This article reads Teju Cole's award-winning novel Open City (2011) as an extended allegory for the operations of a 'technological unconscious' recently theorized by critics including Nigel Thrift, David Beer, Alexander Galloway, and Katherine Hayles. Cole is widely recognized for being an innovative social media activist; and yet Open City has almost uniformly been labeled an 'antiquarian' text, the highly lettered account of a Nigerian-German flâneur (Julius) who 'aimlessly wanders' New York in search of his racial identity. Yet an emphasis exclusively on Cole's 'antiquarian' style risks missing his novel's formal engagement with the technological present. Drawing on Lev Manovich's account of the flâneur as a figural precursor to the Internet user, I argue that the twenty-one short chapters that serialize Julius's 'aimless wandering' also chart his gradual slotting into an implicitly preferred racial identity category, as Julius is repeatedly hailed by African and African American persons and objects eager to gain his attention. Carefully yoking Julius's flânerie to the protocols of now-ubiquitous systems for user tracking and content personalization notably deployed by Internet browsers like Google, Open City subsequently shows how Julius's 'aimless' desire for serendipitous and diverse social encounters yields, instead, a subtly curated journey through New York cued by his perceived racial indicators. In this way, the novel presents the 'Open City' as a metonym for the 'open' Web in order to lay bare the ideology of 'openness' itself, giving the lie to pervasive cultural investments in the Internet as a 'postracial' global mode of production, and illustrating race's systemic drag within a current phase of tech-intensified capitalism whose putatively neutral proxies reiterate global class formations along racial lines.
本文将Teju Cole的获奖小说《开放之城》(Open City, 2011)视为对“技术无意识”运作的延伸寓言，该理论最近被奈杰尔·斯瑞德、大卫·比尔、亚历山大·加洛韦和凯瑟琳·海尔斯等评论家理论化。科尔被广泛认为是一名创新的社交媒体活动家;然而，《开放之城》几乎被一致地贴上了“古玩”的标签，这是一部关于尼日利亚-德国fl neur(朱利叶斯)为寻找自己的种族身份而在纽约“漫无目的地游荡”的高度文字叙述。然而，如果只强调科尔的“古玩”风格，就有可能错过他的小说与现代科技的正式接触。根据列夫·马诺维奇对fl neur的描述作为互联网用户的象征性先驱，我认为连载朱利叶斯的"漫无目的的游荡"的21个简短章节也描绘了他逐渐进入一个隐含的偏爱的种族身份类别，朱利叶斯被非洲人和非裔美国人反复称赞渴望获得他的注意。《开放城市》仔细地将朱利叶斯的fl与如今无处不在的用户跟踪和内容个性化系统(尤其是谷歌等互联网浏览器部署的系统)的协议联系在一起，随后展示了朱利叶斯对偶然和多样化的社会遭遇的“漫无目的”的渴望是如何产生的，相反，在他感知到的种族指标的指引下，他在纽约进行了一次精心策划的旅行。通过这种方式，小说将“开放城市”呈现为“开放”网络的转喻，以揭露“开放”本身的意识形态，将互联网中无处不在的文化投资视为“后种族”全球生产模式的谎言，并说明在技术强化的资本主义的当前阶段，种族的系统性拖沓，其假定的中立代理人重申了沿着种族线的全球阶级形成。
{"title":"Virtual Flânerie Teju Cole and the Algorithmic Logic of Racial Ascription","authors":"Maria Bose","doi":"10.16995/C21.772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.772","url":null,"abstract":"This article reads Teju Cole's award-winning novel Open City (2011) as an extended allegory for the operations of a 'technological unconscious' recently theorized by critics including Nigel Thrift, David Beer, Alexander Galloway, and Katherine Hayles. Cole is widely recognized for being an innovative social media activist; and yet Open City has almost uniformly been labeled an 'antiquarian' text, the highly lettered account of a Nigerian-German flâneur (Julius) who 'aimlessly wanders' New York in search of his racial identity. Yet an emphasis exclusively on Cole's 'antiquarian' style risks missing his novel's formal engagement with the technological present. Drawing on Lev Manovich's account of the flâneur as a figural precursor to the Internet user, I argue that the twenty-one short chapters that serialize Julius's 'aimless wandering' also chart his gradual slotting into an implicitly preferred racial identity category, as Julius is repeatedly hailed by African and African American persons and objects eager to gain his attention. Carefully yoking Julius's flânerie to the protocols of now-ubiquitous systems for user tracking and content personalization notably deployed by Internet browsers like Google, Open City subsequently shows how Julius's 'aimless' desire for serendipitous and diverse social encounters yields, instead, a subtly curated journey through New York cued by his perceived racial indicators. In this way, the novel presents the 'Open City' as a metonym for the 'open' Web in order to lay bare the ideology of 'openness' itself, giving the lie to pervasive cultural investments in the Internet as a 'postracial' global mode of production, and illustrating race's systemic drag within a current phase of tech-intensified capitalism whose putatively neutral proxies reiterate global class formations along racial lines.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123696409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Literature and Capital by Thomas Docherty","authors":"J. Greenaway","doi":"10.16995/C21.1332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.1332","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125488502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rachel Greenwald Smith, ed. American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010. Cambridge University Press, 2017","authors":"Tim Groenland","doi":"10.16995/C21.806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.806","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115380592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Epiphany in contemporary British poetry is perceived by some poets and critics, often those who self-identify as being outside of the mainstream, as a uniform, coercive, teleological, and unchallenging literary mode. This article intervenes in these debates to show how mainstream contemporary poetry, like its more experimental and avant-garde counterparts, also disrupts the traditional epiphanic paradigm. Through new critical readings of selected poems from Alice Oswald’s collection Woods etc. (2005), this article argues for a reframing that comprises epiphanies of ‘brightness’ and ‘unfixity’ and resists a teleological reading of this deep-rooted literary mode. It proposes that these poems offer a new way of thinking about epiphany as an ongoing process of revelation in contrast to the more familiar and well-established singular moment of insight.
{"title":"Oswald's 'tear in the veil': epiphany in Woods etc.","authors":"Joanne Dixon","doi":"10.16995/C21.588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.588","url":null,"abstract":"Epiphany in contemporary British poetry is perceived by some poets and critics, often those who self-identify as being outside of the mainstream, as a uniform, coercive, teleological, and unchallenging literary mode. This article intervenes in these debates to show how mainstream contemporary poetry, like its more experimental and avant-garde counterparts, also disrupts the traditional epiphanic paradigm. Through new critical readings of selected poems from Alice Oswald’s collection Woods etc. (2005), this article argues for a reframing that comprises epiphanies of ‘brightness’ and ‘unfixity’ and resists a teleological reading of this deep-rooted literary mode. It proposes that these poems offer a new way of thinking about epiphany as an ongoing process of revelation in contrast to the more familiar and well-established singular moment of insight.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117280190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article unites infrastructural criticism, speculative fiction, and ecocriticism. Bruce Robbins, Patricia Yeager, and other scholars have been building the field of infrastructural criticism over the past ten years, but this work has largely focused on infrastructure within realist fiction. Because speculative fiction often emphasizes infrastructural objects and systems as the techno-scientific developments that differentiate their imagined worlds from ours, these narratives offer highly productive cases for rigorous analysis of those parts of the world that enable water, petro-culture, electricity, and telco flows and connections. This article presents through sustained close reading an ecological and ideological critique of the infrastructures at work in China Mieville’s short story “Covehithe” followed by consideration of how to develop this short story as a test case for a method of applying infrastructural criticism to other speculative fictions.
{"title":"Bringing Infrastructural Criticism to Speculative Fiction: China Miéville’s “Covehithe”","authors":"A. Hageman","doi":"10.16995/C21.594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.594","url":null,"abstract":"This article unites infrastructural criticism, speculative fiction, and ecocriticism. Bruce Robbins, Patricia Yeager, and other scholars have been building the field of infrastructural criticism over the past ten years, but this work has largely focused on infrastructure within realist fiction. Because speculative fiction often emphasizes infrastructural objects and systems as the techno-scientific developments that differentiate their imagined worlds from ours, these narratives offer highly productive cases for rigorous analysis of those parts of the world that enable water, petro-culture, electricity, and telco flows and connections. This article presents through sustained close reading an ecological and ideological critique of the infrastructures at work in China Mieville’s short story “Covehithe” followed by consideration of how to develop this short story as a test case for a method of applying infrastructural criticism to other speculative fictions.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122659178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Pat Barker’s 2003 novel Double Vision, the intertwining of traumatic and uncanny aesthetics works to affirm the role of the unconscious in traumatic memory, drawing attention to the uneasy connection between trauma, violence, and libidinal fantasy, and offering through this a generic challenge to overly mimetic traumatic representations. The ambivalent significance of traumatic memory as a source both of hermeneutic excess and psychological insight is foremost here, offering brief glimpses into the hidden fantasies of impacted characters. As such, the novel can be read as a semi-Gothic exploration of traumatic pathology, highlighting trauma’s experiential ‘possession’ of an individual or culture in its happening, and questioning along with this the opposing ‘traumatological’, fantastic, and ideological bases for traumatic suffering. The findings of this examination in turn infer a larger pronouncement on the ambivalent ethics of traumatic representation and the critical need for narrative and artistic self-examination.
{"title":"21st Century Trauma and the Uncanny A Gothic Reading of Trauma in Pat Barker’s Double Vision","authors":"E. Horton","doi":"10.16995/C21.675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.675","url":null,"abstract":"In Pat Barker’s 2003 novel Double Vision, the intertwining of traumatic and uncanny aesthetics works to affirm the role of the unconscious in traumatic memory, drawing attention to the uneasy connection between trauma, violence, and libidinal fantasy, and offering through this a generic challenge to overly mimetic traumatic representations. The ambivalent significance of traumatic memory as a source both of hermeneutic excess and psychological insight is foremost here, offering brief glimpses into the hidden fantasies of impacted characters. As such, the novel can be read as a semi-Gothic exploration of traumatic pathology, highlighting trauma’s experiential ‘possession’ of an individual or culture in its happening, and questioning along with this the opposing ‘traumatological’, fantastic, and ideological bases for traumatic suffering. The findings of this examination in turn infer a larger pronouncement on the ambivalent ethics of traumatic representation and the critical need for narrative and artistic self-examination.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131113657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist responds tentatively to the question Judith Butler posed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: ‘is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief?’ (Butler 2004: xii). Drawing on recent theorisations of precarity by Butler and Isabell Lorey, this paper argues that in this novel Hamid proposes an ethico-political theory of grief that refuses to conform to existing modes of post-9/11 mourning. This model does not stoke nationalist fervour, or reiterate exceptional circumstances of trauma, but instead advocates a continuous engagement with loss and its resources for political action. The novel suggests that tarrying with grief and its exposure of the permeability of psychic borders can produce new subjectivities and political movements. At the moment of writing in 2019, when borders between nations, populations and peoples are subject to increasing scrutiny, The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s exploration of grief is both prescient and relevant to contemporary times.
{"title":"‘Tarrying With Grief’ in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist","authors":"Kelsie Donnelly","doi":"10.16995/C21.679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.679","url":null,"abstract":"Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist responds tentatively to the question Judith Butler posed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: ‘is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief?’ (Butler 2004: xii). Drawing on recent theorisations of precarity by Butler and Isabell Lorey, this paper argues that in this novel Hamid proposes an ethico-political theory of grief that refuses to conform to existing modes of post-9/11 mourning. This model does not stoke nationalist fervour, or reiterate exceptional circumstances of trauma, but instead advocates a continuous engagement with loss and its resources for political action. The novel suggests that tarrying with grief and its exposure of the permeability of psychic borders can produce new subjectivities and political movements. At the moment of writing in 2019, when borders between nations, populations and peoples are subject to increasing scrutiny, The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s exploration of grief is both prescient and relevant to contemporary times.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121555528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go has, within literary scholarship, been primarily framed as a science fiction novel concerned with cloning and genetic questions of ‘the self’. This article offers a new perspective on the novel by analysing the ways in which it is also about the legacy of a particularly Thatcherite notion of aspirational individualism. To this end, I consider the extent to which the stories of the main characters of Ishiguro’s novel – Kathy, Ruth and Tommy – are also stories of unfulfilled ambition. Placing the novel within contemporary debates about aspirational individualism, the article considers how Ishiguro – while critical of Thatcherite ideas of aspiration – nonetheless concedes that a belief in such ideas gives structure, fulfilment and meaning to individual lives.
{"title":"Kazuo Ishiguro and the Legacy of Aspirational Individualism","authors":"A. Mullen","doi":"10.16995/C21.556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.556","url":null,"abstract":"Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go has, within literary scholarship, been primarily framed as a science fiction novel concerned with cloning and genetic questions of ‘the self’. This article offers a new perspective on the novel by analysing the ways in which it is also about the legacy of a particularly Thatcherite notion of aspirational individualism. To this end, I consider the extent to which the stories of the main characters of Ishiguro’s novel – Kathy, Ruth and Tommy – are also stories of unfulfilled ambition. Placing the novel within contemporary debates about aspirational individualism, the article considers how Ishiguro – while critical of Thatcherite ideas of aspiration – nonetheless concedes that a belief in such ideas gives structure, fulfilment and meaning to individual lives.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132522613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trimm, Ryan. Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain. Routledge. 2018.","authors":"J. Peacock","doi":"10.16995/C21.669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.669","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"130 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127861203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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