Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2012"
TL;DR: In A Mercy, Morrison frames the psychic damage inflicted by slavery as a series of failed messages between slave mother and slave daughter, and Florens's misreading of her mother's message becomes the distorting lens through which she perceives the world; and as a consequence, her capacity to read the meanings of others' messages is disabled as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In A Mercy , Morrison frames the psychic damage inflicted by slavery as a series of failed messages between slave mother and slave daughter. Florens's misreading of her mother's message, as she arranged for Florens's sale, becomes the distorting lens through which she perceives the world; and as a consequence of her separation from her mother, her capacity to read the meanings of others' messages is disabled. Jean Laplanche's theory of the enigmatic signifier, which also examines the effects of a parental message that cannot be understood, enables me to clarify some baffling aspects of Florens's actions and of her style as narrator. The narrative structure formally reproduces the thematics of mother-daughter separation.
17 citations
TL;DR: The authors explores the remainders of aesthetic modernism in the fiction and art of Tom McCarthy, reading McCarthy as a media archaeologist of the modern, placing McCarthy's work in dialogue with recent scholarly approaches to modernist media environments.
Abstract: This essay explores the remainders of aesthetic modernism in the fiction and art of Tom McCarthy. Reading McCarthy as a media archaeologist of the modern, the essay places McCarthy’s work in dialogue with recent scholarly approaches to modernist media environments. McCarthy understands modernism not as a repertoire of forms, or a utopian techno-poetics, but as confrontation between the noble subjectivity of the human and inhuman media. Recalling modernism’s sustained attentiveness to the inhuman, McCarthy’s paean to dirty media aligns his experimental work with the renewed prestige of certain strands of modernism in contemporary media theory.
17 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the rhetoric of science and race have real effects on the characters and relationships in Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and that characteristics of those categories that are taken for granted, such as what constitutes Britishness in the 21st century, and the certainty of scientific evidence, actually destabilize the relationships they are intended to define.
Abstract: This essay argues that the rhetoric of science and race have real effects on the characters and relationships in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth . Through reading the anxieties about race, ethnicity, and science that permeate the novel in conjunction with the cybernetic term “black box,” two things become evident. First, race and science become the primary categories through which the characters comprehend each other. Second, characteristics of those categories that are taken for granted, such as what constitutes Britishness in the 21st century, and the certainty of scientific evidence, actually destabilize the relationships they are intended to define.
14 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the way secrecy and silence are raised from the level of colonial imposition to post-colonial methodology in The Calcutta Chromosome, arguing that silence and secrecy form a counter-hegemonic practice to the instrumentalizing form of Western rationality.
Abstract: This article examines the way that secrecy and silence are raised from the level of colonial imposition to postcolonial methodology in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Drawing on Ghosh’s claim that any attempt at forming a counter-modernity to the experience of imperial modernization would necessarily have had to operate without record, it argues that silence and secrecy form a counter-hegemonic practice to the instrumentalizing form of Western rationality. As such, the novel performs a postcolonial decentering of futuricity from Western capitalist epistemology, eschewing a mastery of the past to reopen the possibility of a future beyond imperial logic.
13 citations
TL;DR: Mcarthy's Remainder as mentioned in this paper debunks the conventions of trauma fiction, showing how trauma operates across the domains of the social, the somatic, and the psychological, and inaugurates a different account of the linkage of literature and trauma.
Abstract: In the last few years, Tom Mcarthy has launched a sustained campaign against the pieties of the traditional British novel. His debut novel Remainder sets out to debunk the conventions of trauma fiction, that, despite its emphasis on fragmentation, repetition, and temporal dislocation, often continues to rely on the conventions of psychological realism. In Remainder , trauma emerges not as a psychological event, but rather as an intractable, dysphoric, subjectless affect. Showing how trauma operates across the domains of the social, the somatic, and the psychological, the novel inaugurates a different account of the linkage of literature and trauma.
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the issue of what it means to live an authentic life in the twenty-first century has been a significant trope in recent British fiction, and locates a profound psychological anxiety as the dominant mode for engaging with authentic subjectification.
Abstract: This essay argues that the issue of what it means to live an authentic life in the twenty-first century has been a significant trope in recent British fiction. Negotiating between universalizing humanist perspectives and the radically individualizing politics of late-capitalist philosophy, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts pose the question of whether any authenticity of the self can be imagined in an increasingly globalized, mediated, and digitalized world. Contextualizing these novels within contemporary British writing, this essay locates a profound psychological anxiety as the dominant mode for engaging with authentic subjectification.
11 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that Octavia Butler's Fledgling traces, in the transformation of the protagonist Shori from mere zoē into bios, the evolution of a posthumanist condition where vampires coevolve with humans.
Abstract: This essay argues that Octavia Butler’s Fledgling traces, in the transformation of the protagonist Shori from mere zoē into bios , the evolution of a posthumanist condition where vampires coevolve with humans. This occurs in three stages before climaxing in a posthumanist corporeality that involves a multispecies biological citizenship. Shori’s biovalue and biological citizenship is at once corporeal and moral. Biovalue in Butler’s posthumanist vision, I conclude, inheres in the moral enhancement of Shori and is the result of her multispecies citizenship.
11 citations
TL;DR: Morrison's A Mercy as mentioned in this paper is the counterwriting of a negative community, forged on affiliations and affects, as much as conflict and inequalities, which define the early beginnings of modernity in America; this community remains on the edges of the national imaginary and betrays another history of community in modernity, not yet bound or enchanted by the national community.
Abstract: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is the counterwriting of a negative community, forged on affiliations and affects, as much as conflict and inequalities, which define the early beginnings of modernity in America; this community remains on the edges of the national imaginary and betrays another history of community in modernity, not yet bound or enchanted by the myth of the national community. In her postnational narration of this prenational negative community, Morrison problematizes the concept of the exceptional community that runs at the expense of the constituencies and their communities defined as liminal, dysfunctional, and always already in the negative.
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that Taylor's non-contemporaneous or "metachronous" temporalities reconfigure narrative time within the broader context of increasingly postsecular questions of final judgment.
Abstract: This article interrogates representations of time in the novels of Sam Taylor. Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s utopian philosophical framework, I argue that Taylor’s non-contemporaneous or “metachronous” temporalities reconfigure narrative time within the broader context of increasingly post-secular questions of final judgment. Rather than recapitulating the “Arcadian revenge” of SF ecocatastrophes, Taylor’s nonanthropocentric glimpses of futurity enable us to move beyond the dichotomy of pastoral Arcadia/savage wilderness in twenty-first-century fiction. A comparative reading of Bloch’s writings on natural futurity and Taylor’s novels thus helps us reorient the theorization of temporality, suggesting new directions for post-apocalyptic, ecocritical, and utopian literary analysis.
9 citations
TL;DR: In the wake of late-twentieth-century critiques of humanism in general and of human rights in particular, what basis remains for robust claims on behalf of the rights of humans? Through readings of work by Ishmael Bead, Dave Eggers, Helon Habila, and Chris Abani, the authors suggests that a new generation of twenty-first-century authors have learned the lessons of those critiques but nevertheless refuse to abandon the human rights project altogether.
Abstract: In the wake of late-twentieth-century critiques of humanism in general and of human rights in particular, what basis remains for robust claims on behalf of the rights of humans? Through readings of work by Ishmael Bead, Dave Eggers, Helon Habila, and Chris Abani, this article suggests that a new generation of twenty-first-century authors have learned the lessons of those critiques but nevertheless refuse to abandon the human rights project altogether. Instead, each of these authors develops unique models of reference that struggle to overcome the impasse between universality and particularity that has historically plagued debates about human rights.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors show how Capote's story about homophobic bullying opens rich avenues for reconsidering the structures of queerness and normativity, instead of presenting queerness as an antirelational force opposed to sociality, Capote renders it as something unremarkable, even perversely mundane, deflecting attention away from questions of identity to more urgent concerns of ethics and justice.
Abstract: This essay shows how Truman Capote's story about homophobic bullying opens rich avenues for reconsidering the structures of queerness and normativity. Instead of presenting queerness as an antirelational force opposed to sociality, Capote renders it as something unremarkable, even perversely mundane, deflecting attention away from questions of identity to more urgent concerns of ethics and justice. Writing against the homonormative militancy of the burgeoning gay liberation movement, Capote strategically redeploys the notion of southern hospitality to rearrange both regional and national normativities and reaffirm the queer's open inclusion within society.
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TL;DR: The MFS Special Issue on New British Fiction as discussed by the authors discusses new British fiction in broadly generational, aesthetic, and cultural contexts, and briefly introduces each of the ten essays in the issue.
Abstract: This is the guest editor’s Introduction to the MFS Special Issue on “New British Fiction.” The essay discusses new British fiction in broadly generational, aesthetic, and cultural contexts, and briefly introduces each of the ten essays in the issue.
TL;DR: The response of European modernism to the invention of flush toilets and public restrooms in the first decades of the twentieth century, arguing that modernist writers such as James Joyce and Jean Rhys subverted dominant attitudes toward privacy, propriety, and femininity via images of women using toilets and restrooms as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This article considers the response of European modernism to the invention of flush toilets and public restrooms in the first decades of the twentieth century, arguing that modernist writers such as James Joyce and Jean Rhys subverted dominant attitudes toward privacy, propriety, and femininity via images of women using toilets and restrooms. It considers Ulysses and Good Morning, Midnight within the context of debates surrounding women, cleanliness, and public urban space. It also argues that modernist and avant-garde art can be characterized by its representations of dirt and excrement, for which it was often censored or banned.
TL;DR: The authors examine the ethical import of Morrison's eighth novel, Love (2003), through analysis of its narrative forms, and foreground narrative ethics as the figurative, as showing rather than telling and signifying.
Abstract: This study seeks to examine the ethical import of Morrison's eighth novel, Love (2003), through analysis of its narrative forms. With a complex weaving of narrative voices that offer oppositional points of views, Love demands that readers reconsider what they have been told. By foregrounding narrative ethics as the figurative, as showing rather than telling and signifying, this paper closely examines Love 's narrative voices.
TL;DR: This article used irony to suggest that the contradictions of ethical representation are rooted in South Africa's racial history and argued that ethical representation can be successfully achieved through irony because the other can be addressed only indirectly.
Abstract: This essay uses Kierkegaard and Schlegel’s concept of philosophical irony to read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace . In the novel Coetzee uses irony to suggest that the contradictions of ethical representation are rooted in South Africa’s racial history. In effect, the novel argues that in South Africa ethical representation can be successfully achieved through irony because the other can be addressed only indirectly. Disgrace therefore speaks with a forked tongue, a deliberate avoidance of the priorities of literary realism by which Coetzee suggests that reticence about the other—and acknowledgement of the failure to capture the other as a complex being in time and space—is more ethical than realistic portrayal.
TL;DR: The authors argued that a cognitively-informed analysis of the contemporary novel not only can reformulate our understanding of specific novels, but also can provide new perspectives on problems inherent within critical construction of literary postmodernism.
Abstract: This essay outlines the formal characteristics and critical relevance of the “Multiple Drafts Novel,” a neuroscientifically-informed subgenre whose prominence is often obscured by the dominance of social and historical concerns in studies of contemporary British fiction. By reading a sequence of novels by Andrew Crumey, Tom McCarthy, and David Mitchell, alongside Daniel Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness, this essay argues that a cognitively-informed analysis of the contemporary novel not only can reformulate our understanding of specific novels, but also can provide new perspectives on problems inherent within critical construction of literary postmodernism.
TL;DR: Gordimer as mentioned in this paper dramatizes how the errant energies of the postcolonial as event exceed paradoxical discourses of national exceptionalism, while illustrating the weight of mounting failures of postapartheid social and economic transformations in a world of global capital.
Abstract: Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup dramatizes how the errant energies of the postcolonial as event exceed paradoxical discourses of national exceptionalism, while illustrating the weight of mounting failures of postapartheid social and economic transformations in a world of global capital. Through her masterful use of passive voice, her complex framing of characters as effects of discourses, racialization, material determinations, and time, Gordimer registers the “facts” of the event and forces of time irreducible to history. In doing so, Gordimer highlights expressions of the event insinuated into bodily action and collectivities, impersonal forces that might precipitate new political futures.
TL;DR: The Accidental as mentioned in this paper explores Ali Smith's The Accidental both as a negotiation and critique of this fashion, and argues that the novel reaffirms trauma theory's importance, even as it criticizes post-9/11 appropriations of traumatic sentiment.
Abstract: Noting a recent critical trend to read contemporary fiction in terms of trauma theory, this article explores Ali Smith’s The Accidental both as a negotiation and critique of this fashion. Recognizing trauma’s centrality in the novel in terms of personal guilt and public catastrophe in relation to an implicit Iraq War background, I argue that the novel reaffirms trauma theory’s importance, even as it criticizes post-9/11 appropriations of traumatic sentiment. By undermining romantic and patriarchal readings of trauma as the function of a state-of-alert, the novel satirizes salient post-9/11 discourses and reaffirms its final unease with trauma culture.
TL;DR: This article traced Burnside's audacious strategies of ecological description and reflected on the political and phenomenological purposes of evoking natural landscapes together with the consolations that are generated by the act of evocation itself.
Abstract: John Burnside’s prominence has arguably been achieved through his award-winning poetry rather than through his fiction. Indeed, his preoccupation with the numinous quality of ordinary environments seems most suitably articulated in lyric rather than narrative form. This article, however, reconsiders his virtuosity as a novelist, exploring the way Glister and A Summer of Drowning reinvigorate the practice of regional writing. Tracing Burnside’s audacious strategies of ecological description, the essay charts his concern with reflecting on the political and phenomenological purposes of evoking natural landscapes together with the consolations that are generated by the act of evocation itself.
TL;DR: In this article, the poetics and thought of Rainer Maria Rilke, the major German poet of the early 20th century, are explored in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Abstract: The paper deals with a central concern in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow - the poetics and thought of Rainer Maria Rilke, the major German poet of the early 20th century. Although cited throughout Pynchon's novel, perplexingly Rilke receives scant attention from the text's many commentators, a situation that's become something of a lacuna in Pynchon studies. Addressing this gap, my study shows how Pynchon uses his two central characters to engage critically with Rilke's Elegies and Sonnets. He reads Rilke contextually and thematically to explore Weimar irrationality as preparation for Nazism, to develop a way of interpreting the social dynamics of the interwar period, and to demonstrate that Rilke's variety of neo-Romanticism and its avatars reveal an unconscious ideological basis in the fetish of the commodity. Thus the essay tracks the relation between a close attention to Rilke's verse and Pynchon's historiographical and aesthetic approach more generally.
TL;DR: The authors examines Alejo Carpentier's novel iEcue-yamba-O! within the historical context of Pan Americanism, particularly the First Pan-American Conference on Eugenics held in Havana in 1927.
Abstract: This article examines Alejo Carpentier's novel iEcue-Yamba-O! within the historical context of Pan Americanism, particularly the First Pan-American Conference on Eugenics held in Havana in 1927. The conference aimed to establish a set of criteria for identifying so-called degenerates throughout the hemisphere. But, while this was taking place, Carpentier was imprisoned in a nearby Havana jail, surrounded by the Afro Cubans who had been labeled degenerates and criminals by the Cuban state. I read iEcue-Yamba-O! as a rebuttal to the eugenicists and the state since it presents a unified vision of black labor in the hemisphere.
TL;DR: The first of these influential but critically neglected novels arrived just as Indian anticolonial terrorism had begun to incite drastic legislative powers of detention as discussed by the authors, and in terms that closely anticipate Agamben's figure of homo sacer, the narrative endorses instead the grounds for a wholly modern and unobstructed form of sovereign violence.
Abstract: In 1908 the novelist Flora Annie Steel turned her attention to historical fiction centered on the Mughal emperors. The first of these influential but critically neglected novels arrived just as Indian anticolonial terrorism had begun to incite drastic legislative powers of detention. Recasting the paradox of liberal imperialism in the form of Akbar's liberalizing impulse, Steel openly challenges the colonial rule of law. Prophetic of later British responses to mass nationalist mobilization, and in terms that closely anticipate Agamben's figure of homo sacer , the narrative endorses instead the grounds for a wholly modern and unobstructed form of sovereign violence.
TL;DR: This paper worked the insights of Edward Said, Mahmood Mamdani, and V. S. Naipaul to elaborate a style of reading that is attuned to the historical formation of the colonial periphery.
Abstract: This essay works the insights of Edward Said, Mahmood Mamdani, and V. S. Naipaul to elaborate a style of reading that is attuned to the historical formation of the colonial periphery.
TL;DR: The authors argue that Coetzee's novel Disgrace instantiates a posthumanist form of ethical thinking, an ethics that takes us beyond a humanist framework, making it possible to imagine the ethical subject as no longer exclusively human.
Abstract: This article argues that J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace instantiates a posthumanist form of ethical thinking—an ethics that takes us beyond a humanist framework, making it possible to imagine the ethical subject as no longer exclusively human. It posits that Coetzee’s ethics, which is grounded in a Levinasian ethics of the Other that is extended to animals, depends on the text’s literary elements—specifically, on the intertextual relationship between Disgrace and Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” The latter, this article argues, provides the model of “the disgrace” that Coetzee takes up and reimagines within his work.
TL;DR: The End of the Road as mentioned in this paper is a sourcebook for Barth's later ideas regarding the relation of art to morality in the context of the postwar cultural divide between modernism and mass culture.
Abstract: John Barth's short second novel The End of the Road acted as a sourcebook for his later ideas regarding the relation of art to morality in the context of the postwar cultural divide between modernism and mass culture. The narrator's paralysis in the face of practical life, and the therapies of "motion" he adopts to traverse the mass cultural landscape, expressed the incommensurability of the aesthetic sphere with everyday life. The critical potential of Barth's emphasis on form is inseparable from the ambiguous figure of Jacob Horner, the narrator who lightens his moral commitments to others by claiming the aesthetic alibi.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider how Monica Ali's novel In the Kitchen is informed by and participates in the circulation of ideas about the superior psychology of the flexible self, a self crucial to the ideologies of work manifest in neoliberal management practice and government policy.
Abstract: This article considers how Monica Ali’s novel In the Kitchen is informed by and participates in the circulation of ideas about the superior psychology of the flexible self, a self crucial to the ideologies of work manifest in neoliberal management practice and government policy. I argue that, as it refracts Ali’s own controversial career, the novel is a form of the same self-referencing introspection that it positions at the heart of flexible, creative, self-managing work.
TL;DR: The authors examine Ali's Brick Lane and reveal the extent to which cultural claims about race, language, assimilation, and authenticity remain anchored in naturalized identity claims about what it means for former colonial migrants to belong in Britain today.
Abstract: This essay examines Monica Ali’s Brick Lane ’s tactics of cultural preservation, both dominant and minor, that routinely frame biologically inflected claims about migrant belonging in Britain. Working within and against theories of biopolitics, I trace how the novel is implicated in public discourses about the cultural demands of citizenship for migrants to Britain who are often mired in an irreducibly corporeal shadow language. Rather than social constructs, the uproar surrounding the publication of Brick Lane divulges the extent to which cultural claims about race, language, assimilation, and authenticity remain anchored in naturalized identity claims about what it means for former colonial migrants to belong in Britain today.