scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question

Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2015"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: David Foster Wallace's "Octet" as discussed by the authors provides a singular example of how he endeavors to negotiate with the ever-present specter of irony and interrogate the efficacy and applicability of sincerity within the millennial zeitgeist.
Abstract: David Foster Wallace's “Octet” provides a singular example of how he endeavors to negotiate with the ever-present specter of irony and interrogate the efficacy and applicability of sincerity within the millennial zeitgeist. By requiring of his readers a vast investment of time and concentration, acknowledging and working through the specter of irony while proleptically anticipating theoretical rebuttals, and resisting both a retrograde appeal for “pre-ironic” sincerity and a reductive synthesis of irony and sincerity, Wallace achieves a “new” position of sincerity that is ostensibly unchallengeable. This, however, exposes an underlying conservative individualism and suggests that the very need for a New Sincerity might be the preserve of a relatively empowered, elite section of U.S. society.

22 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) displaces and defamiliarizes the attacks on the World Trade Center and their aftermath, positioning the reader between a pair of funhouse mirrors, one backlit with the specter of 9/11 and the other with an early twentieth-century history of anticapitalist insurgency, with the two reflections bi-locating the reader within their surreal temporal overlap as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) displaces and defamiliarizes the attacks on the World Trade Center and their aftermath, positioning the reader between a pair of funhouse mirrors, one backlit with the specter of 9/11 and the other with an early twentieth-century history of anticapitalist insurgency—with the two reflections bi-locating the reader within their surreal temporal overlap.

17 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas as discussed by the authors is an example of a novel that does not submit to the linearity of temporal developments, drawing on postcolonialism, environmentalism, and technological disasters.
Abstract: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004) approaches the tradition of apocalyptic writing from a unique angle in that it refuses to submit to the linearity of temporal developments Drawing on postcolonialism, environmentalism, and technological disasters, Mitchell implies that the kind of apocalypse traditionally envisioned as an event to be encountered in the future is already taking place His novel casts any historical present as fundamentally marked by catastrophic developments

15 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Lai's Salt Fish Girl and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods as mentioned in this paper are two dystopian novels that ponder the relationship between body and self in the context of technological societies, and interrogate the ways in which technology, in the form of genetic experimentation and robotics, affects identity, reinforcing gender difference but also proposing appealing interpretations of interbreeding, same-sex relationships, and cyborg politics.
Abstract: Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods are two dystopian novels that ponder the relationship between body and self in the context of technological societies. They interrogate the ways in which technology, in the form of genetic experimentation and robotics, affects identity, reinforcing gender difference but also proposing appealing interpretations of interbreeding, same-sex relationships, and cyborg politics.

12 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Egan as discussed by the authors reframes the insights of Proust and Eliot at a century's remove; from the epistemic vantage of her second-generation postmodernism, she reconceptualizes their themes of time lost and problematically recaptured.
Abstract: Far from viewing the aesthetic crafted by earlier postmodernists as outmoded, Jennifer Egan joins them and augments their formal and ideational deconstructions of such vestigial metanarratives (of language, of history, of the unconscious) as continued to shelter in the shadow of that great rock, modernism. Because of her later situation in literary history, however, she can treat the moderns as ancestral figures—as much to be venerated as rebelled against. Like the author of To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, she grapples with the strange imbrication of time and consciousness (the one striving endlessly to integrate the other). Like the Don DeLillo of Cosmopolis or The Body Artist, she perceives temporality and sentience as features of language. But chiefly she reframes the insights of Proust and Eliot at a century's remove; from the epistemic vantage of her second-generation postmodernism, she reconceptualizes their themes of time lost and problematically recaptured.

11 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The MaddAddam trilogy as discussed by the authors is a collection of speculative fictions that challenge speculative capital's monetization of the elements of life, arguing that life becoming rendered into an algorithmic game, a complex calculation that generates automated reasoning, and instrumentalizes attention to control life.
Abstract: In her MaddAddam trilogy, Canadian author Margaret Atwood profoundly critiques humanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism by focusing on the instrumentalization of life in transgenics and critical theological and ecological discourses. Atwood, I contend, writes speculative fictions that challenge speculative capital's monetization of the elements of life. Speculative fictions envision unrealized future scenarios; in this regard, they share a similar strategy to speculative capital, the very forces whose fictions have become our realities. I argue that Atwood opposes life becoming rendered into an algorithmic game, a complex calculation that generates automated reasoning, and instrumentalizes attention to control life. Next, I elucidate how Atwood problematizes claims of resistance to instrumentalization and power by religious and ecological discourses by demonstrating that nature, God, and bodies become tools for enfiguring complex processes that exceed the limits of human knowledge. Atwood proposes thinki...

11 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors posits that David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is marked by an epiphanic structure pivoting on carefully obscured and often illusory moments of insight, which are used to tease questions of character intent by blurring empathetic identification through trauma with primal desires for cathartic release.
Abstract: The article posits that David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is marked by an epiphanic structure pivoting on carefully obscured and often illusory moments of insight. These moments, tied to situations of extreme trial, are used to tease questions of character intent by blurring empathetic identification through trauma with primal desires for cathartic release. By employing genetic analysis on Wallace's manuscripts, the essay traces these effects to Wallace's deeper design.

10 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Susan L. Hall1
TL;DR: This article argued that Abani's representation of sex trafficking aligns with the variously classified human rights/sex work/liberal feminist positions on trafficking and showed that the novella stages its intervention into anti-trafficking debates at the ideological level through the protagonist's rejection of the stereotypes surrounding the trafficking victim in mainstream discourse and policy.
Abstract: This article argues that Abani's representation of sex trafficking aligns with the variously classified human rights/sex work/liberal feminist positions on trafficking and shows that the novella stages its intervention into anti-trafficking debates at the ideological level through the protagonist's rejection of the stereotypes surrounding the trafficking victim in mainstream discourse and policy. Moreover, the novella's critique of the moralistic and neocolonial agendas of many mainstream anti-trafficking positions is examined.

8 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Danielewski's House of Leaves as discussed by the authors models the experience of psychological trauma on the archetypal descent into Hell, or katabasis, which can provide a paradigm for the representation of trauma which is often theorized as being unrepresentable.
Abstract: The archetypal descent into hell can provide a paradigm for the representation of trauma, which is often theorized as being unrepresentable. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000) models the experience of psychological trauma on the archetypal descent into hell, or katabasis. House of Leaves thus challenges a certain strand of poststructuralism that has become dominant within literary critical circles of trauma studies. Ultimately, Danielewski manipulates the paradigm of katabasis to forge what I style an infernal phenomenal reference system to represent the hell of trauma.

8 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: DeLillo's Point Omega as mentioned in this paper is a novel in which violence assumes an aura of Catholic mystery, and the author screens violence from view to critique replayed, on-screen media violence and fanatical fundamentalist terrorism.
Abstract: This article considers Don DeLillo's Point Omega as a tacit response to 9/11 in which violence assumes an aura of Catholic mystery. In the novel, DeLillo screens violence from view to critique replayed, on-screen media violence and fanatical fundamentalist terrorism. He thus reinvigorates the novelist as a visionary rhetorical force that fosters contemplation via questions and advocates for compromise rather than extremism.

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the unique resonance of Roberto Bolano's fiction in the moment of the War on Terror: the questions his work poses for the project of literature in a time of interminable global war, the genealogies of empire and capital, and the dialectic of civilization and barbarism his work reveals and critiques.
Abstract: This article examines the unique resonance of Roberto Bolano's fiction in the moment of the War on Terror: the questions his work poses for the project of literature in a time of interminable global war, the genealogies of empire and capital his work brings into view, and the dialectic of civilization and barbarism his work reveals and critiques.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argues that Atwood's novel The Blind Assassin is a critique against market liberalism's attempt to bring all human spheres into the realm of market logics, arguing that market liberalism, a theory of political economy, is a theory also of human subjectivity.
Abstract: Margaret Atwood's tenth novel The Blind Assassin (2000) juxtaposes Depression-era politics against those at the end of the twentieth century. This essay argues that the novel levies a critique against market liberalism's attempt to bring all human spheres into the realm of market logics. At stake in The Blind Assassin is an acknowledgment that market liberalism, a theory of political economy, is a theory also of human subjectivity.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For instance, the authors recognized the influence of conventions deriving from classical epic literature in the form of the Iliad and the Aeneid in Blood Meridian, a novel with a preoccupation with violence and its relationship to the history and heritage of the nation.
Abstract: Recognition of the influence of conventions deriving from classical epic is central to any reckoning of Blood Meridian's form and concerns. In its preoccupation with violence and its relationship to the history and heritage of the nation, Blood Meridian owes direct debts to the Iliad and the Aeneid. Several formal features, notably the prevalence of similes, further identify the novel with the genre of epic.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors analyzed three contemporary novels that engage with the most recent Iraq war: Point Omega by Don DeLillo (2010), Gods without Men by Hari Kunzru (2011), and The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (2012).
Abstract: This article analyzes three contemporary novels that engage with the most recent Iraq war: Point Omega by Don DeLillo (2010), Gods without Men by Hari Kunzru (2011), and The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (2012). It argues that the novels produce a kind of “connective dissonance” that works to redress what Judith Butler has described as a dehumanizing “derealization of loss” in the context of Western media representations of the war on terror.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Byatt's Possession and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman as mentioned in this paper suggest that erotic love can lead to possessive madness, and also represent the original idea of Platonic love as a possible antidote to acquisitive, destructive love.
Abstract: Employing the Greek concept of eros, as well as medieval and Renaissance notions of sexual possession by the “phantasm,” I consider the ways in which the erotic is represented in A. S. Byatt's Possession and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. Both novels suggest that erotic love can lead to possessive madness. In addition, Byatt also represents the original idea of Platonic love as a possible antidote to acquisitive, destructive love.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In Pynchon's second novel, after having fallen in a complex net of uncertain signification, protagonist Oedipa Maas finally realizes that she should escape categorical binary thinking as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In Pynchon's second novel, after having fallen in a complex net of uncertain signification, protagonist Oedipa Maas finally realizes that she should escape categorical binary thinking This article contends that Oedipa's portrait is also informed by Jungian symbolism—an underestimated source of Pynchon's fiction—and by the author's literary quest for V, two factors that merge in the novel with other interpretations to develop a dense search for meaning that eventually announces the coming of social change

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors show that Barthelme's fiction projects an image of patriarchy as a sadistic gentlemen's club rather than as a flawed but redeemable system, and that gender politics is strongly anti-masculinist and anti-Oedipal.
Abstract: While Barthelme's ironic treatment of patriarchy is acknowledged in some critical accounts, the specifics of Barthelme's gender politics remain an object of critical dispute. Through an exploration of an aspect of Barthelme's fiction that has been afforded insufficient critical attention so far—Barthelme's narrative framing of his male characters' threats or actual infliction of physical violence against partners and children—this essay shows that Barthelme's fiction projects an image of patriarchy as a sadistic gentlemen's club rather than as a flawed but redeemable system, and that Barthelme's gender politics is strongly anti-masculinist and anti-Oedipal.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that Waters's Fingersmith revisits feminist debates arising from the "sex wars" of the 1980s and 1990s in which feminism was divided over its approach to female sexual representation.
Abstract: This article argues that Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002) revisits feminist debates arising from the “sex wars” of the 1980s and 1990s in which feminism was divided over its approach to female sexual representation. I argue that the novel rehearses varied debates on gender and pornography, and I suggest that Waters uses such perspectives to provide her own deconstruction of heteropatriarchal representations of lesbianism in pornography.

Journal ArticleDOI
Graley Herren1
TL;DR: In this paper, Shay creates an origin myth (what I call "The Martiniad") involving Cotter and Manx Martin to account for the missing first link of the Thomson homerun ball's provenance.
Abstract: Nick Shay functions as embedded author and implied narrator within DeLillo's Underworld. Nick creates an origin myth (what I call “The Martiniad”) involving Cotter and Manx Martin to account for the missing first link of the Thomson homerun ball's provenance on October 3, 1951. This invention provides an imaginative forum to reenact, revise, and work through formative traumas and fantasies from Nick's past, principally unresolved tensions with his deadbeat dad.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that Andrea Levy's 2004 novel, Small Island, and its interrogation of the politics of British multiculturalism imagines a model of multicultural encounter that prioritizes the emplaced and embodied experience.
Abstract: This article argues that Andrea Levy's 2004 novel, Small Island, and its interrogation of the politics of British multiculturalism imagines a model of multicultural encounter that prioritizes the emplaced and embodied experience. Playing off of David Cameron's call for a “muscular liberalism,” I suggest that Levy imagines a “muscular multiculturalism” whereby, through difficult, corporeal interactions, the inhabitants of a shared space learn to live together.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go as a metaphor for novel reading and argues that the reader's abiding and troubling acceptance of their circumstances demonstrates their own nearly automatic practice of assenting to the created world of a novel.
Abstract: This essay examines Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go as a metaphor for novel reading. It addresses in particular the main characters' abiding and troubling acceptance of their circumstances. It uses the theories of Jose Ortega y Gasset and Walter Benjamin to build the argument that, by thematizing acceptance, Never Let Me Go demonstrates the reader's own nearly automatic practice of assenting to the created world of a novel.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on gender performativity in Abdulrazak Gurnah's debut novel Memory of Departure (1987), which is underpinned by Muslim codes of conduct, which demands that the production of meaning be unraveled from this starting point.
Abstract: This article focuses on gender performativity in Abdulrazak Gurnah's debut novel Memory of Departure (1987). Like all of Gurnah's oeuvre, this novel is underpinned by Muslim codes of conduct, which demands that the production of meaning be unraveled from this starting point. The ambiguity of social constructions of gender that sexualize relations of domination are highlighted in this novel, which renders Muslim men more visible as gendered subjects.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that O'Neill is not unaware of the legacies of modernism and postmodernism, but that like many of his most distinguished contemporaries, he simply refuses, in Netherland and elsewhere, to write in a style that is outwardly or flamboyantly experimental.
Abstract: Joseph O'Neill's Netherland has often been read as an old-fashioned Realist novel happily oblivious to the technical innovations brought to bear on the novel in the twentieth century by Joyce, Proust, and Woolf and their postmodern followers. This essay argues that O'Neill is not unaware of the legacies of modernism and postmodernism, but that like many of his most distinguished contemporaries, he simply refuses, in Netherland and elsewhere, to write in a style that is outwardly or flamboyantly experimental. Because for all the apparent smoothness of the narrative surface of Netherland, O'Neill self-consciously engages throughout not only with the theoretical foundations of Realism itself but also with many of the key concerns of modernist and postmodernist literature.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article argued that Bolano's novel deploys a modified form of realism that both evidences the reality effect defined by Roland Barthes and contributes to the democratization of the reading process theorized by Jacques Ranciere.
Abstract: This article argues that Bolano's novel deploys a modified form of realism that both evidences the “reality effect” defined by Roland Barthes and contributes to the democratization of the reading process theorized by Jacques Ranciere. The novel's language and address of the reader thus mimic the politics of the Latin American avant-garde tradition but situate that politics in the realm of realistic detail, rather than within an avant-garde literary sensibility.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper explored the singular and productive relationship between Alan Nourse's novel The Bladerunner (1974) and William S Burroughs's novella Blade Runner (a movie) (1979).
Abstract: This article explores the singular and productive relationship between Alan Nourse's novel The Bladerunner (1974) and William S Burroughs's novella Blade Runner (a movie) (1979) Burroughs, known for his experimental Cut Up method, found in Nourse's text the opportunity for a new project of revision and expansion The result is an exploration of narratological limitations, a challenge to traditional understandings of genre and medium, and a theory of “the version”

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors consider the entanglements of art and terrorist violence in Paul Theroux's The Family Arsenal and Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, each of which responds to anxieties about the political power of the novelist in contradistinction with the terrorist-anxieties that Joseph Conrad raises but never fully settles in The Secret Agent.
Abstract: This article considers the entanglements of art and terrorist violence in Paul Theroux's The Family Arsenal and Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, each of which responds to anxieties about the political power of the novelist in contradistinction with the terrorist-anxieties that Joseph Conrad raises but never fully settles in The Secret Agent.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article argued that the reader can enter into a "metafictional pact" with the author, through which the reader agrees to view the text as a writerly act, rather than as an object or event; through this pact, a new moral significance is granted to the text and to the relationship formed between author and reader.
Abstract: This article argues that Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity invites the reader, via various textual markers, to enter into a “metafictional pact” with the author, through which the reader agrees to view the text as a writerly act, rather than as an object or event; through this pact, a new moral significance is granted to the text and to the relationship formed between author and reader.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the obscured history of Zen as an ideology of Japanese imperialism in Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists and makes a case for the need for readers to account for this obscured history precisely because it exerts overdetermining force on the protagonist's understanding of her experiences of the historical events that shaped her.
Abstract: This essay examines the obscured history of Zen as an ideology of Japanese imperialism in Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists It contends that the novel silently draws on this history as a narrative device to subvert readings that overlook both its mobilization of Zen and the fact that Zen, as it is popularly understood today by a majority of scholars and theologians, has been distorted by Western orientalists and Japanese apologists since the turn of the twentieth century The essay makes a case for the need for readers to account for this obscured history precisely because it exerts overdetermining force on the protagonist's understanding of her experiences of the historical events that shaped her

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyse the use of cold and warm reading techniques associated with mind reading in both narrative fiction and the performances of stage mediums in A L Kennedy's most recent novel, The Blue Book (2011).
Abstract: This article looks at the use A L Kennedy's most recent novel, The Blue Book (2011), makes of practices associated with mind reading in both narrative fiction and the performances of stage mediums Kennedy's novel takes mediums' techniques of cold and warm reading and embeds them into its own narrative technique These techniques are analyzed here in terms of current narratological debates about second-person narration and mind reading in unnatural narrative, but also in the context of recent European legislation that has reclassified the legal status of mediumship performances

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the notion of the death drive as related to global capitalism in Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis and David Cronenberg's film adaptation, and discuss a mimetic reading that makes its political message more definite and transforms the sublimation of Eric's death drive.
Abstract: This article discusses the notion of the death drive as related to global capitalism in Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis and David Cronenberg's film adaptation. Cronenberg's elimination of the fantastic elements in the novel and the focus on the dialectical relationship between Eric and Benno, his assassin, enforce a mimetic reading that makes its political message more definite and transforms the sublimation of Eric's death drive as represented in DeLillo's text.