Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2007"

Abstract: Conspicuous in the work of author Haruki Murakami are his use of the hard-boiled detective, in whom Murakami recognizes himself as a professional writer, and the problematizing of the boundaries that separate one genre from another and circumscribe genre discourse in general. By means of noir pastiche, Murakami carries these tropes into A Wild Sheep's Chase and Dance Dance Dance where they function within a larger critique of the postmodern. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World takes this deployment of noir even further. In a skillful montage of alternating discursive modes, Murakami deconstructs noir itself, divesting it of its power to define a postmodern Japan that only exists in a politically conservative Japanese imagination, or in a peculiarly postmodern type of Orientalism within the Western imagination.

Abstract: This article explores Louise Erdrich's use of the saints' lives as a subtext in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Erdrich repeatedly rewrites central stories from the medieval canon of saints, creating in effect a kind of hijacked hagiography. This revision questions the relationship between the Catholic religion and Ojibwe beliefs, presenting the encounter between Catholicism and Anishinabe less as a straightforward conflict and more as a complex web of borrowings, reappropriations, and transformations. Because the saints offered models for holy living, Erdrich also challenges the role of imitation in constituting identity.

Abstract: This article offers a close reading of two contemporary novels that question the received idea of terrorism as the desperate violence of disenfranchised groups. Glamorama and Super-Cannes symbolize the violence perpetrated by Western states and institutions by presenting us with terrorists who are corporate executives and supermodels, and who inflict their violence on ethnic minorities, or allow them to be wrongly blamed for it. The texts present an ironic riposte both to Samuel P. Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis and Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" theory by suggesting that they are not in fact contradictory, but that instead, the contemporary West depends for its structural integrity on an ongoing conflict with an excluded outsider. The novels demonstrate that the West's sense of security before 9/11 had been purchased through the perpetuation of violence throughout the globe. They expose the structural violence within Western society and the lies and evasions surrounding a highly conten...

Abstract: Applying the theories of Guy Hocquenghem, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Louis Althusser, this essay identifies Robert Coover's novel The Public Burning and Norman Mailer's novels of the sixties, An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam?, as cold war critical national narratives. The essay discusses the crises of masculinity provoked in the American fifties and sixties by anticommunist discourse, which rhetorically linked communism and homosexuality (and thus, in the psychiatric and popular imaginary, effeminacy) as "perversions." These novels critique the way homosociality functions to consolidate patriarchal power, and the resulting institutional homophobia, homosexual panic, and violence. These concerns center on the anus and anality, a trope signifying male homosexuality, and subverting the dominant discourse. The essay also discusses Mailer's and critic Leslie Fiedler's homophobia and concludes that Coover, with his use of subversive Bakhtinian carnival laughter, presents a more devastating, comprehen...

Abstract: The author explores the spatialization of textuality that characterizes the postmodern narrative. Focusing on Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things, the article discusses the debunkment of time as an ordering principle of narrativity and the transformation of space into the dominant textual feature. Auster's work introduces various spaces—geographical, subjective, authorial, historical, and literary—that have an uneasy relationship and create the text as an incongruous spatial network. The spaces continually split, deconstruct, and reconstitute themselves, producing a textual site that is incoherent, unstable, and discontinuous.

Abstract: In The Gold Bug Variations, novelist Richard Powers alludes to four rhetorical theories—differance, iteration, rhizomatics, and performativity—as he tells the story of three characters seeking to understand the related meanings of life and DNA By integrating these theories into his novel, Powers attempts to unify seemingly disparate biological and rhetorical concepts These concepts find common ground in the novel's theme of "circulation," the idea that all things linguistic and material enter systems, circulate, and emerge altered Powers's deployment of rhetorical theory allows him to explain the connection between linguistic utterance and DNA replication

Abstract: The Optimist's Daughter is typically analyzed through the themes of memory and vision. The central focus is placed on Laurel Hand's realization that one's memories are the best way to stay connected to the past without being oppressed by it. Such readings typically dismiss Laurel's stepmother, Fay McKelva, as "poor white trash" and a person incapable of understanding this revelation because she is too focused on her own future; thus, Fay is treated as Laurel's foil. This essay problematizes this approach by making Fay a source for investigating issues of gender, class, and whiteness, to explore the metanarrative operating in Welty's text. The author finds that other commentaries have neglected the transgressive function Fay plays in the novel; this is a role of which Welty is conscious but also is consciously silencing. Fay rejects the community's hierarchical structure to construct a position that resists the public discourses meant to contain subjects in prescribed social roles. I focus on three areas F...

Abstract: The author studies the gendering of women in theories of trauma through an analysis of one film and six novels by Chilean author Ariel Dorfman. The essay begins by situating Dorfman's writing in the context of the 1973 Chilean coup, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and the Chilean Truth Commission. Tracing the representation of women as markers of national trauma and masculine identity in Dorfman's writing demonstrates that women's voices remain a site of uncontained ambivalence in his work. As these texts oscillate between a critique of the sexualized figuring of women and a continued reduction of them to desired objects, the silent female voices rupture both authoritarian national discourse and the anti-authoritarian narrative practices of the novels. Ultimately, this figuring of women registers a textual trauma in Dorfman's writing that draws attention to the dissociation and discursive erasure of women's experience in narratives of national tragedy and trauma studies.

Abstract: Leroy Moffitt, the protagonist of Bobbie Ann Mason's short story "Shiloh," is marked by the same tendencies for far-wandering, slumbering escapism and perpetual adolescence that Judith Fetterley's Resisting Reader identifies in Washington Irving's masculinist icon Rip Van Winkle. Unlike Rip, however, when Leroy is forced home from his wanderings, he is greeted not by the comforting and liberating news of his wife's demise, an absence that would allow him to continue as he has for many years been accustomed, but by the presence of his own lively and much-changed wife. Norma Jean, whose Southern and feminist "her story" of their long-distance relationship threatens to displace Leroy's deeply ingrained and well-rehearsed "his story," resists becoming demonized in or excluded from this text, as Fetterley maintains Dame Van Winkle and others of her literary daughters have been. Despite textual clues in Mason's story, intertextual threads throughout her canon, and Mason's own defense of her character, however, ...

Abstract: Whitehead's often humorous novel about elevator inspectors is also a serious examination of textual authority in relation to issues of race, identity, and history. Set in an imagined past, The Intuitionist presents itself as antidetective fiction: a revision of American history and the detective genre. The novel's allusions to other literary predecessors, however, and its references to various hoaxes and deceptions indicate a complex investigation of literacy, inscription, and interpretation. Similar to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Whitehead's racial allegory bears a closer relationship to Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.

Abstract: The author, a transnational, combines genre study with an exploration of group and individual identity. He argues that in Renegade or Halo2 , Mo bends the picaresque genre to narrate the widespread...

Abstract: Nuala O'Faolain's novel My Dream of You connects the Great Famine and contemporary women's status in the Republic of Ireland. Her narrative structure juxtaposes an embedded story from the 1840s with the main story arc, set in contemporary Ireland, relating the legacy of the Great Famine both to postcolonial attitudes about food and eating and to women's limited political roles in the Republic. The text presents mirrored female characters from the famine-era Big House and the mid-twentieth century to create a gendered association between the eras. This textual strategy of spiraling from the Famine to more recent oppression of women provides insight into Ireland's obsessive control of female reproductive ability. O'Faolain's text repeats images of land, fertility, food production (and consumption), women's bodies, and reproduction, suggesting a link between the failure of the land to produce food and the need to control unruly female bodies. Women's bodies and their fertility become ciphers for the health o...

Abstract: Author Janette Turner Hospital discusses her work, including her upcoming novel Orpheus Lost.

Abstract: As an internationally renowned writer who has lived on four continents and who often feels what she describes as "dislocated," even in her native Australia, Janette Turner Hospital has long centered her novels and stories on characters who inhabit the margins of specific geographical locations. In her acclaimed novel Oyster (1996), however, she uses physical dislocation as a metaphor to explore the nature of narrative itself. Setting Oyster in the forbidding Australian Outback, Hospital contrasts the necessity of maps for people crossing the border to that huge expanse of desert and the unreliability of all maps. In Oyster, readers must become users of maps if they hope to negotiate the complexity of this nonlinear novel. Although maps, stories, and words themselves are no more than "poignant ideas of order," Hospital urges the reader to continue trying to know the story, even if no story (or novel such as Oyster) can be fully known.

Abstract: Tom Perrotta's novel Little Children (2004) thematizes anxieties about gender redefinition and illustrates an ambivalent attraction in American culture to reactionary masculinity; that is, men enacting highly authoritarian or violent roles. The novel centers on the adulterous affair of two young parents who meet at a suburban playground. Sarah has the contempt of a nontraditional woman for suburban mothers while feeling herself trapped in the role of stay-at-home mother. Her romantic partner Todd is also an instance of gender redefinition in that he stays home with his young child while his wife supports the family. Both characters rebel against the strains associated with redefinitions of gender roles by regressing into adolescent behavior. A subplot acknowledges that masculine frustration at feelings of inadequacy can lead to reassertions of the masculinity in the form of violence, as shown in how Larry (a friend of Todd's) asserts his masculinity through a violent campaign against Ronnie, a released se...

Abstract: Janette Turner Hospital, in embracing the theme of terrorism, has taken the literary novel back to something akin to Graham Greene's work. She is a thriller writer where the murderers and the victims are "real." Orpheus Lost is a powerfully plotted book that has moral gravity and that is also touched by a spirit of mercy. It is a remarkable literary performance that can explain why Joyce Carol Oates described Hospital as a major writer.

Abstract: This article explores, from a feminist perspective, a critically neglected work of Canadian fiction, drawing from the disciplines of narratology and literary linguistics in its argument. It initially considers some of the reasons why Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground, published in 1978, has attracted scant academic attention, suggesting that it suffered from the feminist backlash prevalent in the late seventies in North America. In its depiction of a disassociated, perhaps even rebarbative female narrator, in a narrative described in one contemporary review as "an expression of selfishness in women's libration," the novel incurred, and still incurs, antipathetic responses, which, the article, argues, have tended to deflect from its undoubted stylistic merits. The author of the article maintains that Gaining Ground deserves much greater critical acclaim. The article identifies and analyzes the many instances of subversion in the narrative, demonstrating how narrative devices such as temporal dislocation, hypod...

Abstract: Janette Turner Hospital's Charades enacts a complex and lively intertwining of narrative strands in which contiguities between different modes of representing truths are examined. These modes include the demands of stories, whether fabular or realist, the drive to explain the origins of the universe, along with the claims to objectivity of photographs and history. In the process, the book playfully activates parallels with the story of Shahrazad, leading to constant juxtapositioning of narrative theory and the protocols of scientific explanation. In turn, the teasing energies of the multiplicity of stories come up against the hermeneutic responsibilities exacted by Holocaust deniers or the gaps and absences in our own family histories.

Abstract: The author provides a checklist of the works of Janette Turner Hospital.

Abstract: Jean Baudrillard defines the advent of postmodernity in terms of the disappearance of the private space in which the subject can establish a sense of interiority—the space in which subjectivity emerges within discrete existential boundaries guaranteeing the coherence of identity. Such interiority has been replaced by what Baudrillard refers to as the "schizophrenic" nature of the real—a condition in which the we finds ourselves prey to the onslaught of unmediated experience that erodes all the limits within which we seek to locate and preserve subjectivity. Spalding Gray's novel, Impossible Vacation, charts the attempt by the protagonist, Brewster North, to retreat from this schizophrenic reality by attempting to reclaim a space from which to impose visual order on the world; a space from which the subject can secure the coherence of the "I" through the "eye"; a space in which the exercise of the gaze that separates the specular subject from the visual field promises to grant an epistemological mastery ov...

Abstract: Paul Theroux's 1981 novel, The Mosquito Coast, provides a critical analysis of American manhood, describing Allie Fox's pursuit of the "self-made man" in the late 1970s. Narrated by Charlie Fox, Allie's son, the novel presents the mechanism of the masculine subject: it is not so much a pregiven entity as an effect produced by the process of subjectivation, which is based on the body. Allie's exodus to the jungle in Honduras with his family is an attempt to embody the ideal of the archaic American masculine self, whose bodily activities rule over the whole familial sphere. Similar to Michel Foucault's analysis of the subject, the father's masculine self emerges from power relationships within the family. Incorporated in this process of subjectivation, Charlie and his brother try to resist the reign of the father by seeking the return to the contemporary way of life. When a battle with strange invaders ruins Allie's community, the paternal dominance crumbles, and the tension between the father and the sons ...

Abstract: Drawing his title from William Blake, the author explores the question of friendship in Iain Pears's novel, The Dream of Scipio (2002). Using three overlapping historical narratives, Pears traces how the classical understanding of friendship, grounded in a logic of commonly held values, has given birth to a civilization that is both exclusionary and unethical. He makes his case by using the history of anti-Semitism to show how routine persecution of the Jews culminating in the Holocaust became a way to solidify communities in the face of such crises as barbarian invasions, the Black Death, and economic decline. The purpose of this essay is to examine Pears's critique of the limitations of civilization and to outline his vision of a new perception of friendship that understands and values the ethical and pragmatic importance of difference.

Abstract: Although many social scientists have long questioned its validity as an analytical tool, the nineteenth-century concept of the two nations continues to be a popular politico-historical and literary model of describing socioeconomic, political, and cultural divisions within British society. The author examines in detail the ways Margaret Drabble and David Caute treat this subject in The Radiant Way and Veronica, or, The Two Nations. Locating them in a wider historical context, he sets out to analyze their different aesthetic approaches, thematic emphases, and ideological orientations.