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Copyright of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is the property of Universidad de La Laguna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article proposes environmental memory as an approach to reframing environmental justice in transnational contexts through the work of U.S. author, William T. Vollmann. Combining recent theorizations of environmental memory with Nancy Fraser’s “politics of framing,” I argue that Vollmann reimagines the political spaces of social ecology in the twenty-first century by metafictionally dramatizing the various contexts, uses, limits, and possibilities of narrative. I focus on two novels, The Ice-Shirt (1990) and Imperial (2009), to illustrate how Vollmann constructs environmental memory as a challenge to the interpretive frame of the nation-state in an era of anthropogenic change. As with other contributions to this issue, the original occasion of this essay was for a publication following the 2014 symposium, “Rethinking Environmental Consciousness,” at Mid Sweden University. Since then, the intensification of borders and reactionary nationalisms under neoliberalism have made the reimagining of transnational connections even more urgent. As this reading contends, Vollmann’s profuse narratives do not begin to exhaust the possibilities of rewriting that history. Rather, they suggest a modest starting point.

La reputazione letteraria di Vollmann si basa su un’immagine dell’autore come devoto alla sincerità, al racconto della verità, e a un’apertura perfino patologica al mondo. Ma così come ci sono artificio e creatività nelle sue opere letterarie, anche le sue interviste lasciano intravedere affascinanti strategie di autocostruzione e occultamento, e un’oscillazione tra il rivelare e il celare, fornendo utili spunti per analizzare le sue opere letterarie sia narrative che saggistiche. Vollmann fa dell’onestà e dell’apertura una virtù, ma si trincera e si costruisce, divertendosi a volte a giocare maliziosamente con la sua identità di autore in uno spazio testuale a metà strada tra realtà e finzione, nascondendo se stesso in bella vista tra le proprie creazioni. Vollmann’s literary reputation rests on an image of him as an author committed to sincerity, truth-telling, and an even pathological openness to the world. But as there is artifice and creativity within his literary works, his interviews also give a glimpse into fascinating strategies of self-construction and concealment, and an interplay between revealing and hiding, which provide useful avenues for parsing his literary works, fiction and non-fiction alike. As Vollmann makes a virtue of honesty and openness, he also self-protects, self-constructs, and at times plays mischievously with an authorial identity in the space between fact and fiction, hiding within the plain sight that he creates.

The aim of the article is to ponder, from a narratological perspective, on the fictional pacts in William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreamsseries, i.e., on the virtual contract through which the author gives the reader, whether explicitly or not, instructions about the way in which his texts should be read, and that the reader, in turn, should follow to coherently process textual contents. By focusing on The Ice-Shirt, the first novel in the series, I will try to demonstrate how such a pact proves to be a problematic one, especially in that, throughout the whole text, fictional and non-fictional elements are constantly blended. Moreover, my aim is to address how on the reader’s part a ‘flexible’ approach, i.e., an approach that recognizes and builds on such a compresence of elements, allows him to navigate a text that reveals to be hybrid in nature.

William T. Vollmann frequently asserts that his ideal reader will appreciate the functionality and beauty of his sentences. This article begins by taking such claims seriously, and draws on both literary and rhetorical stylistics to explore some of the many ways that his texts answer to his intention to find “the right sentence for the right job.” In particular, this article argues that Vollmann’s stylistic decisions are most notable when they most directly satisfy his effort to produce texts that foster empathetic knowledge, serve truth, resist abusive power, and encourage charitable action. Extended close analyses of passages from an early and from a mid-career text (The Rainbow Storiesand Europe Central) illustrate Vollmann’s consistency across two decades of his career regarding choices in the areas of figuration (including schemes and tropes of comparison, repetition, balance, naming, and amplification), grammar, deixis, allusion, and other compositional strategies. Particular attention is paid to passages that display the stylistic mechanisms underlying Vollmann’s negotiation of his texts’ moral qualities, including both the moral content of the worlds represented in the texts, and the moral responsibility the texts bear with regard to their audience. The results of my analyses demonstrate that Vollmann typically prioritizes openness, critique, and dialogue not only in terms of incident and character, but also on the scale of the phrase, clause, and sentence. Ultimately, this article shows how Vollmann’s sentences serve his declared intentions and allow readers to recognize compatibilities between Vollmann’s works and the characteristic features of post-postmodernist writing in general.

Per testimoniare la diffusione e la fortuna di Vollmann in Italia, Massimo Bocchiola, traduttore di Fathers and Crows(1992; Venga il tuo regno, 2011), Luca Briasco, editor di Minimum Fax, Claudia Durastanti, scrittrice, e Vanni Santoni, scrittore ed editor, intervengono con un loro personale contributo da lettori di Vollmann. In order to discuss Vollmann’s reception in Italy, Massimo Bocchiola, translator of Fathers and Crows (1992; Venga il tuo regno, 2011), Luca Briasco, editor at Minimum Fax, Claudia Durastanti, writer, and Vanni Santoni, writer and editor, participate with their personal point of view as Vollmann’s readers.

A shorter version of this interview was published in The Claw, Fall 2009, Vol 2, No 1. © by Max McClure. Reprinted by permission.

Presentazione della sezione “«We Should Never Write Without Feelings». Studi su William T. Vollmann”. Introduction to the monographic section “’We Should Never Write Without Feelings.’ Studies on William T. Vollmann”.

The article compares the representation of Asian sex workers in William T. Vollmann’s Butterfly Stories(1993) and Michel Houellebecq’s Platform(Plateforme, 2001). Both the novels are set in South-East Asia, and both involve an apologetic and romanticised description of the sex trade. By comparing the two novels, I argue that both authors’ treatments of the sex industry develop a critique of Western Orientalism, and at the same time sympathy for and complicity with the colonial power dynamics that regulate the relationships between Asian countries and the West.

This essay argues that a persistent structure of feeling in the literature and cultural politics of coal extraction in the United States can be described by Lauren Berlant's concept of 'cruel optimism'. This contradictory desire for an object which materially prevents the flourishing it promises is evident in the case of the fossil energies, which are invested with late Fordist fantasies of stabilisation at the same time that climate change renders them untenable. It explores this 'coal optimism' through William T. Vollmann's two-volume Carbon Ideologies, and recent novels by Tawni O'Dell and Carter Sickels, each of which call into question the utility of affect in the context of energy and climate discourse. [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]

Copyright of Enthymema is the property of Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory & Philosophy of Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A shorter version of this interview was published in The Claw, Fall 2009, Vol 2, No 1. © by Max McClure. Reprinted by permission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to ponder, from a narratological perspective, on the fictional pacts in William T. Vollmann's Seven Dreams series, i.e., on the virtual contract through which the author gives the reader, whether explicitly or not, instructions about the way in which his texts should be read, and that the reader, in turn, should follow to coherently process textual contents. By focusing on The Ice- Shirt, the first novel in the series, I will try to demonstrate how such a pact proves to be a problematic one, especially in that, throughout the whole text, fictional and non-fictional elements are constantly blended. Moreover, my aim is to address how on the reader's part a 'flexible' approach, i.e., an approach that recognizes and builds on such a compresence of elements, allows him to navigate a text that reveals to be hybrid in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the representation of Asian sex workers in William T. Vollmann's Butterfly Stories (1993) and Michel Houellebecq's Platform (Plateforme, 2001). Both the novels are set in South-East Asia, and both involve an apologetic and romanticised description of the sex trade. By comparing the two novels, I argue that both authors' treatments of the sex industry develop a critique of Western Orientalism, and at the same time sympathy for and complicity with the colonial power dynamics that regulate the relationships between Asian countries and the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Enthymema is the property of Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory & Philosophy of Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

William T. Vollmann frequently asserts that his ideal reader will appreciate the functionality and beauty of his sentences. This article begins by taking such claims seriously, and draws on both literary and rhetorical stylistics to explore some of the many ways that his texts answer to his intention to find "the right sentence for the right job." In particular, this article argues that Vollmann's stylistic decisions are most notable when they most directly satisfy his effort to produce texts that foster empathetic knowledge, serve truth, resist abusive power, and encourage charitable action. Extended close analyses of passages from an early and from a mid-career text (The Rainbow Stories and Europe Central) illustrate Vollmann's consistency across two decades of his career regarding choices in the areas of figuration (including schemes and tropes of comparison, repetition, balance, naming, and amplification), grammar, deixis, allusion, and other compositional strategies. Particular attention is paid to passages that display the stylistic mechanisms underlying Vollmann's negotiation of his texts' moral qualities, including both the moral content of the worlds represented in the texts, and the moral responsibility the texts bear with regard to their audience. The results of my analyses demonstrate that Vollmann typically prioritizes openness, critique, and dialogue not only in terms of incident and character, but also on the scale of the phrase, clause, and sentence. Ultimately, this article shows how Vollmann's sentences serve his declared intentions and allow readers to recognize compatibilities between Vollmann's works and the characteristic features of post-postmodernist writing in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Enthymema is the property of Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory & Philosophy of Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Le roman La Famille royale de William T. Vollmann dépeint les villes de la Côte ouest des Etats-Unis en une épopée dantesque, une descente aux enfers à la recherche du salut dans la déchéance. Chaque ville représente une philosophie, une structure de l’espace mental dans l’espace urbain. Le roman élabore une dialectique conflictuelle entre San Francisco et Sacramento pour l’essentiel, mises en regard de Los Angeles et de Las Vegas plus brièvement. Au bout de son périple urbain, la quête métaphysique du héros déchu s’achève à Slab City, une utopie dont le dénuement et l’âpre poésie restent ouverts à tous les possibles.

Narratological discussions about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction predominantly focus on an opposition between narrative pragmatics and narrative semantics. The former position holds that fictionality depends on the author's intention to present the text as fiction or nonfiction, whereas the latter implies that readers assign texts to one of these two categories depending on text-immanent features. This essay suggests that crossings of the border between fiction and nonfiction are the result of both author intention and reader reception. By considering recent theories on the relation between authors and readers, I submit that the distinction between real-life author and fictional narrator is not always clear-cut. The narrative discourse in the novels by Richard Powers, for example, can at times be taken for real-world discourse. Similarly, William T. Vollmann's nonfictional work Imperial continuously suggests that facts are informed by the fictions we tell ourselves. The distinction between nonfiction and fiction arguably no longer functions as a global interpretative frame for these texts, which can be read at times as fiction, at times as nonfiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay highlights the spectral analogies between the attempts to discover the fate of Sir John Franklin's Arctic expedition in the 1850s, and the sudden eruption of novels in the 1990s dealing with its demise. In both cases, supernatural tropes occupied a central role in how Western audiences confronted Arctic disaster. A thematic survey focusing on two novels demonstrates how contemporary mappings of Arctic exploration utilize spectral motifs in reconstructing Victorian trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the three novels Vollmann devoted to the “oldest profession in the world,” inspired by his personal experiences in San Francisco's Tenderloin District and travels to Thailand: Whores for Gloria (1991), Butterfly Stories (1993), and The Royal Family (2000). At the core of each novel is a love story. While not published as a trilogy, the books are interconnected in theme, style, and autobiography so that they form a de facto trilogy. The protagonists—all antiheroes—are on a quest for human connection, a search for what they consider is love in the guise of a prostitute. These are not romance novels in the traditional sense of the genre or love stories one would expect from mainstream, commercial fiction. These are sordid tales of affection for the apparent outcasts of society, a triptych that contributes an ironic version of “romance fiction,” vindicating the many varieties of love (even if unsavory) that life presents. The prostitute is a common character in Vollmann's work, both fiction and nonfiction, the lives they lead a common theme. Vollmann has been criticized for obsessing on the world of streetwalkers and call girls, of giving them too much repetitive attention; yet, when studying Vollmann's work, considering this obsession sheds light on Vollmann's oeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]