Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2019"
8 citations
TL;DR: The Surrounded (1936) as discussed by the authors is an allotment-era novel set on the Flathead Indian Reservation, where McNickle's social vision theorizes culture, history and race in ways that align with recent critical calls in the Native American humanities and the new indigenous transnationalisms for more socially inflected approaches to theory and method.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay aims to renew interest in D'Arcy McNickle's allotment-era novel set on the Flathead Indian Reservation, The Surrounded (1936), by drawing attention to how McNickle's social vision theorizes culture, history, and race in ways that align with recent critical calls in the Native American humanities and the new indigenous transnationalisms for more socially inflected approaches to theory and method. This essay draws on tribal history sources to illustrate McNickle's contributions to the development of a contemporary Native American social theory.
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TL;DR: The Cruft of Fiction as mentioned in this paper provides an important corrective to some of the less productive tendencies in post-modern scholarship, namely, circumfabulatory occurrences that do not plot, misleading associations, nonsense, repetitiveness, gratuitously jocular intertextuality, allusions and hints challenging our capacity to puzzle things out, and entropic accumulations of all sorts are not accessorial but pivotal both to meaningmaking and to the opera aperta this heterogeneous poiesis protocol usually engenders.
Abstract: central to postmodern craft. According to the latter, circumfabulatory occurrences that do not plot, misleading associations, nonsense, repetitiveness, gratuitously jocular intertextuality, allusions and hints challenging our capacity to puzzle things out, and entropic accumulations of all sorts are not accessorial but pivotal both to meaningmaking and to the opera aperta this heterogeneous poiesis protocol usually engenders. A rationalist reading model for which the entirety of the novel’s narrative mass has to plot, to reference identifiable objects without repetition or omission, and otherwise to signify or symbolize in no uncertain terms is naturally less apposite to postmodern “cruftsmanship.” On the other hand, Letzler is right to maintain that claims about which novel dramatizes our time’s informational inflation, resists grand narratives, or allegorizes nothing but its own unreadability do not further our understanding of meganovels. On this account, The Cruft of Fiction provides an important corrective to some of the less productive tendencies in postmodern scholarship.
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TL;DR: A posthuman mode of living, one with strong echoes of Bergson, is explored in this article, where the protagonist of Aaron's Rod coheres with a plantlike scheme defined by unprocessed responses to immediate stimuli and the bifurcating pursuit of ostensibly exclusive possibilities.
Abstract: Abstract:D. H. Lawrence considered Aaron's Rod the successor to The Rainbow and Women in Love. However, the novel's opaque protagonist alienates readers, who often consider Aaron's Rod a minor novel next to Lawrence's earlier works. Lawrence's fascination with trees, which peaked around the time of Aaron's Rod, provides a means of understanding Aaron—and the novel—better. Aaron's mode of living coheres with a plantlike scheme defined by unprocessed responses to immediate stimuli and the bifurcating pursuit of ostensibly exclusive possibilities. The novel thus explores a posthuman mode of living, one with strong echoes of Bergson.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine transatlantic visual and fictional examples of queer disability aesthetics in the World War I era and identify two strains of crip/queer representation in the period: one that attempts to rid queer bodies of their association with disability by espousing ableist ideals of wholeness and another that embraces disability by portraying queerness as bodily and mental fragmentation.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay examines transatlantic visual and fictional examples of queer disability aesthetics in the World War I era. I identify two strains of crip/queer representation in the period: one that attempts to rid queer bodies of their association with disability by espousing ableist ideals of wholeness and another that embraces disability by portraying queerness as bodily and mental fragmentation. Ultimately, I argue that both of these representational strategies fail to produce viable futures for crip/queer subjects. While queer ableism wishes away disability, modernist experimentation sacrifices the queer disabled body in the interest of the aesthetic itself.
TL;DR: This article focused on the writing of Virginia Woolf and offered an account of tiredness that navigates the terms and the posture of recumbency, revealing a deep desire for rest without recuperation and rejecting the moral and bodily economies of production, labor and uprightness.
Abstract: Abstract:Focusing on the writing of Virginia Woolf, this essay offers an account of tiredness that navigates the terms and the posture of recumbency. Woolf's descriptions of tiredness evoke a sense of incurable, ongoing weariness, revealing a deep desire for rest without recuperation and rejecting the moral and bodily economies of production, labor, and uprightness. The tired body lies prone, or \"downwrong,\" eschewing the finality of narratives of recovery or cure in favor of exhaustion's incomplete and endless deferral and delay, which neutralizes binary structures of ability and disability, health and illness.
TL;DR: The authors read the narrative role of disability in the ''Nausicaa'' episode of Joyce's Ulysses through Roland Barthes's notion in Camera Lucida of the punctum, and repositioned the disability of Gerty MacDowell both as a dynamic feature of the narrative and as evidence of her considerable agency within the chapter.
Abstract: Abstract:Reading the narrative role of disability in the \"Nausicaa\" episode of Joyce's Ulysses through Roland Barthes's notion in Camera Lucida of the punctum, this essay repositions the disability of Gerty MacDowell both as a dynamic feature of the narrative and as evidence of her considerable agency within the chapter. Joyce's depiction of Gerty's disability shows that, far from passive and desexualized, she is a model for the structure of the episode generally, especially its use of juxtaposition and disruption. Reappraising Gerty's disability, then, reveals not only greater depth in her character but greater complexity and nuance in the episode as well.
TL;DR: The authors describe key concepts from literary disability studies and crip methodology, and give some examples of modernist writers' use of disability metaphors, raising questions about how disability inflects modernist themes and modernist form.
Abstract: Abstract:This introduction briefly describes key concepts from literary disability studies and crip methodology. After discussing these concepts and giving some examples of modernist writers' use of disability metaphors, it raises questions about how disability inflects modernist themes and modernist form. It then offers synopses of the nine essays in the special issue, essays that treat a range of authors from the early to mid-twentieth century. The essays engage with literary theory, various early twentieth-century historical contexts, and issues of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and class.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors situate Sylvia Townsend Warner's The True Heart (1929) in the context of developments in disability policy and eugenic thought in the aftermath of the Great War as well as Warner's own interventions on behalf of disabled people.
Abstract: Abstract:Expanding on recent work on rural modernisms, sexuality, and disability history, this essay situates Sylvia Townsend Warner's The True Heart (1929) in the context of developments in disability policy and eugenic thought in the aftermath of the Great War as well as Warner's own interventions on behalf of disabled people. While the novel can be read in relation to a postwar wave of rural retrenchment and the Anglocentric turn of interwar modernisms, it ultimately espouses progressive values and more inclusive modernisms. Imagining future love, reproduction, and community for characters with disabilities and alternative sexualities, Warner worked through issues facing Britain's social and sexual outsiders in her fictions and her public life.
TL;DR: In the Song of the Lark, Cather created a palimpsest in which Thea's own years of struggle in Chicago are written over the turbulent years in the American musical culture that Dvořák experienced firsthand during his American stay from 1892 to 1895.
Abstract: Abstract:In referencing Antonin Dvořák's New World Symphony in her novel The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather creates a palimpsest in which Thea's own years of struggle in Chicago are written over the turbulent years in the American musical culture that Dvořák experienced firsthand during his American stay from 1892 to 1895. Cather situates her novel in a swirling constellation of questions and arguments that nineteenth-century American artists of all stripes considered as they explored art's relation to an authentic national identity and to a unique regional and environmental consciousness.
TL;DR: The authors examines the relationship between modernist formal experimentation and rehabilitative futurism, the modern cultural fantasy of a hygienic future in which all illness and disability have been eradicated.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay examines the relationship between modernist formal experimentation and rehabilitative futurism, the modern cultural fantasy of a hygienic future in which all illness and disability have been eradicated. Through a reading of Kenneth Burke's early essay collection Counter-Statement (1931) and his first and only novel, Towards a Better Life (1932), it traces the development both of Burke's notion of literature as \"medicine\" or \"equipment for living\" and of modernist literature as a particular kind of antinomian remedy that subverts the norms of health. Drawing on these ideas, this essay argues that modernist literature has the transgressive capacity to alter readers' orientation toward the good life and the horizon of what is possible for acting toward the creation of a future society in which disability can flourish.
TL;DR: The Ladies Almanack as discussed by the authors is an early work of gossip literature, written simultaneously for the insiders and outsiders of Natalie Barney's Académie des Femmes, which publicizes the coterie's private lives and loves.
Abstract: Abstract:Written simultaneously for the insiders and outsiders of Natalie Barney's Académie des Femmes, Djuna Barnes's cryptic, playful Ladies Almanack publicizes the coterie's private lives and loves. By positing Barnes's text as a descendent of Les Caquets de l'accouchée, an early work of gossip literature, this essay shows how Barnes critiques and subverts social norms through the seemingly trivial chatter of women's talk. In so doing, she underscores the significance of women's words, redefines the boundary between the public eye and the private life, turns gossip toward progressive ends, and establishes powerful, long-lasting communities of readers and critics.
TL;DR: This article explored how Depression-era cultural production employed a ''crip modernism'' to render disability as a consciously emerging social, legal, and medical class, and drew these texts together to argue that, in line with a depression-era interest in the marginalized, they utilize formal experimentation to disrupt notions of disability as an individualized phenomenon belonging merely to the realm of medical expertise.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay explores how Depression-era cultural production employed a \"crip modernism\" to render disability as a consciously emerging social, legal, and medical class. Here, I examine modernist engagements with the shifting category of disability, specifically Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and the films Freaks (1932) and Beggars in Ermine (1934). I draw these texts together to argue that, in line with a Depression-era interest in the marginalized, they utilize formal experimentation to disrupt notions of disability as an individualized phenomenon belonging merely to the realm of medical expertise. Instead, they register the form of a burgeoning, activist disability collectivity.
TL;DR: In an age of unprecedented prosthetic advancement hastened by the Great War's mechanized slaughter, what options were available to someone who lost his penis in battle? Deprived of the bodily augmentation offered to leg and arm amputees, Jake Barnes, protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, can seek only abstract spiritual solace.
Abstract: Abstract:In an age of unprecedented prosthetic advancement hastened by the Great War's mechanized slaughter, what options were available to someone who lost his penis in battle? Deprived of the bodily augmentation offered to leg and arm amputees, Jake Barnes, protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, can seek only abstract spiritual solace. I argue that the veteran aviator does so not only through his story's \"gear and girder\" prose, which avoids direct discussion of emasculation, but also by envisioning the bullfighter Romero, with whom Jake closely identifies, as a mechanized penile substitute who can provide a kind of cure to Brett Ashley's apparent hysteria, which medical science of the time frequently treated with vibrators.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors trace J. M. Coetzee's employment in the computer industry in the 1960s, arguing that this experience influenced his understanding of literature and the writing process.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay traces J. M. Coetzee's employment in the computer industry in the 1960s, arguing that this experience influenced his understanding of literature and the writing process. Drawing on his archives, the essay examines Coetzee's programming work and generation of computer poetry. It places his scholarly interest in literary impressionism and stylostatistics in this practical context and outlines his early engagement in the field of humanities computing. One of the major results of his programming experiences was the development of a platform of what I call "aesthetic automatism," or the redeployment of modernist formalism in an age of computation.
TL;DR: In this article, the affective and aesthetic consequences of violence and criminality in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games are explored at the intersection of postcolonial studies, affect studies, and narratology.
Abstract: Abstract:Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies, affect studies, and narratology, this essay explores the affective and aesthetic consequences of violence and criminality in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. I begin by discussing the minor crimes to be found within its pages, before moving on to address various instances of so-called exceptional criminality. The affective state that emerges out of this combination of the banal and the extraordinary, I argue, could best be described by invoking Sianne Ngai's notion of stuplimity, a conjunction of the stupefying and the sublime that ultimately infiltrates the very tissue of the narrative.
TL;DR: In this paper, an in-depth interview with Michael Bérubé puts front and center his pioneering work in disability studies, which discusses language, human rights, education policy and practice, bioethics, and narrative fiction, among many other areas.
Abstract: Abstract:This in-depth interview with Michael Bérubé puts front and center his pioneering work in disability studies, which discusses language, human rights, education policy and practice, bioethics, and narrative fiction, among many other areas. The interview includes discussions of several of Bérubé's books, including Life As We Know It (1996), Life as Jamie Knows It (2016), and The Secret Life of Stories (2016).
TL;DR: In this article, the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context are identified and intervened in the limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly, and the authors suggest that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject.