Search

Farah Baker is a teenager living in Gaza who used Twitter to report the bombings she witnessed over the summer of 2014. She has been controversially named the ‘#AnneFrank of Palestine’. This article examines how far digital and printed forms of war writing compare, and places particular emphasis on a remark Anne Frank made in, and about, her diary: ‘paper is patient’. It discusses the extent to which the expectations of readers, and the limitations of the form of the tweet, shaped what Baker was able to say. It considers how she answered the premium placed upon authenticity and immediacy in war reporting, and also the desire for a medium that would rally support and express solidarity. It also asks how far the digital meme meets the challenge of reconciling the need for expressions of commonality with the recognition of complexity. In comparison with the diary, the ability of users of social media to manipulate form, and to make their own formal choices, is constrained. This article discusses the implications these restrictions might have for both war writers and life writers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article takes a critical approach to the possibility of applying Bruno Lator’s work to Tristram Shandy. Sterne is both reflexive about the impossibility of representing the material work and determined to do just that in relation to his book. But these are competing tendencies in Latour’s terms, difficult to judge in the context of a single work. Latour’s recent language for Fiction as a “mode” ultimately leaves us without a way to distinguish between texts that are self-conscious and those that aren’t. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Coetzee’s early interest in photography provides the stimulus for this paper, which argues that photography serves as a useful gateway into his novel-writing, with a particular focus on his before-and-after pairing of school photographs. The paper traces a line between this early interest and themes of individual resistance to co-optation by the state that would later come to define Coetzee’s fictional work. It contends that his experimentation with ‘before-and-after’ technique in photography taught him valuable lessons that would later be used to disassemble narratives that compel individuals to conform to societal expectations. The paper includes a detailed examination of the way that Coetzee challenges the social structures of both family and the school in the ‘Jesus’ trilogy, developing methods which arguably have their origin in the early photography, techniques of juxtaposition, seriality and montage. The thesis is that ‘photographic thinking’ has remained an influential feature of Coetzee’s work throughout his writing career, albeit with significant changes that are discussed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends recent examinations of neoliberalism’s affective impact through a close reading of Kae Tempest’s 2016 piece Let Them Eat Chaos. Building upon the work of Rachel Greenwald Smith, I demonstrate how Tempest locates geopolitical discussions of neoliberal affect in London’s particular geo-historical contexts. The significance of this approach lies in the insights Tempest offers into the digital infrastructures that underpin neoliberalism’s affective atmosphere. These findings are expounded through a close reading of Tempest’s work in dialogue with the writings of Paul Gilroy, Byung-Chul Han, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Mark Fisher. Through such a framework, I foreground how gentrification is a key driver in establishing, and maintaining, neoliberalism’s digitally enervating affects. The paper concludes via the work of Hans Blumenberg – whose meditations on maritime disaster help unpack the emancipatory humanism Tempest seeks to salvage from London’s ruin. Offering no grand political alternatives, Tempest’s critique of neoliberal technology aims, instead, at redrawing the parameters of political solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Frank O’Hara’s two elegiac poems written on the occasion of James Dean’s death in 1955 and investigates their deep-seated yet intriguingly ambivalent relationship with the tradition of pastoral elegy. O’Hara’s poetry is characteristically marked by immediacy, spontaneity, and intimacy. When confronted by the death of his cultural alter ego, however, O’Hara almost self-consciously taps into the cliché-laden, pity-driven tradition of pastoral elegy both to enact a ritual of mourning for the dead and to address his sense of loss and grief. This paper discusses how O’Hara utilizes the rich thematic and rhetorical conventions of the pastoral elegiac tradition without diminishing the authenticity of poetic mourning. Concurrently, this paper further delves into how O’Hara uses a distinctively self-referential quality coded in the genre of elegy as a vehicle for affirming his vocational identity and establishing poetic authority. I will thus argue that James Dean elegies not only commemorate the truncated life of a rebellious young actor but also depict O’Hara’s own poetic rite of passage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on Orientalist representations of Islam and/or Muslims has been rampant in academic literature since Edward Said’s publication of his seminal work Orientalism (1978). The articulation of this discourse however has transformed in due course. It has manifested into its new variant ‘neo-Orientalism’, which has gained prominence in the post-9/11 era. In this paper, I discuss the transition from Orientalism to neo-Orientalism, and argue that this new mode of representation does not exclusively result from the 9/11 events and the subsequent War on Terror, but also from the portrayals of Muslims in the last quarter of the twentieth century. These portrayals, disseminated with great intensity by people in the media, journalists, politicians, and Orientalist academics, as well as in literary and cultural productions, continue to reify narratives about Islam and Muslim societies. This paper concludes with the dynamics Orientalism holds and reveals the role authors of the Middle East and South Asia play in disseminating neo-Orientalist discourses with the often-detrimental effect of catering to and promoting modern-day Islamophobia in contemporary Western societies. This is briefly illustrated on the examples of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), Qaisra Shahraz’s The Holy Woman (2001), and Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to read Michael Taussig's My Cocaine Museum (2004) as a forerunner of recent research on the Latin American extractive zone (Gómez-Barris). In his remarkable book, the Australian anthropologist writes on the relation between two prime materials that have an important impact on the past and present of Colombia: gold and cocaine. Focusing on a region close to the Pacific Coast, more specifically the gold-mining village of Santa María, Taussig's creative work of nonfiction explores the fact that multiple forms of violence (ecological, colonial, extractivist, political) converge in the Timbiquí region. It also makes an innovative move by including cocaine within the discussion on capitalist extractivism. Returning to Taussig's book is also productive at this stage because it offers a theoretical and artistic starting point for thinking through the social ecologies and the resistance encountered in the extractive region of the Colombian South-West Pacific. Ultimately, this paper argues, My Cocaine Museum constitutes an example of anti-extractivist non-fiction, as it uses montage techniques to create shock, wonder, and hope, to establish unexpected connections between the past and the present, and to revitalise both the Timbiquí region and the official Colombian Gold Museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, literary fiction’s interventions into debates about the crisis in literary studies, and contestations over critical methods, have received scant scholarly attention. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind treats the idea of crisis with irony, utilising overstatement in the novel’s narrative discourse to draw attention to crisis discourse’s inefficacy in delivering meaningful change. The novel represents literary critique, especially as extended to non-literary objects, as a compulsion; and, as failing to result in action. Instead, in The Life of the Mind, crisis and critique are discursive conventions which culminate in the protagonist remaining in a suspended emotional and economic state. This paper draws its theoretical approach from the novel’s intertexts, including Lauren Berlant’s conceptions of crisis ordinariness and impasse, and contextualises The Life of the Mind in relation to its intervention into discussions about critique and reading methodologies. Literary criticism and literary fiction are portrayed as being in a state of impasse in Smallwood’s novel. Despite Berlant’s (and Ann Cvetkovich’s) guarded sense of impasse as a state of potential, in The Life of the Mind impasse is regarded ironically; progress in the protagonist’s situation, in the discipline of literary studies, and in the practice of critique, are questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of the various criticisms that have been levelled at Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), a common complaint is that the film’s narrative descends from the cosmic heights of its setup – the dying sun must be resurrected explosively by a team of intrepid astronauts lest Earth freeze over – to the histrionic depths of its ending, in which the improbable return of a Kurtz-like individual grounds the plot as a struggle of individual wills. For several critics, the third act of the film becomes the locus of the melodramatic, here framed pejoratively as that which chafes against the scientific realism of the film more generally. However, in this paper I argue that melodrama in Sunshine cannot be compartmentalised in this way, but instead functions as a mode, revealing itself subtly in a number of technical and stylistic components that punctuate the emotional ebb and flow of the plot from the outset. While the film’s attempts at astronomical accuracy might seem to suggest its adherence to the reality principle, here I contend that the problem of narrativising the death of the solar star sends it into the orbit of melodrama well before its final sequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss the influence of commedia dell'arte on The Tempest and consider the possibility of a late truncation of the play. This foundation sets the stage for the task of writing my own twenty-first century adaptation, This Thing of Darkness. By examining Kathleen Lea's discussion of commedia scenarios and considering their parallels with The Tempest, I postulate several possible missing elements including the unfinished revenge plots and the uncomplicated romance plot of Miranda and Frederick. I consider Henry David Gray's hypothesis that Shakespeare cut his own climax in favour of a wedding masque to appease the court of King James I, which adds another layer of complexity to our understanding of The Tempest's evolution. In considering the ethics of adaptation, I draw on Walter Benjamin's model of the textual afterlife which suggests that every text has the potential to be reinterpreted and reworked by future generations. I then situate This Thing of Darkness as a pre-imagination of The Tempest that addresses these criticisms dramaturgically. Through engaging with these potential source materials, This Thing of Darkness opens new avenues for understanding both the First Folio Tempest and its many afterlives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use the figure of the air-conditioner to get at the bifurcated issues of access to comfort in the Anthropocene. I think through the phenomenological relations to the air-conditioner, using as my archive Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning novel The White Tiger. I put forth the theory of what I call subaltern discomfort, arguing that who gets to be comfortable, and why, I argue, is a matter of increasing importance as the climate warms and air-conditioning becomes much more significant in the lives of people worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ezra Pound’s The Cantos is a truly transnational feat, transcending different periods and geographical locations. The epic, ‘a poem including history’, expands the parameters of modernism in space and time, representing a diversity of culture and era through several languages, including Greek, Chinese, Italian, German, and French. The legacy of The Cantos then articulates the formation of a global poetics that has inspired writers, poets, and artists from Russia, Japan to South America. This article attempts to examine the extent to which Pound’s Cantos influenced a contemporary Chinese poet named Yang Lian (1955-). Between 1994 and 1997, Yang Lian, in his own words, attempted to ‘produce a Chinese version of the Cantos’ in his Concentric Circles. Yang Lian, exiled from China on the eve of 1989, adopts an Odysseus-like nomadic life that seeks to take on his own version of periplum. In Concentric Circles, Yang Lian adopts the form of an ideogrammic vortex where images move dynamically, intersecting, relating to one another to catalyse, convey and render emotion organically. This paper attempts to address the transmigration of Poundian influences on Yang Lian’s Chinese epic that exemplifies fragmented pattern, linguistic collage, structural discordance and avant-garde experimentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the plight of nonhumans and the form of the coming community through the status quo of border-crossing bodies in selected works by Olga Tokarczuk in light of biopolitics. It highlights the link between dehumanization and biopolitics and argues that the nonhuman becomes a foundation of modern sovereignty. The nonhuman is produced by an inclusive exclusion, where the violence enters in and maintains the sovereign, and this anthropocentric mechanism becomes the fundamental political paradigm. To resist this anthropocentrism, Tokarczuk proposes a new form of community, the ‘airport-republic’ with fluid trans-borders, for opening up a new subject construction model and human organization form for post-Holocaust humanity. However, it is easy for these people who are invisible or becoming nonhuman to fall into the indistinguishable zone between humans and animals, between bios (politically qualified life) and zoē (bare life). They cannot be guaranteed by the sovereignty power, thereby falling back again into the logic of the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attends to recent examples of British estate literature, a literary form which extends across disparate genres and media. In general, estate literature attempts to correct pernicious prejudices about communities centred on the council estate, stereotypes which align classist, racist, and sexist rhetoric to marginalise this population. In addition to locating recent examples of estate literature – Caleb Femi's, Poor (2020), Anders Lustgarten's The Seven Acts of Mercy (2016), and Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) – amidst this socio-economic context, this paper also identifies the various formal features these works draw upon to generate a collective voice which at once rejects the othering of the council estate while also resisting the temptation to substitute one reductive group identity label for another. In these texts, often-surprising connections are formed on the grounds of the estate between people, objects, ideas, art, music – and fade as suddenly as they appear. The essay spans media studies, literary criticism, and sociology to argue that the networks conjured by estate literature are not only corrective but generative, inasmuch as they indicate that more affirmative configurations of these networks are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attends to the utopian imagination circulating in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017) and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange (1997). These texts exemplify the formal innovation assigned to migrancy fiction more generally, a genre characterised by its embrace of mobility in content as well as in form. Alongside migrancy novels, utopian fiction both maps and distorts the networks and infrastructures that generate wealth inequality on a global scale. But while previous studies have touched on the utopian implications to migration fiction, this paper elaborates on the affordances of placing these fields into full dialogue. To develop this last point, this paper draws from Mary Louise Pratt's influential concept of the contact zone in order to acknowledge the different scales of utopian thinking within (and between) Tropic of Orange, which demarcates a specific utopian community, and Exit West, which imagines a global commons. Approaching these texts through the lens of the contact zone helps bring into focus how mundane technologies create inequality today but might be repurposed to radically remake society in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Story, storytelling, and storying are exceptionally privileged concepts in contemporary environmental arts, humanities and social sciences research. This provocation does not set out to exhaustively describe the function of story across so large and diverse a scholarly array. It aims instead to characterise the particular, widespread tendency to posit the making of new stories, or the transforming of extant stories, or the ‘storying’ of a particular issue, place, or dilemma as the ultimate ends of environmental humanities work. We call this tendency ‘storyism’. In its broadest sense, our project attempts to construct a transdisciplinary genealogy of ‘storyism’ in relation to environmental concerns, as well as to comprehend its institutional and disciplinary orientations. For the limited purposes of this paper, we explore how ecocriticism, a field primarily interested in reading, interpreting and critiquing story, relates to the methodological innovation we describe. We hypothesise that ecocritical discourses have ironically undermined their critical values by producing and reproducing a storyist teleology which understands the generation of more, new narratives as ultimately, if not singularly, useful. We conclude by suggesting some ways in which literary ecocriticism can break out of this habit while still participating in the wider interdisciplinary field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), the concept of identity comes undone because the narrator-protagonist, confronted with his lack of belonging, resorts to role-playing as a means of feeling whole. Undertaken in order to heal the self, role-playing plays out in the sense of playacting and responsibility. Although critics have commented on the novel's deconstruction of belonging, the dual sense of role-playing has not been analysed in terms of how it affects the selflessness responsibility involves. This paper explores the text's implication of responsibility in playacting, with respect to how this entanglement opens onto a negative depiction of selflessness. The 9/11 novel's grim take on selflessness, which ties in with its focus on terror, is shown to undercut the ethical value that deracination bears in Jacques Derrida's readings of responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades, literary multilingualism scholarship has focused above all on the way linguistic diversity openly manifests itself, for instance by examining multilingual practices such as code-switching, code-mixing, hybridization, etc. However, fewer studies have analysed so-called latent multilingualism, which could be defined as the presence of languages in a text even when they are not immediately perceptible. Even though it is less discernible, latent multilingualism is certainly more widespread than manifest multilingualism. More often than not narrators relate their stories in the tongue of the supposedly monolingual reader, rather than directly inserting or even mixing foreign tongues in their narrative. In this paper, I aim to trace back the origins of latent multilingualism, explore its principles, and compare the different theoretical approaches which have been formulated to examine it. Additionally, I aim to show that the research on latent multilingualism has helped to further expand literary multilingual boundaries. Latent practices have provided writers with extra tools to achieve their narratological aims, which would not be reached with manifest forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

R.W. Connell argues that masculinity is not a unitary phenomenon; rather, that masculinities emerge out of situationally specific choices drawn from a 'cultural repertoire' of so-called masculine behaviour that result in a particular 'configuration of practice'. Ben Lerner's novel The Topeka School (2019) calls attention to this process by focussing on the coding of particular speech-acts as masculine in the context of mid-nineties, small-town Kansas; moreover, he contextualises these particular speech-acts as the cultural precursors to the political rise of the alt-right, leading to Trump's presidency. In The Topeka School, then, speech-acts are not simply gendered but shown to have significant political ramifications. In this paper I argue that while Lerner dissects the genealogy of this particular construction of masculinity, he also presents alternative models of gendered speech-acts that subvert what Hélène Cixous calls the libidinal and cultural masculine economy, and that he explicitly links each of these models to the figure of the mother. Lerner thus suggests a gender-inclusive speaking-back against the dominant masculinist order, with the mother acting as a key locus of political dissent, resistance, and change – he suggests, too, what Connell would call a necessary reconfiguration of masculine practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Don DeLillo's 2016 novel Zero K uses a debt to Sir Thomas Browne to stage a scalar approach to literature in the Anthropocene. Zero K uses its intertextual relationship to Browne's Urne-Buriall to subject not only itself but the institution of literature per se to a kind of radical reduction or minimisation, cancelling out both against the scale of geological time. DeLillo's novel can be seen as echoing the process of 'agitation' Brent Nelson finds in Urne-Buriall, pulling the reader back and forth between the time of the novel and geological time; in so doing, it responds to questions foregrounded by – among others – Timothy Clark and Timothy Morton about the anthropocentric limits of the novel in the Anthropocene. The present article pursues three aspects of Zero K to make this argument: Jeffrey Lockhart's compulsion to find meaning in moments (which echoes the attention of Clark and Morton to Wordsworth's 'spots of time'); Jeffrey's sense of Artis Martineau speaking a 'shadow language,' which works to withdraw certainty from the present; and a literary fascination with immortality (continuing Browne's insistence on the transience of monuments). The paper concludes with a brief coda on periodisation and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are used to thinking of modernist works, à la Ricoeur, as 'tales about time', either as marking ruptures in time, or cycling back on time. In recent criticism, in what has been seen as a move beyond the historicism of the new modernist studies, there has been significant attention paid to the future in modernism, and indeed the futures of modernism. This paper will attend to how some of the key modernist texts of 1922, including Ulysses, Jacob's Room, and the beginnings of Mrs Dalloway, address futurity in various forms (prolepsis, prophecy, speculation), and open themselves to possible futures. More than a century on from the annus mirabilis of 'high' modernism, what accounts for the continued 'usefulness' of such works as ways of thinking about and preparing for what Joyce called 'the imprevidibility of the future'? And what are the implications for modernist studies, at this commemorative moment, of a future-oriented criticism? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time and memory in Gertrude Stein are explored using on the one hand a fragment of her play, What Happened; and on the other hand, the conceptual underpinnings of Fourier transforms as applied in musical composition to relate the 'time domain' to the 'frequency domain' in the description of sonic events. The paper sets these concepts to work in a reconstruction of the operation of memory in interaction with real-time events – both the event being remembered and the act of remembering as an event in time itself, with memory being understood as a harmony-like resonance connecting those moments. The concept of 'harmony' here is given a wider understanding, extending from relations between sounds to relations between people (musicians, collaborators). The paper looks in detail at the collaborative diachronic resonances that lead from Stein's attending a birthday party in 1913, through her writing a play, then a collective reading of the play and the collaborative composition of an opera, to the reconstitution in-time of this act of memory in performance, in collaboration with musicians. Finally, the paper provides an answer to an important question raised by Stein on birthday cakes – is a cut a slice? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gertrude Stein and, consequently, Adam Frank's Radio Free Stein project underscore the potentiality of enjoyment as a mode of analysis and knowledge. This paper considers the complex nature of enjoyment – regarding it a generative form of struggle, appreciation and, in Stein's words, 'making a fuss' – and positions it as a radical challenge to the current data-driven mode of flattening aesthetic judgment to 'like' or 'dislike'. The Radio Free Stein project also functions as a case study for the value of artistic research and how artistic research either might align with or provide an alternative to the model of 'scientific research' in the university. Finally, this paper employs theoretical descriptions of listening from Roland Barthes, Pauline Oliveros and Charles Bernstein to propose varying methods of enjoying (and understanding) Radio Free Stein's two recordings of Stein's 1917 play 'An Exercise in Analysis', composed by Dan Warner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty's commitment to define the terms in which his work will be remembered through close analysis of a range of archival materials gathered by Kalkadoon scholar Philip Morrissey and Tyne Daile Sumner for Lionel Fogarty's Selected Poems 1980–2017 (2017). I describe this component of his work as hauntology, a term picked up from Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (1993) by Eve Tuck and Christopher Ree, who redefine hauntology as a 'relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society's assurances of innocence and reconciliation.'1 In reference to these materials, I argue that Fogarty's poetry has a hauntological capacity to recall the moment of the poem's expression in endlessly cyclical processes so as to resist closure. By analysing the way these materials exemplify Fogarty's poetic principles, the paper anticipates a shift in the relationship between Aboriginal Australian writers and the literary archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexis Wright's novel The Swan Book (2013) has been read as contesting imperialist histories in its use of ironic magical realism: asengaging with debates in Australian indigenous communities about sovereignty; and, as world-making in its portrayal of conflicting and overlapping material forces and temporalities. Previous readings have examined the text's dramatisation of biopolitical interventions into the lives of Aboriginal people, and the novel's near-simultaneous evocation of different time periods. To date, scholarship on The Swan Book has not fully conceptualised its assault on western narrative forms. The following paper focuses on the novel's contestation of crisis and catastrophe as metonyms for colonial and western ways of being and knowledge, and its narratival focus on what could be termed 'survivance', a term used (after Derrida) by Native American fiction writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor, to whose novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990), Wright's book makes intertextual references. The following paper contends that Wright's novel offers radical structures of feeling that counter western notions of narrative,history, time and the individual. These are manifest in the text's inclusion of nested narratives, its critique of western notions of history, its de-hierarchisation of time, and in its disputation of the centrality of the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by mapping what it calls the 'affect-neoliberal' debate in contemporary literary studies. This debate, centred on the relationship between the personal-affective novel and neoliberalism, contains two dominant positions, termed capitulationist and subversion views. The former asserts that the personal novel form, as tied to the particular, fails to represent late capitalism; the latter argues that affective literature is always-already social, potentially offering a poignant critique of neoliberal individualism. Yet instead of favouring one position over the other, this paper claims that each view is ultimately one-sided: capitulationists fail to see how the social mediates the personal, thus missing the possibility of self-critical affective novels; the subversion view fails to see how the social is caught up in the personal and neoliberal, thus missing the capitulatory aspect of so-called 'impersonal' affect. Ultimately, this paper argues that the task is not to think the affective novel in its purely personal (capitulatory) or social (subversive) dimension, but to see it as antagonistically situated between the two. This perspective entails thinking the impossibility of the affective novel, or the way such novels may think the personal-affective as disruptively mediated by neoliberalism, a position derived from Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Muslim women’s writing can help to shed light on how the ostensibly incommensurate relationship between the conditions of women’s lives and gendered forms of social reproduction in modern Muslim societies are intimately connected with the uneven development of capitalist modernity, especially in oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia. This paper traces the ways in which gendered forms of social reproduction and patriarchal oppression are mediated but also contested in the form of a text from modern Saudi Arabia: Raja Alem’s Fatma A Novel of Arabia. It considers how this novel combines elements of magic, fantasy, and realism to foreground how the oppression of Muslim women and their relegation to a position of gendered subalternity is a crucial determinant in the combined and uneven development of petro-capitalist modernity in the modern Muslim world. By drawing on Sufism in a modern narrative of so-called magical realism, the novel, I argue, contests gender roles in contemporary capitalist modernity by offering a view that stems from the Islamic tradition but does not align with patriarchy and capitalist ideology; on the other hand, it registers the coexistence of the religious and the magical within the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global publishing phenomenon Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls launched a wave of biography aimed at children. Styled as feminist bedtime stories and as a reinvention of the fairy tale, the trademark celebratory biographical arcs which focus on women's lives and stories as heroic have also attracted critique. This paper argues that Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls draws deliberate attention to both the limits and possibility of biography as a genre that has distinctive, ideological, and cultural power in conferring visibility and status to the subjects of representation. In interactive journal pages appended to each Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls volume, and in publications like I Am A Rebel Girl, the reader becomes a participant in the biographical project, invited to practise auto/biography and to create their own 'rebel' story. Rebel Girls work within the limits of but also models a potential for auto/biography as a feminist, activist tool, available to be taken up self-consciously by a generation of 'rebel' readers who may themselves become the rebel writers of their own or others' lives, inventing and evolving the possibility for biography as a feminist mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the relationship between modernism and its 'sister-genre' detective fiction [Brian McHale, Postmodern Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 59] has tended to be characterised in oppositional terms, recent scholarship has challenged this conceptualisation, arguing that the two forms can be productively read in relation to each other. However, the ways in which detective fiction, like modernist writing, is invested in questions of temporality remains underexplored. This paper argues that detective fiction simultaneously asserts and challenges modernity's universal, standardised time-keeping regime. This argument is developed through a detailed examination of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the criminal's ability to elude the net of modern time is only exceeded by the detective's ability to reassert it, and then through a wider discussion of the way this pattern reappears throughout the genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The East–West encounter in the twenty-first century is a major theme in the works of contemporary Anglophone Arab diasporic writers. However, unlike some Arab intellectuals and writers of the previous centuries whose accounts hyperbolically praised Western lifestyles and cultures, twenty-first-century Anglophone Arab diasporic writers draw a different image of the Occident. We argue that their texts tend to restructure Arab people’s inherited glamorised image of the ‘West’ by depicting the difficulties that Arab immigrants and refugees face there. Hence, the aim of this paper is to explore the representation of the Occident in Lebanese-Canadian novelist Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008) and Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans (2021). We conclude that the selected novels, as well as other contemporary Anglophone Arab diasporic texts, can provide an insight into the importance of Occidentalism as a mechanism through which Occidentalist literature sheds light on the unconceived matters that Arabs, whether immigrants or living in the Arab world, are oblivious to and reminds the ‘West’ of the struggles that Arab immigrants/refugees encounter while living in Western societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the radical ekphrasis employed by Max Porter within his 2021 novella, The Death of Francis Bacon. Blurring prose, poetry and quasi-fictional biography, the text greatly elaborates upon more traditional and classical forms of ekphrasis, exploring all new methods of adopting the form. Alongside Porter's linguistic-aesthetic mosaic there is a theoretical acuity to his assimilation which resonates greatly with Gilles Deleuze's 1981 creative-critical study, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Porter demonstrates the great potentiality of his innovative expansion of the form as a means to enhance our understanding of an artwork and to give an intimate glimpse into the processes undertaken by the artist, testing the ground for literary methods which evoke Bacon’s iconic style of painting, as well as pondering how to capture a true sense of his philosophical impetus. Porter seems particularly interested in considering the process of readership itself; the very act of conjuring mental images while reading - particularly through literary metaphor - and how this experience can be manipulated in writing to reflect Bacon’s visual aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With its depiction of a ‘word man’ as the sole survivor of the human race, Oryx and Crake offers a unique perspective on the correlation between the death of a people and the death of their language: Jimmy/Snowman’s narrative perspective centres the role of language at the tipping point of society. This paper undertakes a close reading of extinction (of humankind and of human language) in the novel, using this to inform a broader conceptual study of meaning-making in social systems and the role of language in memory. The oscillation throughout the novel between memories of a peopled world and the post-apocalyptic present day facilitates discussion of how language functions in both individual and social settings, such as fashioning memory through acts of naming and renaming, and the experience of shared language as a form of intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss what I call the 'catastrophe of the face'. I use the plays of Samuel Beckett, as well as deconstructive theories from Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Catherine Malabou, as a lens through which to see contemporary issues about the face. Arguing that the face is marked by plasticity, I trace a double-movement of the face, of disappearance-in-appearance in facial recognition software and appearance-in-disappearance in the usage of face masks during Covid pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abandonment of urban areas in anticipation of climate change constitutes a kind of ghosting: a veil is drawn that divides spaces of being (that are valued and preserved) from spaces of non-being (that are deemed expendable and 'dead'). These spaces of non-being can be understood as the 'sacrifice zones' of a capitalist worldview that orders the world through simplified dualistic categories. Opposed to this sacrificial logic, David Farrier has proposed a relational way of thinking that haunts the dualisms of capitalist modernity via spectres of human-nonhuman entanglement. Building on existing work from decolonial and Black studies, this paper extends understandings of such entanglements by exposing how they are tied up with racial and colonial logics. It does so by focusing on two Anthropocene imaginaries that 'open up' the city as a place haunted by complex relationality. First, my reading of Jan van Aken's 'Proximale Falanx' (2019) shows how its portrayal of a submerged Amsterdam can be read as an Anthropocene imaginary of relationality but is also haunted by colonial paradigms. Second, my reading of Teju Cole's Open City (2011) expands this narrow understanding of the climate crisis by articulating decolonial ways of being in New York City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To frame this collection of essays, this introduction reviews existing research on sacrifice zones and related concepts, extractivist thinking and regenerative mindsets, and the presence of damaged settings in contemporary literature and literary history. To be more precise, it considers the affordances and limitations of notions such as the extractive zone, the contact zone, and the critical zone alongside attempts to articulate hopeful strategies of counter-extractivist reading and writing before identifying precursors of the sacrifice zone in the literary archive and briefly sketching recent shifts in mining and extraction technologies. To illustrate these points, the paper then turns to Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport and explains how this angry novel represents violated sites as well as settings of hope and resists the easy solutions of compromise aesthetics by summoning an indignant and anti-extractivist public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores structures of attention in the lyric poetry of James Schuyler. Arguing for a poetics of distraction and boredom, I suggest that Schuyler's idiosyncratic use of the parenthesis functions as a formal strategy for confronting readerly distraction in the long-form lyric, breaking the reader's attention to produce new forms of rhythmic and temporal engagement. Through readings of Roland Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text and Camera Lucida, I show how the digressional parentheses in Schuyler's poems open up syntactical spaces which house the body of both speaker and reader, substituting the cerebral for the corporeal to induce states of textual pleasure and recode readerly attitudes to boredom. This paper situates itself in relation to contemporary questions of attention in twenty-first century culture, proposing models for both writing and reading poetry that might engender continued engagement with the lyric form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the representation of unfulfilled creative vocations in contemporary American fiction using career construction theory, which emerged after the 2007 economic crisis when large numbers of people sought new forms of vocational guidance. It argues that a number of American novelists started to portray changing or unfulfilled creative vocations in fiction as a response to the overall changes in American society caused by the crisis. This means that career construction theory and the fictional portrayal of frustrated vocations have a common origin, so that the former can usefully be applied to our interpretation of the latter. The paper undertakes such work by applying specific components of career construction theory to interpretation and analysis of particular texts. Specifically, it applies theoretical insight by Mark Savickas, John Holland, Peter McIlveen and Kobus Maree to analysis of Joshua Ferris's novel Then We Came to the End (2007); Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World (2014); Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings (2013) and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Overall it argues that career construction theory is a potentially fertile body of work capable of informing our understanding of the fictional portrayal of creative vocations in new and innovative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Set against the soaring skyscrapers of much canonical urban science fiction (sf), the single storey structures of Abbenay in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed might be easily overlooked. But, as this paper argues, the sparse description of this city 'as plain as spilt salt' offers a rich and complex vision of architectural possibility. This paper dwells within this moment of description, drawing on personal association alongside architectural and literary theory to consider how this image of a city might cast strange new light on embedded aspects of architectural practice. It explores how the sustained consideration of the built spaces of feminist sf can provide designers with an empathetic appreciation of how the built environment reflects and informs social relations. Salt is modest, Salt is domestic, Salt is refined, Salt is anything but plain, To spill salt is to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the first translations of Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece’ by Liang Qichao, Ma Junwu, Huang Kan and Hu Shi to highlight an essential facet of Chinese literary modernity – namely, the recourse to traditional poetic language and forms, which, though often dismissed as outdated and incapable of representing modern reality in the dominant narratives of Chinese literary history, nonetheless reflects a growing sense of urgency to find a new voice during the late Qing and early Republican periods. With considerable emphasis placed on the poetic form and narrative mode of both the original and its translations, this study facilitates a productive textual investigation into the temporal–spatial paradigm of progression and evolution of early modern Chinese poetry as well as modern Chinese literature from a historical perspective. The findings suggest that the poetic manipulations by the respective translators were in line with the nationalist discourse of the day and that their act of rewriting poetic tradition to integrate the legacy of the past into a new vision of the present established a far-reaching basis for the construction of Chinese literary modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss what I call ‘the other vow’, a vow that undoes all others. Interweaving an aphorism from Kafka, Juliet’s speech from Romeo & Juliet, and the Jewish liturgical passage Kol Nidrei, I argue that we might find ways to inhabit language differently in the other vow – not the God of the name, or the God of the father, but rather a relation to the other to be otherwise. Instead, we might practice an affirmative denial and collectively attempt to undo the oaths and names that bind us, legally, socially, economically, in order to live in a different way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amongst humanities scholars seeking to transform our understanding of the relationship between humans and other animals, there is near universal agreement that the stories constitutive of the tradition we call 'the West' assume and inform an ontology of absolute separation and hierarchy, and a politics of domination. Whilst this way of telling stories about our stories elucidates the tremendous hold that the narrative of human/animal discontinuity has, it nevertheless deprives us of resources that might nourish a different way of ordering ourselves and our worlds. By weaving the threads of stories that lie at the heart of our cultural traditions, principally the creation story from the Old Testament, and Shakespeare's King Lear, but also Plutarch's Gryllus, this paper suggests another retelling, one in which the apparent disorder wrought through the loss of human sovereignty opens up to radically different ways of being human and living together with the morethanhuman. If the story of humans' homelessness in the world has, in our historical retellings, also been the occasion for declaring our transcendence and triumph, this paper muses upon how we might story ourselves at home in the world amongst animal others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will look at two Irish literary texts from the mid-1990s up to the present day, and will read these texts in terms of their dramatisation of the politics of debt and guilt. Attention will be given to how different literary genres narrated debt and guilt in Irish society under the sway of the globalised Celtic Tiger economy. An analysis of Denis O'Driscoll's poem, 'The Celtic Tiger' will be presented first of all, as the poem is instructive on Ireland's new slew of performed identities during the economic 'boom', and the poem will be attended to in terms of the cultural politics of performance, desire and affect. Subsequently the paper will analyse Claire Kilroy's novel, The Devil I Know, an analysis that will be underpinned by a theoretical framework that focuses on how debt and guilt are formative of the modern sovereign subject. The arguments forwarded in the paper will take significant theoretical guidance from both Friedrich Nietzsche and Maurizio Lazzarato. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the act of storytelling is inventive and performative. Tracing the idea of truth and lie as discursive enactments, the paper discusses that stories cannot be stipulated by the binary of truth and lie. It is a discursive repetition that invents and produces the truth of fiction. The truth of fiction has to be mediated by the reality that it establishes for itself in the process of its creation. This proposition is developed further in this paper to understand how the mode of tell-tale institutes the phantasm or fictionality. This is examined while keeping Salman Rushdie's novellas in the background. The larger frame of the paper comes from the statement Salman Rushdie makes in Luka and the Fire of Life (2010). He defines the human as a storytelling animal and says that the identity and meaning of life are in stories. This force of the narrative that gives meaning to life enabled Rushdie to take up Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) under the fatwa. The narrative is also about the power of literature as an institution. Moreover, both the novellas become parables of the power of the literary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was presented as a keynote lecture at a conference on 'Elizabeth Bowen: Blurring Boundaries', organised by Nicola Darwood and Nick Turner at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, at the end of the morning, just before the scheduled lunch-break, on 8 June 2019. This was only the third time we have had the pleasure of giving a joint paper on Bowen. (Previous occasions were at Goldsmith's College, University of London, in December 1996, and at the University of Sussex, in May 2009.1) For 'Demon Writing' we decided to break with our usual practice (whereby we individually draft chapters before heavily revising and rewriting them collaboratively) and, instead, write and present the work as a dialogue or conversation. This published version retains the performative character of the original format but has been lightly revised in the wake of subsequent discussion and reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Louis Marin sees the aesthetic realm as engendering power through its effects. The chiasmic intersplicing of allegorical text and image on a medal divides and arrests the spectator in the king-effect. It is real in the sense you can touch it and it is imaginary in that it reveals 'baroque' desire, the fantastic desire of absolute power. This paper explores the other side – fragile, material, and gendered – of Marin's world to examine not so much the institution of power's potential in the operation of grand 'finished' art works or art as 'representation', but a drawing by Poussin, which stages violent force ('power in the most vulgar and general sense') in relation to powerlessness, specifically the vulnerability of infants and women, their mothers. Rather than focus on the operation of power in relation to the great unleashers of absolutism and European wars, it inquires into a particular depiction of their victims, those caught up, against their will, in historical convulsion and into the strange precipitates of these forces in which the viewer is implicated. In light of recent work by Jean-Luc Nancy, Andrew Benjamin and other scholars, it considers what the drawing brings to its subject materially beyond representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widespread centrist and conservative explanation for the ongoing rise of racist and xenophobic populism has been that progressives have been too preoccupied with identity politics, and not attentive enough to rural economic precarity. This narrative has been particularly popularised in two high-profile memoirs, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Tara Westover's Educated, which both attempt to explain the realities of the rural, white working class and its particular resentments. Simultaneous to the publication of these memoirs, there has been a number of contemporary Anglophone novels about rural retreat published, all of which similarly suggest that rural living offers an alternative or challenge to contemporary life. This paper focuses on two British iterations of this genre, Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall and Fiona Mozley's Elmet, that suggest the rural as a site of communal possibility, rather than a retreat into melancholic resentment. I argue, then, that not only do Ghost Wall and Elmet call into question how a prevailing argument about the current global rise of racist populism is spatialised, but that they frame this as a question that is inextricable from the arrangements of space that structure access to life chances beyond simply those of liberal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze to explore the generative and nonorganic power of disease and death as forces that enable an individual to encounter an impersonality in J. M. Coetzee's epistolary novel, Age of Iron. In Deleuze's theorisations, the experience of disease leads to self-dissolution, whereby the self becomes cracked and fragmented, and is opened to the suffering of others. In Coetzee's novel, societal illness is produced and forged by a racially segregated politics, an unequal economic system, and strident messages in the context of apartheid South Africa, which intersect with the protagonist Mrs. Curren's personal disease. By stressing the associative lines between personal and societal illness, I examine how Curren's ailing body becomes cracked, yet transforms into an impersonal dimension, as it folds and unfolds into the deaths of black people. In the process of (un)folding their deaths along with her dying, Curren further enacts and multiplies the impersonal time of the past-future conjunction. I thus demonstrate, through Deleuze's theorisations, how the power of Curren's physical frailty eventually generates an impersonality beyond personal suffering, in which black and white people move toward an impersonal space beyond the bifurcated world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel can alter a change in readers over a lifetime. This paper examines the dynamics of transference animated by novels that affect us. In her reading of Thomas Ogden's The Parts Left Out, the author follows the novel's aesthetic and formal operation as it animates transference to one's own childhood in readers. The conceptualisation of transference in reading advanced in this paper leans on Melanie Klein's version of the workings of unconscious phantasy in the infant's first felt reading of the (m)other. The content of novels that profoundly affect us, the author argues, aesthetically and formally operate via self-other and/or author-reader transference in the event of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]