Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2016"
TL;DR: The authors explored how this narrative of father and son walking a dead landscape speaks to contemporary environmental concerns, contrasting a lost humanity (that is, being both human and humane) against present inhumanity, locating the measure of humanity in the father's care for his son.
Abstract: Though it never names its ecological catastrophe, The Road is increasingly read as a climate change novel. I explore how this narrative of father and son walking a dead landscape speaks to contemporary environmental concerns. Adapting apocalyptic techniques, it contrasts a lost humanity (that is, being both human and humane) against present inhumanity, locating the measure of humanity in the father's care for his son. Thus, the novel resonates with contemporary anxieties about caring for the future, anxieties often expressed in the figure of the child. The novel's conclusion, however, affords the opportunity of rising above such anxieties.
20 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Du Bois's Dark Princess describes the fashioning and self-fashioning of a black internationalist hero, while also distinguishing between the masculinized pursuit of beauty and justice and the feminized cultivation of personal appearance.
Abstract: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess describes the fashioning and self-fashioning of a black internationalist hero, while also distinguishing between the masculinized pursuit of beauty and justice and the feminized cultivation of personal appearance. This article argues that such distinctions respond to the alternative discourses of beauty, internationalism, empire, and Afro-Orientalism that emerge in the advertisements, salons, and lifestyles of black beauty culturalists Madam C.J. and A’Lelia Walker. Du Bois and the Walkers offer competing accounts of what spaces, practices, and images of beauty support desired forms of community, intimacy, and agency on a global scale.
8 citations
TL;DR: A comprehensive analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's sustained engagement with French and British decadent writing, arguing that this relationship was more significant to Fitzgerald's literary practice than has been acknowledged, is given in this paper.
Abstract: This article offers a comprehensive analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sustained engagement with French and British decadent writing, arguing that this relationship was more significant to Fitzgerald’s literary practice than has been acknowledged. The articlebegins with Fitzgerald’s youthful infatuation with decadence at Princeton, explores his critique of decadence in The Great Gatsby, and concludes with his ambivalent revisiting of the literatures of decaying Europe in Tender Is the Night. The essay uses the symbol of the Dance of Death and the motif of the dying fall as indexes for Fitzgerald’s shifting relationship to this European model of decline.
6 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that Love Medicine makes visible the subject of collective rights of recent indigenous political activism by reshaping the usual conflict between individual protagonists and the societies they inhabit, the conflict between what Georg Lukacs calls "the soul and the world".
Abstract: This essay argues that Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine makes visible the subject of collective rights of recent indigenous political activism by reshaping the usual conflict between individual protagonists and the societies they inhabit, the conflict between what Georg Lukacs calls “the soul and the world.” Moreover, I contend that, while tribalist, the novel’s politics of representation differ from those of Native American nationalism, which tasks literature and criticism with establishing a tribal nation’s cultural distinctiveness.
6 citations
TL;DR: Tropic of Orange as discussed by the authors rethinks postmodernism, its relationship to neoliberalism, and the political implications of a form of collectivity modeled on the World Wide Web.
Abstract: Tropic of Orange rethinks postmodernism, its relationship to neoliberalism, and the political implications of a form of collectivity modeled on the World Wide Web. In Yamashita’s novel, the network is the privileged figure for the ontological condition of the neoliberal world order and for a mode of postnational belonging endowed with the potential to instigate radical change. As the novel struggles with this potential, it prefigures and significantly complicates the controversial vision of postmodern politics that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri began elaborating three years after the novel came to press.
6 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an aesthetic that combines the act of listening with an environmental awareness in ways that transform matter into both the receptacle and the bearer of silenced indigenous voices is explored.
Abstract: This essay engages with the social, cultural, and environmental legacies of colonialism and globalization by investigating acoustic ecologies in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things . It draws on sound studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and new materialist perspectives to reveal an aesthetic that combines the act of listening with an environmental awareness in ways that transform matter into both the receptacle and the bearer of silenced indigenous voices. Countering ocularcentric paradigms, it shows that modernity is characterized as much by particular ideas about sound as it is by regimes of visuality and induces a more viscerally engaged, ecologically sensitive humanism.
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the literary tropes that shaped the mid-twentieth-century fascination with the Collyer brothers, and traces this genealogy through four successive fictionalizations of their lives by Marcia Davenport, Stephen King, Charles Johnson and E. L. Doctorow.
Abstract: Since their deaths, Homer and Langley Collyer have become mainstays in conversations about hoarding, as well as characters in numerous pieces of modern fiction. This essay examines the literary tropes that shaped the mid-twentieth-century fascination with the brothers. It traces this genealogy through four successive fictionalizations of the Collyers’ lives by Marcia Davenport, Stephen King, Charles Johnson, and E. L. Doctorow. Ultimately, the Collyers occasion a unique opportunity to think about modern fiction’s role in the contemporary invention of the hoarder.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors of contemporary Chinese novelists are discussed in a historical and critical way with regard to their relations with world literature, and they also discuss the relationship between contemporary Chinese literature and classical Chinese literature.
Abstract: Fiction in the history of modern Chinese literature has been increasingly dominating literary production, ranking the top among all the genres. Contemporary Chinese fiction is thus a universally recognized major literary genre that has long been practiced in a glocalized Chinese context although it has been largely influenced by its Western counterpart. Thus it has been qualified enough to dialogue with both classical Chinese fiction as well as Western texts. In this introductory article eminent contemporary Chinese novelists are also discussed in a historical and critical way with regard to their relations with world literature.
4 citations
TL;DR: The romance novel is often described as a conservative genre, inflexible in its narrative forms and committed to reproducing traditional social structures as mentioned in this paper, yet historically the genre has had a disruptive rather than stabilizing effect on British cultural identity.
Abstract: The romance novel is often described as a conservative genre, inflexible in its narrative forms and committed to reproducing traditional social structures. Yet historically the genre has had a disruptive rather than stabilizing effect on British cultural identity. This article reads Mary Renault’s first romance novel, Purposes of Love, against the backdrop of interwar attacks on popular fiction. Renault’s startlingly dark novels reveal a common thread between the conservative commitments of the romance and the eugenics-inflected rhetoric of highbrow literary criticism. The bleakness of their purportedly happy endings also raises questions about the political investments of contemporary recovery projects.
4 citations
TL;DR: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides as mentioned in this paper parodies Wallace's public battles with his postmodern forebears and transforms Bloom's Oedipal model of artistic influence into a love triangle.
Abstract: It is no mere coincidence that the fictional character Leonard Bankhead in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot resembles the author David Foster Wallace. By directly invoking Wallace, Eugenides engages in an artistic battle with Wallace that both parodies Wallace’s public battles with his postmodern forebears and transforms Harold Bloom’s Oedipal model of artistic influence into a love triangle. The Marriage Plot not only revives the traditional love story through metafictional parody but also playfully pits Eugenides against Wallace as rivals for the reader’s affection.
4 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined Yan Lianke's literary method of shenshi zhuyi (mythorealism) evidenced in Lenin's Kisses and Garden No. 711: The Ultimate Last Memo of Beijing and examined Yan's post-Maoist representations of macro-and micro-shenshi, political dystopia and ecocritical utopia, the humiliated and insulted and their silence and speech.
Abstract: This article considers Yan Lianke’s literary method of shenshi zhuyi (mythorealism) evidenced in Lenin’s Kisses and Garden No. 711: The Ultimate Last Memo of Beijing and examines Yan’s post-Maoist representations of macro- and micro- shenshi (mythoreality), political dystopia and ecocritical utopia, the humiliated and insulted and their silence and speech, as well as the large-scale ferocity of slow violence in the country and city.
TL;DR: From Willa Cather's first novel to her last, the railroad served as a powerful figure for modernity, westward expansion, and class ascent as mentioned in this paper, and Cather used it to stage a multifaceted, if ambivalent, critique of class inequality in US culture.
Abstract: From Willa Cather’s first novel to her last, the railroad served as a powerful figure for modernity, westward expansion, and class ascent. Advantaged by her family’s arrival in Nebraska during boom times and expanded access to job markets and inspirational vacations via the railroads, Cather provides many friendly briefs on their behalf. Yet in confronting women’s uncertain status in the bourgeois narrative of ascent and displaying a complex mixture of attitudes toward Native Americans and the working classes, Cather’s railroad-age fiction came ultimately to stage a multifaceted, if ambivalent, critique of class inequality in US culture.
TL;DR: The authors argues that A Farewell to Arms flattens the lived world inhabited by reader and character in order to enact at the level of representation a dynamic of absent presence that registers Frederic's traumatic loss of Catherine.
Abstract: Despite its enumeration of sensory details and tangible specifics, A Farewell to Arms often resists and even refuses imaginative access to the love story it creates. Rather than reading the narrative’s resistance as a necessary outcome of Hemingway’s minimalist style, this essay argues that the novel flattens the lived world inhabited by reader and character in order to enact at the level of representation a dynamic of absent presence that registers Frederic’s traumatic loss of Catherine.
TL;DR: Delany's The Mad Man as mentioned in this paper revises the ideological tenants of the classical bildungsroman through the figure of the racialized homeless, and argues that the novel takes up the narrative conventions of the classic bi-linear narrative in order to unthink the liberal constraints of freedom and belonging established by possessive individualism.
Abstract: This article examines Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man for the way it revises the ideological tenants of the classical bildungsroman through the figure of the racialized homeless. In particular, it argues that the novel takes up the narrative conventions of the classic bildungsroman in order to unthink the liberal constraints of freedom and belonging established by possessive individualism. By troubling the aesthetic ideas of self-ownership within the classic bildungsroman, the novel not only “turns out” possessive individualism but generates an alternative account of freedom and belonging that reckons with the racialized and gendered history of self-ownership and property.
TL;DR: The authors identified the way famous names mediated the relationship between US cultural insecurity and secure consumer behavior by reading Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes alongside US film branding and shopping guides to Europe.
Abstract: This article identifies the way famous names mediated the relationship between US cultural insecurity and secure consumer behavior by reading Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes alongside US film branding and shopping guides to Europe. In Blondes , Loos establishes a new kind of value based on recognizable brand names such as Cartier and Ritz. Branding and franchising luxury goods resonated with a US desire to democratize high culture, with the effect of rewriting the grand tour narrative as a shopping expedition.
TL;DR: The authors argue that Geling's translation of Jinling Shisan Chai highlights the impossibility of reconstituting material history through narrative and calls for a reassessment of the ethics of historical fiction.
Abstract: The English translation of Yan Geling’s Jinling Shisan Chai includes several new additions that are suggestive of key differences between Chinese and Western conceptions of narrative and history. Whereas the Chinese original challenges monolithic interpretations of history with a self-consciously mythologized reading of the past, the international version seeks to counter revisionist histories and the cynicism of the assumed Western reader with additions that emphasize the materiality of the historical event. I argue that the additions highlight the impossibility of reconstituting material history through narrative and calls for a reassessment of the ethics of historical fiction.
TL;DR: The authors examines scenes portraying care for the aging, ill, and dying across J.M. Coetzee's fiction and examines how this ideal is constrained by a global neoliberal regime that conceives of dying as a crisis to be managed.
Abstract: This essay examines scenes portrayingcare for the aging, ill, and dying across J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. Even as Coetzee’s work models an ideal of hospice that resonates with Derrida’s conception of unconditional hospitality, it also attends to how this ideal is constrained by a global neoliberal regime that conceives of dying as a crisis to be managed. Coetzee’s fiction envisions both care for the dying and dying itself not only as managed, routinized labor but also as potentially unmanageable acts of creation.
TL;DR: Burstein's Cold Modernism is a welcome addition to the body and breadth of what we today understand as the transatlantic modernist movement as mentioned in this paper, and it's recovery of less canonical works and its important integration of the claims of modernity on these texts make it a pleasurable, timely read and merit its inclusion in undergraduate and graduate coursework.
Abstract: games, gambling, addiction, and the psychology of play. While less integrated than some of her earlier chapters, Burstein's analysis of Balthus offers intuitive analyses of these works and suggests the directions that her vision of cold modernism might be applied. Burstein's Cold Modernism is a welcome addition to the body and breadth of what we today understand as the transatlantic modernist movement. It's recovery of less canonical works and its important integration of the claims of modernity on these texts make it a pleasurable, timely read and merit its inclusion in undergraduate and graduate coursework.
TL;DR: This article argued that the phrase "under four eyes" appears twice in the text of Ford Madox Ford's most influential novel, The Good Soldier, and although it may seem generic enough to be overlooked, it is not only integral to the novel's themes of sight, impression, and privacy, but also, in its translation from the German idiom unter vier Augen, indicative of Ford's ambivalent, shifting performance of national identity during World War I.
Abstract: The phrase “under four eyes” appears twice in the text of Ford Madox Ford’s most influential novel, The Good Soldier , and although it may seem generic enough to be overlooked, this article argues that it is not only integral to the novel’s themes of sight, impression, and privacy, but also, in its translation from the German idiom unter vier Augen , indicative of Ford’s ambivalent, shifting performance of national identity during World War I. This article explores the connections between The Good Soldier and Ford’s engagement with anti-German propaganda and translation, as well as his later amendment of these views in his postwar work, Parade’s End .
TL;DR: This article explored work by Chinese writers of the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that the period between the Cultural Revolution and the late twentieth century economic transformations produced a literary surge not known in mainland China since the May Fourth writers.
Abstract: This essay explores work by Chinese writers of the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that the period between the Cultural Revolution and the late twentieth century economic transformations produced a literary surge not known in mainland China since the May Fourth writers. Drawing on work by Ge Fei, Can Xue, Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, this essay examines how Chinese writers produced strategies to convey a profound sense of psychic and temporal disorientation and historical suspension. Doggedly avoiding doctrines of historical progressiveness, these writers uproot and contort reality and collapse boundaries between the past and present.
TL;DR: In this article, a critical reevaluation of Hagedorn's Dogeaters is presented, where the author is read alongside the late nineteenth-century Filipino patriot and national hero Jose Rizal.
Abstract: This article calls for a critical reevaluation of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters that situates Hagedorn within the historical specificity of the Philippines during multiple occupations. Though she is typically read as an Asian American author, reading Hagedorn back into the Philippines reveals new literary traditions that inform her work. Specifically, reading Hagedorn alongside the late nineteenth-century Filipino patriot and national hero Jose Rizal reveals a previously unidentified genre, the guerrilla conversion narrative.
TL;DR: This article identified a typology of Chinese metafiction in terms of four innovative modes, and Chinese met-afiction from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s presents different densities along the range of these four modes.
Abstract: Compared with its Western counterpart, Chinese metafiction is a complicated case that flourished in the mixture of modernism and postmodernism and of local sentiments and the globalized context. While Chinese postmodernism has been adequately examined, Chinese metafiction has seldom been explored. To approach the core of Chinese modern/postmodern metafiction, a holistic view is required and a typology is to be established. I identify a typology of Chinese metafiction in terms of four innovative modes, and Chinese metafiction from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s presents different densities along the range of these four modes.
TL;DR: Forster's A Passage to India as discussed by the authors, an example of modernist orientalism, draws its archive from works of enlightenment Orientalism, including Fay's Original Letters from India and Gibbes's Hartly House, Calcutta.
Abstract: This essay asks that we read E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India in light of its relationship to an eighteenth-century feminist Orientalism, signified by early female writers such as Eliza Fay and Phebe Gibbes. It argues that the novel, an example of modernist Orientalism, draws its archive from works of enlightenment Orientalism, including Fay’s Original Letters from India and Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta . Far from trying to resolve questions of empire or offering a universal feminism, the novel negotiates and rewrites the place of the bourgeois woman to the metropolis by way of the colony.
TL;DR: The authors argue that David Foster Wallace, across his career, was subtly invested in the possibilities for defining community value in varied structures of insurance, from the New Deal's transformation of the welfare state to the neoliberal economics of for-profit health insurance.
Abstract: This article argues that David Foster Wallace, across his career, was subtly invested in the possibilities for defining community value in varied structures of insurance, from the New Deal’s transformation of the welfare state to the neoliberal economics of for-profit health insurance. Historicizing Wallace and deciphering the overlooked ways in which he deploys economics, the article focuses on readings of “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (1989), “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” (2004), and “Oblivion” (2004), while also linking the latter two to the development of The Pale King (2011).
TL;DR: This paper read the telephone in Muriel Spark's postwar novels Memento Mori (1959) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963) as an antagonistic medium that exposes a pervasive anxiety about communication and surveillance.
Abstract: “Call and Answer: Muriel Spark and Media Culture” reads the telephone in Muriel Spark’s postwar novels Memento Mori (1959) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963) as an antagonistic medium that exposes a pervasive anxiety about communication and surveillance. The essay argues that reading Spark’s postwar novels through the lens of contemporary media culture gives us new purchase on her as a writer informed by machine age modernism, whose preoccupation with media demands that we also consider how her particular historical moment breeds a culture of surveillance that we are inextricably tethered to today.
TL;DR: Based on a careful analysis of Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, the authors discusses how Gao's writings reflect the various dilemmas he has gone through.
Abstract: Based on a careful analysis of Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, this paper discusses how Gao’s writings reflect the various dilemmas he has gone through. The questions that will be addressed include, What happened to his pursuit of individualism at a time of increasing enforcement of collectivism? In what ways does his fiction become a testimony to the Cultural Revolution? How is Gao’s exilic narrative of China’s past different from that of other Chinese writers? How is Gao able to both deconstruct and reconstruct Chineseness in his novels?
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on acts of recovery in women's African American literature in the second half of the twentieth century, seeking to revise and expand our understanding of community, black feminism, and the role of literary form in constructions of nation and identity.
Abstract: This essay reviews Carmen L. Phelps’s Visionary Women Writers of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement and Courtney Thorsson’s Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels . Both monographs focus on acts of recovery in women’s African American literature in the second half of the twentieth century, seeking to revise and expand our understanding of community, black feminism, and the role of literary form in constructions of nation and identity.
TL;DR: In this paper, the intersection between trends in British fiction and architecture during the socially and culturally transformative years of the late 1950s is considered, arguing that the architectural and literary innovations of this period turned away from the recent past to create a new set of narrative and material codes that valued poetic renderings of reality, transparency, fluidity, and the freedom to move and to consume at will.
Abstract: This essay considers the intersection between trends in British fiction and architecture during the socially and culturally transformative years of the late 1950s. Reading Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners (1959) alongside Alison and Peter Smithson’s New Brutalism-inspired House of the Future (1956), the essay argues that the architectural and literary innovations of this period turned away from the recent past to create a new set of narrative and material codes that valued poetic renderings of reality, transparency, fluidity, and the freedom to move and to consume at will.