Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2022"
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the contexts and influences surrounding both New Narrative and French feminism post-1960 before posting experimental writer Kathy Acker's unique position between these movements in her 1978 novel, Kathy Goes to Haiti, which predicts and enacts autotheory by enmeshing her body into the theoretical conception of her autobiographical novel.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Though autotheory formally entered feminist critical discourse with the publication of Nelson‘s 2015 text The Argonauts as a practice that takes on first-person, subjective, autobiographical perspectives to decenter and challenge hegemonic critical theories, several critical movements led to the rise of autotheory. In this paper, I analyze the contexts and influences surrounding both New Narrative and French feminism post-1960 before posting experimental writer Kathy Acker’s unique position between these movements in her 1978 novel, Kathy Goes to Haiti. If autotheory sutures together the author and theory, then Kathy Acker predicts and enacts autotheory by enmeshing her body into the theoretical conception of her autobiographical novel. Kathy Goes to Haiti lays important groundwork preceding autotheory and forges a new linguistic form at the nexus of language, disability, and sexuality studies. I call this nexus in Acker “feminine cognitive embodiment.” Acker’s feminine cognitive embodiment fuses the female body and mental states between traditional boundaries of language. I intend to historicize Kathy Goes to Haiti as an autotheoretical text that preceded works like Chris Kraus’ 1997 I Love Dick and Maggie‘s The Argonauts, and in doing so I analyze the ways Acker’s ex-centric language, madness, and pornography anticipate the autotheoretical turn.
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TL;DR: In this article , the author examines J.G. Ballard's story "The Terminal Beach" as a profound study of a mind traumatized by the grim perspective of future calamities, focusing on the protagonist's inner space.
Abstract: ABSTRACT This article J.G. Ballard’s Depiction of Global Psychodynamics: “The Terminal Beach” and Pre-Traumatic Stress examines J.G. Ballard’s story “The Terminal Beach,” published for the first time in March 1964 in New Worlds, as a profound study of a mind traumatized by the grim perspective of future calamities. By focusing on the protagonist’s inner space, I analyze Ballard’s depictions of “collective pre-traumatic stress disorder,” which, in the time since the story was written, has become social and cultural reality. Feelings of helplessness and the certainty of disaster make Ballard’s protagonist a victim of pre-traumatic stress, whose symptoms are similar to the extreme climate change anxiety some people suffer today‒he is traumatized by the fact that the Earth is not going to be able to sustain human life much longer. Thus, I am interested not in Ballard’s accuracy in predicting future events but in his ability to foreshadow the global psychodynamics of a period during which many people are subconsciously anxious about the impending changes on earth.
TL;DR: This article explored Ishiguro's unpublished film-related works to reflect on the cinematic influence found in his writing and argue that his scriptwriting and thoughts about film helped Ishigurus create a type of composite universe in which illusions from individual memory and national history reflect each other and where narratives of Japan and Britain are connected with those of the world.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Using materials from the Kazuo Ishiguro archives located in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, this article explores Ishiguro’s unpublished film-related works – his Japanese ghost documentary film project, scriptwriting experiments for The Remains of the Day, and reviews for films – in close relation to his major novels to reflect on the cinematic influence found in his writing. I argue that his scriptwriting and thoughts about film helped Ishiguro create a type of composite universe in which illusions from individual memory and national history reflect each other and where narratives of Japan and Britain are connected with those of the world.
TL;DR: Using Elleke Boehmer's postcolonial poetics, this paper explored juxtaposition and asynchronicity in Elaine Castillo's America Is Not the Heart and explained the novel's contribution to enriching Filipinos' counter-memory and in enabling resistance.
Abstract: Literary studies, with the influence of critical theory inspired by Marxism and the Frankfurt School, have sidestepped concerns on aesthetics and poetics. Using Elleke Boehmer’s postcolonial poetics, this study aims to explore juxtaposition and asynchronicity in Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart. It discusses how juxtaposition and asynchronicity as postcolonial poetics interrogate the postcolonial politics in the novel and explains the novel’s contribution to enriching Filipinos’ counter-memory and in enabling resistance. The poetics of second-person narrator point of view, flashbacks, free indirect discourse, and elliptical narrative are ways through which the text has explored migrants’ efforts of forging and linking social relations in the interstitial spaces between homeland and host land. At the same time, the novel goes beyond essentialist contours of migrant experience such as heteronormative nationalism and nostalgia for lost origins. The paper demonstrates not only a critical reckoning with power structures but also renewed attempts and continued struggle, which lead to radical hope.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors of That Deadman Dance and Carpentaria, Kim Scott and Alexis Wright reveal these Indigenous histories and cultures through their explorations of country, an Aboriginal English word encompassing the belief that all things, human and non-human, are equally and spiritually connected across time in an ecological web of stories.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Following the 1992 Mabo Decision which overturned the historical myth of terra nullius and its declaration that Australia was “nobody’s land,” Indigenous Australian literature has been concerned with recovering both the sidelined historical of colonial dispossession and traditional ecological knowledge. Inspired by their own storytelling traditions, First Nations writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright reveal these Indigenous histories and cultures through their explorations of “Country”: an Aboriginal English word encompassing the belief that all things, human and non-human, are equally and spiritually connected across time in an ecological web of stories. By examining the interrelationship of postcolonialism and ecocriticism, I argue that Scott and Wright, through their respective novels That Deadman Dance and Carpentaria, promote diverse, Indigenous understandings of the environment, challenging the dominance of Anglo-American writing in ecocriticism. Alongside its capacity to interrogate the way we read and analyze nature and history, I also argue that Indigenous writing has the capacity to challenge the novel form itself by moving away from Western conceptions of linear temporality, casual development, and action or character driven plot, and instead incorporating traditional storytelling modes (oral stories, music, and dance) that are all framed by the rhythmed events of ecological time and place.
TL;DR: McEwan's Nutshell as mentioned in this paper is a rewriting of Hamlet with the amusing transposition of the eternally hesitating hero into the inside of the womb, that is, into the position of the ultimate powerlessness.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Ian McEwan’s Nutshell is obviously a rewriting of Hamlet – with the amusing transposition of the eternally hesitating hero into the inside of the womb, that is, into the position of the ultimate powerlessness. Made privy to the pillow talk of his mother and uncle plotting the murder of his father, the unborn child meditates on the human condition – before he can experience any of the fascinating and frightening “reality” directly. This essay will examine the mechanics of the story and the tension built between the impossible and the predictable, the comic and the tragic, the unnatural and the mimetic. Its main focus will be on the strange potency of the narrator (despite his obvious powerlessness), which suggests that the persona of the fetus-Hamlet may be a mask, a shell of clever disguise adopted by another narrative agent. The essay will attempt to discover this secret narrator hiding behind an impressive array of literary references and intertextual games.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors interpret four short stories of Vandana Singh from the anthology The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (2008) by using écriture feminine as a tool of analysis.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Anchoring on the core notions spiraled out of a close reading of Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), this article intends to interpret four short stories of Vandana Singh from the anthology The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (2008) by using écriture feminine as a tool of analysis. The selected stories belonging to the genre of speculative fiction respectively oscillate around four women characters and leave us with an emerging pattern of searching for a lost “self.” The ingenious story telling with elements of the imaginary addresses subtle yet complicated gender issues. Apropos to this, compartmentalized into three primary sections this work develops an argument toward recognizing an unconventional and original literary tradition in the making that might partially realize the intricate nuances of woman’s writing within a South-Asian (Indian) context.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors focus on those moments that establish a dialogue between fiction and history/herstory, present and past, and voice and silence in a metafictional novel that constitute herstoriography.
Abstract: Herstoriography is a feminist tool that explores the voicing of women who were silenced by literary historiographic discourses. As a herstoriographic metafiction, Stevie Davies’ Impassioned Clay (1999) has diverse narratives about the same historical events. The herstoriographic metafictional moments in the novel doubt and question the concept of the indisputable universal truth endorsed by patriarchy. The paper draws mainly on the “Arachne” paradigm in the light of feminist and postmodern theories of Nancy Miller, Judith Butler, Patricia Waugh, Linda Hutcheon, Elaine Showalter, Teresa De Lauretis and others to offer a herstoriographic reading in opposition to patriarchal historiography that fixes women as menial or monstrous beings, or as objects of sexual gaze. Three moments of subversion or blurring can be elicited in this metafictional novel that constitute herstoriography: political and religious, gender, and literary and historical. The paper seeks to focus on those moments that establish a dialogue between fiction and history/ herstory, present and past, and voice and silence. Thus, the female voicing that has been silenced by the androcentric historiographic discourse is rescued and reframed in herstoriography.
TL;DR: The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati's most famous work, is not simply a narrative account of an officer serving in a remote fortress overlooking a vast northern desert; it oscillates between the chronicle and fantastic realism throughout as discussed by the authors .
Abstract: The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati’s most famous work, is not simply a narrative account of an officer serving in a remote fortress overlooking a vast northern desert; it oscillates between the chronicle and fantastic realism throughout. Anguish and malaise are expressed in the narrative in a manner similar to existentialist philosophy and Kafka’s fiction. Based upon the comparison to his Masters, I will attempt at reinterpreting Buzzati’s novel as a journey to the afterlife, as a transcendental roaming to a spiritual limbo where all objects, people, and landscapes are but individual projections.
TL;DR: Mc McGuire's graphic novel Here as mentioned in this paper provides a reader with a readerly experience of the challenges of the contemporary, by reading it with an ear for sound and installing a sense of the liveliness and density of contemporary.
Abstract: This essay suggests that the sounds in Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here provide a readerly experience of the challenges of the contemporary. The difficulties of talking about the present – especially amidst literary inquiry’s pressure to periodize – often emerge from the contemporary’s immersive qualities and its constant propensity to change. While images can seem to extract or freeze historical moments, sounds keep these moments moving; they establish resonances and dissonances that undermine the stability of a singular present. Comics, unlike moving picture arts like films or videogames, require readers to extrapolate temporal rhythm, pace, and duration, and this constructive act is crucial to a contemporary that is immersive and always in formation. Here’s visual collage of three billion years of history invokes the representational allure of images; by reading it with an ear for sound, I argue that the sonic disrupts the temporality of its images and installs a sense of the liveliness and density of the contemporary. In effect, close listening to silent texts provides a way of grappling with the elusiveness of “now,” and a sonic vocabulary can help articulate how recent literary texts conceive of a multi-layered, ever-changing present that defies the privilege of critical distance.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors focus on the reprinted photograph as a paratextual element in order to examine the ways in which photography is deployed as an embedded commentary on ways of seeing and making in the novel.
Abstract: ABSTRACT There are, at least, two modes of experience when we encounter the pictorial and verbal in the Penguin UK paperback edition of Ali Smith’s How to be both (2014). One aspect of Smith’s work that deserves closer attention is the relationship between the visual and verbal, particularly in relation to the use of a reprinted artwork as cover art and its reappearance as an ekphrastic object in the narrative. This essay focuses on the reprinted photograph as a paratextual element in order to examine the ways in which photography is deployed as an embedded commentary on ways of seeing and making in the novel. The ekphrastic descriptions of artworks problematize the boundaries between fictive worlds and external reality. Therefore, might ekphrasis be deployed as a self-conscious maneuver aimed at revealing the artifice of these fictive worlds in the novel? Smith’s exploration of duality extends to the crossing of boundaries between art forms, paratext and text, and image and word. Although this essay does not discuss duality in the context of gender and sexuality, it illustrates the ways in which How to be both encourages ethical action, as key to seeing and being, without losing sight of art and aesthetics.
TL;DR: The PowerBook as discussed by the authors is about the cyber and story-making experience of Ali/Alix, the main character and the narrator of many interwoven narratives who experiments with time and retells well-known historical literary texts in the novel.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook is about the cyber and story-making experience of Ali/Alix, the main character and the narrator of many interwoven narratives who experiments with time and retells well-known historical literary texts in the novel. Toward the end of the novel, while he knots himself into time, Ali calls to mind St. Augustine and thinks that St. Augustine might be right when he said “the universe was not created in time but with time.” St. Augustine, one of the most important Fathers of Christianity whose writings had a great impact on shaping the Western prejudices about sex and the body, is also important for his ideas of time. In spite of the short reference to St. Augustine in The PowerBook, Ali/Alix’s story-telling experience can be read not only as a deconstruction and encarnalization of St Augustine’s metaphysical philosophy, but also as reconstructing his personal life and philosophy in the queer spatio-temporal cyber world of the novel.
TL;DR: In this article , an alternative reading of the political agency and passivity of the novel's protagonist Stevens with the help of affect theory was proposed, which can also enable the readers to perceive Ishiguro's work as a hopeful narrative affirming the power of affect in the matters of political emancipation and agency.
Abstract: ABSTRACT In one of the latest commentaries on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day (1989), it is explained that the novel’s protagonist Stevens is a true monster who “has embraced antisemitism and fascism throughout his career” and it is also underlined that although “there is no question about Stevens’s emotional repression … this trait has little to do with his racism and refusal to intervene morally in Darlington’s household.” The present paper aims to offer an alternative reading of the political agency and passivity of the novel’s protagonist Stevens with the help of affect theory. This paper will read The Remains of the Day and its protagonist primarily by looking at their relationship with sense reception, motion, and emotion, and show that the apathy and affective restraint experienced by Stevens as an English butler underlies his political passivity. Such a reading will also enable the readers to perceive Ishiguro’s work as a hopeful narrative affirming the power of affect in the matters of political emancipation and agency.
TL;DR: The Crying of Lot 49 is often read through the lens of psychoanalysis and taken as a model of post-modern fiction with its indeterminable, norm-subverting, hermeneutic narrative as mentioned in this paper .
Abstract: ABSTRACT Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is often read through the lens of psychoanalysis and taken as a model of postmodern fiction with its indeterminable, norm-subverting, hermeneutic narrative. Yet, as Pierce Inverarity, the ultimate capitalist, stands as the absent center of the mystery, this paper re-approaches Lot 49 and proposes that buried beneath its detective/mystery threads is a potent critique of the political-economic milieu of the sixties California. The various tropes, from the captive Rapunzel, Remedios Varo’s triptych, the duplicitous Trystero, to the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, knit out a world that is consolidated by economic activities and above all commodity fetishism. The article contends that Lot 49 is a reply to the sociopolitical discourses and the civil movements of the sixties. Drawing on economic and communication activities, Lot 49 breaks down the conventional binary distinction and demonstrates a complex interplay of capital, credit, and rhetoric that fabricates a postmodern world of which “all that is solid melts into air.”
TL;DR: In this article , a science fiction reading of Remainder reveals the ways in which trauma narrative can move beyond psychological realism and toward an inter-generic understanding of trauma not as a formally representable event, but rather as an ongoing series of cognitively estranging moments that amount to science fiction of the interior.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Can alternative methods of reading and writing trauma generate new understandings of trauma itself? This paper seeks to answer this question by reading Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) not as a radical break from tradition but rather as a text that makes use of a preexisting science fiction poetics to reconceptualize the trauma novel. If, as Roger Luckhurst has argued, science fiction explores a side of trauma that cultural and literary studies have not yet uncovered, Remainder suggests that the inverse of this claim is also valid – if science fiction is uniquely positioned to investigate or represent trauma in nontraditional ways, then so too are novels beyond the realm of science fiction able to co-opt the poetics of the genre to defamiliarize trauma itself. Ultimately, a science-fictional reading of Remainder reveals the ways in which trauma narrative can move beyond psychological realism and toward an inter-generic understanding of trauma not as a formally representable event, but rather as an ongoing series of cognitively estranging moments that amount to a science fiction of the interior.
TL;DR: The Sellout comic novel as mentioned in this paper explores a series of deeply troubling questions implied in the text, around how black identity is constructed in Obama's America, or in the country's so-called postracial moment.
Abstract: ABSTRACT This paper analyses Paul Beatty’s Booker Prize winning comic novel, The Sellout (2015), as it relates to theories of black posthumanism, as outlined in the work of Alexander Weheliye and Hortense Spillers. In the novel, the protagonist – identified by his second name, “Me” – goes on trial at the Supreme Court for violating the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments by respectively owning slaves and reintroducing segregation. My article explores a series of deeply troubling questions implied in the text, around how black identity is constructed in Obama’s America, or in the country’s so-called “postracial moment.” What if, in Beatty’s anarchic fictive universe, black characters opted to become slaves, or masters, or segregated subjects? What happens to our conception of post-civil rights progress and postracial utopias when such choices are made, however satirically? I wish to consider Beatty’s provocations around definitions of the human, as they intersect with constructions of race (and postrace) – particularly in the light of recent scholarship in black posthumanism. The article will draw on Weheliye’s twin reframings of Giorgio Agamben’s delineation of bare life and Hortense Spillers’s distinction between body and flesh. The aim here is twofold – both to consider the novel’s uses and abuses of humor (frequently characterized in criticism as Beatty’s “black satire”) and to position the novel within the wider frame of black posthumanism.
TL;DR: The Forensic Records Society as mentioned in this paper is an artfully-constructed post-modern performative text which manipulates time, evades period setting, and questions historical certainty; a concrete-poetry inspired novella that deploys mimetic cover art, musical allusions, numerology, nominal characterization, melodic repetition and affirmative character arcs to replicate, and pay homage to, the subject of the book.
Abstract: What is the correct way to appreciate art and specifically the art of the pop song? This is the question at the heart of Magnus Mills’s 2017 novella The Forensic Records Society which reads like an absurd comic parable of how men (specifically), repeatedly fail to appreciate art and reduce even the most inoffensive acts of creativity to dysfunctional bureaucracies. This paper briefly discusses how the book tackles aesthetics, community, gender and commodity fetishism and outlines its uncanny parallels with Adorno’s Sociology of Music (1976). Most significantly, the argument put forward here is that this deceptively brief and simple novella is truly an artfully-constructed postmodern performative text – a work of histiographic metafiction which manipulates time, evades period setting, and questions historical certainty; a concrete-poetry inspired novella that deploys mimetic cover art, musical allusions, numerology, nominal characterization, melodic repetition and affirmative character arcs to replicate, and pay homage to, the subject of the book – the iconic 7-inch three-minute pop single. The conclusion asserts that The Forensic Records Society is an intermedial text that ironically benefits from the perpetual online distractions of the internet and pop music, thus providing a novel 21st century reading experience.