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Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2011"




Journal ArticleDOI

41 citations






Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors track the evolution of the Brangwen family in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow from a Christian-humanist tradition sanctioned by a benevolent deity to a modernist culture, where new processes of individuation precipitate the breakup of communal values.
Abstract: This essay tracks the evolution of the Brangwen family in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow from a Christian-humanist tradition sanctioned by a benevolent deity to a modernist culture, where new processes of individuation precipitate the breakup of communal values. In this transition, sacrificial activity undergoes dramatic transformations. From its source in direct contact with a God who rewards suffering with transcendent revelation for the first generation, it becomes secularized, sexualized, and increasingly violent. In the second and third generations, the animal-body that resists transfiguration is repeatedly subjected to symbolic disfiguration and death.

16 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors discusses the impact of the Holocaust on three novels written by third-generation Jewish American authors: Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and Nicole Krauss's The History of Love.
Abstract: This essay discusses the impact of the Holocaust on three novels written by third-generation Jewish American authors: Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , and Nicole Krauss's The History of Love . Each novel, it is argued, carries Derridean traces of the Holocaust and its victims: the bombing of the Ukrainian village of Trachimbrod, the Jewish victim Simon Goldberg, and the Jewish Polish author Bruno Schulz haunt these texts as absent presences that allow the characters—and the authors—to keep history at bay.

15 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that Jackson's text represents assisted conceptions, cyborgian births, and monstrous progenesis in ways that explore the possibilities and limitations of the cyborg, and address current preoccupations with the potential benefits and horrors of new reproductive technologies.
Abstract: This article uses Donna Haraway’s work in “A Cyborg Manifesto” to examine how new reproductive technologies and politics meet and converge with fictional representations of the posthuman subject in Shelley Jackson’s hypertext, Patchwork Girl . It argues that Jackson’s text offers a cyborgian reading of reproduction that challenges the dominant discourse surrounding new reproductive technologies. Ultimately, it argues that Jackson’s text represents assisted conceptions, cyborgian births, and monstrous progenesis in ways that explore the possibilities and limitations of the cyborg, and it addresses current preoccupations with the potential benefits and horrors of new reproductive technologies.

12 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that Woolf's late style can be understood as a response to a sense of historical impasse and to the repetition of war itself that bracketed her writing life, and they focus on The Years and Between the Acts.
Abstract: This essay focuses on The Years and Between the Acts and argues that Virginia Woolf’s late style can be understood in part as a response to a sense of historical impasse and to the repetition of war itself that brackets her writing life. The essay works in detail with the signal features of Woolf’s late style: an interest in cliche and repetition on a variety of levels, a fascination with platitudes and outworn formulae, and an apparent determination to mar the rhythms of her sentences.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Baldwin's Another Country as mentioned in this paper is a novel that articulates a model of sympathetic identification as a form of passivity in which we receive the experiences of another not by inhabiting other's bodies, but by allowing other bodies, and the pain those bodies have endured, to enter into our own.
Abstract: Despite James Baldwin's seeming antipathy towards sentimentalism, his novel Another Country reveals a profound investment in the political and aesthetic significance of authentic feeling. Mediating between the models of sympathetic identification found in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Norman Mailer's "The White Negro," Baldwin articulates a model of sympathetic identification as a form of passivity in which we receive the experiences of another not by inhabiting other's bodies, but by allowing other bodies, and the pain those bodies have endured, to enter into our own.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Adichie's second novel as discussed by the authors represents the fracturing of national unity and the suffering of the Igbo people as the doomed war propels them into diaspora, and explores the novel's diasporic vision, tracing Adichie representation of the colonial legacies that shape public history and undermine personal communities.
Abstract: Set in postcolonial Nigeria during the Biafra War, Adichie's second novel represents the fracturing of national unity and the suffering of the Igbo people as the doomed war propels them into diaspora. The essay explores the novel's diasporic vision, tracing Adichie's representation of the colonial legacies that shape public history and undermine personal communities. Rejecting historical omniscience and narrating instead through three uncertain characters, Adichie demonstrates the diasporic vision produced by events in the novel. The estranged observers demonstrate anticolonial modes of perception and the potential for a diasporic consciousness attuned to the innate failures of nationalism.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that science fiction is now the genre hosting the strongest form of realism, and that this is not at odds with the claim that SF is a preserve for the utopian impulse.
Abstract: This essay argues that science fiction (SF) is now the genre hosting the strongest form of realism, and that this is not at odds with the claim that SF is a preserve for the utopian impulse. Using Octavia Butler's Parable novels, this essay shows that, because today's mainstream of realist discourse is already shot through with unacknowledged utopian language, SF is an "epistemologically self-conscious" mode of representation because it avows its utopian effects. Though heavily stylized, Butler's Parable novels are best read as efforts to construct the real history of the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper argued that Larsen identifies and critiques a distinct black nativism that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, sutured racial and sexual normativity, producing figures like Larsen as queer.
Abstract: Drawing from George Hutchinson’s recent revisionist biography of Nella Larsen and scholarship in the fields of immigration and queer studies, this article advances a new interpretation of Quicksand as a text that critiques racial and sexual normativity. I argue that Larsen identifies and critiques a distinct black nativism that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, sutured racial and sexual normativity, producing figures like Larsen as queer.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, Auster re-contextualizes the story of regime change to the scene of language, with Humpty's linguistic arrogance pitted against Alice's conventional view of language.
Abstract: Humpty Dumpty began as a caricature of Charles I, the king toppled by Puritans. Lewis Carroll's better-known version moves the story of regime change to the scene of language, with Humpty's linguistic arrogance pitted against Alice's conventional view of language. Paul Auster recycles both figures, situating the egg in a site-specific American battle between the Puritan dream of a transparent language and the postmodern recognition of its impossibility. New York becomes the contemporary looking-glass stage for an allegorical struggle between incompatible language regimes, which is also a story about the dissolution of the Dumptyesque sovereign subject.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that post-Civil Rights "Power literature" inspired a paradigm shift in the way separate group identities in the US could be politicized, and that the racial memory trope made mythic in House Made of Dawn demonstrates how Power literature partakes in universalist methods homologous with those of universalist midcentury mythologists.
Abstract: This article argues that post-Civil Rights "Power literature" inspired a paradigm shift in the way separate group identities in the US could be politicized. Serving as an exemplary case, N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968) theorizes a politically viable sense of collective identity by emplotting alternate origin stories, or myths, through the controversial device of racial memory. The racial memory trope made mythic in House Made of Dawn demonstrates how Power literature partakes in universalist methods homologous with those of universalist midcentury mythologists. Yet it does so to further separatist political ends, thereby making such a seeming dissonance productive.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that Ireland's reciprocal engagement in the European interstate system, resulting in a perpetual disruption of what Frantz Fanon called "international consciousness," can be traced back to the Ulysses novel.
Abstract: This essay moves beyond questions of national identity and symbolic national territory in Ulysses by shifting the focus to the novel's coastal setting. It argues that Joyce strategically employs this setting to expose the economic and political mechanisms that have conspired to postpone Ireland's reciprocal engagement in the European interstate system, resulting, culturally, in a perpetual disruption of what Frantz Fanon called "international consciousness." This essay situates these observations in the context of recent critical arguments about the ways in which the opposing discourses of nationalism and cosmopolitanism obscure the pragmatic challenges of sustainable internationalism and egalitarian statehood in the developing world.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines how Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine shifts engagement with the details of the material world consistently onto the axis of temporality and how, in so doing, it fashions a theory of periodization in which historical and social trends and events are relegated in importance.
Abstract: This essay examines how Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine shifts engagement with the details of the material world consistently onto the axis of temporality and how, in so doing, it fashions a theory of periodization in which historical and social trends and events are relegated in importance. Asking how the detail or moment might both alter an understanding of the general and spread time to infinite proportions, The Mezzanine casts doubt on the process of periodizing by way of metonymy and synecdoche and offers instead a contingent and improvised version of the 1980s.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Kerouac's work was an anxious inquiry into the psychological and cultural reasons behind certain Americans' failure to adapt to the United States' class structure as mentioned in this paper, echoing the discourse of delinquency that pervaded US social science in the 1950s.
Abstract: Kerouac's fiction echoes the discourse of delinquency that pervaded US social science in the 1950s. Like this discourse, Kerouac's work was an anxious inquiry into the psychological and cultural reasons behind certain Americans' failure to adapt to the United States' class structure. In texts like On the Road, Maggie Cassidy , and Dr. Sax , his autobiographical protagonists are alienated from the cultural attitudes of both the traditional working and new middle class. Prefiguring 1960s poverty theory, Kerouac depicts this in-between class status as the consequence of a deviant work ethic, passed on from inadequate fathers to their delinquent sons.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article argued that As I Lay Dying elucidates the political economies driving the illicit over-the-counter trade in birth control products during the 1910s and 1920s, drawing on works such as Margaret Jarman Hagood's ethnographic studies of tenant farm women, advertisements for feminine hygiene products and Margaret Sanger's political tracts.
Abstract: This essay argues that William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying elucidates the political economies driving the illicit over-the-counter trade in birth control products during the 1910s and 1920s. Drawing on works such as Margaret Jarman Hagood’s ethnographic studies of tenant farm women, advertisements for feminine hygiene products, and Margaret Sanger’s political tracts, I read Faulkner’s novel as staging—through the endeavours of Addie, Cora, and Dewey Dell—a series of failed rebellions against maternity that represent the real historical co-optation, by commercial interests, of women’s radical demands for reproductive rights.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors place the representation of vision in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth within an evolutionary framework, arguing against theorizations of the male gaze in realist and naturalist texts, and rethinks the relationship between gender and vision in the novel.
Abstract: This essay places the representation of vision in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth within an evolutionary framework. Arguing against theorizations of the male gaze in realist and naturalist texts, Saltz rethinks the relationship between gender and vision in the novel. Turning to the works of Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, and late nineteenth-century naturalist and photographer P. H. Emerson, Saltz situates The House of Mirth in a turn-of-the-century dialogue about the subjective and idiosyncratic nature of human vision. Saltz argues that The House of Mirth makes a case for the visual education, and therefore evolution, of women like Lily Bart.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made in DRO • the fulltext is not changed in any way.
Abstract: The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Rain God and Migrant Souls by Arturo Islas Jr as discussed by the authors is an example of a Chicana/o community that circumvents the exclusions on which cultural nationalisms are often predicated.
Abstract: Drawing from disability theory and Chicana/o feminist and queer theory, this essay argues that the novels The Rain God and Migrant Souls by Arturo Islas Jr produce a vision of Chicana/o community that circumvents the exclusions on which cultural nationalisms are often predicated Even as both betray uneasiness with Chicano nationalism, they embrace the drive toward community that lies at the core of nationalist impulses Moreover, their vision of community finds expression through images of disability The novels therefore provide an opportunity to contemplate how disability might modify and expand the construction of concepts like nation, family, and community

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Lawrence Chua's Gold By the Inch depicts the conditions of Southeast Asia after decolonization in which the logic of exchange value ruthlessly circulates through commodified bodies and the local and global exploitation of labor as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Lawrence Chua's Gold By the Inch depicts the conditions of Southeast Asia after decolonization in which the logic of exchange value ruthlessly circulates through commodified bodies and the local and global exploitation of labor Chua's novel follows the interconnected relationships between the logic of capital and the logic of profit under the global capitalist mode of production and exposes the occluded narratives of the exploitation of differentiated racialized bodies This essay argues that the text presents an incisive critique of the euphemistic notion of historical progress


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper reinterpreted Jewish American literary history outside a nationalist framework that assumes Jewish American literature represents a recognizable historical subject, and made available a non-nationalist JA literary history oriented not by recognition and continuity, but by desire and emergence.
Abstract: This article aims to reimagine Jewish American literary history outside a nationalist framework that assumes Jewish American literature represents a recognizable historical subject. Free of the historicist expectation that its job is the coordination of literature with a historical Jewish subject, Jewish American literary history would not disregard the problem of identity, but would function as a counterdiscourse of identity. In this essay I focus on Abraham Cahan’s “The Imported Bridegroom,” which subverts the expectation of identity’s self-evidence, making available a non-nationalist Jewish American literary history oriented not by recognition and continuity, but by desire and emergence.