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Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies, affect studies, and narratology, this essay explores the affective and aesthetic consequences of violence and criminality in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. I begin by discussing the minor crimes to be found within its pages, before moving on to address various instances of so-called exceptional criminality. The affective state that emerges out of this combination of the banal and the extraordinary, I argue, could best be described by invoking Sianne Ngai's notion of stuplimity, a conjunction of the stupefying and the sublime that ultimately infiltrates the very tissue of the narrative.

This article explores the representation of serial murder in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, focusing in particular on Part Four, “The Part About the Crimes,” which provides a thinly fictionalized account of the notorious femicides that have afflicted the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez over the last two and a half decades. What impact does this extensive litany of dead bodies have on the novel’s plot trajectory, its production of meaning, and its proairetic qualities? What, precisely, does the recitation of such atrocities do to the fictional discourse it generates? In the following article, I argue that the unrelenting seriality of this section induces what we might call a “narrative necrosis,” whereby the tissue of the narrative itself undergoes a process of decomposition. More specifically, I would like to suggest that such repetition serves to undermine the narrativity of the novel and, in so doing, emphasizes the collective, systemic, and interminable nature of these appalling crimes. Accepted version

This article explores the various ways in which Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy privileges the affective (and aesthetic) quality of reticence. I begin by addressing the broader political significance of such moderation—relating it, more specifically, to the placatory content of the speeches made by Jawaharlal Nehru during the late forties and early fifties. I then trace the process by which Nehru’s “meandering pleas for mutual tolerance” eventually find their way into the very structure of A Suitable Boy, directly influencing its formal qualities and creating a general discursive “climate” of order and stability. In other words, I would like to suggest that the narrative not only privileges this Nehruvian virtue at the level of content—by explicitly advocating the renunciation of strong feeling—but also practices it at the formal or structural level. And by doing so, I shall argue, it ultimately obliges the reader to adopt a similar affective stance.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel . . . is that it be interesting. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” 1884 What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing. Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, January 1852.

This article explores the crisis initiated by colonial modernity in Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947 novel Midaq Alley. I begin by discussing the significance of anger within the narrative, arguing that this dominant structure of feeling could be read as a collective response to wider social and historical forces. In other words, rather than understanding emotion as the “subjective property” of the individual, I regard it here as a relational practice embedded within and determined by quite specific sociocultural circumstances. I then proceed to discuss the role of rumour in the novel and the significance of its pronounced melodramatic qualities. In the first case, I shall argue, the circulation of rumour provides a way of containing or quarantining the negative feelings produced by modernity, while also reinforcing the boundaries of a community facing the very real possibility of its own demise. In the second case, I would like to suggest that the narrative’s tendency to privilege the melodramatic mode creates a sense of social order and moral intelligibility by channelling these feelings into a stable and predictable generic structure. This latter project is ultimately frustrated, however, when the forces of evil emerge to destroy the novel’s principle representative of virtue.

This article explores the spatial dimension of colonial modernity in Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947 novel Midaq Alley. I begin by discussing the way in which modernity reconfigures urban space in Cairo so that the radical disjunctures and discontinuities it initiates become encoded within the topography of the city itself. I then address the impact this reconfiguration of space has on the inhabitants of Midaq Alley, forcing them to engage with modernity as a concrete presence in their daily lives. In other words, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s terminology, modernity in the novel takes on a chronotopic quality – fusing time and space, history and geography – and as a consequence, those characters who aspire to move from one temporality to another are required to do so by following a particular spatial trajectory. They must traverse a number of significant boundaries and interstitial zones, before entering those chronotopic sites whose function it is both to signify and shape colonial modernity: in this case, specifically, the brothel and the bar.

This article explores the quality of lightness in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s . Precisely what kind of lightness do we find in the novel, what are some of its defining characteristics and what are the key strategies by which this effect is achieved? I begin by discussing the narrative’s readability, its linguistic transparency and its deliberate attenuation of supplementary meaning. This transparency, I would like to suggest, ultimately impedes our standard interpretative procedures, frustrating any attempt to reinstate (plausible) symbolic meaning. I then address in greater detail the “depthlessness” of the novel, its emphasis on surfaces and immediate legibility. Finally, I offer an analysis of Holly Golightly herself, making the argument that as a character she shares (and indeed determines) many of the novel’s lighter qualities — attaching supreme value to “the surface of things,” privileging the signifier over the signified and actively pursuing the freedom and mobility of non-meaning.