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The contributors to this special issue share the understanding that literature has an important contribution to make to scholarly discussions of gentrification. Their articles on a wide variety of contemporary novelists and poets writing in English reflect the explosion of twenty-first-century literary production concerned with gentrifying neighbourhoods, and the ways in which different literary genres and formal approaches can elucidate the complex structures of feeling pertaining as urban spaces undergo gentrification. This special issue demonstrates how literary texts reveal complex patterns of settlement and displacement, and the perspectives and affective responses not only of those marginalized by gentrification - but also of gentrifiers. It takes an intersectional approach, exploring the importance of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality and their interrelations in representations of gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels including The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Stranger's Child (2011), The Sparsholt Affair (2017), and The Line of Beauty (2004), with the latter winning the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He is widely celebrated for his distinctive style, his tragicomical explorations of English life in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and his introduction of richly imagined and humanely observed gay themes to mainstream literary fiction. His latest novel is Our Evenings (2024). Alan Hollinghurst spoke with Dominic Dean about Our Evenings, its themes, inspirations and treatment of social and political history; the role of buildings and material objects in his fiction; his style and formal innovations and influences; and his relationships with TV adaptations and with the literary academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to the emerging field of critical sleep studies, and developing an intervention situated at the intersection of the environmental and the medical humanities, this article considers a range of contemporary texts: Jenny Offill's realist novel Weather (2020), Karen Russell's Sleep Donation (2014), Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) and Hunting by Stars (2021) – three examples of the 'sleep-apocalypse' genre – Finegan Kruckemeyer's play Hibernation (2021), and the Perfect Sleep app by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne (2021). I show how these texts do not just simply reflect the negative effects that climate change has on sleep health, which are manifold, as scientific research evidences. Rather, cultural production arguably draws attention to structural parallels between the climate crisis and the so-called sleep crisis, namely, contemporary society's presumed widespread sleep deprivation and rise in sleep disorders. Both crises are the product of a capitalist system geared towards continuous extraction – and exhaustion – of resources, from the Earth and human bodies. Thus, in the texts considered, sleep is explored, on the one hand, as a casualty of the climate crisis and, on the other hand, as something whose value we need to reassess as part of our ongoing work to avert climate collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, narratology has yielded innovative views on how certain narratives create and convey meaning through embodied processes. Such 'embodied narratives' have increasingly been considered to reflect the way human perception itself functions: by drawing upon corporeal impressions before mental cognition, and physical sensation before language. This article suggests that Kim de l'Horizon's Blutbuch offers further productive insight regarding the nature and function of the embodied narrative. The novel – an auto-fictional tale that deals with non-binary identity – shot to fame in the winter of 2022 after winning prestigious literary awards in the German-speaking world; and it has been lauded, in particular, for the pride of place it offers to the author-narrator's embodied perspectives on gender identity. As this article will argue, however, Blutbuch also foregrounds a biopolitical worldview in which all boundaries – and not just those of gender – are seen as superfluous. In doing so, not only does the novel allows its author-narrator to create a narrative body that reappropriates for itself the agency that cisnormative discourse would traditionally deny it, but it also proposes an expanded understanding of the embodied narrative: one that conceives of such forms of writing as metaphors for the body itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys recent Latin American artistic practices that privilege the fragment and embrace interdisciplinarity, thereby creating the conditions of possibility for a distinct way of being in contemporaneity. Coupled with the intervention of an active, emancipated reader/spectator, these practices produce objects, beings, communities, and events that alter what is experienced as "real". To describe this phenomenon, I propose the notion of the prosthetic condition, a non-ontological way of being proper to contemporaneity that affects entities that exist only conceptually, but that have the potential to operate as "real". By analysing two contemporary works – the creation of the prosthetic object in Mario Bellatin's Lecciones para una liebre muerta (2004); and the creation of a prosthetic being in Simón Hosie's la lavandera de Ciudad Bolívar (2008–2009) – I determine three main characteristics of entities affected by the prosthetic condition: they are artificial, come to fill a void, and produce real effects. The article concludes by considering the potential implications and effects of using the prosthetic condition as a tool to approach both contemporary artistic practices and relational ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores recent work of Zadie Smith ('The Embassy if Cambodia', 2013, and 'The Lazy River', 2019) and David Szalay (All That Man Is, 2016), as examples of BrexLit fiction, a term coined by Kristian Shaw to denote 'fictions that either directly respond or imaginatively allude, to Britain's exit from the EU'. In contrast to the nineteenth century state-of-the-nation novel, which drew upon the liberal-humanist resources of the novel to intervene in public debates, I contend that a significant strand of contemporary BrexLit reflects a crisis not simply within but rather of the public sphere. Accordingly, my case studies hit upon the limits of the liberal literary tradition and they do so precisely as a means to explore the deficiencies of the mainstream liberal response to populism. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's post-political thesis – the argument that the representative systems of European democracies have capitulated to a technocratic-centrist inertia based on the idea that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization – this essay claims that BrexLit offers a generic framework for thinking through an alternative agonistic imagination; a way of thinking and writing that offers a way for redeeming an illiberal politics for progressive rather than reactionary ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I aim to demonstrate how a contemporary novelist can write about extremism in the social media age and in the process engage with the literary consciousness of the past. Although several novelists have written about extremism in recent years – notably Kamila Shamsie in Home Fire (2017), Guy Gunaratne in In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) and John Wray in Godsend (2019) – few efforts have yet been made to show how it relates to the experience of life online. I argue that for a novelist wanting to explore extremism today the precursor it would be most valuable to revisit is Fyodor Dostoevsky. He perceived how in mid-nineteenth-century Russia the new mass medium of the newspaper was transforming consciousness and heightening radical sentiment, and explored this in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1871). Through a sustained engagement with these works, I interrogate the opportunities offered by entering into dialogue with him and consider how his most important narrative technique, polyphony, can be reimagined in the social media age. [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 article is concerned with the legacy of modernism in twenty-first century literature. It asks: do contemporary experimental literatures signal a new literary epoch distinct from iterations of modernism, late modernism and postmodernism which preceded them? Or can these categories overlap in the twenty-first century novel? Tackling these questions, this article probes the critical underpinnings that structure the perceived or ignored operation of modernism in contemporary literary practice. In doing so, it subjects to scrutiny the literary critical practices of periodisation which have determined the description of twenty-first century fictional innovation as a new era of literary production (metamodernism, remodernism, post-postmodernism, postfiction). In turn, it indicates a frame of continuity and divergence that caters for the relations between the forms of modernism that have appeared over the last century, as well as the forms of modernism that will inevitably follow our current new modernisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transgressive aesthetics' unrestrained extremity has been problematised by post-Cold War capitalism, via their shared reliance upon unregulated desire. Amanda Filipacchi's Love Creeps reframes transgressive excess through limitation, accounting for transgression's contradictory position within twenty-first century capitalism. The novel's expression of transgressive aesthetics relies upon a fundamental paradox: constriction simultaneously intensifies textual depictions of sexual desire. This apparent incongruity informs the novel's response to the contradictions of contemporary capitalist culture. Initially, the article considers Filipacchi's depiction of desire within a transgressive aesthetic context – beginning with definitions of transgression, before considering how the novel's innovative use of limitation reformulates perversity and extremity to respond to twenty-first century capitalism. Love Creeps' decoupling of content from consequences, via the subversive potential it aligns with limitation, is then reconnected to twentieth century uses of transgressive aesthetics, establishing the intensity Filipacchi produces as a contemporary innovation of this legacy. I argue Filipacchi's counterintuitive use of limitation recalibrates transgressive aesthetics in a way that accounts for the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, presenting an extremity that is furthered by the very limitation that intuitively should diminish it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific laboratory is often construed as a space in which laboratory animals are sacrificed on the altar of biomedical progress. However, this understanding of nonhuman animals raises significant ethical concerns and appears complicit in the anthropocentric and colonial violence that creates sacrifice zones in Naomi Klein's sense. In this article, we argue that contemporary literature can work towards an imaginative and affective reframing of the lab, which is no longer seen as a sacrifice zone but as a contact zone—a space of relationality and entanglement across the human-nonhuman divide. To explore this shift, we offer close readings of two contemporary narratives that centre on the lab: Tania Hershman's short story 'Grounded' and Jeff VanderMeer's The Strange Bird. In both of these texts, animals refuse to be made data through sacrifice and instead affirm, if in a limited sense, their own autonomy and vitality. Literary experimentation on a stylistic level plays a key role in this process: our readings highlight how both narratives evoke embodied (and more specifically haptic) connectedness with animals by deploying literary strategies that deconstruct the visual language associated with scientific objectivity. [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 article discusses American poet Steven Zultanski's 2014 Bribery, a book of post-conceptual poetry which unfolds as a quest for authenticity, the aim being to address the sense of impasse and guilt that, according to the book's speaker, are prevalent among the denizens of America, depicted throughout as the nexus of evil. For Bribery's speaker, we argue, authenticity is a necessary part of his method which aims at beginning again and at circumventing neoliberalism's individualising tendencies, which make his efforts to change the status quo feel futile. Similarly to earlier American writers like Franklin or Thoreau, self-development, for Bribery's speaker, becomes a route towards precision and humility, a way to reimagine his community without elevating himself and resorting to easy moralism. Bribery is an experimental project that works methodically to generate something precise and surprising without relying on randomness and abstraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by a desire-centred framework, this article explores how Tenille Campbell (Dene/Métis) uses Instagram as a space for contemporary muiltimedia artistic practice. Her poetry, photography, and other creative endeavours have presented meaningful opportunities for community-building and identity-affirmation as a force specifically for Indigenous resurgence across national, tribal, and geographical lines. The first section begins with a discussion of desire-centred research as it intersects with Indigenous new media studies and decolonial methodologies. Later sections argue that Campbell's artistic expressions nurture emotional, mental, communal, and spiritual connections to land, thereby growing a virtual landedness—especially in relation to the erotic, which best captures Campbell's project of community-building and identity-affirmation. Lastly, this article highlights the remediation of Campbell's poetry into fashionwear, which simultaneously cultivates networks of Indigenous women entrepreneurs. Her poetry, evinced as a co-creative, community-based, multidisciplinary literary arts practice, surpasses its manifestation on social media, and should be understood as a multimodal constellation that has impacts that ripple far beyond digital environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each contributor of this special issue responds to this call to disturb the illusion of neutrality and reveal age and ageing's role in structuring American culture and inequalities. As evidenced by this special issue, the conversations sparked by that symposium live on, and invite current and future scholars to engage with the vital subject of age(ing) in America. Keywords: Age; ageing; coming of age; genre; contemporary literature; country music EN Age ageing coming of age genre contemporary literature country music 1 4 4 07/10/23 20230301 NES 230301 This special issue of I Comparative American Studies i , titled I Age(ing) in America i , began life at a symposium, hosted by the University of East Anglia in September 2021. Simon Buck opens this issue with an examination of musician and entertainer Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones and the practice of age masquerade, or "ageing-up", in country music. [Extracted from the article]

Partendo dalle teorie sul trauma e la testimonianza di studiosi quali Sigmund Freud, Dominick LaCapra e Lawrence Langer, questo saggio studia il processo di trasmissione e sopravvivenza messo in atto da Alda Merini nel romanzo giallo La nera novella. Confinata per diversi anni all'ospedale psichiatrico Paolo Pini di Milano, Alda Merini nelle sue opere ricorda ossessivamente il trauma del confino. Nel presente saggio vedo come la poetessa, nell'impiego di una serie di spazi – che vanno dal condominio, al solaio, alla casa – e la costruzione testuale del labirinto, realizzata attraverso una completa distruzione linguistica e narrativa, attui il processo di testimonianza attraverso cui potersi riconoscere come sopravvissuta. Lo scopo di questo saggio è quello di riconsiderare il ruolo delle istituzioni psichiatriche in Italia e quello di far emergere, attraverso le parole della poetessa, il crimine commesso verso i malati mentali sia nel confino manicomiale sia nello stigma ed emarginazione del pazzo, fenomeni che purtroppo persistono tutt'oggi nell'opinione pubblica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prison is a marginal space that is hidden from society, and life writing by prisoners thus offers valuable insights into prison life. This paper examines prisoner writing, as a genre neglected by academia, focusing on how the prisoner-writer describes imprisonment to the non-prisoner reader. My analysis explores Davies's (1990. Writers in Prison. Oxford: Blackwell) assertion that prisoner writing represents an act of translation. Drawing on Doloughan's (2016. English as a Literature in Translation. London: Bloomsbury) description of 'narratives of translation' that stem from multilingual and multicultural life experiences, I theorise that the prisoner-writer can be likened to a translator. In exploring this assertion, I employ archival research to compile a corpus of short stories about prison, written by UK prisoners, and published via periodicals and competitions. My reading of these texts centres on the presence of diegetic translators who fulfil a translational role, describing prison life to other characters and to the non-prisoner reader. I produce a typology of these translators, and examine how they establish their authority and credibility to translate prison life, to understand how prisoner-writers conceive of the carceral authorial process. My analysis offers further evidence of the translational function of prisoner writing, and demonstrates the value of reading life writing through the lens of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article historicises Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Series novels in terms of 1970s feminism. The novels provide a phenomenological account of the development of the autonomist Italian left in the 1970s, but unlike most histories of this process, they centre the gendered contradictions within that political milieu. This narrative arc demands to be contextualised with the ideas of Italian feminists Carla Lonzi, Mariarosa dalla Costa, and the major Anglophone thinkers of Marxist Feminism. The Neapolitan Series investigates the feminist potential of relationships among women, even women who have no political consciousness in the common sense of the term, a potential that is illuminated by contrast with the oppressive effect of the most ardent and sophisticated male Marxists. What is crucial however, and this is at the heart of this article, is the fact that Ferrante stages this skewering of male proletarian rebels amid the finely wrought depictions of the capitalist immiseration of working-class women's lives and the inanity of bourgeois feminism. In short, this essay uses Ferrante (and her sensational popularity) as a way of thinking about the current revival of interest in 1970s feminism as an expression of the desire to reconcile the central tenets of Radical and Marxist Feminisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I read and analyse the novel Satantango (1985) by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai's. Set in a small community in rural Eastern Hungary – before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet regime – where the rain is falling incessantly, all hope has been lost, history has ended before it even began, and the houses are crumbling from the inside out, the novel is, for obvious reasons, often considered to have a tone of brutal and bleak pessimism. Robert Boyers thus talks about Krasznahorkai's 'pessimistic virtuosity' and literary realism, the sole purpose of which is disillusion. In this article, however, I would like to contest this claim and look for some paradoxical glimpses of hope hidden in the anatomy of hopelessness that the author undoubtedly makes manifest trough a radical materialism; a hope against hope. I argue that Krasznahorkai destroys necessity with necessity. To that end I will bring in the work of Ernst Bloch as well as Jacques Ranciére's book on filmmaker Bela Tarr who has adapted several of Krasznahorkai's novels for the screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of aesthetics, the expression formal constraint is most often used in non-problematic ways by critics, who tend to consider it as a convenient and even redundant category, whose constitution need not be questioned. On the contrary, this paper will closely examine the lexical and conceptual association of constraint and form, to try to understand under what conditions and modalities constraints can give rise to aesthetic forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers American writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus's genre-bending, parodic book I Love Dick (1997) as a way to deconstruct divisions that persist between the female "hysteric" and the male "schizophrenic" in contemporary theory. Even after the feminist movements in France, the UK, and America in the 1970s, there remained a gender divide lying dormant within even the more experimental contemporary theory: the male schizophrenic is given more agency to occupy the roles of theorist, author, and philosopher of living while the female hysteric is rendered non-intellectual, unintelligible, and suppressed, seen in the popularization of metaphors of schizophrenia to describe the postmodern condition, for example. This is a dilemma Kraus confronts head-on, and which this article takes up at length, with the author making the case that Kraus's work marks the beginning of a nuanced theory that encompasses both the hysteric and the schizo in tandem. The article argues that frameworks of becoming-hysteric and becoming-schizo are feminist ways through the post-structuralist terrains that Kraus deterritorializes, including but not limited to the theoretical realms of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism is traversing socio-cultural and political discourses across the globe. In the feminist movement, it is contributing to a paradoxical dance where feminism's massification is resulting in a loss of values and radicalism as a social justice movement. In this article, I argue that a reconfiguration of the definition of the literary object can serve as a strategic tool to break through what Nancy Fraser has labelled as "the handmaiden of capitalism". In order to do so, I elaborate the concept of "intra-mat-extuality" as a methodological and political strategy. As a case study, I use the phenomenon The Handmaid's Tale to configure global resilient feminist interferences in these neoliberal contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jean-Yves Jouannais examines the history of war in L'Encyclopédie des guerres, a performance piece at the Centre Pompidou, which is ongoing since 2008. Compiling citations on the theme of war while also interrogating the possibilities of literary form, the work stages itself being composed session by session and year after year. Proposing itself as a "fiasco," the work initially insisted on its protean, unpublishable nature. What began as a project with undefined contours has resulted in several published volumes, including MOAB: Épopée en 22 chants. Adopting the form of the epic by using a montage of citations from across the ages, MOAB stages the "Mother of All Battles." This idiosyncratic use of montage foregrounds the chaos of warfare, while also insisting on its burlesque qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As American publishing conglomerates and institutions have come to play an increasingly dominant role in world literature, dominant critical discourses tend to equate the "Americanization" of world literature with a process of aesthetic diminishment and devernacularization. This essay nuances and complements such accounts by focusing on the role of American independent publishers as curators of world literature. The "world literary vernacular" through which these presses construct world literary value contains five key elements: an insistence on modernist literary genealogies; an emphasis on regional (or at least subnational) attachments; an investment in oeuvres rather than in individual works or personal charisma as salient units of literary value; a decidedly unironic rhetoric that connects literature to a putative world republic of letters; and finally an emphasis on translatedness and the creative values of translation. The essay situates independent publishers as crucial participants in the contemporary world literature ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Description has made something of a comeback in recent years as part of a theorising of possibilities for a post-hermeneutical critical orientation. The present essay considers the descriptive turn, so-called, in relation to a range of writing that crosses the boundaries of the critical and the creative: in work by Claire-Louise Bennett, Lisa Robertson, Wayne Koestenbaum and R. F. Langley. The essay identifies in this writing an occupancy of description's register as it has been articulated over the ages by a frequently sceptical regulatory discourse: description as understood to be variously gratuitous, ornamental or passively affirmative. Rather than suggest an expanded field of contemporary descriptive practice, the proposal here is for description conceived as a minor mode, a relatively rare happening, but all the more valuable for being so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of post-'9/11' terrorism on how the city of London has been reimagined is significant. In this paper, we will explore two post-'9/11' novels, Chris Cleave's 2005 Incendiary and Mohsin Hamid's 2017 Exit West, which complicate the tradition of British literature featuring terrorists (Taylor, London's Burning: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840–2005 (London: Continuum, 2012), 1–2) by reenvisaging London as a nexus of state terrorism. Incendiary, published on the day of the '7/7' bombings, highlights the complexity of political violence through the story of a traumatised woman who loses her son and husband during a terrorist attack in London. Cleave critiques the post '9/11' city by constructing a narrative centred on the Londoners' response to the terror perpetrated by the government, the police, and media (e.g.: violence against civilians, suspension of civil rights, martial law, and surveillance). Similarly, Hamid's Exit West depicts London as a place where refugees live in terror, exploited in work camps and subjected to surveillance (through drones and by citizens turned vigilantes) by the British state. This paper aims to interrogate how these texts problematise mainstream representations of sovereign power in London. If state sovereignty is understood as 'an aspiration that seeks to create itself in the face of internally fragmented, unevenly distributed and unpredictable configurations of political authority that exercise more or less legitimate violence in a territory' (T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds.), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2005), 10), literary fiction creates a space suitable for questioning the legitimacy of this aspiration. The state actively produces 'fear, terror, and violence', embedding in the construction of cities (D. Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), 4). The London of Cleave's and Hamid's novels becomes a site for both projecting terrorism and resisting terror in all its forms. Our interdisciplinary theoretical framework combines postcolonial theory and elements of urban and cultural sociology (S. Graham (ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); S. Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011); J. C. Alexander, Performance and Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2011)) with inquiries into the cultural imaginary of terrorism (Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film: Narrating Terror (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 75.) in post-'9/11' literature. We subscribe to the proposition that the 'only real solution to our current geopolitical crisis' is asserting the global values that connect the Self with the Other (Gauthier, 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 1.) and we argue that Incendiary and Exit West provide a counternarrative to the dominant discourse of terrorism post '9/11', which champions the state's supreme authority through stereotyping and polarisation. The proposed reading of Cleave's and Hamid's novels will show how the city of London, as imagined in literary responses to '9/11', can crystallise a counternarrative of protest by revealing the systemic violence through which sovereign power is performed at the expense of civil populations, particularly minoritised populations through discourses of hate such as Islamophobia and antiimmigrant/refugee rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the representation of Western modernity's dark undercurrent, the Gothic novel has since its inception in the 1760s developed and transformed alongside that modernity. This paper looks at two contemporary Gothic novels from the Low Countries, Herman Franke's Wolfstonen (2003) and Saskia de Coster's Wat alleen wij horen (2015), which are occupied with contemporary globalisation and immigration to the Netherlands and Belgium. Both novels cast the apartment buildings that are central to their plots as Gothic spaces fraught with images of modern, globalised society, as well as widespread anxiety over societal cohesion in ethnically and culturally diverse cities. An interdisciplinary reading constituted by gothic and postcolonial reading practices brings to the fore new elements of the Dutch and Flemish cultural imaginary. It reveals the continuous renewal of the gothic itself, but also into the changes brought to the Low Countries as a result of globalisation and immigration. These have their effect on the construction of community, a process that is articulated in both the form and the content of the novels' narratives. Ultimately, I argue, the gothic is put to work in these novels as a way of dealing with the anxieties about and uncertainties of a postcolonial world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does one attempt to renew the literary style—far from the buttoned-up classics, from perfectionistic Proust, from the Nouveau Roman and its cold epigones? To renew the style is to first succeed in renewing the imagination of the public. Starting with the "écriture blanche" theorized by Barthes, Fargues' reflections begin with Céline, whose work marked the end of a centuries-old conception of the literary language as aesthetic and monolithic, and the beginning of a liberated and simple writing style with no bombast. In the contemporary field, Michel Houellebecq is one of his most significant heirs, and in the same sense, Fargues evaluates the contribution of Angot, Carrère (and his narrative investigations), and Despentes. He sees in it a reinvented "écriture blanche" reconciled with life, a peaceful synthesis of all literary experiences: a simple, direct sentence, without artifice, on the border of banality, economical without ostentation, where meaning and clarity prevail, where the expression seems to go without saying, without effort, like a conversation. The dream of "écriture blanche" is finally fulfilled: the style has disappeared. The simplicity of a primitive "I" is reinvented, distancing itself from the jumble of classical narrative, the simple past, and purely decorative sentences such as "La marquise sortit à cinq heures." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the narration and the narrative strategies in Dany Laferriere's novel, Je suis un écrivain japonais. Indeed, the narration of this text puts into relief its generic issues and contributes to create a singular fictional form: short and long, simultaneously narrated and in the process of narration, fictional and non-fictional. The author paradoxically proposes that there the text says nothing and that nothing is happening in it. The result is a type of narration where author and reader share an ambivalent system of meaning and ending. As a result, we are obliged, as readers, to go with the flow of the text in a kind of incessant and perpetually potential movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Giorgio Agamben, being contemporary suggests an oblique relation to time, where the author must be both modern and anachronistic. This understanding of contemporaneity implies that a critical distance must be achieved by the individual vis-à-vis his or her own time in order to have a better overview of it. In Vies minuscules, Pierre Michon seems to adopt a reactionary position by going back to a traditional form of storytelling, by using extremely flowery language and by creating a literature devoid of any explicit experimental devices, thereby differentiating himself from the Oulipo and Tel Quel schools, which dominated the literary world in France at the time. However, this article aims to show that Michon's novel is still very contemporary, in the sense that Agamben gives to this word: by focusing his writing on insignificant or reprehensible characters, by putting his journey as a writer at the center of his story, and by deciding to write in an archaic language, he travesties the medieval genre of the vita and therefore achieves a truly contemporary style. Between hagiography and autofiction, Vies minuscules offers an original conception of modern writing that is, as the author puts it, "always new, always from yesterday." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends with the paradigm in critical works on David Foster Wallace that posit affectless irony as a central predicament in his work. Insofar as critics have become caught explicating affective resolutions to an ironic problem, an "x over irony" approach has reached a stalemate in Wallace studies. Instead, this article argues that Wallace's critique of irony is more a criticism of its narcissistic use, which problematizes the notion that irony is non-affective. In Infinite Jest, irony constitutes only part of a highly affective narcissistic dilemma that not only results in isolation, but also buffers subjects from an engulfment threat that pervades the novel. Accordingly, Wallace's characters reside in a double-bind of distance and closeness with regard to the other—a balancing act that underlies the author's model of subjectivity. Consequently, any "resolutions" to affectless irony are better approached as mitigations of this double-bind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to describe the reception of literary texts with the help of attractors, a concept developed in chaos theory. The main thesis is that attractors can describe literary texts — especially highly fragmented and open contemporary texts — in a more differentiated way than reception theory does. With the concept of attractors, phenomena come into focus that only resonate on the margins of other models of reception. An analysis of the famous Latin American novel Los detectives salvajes written by Roberto Bolaño shows how incongruous, possible, unsettled and alleged meanings work together and create an impression of dispersion and convergence of meaning in the text. This can clearly be shown by an analysis organized around attractors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the New Sincerity in contemporary American fiction has largely been read on terms provided by a handful of early proponents. This article contends that more complex formulations of the notion are necessary if it is to remain useful as a descriptor for important qualities of recent texts. Among issues in need of greater attention are the implications of the New Sincerity for historical awareness, a topic I pursue via consideration of William T. Vollmann's grappling with literary history. I argue that Vollmann's works offer more than the pastiche that allegedly defined historical consciousness in postmodernist fiction. His intertextual engagements with Edgar Allan Poe are especially valuable for modelling some of the ways recent fictions bypass postmodernist ahistoricism in favour of connections to a usable past, and, especially, a usable literary tradition. Readings of Vollmann's 'The Grave of Lost Stories' (in several editions) and 'The Cemetery of the World' show how he employs research in the textual archive as a figuration of relations to the past that can serve the ends of renewal and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article locates a form of literary realism adapted to the event of climate change in Don DeLillo’s late fiction. The social element of the realist novel is shaped by limits in human empathy. ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life’, writes George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’. That ‘roar’ has become intelligible as global warming, and the world fashioned by the sensations of the bourgeois body is now vulnerably, imperfectly separated from a larger ecological reality. DeLillo’s late fiction attunes itself to this reality through its emphasis on the contingent character of sensation. In ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, Libra, Underworld and other works, momentary impressions gleaned from an environment capture the ‘whole life’ - a figure’s past, future and life’s meaning. A tension between these ‘whole lives’ and the consistently disruptive environments from which they are drawn expands the receptive field of DeLillo’s fiction, producing an ecological realism that suggests future possibilities for extending the range of human empathy to objects as big as global warming and the planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference chiefly to Dickicht (2011) and ich bin ein Feld voller Raps, verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde übereinandergelegt (2016) this paper will demonstrate that voice is a key concern of the poet and that the voices created in Sandig's collections are deliberately constructed in various ways. Some contain literary quotations, some play with fairy tales and nursery rhymes. At issue for Sandig more than anything else is the ‘Hörbarkeit der Dichtung’: finding a voice for poetry, which also challenges conventional understandings of the link between voice and identity. What is more: many of the poems have a simultaneous life as songs, sound pieces, or in relation to films; others emerge in collaboration with artists, musicians or composers. This paper teases out Sandig's project with reference to her collections, her multi-media work, recent commissions and ‘Lied aus dem Off’, her lecture on voice as part of her Poetikdozentur in Mainz (2017) in order to understand how the idea of voice relates to her other literary concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ulrike Almut Sandig’s poetic output engages with the traditions of Romanticism, but it is apparent from her performance techniques and the visual qualities of her work, as well as some of its central thematic concerns, that her relationship to this tradition is complex. This essay illuminates Sandig’s relationship to German literary history, and particularly to the work of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, by arguing that both Sandig and Droste negotiate between Romanticism and Realism — and, in doing so, emphasize the primacy of sensory engagement as a means of social engagement and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yurii Andrukhovych is one of the first writers in post-Soviet Ukraine who created their own concept of Central Europe with a particular focus on the historical region of Galicia as a legacy of the Habsburg Empire. The West Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivs’k, the author’s place of birth and residency, appears in his texts as a part of the historical region of Eastern Galicia and the embodiment of Andrukhovych’s vision of the region and, by extension, Central Europe. Showing the relationship of the city to the Habsburg monarchy while referencing his own family memories, Andrukhovych combines the pre-war history of the town with contemporary history. Thus, Ivano-Frankivs’k is depicted by the writer not only through the prism of its Habsburg era, but also through post-Soviet reality. Furthermore, in his first publications, the Habsburg history of Galicia represents the idea of belonging to European civilization as an alternative to the more recent totalitarian past, but Andrukhovych has always attempted to create a new image of modern Ivano-Frankivs’k rather than to reconstruct the Austro-Hungarian past of the region: the subjective and personalized Austrian past of the city is more akin to a point of reference and signpost to other perspectives. Both Ivano-Frankivs’k and Eastern Galicia are portrayed by the author as ambivalent and hybrid spaces. On the one hand it is a peripheral area between East and West; but, on the other hand, it is Andrukhovych’s personal part of Europe, where the processes and figures that shaped the continent gain an individual, unique dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article André Derval, the Director of Collections at IMEC (l'Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine), retraces the history of these literary and editorial archives chronologically, while he simultaneously explains the principles which guided the development of the documentary offering, and summarizes the diversification of the institute's activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the three sets of issues that have dominated research devoted to literature over the last 30 years in France: the theory of fiction, the attention to contemporary literature and, symmetrically, literature as cultural heritage, and finally, philosophical reflection on the nature of interactions between democracy and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article unpacks the relationship between literary depictions of 9/11 and contemporary idealism regarding the potential of the Internet through their elaboration in Thomas Pynchon’sBleeding Edge(2013). It suggests that the concerns of postmodern writers and theorists came to dominate interpretations of 9/11 (practiced most successfully by Don DeLillo inFalling Man) and, in doing so, severed its connection to deeper historical trajectories. At the heart of the postmodernist fallacy is the same privileging of discourse over materiality typified by utopian conceptions of the Internet. InBleeding Edge, this utopia takes the form of DeepArcher: a “Deep Web” paradise infiltrated by suspicious forces during the 9/11 attacks. The intermingling of espionage, the tech industry, and the response to 9/11 in Pynchon’s novel foregrounds the ambiguities of digital modernity in a way yet to be recognized by most writers and theorists of the contemporary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses Stefan Wolter's memoir of his service as a Bausoldat in the Nationale Volksarmee:Hinterm Horizont allein — Der ‘Prinz’ von Prora (2005). I suggest the term ‘archival narrative’ to describe its narrative made up of juxtapositions of different sources and to draw attention to archival forces of selection, preservation and omission which the text displays. Wolter scrutinizes his documents of military service and highlights their inadequacy as evidence of his same-sex relationship, drawing attention to traces of his anxieties about revealing once closeted desires. The text therefore invites a reading through the archive theories of Jacques Derrida and José Esteban Muñoz, as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's concept of the closet. Wolter offers a uniquely candid account of same-sex desire in the East German military. He shows the effects of a closet defined by concealment, tacit knowledge and the threat of exposure on the documentation and archivization of queer experiences. Above all, he suggests ways of preserving evidence of same-sex desire without neglecting experiences of closeting and suppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing a preliminary dialogue between sound studies and animal studies, this article investigates the representation of animal sounds in the contemporary novel. Focusing particularly on Cormac McCarthy’sThe Road, Julia Leigh’sThe Hunter, and Tom McCarthy’sC, it highlights the way in which these novels register and celebrate endangered sounds on the one hand and hybrid, biotechnological sounds on the other, thereby unearthing an overlooked aspect of our cultural response to species extinction and the ongoing technological mediation of the nonhuman world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abdelkebir Khatibi asserted in his 1968Le Roman maghrébinthat the Algerian War of Independence occupied the imagination of mid-twentieth-century writers and encapsulated an era; this essay argues that the twenty-first century lightning rod for theroman maghrébinis clandestine emigration—l'hrig,or “burning.” This “soft war” that is both the legacy of colonialism and a byproduct of globalization is becoming as imaginatively all-encompassing to North African writers today as the Algerian war was to writers of that era. This essay briefly touches upon six texts to demonstrate that authors concentrate on humanizing the individualharragas(“burners” or clandestine emigrants) both to bear witness to and to challenge globalization's false rhetoric of free circulation as well as the inhuman indifference of North African states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the applicability of postfeminist discourse to contemporary Spanish cultural production. Incited by the apparent confrontation with traditional feminist thinking, postfeminist theories are thought to be an obstacle to the rights of women in contemporary societies. Bearing in mind such complications of the term, our essay questions the recent criticism that postfeminism has received in the last few years and tries to elucidate how its implications affect the progressive development of the achievements of previous or simultaneous feminisms. Such discussion is presented in this essay through the study of the narrative texts of Lola Beccaria and La Fura dels Baus, who respectively present in her novel (Una mujer desnuda, 2004) and their film (Fausto 5.0, 2001) features of the feminine subjectivity in collision with the masculine gazes of the discourses that partake in the construction of the feminine characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we read contemporary fiction in the age of its real subsumption under capital? How can we avoid explaining it as just one more commodity? This presentation explores these questions by returning to the proximity between neoliberalism and biopolitics in Foucault’s 1978–1979 lectures, and by describing the tension between contemporary literature and neoliberal biopolitics as a relation ofreciprocal saturation: while the market has colonised all but the most marginal fields of culture, the market has in its turn adopted markedly literary strategies, of which the mobilisation of affect and the manipulation of potentiality are the two most important. Neither a form of surface reading nor of interpretation, the reading alongside the market that I propose reads for contemporary fiction’s engagement with affect and potentiality, in order to trace the minimal difference between its textual performance and its biopolitical solicitation. I illustrate this approach through a brief reading of Teju Cole’sOpen Cityand a more extensive discussion of Dinaw Mengestu’sThe Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ways in which the poems of Ramsey Nasr explore the urban space of the Flemish city of Antwerp and stage encounters with various inhabitants of the Flemish metropolis are examined. In 2005, Nasr, a poet of Palestinian- Dutch background, was appointed City Poet of Antwerp. The nine poems that he wrote during this one-year-appointment were published in his third poetry collection onze-lieve-vrouwe-zeppelin. Antwerpse gedichten (2006). Through close analysis of three selected poems it is shown how this work by an urban poet-with-official-status, a representative poet so to speak, represents the Antwerp cityscape. By reading the poems as examples of a third phase of literary flanerie (whereby flanerie refers to a particularly productive combination of simultaneous moving and seeing, reading and interpreting), what could be called postcolonial flanerie is conceptualized. Postcolonial flanerie refers to a particular way of processing the, at times, overwhelming experiences of the increasingly globalized metropolis. Nasr's 'Antwerpse stadsgedichten' [Antwerp city poems] feature as a poetic test case of postcolonial flanerie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the June 2011 issue of "American Review of Canadian Studies" is presented which discusses the portrayal of Quebec families in literature and film.

Perfume critique is an underdeveloped academic field, and this includes considerations of perfume as a theme within other art forms such as literature. In this article, Angela Carter's Wise Children and Monika Fagerholm's Wonderful Women by the Sea are read alongside perfume blogs in order to analyze the significance of perfume references in the novels. It is demonstrated that the authors' choice of perfumes for their characters plays a crucial part in their characterization, especially in relation to the theme of identity change. Using Alfred Gell's analysis of perfume use as bound up with "the transcendence of the sweet life," it is argued that female characters use perfume to become someone else, sometimes a past self. Furthermore, the use of perfume as a literary device in these novels is shown serve as the vehicle for a feminist critique of the division between "masculine" "high" and "feminine" "low" culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her contribution, journalist and critic Florence Noiville takes a look at the British literary scene from her Parisian vantage point. What she discovers is the ability of contemporary British novelists to combine history and politics with humour and entertainment, thus neither relegating history and politics to the background nor turning their works into dry novels of ideas. Rather, in the works of writers such as Jonathan Coe and others, individual lives are intertwined with the bigger picture, thus turning the contemporary British novel into a refreshing source for their (French) readers and providing ample material for a kind of literary – cultural exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]