Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2014"
TL;DR: Inherent Vice as discussed by the authors is concerned with the transition in the U.S. from Fordism to 1970s neoliberalism and how Pynchon maps that process in his California novels and in Gravity's Rainbow and how the writer alludes also to the longer history of such economics.
Abstract: This article presents Inherent Vice as concerned with the transition in the U.S. from Fordism to 1970s neoliberalism. It shows how Pynchon maps that process in his California novels and in Gravity's Rainbow and how the writer alludes also to the longer history of such economics. Quietly driving Inherent Vice is the crisis generated by the Vietnam War and the confrontation between the U.S. and its competitors, setting the stage for the destruction of capital the novel depicts.
29 citations
TL;DR: A close reading of Wallace's early novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" reveals that Wallace's literary relationship with Barth is better understood as agonistic rather than antagonistic, an example of what Harold Bloom iconically describes as "the anxiety of influence" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: A common misconception among critics is that a young David Foster Wallace fell under the influence of John Barth and other postmodernist writers, only to wrest himself free of this sinister authority as he matured as a writer, steering his own fiction away from its sway and becoming one of postmodern fiction's strongest detractors in the process. But a close reading of Wallace's early novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” reveals that Wallace's literary relationship with Barth is better understood as agonistic rather than antagonistic, an example of what Harold Bloom iconically describes as “the anxiety of influence.” “Westward” should be read as not only a misprision of “Lost in the Funhouse,” Barth's predecessor text, but as a self-aware misprision, a knowing enactment of the anxiety of influence, as well as a fulfillment of the putatively unrealized possibilities of Barth's fiction and postmodern fiction in general.
10 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored how Vonnegut found a unique way to recount an experience that lies outside the bounds of normative human consciousness by turning to the generic characteristics of science fiction, paying particular attention to the familiar/unfamiliar binary intrinsic to science fiction.
Abstract: Kurt Vonnegut struggled for years to depict his memories of Dresden's infamous firebombing in 1945, due in part to the fact that no specific medical discourse yet existed regarding psychological trauma. This article explores how Vonnegut found a unique way to recount an experience that lies outside the bounds of normative human consciousness by turning to the generic characteristics of science fiction. By paying particular attention to the familiar/unfamiliar binary intrinsic to science fiction, Vonnegut finds the terminology and structure to narrate the bizarre, frightening experience of trauma in general and traumatic memory in particular.
8 citations
TL;DR: O'Neill's Netherland is less a novel about a multicultural post-9/11 America than it is a wistful story of lost Orientalized interracial male love in which Hans van der Broek mourns for the dead Trinidadian immigrant Chuck Ramkissoon as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is less a novel about a multicultural post-9/11 America than it is a wistful story of lost Orientalized interracial male love in which Hans van der Broek mourns for the dead Trinidadian immigrant Chuck Ramkissoon. Hans's memories of their shared passion for cricket casts the sport as a form of sexual pleasure (even as actual sexual pleasure threatens Hans's sense of self) and queers the narrative's heteronormative resolution.
7 citations
TL;DR: Lai's Salt Fish Girl as mentioned in this paper is structured on the contrasting themes of reincarnation and cloning as means of human reproduction, and its strategic use of distinct literary forms reveal the ways in which capitalism racially codes and recodes the body in its attendant stages of development.
Abstract: Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl is structured on the contrasting themes of reincarnation and cloning as means of human reproduction. Lai's strategic use of distinct literary forms—mythology and science fiction—reveals the ways in which capitalism racially codes and recodes the body in its attendant stages of development. Specifically, the novel's attention to bodily transformations and duplications emphasizes the historical formation of Asian American subjectivity.
7 citations
TL;DR: The authors analyzes Pierre Bergounioux's La Mort de Brune and argues that its structure and treatment of secondary characters offer strong evidence of debt to two ostensibly very different sources: the Arthurian quest narrative and traditional early learning materials.
Abstract: This article analyzes Pierre Bergounioux's La Mort de Brune and argues that its structure and treatment of secondary characters offer strong evidence of debt to two ostensibly very different sources: the Arthurian quest narrative and traditional early learning materials. Drawing on Norbert Elias's social theory, the article seeks to show that Bergounioux exploits these textual and visual sources in order to chart the shifting balance in the child-protagonist's thinking between magico-mythical views of his world and a rational perspective on it.
6 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the depiction in Pat Barker's Regeneration of Dr. Lewis Yealland, notorious First World War disciplinary therapist, and demonstrates how Barker attunes her novel to contemporary discourses of torture and witnessing in order to update a long tradition of opposing Yeallands with his contemporary, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, putting Regeneration at the intersection of lively debates about trauma, psychoanalysis and the psychology of torture.
Abstract: This article examines the depiction in Pat Barker's Regeneration of Dr. Lewis Yealland, notorious First World War disciplinary therapist. I demonstrate how Barker attunes her novel to contemporary discourses of torture and witnessing in order to update a long tradition of opposing Yealland with his contemporary, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, putting Regeneration at the intersection of lively debates about trauma, psychoanalysis, and the psychology of torture.
6 citations
TL;DR: Danielewski's House of Leaves can be read as a representation of the symbolic and the real as mentioned in this paper. But the relationship between what can be signified and what cannot is not.
Abstract: In this article, I examine the ways in which the figures of the labyrinth and the lacuna organize Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves The novel's labyrinths appear in a variety of forms, and yet each has at its center a lacuna in which signification is problematized I argue that these labyrinths and lacunae can be read as representations of, respectively, the Symbolic and the Real, and, as such, they suggest that the book's metafictional nature allows it to engage critically with the dynamic between what can be signified and what cannot
6 citations
TL;DR: The Zero as mentioned in this paper uses satire to critique the ways institutions commodified and co-opted public grief to serve commercial and nationalistic ends after 9/11, in this way, the novel asks how grieving otherwise might be possible.
Abstract: By using satire as its primary trope, Jess Walter's The Zero (2006) presents an uncharacteristic approach to 9/11 fiction, which tends to represent September 11 somberly. As this article shows, Walter's novel uses satire to critique the ways institutions commodified and co-opted public grief to serve commercial and nationalistic ends after September 11. In this way, the novel asks how grieving otherwise might be possible.
6 citations
TL;DR: In the alternative world of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy must find ways to hang on to the precious memories of their childhood.
Abstract: In the alternative world of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy must find ways to hang on to the precious memories of their childhood The affirmation of shared memories of Hailsham unites them, and the collective memories of the clones serve as testimonies to their plight in servitude to humankind This examination of the novel provides a glimpse into Ishiguro's profound and elegiac work of memory
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors read McEwan's Black Dogs as a "literature that sets out to transform history by bearing witness" (Shoshana Felman, “Camus' The Plague” 108).
Abstract: This essay reads Ian McEwan's Black Dogs as “literature that sets out to transform history by bearing witness” (Shoshana Felman, “Camus' The Plague” 108). It argues this is achieved in large part by means of the novel's dialogic engagement with three intertexts: the classical genre that is pastoral, Arthur Koestler's “The Yogi and the Commissar,” and Albert Camus's The Plague.
TL;DR: The authors discusses recent influences of digital structures on print narrative and a convergence of digital and urban structures, showing how Foer's die-cut experiment challenges the reader's ability to construe meaning and thus simulates modes of perception peculiar to our contemporary urban environment.
Abstract: Extracting another narrative from Schulz's fictional account of early twentieth-century urbanity, Tree of Codes can be read as an experiential performance of the contemporary urban mind. To show how Foer's die-cut experiment challenges the reader's ability to construe meaning and thus simulates modes of perception peculiar to our contemporary urban environment, this essay discusses recent influences of digital structures on print narrative and a convergence of digital and urban structures.
TL;DR: The authors examines Cormac McCarthy's antipathy toward modern ideology, or the ideas that when taken together enable the process of top-down social transformation called "modernization" and argues that McCarthy employs a formal device we may call "the eruption of the sordid" to create spaces for the representation of more organic ways of living.
Abstract: This essay examines Cormac McCarthy's antipathy toward modern ideology, or the ideas that when taken together enable the process of top-down social transformation called “modernization.” The essay argues that McCarthy employs a formal device we may call “the eruption of the sordid” to create spaces for the representation of more organic ways of living. This article further focuses on the double bind McCarthy's approach creates, whereby he can upset the logic of modernization but does not induce from the lives of his characters a shared alternative to this logic.
TL;DR: A more nuanced understanding of Wallace's relationship to sincerity and irony through a reading of his final work, The Pale King, alongside key statements from interviews and published essays is presented in this paper.
Abstract: Postmortem retrospectives of David Foster Wallace have too often painted him in broad strokes as either a postmodern trickster, enthralled with literary gamesmanship and irony, or, perhaps more commonly, as an apostle of the earnest and the straightforward. This essay attempts to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of Wallace's relationship to sincerity and irony through a reading of his final work, The Pale King, alongside key statements from interviews and published essays. The most well-developed sections of The Pale King portray characters for whom a commitment to sincerity can be just as much a danger as a commitment to irony. For these characters, moving toward adulthood means leaving childish fixations on sincerity behind and calling upon new parts of themselves that may be accessible only through performance, pretense, and artifice.
TL;DR: The authors examine Gonzales' negotiation of the human/animal divide through the hybrid character Lucy, and argue that Gonzales relies upon the very categories he calls into question, and the very processes that maintain them, in order to resolve his fictional...
Abstract: As our closest genetic relatives, the nonhuman great apes are subject to particular scrutiny in Western society; so close to the “human,” and yet fully “animal,” apes raise troublesome questions concerning the separation of the human from the animal. The prospect of a nonhuman/human ape hybrid compels a difficult and potentially deconstructive examination of just what it is that makes human beings worthy of moral consideration above and beyond all other forms of life. The eponymous protagonist of Laurence Gonzales' novel Lucy (2010) is a human-bonobo hybrid; her fraught reception in the U.S., and her ultimately unsuccessful struggle to attain human status, demonstrate the intense anxieties around human identity in an age of biotechnology. In this essay I examine Gonzales' negotiation of the human/animal divide through the hybrid character Lucy. Ultimately, I argue, Gonzales relies upon the very categories he calls into question, and the very processes that maintain them, in order to resolve his fictional ...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors highlight the spectral analogies between the attempts to discover the fate of Sir John Franklin's Arctic expedition in the 1850s, and the sudden eruption of novels in the 1990s dealing with its demise.
Abstract: This essay highlights the spectral analogies between the attempts to discover the fate of Sir John Franklin's Arctic expedition in the 1850s, and the sudden eruption of novels in the 1990s dealing with its demise. In both cases, supernatural tropes occupied a central role in how Western audiences confronted Arctic disaster. A thematic survey focusing on two novels demonstrates how contemporary mappings of Arctic exploration utilize spectral motifs in reconstructing Victorian trauma.
TL;DR: The authors traces the emergence of efficiency as a significant ideology in Graham Swift's Waterland (1983) by dramatizing the process of engineering in the reclamation of water and the expansion of a business empire, showing that the Atkinsons were motivated by the pursuit of efficient outcomes rather than the quest for vulgar profit.
Abstract: This essay traces the emergence of efficiency as a significant ideology in Graham Swift's Waterland (1983). By dramatizing the process of engineering in the reclamation of water and the expansion of a business empire, Swift demonstrates that the Atkinsons were motivated by the pursuit of efficient outcomes rather than the quest for vulgar profit. This focus on efficiency foregrounds a pattern of unintended consequences, accounts for the increasing commodification of human beings, and contributes to a dialectical understanding of history. Last Orders (1996) also receives some attention.
TL;DR: The authors use a modified definition of epiphany attuned to Gaddis's aesthetics to examine the story arcs of some characters in The Recognitions: Wyatt, whose existence becomes dislocated in his childhood and who attempts to regain it in religion, art, and physical love before finally recovering it in the need for agapē in his modernist world.
Abstract: I use a modified definition of “epiphany” attuned to Gaddis's aesthetics to examine the story arcs of some characters in The Recognitions: Wyatt—whose existence becomes dislocated in his childhood and who attempts to regain it in religion, art, and physical love before finally recovering it in the need for agapē in his modernist world—Otto, Anselm, Stanley, Agnes, and Benny. I thereby reclassify The Recognitions as a modernist work.
TL;DR: The authors argue that in addition to underscoring one's responsibility for, or in the face of the other, Cleave taps into the novel's potential for transforming consciousness by mobilizing what Ahmed has called just emotions: those emotions that show not only the effects of injustice, in the form of scars, but also open up the possibility of healing and recovery.
Abstract: My essay focuses on Chris Cleave's novel Little Bee/The Other Hand as a fertile ground for exploring the ethical and political grounds on which cross-cultural encounters take place. Bringing Sara Ahmed's theory of the cultural politics of emotion in conjunction with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ethics, I argue that, in addition to underscoring one's responsibility for, or in the face of the other, Cleave taps into the novel's potential for transforming consciousness by mobilizing what Ahmed has called “just emotions”: those emotions that show not only the effects of injustice, in the form of scars, but also open up the possibility of healing and recovery.
TL;DR: The protagonist of Atwood's Alias Grace as mentioned in this paper takes the form of a fictive memoir, in which the protagonist, based on the historical Grace Marks, who was tried and convicted of murder at age sixteen, gives an account of her life to a doctor who could arrange her release from prison.
Abstract: Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace takes the form of a fictive memoir, in which the protagonist, based on the historical Grace Marks, who was tried and convicted of murder at age sixteen, gives an account of her life to a doctor who could arrange her release from prison Through the strategic interplay of silence and revelation, purposeful invocation of her girlishness, and re-evaluation of notions of guilt, innocence, and identity, Grace positions herself as an agent capable of radical social critique rather than as a victim or a passive object of rescue
TL;DR: The authors argue that the Booker Prize should be understood as a complex literary system that gives rise to a generic form, the cosmopolitan global novel, even as it creates the conditions for the subversion and revision of that form.
Abstract: Focusing on Britain's prestigious prize for a best annual novel, this essay argues that the Booker Prize should be understood as a complex literary system that gives rise to a generic form—the cosmopolitan global novel—even as it creates the conditions for the subversion and revision of that form In this sense, the Booker Prize provides a model for the more general study of literary systems within the current era of late capitalism and decolonization
TL;DR: Marilynne Robinson's two most recent novels offer a compelling ethical framework for contemporary readers as mentioned in this paper, focusing on responsibility, generosity, and interdependence, all founded in a system of belief her protagonists have accepted.
Abstract: Marilynne Robinson's two most recent novels offer a compelling ethical framework for contemporary readers. After reviewing the shift in how her seminal novel Housekeeping has been received, this article demonstrates how Robinson's more recent fiction focuses on responsibility, generosity, and interdependence, all founded in a system of belief her protagonists have accepted. Robinson's work invites readers to reconsider humanistic concerns in ways that speak back to neoliberal hegemony and postmodern relativism.
TL;DR: The authors examines Ishiguro's use of filiation and patrimony in The Unconsoled and argues that these frustrated genealogies allude to the long history of the novel genre and allegorize the impossibility of taking up this legacy in the wake of modernism and associated traumatic European histories.
Abstract: The world of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled is caught in a strange stasis where history is both too present and absent altogether, and where the narrator-protagonist is both father and son, and also neither at the same time. This essay examines Ishiguro's use of tropes of filiation and patrimony, and argues that these frustrated genealogies allude to the long history of the novel genre and allegorize the impossibility of taking up this legacy in the wake of modernism and associated traumatic European histories.
TL;DR: The fourth and final iteration of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, “B.I. #20,” is seen by many as a love story in disguise, but as mentioned in this paper argues that that interpretation is a misreading.
Abstract: David Foster Wallace's 1999 short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men offers four homonymous stories that demonstrate a similar conceit: unnamed, silent interviewer questions one or more hideous men. The fourth and final iteration of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” “B.I. #20,” is seen by many as a love story in disguise, but this article argues that that interpretation is a misreading. To view the story as a love story is to identify completely with Wallace's last hideous man. These men manipulate the women in their lives and the interviewer(s), but Wallace means for the reader to both feel implicated by their hideousness and separate enough from it to judge it. In “B.I. #20,” the nesting narratives reveal a pervasive rape culture and the ways in which its values pervert love for those who live inside it.
TL;DR: This paper argued that the presence of others shatters Harry's selfhood, demonstrating a relational identity that replaces the egoism often associated with Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, drawing from Kierkegaard's "neighbor-love" and Levinas's phenomenological ethics.
Abstract: Contrary to the solipsism emphasized in most discussions of John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, this article examines the tenuous and improper community Harry Angstrom forms when he invites two members of enemy groups to stay in his house. Drawing from Kierkegaard's “neighbor-love” and Levinas's phenomenological ethics, I argue that the presence of others shatters Harry's selfhood, demonstrating a relational identity that replaces the egoism often associated with Updike.
TL;DR: The authors argues that the archive is the central trope of Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) and argues that Branch's project of "archivization produces as much as it records the event" (Archive 17).
Abstract: This essay argues that the archive is the central trope of Don DeLillo's Libra (1988). The novel's contemporary protagonist, a retired CIA analyst named Nicholas Branch, pores over the Kennedy assassination's voluminous archive in an attempt to mitigate the political and epistemological chaos precipitated by the president's death. However, the desire to locate within this archive a controlling, “meta-historical” vantage point on the assassination proves untenable. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's theorizing of both the archive and the event, this essay contends that Branch's project of “archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Archive 17). In depicting the conspiracy against the president as itself a protracted exercise in the production and management of documents, DeLillo demonstrates that the destructive effects of the assassination can only be augmented, carried down into the future, by reiterative acts of archival violence.
TL;DR: In this paper, the presence of the rat as a unit of currency demonstrates the undeniable power of countercurrencies, of which the most significant is the human body, which is a signifier of desire.
Abstract: Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis employs postmodern, derealized money to represent the psychic and social conditions of the early twenty-first century, as embodied by billionaire Eric Packer. The yen on which Packer bets, and loses, his fortune reveals currency's role as a signifier of desire. Ultimately, the presence of the rat as a “unit of currency” demonstrates the undeniable power of countercurrencies, of which the most significant is the human body.
TL;DR: In this paper, the figure of the Mobius strip is used to demonstrate the ways in which narrative structure, space, and the bodies of characters function in Falling Man to reveal the futility of binary logic as it relates to identity, language, and nation in response to terrorism.
Abstract: This essay offers a new way in which to topologically read Don DeLillo's Falling Man and the events of September 11, 2001. Specifically, the figure of the Mobius strip is used to demonstrate the ways in which narrative structure, space, and the bodies of characters function in Falling Man to reveal the futility of binary logic as it relates to identity, language, and nation in response to terror.
TL;DR: The authors explored the sources for Acker's image as a punk writer: her autobiographical narratives, mode of self-presentation, and the role the publishing and media industries played in this authorial fashioning.
Abstract: In numerous articles, interviews, and reviews, the late twentieth-century author Kathy Acker is described as a punk writer. This article explores the sources for Acker's image as a punk writer: her autobiographical narratives, mode of self-presentation, and the role the publishing and media industries played in this authorial fashioning. I argue that Acker's image is a unique suturing of the identities and ideologies of the punk and the feminist.
TL;DR: This article analyzed the significance of the unstable body in Coover's Pinocchio in Venice (1991), focusing on a triple model of body space: city, body, and knowledge.
Abstract: This article analyzes the significance of the unstable body in Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice (1991), focusing on a triple model of body space: city, body, and knowledge. Notably, these body spaces are rooted in Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection, as they simultaneously horrify and compel. Further, the reinscription of Pinocchio into a “talking book” offers a new look at postmodern notions of the body and its control.