Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2008"
TL;DR: This article used comic books to challenge some of the most basic tenets of the linguistic turn of twentieth-century critical theory, such as the notion of time, metaphor, and metaphor, as a source of readymade metaphors.
Abstract: Novels written about comic books possess a unique representational potential. Although many of these novels treat comics chiefly as sources of readymade metaphors, authors such as Rick Moody and Michael Chabon have expanded their figural lexicon. As serial narratives, comic books present novelists with a form of metonymic combination that can conflate or arrest time; as visual narratives, they offer the possibility of escaping conventional linguistic signification. The novels that translate these figurative strategies to prose use comics to challenge some of the most basic tenets of the linguistic turn of twentieth-century critical theory.
43 citations
TL;DR: The Poisonwood Bible as discussed by the authors is a political allegory, developing complex links between the private domestic story of the Price family and the public political narrative of U. S. intervention in the Congo.
Abstract: Kingsolver has called The Poisonwood Bible "a political allegory," developing complex links between the private domestic story of the Price family and the public political narrative of U. S. intervention in the Congo. The novel shows how American exceptionalism reproduces itself in the American home, as Nathan's assumptions about chosen people shape his daughters. After Lumumba and Ruth May die, the daughters choose unsettled homes and complex, diverging paths away from their father's American legacies.
30 citations
TL;DR: Lahiri's The Namesake as discussed by the authors is an example of the contemporary immigrant narrative, which does not place the idea of an "American Dream" at the center of the story, but rather positions the immigrant ethnic family within a community of cosmopolitan travelers.
Abstract: Lahiri's The Namesake is an example of the contemporary immigrant narrative, which does not place the idea of an "American Dream" at the center of the story, but rather positions the immigrant ethnic family within a community of cosmopolitan travelers. Examining the experience of upper-class South Asian immigration through the eyes of American-born children, Lahiri's novel contains moments and tropes that resemble those of the travel narrative genre, particularly in its detached tone and digressive, pluralist narration.
27 citations
TL;DR: The authors posits that postmodern fictions can create environmental awareness, as they incorporate ecological issues in their narratives in a dialogic interaction with their textual strategies as well as disclose how the discursive constructions of nature shape and condition the human valuation and understanding of the environment.
Abstract: The author posits that postmodern fictions can create environmental awareness, as they incorporate ecological issues in their narratives in a dialogic interaction with their textual strategies as well as disclose how the discursive constructions of nature shape and condition the human valuation and understanding of the environment. Postmodern fictions also transcend false dichotomies in a process of writing that self-consciously interrelates texts and contexts.
18 citations
TL;DR: Danielewski's House of Leaves as discussed by the authors is a work of experimental fiction that incorporates color, photos, graphics, and a unique textual layout, which can be traced back to familiar themes and important literary predecessors, including Jorge Luis Borges.
Abstract: Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves is a work of experimental fiction that incorporates color, photos, graphics, and a unique textual layout. The roots of this experimental style can be traced back to familiar themes and important literary predecessors, including Jorge Luis Borges. Danielewski's use of the labyrinth as theme, symbol, and form underscores his debt to Borges. This article will examine the foundations on which this novel was constructed and explore the innovative ways in which Danielewski uses the labyrinth as theme and form.
18 citations
TL;DR: Butler's approach to power both coincides with Foucault's critique of it and moves beyond that critique into concrete responses that answer to dominant discourses, producing viable alternatives as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Octavia E. Butler articulates a complex conception of power in her last three novels that can provide new insights into lasting debates about the usefulness of a Foucauldian framework for feminist theorists. The author argues that Butler's approach to power both coincides with Foucault's critique of it and moves beyond that critique into concrete responses that answer to dominant discourses, producing viable alternatives. Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Fledgling respond to power by working to demystify damaging discourses, resurrect subjugated knowledges, revise dominant discourses, create alternative communities, and emphasize a strategy of becoming over stagnation.
10 citations
TL;DR: The Infinite Jest of David Foster Wallace as mentioned in this paper depicts play as an activity fraught with anxiety, subject to the same disciplinary structures that restrict autonomy in any other individual endeavor, and the novel continues a tradition of postmodern sports literature in which playful rebellion is treated with skepticism.
Abstract: Through its treatment of sport, recreation, and leisure, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest depicts play as an activity fraught with anxiety, subject to the same disciplinary structures that restrict autonomy in any other individual endeavor. As such, the novel continues a tradition of postmodern sports literature in which playful rebellion is treated with skepticism. Only through a strategic and provisional use of what Donna Haraway has called "serious play" are Infinite Jest's central characters able to construct meaningful autonomy.
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, Atwood's Oryx and Crake is read as an intertextual dialogue with Shakespeare's Hamlet, where a revenge plot inexorably unfolds: a father is treacherously murdered; a mother, implicated in her husband's death, marries the murderer; an only son learns of the secret crime and dedicates himself to vengeance.
Abstract: The many literary traditions Margaret Atwood explores and subverts in Oryx and Crake tend to obscure the crucial genre form with which her novel engages: the revenge tragedy. This article proposes that Oryx and Crake be read as an intertextual dialogue with Shakespeare's Hamlet in particular. In both texts, a revenge plot inexorably unfolds: a father is treacherously murdered; a mother, implicated in her husband's death, marries the murderer; an only son learns of the secret crime and dedicates himself to vengeance.
8 citations
TL;DR: In Fogg, Moon Palace's traumatized protagonist, Paul Auster addresses the epistemological contradiction between a poststructuralist reality as constructed by the subject through language and an acknowledgment of materiality and the real of referential history as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In Fogg, Moon Palace's traumatized protagonist, Paul Auster addresses the epistemological contradiction between a poststructuralist reality as constructed by the subject through language and an acknowledgment of materiality and the real of referential history. Fogg first commits himself to the postmodern condition and then engages with traumatic repetition that draws him toward the possibility of reference. The genealogical quest structuring Moon Palace demonstrates that a traumatic subject requires presence, a narratable story of the body in time, so as to be freed from the timeless mode of compulsive repetition. As Auster deconstructs such oppositions as subject/object and "I"/body, the novel posits the conditions under which a representational mode of realism may coexist with the postmodern.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the role of narrative in the construction and reconstruction of a human reality that constantly hovers on the edge of oblivion is discussed, and the paratext, an alternate narrative standing apart from the main one yet parallel to it in important ways, is presented.
Abstract: Paul Auster's work is filled with writers telling their own stories and the stories of others, but it is also characterized by a concentration on the interface between life and death and on the fragility of human identity. In Auster, the dynamic of self-extinction and rebirth with every act of cognition constitutes consciousness and therefore identity. He often employs the paratext—an alternate narrative standing apart from the main one yet parallel to it in important ways—to display the role of narrative in the construction and reconstruction of a human reality that constantly hovers on the edge of oblivion.
7 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines contemporary U.S. novels set in the comic book industry or that use comic-book characters in their narratives and concludes with Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that breaks with this tradition and uses comic book to redefine the relationship between the individual and the economic landscape.
Abstract: The novelistic tradition of economic individualism was challenged in the twentieth century as the rise of the corporation changed the nature of work and ownership. The author examines contemporary U.S. novels set in the comic-book industry or that use comic-book characters in their narratives. Comic-book narratives reveal particularly clearly the corporate influence on originality and the attempt to claim ownership of artistic creations. The author concludes with Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that breaks with this tradition and uses the comic book to redefine the relationship between the individual and the economic landscape.
TL;DR: The authors investigates Possession's use of blanching metaphors and spectral intertextualization by which Blanche Glover's lesbianism is apparitionalized and draws parallels between Glover/Leonora Stern and the construction of "good"/dangerous" homosexuals in UK parliamentary discourse attending the Section 28 amendment, which sought to legally curtail homosexual visibility in the late 1980s, when Possession was written.
Abstract: The author unearths the retrograde politics of lesbian sexuality that inform A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance. She investigates Possession's use of blanching metaphors and spectral intertextualization (from James to Coleridge) by which Blanche Glover's lesbianism is apparitionalized. Parallels are also drawn between Glover/Leonora Stern and the construction of "good"/"dangerous" homosexuals in UK parliamentary discourse attending the Section 28 amendment, which sought to legally curtail homosexual visibility in the late 1980s, when Possession was written.
TL;DR: Galloway's 1989 novel The Trick Is to Keep Breathing scrutinizes concerns of subjectivity and narratability on both formal and thematic levels as discussed by the authors, examining the legacy of continental philosophy for women.
Abstract: Janice Galloway's 1989 novel The Trick Is to Keep Breathing scrutinizes concerns of subjectivity and narratability on both formal and thematic levels. Galloway's exploration of nation and gender via eating disorders links postmodern formal experiment to political and economic concerns. Examining the legacy of continental philosophy for women, the author compares the novel to Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" and suggests that for a postcolonial text, stylistic choices have political consequences.
TL;DR: The writer-protagonist in Paul Auster's fiction often attain a creative mental state marked by a positive disregard for their physical context as mentioned in this paper, and they repeatedly associate this state of creative regeneration with the spatial notion of nowhere, or nonplace.
Abstract: The writer-protagonists in Paul Auster's fiction often attain a creative mental state marked by a positive disregard for their physical context. Auster's texts repeatedly associate this state of creative regeneration with the spatial notion of nowhere, or nonplace. Drawing on various ideas concerning perception and literary spatiality, the author examines the notable consistency of that notion in Auster's prose works. The private site called Nowhere has several different manifestations in Auster, but its basic functions change little from one text to another. Disconnection from spatial points of reference serves to elicit, in the writer character, a sense of independence from society's productive machinery.
TL;DR: Byatt's work is marked by a "return of the Arnoldian repressed" (40), and as mentioned in this paper argues that Byatt uses a refigured Arnoldian humanism to critique postwar literary criticism.
Abstract: Extending Louise Yelin's study of Possession, the author argues that all of A. S. Byatt's work is marked by a "return of the Arnoldian repressed" (40). More specifically, she claims that Byatt uses a refigured Arnoldian humanism to critique postwar literary criticism. Through repeatedly privileging the role of the author and diminishing the power of the critic, Byatt restores what she believes to be the proper "Function of Criticism at the Present Time".
TL;DR: The Island of the Day Before as discussed by the authors is a narrative patterned on the quantum-mechanical theory of multiple worlds, where the main character's belief in one or more doubles and parallel universes relates directly to subatomic particle entanglement and the fractal geometry associated with complexity science.
Abstract: The author posits that in The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco presents a narrative patterned on the quantum-mechanical theory of multiple worlds. He argues that the peculiar scientific devices in Eco's work, along with the main character's belief in one or more doubles and parallel universes, relate directly to subatomic particle entanglement and the fractal geometry associated with complexity science; these exacting parallels not only structure the novel, but also undermine notions of narrative authority and subjectivity.
TL;DR: DeLillo offers Libra as a consolation for the problem of attaining historical certainty, but despite giving fictive order to the confusions of history, he complicates attempts to explain events such as John F. Kennedy's assassination by displacing individual agency onto outside forces as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Don DeLillo offers Libra as a consolation for the problem of attaining historical certainty, but despite giving fictive order to the confusions of history, he complicates attempts to explain events, such as John F. Kennedy's assassination, by displacing individual agency onto outside forces. Rejecting caricatures of these forces by paranoia, conspiracy, and astrology, he allows characters to make choices. Yet independent actions, seemingly originating from characters, emerge as products of a system, while design emerges out of and despite individuals' intentions. Although system and chaos theories help explain the convergence of randomness and determinism, the global subsumes the individual. Furthermore, Oswald's unstable identity is performative, and he acts for a shifting audience that dictates each new performance.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the works of Czech writer Milan Kundera and a number of Romanian novels that metaphorically dramatize the subtle relation between cultural representation and ideological control.
Abstract: This article demonstrates how the specific forms of magical realism in East-Central European literature during the 1980s are an integral part of the larger subversive poetics of the final decades of Communist totalitarianism. It relies on Bakhtin's invaluable conception of the polyphonic novel and the carnivalesque. The article focuses on the works of Czech writer Milan Kundera and a number of Romanian novels that metaphorically dramatize the subtle relation between cultural representation and ideological control. This study highlights an aspect seldom remarked on by scholars of East-Central European literature: namely, that "indirect" or "allegorical" literary fictions often constituted the only available form of oppositional discourse in highly Stalinized Communist regimes.
TL;DR: In this paper, the author analyzes The Spire by William Golding in the context of the medieval construction industry and the tension between Christianity and paganism and analyzes the relationship between the two.
Abstract: The author analyzes The Spire by William Golding in the context of the medieval construction industry and the tension between Christianity and paganism. Jocelin, dean of the cathedral on which the ...
TL;DR: In this paper, the author explores the problem of hospitality in DeLillo's The Body Artist, focusing on the status of guest and host and how the instability of those categories destabilizes hospitality.
Abstract: The author explores the problem of hospitality in DeLillo's The Body Artist. The reading concentrates on the status of guest and host and how the instability of those categories destabilizes hospitality. The primary concern is the extension of hospitality within an interrupted scene of hospitality, where the possibility of Derridean absolute hospitality emerges.
TL;DR: The authors examines the syntactic uniqueness of Carver's minimalism, his turn to linguistic flatness and destitution, and his strategy of suspending the referentiality of language, showing that the aesthetic effect of these techniques is a paradoxical coexistence of heightened realism and a blankness of meaning.
Abstract: With their brevity, ascetic style, and lack of resolutions, Raymond Carver's minimalist short stories have often served as an example of an unstylized and even clumsy attempt to depict the more prosaic aspects of everyday life, resulting in a literature of utter banality. Against the background of the unquestioned cultural anticipations of Carver's critics, the author examines the syntactic uniqueness of Carver's minimalism, his turn to linguistic flatness and destitution, and his strategy of suspending the referentiality of language. The author shows that the aesthetic effect of these techniques is a paradoxical coexistence of heightened realism and a blankness of meaning.
TL;DR: Pynchon's V. as discussed by the authors examines the connections between Thomas Pynchons' V. and the work of W. B. Yeats, arguing that it is not only Yeats as poet, but also Yeats the mage, who interests PYNchon, and shows what part is played in V. by Yeats in his works Per Amica Silentia Lunae and A Vision.
Abstract: This article examines the connections between Thomas Pynchon's V. and the work of W. B. Yeats, arguing that it is not only Yeats as poet, but also Yeats as mage, who interests Pynchon. It shows what part is played in V. by the concepts developed by Yeats in his works Per Amica Silentia Lunae and A Vision—the symbol of interlocking gyres, the twenty-eight phases, the Great Wheel, and the Anima Mundi, or soul of the world. It argues that in the course of the chapter "Confessions of Fausto Maijstral," Pynchon uses the destruction of the Maltese city of Valletta first to both represent and criticize the abstraction of Yeats's Byzantium and second, through the figure of the child poet, to recast Yeats's Anima Mundi as a textual realm open to and changing with the demands and experiences of the present.
TL;DR: This paper argued that Byatt's story presents itself as a "verbal still life" not only for its attempt to cross the boundaries between the literary and the pictorial but also for its impossible endeavor to render the stillness, understood as "silence," of pictures.
Abstract: Building on the work of major critics in the field of text and image, and color theory, the author examines how A. S. Byatt's "Art Work," from The Matisse Stories, is the textual equivalent of Matisse's visual experiments with color and composition. She argues that Byatt's story presents itself as a "verbal still life," not just for its attempt to cross the boundaries between the literary and the pictorial but also for its impossible endeavor to render the "stillness," understood as "silence," of pictures.
TL;DR: By examining Brossard's Mauve Desert through an ecocritical lens, the author undertakes a theoretical cross-fertilization as discussed by the authors, examining the text's representation of the desert as place.
Abstract: By examining Nicole Brossard's Mauve Desert through an ecocritical lens, the author undertakes a theoretical cross-fertilization. The literary criticism of Mauve Desert has overlooked the text's representation of the desert as place—and ecocriticism illuminates this blind spot. Ecocriticism, which has traditionally focused on works of realism, benefits from tackling an experimental work such as Mauve Desert, because the text destabilizes the boundary between nature and language in a way that challenges ecocritical vision.
TL;DR: The authors examined the social criticism in Gaddis's work and found that his final novel, Agapēe Agape, and essay collection The Rush for Second Place reflect his concern about aspects of society that could undo the social order.
Abstract: William Gaddis's final novel, Agapēe Agape, and his essay collection The Rush for Second Place reflect his concern about aspects of society that could undo the social order. The author examines the social criticism in Gaddis's work.