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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]

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]

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]

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]

Wishing to access the referential nature of things, the later Roland Barthes turned to premodern modes of thinking that emphasise presence, exteriority, and certainty. This essay shows this turn by elaborating on the Platonic, mythical, and tragic subtexts of his Camera Lucida. The photographic pose – interpreted variously through tragic masks, sacred icons, or documentary transparency – offers a rich site to reflect on the objectivity of experience. Though its memories are subjective, photography’s vivid effect shares in the universality promised by myth, which is also an imagistic mode of experience. The tension between the studium (techne/rhetoric) and the punctum (wound/experience) leads Barthes to affirm the incontrovertible reality of the latter over the artificiality of the former. Additionally, photography’s temporality of the past functions as a confirmation of presence rather than absence: the no-more does not signify what is not there, but corroborates in its melancholy what once was. In short, the light of photography in Camera Lucida is not so much a technical device required by an artistic medium but the very light of truth that grounds the referentiality of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]