Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2023"
TL;DR: In this paper , a historical account of the general decline of class consciousness in the UK throughout the 1980s, when the vision of personal affluence was increasingly connected to people's choice in the marketplace, rather than their class identity at the sites of mass production.
Abstract: This article starts with a historical account of the general decline of class consciousness in the UK throughout the 1980s, when the vision of personal affluence was increasingly connected to people’s choice in the marketplace, rather than their class identity at the sites of mass production. Personal desires were recognized by the Thatcher governments and taken as the motivation to pursue a unique style of life – a marker of Thatcherite individualism – through consumption. In this case, I will read one of James Lovegrove’s early novels, Days (1997), as an example of the consumer dreamland in which a different political identity can be formed. This consumption-based identity, however, is established upon the production of not material commodities but Debordian spectacles. These politicized consumers, as I will argue, never become liberated agents in the matrix of social production. They are, instead, spectators in the Debordian sense, who are granted not a political subjectivity but a collective unconscious.
TL;DR: A hydro-logical account of Red Tory (2019) and its critique of individualism's contemporary capitalist forms is given in this paper , where the authors examine the novel as a world comprising sexual, chemical, and political flows and the channels that organize them: pipes, reservoirs, Grindr, gay sex, metaphors, and, finally, MMT, the mysterious new drug referred to as the novel's radical, communist “infrastructure.
Abstract: In this essay, I offer a hydro-logical account of Red Tory (2019) and its critique of individualism’s contemporary capitalist forms. Drawing on the queer posthumanism of Astrida Neimanis, and the idea that we are all “bodies of water,” I examine the novel as a world comprising sexual, chemical, and political flows and the channels that organize them: pipes, reservoirs, Grindr, gay sex, metaphors, and, finally, MMT, the mysterious new drug referred to as the novel’s radical, communist “infrastructure.” MMT structures the psycho-sexual-political conversion of the novel’s protagonist, Tom, requiring him to conceive of embodiment not as a solitary, extractive activity but as sensuously inter-dependent, thus reconceiving the body as a dependence on infrastructure, in Judith Butler’s formulation. This sense of collectivity disavows the individualist metaphysics of neoliberal capitalism. However, this disavowal is not a smooth process. I argue that Tom’s political awakening involves a more specific concern about the heterogeneity of flows, and that his learning to embrace the failure of flows to dissolve into one another is central to the novel’s politics. Immiscibility makes far too visible our inter-dependence – and, in organizing the antagonistic interaction of flows, serves as Red Tory’s most insurgent infrastructure.
TL;DR: The authors examined Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape and The Island of Lost Girls using the agential realist and philosophical posthumanist methodologies of Karen Barad and Francesca Ferrando, and concluded that Meiji-Smaug expresses an intraactive, agential, posthuman self that neither prioritizes nor erases sex/gender, rather they no longer remain organizing principles of identity and society.
Abstract: This paper examines Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape and The Island of Lost Girls using the agential realist and philosophical posthumanist methodologies of Karen Barad and Francesca Ferrando. While Escape has received some critical attention within academic circles, scholarly examination of this duology as a whole is surprisingly missing. I examine the conflict between transhumanist Generals and posthumanist Meiji, and consider its implications for the ongoing debates around gender. Does the duology posit posthumanism as an adequate solution to the gendered Othering and biological essentialism seen in the texts? Can posthumanism create an alternative space for people like Meiji, who contravene not only the human binary constructions of gender, but the constructions of human itself? As a posthuman figure, what possibilities does Meiji have for exercising agency? Though the texts see gender non-conforming identities as merely a money-making tool, torture device, or trauma response, I conclude that the figure of Meiji-Smaug expresses an intra-active, agential, posthuman self that neither prioritizes nor erases sex/gender, rather they no longer remain organizing principles of identity and society. This makes for a fruitful and situated collaboration between posthumanism and feminism.
TL;DR: Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto illustrates the protagonist's longing for an alternative sexuality, and why adhering to the traditional identity, whether personally, sexually, or nationally, is no longer feasible in contemporary Ireland as discussed by the authors .
Abstract: Traditional Irish literature has valorized women through idealized female stereotypes. This sanctification was promoted to liberate their nation and retrieve their motherland from their colonizers. Due to this idealization and abstraction, Irish women were deprived of any actual power amid the nationalistic, patriarchal culture. However, a precise distinction between men and women has become problematic in the increasingly multicultural world since the late twentieth century. This debunking of sexual essentialism often arises in tandem with other changes in politics, history, and religion. Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto illustrates this phenomenon. By reading Breakfast on Pluto, this paper discusses the protagonist’s longing for an alternative sexuality, and why adhering to the traditional identity, whether personally, sexually, or nationally, is no longer feasible in contemporary Ireland. I argue that McCabe purports to challenge established fixities surrounding (post-)Trouble writing by adopting an extremely marginalized protagonist, thereby debilitating constructed foundations of gender and politics and anticipating an alternative framework of post-Trouble history.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors analyze women's food practices in two of her select works, The Anger of Aubergines and Eating Women, Telling Tales, to deconstruct how women are brought into the structures of patriarchy through their consumption and production of food.
Abstract: Food is the most elementary aspect of human society and culture. It embeds in itself multiple contexts and discourses which makes it a perfect conveyor of social structures and cultural systems across diverse cultural spheres. Indian writer, Bulbul Sharma capitalizes on this discursive and multi-contextual significance of food to represent the gendered nature of the Hindu domestic sphere in her works by focusing on women’s culinary practices. The present paper attempts to analyze women’s food practices in two of her select works titled The Anger of Aubergines and Eating Women, Telling Tales to deconstruct how women are brought into the structures of patriarchy through their consumption and production of food. The paper intends to unveil the norms and politics of gender in shaping and controlling women’s food choices which keep them under the patriarchal yoke. The paper also aims to represent how food provides women with a site of agency to resist and subvert the normative structures of patriarchy.
TL;DR: The authors analyzes the critical cosmopolitan discourse that permeates Julia Alvarez's Finding Miracles so as to better understand the relations between self, other, and the world that are spotlighted in the text.
Abstract: ABSTRACT This article analyzes the critical cosmopolitan discourse that permeates Julia Alvarez’s Finding Miracles so as to better understand the relations between self, other, and the world that are spotlighted in the text. In this young adult novel, Alvarez follows the self-discovery journey of Milly, a Latin American adoptee raised in Vermont, focusing on her evolution from an uncommitted girl to a critical reflective and socially responsible individual. This transformation begins when Pablo, a refugee from her birth country, settles in Vermont, which instills in the protagonist fears about her place in the world. To illustrate this evolution, this paper starts by examining the relation between strangers, embodiment, and place depicted in the first part of the novel. Thus, attention is paid to the anxieties triggered by Pablo’s status as stranger in the US. Drawing on critical cosmopolitan scholarship, this paper moves on to explore how Milly’s dialogical encounters with Pablo open a space of love and decoloniality that defies colonial structures, engendering in turn new ways of thinking about herself, others, and the world. Finally, this article argues that young adult novels like this enable the development of a young readership that can critically reflect upon social, cultural, and political issues.
TL;DR: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao) as mentioned in this paper is a decolonial project that recognizes coloniality specific to the Dominican Republic and its diaspora.
Abstract: Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao) is a decolonial project that recognizes coloniality specific to the Dominican Republic and its diaspora. Coloniality is the aftereffect of colonialism – the systems of hierarchy and systems of knowing established 500 years ago that still function today. This article argues that Oscar Wao attempts to undo colonial systems by rewriting history with its footnotes. It also argues that while Fukú Americanus, “the Curse and Doom of the New World,” is the novel’s rich conceptual tool that demonstrates coloniality, the fukú curse is also a symbol of passivity since resigning oneself to it helps coloniality persist (Díaz 1). Narrator Yunior is an epistemic agent whose footnotes help conquer benightedness and neutralize fukú, liberating his mind and his gender performativity from a colonial straitjacket. This article draws on existing scholarship by M. M. Gonzalez, “The Only Way Out Is In, Power, Race, and Sexuality Under Capitalism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” which argues that the novel “elaborate[s] a non-emancipatory version of decolonization” to suggest instead that Oscar Wao argues for an emancipatory stake in decoloniality.
TL;DR: The authors examines how Doris Lessing carries out her ethical exploration on elderly care through the narrative forms in The Diary of a Good Neighbor, with a double-seeing narrative, showing her sympathy toward the elderly group and revealing the pervasive ageism among the middle-aged and the young generations.
Abstract: With the “Ethical Turn” from the end of the last century, ethical narratology has become an inspiring guide in narrative studies. This essay examines how Doris Lessing carries out her ethical exploration on elderly care through the narrative forms in The Diary of a Good Neighbor. With a double-seeing narrative, Lessing shows her sympathy toward the elderly group and reveals the pervasive ageism among the middle-aged and the young generations. By adopting a listening narrative which records various dialogs, oral narratives, and daily accounts of the elders, Lessing calls on respect for the aged individuals and expresses her desire to break the inter-generation isolation in modern society. The diary style of the novel provides space for a reflective narrative, and the recurrent questioning-pondering-answering mode from the character narrator in the diary corresponds with Lessing’s exploration of new inter-generation ethics in the post-modern era.
TL;DR: Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees as discussed by the authors explores the ways in which families with traumatic histories transfer these experiences of suffering, grief, nostalgia, and melancholy from one generation to another through the character of Ada, the daughter of Kostas and Defne.
Abstract: The emergence of postmemory in recent decades has opened various tangents around which the frameworks of memory, trauma, and nostalgia can be reimagined and reexamined. The notions of memory and postmemory and the complex relation underlying their mutual interaction is a recent development in memory studies. In this light, the questions arise: What happens when people with traumatic memories are forced to flee their homelands? How do the subsequent generations of the survivors deal with the traumatic intergenerational memories of the past? Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees is set in Cyprus, a place divided by a border, destroyed by ethnic conflict, and years of violence and bloodshed. Shafak not only incorporates the idea of inherited pain and silence but also further explores the ways in which families with traumatic histories transfer these experiences of suffering, grief, nostalgia, and melancholy from one generation to another. Through the character of Ada, the daughter of Kostas and Defne, the researcher attempts to delve into the terrain of intergenerational memories and further attempts to analyze the various tenets of the notion of postmemory by undertaking a textual analysis of The Island of Missing Trees.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors analyze the portrayal of dementia in Emma Healey's novel Elizabeth Is Missing (2014), which brings together fictional exploration of dementia and the detective genre framework, and examine the ways in which it acknowledges the limits of this endeavor, and the sources of reassurance it offers to its readership.
Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyze the portrayal of dementia in Emma Healey’s novel Elizabeth Is Missing (2014), which brings together fictional exploration of dementia and the detective genre framework. This pairing may seem curious, even counterintuitive, yet it foregrounds important issues regarding subjectivity and personhood in the context of cognitive decline. In Healey’s novel, the protagonist with dementia is endowed with narrative authority and appears as the central participant in the mystery quest. These aspects of the novel seek to build empathy and preserve the agency of the person with dementia, and have been at the forefront of critical interest. However, while the use of the detective framework mediates and contributes to these selfhood-preserving effects, its solution-oriented formula also serves to mitigate fears and anxieties provoked by the disease. The ending of the novel, which allows no closure for its protagonist and underscores her progressive deterioration, also reveals a bleaker, more ambivalent stance, sometimes overlooked in critical investigations. The article will, therefore, salute the novel’s efforts to preserve the protagonist’s agency, but also examine the ways in which it acknowledges the limits of this endeavor, and the sources of reassurance it offers to its readership.
TL;DR: The authors argue that Xiaolu Guo's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and its sequel, A Lover's Discourse, are a continuous literary experiment in writing about the Chinese diaspora and pushing against those stereotypes.
Abstract: The narrative patterns of family saga, international romance, and hyphenated identity are popular with overseas Chinese authors who wish to enter the Anglophone market. In fact, they are implicated in the homogenization and marginalization of the ethnic minorities’ cultural discourse under asymmetrical globalization. This article argues that Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and its sequel, A Lover’s Discourse, are a continuous literary experiment in writing about the Chinese diaspora and pushing against those stereotypes. By shaping her protagonists not as recollectors but as observers via a documentary approach, Guo includes their international love within criticism of Western masculinity and links their diasporic experience to a cosmopolitan journey. The analysis of her experimental style of challenging Anglophone cultural imperialism and seeking global justice reveals the innovation and diversity of the Chinese diaspora’s translingual writing. Thus, Guo’s counter-hegemonic literary practice not only distinguishes itself from literature categorized as “ethnic” but also contributes to the discursive equality of international English-language literature by minority writers.
TL;DR: The Small Personal Voice (SVP) of Doris Lessing as mentioned in this paper is a notion of literary commitment and commitment as a counter to literary aestheticism, relating her idea of committedness to her African past and evaluating her theory of art articulated in the essay from the Islamic viewpoint.
Abstract: Doris Lessing celebrates the realist, committed novel and laments its absence in much of modern literature. Her theory of literature emanates from an understanding of good and evil and has an instructive function. Accordingly, she admires nineteenth-century realist novelists and commends their efforts to document and question unjust social practices. Based on Lessing’s literary credo titled “The Small Personal Voice,” in this paper I shall explicate her notion of literary commitment and regard it as a counter to literary aestheticism, relating her idea of committedness to her African past and evaluating her theory of art articulated in the essay from the Islamic viewpoint.
TL;DR: The authors examined whether two contemporary literary fiction, The Island Child by Molly Aitken (2020) and Folk by Zoe Gilbert (2019), could be considered Folk Horror, and how their respective employment of the calendar custom as a narrative device impacts the text.
Abstract: The UK has a rich calendar of folkloric traditional customs that continue to occur in our communities, even when their purpose is archaic or unknown. Folk Horror is most associated with cinema and television, and filmmakers consciously use calendar customs as a “summoning,” to epitomize the horror of the landscape, the isolation of the characters and their “skewed moral beliefs” (Scovell, “The Folk Horror Chain”). Though Folk Horror scholarship is new and emerging, this paper aims to interrogate whether two works of contemporary literary fiction, The Island Child by Molly Aitken (2020) and Folk by Zoe Gilbert (2019), could be considered Folk Horror, and how their respective employment of the calendar custom as a narrative device impacts the text.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors read Indra Sinha's Animal's People through the lens of disability theories to expose the entanglement of disability, sexuality, and humanness, and they made the connection between disability and sexuality explicit exposing the reality of the protagonist with disability as a desiring subject who grapples with the question whether he can be an object of desire.
Abstract: The goal of this paper is to read Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People through the lens of disability theories to expose the entanglement of disability, sexuality, and humanness. Only by taking into account these three interlocking spheres are we able to acknowledge fully Sinha’s nuanced and fair representation of disability in the novel. The narrative makes the connection between disability and sexuality explicit exposing the reality of the protagonist with disability as a desiring subject who grapples with the question whether he can be an object of desire. The intersection of animality and disability is also addressed through the investigation of the negative impact of ableism on the perception of humanness and its consequences for the realization of human sexual needs.
TL;DR: Luiselli's Lost Children Archive as discussed by the authors is a documentary fiction that innovatively explores the possibilities and limitations of the novel genre and engenders a precarious aesthetic through its unconventional narrative structure.
Abstract: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive is a documentary fiction that innovatively explores the possibilities and limitations of the novel genre and engenders a precarious aesthetic through its unconventional narrative structure. Drawing on the theoretical framework of precarious texts, as advanced by eminent German cultural critic Sieglinde Lemke, this paper argues that Luiselli’s fiction, with its eclectic blend of intertextual references, avant-garde narrative strategies, and incorporation of archival materials, offers a richly nuanced and pluralistic representation of undocumented children at the US-Mexico border. By utilizing child focalization, magic realism, and unreliable narration, in conjunction with the assimilation of archival materials such as posters, reports, and photographs, the author reenacts the novel’s story with a second narrator to elicit a precarious gaze, empowering an alternative mode of understanding the complexity of the migration crisis. Rather than resorting to overt political messaging, Luiselli implores readers to engage with the novel’s structure and contemplate its representational modes, provoking a creative response that transcends feelings of pity and indignation. By subtly foregrounding the political impasse surrounding the uneven distribution of precariousness, the narrative creates a complex blend of fact and fiction to generate a reflexive understanding that can potentially challenge readers’ ethical and epistemological dispositions.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the cousin occupies a particularly unheimlich position in the family unit: a cousin might be of the same age, or so distant in age that they are almost a stranger; they might be entirely unfamiliar, or raised from childhood with their cousins; they may be an acceptable romantic interest or an entirely taboo one.
Abstract: While the family unit in the Gothic novel has been widely discussed, the figure of the Gothic cousin has largely been relegated to the periphery of critical scholarship. This paper contends that the cousin occupies a particularly unheimlich position in the family unit: a cousin might be of the same age, or so distant in age that they are almost a stranger; they might be entirely unfamiliar, or raised from childhood with their cousins; they might be an acceptable romantic interest or an entirely taboo one. While clearly a flexible, shifting figure within the family unit, in many Gothic novels the arrival of a cousin causes significant upheaval – either immediate or generational – that undermines, dismantles, or enacts a renegotiation of the domestic order. The intrusions of Charles in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Rachel in Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel both reflect and reinforce this trajectory. In this paper, we consider the ways in which Rachel and Charles support our interpretation of the cousin as a disruptive figure within Gothic texts.
TL;DR: Negarestani as discussed by the authors presents Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia as a dramatic reappraisal of Lovecraftian horror from a twenty-first century non-Western perspective.
Abstract: H.P Lovecraft’s inhuman horror represents a site of both creativity and controversy, complicating his innovative depictions of the unknown by his racially problematic politics. This article presents Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia as a dramatic reappraisal of Lovecraftian horror from a twenty-first century non-Western perspective. Negarestani’s academic prose – specifically concepts and footnotes – centralizes the inhumanity of oil to dramatize the limits of subjectivity. Initially, oil provides a means of conceptualizing gaps within the text, adding a theoretical form of coherence to textual expressions of the unknown and the inhuman. The counterintuitive return to a subjectivity, relegated to the margins and footnotes of the text, recalibrates rather than rejects human form. This disruption of a human/inhuman binary challenges Lovecraft’s formulation of white Western subjectivity, while retaining a Lovecraftian horror aesthetic. Furthermore, by presenting academic prose as an intensifier of textual horror, its aesthetic function also challenges an implied literary/theory hierarchy, whereby literature serves the needs of theory. Cylonopedia’s theory-fictional form presents an intersection between the New Weird and the inhuman turn of contemporary theory; one which radically challenges humanist, anti-humanist, and posthumanist notions of subjectivity.
TL;DR: The Promise (2021) by Damon Galgut as mentioned in this paper is a South African post-apartheid novel whose characters are caught up in a nation torn by racial divisions.
Abstract: Being a South African post-apartheid novel, The Promise (2021) by Damon Galgut is a narrative whose characters are caught up in a nation torn by racial divisions. The novel bids a sharp comment on racial supremacy ideologies and the dead-ends such dogmas engender. As a white writer who is cognizant of the appalling racial condition of his nation, Galgut brawls to find hope in post-apartheid South Africa which does not live up to the pledged heterogeneity between races. Thus, the fundamental premise of this essay adopts the notion of the abject in the novel which is employed, I argue, to depart from the Manichean politics of black-white divide into a “Third Space” that threatens the norms of fixity. In addition, the essay makes use of Homi Bhabha’s notions of enunciation and the stereotype. These concepts help in construing the novel as a site of erupting the prevailed racial patterns in South Africa.
TL;DR: By viewing the Troubles in Northern Ireland through the lens of dystopia, the 2018 novel Milkman provides insight into how the genre of dystopian fiction may be changing as it moves into the twenty-first century as mentioned in this paper .
Abstract: By viewing the Troubles in Northern Ireland through the lens of dystopia, the 2018 novel Milkman provides insight into how the genre of dystopian fiction may be changing as it moves into the twenty-first century. Milkman’s innovative depiction of 1970s Belfast strikes many as totalitarian, and the novel shares central features with other dystopian novels: an oppressive society with no room for individualism, a protagonist that challenges it, and a plot that hinges on an unfair trial. At the same time, it makes several interesting adaptations. It is more interested in the ways a noncombatant community embraces dystopian practices in a dysfunctional attempt to cope with chaos than in the ways a totalitarian state uses them strategically to maintain power. Secondly, the historical setting should be recognized as a significant innovation in the genre because it spurs reexamination of assumptions about how dystopias relate to the present. Finally, the novel opens consideration of how a society could move past dystopia, which until now has been little explored.
TL;DR: The authors traces the trope of partitioning and de-partitioning in Sherley Anne Williams's neo-slave narrative Dessa Rose (1986) to argue that the richly structured, polyvocal narrative reveals a political impetus: it privileges the protagonist's voice and vision in order to comment on the representational paradigm endemic to mainstream cultural representations of the American South.
Abstract: The paper traces the trope of partitioning and de-partitioning in Sherley Anne Williams’s neo-slave narrative Dessa Rose (1986) to argue that the richly structured, polyvocal narrative reveals a political impetus: it privileges the protagonist’s voice and vision in order to comment on the representational paradigm endemic to mainstream cultural representations of the American South. Dessa Rose challenges those well-known, white-authored representations of the South that either emit or distort the Black perspective. Its structure, especially its initial reliance on the monocular, fragmenting white gaze and its subsequent disruption of this mode of seeing ultimately allow Dessa to emerge as the only reliable narrator, thus amplifying – what is more, enabling – the eventual catharsis while producing a complexly fragmented vision of the South.
TL;DR: In this article , a postsecular interpretation of Ali Smith's caring can be found in the analysis of How to Be Both, where the author suggests that such nonsensical care can be read as a typically metamodernist whole-hearted commitment to a cause that is doomed to failure.
Abstract: Caring is the theme Ali Smith pursues consistently throughout her fiction. She seems particularly concerned with all kinds of nonstandard caring situations, care that apparently cannot make any difference included. In Like Kate offers her orange kangaroo to the dead girl living in the drain, in Hotel World Clare tries to intensely experience life for the sake of her dead sister, in How to Be Both George resolves to watch each day a porn movie for the sake of the actress presumably abused in its production. The paper suggests that such nonsensical − predictably ineffective − caring can be read as a typically metamodernist whole-hearted commitment to a cause that is doomed to failure (cf. Vermeulen and van den Akker’s “Notes on Metamodernism,” 2010). However, the caring in question also can be interpreted as a hopeful cooperation with intimated spiritual forces on the assumption of postsecularism (cf. McClure’s Partial Faiths, 2007). The paper argues that such postsecular interpretation of Smith is justifiable focusing in the analysis on How to Be Both. In all, the paper aims to contribute to research on ethical considerations in Smith’s fiction.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors present an analysis of the relationship between the right to kill animals and the legitimacy of the custom of hunting in the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
Abstract: Among various ecological problems, the theme of animals is one of the constantly recurring leitmotifs in Olga Tokarczuk’s work. The issues of the right to kill them and the legitimacy of the custom of hunting are addressed in the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Its protagonist, Janina Duszejko, who shares the writer’s philosophy regarding our attitude toward these beings, defends them in a radical way, oscillating between tenderness and anger. The present analysis focuses on this dichotomy by examining the interactions between these two extreme emotions and the behaviors that these interactions lead to. Reading the novel in the light of the philosophy of deep ecology, close to Tokarczuk’s thinking, but also using the tools of ecopoetics, I attempt to find what the status of creatures other than human beings is in this text, noting how they are represented and named, as well as trying to specify the role they play.
TL;DR: In this paper , a new interpretation of Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives (1972) is presented, and it is shown that female economic dependence is in fact the key issue of the novel.
Abstract: This paper provides a new interpretation of Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives (1972). It seeks to refute that the novel “misses the deeper concerns over the wage relations making the antagonism between Joanna and her husband inevitable” (Brady 2021, 9) and that its ambivalent ending is “part of a canny strategy” (Neill 2018, 265) to win as large a readership as possible. I will show that female economic dependence is in fact the key issue of The Stepford Wives. Moreover, I draw on the novel’s roots in the Gothic genre to demonstrate that its ambivalence entails an insightful commentary on the pervasiveness of patriarchy. Levin’s novel illustrates that the fight for women’s rights is challenged on multiple levels, neither solely nor exclusively by men, but rather by a whole (patriarchal) culture. Gender equality hence requires that both men and women critically reflect on their own role in sustaining patriarchy. The Stepford Wives therefore paints a more complex picture of the “war between the sexes” than its conventional reading allows.
TL;DR: Sebald uses mental breakdowns as a strategy to create an impasse whereby he refrains from offering overarching meaning to the past he is reconstructing, indicating the impossibility of attaining historical truths through literary imagination as mentioned in this paper .
Abstract: This essay examines how Sebald exploits the time-honored literary theme of illness to maintain his dialectics of literary historiography. On the one hand, Sebald exhorts writers and readers to involve creative imagination when trying to approach a traumatic past. On the other hand, he warns about the peril of mistaking imagination for historical truths. Readers should understand that what literature offers are aesthetic truths, not historical ones. Sebald demonstrates a balanced attitude toward the power of literature in understanding history through his literary representation of illness. On the one hand, Sebald uses Austerlitz’s speech loss to illustrate the danger of abstention from imaginative investment and overreliance on the archive. On the other hand, Sebald employs mental breakdowns as a strategy to create an impasse whereby he refrains from offering overarching meaning to the past he is reconstructing. The impasse indicates the impossibility of attaining historical truths through literary imagination.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the text's exploration of animality facilitates an evaluation of intra-and inter-species relationships which leads to a more nuanced account of empathy within a broader context of feeling politics.
Abstract: Drawing on Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, this article responds to the polarization in current critical responses to empathy, which is framed either as key to intersubjective understanding and social cohesion, or as distracting and narcissistic. Examining the vegetal metamorphosis of the novel’s protagonist Yeong-hye, the article argues two things: first, that the text’s exploration of animality facilitates an evaluation of intra- and inter-species relationships which leads to a more nuanced account of empathy within a broader context of “feeling politics” (Berlant 111); and secondly, that an irresolvable tension between animality and vegetality persists throughout the novel, which tempers the claim (both within and beyond the text) that we can redeem our humanimality through an escape into vegetal subjectivity.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors examine the transformative effects of adding gaze theory to the critical approaches that have focused on Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021).
Abstract: This article examines the transformative effects of adding gaze theory to the critical approaches that have focused on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). Drawing on the issues of looking dynamics and surveillance in Michel Foucault’s epistemology of the gaze, the argument is that a Foucauldian reading of Ishiguro’s story uncovers the dependence of its power relations on gazing practices. By exploring the humanoid robot Klara’s storyline, I highlight the dual role of the gaze and related visual dynamics in Klara and the Sun as both facilitators of humans’ mastery of nonhumans and sites of nonhuman possibility. My analysis suggests that the novel articulates a complex disciplinary system in which the technological Other is constantly reified by both the human gaze and internalized practices of self-discipline. At the same time, against the reductive reading of Klara as a technological Other at the service of human selves, this article also proposes her figure as one of transgressive boundaries and gaze-engendered opposition, arguing that the novel’s social system is ultimately undermined by the visual acts of overconformity that Klara adopts.
TL;DR: In this paper , the human relationship with non-linguist, storied matter is explored, and it is argued that reading for storied matters and trans-corporality proves a powerful antidote for postmodern stagnation and the despair of anthropocentrism.
Abstract: “‘Storied Matter’ & the Human Response” considers how Williams’s The Changeling (1978; reissued 2018) and Samantha Hunt’s novel The Seas (2004; reissued 2018) embody non-linguist, storied matter by extending the category of narrative agency beyond the realm of the human. Using interdisciplinary frameworks and ideas culled from recent scholarship in literary and writing studies, ecocriticism, anthropology, political theory, and philosophy, I illuminate how the human relationship with non-linguist matter is shaped by class and disposition. Furthermore, I insist that reading for storied matter and trans-corporality proves a powerful antidote for postmodern stagnation and the despair of anthropocentrism.
TL;DR: In the David Foster Wallace Collection as discussed by the authors , Schacht's "Inevitability of Alienation" (1971) is one of the most interesting books in the collection, and it was used by Wallace at various stages throughout his career, including when he was working on the manuscript of what would become his last work, The Pale King (2011).
Abstract: Richard Schacht’s philosophical study entitled Alienation (1971) is one of the most interesting books in the David Foster Wallace Collection housed at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. As the dedication reveals, Wallace acquired this book shortly after the publication of his debut novel, The Broom of the System (1987), and the extensive notes on its margins show that he returned to it at various stages throughout his career, including the time when he was working on the manuscript of what would become his last work, The Pale King (2011). The problem of alienation is a prominent and recurrent theme in Wallace’s fiction, and my study of both the book’s contents and the writer’s marginalia aim to depict the complexity of Wallace’s engagement with Schacht’s Alienation and its introductory essay, Walter Kaufmann’s “The Inevitability of Alienation.” My discussion aims to show that Wallace’s philosophical influences reach beyond the thinkers that are commonly associated with him (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, William James, etc.), and that figures such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Robert Blauner have thus far been neglected, in the hope of opening Wallace scholarship to new interpretative perspectives.