Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2017"
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TL;DR: Inherent Vice as mentioned in this paper, a drug-addled and waning counterculture finds its hopes and disillusionments bound up in the myth of a sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean.
Abstract: The tail end of the 1960s saw the closing of two major sites of utopian potential and imagining: the waning of enthusiasm about deep-sea exploration and the disillusionment of radical social movements with the emerging conservatism of the 1970s. These two sites come together in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, where a drug-addled and waning counterculture finds its hopes and disillusionments bound up in the myth of a sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean. Reading this continent, Lemuria, as a heterotopia, and applying an archetypal, psychological, and spatial reading to a novel normally read as an exemplar of postmodern aesthetics and paranoid epistemologies allows for a rethinking of postmodern allegory as not necessarily disruptive of a historical continuum, but as confused, melancholy, and fundamentally lost.
19 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, a media-historical analysis is used to argue for the search engine as the prime motor spurring the reorganization of Pynchon's technique and his take on popular culture in the novel.
Abstract: Given the state of contemporary American culture, it should come as no surprise that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge (2013) revolves around technological change: all of the published responses to the novel refer to this phenomenon in some way. What these interpretations fail to appreciate, however, is that this novel is not just about media technology or even the Internet more specifically; it is about the effect of the search engine. To that end, this article uses a media-historical analysis to argue for the search engine as the prime motor spurring the reorganization of Pynchon’s technique and his take on popular culture in the novel.
16 citations
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TL;DR: Autofiction occupies a liminal space between fiction and nonfiction that requires continuous adjustments to the reading process as the novel vacillates between biographical fact and outright fiction.
Abstract: Autofiction occupies a liminal space between fiction and nonfiction that requires continuous adjustments to the reading process as the novel vacillates between biographical fact and outright fiction. “Post-truth” may have been Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 Word of the Year, but the popularity of autofiction demonstrates that, while readers like to toy with the idea of truth being in the eye of the beholder, they ultimately maintain a line of demarcation between fact and fiction. Despite poststructuralist assertions to the contrary, there remains a difference in effect between a factual story and a fictional one. On the other hand, readers’ ability to navigate autofiction’s narrative intricacies demonstrates the wider cultural acceptance of those same poststructuralist ideas. Autofictions consciously play with readerly expectations about memoir and fiction, thwarting both, thereby simultaneously calling into question, and making a case for, the importance of distinguishing between fact and fiction.
11 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, the author offers a sustained exploration of dwelling in Ali Smith's There but for the. Focusing on the way the character Miles locks himself into a family's bedroom, the author argues that this move trans...
Abstract: This article offers a sustained exploration of dwelling in Ali Smith’s There but for the. Focusing on the way the character Miles locks himself into a family’s bedroom, I argue that this move trans...
10 citations
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TL;DR: This paper identified a scientific turn in two recent novels by Ian McEwan, arguing that in Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010), literary realism becomes linked with a particular conception of science.
Abstract: This essay identifies a “scientific turn” in two recent novels by Ian McEwan, arguing that in Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010), literary realism becomes linked with a particular conception of science. Science is presented in these two novels as the discourse of objectivity, enjoying largely unproblematic access to the workings of the material universe, and the reality that science describes is seen to underlie the models of realism utilized in each text. Realism, and the scientifically backed reality that supports it, is placed in opposition to a particular type of mindset, embodied by religious extremists, the broadly postmodern humanities, and climate change deniers, all of whom are seen to represent, and be in thrall to, an excessive focus on the subjective world.
9 citations
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TL;DR: This article argued that Native Son does not idealize the historical black-Jewish convergence, nor does it seem to celebrate Jewishness as an inspiration for dealing with black oppression, and rereading Wright's classic from the perspective of black−Jewish relations evinces the ambivalent race, class, and gendered attitudes that each group held toward the other at the time, ranging from black anti-Semitism to cross-cultural identification.
Abstract: While scholarship has recurrently focused on Richard Wright’s Native Son as the paradigm of his black nationalist (read race), Communist (read class), or (anti-)feminist (read gender) ideologies, this essay contends that these three allegedly disparate discourses are linked throughout Wright’s novel by the “spectral” figure of the Jew, who hauntingly traverses and, in so doing, subtly qualifies each of them. If Native Son does not idealize the historical black–Jewish convergence, nor does it seem to celebrate Jewishness as an inspiration for dealing with black oppression, rereading Wright’s classic from the perspective of black–Jewish relations evinces the ambivalent race, class, and gendered attitudes that each group held toward the other at the time, ranging from black anti-Semitism to cross-cultural identification. The study concludes that the (non-)presence of the Jewish “Other” textually reproduces the very exclusions that Native Son is intent on criticizing, thus transforming the text into a...
8 citations
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TL;DR: The authors analyzes Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 from the perspective of narrative embedding, drawing on narrative theories of Todorov, Genette, Rimmon-Kenan, Nelles, and others.
Abstract: This article analyzes Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 from the perspective of narrative embedding. Drawing on narrative theories of Todorov, Genette, Rimmon-Kenan, Nelles, and others, it examines how the au...
8 citations
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TL;DR: Pynchon's politics have frequently been minimized in the criticism of his work, in large part because his novels' profusion of voices makes a stable position difficult to pin down.
Abstract: Thomas Pynchon’s politics have frequently been minimized in the criticism of his work, in large part because his novels’ profusion of voices makes a stable position difficult to pin down. I argue that Against the Day’s (2007) various reflections on what it means to be “innocent”—politically, artistically, ethically—are central to an understanding of how Pynchon historicizes September 11 and terrorist violence. Shifting from the historical, allegorical mode of Against the Day to a relatively realistic representation of 9/11 and its aftermath in Bleeding Edge (2013), Pynchon searches for points of resistance in the flattened network of twenty-first-century global capital. In his rejection of both the techno-utopian faith in the Internet as an instrument of liberation and the possibilities of withdrawal in an age of pervasive surveillance, Pynchon instead turns to the next generation, finding perhaps the only hope for the future of progressive politics in the children themselves.
8 citations
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TL;DR: In the context of the "anti-heritage animus" of late twentieth-century Britain, Barnes as mentioned in this paper criticizes the heritage-enterprise couplet based on the commodification of the UK’s national past into fake artifacts and cliched nostalgic images.
Abstract: Julian Barnes’s 1998 novel England, England is a tongue-in-cheek but pointed critique of the Thatcherite entrepreneurial heritage industry. Written in the context of the “anti-heritage animus” of late twentieth-century Britain, the novel criticizes the heritage-enterprise couplet based on the commodification of the UK’s national past into fake artifacts and cliched nostalgic images. Sir Jack Pitman is a satirical caricature of a Thatcherite entrepreneur. The very success of his heritage theme park seems intended as an endorsement of a close partnership between heritage and enterprise. The result of their combination, however, turns out to be potentially harmful and disturbing.
7 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors of The Book of Illusions present a meditation on assuming responsibility for one's own actions and their sometimes tragic consequences, rejecting any claim to an unsatisfying relativism of “anything goes.”
Abstract: Paul Auster’s novels evoke with staunch sincerity what the American philosopher Stanley Cavell calls “the responsibility you bear” for your words and actions alike. I argue that Cavell’s ongoing inquiry into topics such as community and skepticism, informed by nineteenth-century Transcendentalist philosophy, can be extended to Auster’s fiction to help illuminate the ethical underpinnings of his metaphysical work. In my analysis of the author’s 2002 novel, The Book of Illusions, I show how Auster subverts the postmodern paradigm of deconstructing the humanist subject as a locus of ethical conflicts and choices. A meditation on assuming responsibility for one’s own actions and their sometimes tragic consequences, the novel rejects any claim to an unsatisfying relativism of “anything goes.” In a story obsessively occupied with guilt and penance, characters are held accountable for their mistakes and neglects. Shaped by chance events, unanticipated encounters, and deadly accidents, The Book of Illusio...
6 citations
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TL;DR: Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and Four Souls as discussed by the authors explore intersections between gender, ethnicity, and spirituality through cross-gender performances involving the assumption of gendered religious roles.
Abstract: Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and Four Souls, two of the later installments in her saga about a fictional North Dakota reservation, explore intersections between gender, ethnicity, and spirituality through cross-gender performances involving the assumption of gendered religious roles. In Last Report, the reservation priest Father Damien is also the former nun Agnes DeWitt, and in Four Souls, Nanapush wears his wife’s medicine dress during a tribal council meeting. These performances present gender identity and spirituality as deeply intertwined, aligning Erdrich’s fiction with beliefs in the sacredness of gender fluidity in many Native North American religions. Drawing from aspects of Ojibwe culture and theories of gender performativity, this article suggests that these characters’ transformations of Ojibwe and Catholic social norms work to create inclusive, flexible ways of accessing the spiritual that resist gendered religious hierarchies and either/or const...
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TL;DR: This article examined the fictional positioning of Auster's protagonist in Travels in the Scriptorium (2006/2007) to identify the role of storytelling in authoring one's self and found that the art of storytelling for Mr Blank becomes a means of survival.
Abstract: Paul Auster blends stories with stories, lives with lives, and reality with fiction, and, finally, presents a full sense of the self trapped in a net of uncertainties. In this article, we examine the fictional positioning of Auster’s protagonist in Travels in the Scriptorium (2006/2007) to identify the role of storytelling in authoring one’s self. Based on the newly developed conceptual framework of “virtual fictional and factual positioning,” we elaborate on the possible dialogical coalition of the author’s positions as “I-as-artist/novelist” and “I-as-the-hero-of-my-story,” among other positions. The findings of this research indicated that the art of storytelling for Mr Blank becomes a means of survival. In his creative absorption in the fictional and factual positionings and experiencing the life of his hero, Mr Blank as a motivated artist/novelist could develop a dialogical self and reconstitute a more porous sense of his self and identity.
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TL;DR: The authors explored representations of gender and communication in the context of desire in Wallace's work, as one aspect of his abiding concern with the struggle to define self through language, and in order to understand his work's feminist achievements and blindnesses.
Abstract: “By Hirsute Author” explores representations of gender and communication in the context of desire in Wallace’s work, as one aspect of his abiding concern with the struggle to define self through language, and in order to understand his work’s feminist achievements and blindnesses. First, it examines his reading of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, finding in his feminist critique of Markson Wallace’s own masculinist orientation and sense of complicity with Markson’s objectification of Kate. It then considers the Lacanian model of language, desire, and self-definition as employed and critiqued by much of Wallace’s fiction, and the ways in which this simultaneous critique/complicity defines the “feminist parody of feminism” of his fiction. Finally, the essay considers the impact on Wallace studies of its relative dearth of attention to gender issues and of input by female scholars.
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TL;DR: The authors argue that the compositional processes behind the drafts of David Foster Wallace's final novel can be productively read alongside the increasing presence of metafiction in the work, and the dialogic nature of Wallace's fiction emerges as, in part, a response to the writing process itself.
Abstract: This essay argues for the relevance of the ideas and critical vocabulary of genetic criticism to the study of David Foster Wallace’s drafts. I read Wallace’s manuscripts of the unfinished posthumous novel The Pale King through concepts taken from genetic and textual theorists in order to illuminate the relationship between the dynamics of textual development and the work’s thematic interest in process and incompletion. I argue that the compositional processes behind the drafts of his final novel can be productively read alongside the increasing presence of metafiction in the work. The process of revision emerges as a textual influence in its own right, and the dialogic nature of Wallace’s fiction emerges as, in part, a response to the writing process itself.
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TL;DR: The authors argue that Atonement can be read as a critique of complex forms of social interaction (including storytelling), and advocate instead a reliance on embodied, affective, and a...
Abstract: In this article I will explore the ways in which Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001) engages with contemporary scientific and philosophical theories of intersubjectivity. Recent cognitive and philosophical approaches to intersubjectivity deem as reductive an understanding of social interactions solely in terms of “theory of mind,” i.e., as inferential and observational processes, and provide instead a multilayered account of intersubjectivity incorporating the embodied and affective coupling between self and others (primary intersubjectivity), the capacity to participate in cooperative projects (secondary intersubjectivity), and narrative competences/practices. Through a close reading of how McEwan stages and reflects on the complex interplay between understanding and misunderstanding lying at the heart of social interaction, I will argue that Atonement can be read as a critique of complex forms of social interaction (including storytelling), advocating instead a reliance on embodied, affective, a...
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TL;DR: The authors argue that Robinson's fiction is not driven by the narratological "noise" of action, event, and plot but by the internal machinations of consciousness, a reinvention of modernist themes that is also a return.
Abstract: This essay argues that Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels embody a quiet aesthetic of narrative that has emerged as a vibrant trend in the early years of the twenty-first century. Robinson’s fiction is not driven by the narratological “noise” of action, event, and plot but by the internal machinations of consciousness, a reinvention of modernist themes that is also a return. By reading for quiet in Robinson’s work, this essay therefore demonstrates how the Gilead trilogy challenges the dominance of “trauma” narratives in contemporary American fiction and privileges the representation of quiet people, places, and states above the wider noise associated with Western culture.
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TL;DR: Toibin is one of the most prominent literary voices in Ireland today, but he had to face enormous difficulties in having his first novel, The South (1990), published as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Colm Toibin is one of the most prominent literary voices in Ireland today, but he had to face enormous difficulties in having his first novel, The South (1990), published. In this article, I will look at the 1986 manuscript of the novel—on file in the National Library of Ireland—and argue that after all his revisions, Toibin softened the protagonist’s characterization as an “abject” mother and sanitized the language of her sexual feelings. Central to this essay will be the idea that when Toibin wrote The South in the 1980s, the expression of sexual desire was often censored and seen as obscene, immoral, and shocking. As I intend to show, the sexual frankness that Toibin’s main character displays in the earlier version of The South was unacceptable at the time, and this can be one of the reasons why so many publishers rejected the novel.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that investigating magical realism and trauma from the "vantage point" of women writers leads to a reconceptualization of what constitutes trauma and a redefinition of magical realist fiction.
Abstract: Magical realist literature and trauma are often understood in terms of nationalist and historical paradigms in ways that expose a phallocentric bias. With the convergence of magical realist scholarship and trauma studies—in response to the centrality of trauma to magical realist fiction—this phallocentric bias has in many cases been consolidated. This article attends to magical realist trauma narratives by women, undertaking case studies of the UK writer Ali Smith’s Hotel World and the Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman. Following the groundbreaking work of the feminist historian Joan Kelly, who demonstrated that adopting a woman’s “vantage point” revolutionizes our understanding of history, this article argues that investigating magical realism and trauma from the “vantage point” of women writers leads to a reconceptualization of what constitutes trauma and a redefinition of magical realist fiction.
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TL;DR: The authors examined the literary-philosophical functions of shallowness and self-realization (particularly vis-a-vis memory) in Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and Wilde's De Profundis.
Abstract: This article examines the literary-philosophical functions of shallowness and self-realization (particularly vis-a-vis memory) in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and Wilde’s De Profundis. Beginning with a comparative reading of Barnes’s novel and Kermode’s critical classic of the same name, it shows how Barnes’s narrator’s need for Kermodian “concord fictions” causes him to distort and misremember his own past, making it shallower and more banal than it truly was. Engaging earlier critical literature on the novel, the article also reads Wilde’s De Profundis (and Bosie’s responses to it) as “nonfiction” counterparts to the project of Barnes’s narrator. Wilde’s own narrative self-realization is cited as a positive counterexample, while Douglas’s Autobiography offers a sharp negative contrast. Reading Barnes’s narrator Tony as falling between these extremes, the article ends by reflecting on the reconstruction of the past (and strange figuration of “the narrative present”) that the novel’s clo...
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TL;DR: The Yellow Birds (2012) as discussed by the authors is an elegiac novel that formally maps the bereavement of a modern American soldier serving in the Iraq War and explores the ways in which the expressions of bereavement in the novel expose the very terrors and traumas that define post-9/11 America.
Abstract: Kevin Powers’s elegiac novel The Yellow Birds (2012) formally maps the bereavement of a modern American soldier serving in the Iraq War. Powers’s novel charts the psychological cartography of Private John Bartle, illustrating a journey that renders both the mental and physical effects of war trauma. Through Bartle’s nonlinear narratology, Powers critiques the experience of bereavement while also adumbrating the difficulty of representing that experience. This article investigates the ways in which the expressions of bereavement in the novel expose the very terrors and traumas that define post-9/11 America. Bartle’s narrative illustrates a soldier who becomes a victim not only to the violence of a seemingly endless war but also to the social and political deceit that defines the United States’ contemporary war politics. Therefore, The Yellow Birds conveys a dislocated narration that stresses both a soldier’s individual mourning and the national mourning that characterizes the United States’ role in...
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss how female characters are presented through visual means in Melania Mazzucco's works, focusing on selected scenes from Il bacio della Medusa (1996) and Limbo (2012), and consider how photography reflects and supports the delineation of female characters as mobile and vanishing.
Abstract: This article discusses how female characters are presented through visual means in Melania Mazzucco’s works. By focusing on selected scenes from Il bacio della Medusa (1996) and Limbo (2012), the article considers how photography—as object, act, and mode of seeing—reflects and supports the delineation of female characters as mobile and vanishing. This novelistic disposition toward the photographic becomes the means to engage the reader in a consideration of the way we perceive reality in the contemporary world.
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TL;DR: The authors investigates the dynamics among national cultures in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, with special emphasis on the characters' national memories, ones that are activated by the global crisis of World War II.
Abstract: This study investigates dynamics among national cultures in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, with special emphasis on the characters’ national memories, ones that are activated by the global crisis of World War II. The displaced characters, situated in the foreign lands of wartime Europe, generate such memories for cultural and ideological purposes. This essay explores the manner in which their memories, implicated with founding myths and elitist genealogy, expose serious contradictions in national histories. Gravity’s Rainbow critically undermines the characters’ desire to return to the pristine national origin and reformulates their genealogy when it powerfully generates the memory of imperialist aggression and modernizing, technological violence. This study also grapples with the questions of primordialism and genealogy in the national myths of the colonial other, especially the type of primordialism called “nativism.” Their myths interrupt imperial national imagination and criticize destruc...
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TL;DR: The main event of Roberto Bolano's 2666 is a feminicide in Santa Teresa, a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico as mentioned in this paper, and the authors show how Bolano approaches this event in a forensic way, not only in terms of content but also in its compositional and stylistic dimensions.
Abstract: The main event of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 is a feminicide in Santa Teresa, a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. In this essay I show how Bolano approaches this event in a forensic way, not only in terms of content but also in its compositional and stylistic dimensions. The result is a blurring of fact and fiction, and in this very blurring the novel moves beyond an ethical paradigm of trauma and testimony and toward a political project of the twenty-first century.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on Lively's Moon Tiger and Carter's Wise Children and analyze how the fictional narratives of two older female protagonists who have lived throughout the twentieth century contribute to the demythologizing of limiting stereotypes and beliefs attached to female aging and, as an extension, old age.
Abstract: British contemporary novelists Penelope Lively and Angela Carter are well known for their contribution to narrative experimentation through which they challenged established cultural discourses in relation to gender and class. This article will focus on Lively’s Moon Tiger and Carter’s Wise Children with the main aim of analyzing how the fictional narratives of two older female protagonists who have lived throughout the twentieth century contribute to the demythologizing of limiting stereotypes and beliefs attached to female aging and, as an extension, old age. In this sense, the playful and subjective nature of the narrative and the temporal disruptions employed by the authors highlight the constructed pathos of a life divided by stages that follow a number of cultural constructs that are limiting and, ultimately, distant from human nature.
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TL;DR: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1989) diagnoses Margaret Thatcher's brand of capitalism as self-ironizing, cynical, and postmodern as mentioned in this paper, and argues that moralistic discourses such as identity politics fail to effectively critique those cynical figures who, like Thatcher's elite entrepreneurs, trumpet multiculturalism and satirize themselves in advance.
Abstract: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989) diagnoses Margaret Thatcher’s brand of capitalism as self-ironizing, cynical, and postmodern. This article focuses on a largely ignored portion of Rushdie’s novel—its satire of Britain’s shift from Keynes’s “dependency culture” to Thatcher’s “enterprise culture.” Citing Slavoj Zizek’s (1989) claim that cynicism is a dominant form of ideology today, the article discusses why moralistic discourses such as identity politics fail to effectively critique those cynical figures who, like Thatcher’s elite entrepreneurs, trumpet multiculturalism and satirize themselves in advance. Rushdie confronts this critical impasse by doubling down on the power of satire, exchanging the politics of blame and victimization for a form of mutually implicating humor. Rushdie’s text often blames everyone—including itself—by insisting that we are all, to different degrees, risible, mutually implicated subjects, especially in our postcolonial, neoliberal age.
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TL;DR: The authors argue that Mitchell's Bone Clock The authors channels the painfully ecstatic throes of a narrative literally "beside itself" with theorizing, shaping, and embodying: both of new generic form and of a self-reflexive discourse on theory.
Abstract: Perhaps nowhere in David Mitchell’s oeuvre does the collision of genre hierarchies take so radical a turn as in his novel The Bone Clocks (2014), where pulp fictional imagery, themes, and style invade such moments of high seriousness as Iraq war journalism and global environmental collapse. This essay argues that Mitchell’s book channels the painfully ecstatic throes of a narrative literally “beside itself” with theorizing, shaping, and embodying: both of new generic form and of a self-reflexive discourse on theory. The cosmic war between “atemporal,” memory-redacting “Anchorites,” and “Horologists” that ruptures the storylines of Mitchell’s novel becomes a way of reexamining the place of meta- and master narratives in the age of their postmodern exile. It also allegorizes a war between theorists, between contesting ways of thinking history, memory, and the archive, yielding important implications for Mitchell’s trans-textual “Uber-Book” and for the novel as a temporal form.
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TL;DR: The authors identify a contemporary form, "estuary grotesque", which is placed in the larger context of the postmodern, the cosmopolitan, and the post-cosmopolitan. But this form is defined as a new turn, an Othering geographic that reconvenes the "condition of England" in terms of the marshlands, industrial detritus, and social deprivation of the Thames Estuary.
Abstract: This essay identifies a contemporary form, “estuary grotesque,” which is placed in the larger context of the postmodern, the cosmopolitan, and the post-cosmopolitan. Examining the writing of representative figures such as Nicola Barker, Ian Sinclair, Jonathan Meades, David Seabrook, and Cathi Unsworth, it constructs contemporary writing about the Thames estuary in terms of a relational metropolitanism. This “London” perspective is connected to literary forms of the past —pastoral, gothic, modernist, and so on—but represents a new turn, an Othering geographic that reconvenes the “condition of England” in terms of the marshlands, industrial detritus, and social deprivation of the Thames Estuary.
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TL;DR: In this article, Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel consistently teetering on the brink of violence, begins in a surprisingly benign manner but ultimately offers a sustained interrogation of the possibilities and limits of hospitality in a time of terror.
Abstract: For a novel consistently teetering on the brink of violence, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist begins in a surprisingly benign manner but ultimately offers a sustained interrogation of the possibilities and limits of hospitality in a time of terror. The novel is permeated by references to familiar forms of hospitality and their ultimate failure, yet this article focuses more specifically on the troubling implications The Reluctant Fundamentalist has for a philosophy of hospitality; that is, what appears as a failure of hospitality—the inevitable violence of the novel’s conclusion—is actually a provocative and sustained engagement with hospitality in its most pure and terrifying form. Using the figures offered to us by Immanuel Kant and Jacques Derrida, I argue that the novel theorizes a hospitality given even and especially when the face of the other is the irreducible face of death. It exemplifies what Gideon Baker conceptualizes as cosmopolitanism as hospitality—an ethics that opens to...
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TL;DR: In this article, Noon's Nymphomation provides readers with an instructive lens through which to examine such a coalescence between corporations and media technologies, and also imagines media technologies as a way to intervene in such situations through the practice of culture hacking.
Abstract: Technological media spectacles increasingly mediate our relation to the nonhuman world. This becomes worrisome from an ecological perspective when the powers steering the media are corporations whose primary concern is profit. Jeff Noon’s science fiction novel Nymphomation provides readers with an instructive lens through which to examine such a coalescence between corporations and media technologies. The novel presents a mediascape saturated by corporate messages as leading to environmental deterioration but also imagines media technologies as a way to intervene in such situations through the practice of culture hacking. Culture hacking engenders creative practice, resulting in the amelioration of the environmental problems caused by the profit-driven logic of postindustrial capitalism. This representation functions as a metaphor for ecological advocacy, thus staging one of the roles ecocriticism hopes to play in mitigating environmental problems: identify and critique the cultural values and ide...
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that there is a historical subtext of "Bikini" that is, Bikini as an emblem of twofold reification of colonial history, running through William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
Abstract: This article argues that running through William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), there is a historical subtext of “Bikini”—that is, Bikini as an emblem of twofold reification of colonial histor