Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2013"
TL;DR: In this article, the role of economic rhetoric and especially money in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is discussed, linking the legitimation crisis of the gold standard at the beginning of the twentieth century to broader questions of representation, value formation, and centralized power.
Abstract: My article “‘There Is Money Everywhere’: Representation, Authority, and the Money Form in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day” deals with the role of economic rhetoric and especially money in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. In the article I will show how Pynchon links the legitimation crisis of the gold standard at the beginning of the twentieth century to broader questions of representation, value formation, and centralized power.
43 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that the setting of Thomas Pynchon's "California novels" allows him to explore concerns that inform all of his work in a less determined, and thus ultimately less pessimistic, way.
Abstract: This article argues that the setting of Thomas Pynchon's “California novels” allows him to explore concerns that inform all of his work in a less determined, and thus ultimately less pessimistic, way. Although his longer works are all set amid recognizable historical crises whose outcomes we generally know, the setting of the California novels contributes to an emphasis in these novels on the “subjunctive” voice of history.
30 citations
TL;DR: The Pacific has been treated as a region where systems of economic and cultural control generate a uniformity that mimics paradise as discussed by the authors, and it also serves as a global, oceanic circulatory system for routes of commerce in whaling, armaments, and food production.
Abstract: The Pacific has been treated as a region where systems of economic and cultural control generate a uniformity that mimics paradise. It also serves as a global, oceanic circulatory system for routes of commerce in whaling, armaments, and food production. Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, and the New Zealand writer Ian Wedde oscillate between historical narratives of Pacific islands and transcendental antinarratives in which history is subsumed by timeless, universalized space.
26 citations
TL;DR: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as mentioned in this paper examines three generations of the Cabral/de Leon family as they negotiate complicated racial terrains in the Dominican Republic and the United States.
Abstract: In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz articulates a complex, fluid racial world that defies conventional ideas about racial classification. The novel examines three generations of the Cabral/de Leon family as they negotiate complicated racial terrains in the Dominican Republic and the United States. This essay explores the historical and cultural factors that have shaped differing conceptions of race in the Dominican Republic and the United States, particularly notions of blackness, whiteness, and Dominican-ness; it then looks to Oscar Wao's engagement with hair as an illustration of the complex, contingent nature of racial categorization.
17 citations
TL;DR: Toth argues that Danielewski's overtly metafictional novel redeploys distinctly postmodern devices to undermine the efficacy of postmodernism itself as discussed by the authors, and this redeployment heralds a still emergent wave of American cultural and aesthetic production intent on "renewing the possibility (if not the reality) of all that post-modernism seemed intent on denying outright: mimesis, communion, closure".
Abstract: Toth argues that Danielewski's overtly metafictional novel redeploys distinctly postmodern devices to undermine the efficacy of postmodernism itself. This redeployment heralds (in turn) a still emergent wave of American cultural and aesthetic production intent on “renewing” the possibility (if not the reality) of all that postmodernism seemed intent on denying outright: mimesis, communion, closure.
12 citations
TL;DR: Morrison's A Mercy provides an ironic look at American origins, showing that the American exceptionalist myth of a chosen people rests on pernicious binary separations between an elect and its Others as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Morrison's A Mercy provides an ironic look at American origins, showing that the American exceptionalist myth of a “chosen people” rests on pernicious binary separations between an elect and its Others. While Florens pays the costs of American exceptionalism, Morrison extends her reflections on the separation of Others through the use of a narrative form that effectively deploys separation as a structural principle and perspective.
11 citations
TL;DR: In the post-September 11, 2001, America, Billy's static meekness may be even more representative of the nation's mood than it was forty-one years ago as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Critical consensus agrees that Slaughterhouse-Five, forty-three years old this year, remains Vonnegut's canon masterpiece. In the 1960s and '70s, the novel was perceived as commenting on World War II, America's putative “good” war, through the lens of the controversial Vietnam War and proving that no war is ever fully righteous. Billy Pilgrim's story, an Everyman saga, condemns American apathy and the defeatist notion that the lone individual is the helpless plaything of juggernaut forces. Vonnegut vehemently argues that individual agency can still influence events in humanistic ways. Currently, in post-September 11, 2001, America, Billy's static meekness may be even more representative of the nation's mood than it was forty-one years ago. If America's current fascination with apocalyptic scenarios is any indication, the psychological exhaustion of the two-front War on Terror, the economic crisis, and disillusion with a new President's inability to reverse everything overnight has led to a near national d...
7 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the novel as museum as represented in Orhan Pamuk's 2008 novel, "The Novel as Museum", and discuss memories inscribed in everyday objects and urban modernity hidden behind the story.
Abstract: This article explores a distinctive mode of narrative, “the novel as museum,” as represented in Orhan Pamuk's 2008 novel. Framed via Walter Benjamin's ideas on collecting and urban representation and Pamuk's 2009 Norton Lectures on The Naive and Sentimental Novelist, the article traces a link between Pamuk's fictional museum and its physical counterpart in Istanbul and talks about memories inscribed in everyday objects and urban modernity hidden behind the story.
7 citations
TL;DR: A close analysis of one particular character in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: Kate Gompert, a suicidal marijuana addict afflicted with "psychotic depression" can be found in this paper.
Abstract: This essay offers a close analysis of one particular character in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: Kate Gompert, a suicidal marijuana addict afflicted with “psychotic depression.” While the novel consistently posits a neuroscientific, material explanation for such an illness—i.e., the primacy of the body and the tyrannical oppression of brain chemistry—there also exists a spiritual-philosophical undercurrent that posits a construction of the Self defined by experience and choice.
7 citations
TL;DR: Powers as discussed by the authors suggests that if our culture encouraged finding happiness internally through mental exertions, we might free ourselves from our consumerist-oriented patterns and thus perhaps open possibilities for improving our world.
Abstract: Richard Powers's novels all offer us two imperatives, and they conflict. One is to study and observe—science, nature, music, almost anything—and derive happiness from understanding their interconnections. The other is to help the vast majority of people in the world who live terrible lives. Powers tries to work out some kind of balance between the two, and while he finds no easy answer, he suggests that if our culture encouraged finding happiness internally through mental exertions, we might free ourselves from our consumerist-oriented patterns and thus perhaps open possibilities for improving our world.
6 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors foregrounded the critical potential linked to the active manipulation of space and time in Sebald's Austerlitz, and the tendency to slow down the narrative tempo through a complex narrative structure and densely textured sentences in which multiple narrative perspectives and temporalities overlap, contributing to intensify the reflection on memory central to his prose.
Abstract: The article foregrounds the critical potential linked to the active manipulation of space and time in Sebald's Austerlitz. Sebald's understanding of space as temporally layered and the tendency to slow down the narrative tempo through a complex narrative structure and densely textured sentences in which multiple narrative perspectives and temporalities overlap, are part of an “aesthetics of delay” that contributes to intensify the reflection on memory central to his prose.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the main characters such as Robbie, Cecilia, and Paul Marshall to illuminate and enhance their understanding of the class contradictions present in the novel, and demonstrate the richness of Thompson's framework and the quality of McEwan's own writing on what he sees as the important issue of class.
Abstract: Ian McEwan's critically acclaimed novel Atonement has attracted a number of different interpretations across many themes. However, there has been little attention paid to the issue of class in this work. I seek to rectify this lacuna by offering an examination of the novel utilizing the understanding of class developed by E. P. Thompson. Thompson understands class as a historical relationship that is developed over time and is associated with core concepts such as class experience, class consciousness, class struggle, class hegemony, and fetishism. I use these categories to examine the main characters such as Robbie, Cecilia, and Paul Marshall to illuminate and enhance our understanding of the class contradictions present in the novel. This not only demonstrates the richness of Thompson's framework but also the quality of McEwan's own writing on what he sees as the important issue of class.
TL;DR: This paper argued that the game of Prisoner's Dilemma is analogous to deconstruction in the way it remains insolvable in its deferral of fixity or stabilization, and it enacts Derrida's idea of infinite moral responsibility.
Abstract: This article argues that the “game” of Prisoner's Dilemma is posited in Richard Powers's novel as a moral response to what Amy Elias calls the “historical sublime,” an “unknowable” and “unrepresentable” conception The rational quandary of the Prisoner's Dilemma is analogous to deconstruction in the way it remains insolvable in its deferral of fixity or stabilization In this way, the game, as insolvable paradox, is deconstruction, and it enacts Derrida's idea of “infinite” moral responsibility
TL;DR: The authors explores the inverse relationship between the corporate body and the corporeal body in Richard Powers's Gain, showing that as the corporation (considered a "person" by law) gains rights, the individual is stripped of them.
Abstract: This essay explores the inverse relationship between the corporate body and the corporeal body in Richard Powers's Gain. The novel's careful anatomy of corporate and American history demonstrates that as the corporation (considered a “person” by law) gains rights, the individual is stripped of them. Notwithstanding the novel's fantasy of a sovereign subject able to resist this biopolitical incorporation, Gain makes it clear that in the neoliberal age the corporate body has narrowed its “responsibility” to increasing shareholders' profits, while the subject's responsibility for her newly “privatized” body has expanded with troubling implications.
TL;DR: The authors argues that the literary materials grouped together in the early 1960s under the rubric of "black humor" frequently attended thematically to acts of interracial identification, and that the prose fictions of Terry Southern, Richard Farina, and Thomas Pynchon also explored the virtues of an alternate model of subjectivity, not predicated on the notion of acquiring a stable self.
Abstract: This essay argues that the literary materials grouped together in the early 1960s under the rubric of “black humor” frequently attended thematically to acts of interracial identification. In addition to examining critically the impulses motivating persons to engage in such imitative procedures, the prose fictions of Terry Southern, Richard Farina, and Thomas Pynchon also explored the virtues of an alternate model of subjectivity, one not predicated on the notion of acquiring a stable self. In pursuing both topics, these authors repeatedly took recourse to certain forms of American popular culture, including superhero comic books and silent screen comedy.
TL;DR: Brown's work defamiliarizes characters' acquisition of gender and sexuality while also showing some of the culturally specific limits to Butler's theory as mentioned in this paper, and avoids, as Butler cannot, the misrecognition of femmes' rebelliousness in schemes of performativity or the limited range of choice in terms of performance for lesbians of color.
Abstract: This essay approaches the oeuvre of the contemporary American author Rebecca Brown as an illuminating fictional exploration of Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. Brown's work defamiliarizes characters' acquisition of gender and sexuality while also showing some of the culturally specific limits to Butler's theory. Besides being performative, sexual identities are especially relational for Brown. Thus she avoids, as Butler cannot, the misrecognition of femmes' rebelliousness in schemes of performativity or, somewhat less overtly, the limited range of choice in terms of performance for lesbians of color.
TL;DR: Although Roth typically writes characters who are intent on pursuing lust rather than love, Sabbath's Theater (1995), while sexually explicit, portrays a protagonist who reveals a longing for attachment as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Although Philip Roth typically writes characters who are intent on pursuing lust rather than love, Sabbath's Theater (1995), while sexually explicit, portrays a protagonist who reveals a longing for attachment. Analyzed against other recent novels and Leslie Fiedler's thesis that fictional American men eschew family responsibilities and women, this article indicates that far from celebrating infidelity, the novel suggests that this immature masculine identity brings only isolation and regret.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the temporal repercussions of near-death and explore how Maurice Blanchot and Don DeLillo attempt to write the instance of remaining through the creative use and transgressive play of language and grapple with the radical uncertainty of surviving death.
Abstract: What is at stake when we write about near-death? This essay engages with the temporal repercussions—a radical “time out of joint”—that the event of near-death opens up. It explores how Maurice Blanchot (in The Instant of My Death) and Don DeLillo (in Falling Man) attempt to write the instance of remaining through the creative use and transgressive play of language and grapple with the radical uncertainty of surviving death.
TL;DR: The authors examines Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) through posthumanist theories of liminal temporality and subjectivity, showing that black power need not be rooted solely in the past: the future can serve as an accessible site of authority and resistance as well.
Abstract: This essay examines Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) through posthumanist theories of liminal temporality and subjectivity. By positioning her women characters as both mothers and daughters, simultaneously past- and future-oriented, Morrison gestures toward a posthumanistic articulation of becoming-subjectivity. The liminality Morrison puts forward in Beloved suggests that black power need not be rooted solely in the past: the future can serve as an accessible site of authority and resistance as well.
TL;DR: Cosmopolis as mentioned in this paper is a graphic novel without the pictures, a mythopoetic vision of a moment of crisis in American history, and the portrait of a great American supervillain.
Abstract: Cosmopolis may be Don DeLillo's most harshly reviewed book, but that is partly due to the application by reviewers of inappropriately naturalistic standards of storytelling. Cosmopolis is actually a graphic novel without the pictures, a mythopoetic vision of a moment of crisis in American history, and the portrait of a great American supervillain. Understanding Cosmopolis in this way explains both why the book was hard for some readers to like and why it will be the first of DeLillo's novels to make it onto the big screen.
TL;DR: In this article, the role of narrative in human consciousness in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker is explored, and it is argued that Dr. Weber uses narrative strategies to navigate the existential crisis he suffers and that he maps his personal crisis onto humanity itself.
Abstract: This article explores the role of narrative in human consciousness in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker. I argue that Dr. Weber uses narrative strategies to navigate the existential crisis he suffers and that he maps his personal crisis onto humanity itself, creating the sense of a species-level epistemological and ontological crisis that forces us to reconsider humanism, the subject, and the role of narrative in consciousness formation and maintenance.
TL;DR: In this article, Smith's 2005 novel, On Beauty, rereads and revises E. M. Forster's Howards End, and Smith's authorial affinities and dissimilarities to Forster were discussed by the novel's critics.
Abstract: Zadie Smith's 2005 novel, On Beauty, rereads and revises E. M. Forster's Howards End, and Smith's authorial affinities and dissimilarities to Forster were much discussed by the novel's critics. This article extends this discussion by arguing that On Beauty actually represents the culmination of an extended engagement with Forster's work. Identifying the marks of a Forsterian ethics within both White Teeth and The Autograph Man, I suggest that a sustained ethical enquiry—prompted largely by Forster but also indebted to contemporary moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Elaine Scarry—underpins and illuminates Smith's fiction in a manner crucial to a fuller understanding of her work.
TL;DR: The authors argued that the spiritual thesis of Underworld is postsecular in nature and called for an understanding of cyberspatial connectivity as a potential vehicle for spiritual agency within the state of late capitalism.
Abstract: This essay argues that the spiritual thesis of Underworld is postsecular in nature and calls for an understanding of cyberspatial connectivity as a potential vehicle for spiritual agency within the state of late capitalism. Through a close reading of Sister Edgar's pseudo-religious quest, which culminates in the novel's epilogue, the article posits DeLillo's cyberspace as a potentially sacred locale that is deeply rooted in the postsecular agenda.
TL;DR: Morrison made use of the original Tar Baby story in order to underscore the relationship between exploitation, commodity consumption, and social and economic domination in his Tar Baby novel as discussed by the authors, where commodities are presented as a dual snare that lead the novel's characters to pursue self-negating, individualistic activities and to repress the exploitative origins of wealth.
Abstract: Throughout Tar Baby, Morrison makes use of the original tar baby story in order to underscore the relationship between exploitation, commodity consumption, and social and economic domination. Commodities are presented as a dual snare that lead the novel's characters to pursue self-negating, individualistic activities and to repress the exploitative origins of wealth.
TL;DR: D Dunn's Geek Love as discussed by the authors is a working-class novel and an allegory of American class conflict that culminates in Oly Binewski's struggle with Miss Lick.
Abstract: Although critics often overlook its intimations of social class, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love is a working-class novel and, in some ways, an allegory of American class conflict that culminates in Oly Binewski's struggle with Miss Lick. American class experience is reflected in the price the Binewski family pays for class mobility, including bodily mutilation, resentment, and hysteresis, a form of class dysphoria attending class mobility.
TL;DR: Hawthorne explores how some artistic methods attempt to fix the past and escape tradition's grip while others participate in the reformation and revitalization of tradition as discussed by the authors, and how one's relation to the past affects and even determines one's ability to live out a hybrid, postnational identity.
Abstract: Hawthorne explores—in The House of Seven Gables and particularly The Marble Faun—how some artistic methods attempt to fix the past and escape tradition's grip while others participate in the reformation and revitalization of tradition. Lahiri draws on Hawthorne's ideas and characters as she probes—in “Hema and Kaushik” and especially its final story, “Going Ashore”—how one's relation to the past affects and even determines one's ability to live out a hybrid, postnational identity.
TL;DR: The authors argues that the Gods Go Begging (GGW) story challenges traditional American models of traumatic community by bringing together multiple minority perspectives from both the Vietnam War and 1990s San Francisco, and explores how individual losses can structure more inclusive communal identities.
Abstract: This article argues that Alfredo Vea's Gods Go Begging challenges traditional American models of traumatic community. By bringing together multiple minority perspectives from both the Vietnam War and 1990s San Francisco, Vea explores how individual losses can structure more inclusive communal identities. These “communities of loss,” I contend, hinge on comparative, multidirectional narrative methods that bring traumatic events together—narratives that seek to do justice in the face of loss.
TL;DR: This paper conducted a one-year research on contemporary American fiction in the English Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where Richard is a professor.
Abstract: With ten prize-winning fictions, Richard Powers has firmly established his position as a leading novelist in contemporary American literature. Hybridizing and blending the discourses of science and art, narration and exposition, Richard has successfully closed the gap between the two cultures, namely the gap between science and art. Invited by Richard, the interviewer has done a one-year research on contemporary American fiction in the English Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where Richard is a professor. The interview was conducted on May 9, 2011 on the campus of UIUC. In the interview, Richard kindly answered the interviewer's questions concerning categorization, themes, his relationship with other writers, and other issues.
TL;DR: The authors link Didion's concern with American expansionism to the representation of gender and desire in her two most recent novels, Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, and show how a concern with the Cold War national security apparatus saturates her fiction as well.
Abstract: This article links Joan Didion's concern with American expansionism to the representation of gender and desire in her two most recent novels, Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted. From an analysis that shows much of her nonfictional work to be focused on the fictive qualities of contemporary political discourse, it moves on to show how a concern with the Cold War national security apparatus saturates her fiction as well.
TL;DR: The authors examines the ways in which Vineland and Pattern Recognition imagine the interactions between alternative spiritual practices and the formation of new social collectivities, and analyzes the vexed role that race plays in the two novels' understanding of the sociopolitical functions of alternative spiritualities.
Abstract: This essay has two related goals. First, it examines the ways in which Vineland and Pattern Recognition imagine the interactions between alternative spiritual practices and the formation of new social collectivities. Second, it analyzes the vexed role that race plays in the two novels' understanding of the sociopolitical functions of alternative spiritualities. In so doing, the article suggests a way of understanding the relationship between representations of secular religion and of imaginings of community formation in contemporary American literature, and between “mainstream” and “ethnic” components of this literature.