Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2010"
TL;DR: DeLillo's Cosmopolis as discussed by the authors is a post-9/11 novel that depicts the protagonist, Eric Packer, as a kind of third Twin Tower, a monolithic symbol of global economic hegemony.
Abstract: Although it is set in April of 2000, Cosmopolis is Don DeLillo's first post-9/11 novel. DeLillo presents the novel's protagonist, Eric Packer, as a kind of third Twin Tower, a monolithic symbol of global economic hegemony. The commentaries on 9/11 by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio suggest a theoretical context for understanding the manner in which DeLillo portrays Eric's psychological collapse and the collapse of the World Trade Center as eerie analogues of one another, both indicating suicidal tendencies in the heart of homo technologicus.
16 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored three examples of a literary genre that historically specializes in monitoring transition and identifying shifts "in the representation of things" (Jameson ix), and argued that contemporary novels in the genre, by Philip Roth, Paul Auster, and Jeffrey Eugenides, focus on the problem of representing moments of decision.
Abstract: Debates concerning the emergence of a post-postmodern paradigm in contemporary American fiction have highlighted the thinking of transition as a central problem. In this essay I explore three examples of a literary genre—observer-hero narrative—that historically specializes in monitoring transition and identifying shifts “in the representation of things” (Jameson ix). After outlining the critical history of this genre, I go on to argue that contemporary novels in the genre, by Philip Roth, Paul Auster, and Jeffrey Eugenides, focus on the problem of representing moments of decision. I frame the alternating interpretations these novels foreground—tragic, modern, postmodern—and conclude the essay by relating this interpretive oscillation to a Derridean undecidability that challenges the spatial emphasis found in Jamesonian postmodernism, thereby pointing toward new representational possibilities in contemporary literature.
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors argues that Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss shows a radical postcolonial subjectivity in which flexibility, assimilation, and multiculturalism are preferable to maintaining difference The characters who cling to solid knowledge come to bad ends, while those more comfortable with cultural contradictions tend to fare better.
Abstract: This essay argues that Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss shows us a radical postcolonial subjectivity in which flexibility, assimilation, and multiculturalism are preferable to maintaining difference The characters who cling to “solid knowledge” come to bad ends, while those more comfortable with cultural contradictions tend to fare better
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the role and significance of marine geographies in the fiction of Colm Toibin, with specific reference to his novels The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), and The Blackwater Lightship (1999).
Abstract: This essay examines the role and significance of marine geographies in the fiction of Colm Toibin, with specific reference to his novels The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), and The Blackwater Lightship (1999). By showing how liminal landscapes resonate with Toibin's revisionist sensibility, the essay argues that the marine spaces of these novels are properly read as enabling metaphors for the transitional state of contemporary Irish society, which may yet figure forth a future freed from the constraining myth of national territory and its attendant calcified ideologies, as perceived by the novelist.
11 citations
TL;DR: A memory I will take with me to my grave: In 1995, my wife Victoria Frenkel Harris and I accompanied our daughter on a flight to New York City where Kymberly was to audition for the New School's recently established Actor's Studio MFA program as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: A memory I’ll take with me to my grave: In 1995, my wife Victoria Frenkel Harris and I accompanied our daughter on a flight to New York City where Kymberly was to audition for the New School’s recently established Actor’s Studio MFA program. Kymberly and our colleague David Foster Wallace had become close friends, so he decided to come too. David, who had just completed the final revision of Infinite Jest, brought the manually typed manuscript with him on the flight for personal delivery to his publisher. Our commuter flight to Chicago O’Hare out of the Central Illinois Regional Airport in Bloomington-Normal was full. Although David was not yet the immediately recognizable celebrity he was about to become, he stood out in a crowd nonetheless. He was, I’m pretty certain, the only guy on that flight wearing a do-rag. I like to speculate about some anonymous passenger on that plane, your average Normalite, say, perhaps making his biweekly commute to Chicago, who may still recall, if only vaguely, that tall unshaven guy in the seat across the aisle, wearing a bandana on his head, sitting next to an attractive young woman, and holding on his lap this huge box. What that anonymous passenger probably doesn’t realize to this day, and what none of us could have predicted at the time, is that that big box contained the finished manuscript of one of the few literary masterworks of our time. I am reminded of Auden’s poetic meditation on Breughel’s “Fall of Icarus,” how
10 citations
TL;DR: The American Psycho's alternating rhythms of repetition incite intense uncertainty, emptying its violence of meaning and culpability while compelling "nameless" dread and desire as mentioned in this paper, and thus, confront violence qua violence, unmitigated and inexplicable.
Abstract: American Psycho's alternating rhythms of repetition incite intense uncertainty, emptying its violence of meaning and culpability while compelling “nameless” dread and desire. We read in suspense of epistemologically and ethically suspended horror and thus, confront violence qua violence, unmitigated and inexplicable. Reading this “stark fiction” reads us; it affords ethical self-reflection in the play of dreadful desire for a flat, vivid violence that only signifies as we each activate it.
10 citations
TL;DR: This paper read Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as a self-reflexive text that theorizes its own fiction and found that the aesthetic flight from the signifying order of the novel is connected to a revolutionary threat to the social order.
Abstract: This essay reads Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as a self-reflexive text that theorizes its own fiction. The aesthetic flight from the signifying order of the novel is connected to a revolutionary threat to the social order of the novel. Lot 49, however, contains this revolutionary potential through the name “Tristero.” Even if Tristero is the manifestation of a revolutionary movement, it manifests itself along the same structure of power as that which governs the novel and the social order within the novel.
8 citations
TL;DR: Thomas Pynchon's Vineland as mentioned in this paper examines the traumatic consequences of the paranoid fantasies constructing American social reality in the history of the Traverse-Becker family and the Thanatoids.
Abstract: Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990) examines how political demonology forges consensus in America. Tracking the manipulative deployment of a conspiratorial enemy, Vineland envisions American history as repetition. The novel examines the traumatic consequences of the paranoid fantasies constructing American social reality in the history of the Traverse-Becker family and the Thanatoids. By making use of the rival theories of spectrality proposed by Derrida and Žižek, I demonstrate how Vineland explores the victims of a countersubversive tradition that repeatedly exploits political paranoia to secure the status quo in changing historical circumstances. Moreover, the novel presents an alternative to official history in what Walter Benjamin calls “revolutionary nostalgia.”
8 citations
TL;DR: This article read Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 novel Middlesex as a book that endorses a narrative of heteronormativity and ethnic assimilation, but on the question of homosexuality, the text appears to stage the impasse of sexuality and gender, only to resolve its complexities as a coming of age narrative that affirms heterosexuality.
Abstract: I read Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 novel Middlesex as a book that endorses a narrative of heteronormativity and ethnic assimilation. Ethnocentrism is critiqued through irony, first with an incestuous marriage and then by parodying the Nation of Islam. But on the question of homosexuality, the text appears to stage the impasse of sexuality and gender, only to resolve its complexities as a coming of age narrative that affirms heterosexuality.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors discuss Wallace's boyhood in Philo, Illinois, the tiny town where he was raised by his mother and stepfather, and briefly discuss his boyhood with his mother.
Abstract: In my essay on David Foster Wallace in Critique's special issue “An American Requiem: Elegies for Thirteen Novelists” (51.2), I briefly discuss Wallace's boyhood in Philo, Illinois, the tiny town h...
6 citations
TL;DR: In The Gold Bug Variations as discussed by the authors, a novel published amidst contemporary debates over theories of secularism and postsecularism, Powers incorporates a host of quotations from various texts (e.g. Romantic and modern poetry, musical scores, medieval bestiaries, the Bible) to translate the wonder associated with religious experience into what might be referred to as secular piety.
Abstract: In The Gold Bug Variations, a novel published amidst contemporary debates over theories of secularism and postsecularism, Richard Powers celebrates the wonders of molecular biology via the relocation of religious transcendence. Throughout the book, Powers incorporates a host of quotations from various texts (e.g. Romantic and modern poetry, musical scores, medieval bestiaries, the Bible) in order to translate the wonder associated with religious experience into what might be referred to as secular piety. Extracted from their original textual environment, these passages are defamiliarized and re-contextualized, their signification altered by their inscription within a radically different literary landscape. This essay examines numerous instances of such thematic translation alongside theories of intertextuality in order highlight the amalgamation of, to borrow C. P. Snow's famous phrase, two “cultures” (evolutionary science and religion) that are often deemed antithetical by those engaged in curre...
TL;DR: In this paper, the author argues that the novel's rich use of symbolism depicts the protagonist's maturation through her mastery of semiotics, in learning how to assign meaning to physical and linguistic symbols.
Abstract: Although most critics of Under the Feet of Jesus have studied the political and social implications of Helena Maria Viramontes's depiction of piscadores, this article argues that the novel's rich use of symbolism depicts the protagonist's maturation through her mastery of semiotics. In learning how to assign meaning to physical and linguistic symbols, Estrella learns how to define and claim her own inscape, her subjective consciousness. Through the central symbols of the novel—the barn, the La Brea Tar Pits, owls/flying creatures, Jesus, and fire—Estrella explores the complex notion of human freedom inside a system of marginalization.
TL;DR: In this paper, a reading of Zadie Smith's third novel On Beauty (2005) addresses academia's inability to enjoy beauty as opposed to feelings of rapture in front of art displayed by those characters in the novel who describe themselves as lacking academic expertise.
Abstract: Can we find the answer to what beauty is and is not within the walls of art schools? Can academia account for a feeling that exceeds the limits imposed by reason through a discourse that has traditionally been based on reason itself? What is the role of theory in all this? What happens to beauty after theory? Through a reading of Zadie Smith's third novel On Beauty (2005), this article addresses academia's inability to enjoy beauty as opposed to feelings of rapture in front of art displayed by those characters in the novel who describe themselves as lacking academic expertise.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors of Londonstani (2006) read the 2006 novel in relation to author Gautam Malkani's career as a creative industries professional, and they argued that the novel unwittingly reveals his concerns about the work he did, in writing the novel, to translate his Hounslow “rude boy” background into his means of entry into the creative elite.
Abstract: This article reads the 2006 novel Londonstani (2006) in relation to author Gautam Malkani's career as a creative industries professional. It argues that the novel unwittingly reveals Malkani's concerns about the work he did, in writing the novel, to translate his Hounslow “rude boy” background into his means of entry into the creative elite.
TL;DR: In this article, the author describes a narrative strategy that makes Iranians into Americans and Americans into Iranians, which counteracts the American exploitation of gender in its propaganda machine in the House of Sand and Fog.
Abstract: For Chalmers Johnson, terrorist attacks are a shock to Americans because such attacks are “blowback,” the unintended consequences of earlier, covert American operations. Until recently American awareness of Iran was characterized by a combination of ignorance and amnesia. In Andre Dubus III's 1999 novel, House of Sand and Fog, “not knowing” is the engine of a plot that counteracts the American exploitation of gender in its propaganda machine. Where popular Iranian-American memoirs “Other” Iran, potentially serving imperialist agendas, House of Sand and Fog pursues a narrative strategy that makes Iranians into Americans and Americans into Iranians.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the imaginary binary relationship between Blondie and Lan and the gaze of the (m)Other (Mama Wong) involved in the binary relationship.
Abstract: Focusing on the relationship among three women (Blondie, Lan, and Mama Wong) in Gish Jen's The Love Wife, we shall explore the imaginary binary relationship between Blondie and Lan and the gaze of the (m)Other (Mama Wong) involved in the binary relationship. We are engaged in an arduous query—how does one deal with the Other woman, her otherness?—that can be explicated and linked to a larger social context: the relation between Western and Third-World women.
TL;DR: Wright's two novels M31: A Family Romance and Going Native as discussed by the authors suggest he is a maker of the seemingly anachronistic genre of the anatomy, offering anatomical dissections of the human failures of late capitalist culture and reveals his "demonic vision" of a nation beyond redemption.
Abstract: American novelist Stephen Wright has wrongly been cast as a “postmodern satirist.” Instead of “degenerative satire,” two of Wright's novels, M31: A Family Romance and Going Native, suggest he is a maker of the seemingly anachronistic genre of the anatomy. Unlike satire, neither universal nor conditional palliatives are asserted or implied. Instead, Wright's two novels provide sheer documentary evidence of a culture in decline. Wright offers anatomical dissections of the human failures of late capitalist culture and reveals his “demonic vision” of a nation beyond redemption, thoroughgoing repudiations of quintessentially American metanarratives of individual or collective transformation or progress.
TL;DR: For instance, Updike was the master of the elegantly lyrical sentence and the precisely oblique oblique expression as discussed by the authors, and his departure from the visible world was foreshadowed in "The Full Glass".
Abstract: He's drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending departure from it be damned. —John Updike, “The Full Glass” (2008) He was the master of the elegantly lyrical sentence and the precisely ob...
TL;DR: Sorrentino was recruited to the prestigious creative writing program of Stanford University in the fall of 1982 by the novelist and critic Albert J. Guerard as discussed by the authors on the strength of what has remained Sorrentino's magnum opus, Mulligan Stew.
Abstract: G ilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006) arrived on the palm-littered campus of Stanford University in the fall of 1982. He had been recruited to the prestigious creative writing program by the novelist and critic Albert J. Guerard (Christine/Annette [1985] and The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Faulkner [1977]) on the strength of what has remained Sorrentino’s magnum opus, Mulligan Stew (1979). Guerard’s enthusiasm for the inventive, highly stylized, reflexive parody of modernist fiction that simmered in Sorrentino’s long novel was not shared by the writers in a program founded by Wallace Stegner, the West Coast naturalist writer, and his progeny, the Stegnerites, who aspired to publication in the genteel pages of Esquire or Harper’s and hoped to be tapped for fame by the judges of the O. Henry Prize. It was not Sorrentino’s first academic position, having previously taught in term appointments at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and the New School for Social Research, but his appointment to a full professorship vaulted him directly into prominence among a class of postmodern writers that included John Barth, Robert Coover, and John Hawkes. Yet for seventeen years the Brooklyn-born Sorrentino, who had studied classical literature at Brooklyn College, interrupted by a two-year stint in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, and not taking his degree, would remain a “vox clamantis in deserto” at the sunbleached, moped bestraddled, and conservative Hoover Institution dominated campus. The degree of improbability that the son of a broken marriage between
TL;DR: He was willing to follow a thought, an idea, a joke, an observation so extensive that no one had the nerve or the inclination or the patience to undertake, let alone express as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: He wrote about things that no else had the nerve or the inclination or the patience to undertake, let alone express. He was willing to follow a thought, an idea, a joke, an observation so extensive...
TL;DR: One cannot read more than a page or two of Mailer without a visceral reaction as discussed by the authors, and only D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller (or Henry Miller, subject ofMailer's typically eccentric 1976 anthology Genius and Lust) shocked people.
Abstract: One cannot read more than a page or two of Mailer without a visceral reaction. Only D. H. Lawrence (or Henry Miller, subject of Mailer's typically eccentric 1976 anthology Genius and Lust) shocked ...
TL;DR: The authors investigates Don DeLillo's novel Underworld in the context of Jean-Luc Nancy's understanding of the distinction between society and community, and argues that the novel uses objects to move beyond the mere exposure of cultural mythologies and nostalgic ideas of postwar America.
Abstract: This essay investigates Don DeLillo's novel Underworld in the context of Jean-Luc Nancy's understanding of the distinction between society and community, and argues that DeLillo's narrative uses objects to move beyond the mere exposure of cultural mythologies and nostalgic ideas of postwar America. In postulating a collective around an object like a baseball, DeLillo uses narrative to construct a community that takes into account but does not systemically depend on the past, and does not attempt to avoid or decide the future.
TL;DR: Vonnegut, Jr. as discussed by the authors wrote a letter to his father on May 29, 1945, five months after being captured during the Belsen Prisoner of War (BOW).
Abstract: “I've got too damned much to say, and the rest will have to wait,” wrote twenty-two-year-old Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to his father on May 29, 1945. That was five months after being captured during the B...
TL;DR: The authors explored the question of "realness" in Don DeLillo's Underworld, realness in unofficial, individual fantasies and in national fantasies that shape the idea of the nation in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Abstract: This essay explores the question of “realness” in Don DeLillo's Underworld, realness in unofficial, individual fantasies and in national fantasies that shape the idea of the nation in the latter half of the twentieth century. The essay focuses on reality as an ideological fantasy-construction, a sense of the sublime deriving from all-powerful military technology and economic and racial contradictions in marginal areas of the nation. This study intends a critique of the ideological workings of the warfare state in Underworld through an investigation into the characters' psychological mechanisms as they fluctuate between anxiety about, and fascination with, destructive technology.
TL;DR: Patti Smith and Kathy Acker as discussed by the authors examine the sources of their separation from love and fulfillment by dramatizing violence, sexual oppression, and hidden desires, they were making an assertive, defiant break with restrictive cultural and aesthetic assumptions.
Abstract: P recisely because women artists had been excluded from earlier versions of punk movements (if it was difficult for de Sade or Jarry or William Burroughs to find a niche for their extremist creative expressions, it was virtually unthinkable for a woman to do so), by the time Kathy Acker (1947– 1997) began writing in the early ’70s there were any number of intriguing new possibilities that had been left unexplored. Reacting to and playing with societal expectations about the “proper” nature of women artists and their work, Acker and her punk contemporaries created a space where alternative, often androgynous, identities could be discovered and expressed and where women could openly explore passions—even ugly, violent, sexually perverse passions. It was one thing for Jim Morrison to make obscene gestures and call for libidinal release and a merging of the self with the primal (“lizard”) energies within us; but when women artists like Patti Smith and Kathy Acker began to examine the sources of their separation from love and fulfillment by dramatizing violence, sexual oppression, and hidden desires, they were making an assertive, defiant break with restrictive cultural and aesthetic assumptions.
TL;DR: The authors examines the three novels Vollmann devoted to the "oldest profession in the world, inspired by his personal experiences in San Francisco's Tenderloin District and travels to Thailand: Whores for Gloria (1991), Butterfly Stories (1993), and The Royal Family (2000).
Abstract: This essay examines the three novels Vollmann devoted to the “oldest profession in the world,” inspired by his personal experiences in San Francisco's Tenderloin District and travels to Thailand: Whores for Gloria (1991), Butterfly Stories (1993), and The Royal Family (2000). At the core of each novel is a love story. While not published as a trilogy, the books are interconnected in theme, style, and autobiography so that they form a de facto trilogy. The protagonists—all antiheroes—are on a quest for human connection, a search for what they consider is love in the guise of a prostitute. These are not romance novels in the traditional sense of the genre or love stories one would expect from mainstream, commercial fiction. These are sordid tales of affection for the apparent outcasts of society, a triptych that contributes an ironic version of “romance fiction,” vindicating the many varieties of love (even if unsavory) that life presents. The prostitute is a common character in Vollmann's work, bo...
TL;DR: Teaching Saul Bellow's novels is a delight because he, like Proust, always gives the reader hints of deeper meaning, glimpses beyond appearances to the inner part of the persona as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Teaching Saul Bellow's novels is a delight because he, like Proust, always gives the reader “true impressions,” hints of deeper meaning, glimpses beyond appearances to the inner part of the persona
TL;DR: The sheer size of some contemporary novels astounded me in 1974 when, after receiving an MA in literature, I pulled my head out of the canon to see wha... as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: There were giants in the earth in those days. The sheer size of some contemporary novels astounded me in 1974 when, after receiving an MA in literature, I pulled my head out of the canon to see wha...
TL;DR: To write fiction that portrays the nightmarish aspects of the unconscious is simply to say at the outset that the opposite view is equally true and equally valid as discussed by the authors. All my fiction is, in a sense, lyr...
Abstract: To write fiction that portrays the nightmarish aspects of the unconscious is simply to say at the outset that the opposite view is equally true and equally valid. All my fiction is, in a sense, lyr...