Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2009"

Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque

Abstract: A quarter of a century ago, Raymond Williams called for more novels that attend to \"the close living substance\" of the local while simultaneously tracing the \"occluded relationships\"—the vast transnational economic pressures, the labor and commodity dynamics—that invisibly shape the local. To hazard such novels poses imaginative challenges of a kind that writers content to create what Williams termed \"enclosed fictions\" need never face, among them the challenge of rendering visible occluded, sprawling webs of interconnectedness (Writings 238). In our age of expanding and accelerating globalization, this particular imaginative difficulty has been cast primarily in spatial terms, as exemplified by John Berger's pronouncement, famously cited in Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies: \"Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space and not time that hides consequences from us. To prophesy today it is only necessary to know men [and women] as they are throughout the world in all their inequality\" (qtd. in Soja 22).

Radiation Ecologies and the Wars of Light

Abstract: We are creatures constituted by radiation, solar and otherwise. This is a sign of our planetarity, a merger with an environment that exceeds our attempts at total illumination. Our ability to capture, inscribe, and make meaning of light has been defined as heliography, a word used at the advent of photography to foreground the entrapment of solar rays with the aid of the camera, a \"pencil of nature\" as termed by Henry Fox Talbot, that documents \"words of light\" (Cadava xvii ).1 The concept of heliography is expanded here to represent both the discursive practice of writing about light as well as the inscription of our bodies as they are created, visually ordered and perceived, and penetrated by radiation. Light is an originary source of life in our universe and sustains life on our planet, but its role in modern philosophy as well as physics is profoundly ambiguous. In fact, most genealogies of radiation in modernity emphasize a destructive rather than life-sustaining trajectory. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, writing amidst the state-sanctified violence of World War II, argued that the instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment perpetuates its self-destruction and utilized metaphors of light to warn against the dangers of the \"fully enlightened earth.\" \"What men want to learn from nature,\" they argued, \"is how to use it in order wholly

"A Choice of Nightmares": The Ecology of Heart of Darkness

Abstract: Nature is at the heart of Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel dramatizes modernity's destructive alienation from the natural world against the backdrop of the Congo's ecological collapse. More intimately, Heart of Darkness uses the competing constructions of nature in turn of the century Britain to haunt readers with a new vision of themselves. In 1899, British readers encountered nature in two primary roles: the passive object of imperial commerce and evolution's meritocracy of fitness. This essay will show these distinct attitudes shaping the novel, and then reveal a third role beyond them both, through which the novel destabilizes the framework of Victorian self-fashioning. Specifically, Conrad's novel offers a vision of landscape that challenges the colonizing subject's confidence, and, simultaneously, forecasts the brewing storm of ecological catastrophe. My reading parses the tangled relation between modern Europe's unfolding knowledge of nature and its changing knowledge of itself. In this sense Heart of Darkness is about the cultural boundaries that separate person from place, and more significantly about repositioning human beings within a new understanding of nature.

Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850-2000 (review)

Abstract: were penned by Cold Warriors [and] disease-inflected political threats conformed to the specific mechanisms of viral infection\" (171). In the wake of the Cold War, the social registers of the outbreak narrative mutate yet again with the HIV/AIDS crisis, where the deterioration of the immune system that is the medical symptom of the virus allegorizes the breakdown of geographical boundaries and the threat of \"Africanization\" to the developed world—as Wald describes the way this outbreak is imagined, \"'African AIDS' realized the vision of a diseased continent as both a Third World present and a First World future\" (237). On these terms, microbes, germs, and viruses are not simply biological entities to be apprehended scientifically but rather become symbols for processes of social transformation reinforcing and reinforced by the cultural logic of outbreak. While Contagious bears the best traits of current multidisciplinary approaches to American Studies, combining cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and globalization theory in fruitful and provocative ways, it might share its greatest affinities in terms of theme and critical perspective with Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Like The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Contagious is not only an engrossing study replete with canny, unanticipated readings, but it is also a testament to the social work literary criticism is capable of. Part and parcel of Wald's analysis is what she sees as the ethical reasons for identifying, demystifying, and transforming the outbreak narrative: While the plots describing epidemics might be conventionalized, what we learn from them and how we respond to them can change. In Wald's own words, \"It is possible to revise the outbreak narrative, to tell the story of disease emergence and human connection in the language of social justice rather than of susceptibility\" (270). By pushing the social possibilities of cultural criticism, Contagious is an object lesson in thinking about our own critical practices and theoretical concepts, and how we might reorient and revitalize them.

Speaking Before the Environment: Modern Fiction and the Ecological

Abstract: Artaud said: to write for the illiterate. . . . But what does 'for' mean? It is not 'for their benefit,' or yet 'in their place.' It is 'before.' It is a question of becoming. We think and write for animals themselves. We become animal so that the animal also becomes something else. The agony of a rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as a zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. This is the constitutive relationship of philosophy with nonphilosophy. . . . The artist or philosopher is quite incapable of creating a people, each can only summon it with all his strength. A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot be concerned any more with art or philosophy. But books of philosophy and works of art also contain their sum of unimaginable sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people. They have resistance in common—their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the present. —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, "Geophilosophy

The Backwaters Sphere: Ecological Collectivity, Cosmopolitanism, and Arundhati Roy

Abstract: The God of Small Things is a book which connects the very smallest things to the very biggest. Whether it's the dent that a baby spider makes on the surface of water in a pond or the quality of moonlight on a river or how history and politics intrude into your life, your house, your bedroom, your bed, into the most intimate relationships between people. —Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile

The Metaphysics of Ecology in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping

Abstract: Marilynne Robinson is an intriguing case for ecocriticism. She is most well known for her novels, Housekeeping, Gilead (the 2005 winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and most recently Home. But she is also the author of the 1999 book Mother Country, an essay that provides a trenchant and relentless critique of England's wholesale dumping of nuclear waste into the sea at the Sellafield Nuclear Processing Plant, a fact of incomparable environmental and social devastation. Although Robinson has written a small number of highly regarded works, this book remains surprisingly little known in the United States and in England.1 This is perhaps because the book challenges a whole host of facile assumptions about what it means to be moral politically, environmentally, and socially. Robinson describes a long British history of cultivating an official morality toward the poor that has depended on their continued existence and suffering. Her diagnosis is that this is not merely a case of a divided nation, but rather of a kind of strange co-dependence between a social ill and its supposed political cures, what she calls "moral aphasia" (Mother Country 193). What she questions is why "our education produces an acculturated blindness which precludes our taking in available, unambiguous information if it is contrary to our assumptions" (27). In addition to uncovering the considerable environmental sins of England, she remains focused on the greater moral responsibility to "break down some of the structures of thinking that make reality invisible to us" (32).

Extremities of the Body: The Anoptic Corporeality of As I Lay Dying

Abstract: From the point of view of death, disease has a land, a mappable territory, a subterranean, but secure place where its kinships and its consequences are formed; local values define its forms. Paradoxically, the presence of the corpse enables us to perceive it living—living with a life that is no longer that of either old sympathies or the combinative laws of complications, but one that has its own roles and its own laws. —Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic

Americanist Literary Realism: Howells, Historicism, and American Exceptionalism

Abstract: In November 1887, America's preeminent author and editor William Dean Howells wrote an open letter to the New York Tribune urging others to join him in his attempt to stay the execution of the so-called Haymarket anarchists. These men had been arrested in the wake of the May 1886 Haymarket riot, a labor reform rally in Chicago that turned violent when someone threw a bomb into the crowd. For Howells, the situation's injustice arose from more than the lack of evidence against the accused. As Timothy L. Parrish points out, \"they were essentially tried and convicted for advocating labor reform and for being foreigners\"; they were convicted, that is, for their response to the same unequal social conditions that were becoming a source of increasing dismay to Howells (24). The letter had no effect on the outcome of the trial (four of the eight men convicted were executed), and Howells, the lone literary figure to make a public statement, was much criticized. But if Howells's status as a radical seemed clear at that moment, the question has since become considerably muddied. This is partly a result of Howells's own tendency to qualify his political views. For instance, the Haymarket affair was no doubt very much in Howells's mind when he wrote to Henry James the following year,

Nationalist Ideologies and New Deal Regionalism in The Day of the Locust

Abstract: In the late thirties, Los Angeles was not seen as a quintessentially regional space: it was urban, very modern, and already known for quirky fads and pop culture rather than tradition and folk arts. For Nathanael West, however, the city seemed an ideal setting for considering a question routinely invoked by regional art: what, precisely, is (and should be) the relationship between region and nation?1 West posits this question, particularly pressing as regionalism became the nation's dominant artistic mode in the 1930s, about midway through The Day of the Locust (1939). Here, the novel's protagonist, Tod Hackett, muses about the meaning of the masterpiece he is soon to paint, "The Burning of Los Angeles":

Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939 (review)

Abstract: The final narrative group, "evacuating," describes how the disparate ideologies that worked together for Irish independence were removed from the dominant understanding of Irish nationalism. The "evacuation" of certain ideologies helps to understand how Irish nationalism "could be at once an aggressive force for political liberation . . . and, later, an equally aggressive force blocking progressive economic and social measures" (52). Chapters 3 and 4 essentially explain how these three major narrative forces worked, often in conjunction with each other, to develop a sense of Irishness that "served to integrate individual identity into a collective nationalized identity" (109). After spending the first four chapters of the book on Ireland, Mays's last two chapters concentrate on Northern Irish nationalism. The Northern Irish chapters basically cover the same historical time period as the previous chapters and analyze how "Ulster Protestantism" became the dominant form of nationalism in Northern Ireland. Mays punctuates these two chapters of the book with readings of Conor Cruise O'Brien, Seamus Heaney, Frank McGuinness, and Brian Friel. Mays uses these authors' narratives, along with a concise political history, to show how Northern Irish politics "evacuated" any alternative to Ulster Protestant nationalism. The clearest example of Mays's argument is found in his reading of McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme—a play that nicely fits in with Mays's methodology—where he states that McGuinness identifies the modern Ulster identity as a spectral identity. McGuinness's play performs the transformation of Northern Irish identity into "a modern Ulster Protestant nationalism rooted in a timeless ethnic tradition" (147). Overall, Mays leaves the reader at this junction between Irish and Northern Irish nationalities, both are mutually exclusive identities that are harrowed by a cultural memory for a pure nation-state that never existed.

Damning Fundamentalism: Sinclair Lewis and the Trials of Fiction

Abstract: But the question remains: why, at a moment when religious and religiously tinged conflicts are erupting around the globe and shaping US policy both domestically and internationally, has the discourse on religion and the appropriate education of students for citizenship come to be dominated almost entirely by the issues debated eighty years ago in the Scopes trial? —Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption