Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2017"
TL;DR: This article revisited the racial dynamics of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and found that the Oompa-Loompas, African pygmies in the novel's first drafts, reflect its racism, their cuteness justifying coerced labor and white supremacy.
Abstract: This essay reconsiders the racial dynamics of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). The Oompa-Loompas, African pygmies in the novel's first drafts, reflect its racism, their cuteness justifying coerced labor and white supremacy. An early manuscript version, "Charlie's Chocolate Boy," features a black protagonist trapped in a chocolate mold. Dahl thus connects industrial food production with racialization. In the final version of the novel, the chocolate factory recolors and transforms the bodies of white children, now marked and vulnerable. This ethical lesson complicates the seeming endorsement of white privilege in Charlie's ascent in the Great Glass Elevator.
28 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how such images introduce the War on Terror to the US domestic sphere through fantasies of imperialist nostalgia, and explore how these images introduce war on terrorism to women's mass-media publications such as The Martha Blog and Vogue.
Abstract: In recent years, photographs featuring drones at home have appeared in women's mass-media publications such as The Martha Blog and Vogue . This essay explores how such images introduce the War on Terror to the US domestic sphere through fantasies of imperialist nostalgia.
21 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the military failures, damaged archives, cultural silences, trauma, and human costs of the Iraq War, and suggested that much recent war writing by Kevin Powers, Brian Turner, Sinan Antoon, and the anonymous Iraqi blogger Riverbend speaks against postwar recovery in striking ways.
Abstract: Recent Iraq War literature has often been appropriated to serve the nationalist purpose of recovering from a conflict that lacks a stable place in history or memory. Focusing on Iraq War narratives that represent the recovery of bodies, living and dead, I explore the military failures, damaged archives, cultural silences, trauma, and human costs they uncover. I suggest here that much recent war writing by Kevin Powers, Brian Turner, Sinan Antoon, and the anonymous Iraqi blogger Riverbend speaks against postwar recovery—whether of bodies, archives, or nationalist and imperialist narratives—in striking ways.
14 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors emphasize the interconnections between wandering and dwelling in the context of Sebald's ambulatory narrative, The Rings of Saturn (1998), by using Heidegger's notion of "dwelling" and highlight the ways in which wandering, with its origin in the ancient human desire for movement and which seems to negate the impulse to dwell or be emplaced in a fixed location, not only transmutes in the contemporary consciousness into an alternative mode of dwelling but also leads to its actualization.
Abstract: This essay seeks to emphasize the interconnections between wandering and dwelling in the context of Sebald’s ambulatory narrative, The Rings of Saturn (1998). By using Heidegger’s notion of “dwelling,” it seeks to highlight the ways in which wandering, with its origin in the ancient human desire for movement and which seems to negate the impulse to dwell or be emplaced in a fixed location, not only transmutes in the contemporary consciousness into an alternative mode of dwelling but also leads to its actualization.
10 citations
TL;DR: Aslam's treatment of the military interventions in Afghanistan foregrounds slow and systemic violence, habitat diminishment, and ecosystem degradation, while upholding the resilience of the earth and humanity in deep time.
Abstract: This paper discusses Nadeem Aslam's Afghanistan-based novels as exemplifying the affordances of what I call the "geologic turn" in writing traumatic histories in the era of the Anthropocene. Through its attention to the earth as a medium of memory and to war as a multispecies ecology, Aslam's work brings into view geo-mediation—a nonlinguistic, nonhuman witness to human-borne disaster. Aslam's treatment of the military interventions in Afghanistan foregrounds slow and systemic violence, habitat diminishment, and ecosystem degradation, while upholding the resilience of the earth and humanity in deep time.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors veer from traditional commons thinking and historical scholarship on the interplay between labor and the environment to propose how knowledge work curbs privatization and resource capture.
Abstract: Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been revive the commons as place, as concept, and as narrative motivation. The losses that damaging resource extraction produces give rise to new models for sustaining the commons through work. Specifically, the novels’ women protagonists escape restrictive domesticity to become organic intellectuals who shore up the commons through activist and scientific labors that integrate locals’ experiential knowledge into environmentalist and research agendas. The novels veer from traditional commons thinking and historical scholarship on the interplay between labor and environment to propose how knowledge work curbs privatization and resource capture.
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that these texts call attention to women as what Mitchell and Snyder call narrative prostheses and begin to redress misreadings of women's role in contemporary war, and argue that women's stories are rarely represented or studied.
Abstract: Since the War on Terror began, female troops have increasingly participated in combat operations. Even as the wars have created the first known cluster of female combat amputees, their stories are rarely represented or studied. This neglect has resulted in physical and mental health consequences. This article addresses this omission through an analysis of literary representations of injured female troops by Gologorsky, Proulx, and Schultz. I argue that these texts call attention to women as what Mitchell and Snyder call narrative prostheses—artificial supports to male troops—and begin to redress misreadings of their role in contemporary war.
8 citations
TL;DR: Klein this paper suggests that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged provides one answer, revealing how shock's emergence as a form of neoliberal subject-making is rooted in the white flight anxieties about racializing and decaying urban cores that emerged in the postwar period.
Abstract: Naomi Klein opens The Shock Doctrine by comparing the psychological hypothesis that an array of shocks “could unmake and erase faulty minds” with Milton Friedman’s economic hypothesis that a course of painful policy shocks could return society to “pure capitalism.” Klein’s book raises the following question: why did shock become the dominant metaphor for economic and psychological modernization? This article suggests that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged provides one answer, revealing how shock’s emergence as a form of neoliberal subject-making is rooted in the white flight anxieties about racializing and decaying urban cores that emerged in the postwar period.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors analyzes the works of Anne Haverty and Donal Ryan to highlight how they use the tropes and lingering traumas of the Famine to criticize contemporary forms of gentrification.
Abstract: One of the defining features of the Celtic Tiger was a massive boom in construction that left a visible mark on the Irish landscape. This essay analyzes the works of Anne Haverty and Donal Ryan to highlight how they use the tropes and lingering traumas of the Famine to criticize contemporary forms of gentrification. In their texts, post-Celtic Tiger communities adopt the signifiers and consequences of a new famine; essentially, they articulate how physical changes to the Irish landscape constitute a “famine of gentrification” that makes land unable to sustain, both materially and culturally, an Irish community.
7 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the debates around this fraught question as it emerges in newspaper reportage, photography, confrontational art, and the fiction of the war, concluding with an exploration of fiction by non-American writers, in whose work there appears an attempt to reinscribe the absent bodies of the Iraq War.
Abstract: This essay explores the representation of the Iraq War dead. There is, as yet, no official count of those killed in Iraq. US military policy established a moratorium on representing the American dead, meaning that any images became contested. This essay examines the debates around this fraught question as it emerges in newspaper reportage, photography, confrontational art, and the fiction of the war. It ends with an exploration of fiction by non-American writers Sinan Antoon, Saad Hossain, and Ahmed Saadawi, in whose work there appears an attempt to reinscribe the absent bodies of the Iraq War.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the consequences of the dissolving distinction between battlespaces and domestic spaces and between military and civilian life are explored, including the changing ways we understand the chronology and finitude of war, various iterations of trauma, the racialization and gendering of war and the multifarious uses of combat technologies.
Abstract: In this introduction, we situate the contributors to this special issue within a nascent critical engagement with contemporary war narratives. We are interested in exploring the consequences of the dissolving distinction between battlespaces and domestic spaces and between military and civilian life; the changing ways we understand the chronology and finitude of war; the various iterations of trauma; the racialization and gendering of war; and the multifarious uses of combat technologies.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the fin de siecle writings of Grant Allen, George Gissing, and Mrs. Edward Kennard, arguing that women cyclists, numbering half a million in Britain in the mid-1890s, also participate in this modern culture of speed and lay a claim to a new modern subject energized and enhanced by mechanized speed.
Abstract: Speed is a new modern pleasure that allows individual power in manipulating movement and compensates the industrial subject for the oppressive efficiency of the factory system. This essay investigates the fin de siecle writings of Grant Allen, George Gissing, and Mrs. Edward Kennard. It argues that women cyclists, numbering half a million in Britain in the mid-1890s, also participate in this modern culture of speed and lay a claim to a new modern subject energized and enhanced by mechanized speed.
TL;DR: This paper read James Joyce as a regionalist: as a writer who deliberately represented his region with scrupulous attention to detail, and whose writing illustrates the complex and mutually informing relationship between the local and the global.
Abstract: This essay reads James Joyce as a regionalist: as a writer who deliberately represented his region with scrupulous attention to detail, and whose writing illustrates the complex and mutually informing relationship between the local and the global. Reading Joyce's stories in the context of the Irish Homestead (1895–1923), the journal of Ireland's agricultural cooperative movement, reveals how his stories borrow the regionalism of the journal's editorials and fiction but are distinguished by the use of modernist narrative techniques. This regional affect defines Joyce's modernism as grounded in the local ecology, history, and culture of his city.
TL;DR: The authors argue that through the formal strategy of multiple first-person narrators, several novels about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan decenter American experiences, link soldiers' voices to those of "others", and open up the question of "who counts" in war to include civilians, refugees, and other noncombatants.
Abstract: This essay argues that through the formal strategy of multiple first-person narrators, several novels about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan decenter American experiences, link soldiers' voices to those of "others," and open up the question of "who counts" in war to include civilians, refugees, and other noncombatants. Helen Benedict, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, and Michael Pitre shift the imaginative frame of war to include both the canonical trauma hero and the displaced and disempowered. This formal strategy requires readers to consider the consequences of US military policy and to reassess whose lives matter.
TL;DR: McCarthy's The Road as discussed by the authors examines central thematic and aesthetic elements of Anglo-Irish gothic literature in The Road and reveals the novel's critique of entrenched economic, racial, and gendered power in the US.
Abstract: Abstract:Images of consumption run throughout Cormac McCarthy's The Road, from evocations of a fossil fuel-driven economy to cannibalism. Taken together, grotesque and gothic images of consumption expose the connection between power brokerage and overconsumption or improper consumption of resources. Examining central thematic and aesthetic elements of Anglo-Irish gothic literature in The Road reveals the novel's critique of entrenched economic, racial, and gendered power in the US. The man's son, born after the apocalyptic event, represents through his generosity and exilic wandering the novel's antithesis to a geopolitical system characterized by hegemonic power over others and by rampant consumerism.
TL;DR: This paper examined the conflict between personal and collective memory manifested in some of James's autobiographical and fictional writings (The American Scene, The Bostonians, "Pandora", and "A Modern Warning") and focused on the ways in which his female protagonists confront and resist the dominant historical discourse inscribed in monuments and other sites of memory that officially reinforce patriotic national sentiments.
Abstract: Examining the conflict between personal and collective memory manifested in some of James's autobiographical and fictional writings ( The American Scene, The Bostonians , "Pandora," and "A Modern Warning"), this paper focuses on the ways in which his female protagonists confront and resist the dominant historical discourse inscribed in monuments and other sites of memory that officially reinforce patriotic national sentiments. Challenging the institutional function of collective memory and the shortcomings of American democracy, James's centers of consciousness rupture the cohesion targeted by national memorializing practices, offering a revisionist account of national identity and belonging.
TL;DR: The authors argued that pairing Hopkins's assertion of black American identity through ancient Ethiopian civilization with Walter McDougall's founding of white American lineage on disappearing American Indianness in The Hidden City elucidates the neatness and messiness of the genre's ideological functioning.
Abstract: This essay turns the critical focus on genre in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902-03) to the spatial and temporal logics of lost-race romance. It argues that pairing Hopkins's assertion of black American identity through ancient Ethiopian civilization with Walter McDougall's founding of white American lineage on disappearing American Indianness in The Hidden City (1891) elucidates the neatness and messiness of the genre's ideological functioning. Its imaginary shapes American racial identity by yoking colonial to national space and past to future, reaching across a socially turbulent present within the US that nevertheless emerges significantly in Hopkins's adoption.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the tone and function of citation, arguing that what is cited and how are both significant in terms of the citation quality and the relevance of citations.
Abstract: Abstract:This article asks whether and how enthusiasm can be read as a formal feature of texts and literary institutions in the contemporary period, as well as how enthusiasm produces literary value. I approach this question through an examination of Ali Smith's writing across genres, her reception in the context of literary prizes, and her curatorial work at literary festivals. This analysis pays particular attention to the tone and function of citation, arguing that what is cited and how are both significant. The article thus shows the ways in which enthusiasm is linked to the circular endorsement of literary value.
TL;DR: The Hurt Locker (2008) as discussed by the authors is a war film with gender dynamics that are markedly traditional for the era that would see the combat exclusion lifted for women and gay soldiers in the US military.
Abstract: In avoiding its war's controversial history and in its allegiance to the present moment, The Hurt Locker (2008) actually sharpened its resonance for its contemporary wartime audience. Its reliance on the seemingly discontinuous historicity of moviegoing both obscures and realizes how war films fashion citizenship. The film occupies familiar ground in the American war film genre and its frontier masculinity, with gender dynamics that are markedly traditional for the era that would see the combat exclusion lifted for women and gay soldiers in the US military. Ultimately, the film risks reducing viewers to the function of spectator-citizen-soldiers.
TL;DR: This paper argued that contemporary Mexican debates around indigenousness were absorbed by Lawrence as he prepared the novel and argued that the cultural projects of Mexican revolutionary nationalism in the 1920s provided a key impetus for the utopian thought experiments of The Plumed Serpent.
Abstract: Critical opinion is largely united in seeing D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent as a strange and troubling work, offering a puzzling synthesis of primitivism, idealized masculinity, and authoritarian politics. However, there has been little attempt to grapple with the book's Mexican setting beyond its function as site of cultural exoticism. This article argues that the cultural projects of Mexican revolutionary nationalism in the 1920s provided a key impetus for the utopian thought experiments of The Plumed Serpent. Specifically, the article contends that contemporary Mexican debates around indigenousness were absorbed by Lawrence as he prepared the novel.
TL;DR: Atonement as discussed by the authors reopens the country house as a space that demands both a historical double take and skepticism toward preemptive celebrations of social progress, exposing the way ''New Britain'' both erases and reproduces many of the more pernicious aspects of English history.
Abstract: Abstract:Atonement's depiction of the anachronistic English country house contravenes suppositions that similar spaces nostalgically commemorate an oppressive history. The novel instead explores the house as a historical fiction that continues to structure contemporary English culture. It exposes the way \"New Britain\" both erases and reproduces many of the more pernicious aspects of English history, commodifying and revising history in much the same way that English Heritage has been accused of doing. The novel reopens the country house as a space that demands both a historical double take and skepticism toward preemptive celebrations of social progress.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors of the post-World War I novels of Edith Wharton and Mary Roberts Rinehart are connected by striking plot similarities in their post-war novels, each of which draws on its author's journalistic expeditions to the front lines and highlights her fierce support for the Allies.
Abstract: Edith Wharton and popular romance novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, though not often studied together, are connected by striking plot similarities in their post-World War I novels, each of which draws on its author's journalistic expeditions to the front lines and highlights her fierce support for the Allies. Wharton's and Rinehart's shared pro-war politics fit uneasily into the canon of postwar literature, but these works merit further study because their complex treatment of soldier characters' sexuality challenges presumed narratives about female ignorance and male sexual libertinism during war and anticipates a modernist focus on the body as a locus of political meaning.
TL;DR: The authors argue that Pynchon deploys spiritualist imagery as an analogue for the complexities of modern communication, which displaces the human subject from its self-designated role as creator and/or controller of information.
Abstract: This paper addresses the relationship between spiritual communion and technological communications in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow . I argue that Pynchon deploys spiritualist imagery as an analogue for the complexities of modern communication, which displaces the human subject from its self-designated role as creator and/or controller of information. While many scholarly ventures into Pynchon's work tend to downplay the importance of his supernatural imagery, I contend that the supernatural plays an important role in his fiction even at the formal level, from which the novel appears to its readers as a kind of spirit board.
TL;DR: This article explored a historical fiction that attempts to present a "historical accurate rendition" of the Haitian revolution after postmodernism deconstructed both narrative and history, leaving an intellectual climate skeptical of narrative's ability to depict the historically real.
Abstract: This essay explores a historical fiction that attempts to present a “historically accurate rendition” of the Haitian revolution after postmodernism deconstructed both narrative and history, leaving an intellectual climate skeptical of narrative’s ability to depict the historically real. In Bell’s All Souls’ Rising , characters and plot blend not just with history and not only through historicity, but balance on acceptance or rejection of the narrators’ distinctly diverse historiographic consciousnesses. Bell establishes the contemporary historical novel by productively querying narrative’s production and embracing its myriad possibilities to create a narrative that rejects unity but aspires to comprehensiveness.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider fantasies of human settlement in terms of political philosophy and literature and consider writings by Martin Heidegger, J. G. Fichte, Alexis de Tocqueville, and William Faulkner.
Abstract: This essay considers fantasies of human settlement in terms of political philosophy and literature and considers writings by Martin Heidegger, J. G. Fichte, Alexis de Tocqueville, and William Faulkner. Issues of race and place are examined.
TL;DR: This article read Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) alongside the relatively underread genre of invasion fiction and found that the assumption of an imminent German invasion pervades her final novel.
Abstract: This essay reads Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) alongside the relatively underread genre of invasion fiction. Following modernist studies' recent turn toward interwar Britain's cultural anticipation of catastrophe, the essay foregrounds how Woolf's assumption of an imminent German invasion pervades her final novel. Juxtaposing Woolf's invasion motif with invasion literature reveals a shared skepticism toward English liberalism. Reading Acts in light of invasion clarifies Woolf's suspicion that liberalism is not only susceptible to but in fact fosters its destruction from invasion. Woolf's ambivalence toward her liberalism in the face of invasion, moreover, is inherited by postwar liberal authors.
TL;DR: Brim's analysis of an especially poignant scene in which Vivaldo lies in bed with Rufus and feels as if ''Rufus wants] me to take him in my arms'' highlights what Brim calls ''hetero-raced paralysis, represented by Vivaldo's inability to recognize RufUS's humanity and therefore love him (101) as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: an \"expendable commodity\" for Vivaldo, Rufus's Irish-Italian lover, to contemplate his own racial shortcomings (98). Brim's analysis of an especially poignant scene in which Vivaldo lies in bed with Rufus and feels as if \"[Rufus wants] me to take him in my arms\" highlights what Brim calls \"hetero-raced paralysis,\" represented by Vivaldo's inability to recognize Rufus's humanity and therefore love him (101). Brim is at his best here, laying bare the nexus of gender, sexuality, and race. The final chapter of James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination undergoes a slight shift in focus. Brim turns his attention to three of Baldwin's short stories: \"The Rockpile,\" \"The Man Child,\" and \"Going to Meet the Man.\" This chapter also diverges from the conceptual structure of the previous chapters, as Brim reflects on the white heterosexual male's inability to reproduce a \"white paternal legacy\" and the fear that this procreative failure generates (131). This trio of stories exposes the \"price of the white ticket\" as mothers all but disappear and white men \"intent on securing their own paternal positions in the procreative order\" take center stage. Although nimble, the fourth chapter does not carry the same avant-garde intellectualism of Brim's earlier chapters. While some may take issue with Brim's assertion that Baldwin's lack of writerly engagement with black gay writers evidences a disavowal of black gay identities, James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination provides a refreshingly curious look into the writings of a man who has come to symbolize black gay brilliance through its reconstruction of Baldwin as a decidedly enigmatic figure. More broadly speaking, Brim's text raises questions about the writer's responsibility to his audience. The insight Brim presents is worthy of a place on any upper-level queer theory or Africana Studies syllabus. It will, of course, make it onto mine.
TL;DR: The Harvest Gypsies as discussed by the authors refigure vagrancy into a fantasy involving a mobile class of workers and offer an explicit roadmap for a government desperate to move families across the country to where their labor is needed.
Abstract: This essay departs from recent work on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath —which has focused largely on its problematic racial politics—by framing the text's portrayal of migrancy around the question of state governance. Steinbeck's novel and The Harvest Gypsies , its nonfiction predecessor, refigure vagrancy into a fantasy involving a mobile class of workers. In doing so, Steinbeck offers an explicit roadmap for a government desperate to move families across the country to where their labor is needed. Ultimately, this reading puts the novel into dialogue with state policies that extend beyond New Deal era.