Palladio or the habits of composers writing variations on earlier themes to acknowledge a venerable tradition of artistic repetition. In echoing this history, the arts of postmodernism suggest something more traditional than modernism, but they may be attempting something new as well, a departure as well as a return. But the "something new" is not easy (o characterize. It eludes our grasp.

Existentialism Meets Postmodernism in Paul Auster's The Music of Chance

Abstract: n 1987, with The Invention of Solitude, In the Country of Last Things, and The New York Trilogy behind him and Moon Palace almost completed, Paul Auster admitted to Joseph Mallia that “Whenever I complete a book, I’m filled with a feeling of immense disgust and disappointment. It’s almost a physical collapse. I’m so disappointed by my feeble efforts that I can’t believe I’ve actually spent so much time and accomplished so little” (Mallia 285). This comment must come as quite a shock not only to Auster’s dedicated readers but also to the dozen or so critics who have made The New York Trilogy almost the exclusive focus of Auster criticism. Three years later, upon completing The Music of Chance (1990), his sixth novel and his twelfth published work (counting poetry and nonfiction prose), Auster for the first time experienced something quite different, which he recounts to interviewers Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory:

The Excremental Gaze: Saramago's Blindness and the Disintegration of the Panoptic Vision

Abstract: (2004). The Excremental Gaze: Saramago's Blindness and the Disintegration of the Panoptic Vision. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 293-308.

Self-Organization and Selection in Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations

Abstract: n encyclopedic “Continuing Education Project” that evolves into a survival lesson on complexity and ecological wisdom, Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) strives to be nothing less than “the universe’s User’s Manual”: “Not a how-to, but another kind of self-help manual all together” (Gold Bug 124, 88; Galatea 241). The Gold Bug Variations engages the complex order of the natural kingdom and warns us about the fragility of our niche in the ecosystem. Interconnections between people and the living environment they inhabit catalyze both the subject matter and the narrative methods of Powers’s massive novel. As living systems interacting with other living systems, readers are urged to display a humble attitude toward humanity’s part in life’s “ongoing experiment” (636). More consistently than any other contemporary American novelist, Powers’s writing foregrounds a passionate interest in the life sciences, in particular, the dynamics of complex adaptive systems. A central concept of complexity theory states that emergent phenomena can arise from a system of simple local rules tuned to “the edge of chaos.” The structure of The Gold Bug Variations maps the attention of complexity studies to global patterns onto a more or less realistic pair of twinned love stories and simultaneously illustrates how this global order springs from the simplest elements of life. Throughout the novel, Powers introduces and amplifies a striking analogy between Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations1 and the genetic code that is central to the emergent order of the

Barbara Kingsolver and Keri Hulme: Disability, Family, and Culture

Abstract: (2004). Barbara Kingsolver and Keri Hulme: Disability, Family, and Culture. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 405-420.

Replicating a Dinosaur: Authenticity Run Amok in the "Theme Parking" of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and Julian Barnes's England, England

Abstract: n a sincere and optimistic foreword to the Longman Building Studies volume Theme Parks, Leisure Centres, Zoos and Aquaria, David J. Bellamy notes that theme parks and other leisure centers offer a public service and “can give hope for all our futures.” Not only can they help relieve the pressure of overcrowding on more “natural” sites such as national parks, but “by enthralling, entertaining and educating, [they can also] teach the masses about the importance of the real thing” (v). Postmodern critics, eschewing Bellamy’s clear distinction between the artificial and the real, would beg to differ. Perhaps most notable among these critics is Jean Baudrillard, whose collection of essays, Simulacra and Simulation, includes an analysis of Disneyland, which he presents as an example of what he calls “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). This “hyperreal” or “third order of simulation” is neither a representation of the real (what he calls a “first-order” simulation) nor a blurring of the boundaries between reality and representation (a “second-order” simulation). Instead, it is, in the words of Richard J. Lane, “a reversal of order” in which “the model precedes the real” and yet produces “a detachment” from both reality and representation “whereby the reversal becomes irrelevant” (86, italics in original). Writing from a neo-Marxist position, Baudrillard uses his analysis of Disneyland as a way of illustrating the effects of commodification in late capitalist culture. He extends his theory of “the hyperreal order and [. . .] the order of simulation” beyond Disneyland to all of America, claiming that American culture, like

Finding the Door: Vision/Revision and Stereotype in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

Abstract: (2004). Finding the Door: Vision/Revision and Stereotype in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 12-26.

"This Promising of Great Secrets": Literature, Ideas, and the (Re) Invention of Reality in Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions "Fantasies of an Impossibly Hospitable World": Science Fiction and Madness in Vonnegut's Troutean Trilogy

Abstract: (2004). 'This Promising of Great Secrets': Literature, Ideas, and the (Re) Invention of Reality in Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions 'Fantasies of an Impossibly Hospitable World': Science Fiction and Madness in Vonnegut's Troutean Trilogy. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 261-272.

"You see, I am no stranger to love": Jeanette Winterson and the Extasy of the Word

Abstract: (2004). 'You see, I am no stranger to love': Jeanette Winterson and the Extasy of the Word. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 31-52.

The Past as Revenant: Trauma and Haunting in Pat Barker's Another World

Abstract: nother World is the eighth novel of British writer, Pat Barker, whose work has enjoyed considerable international success. She won particular renown for the Regeneration trilogy, which immediately preceded Another World and was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize in 1995. Barker has recently argued that her novels are united by the themes of trauma and recovery (Start the Week). Another World concerns the trauma of fratricide across three generations—the Victorian murder of the toddler James Fanshawe by his elder brother and sister; Geordie’s murder of his brother Harry in World War I; and Gareth’s attempted murder of his brother Jasper in the present day—and Barker writes a traumatized history in which the present is overshadowed and haunted by the unresolved effects of the past. She has described Another World as a “transitional” novel (Medicine and Creativity), and, indeed, it combines the World War I material of the Regeneration trilogy with the theme of child murder evident in Border Crossing. In this paper I plan to go beyond the novel’s immediate contextual or chronological interest to demonstrate that in Another World Barker has written an effective and powerful study of trauma that considers, within a single narrative frame, both the haunting effect of successive generations and the troubling relation between the violence of war and violence within the family. The epigraph to the novel, taken from Joseph Brodsky, speaks of the overwhelming nature of the past, which cannot be contained by memory but always and necessarily spills over into the present and the future. Even more explicitly than in the Regeneration trilogy, Barker questions the processes of “regeneration” and recovery in the face of the overwhelming social traumas of the twentieth century. In the course of the last century, time itself has become wounded and traumatized so that it no longer flows smoothly and seamlessly back into the past as

Postmodern Mannerism: An Examination of Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice

Abstract: (2004) Postmodern Mannerism: An Examination of Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol 45, No 3, pp 273-292

Science, Narrative, and Agency in Gravity's Rainbow

Abstract: (2004). Science, Narrative, and Agency in Gravity's Rainbow. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 63-80.

"Jasón's Indian": Mexican Americans and the Denial of Indigenous Ethnicity in Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima

Abstract: (2004). 'Jason's Indian': Mexican Americans and the Denial of Indigenous Ethnicity in Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 115-128.

Tradition and "Experiment" in Byatt's "The Conjugial Angel"

Abstract: n her extensive writing on her own and other writers’ fiction, A. S. Byatt foregrounds a problem that she does not overtly resolve. In her essay “People in Paper Houses: Attitudes to ‘Realism’ and ‘Experiment’ in English Post-war Fiction,” she claims that many contemporary writers maintain an ambivalent posture toward “realism” and “experiment,” combining “a sense that models, literature and ‘the tradition’ are ambiguous and problematic goods [. . .] with a profound nostalgia for [. . .] the great works of the past” (161).1 Byatt’s sympathy for, yet impatience with, much contemporary British fiction emerges when she gently accuses certain novelists of a muddled kind of compromise and contends that

Poor White Trash, Great White Hope: Race, Class, and the (De)Construction of Whiteness in Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle

Abstract: n “The Making of a Book,” an essay written not long after the publication of his novel Wolf Whistle, a fictionalized re-imagining of the Emmett Till murder, Lewis Nordan explains the difficulty that he had in approaching his material and the eventual solution that he found. Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, was murdered for allegedly wolf whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. The event had a profound effect on Nordan, who, at the time, was a young boy growing up in the nearby town of Itta Bena, but he never felt comfortable overtly writing Till into his fiction. He claims that his “racial identification with the murderers” troubled him and that he felt “by race and geography [. . .] somehow implicated.” He adds, “[M]aybe I believed that as a white guy who knew the [murderers] and never spoke out against the injustice, or even asked a question about it at the dinner table, it was simply not my story to tell” (75–76). Eventually he realized that he could use his fiction to explore his feeling of implication and the society in which he feels so implicated. In Wolf Whistle, he has written what he calls “the white trash version of the Emmett Till murder”: “ [. . .] the story of the people who were on the periphery of this terrible thing, who didn’t know what was going on, didn’t quite understand their own culpability in the situation” (84). Nordan’s project in Wolf Whistle has an affinity with that of Toni Morrison and other social theorists and literary critics who in recent years have begun to turn the gaze of race theory toward the construction of white identity. A brief examination of their contributions to the field may help us to understand better

Singing Our Place Little Bit New: Aboriginal Narrativity and Nation Building in Kim Scott's True Country

Abstract: I think we need to talk about Australian identity and neurosis, about the insecurity, uncertainty and doubt behind all the tough talk and ticker. I think the image an indigenous person sees reflected back from mainstream Australian society can be a very dispiriting one. The people who created a society in Australia were its indigenous people. The wellbeing of that society—or societies—is the measure of our collective Australian identity. Our place, our community. —Kim Scott, “What it means to be Australian—and Aboriginal”

Fundamentally Freaky: Collapsing the Freak/Norm Binary in Geek Love

Abstract: (2004) Fundamentally Freaky: Collapsing the Freak/Norm Binary in Geek Love Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol 45, No 4, pp 337-346

Blackface Minstrelsy and Jewish Identity: Fleshing Out Ragtime as the Central Metaphor in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime

Abstract: (2004). Blackface Minstrelsy and Jewish Identity: Fleshing Out Ragtime as the Central Metaphor in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 247-260.

"A Barrage of Ethnic Comparisons": Occidental Stereotypes in Amy Tan's Novels

Abstract: (2004). 'A Barrage of Ethnic Comparisons': Occidental Stereotypes in Amy Tan's Novels. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 435-445.

Voces Intimae: Electro-Erotic Speech in Nicholson Baker's Vox

Abstract: (2004). Voces Intimae: Electro-Erotic Speech in Nicholson Baker's Vox. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 99-114.

"Abstain, and Hide Your Life": The Hidden Narrator of Flaubert's Parrot

Abstract: ulian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot is told from the first-person viewpoint of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor. Ostensibly, the novel is Braithwaite’s account of his meticulous research on Gustave Flaubert. Like any first-person narrator’s, his account of other characters in the novel is colored by personal bias; indeed, it reveals as much about Braithwaite as about the characters concerned. As we read the novel, it becomes apparent that Braithwaite’s interest in Flaubert is intimately related to traumas in his own personal life—in particular, to the adultery and suicide of his wife Ellen. In telling us about various characters, Braithwaite alternates between using the Flaubertian world as a means of avoiding these traumas and of seeking to understand them. In addition, because Braithwaite lacks a sense of his own self-worth, he tries, in his account of Flaubert, to identify himself with the great author in terms of both his life experience and his character; Braithwaite is particularly attracted to the fact that Flaubert was solitary and withdrawn from life. He says that Flaubert took the view that “[I]f you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly” (49); like Epictetus, Flaubert firmly believed that one should “Abstain, and Hide your Life” (179). The similarities between that approach to life and Braithwaite’s own are unmistakable. Braithwaite describes himself as someone who “abstain[s] and observe[s], fearing both disappointment and fulfillment” (201). That he concerns himself with Flaubert’s world and makes no mention of any close friends— indeed, his assertion that there are advantages in “making friends with those already dead”—supports this description (14).1 However, unlike Flaubert, Braithwaite cannot claim that he abstains from life for artistic purposes. His attempt to identify with Flaubert breaks down there. He is not an artist; he explains that he “thought of writing books” once—that he “had the ideas; I even made notes. But

Roddy Doyle's "Bad Language" and the Limits of Community

Abstract: (2004). Roddy Doyle's 'Bad Language' and the Limits of Community. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 147-159.

"Seeing That Eye": Tragedy and the Vision of Vision in John Berger's Pig Earth

Abstract: erhaps the best introduction to prevailing interpretations of John Berger’s fiction is Georg Lukács’s pronouncement on the primacy of event over character in the epic: “In epic, the individual is, so to speak, subject to the event; the event over-shadows the human personality by its magnitude and importance, drawing attention away from him by the interestingness, diversity and multiplicity of its images” (34, emphasis added). In approaching Berger’s fiction, critics frequently invoke the primacy of event over character. Yet in this context, the dominant event concerns not particular happenings but the irresistible pressure of social and economic circumstance that define the peasant world of which Berger writes. Here, character is subordinate to event, but event itself is subordinate to a larger historical framework. Raymond Mazurek formulates this critical approach compactly: “Berger both depicts contemporary French peasant society and works toward the larger task associated, especially in the Marxist tradition, with critical realism: to situate actions and events within a broad historical frame, representing the social totality in which we live” (136, emphasis added). Although many critics, such as Joseph McMahon, Nikos Papastergiadis, and Peter Hitchcock, have explored the notion of sociohistorical context in Berger’s work in Marxist terms, other critics, such as Kiernan Ryan and Mazurek, interpret it through the lens of The Country and the City by Raymond Williams—a work that construes the rural country as a symbol of “other values” through which “people make other settlements and attachments” distinct from those of capitalism. Parallel to these studies are those that adopt variant approaches to the questions of social class (Jerry Herron, Fred Pfeil) and ideology (Michael Messmer) in Berger’s work. Their common project is to clarify what A. R. Bras terms “Berger’s unequivocal opposition to the