Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2008"
TL;DR: DeLillo as discussed by the authors contrasts America's self-image with its image in the eyes of the world, and illustrates that the function of art in times of global upheaval is to challenge totalitarian impulses at home and abroad.
Abstract: In three post-9/11 texts, DeLillo contrasts America’s self-image with its image in the eyes of the world. One can map history’s coordinates in these interrelated texts, which lead back inexorably to Mao II, and World War II. What happens when the U.S. becomes the world’s policeman? What happens when the State becomes as lawless as those it seeks to repress? DeLillo illustrates that the function of art in times of global upheaval is to challenge totalitarian impulses – at home and abroad. His themes are the repression of memory and the memory of repression.
58 citations
35 citations
TL;DR: The Sun Also Rises explores the impotence of the post-war American, a figure whose lost capacity for generation Hemingway likens to that of the pioneer filled with longing for a frontier he has outlasted as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: This article discusses how Hemingway's depiction of the sexually mutilated WWI veteran and his inverted generic analogue, the cowboy hero, grows out of modernism's vexed enthrallment with material things. The Sun Also Rises explores the impotence of the post-war American, a figure whose lost capacity for generation Hemingway likens to that of the pioneer filled with longing for a frontier he has outlasted. In this novel, Hemingway rewrites the pioneer as a sexually wounded veteran whose desire to transcend loss finds its material correspondent in objects that commemorate losses, not victories, and that embody and perpetuate national myth.
30 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Coetzee's Disgrace explicitly invokes the concept of human rights only to expose the many limitations of rights as vehicles for approaching social justice, and contemplates a communitarian mode of interpersonal solidarity as an alternative to the rights paradigm.
Abstract: In its engagement with the relative successes and failures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace explicitly invokes the concept of human rights only to expose the many limitations of rights as vehicles for approaching social justice. Disgrace first juxtaposes its protagonist’s “rights of desire” with human rights, thereby exposing significant liabilities of rights talk. At the same time, it contemplates a communitarian mode of interpersonal solidarity as an alternative to the rights paradigm. However, in the end, its insistence upon the indeterminate status of justice is paradoxically what enables its ethical and political force.
24 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the connection between contemporary fiction and contemporary graphic narratives by examining how two novels, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), share the concerns (both formal and thematic) of graphic narrative: namely, an abiding interest in the narrativization of history.
Abstract: This essay explores the connection between contemporary fiction and contemporary graphic narrative by examining how two novels—E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975) and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)—share the concerns (both formal and thematic) of graphic narrative: namely, an abiding interest in the narrativization of history. Both novels, works of historical fiction that are about the rise of popular, visual media in the twentieth-century, suggest the political value of popular forms that are innovative and yet widely accessible, and thus give us a way to think about the import and invention of graphic narrative.
18 citations
TL;DR: The authors carried out an expressly gender-specific analysis of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, showing how the novel pathologizes modern masculinity by identifying its most characteristic traits as symptoms of a variety of psychopathologies, mental disorders and cognitive impairments.
Abstract: This essay carries out an expressly gender-specific analysis of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, showing how the novel pathologizes modern masculinity by identifying its most characteristic traits as symptoms of a variety of psychopathologies, mental disorders and cognitive impairments. Traditional masculinity is read as a residual, ideologically motivated gender construct that – by endorsing and legitimizing the realization of certain, possibly genetic, male dispositions as a fixed set of behavioral norms and imperatives – promotes the genesis a type of male subjectivity that displays conspicuous similarities particularly to Asperger’s Syndrome and high-functioning autism.
17 citations
TL;DR: The authors argues that Sui Sin Far counters Chinese national exclusion by strategically pointing up the more offensive threat of black racial difference, exposing the disingenuous logic that attempted to situate national and racial exclusions on opposite sides of a hinge.
Abstract: This essay looks at how Sui Sin Far’s short stories contested an emerging model of national citizenship that attempted to expand the rights of blacks and women by excluding Chinese immigrants. It argues that her depiction of Chinese-White marriage strategically redresses anxieties about black-white miscegenation that were fueled by Progressive and post-Reconstruction reform. While Sui Sin Far counters Chinese national exclusion by strategically pointing up the more offensive threat of black racial difference, she also exposes the disingenuous logic that attempted to situate national and racial exclusions on opposite sides of a hinge.
16 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that postcolonial studies as a field appears to be plagued by a guilty conscience, a persistent anxiety over its potential complicity with colonialism, which reveals a largely overlooked ethical dimension in a field that derives its raison d'etre from political, not ethical, concerns.
Abstract: To observe that postcolonial studies as a field appears to be plagued by a guilty conscience—a persistent anxiety over its potential complicity with colonialism—is to state the obvious. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy, this essay exploits and extends this observation to argue that this guilty conscience reveals a largely overlooked ethical dimension in a field that derives its raison d'etre from political, not ethical, concerns. Focusing on the concept of le regard, the essay suggests that Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm offers an exemplary dramatization of such a guilty conscience, simultaneously revealing le regard's complicity with colonial violence and its ethical interruption.
13 citations
TL;DR: A prominent strategy in some of the most innovative electronic literature online is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call "digital modernism" as mentioned in this paper, by examining a work that exemplifies it: Dakota by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries.
Abstract: A prominent strategy in some of the most innovative electronic literature online is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call “digital modernism.” This essay introduces digital modernism by examining a work that exemplifies it: Dakota by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. I read this Flash-based work in relation to its literary inspiration: the authors claim that Dakota is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos part I and part II.” The authorial framework claims modernism’s cultural capital for electronic literature and encourages close reading of its text, but the work’s formal presentation of speeding, flashing text challenges such efforts. Reading Dakota as it reads Pound’s first two cantos exposes how modernism serves contemporary, digital literature by providing a model of how to “MAKE IT NEW” by renovating a literary past.
13 citations
TL;DR: Lee's Native Speaker as mentioned in this paper explores how ethnicity can operate as a commodity to fuel corporatized cultural difference in US liberal democracy, and the normalization of "ethnic informants" in Native Speaker creates specific individuals whose existence function as cultural capital, or "brands" of human difference.
Abstract: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker probes how ethnicity can operate as a commodity to fuel corporatized cultural difference in US liberal democracy. The normalization of “ethnic informants” in Native Speaker creates specific individuals whose existence function as cultural capital, or “brands” of human difference, conducive for both state management and market exploitation of ethnic humans. Lee’s Native Speaker thinks through what I call the humanization of capital, whereby capital is “humanized” and personified as human and ethnic to challenge the hegemony of global capital and political liberalism and offer a concept of belonging through the perpetual substitution of figurations.
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors read the works of war journalists Michael Herr and Joe Sacco alongside Levinas's concepts of substitution, responsibility, and the "hatefulness" of the self in order to draw out the political possibilities of Levinas thought.
Abstract: This essay reads the works of war journalists Michael Herr and Joe Sacco alongside Emmanuel Levinas's concepts of substitution, responsibility, and the "hatefulness" of the self in order to draw out the political possibilities of Levinas's thought. Where Herr and Sacco posit responsibility and hatefulness as pre-existing, they grapple with the political practice of substitution. Most importantly, their writings draw out the limit case of the practice of substitution. The marking of their inevitable failure to substitute, however, poses a necessary critique of political, economic, and social structures that privilege some lives over others.
TL;DR: In this paper, the ethical character of the schlemiel is examined by way of a close reading of Levinas's notion of the self, aesthetics, and ethics, coupled with Hommi Bhabba's and Adam Newton's reading of the Levinas in terms of history and narrative.
Abstract: The schlemiel is a central character in the tradition of Yiddish and Jewish-American literature. Oftentimes, the schlemiel is read as a comic character that has political and ethical content. In our essay, we take another look at the ethical character of the schlemiel by way of a close reading of Levinas's notion of the self, aesthetics, and ethics, coupled with Hommi Bhabba's reading of Levinas in terms of history and Adam Newton's reading of Levinas in terms of narrative. This nuanced reading is used in the analysis of schlemiels in selected stories and parables of Franz Kafka, I. B. Singer and Nathan Englander.
TL;DR: The authors explored Auster's ethical motif from the perspective of alterity, but not from the dialectical choice between the loss or the unity of identity, and argued that the body's passivity constitutes ethical subjectivity.
Abstract: Paul Auster's ethical concerns have never been fully discussed because it is problematic to discuss concurrently his characters' unstable identities as a postmodern feature and their pursuit of responsibility for the other. Introducing the thought of Emmanuel Levinas that postmodern thought and ethics can be compatible, this paper explores Auster's ethical motif from the perspective of alterity, but not from the dialectical choice between the loss or the unity of identity. With specific attention to Levinas's ideas on certain physical dimensions and language, it first argues that the body's passivity constitutes ethical subjectivity in Auster's Moon Palace and finally suggests that "incredible narrative" as a testimony works as an ethical demand in the novel.
TL;DR: The authors compare different but mutually informative racial formations in two novels of the 1920s, one by a white and the other by a black writer, and argue that their overlapping deployments of the onomastic tropes of “Jake” and “Congo” reveal what race means to Dos Passos and McKay as both narrative strategy and cultural experience.
Abstract: Extending Toni Morrison's argument that close scrutiny of how American Africanism works in the literary imagination is central to understanding American literature, I compare different but mutually informative racial formations in two novels of the 1920s, one by a white and the other by a black writer. I argue that their overlapping deployments of the onomastic tropes of “Jake” and “Congo” reveal what race means to Dos Passos and McKay as both narrative strategy and cultural experience.
TL;DR: The Handmaid's Tale and the short story "Death by landscape" as discussed by the authors are two of Atwood's fictions whose landscapes are haunted by US imperialism, The Handmaids Tale and short story “Death by Landscape.”
Abstract: This essay focuses on two of Atwood’s fictions whose landscapes are haunted by US imperialism, The Handmaid’s Tale and the short story “Death by Landscape.” In both of these works, the landscapes illuminate victims of American imperial history by taking female characters hostage: in The Handmaid’s Tale , Offred is trapped within Gilead’s landscape, and in “Death by Landscape” Lucy vanishes in the landscape without a trace. Atwood’s containment of female bodies within these landscapes illustrates that understanding how identity and power are negotiated through landscape necessarily involves taking into account the gendered nature of landscape itself.
I cannot avoid seeing, now, the small tattoo on my ankle. Four digits and an eye, a passport in reverse. It’s supposed to guarantee that I will never be able to fade, finally, into another landscape. I am too important, too scarce, for that. I am a national resource.
—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
TL;DR: A Boy's Own Story as mentioned in this paper provides a fictional example of the ways white gay identities might be seen simultaneously to collude with and undermine the history of whiteness, and a strategy for queer reading of the incoherencies of sexual identities within multiple historical discourses.
Abstract: A history of racialized sexuality in the US suggests that sexuality is saturated by race even in American literature written by white gay men. Reading Edmund White’s coming out novel, A Boy’s Own Story, in relation to a little-known work of gay pulp fiction, André Tellier’s Twilight Men, the essay provides a fictional example of the ways white gay identities might be seen simultaneously to collude with and undermine the history of whiteness. The essay also elaborates a strategy for queer reading of the incoherencies of sexual identities within multiple historical discourses.
TL;DR: The authors examines Mark Merlis's 1994 novel American Studies in order to analyze the performative potential of "queer retrosexualities" in the field of American Studies, and argues that the "retrosexual" narrative of the novel thus perform a queering of the field.
Abstract: This article examines Mark Merlis’s 1994 novel American Studies in order to analyze the performative potential of “queer retrosexualities.” In re-visiting the history of the field through the fictional account of F. O. Matthiessen’s life, Merlis’s novel makes the 50s a primal scene of its narrative. By returning to the 50s, Merlis not only ‘exposes’ the heteronormative exclusions that informed the beginnings of American Studies, he also suggests how a different understanding of temporality could facilitate the creation of queer spaces within the practice of American Studies. I thus argue that the “retrosexual” narrative of the novel thus perform a queering of the field of American Studies.
TL;DR: Beyond the Dialectic: Conrad, Levinas, and the Scene of Recognition as mentioned in this paper explores Conrad's Heart of Darkness through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to highlight Conrad's attempts to move beyond the violence inherent in the Hegelian philosophical tradition, to a position of respect and responsibility for the other.
Abstract: "Beyond the Dialectic: Conrad, Levinas, and the Scene of Recognition" reads Conrad's Heart of Darkness through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Focusing on two key scenes—Marlow's meetings with Kurtz and the Intended—the essay uses Levinas's work to highlight Conrad's attempts to move beyond the violence inherent in the Hegelian philosophical tradition, to a position of respect and responsibility for the other.
TL;DR: In this article, the importance of Flaubert's development of cinematographic techniques of writing as a crucial literary antecedent to Joyce's adoption and elaboration of such techniques is discussed.
Abstract: Much attention has been paid in recent years to the influence of the emerging medium of film on modernist literary experimentation. This essay, while acknowledging the importance of this relationship across the art forms, considers the importance of Flaubert’s development of cinematographic techniques of writing as a crucial literary antecedent to Joyce’s adoption and elaboration of such techniques. The essay considers Flaubert and Joyce’s often analogous views of vision and photography and examines Joyce’s attitudes to the cinema before looking in detail at examples from both authors’ works which suggest an extensive technical intertextuality between the two oeuvres .
TL;DR: The Anxiety of obsolescence as mentioned in this paper is a reworking of the anxiety of influence for post-modern literary culture, and it can be seen as a way to claim marginality in a culture "obsessed with fragmentation and decentering" (233).
Abstract: to claim marginality in a culture "obsessed with fragmentation and decentering, a paradoxical source of return to dominance" (233). She tests her argument about the anxiety of obsolescence in the book's closing chapter by broadening her focus to include a younger generation of writers—the "New White Guys," such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace—and to include one of Pynchon and DeLillo's celebrated peers, Toni Morrison. In this chapter, Fitzpatrick questions, "is the anxiety of obsolescence . . . unique to the writers I have addressed in these pages? Or is it a formation common to the entirety of literary culture, all of which is apparently under threat by television and responding in similarly defensive fashion?" (202). As Fitzpatrick illustrates how differently writers such as Franzen, Wallace, and Morrison perceive television's threat than do Pynchon and DeLillo, she usefully identifies the parameters of the novel of obsolescence and solidifies her argument about the real cultural work performed by the discourse of obsolescence. As a reworking of the anxiety of influence for postmodern literary culture, The Anxiety of Obsolescence convincingly illustrates the centrality of the discourse of obsolescence to contemporary literature and criticism even as it exposes the social forces that drive particular novelists and critics to turn to obsolescence as a way to claim marginal status for themselves. The book is an important resource for studying contemporary literature and culture and a valuable addition to scholarship on Pynchon and DeLillo.