Rose Harris-Birtill introduces the David Mitchell special edition of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings. Harris-Birtill provides a critical introduction to David Mitchell’s complete works, before discussing her experiences as organiser of the international David Mitchell Conference 2017, held at the University of St Andrews on 3rd June 2017, and its relationship to the special edition. Highlighting the dominance of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas in both Mitchell’s UK book sales and across current literary criticism to date, Harris-Birtill introduces the articles in the special edition, summarising the contributions of each essay. Drawing on the conference discussion, and the decision to include the author in the event, Harris-Birtill argues for the importance of openly discussing the scholarly issues and rewards of working with living authors in the field of contemporary literature.
Rose Harris-Birtill介绍David Mitchell特别版的C21文学:21世纪写作杂志。哈里斯-比尔蒂尔在讨论她作为2017年6月3日在圣安德鲁斯大学举行的2017年国际大卫·米切尔会议组织者的经历，以及它与特别版的关系之前，对大卫·米切尔的全部作品进行了批判性的介绍。哈里斯-比尔蒂尔在特别版中介绍了这些文章，总结了每篇文章的贡献，强调了大卫·米切尔的小说《云图》在米切尔英国图书销售和当前文学批评中的主导地位。哈里斯-比尔蒂尔借鉴会议讨论，并决定将作者纳入活动，他认为公开讨论学术问题的重要性，以及与当代文学领域的在世作家合作的回报。
{"title":"Introducing the David Mitchell special edition of C21 Literature","authors":"Rose Harris-Birtill","doi":"10.16995/C21.672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.672","url":null,"abstract":"Rose Harris-Birtill introduces the David Mitchell special edition of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings. Harris-Birtill provides a critical introduction to David Mitchell’s complete works, before discussing her experiences as organiser of the international David Mitchell Conference 2017, held at the University of St Andrews on 3rd June 2017, and its relationship to the special edition. Highlighting the dominance of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas in both Mitchell’s UK book sales and across current literary criticism to date, Harris-Birtill introduces the articles in the special edition, summarising the contributions of each essay. Drawing on the conference discussion, and the decision to include the author in the event, Harris-Birtill argues for the importance of openly discussing the scholarly issues and rewards of working with living authors in the field of contemporary literature.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128807392","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}
Translation crops up in David Mitchell’s work both as a fictional theme, for instance in Black Swan Green (2006) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), and as a personal practice when Mitchell and his wife Keiko Yoshida translated two non-fiction works by a young Japanese boy with non-verbal autism: The Reason I Jump (2013) and Fall Down Seven Times, Get up Eight (2017). Interestingly, these four books are all related to the genre of autobiography, and three of them focus on Japan. Drawing from an investigation into the specificity of the Japanese tradition of translation and into theories of translation as intertextual and multi-temporal, we will start by exploring the notions of relay and voice in Mitchell’s use of translation. To further investigate the particular nature of the association of translation and autobiography in Mitchell’s work, we will discuss the concept of devolved testimony developed by French historian Emmanuel Bouju and that of the ‘born-translated novel’ by Rebecca Walkowitz. We will finally contend that the notion of “oblique writing”, defined as the practice of rewriting or writing over a lost voice from a lateral perspective, captures the spirit of these works, enabling him to navigate both issues of power play and the delicate relation between intimacy and distance.
{"title":"Oblique Translations in David Mitchell’s Works","authors":"Claire Larsonneur, Claire Larsonneur","doi":"10.16995/C21.53","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.53","url":null,"abstract":"Translation crops up in David Mitchell’s work both as a fictional theme, for instance in Black Swan Green (2006) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), and as a personal practice when Mitchell and his wife Keiko Yoshida translated two non-fiction works by a young Japanese boy with non-verbal autism: The Reason I Jump (2013) and Fall Down Seven Times, Get up Eight (2017). Interestingly, these four books are all related to the genre of autobiography, and three of them focus on Japan. Drawing from an investigation into the specificity of the Japanese tradition of translation and into theories of translation as intertextual and multi-temporal, we will start by exploring the notions of relay and voice in Mitchell’s use of translation. To further investigate the particular nature of the association of translation and autobiography in Mitchell’s work, we will discuss the concept of devolved testimony developed by French historian Emmanuel Bouju and that of the ‘born-translated novel’ by Rebecca Walkowitz. We will finally contend that the notion of “oblique writing”, defined as the practice of rewriting or writing over a lost voice from a lateral perspective, captures the spirit of these works, enabling him to navigate both issues of power play and the delicate relation between intimacy and distance.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131887513","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}
The breathless itineraries of David Mitchell’s novels Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas position them as books offering a globalized perspective. The novels both employ multiple narratives that—through a range of first person narrators, focalizers, and textual forms—proliferate stories encompassing myriad places and moments. The tales in these works intertwine and nest in one another, their formal links paralleled by spiritual bonds between characters: ghosts, reincarnations, and migrating spirits help bridge disparate story lines. These connections mean their individual stories cannot be read in isolation as an accumulation of different global viewpoints but must be seen as embedded within one another. If globalization views the planet as if from afar and stresses equivalence and exchange (especially through international markets), spirit, conceived here as the capability of some matter to transform itself, allows the world to be seen and surveyed from within. Moreover, the transfer of spirit between characters highlights their interconnections, even if these characters never meet. Consequently, these novels construct the concept of ‘world’ as a complex and dynamic phenomenological production, one echoing Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of ‘mondialisation’. In Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, world is thus discovered only through a confrontation with other beings. As this encounter cannot be staged through merely subsuming the other’s viewpoint, it is dependent on spiritual projection, on endeavoring to inhabit the perspective of another. Through this worldly panorama, Mitchell’s novels rework both the traditional association of novel and nation, as well as invocations of the spirit of a nation, so they can present a world that can only be known from inside material and located bodies, through spiritually entwined perspectives and stories.
{"title":"Spirits in the Material World: Spectral Worlding in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas","authors":"Ryan S. Trimm","doi":"10.16995/C21.63","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.63","url":null,"abstract":"The breathless itineraries of David Mitchell’s novels Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas position them as books offering a globalized perspective. The novels both employ multiple narratives that—through a range of first person narrators, focalizers, and textual forms—proliferate stories encompassing myriad places and moments. The tales in these works intertwine and nest in one another, their formal links paralleled by spiritual bonds between characters: ghosts, reincarnations, and migrating spirits help bridge disparate story lines. These connections mean their individual stories cannot be read in isolation as an accumulation of different global viewpoints but must be seen as embedded within one another. If globalization views the planet as if from afar and stresses equivalence and exchange (especially through international markets), spirit, conceived here as the capability of some matter to transform itself, allows the world to be seen and surveyed from within. Moreover, the transfer of spirit between characters highlights their interconnections, even if these characters never meet. Consequently, these novels construct the concept of ‘world’ as a complex and dynamic phenomenological production, one echoing Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of ‘mondialisation’. In Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, world is thus discovered only through a confrontation with other beings. As this encounter cannot be staged through merely subsuming the other’s viewpoint, it is dependent on spiritual projection, on endeavoring to inhabit the perspective of another. Through this worldly panorama, Mitchell’s novels rework both the traditional association of novel and nation, as well as invocations of the spirit of a nation, so they can present a world that can only be known from inside material and located bodies, through spiritually entwined perspectives and stories.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127692781","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}
Islands are a powerful recurring motif in the writing of David Mitchell. His globe-trotting fictions negotiate the trope of ‘islandness’ as ambiguously positioned between desire and hostility, stranding protagonists on bountiful shores or dooming them in squalid insular exiles. As seemingly contained spaces detached from the centres of the world, islands are malleable platforms for the projection of literary experimentation. In David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), Cloud Atlas (2004), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and The Bone Clocks (2014), islands become utopian imaginaries, sanctuaries for the outcast, sources and tools of power and sites of corruption and entrapment, while constantly mediating between reality and the imagination, the past and the future. First and foremost, however, the analysis of the functions of islands in Mitchell’s work informed by Yi-Fu Tuan’s and Michel de Certeau’s conceptual frameworks of ‘place’ and ‘space’ reveals that, much like the author’s many individual stories, islands are never isolated, but always relational entities enabling protagonists to interact with one another and become interconnected with the larger world around them. If we want to understand how deeply topography, spatiality and identity are interwoven in Mitchell’s work, we cannot circumvent his islands.
{"title":"“No Man is an Island”: Tracing Functions of Insular Landscapes in David Mitchell’s Fiction","authors":"Eva-Maria Schmitz","doi":"10.16995/C21.62","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.62","url":null,"abstract":"Islands are a powerful recurring motif in the writing of David Mitchell. His globe-trotting fictions negotiate the trope of ‘islandness’ as ambiguously positioned between desire and hostility, stranding protagonists on bountiful shores or dooming them in squalid insular exiles. As seemingly contained spaces detached from the centres of the world, islands are malleable platforms for the projection of literary experimentation. In David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), Cloud Atlas (2004), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and The Bone Clocks (2014), islands become utopian imaginaries, sanctuaries for the outcast, sources and tools of power and sites of corruption and entrapment, while constantly mediating between reality and the imagination, the past and the future. First and foremost, however, the analysis of the functions of islands in Mitchell’s work informed by Yi-Fu Tuan’s and Michel de Certeau’s conceptual frameworks of ‘place’ and ‘space’ reveals that, much like the author’s many individual stories, islands are never isolated, but always relational entities enabling protagonists to interact with one another and become interconnected with the larger world around them. If we want to understand how deeply topography, spatiality and identity are interwoven in Mitchell’s work, we cannot circumvent his islands.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133452342","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}
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) features a complex temporal scheme. Critics have discussed the novel as an allegory of mortality and in terms of labyrinthine time and reincarnation time. I herein discuss it in terms of elided time, examining the ellipses or breaks in temporal continuity that the novel so prominently highlights. Although what we might arguably call the main narrative covers Holly Sykes’s lifetime, most of that span is not narrated. Drawing on current discussions of the Anthropocene and climate change, I explore how The Bone Clocks, through its narrative ellipses, spurs readers to link past causes and future effects and to pay attention to the attritional environmental destruction that is taking place across a vast time-scale. Mitchell writes a history of the future that cautions us to mind the gaps.
大卫·米切尔(David Mitchell)的《骨钟》(The Bone Clocks, 2014)以复杂的时间计划为特色。评论家们认为这部小说是关于死亡的寓言，是关于迷宫般的时间和轮回的寓言。我在这里从被省略的时间的角度来讨论它，检查小说中突出强调的时间连续性中的省略或中断。虽然我们可以说主要的叙述涵盖了霍莉·赛克斯的一生，但大部分时间都没有叙述。根据目前关于人类世和气候变化的讨论，我探索了《骨钟》如何通过其叙事省略，促使读者将过去的原因和未来的影响联系起来，并关注在巨大的时间尺度上正在发生的自然环境破坏。米切尔写了一部关于未来的历史，提醒我们要注意差距。
{"title":"Mind the Gap(s): Holly Sykes’s Life, the ‘Invisible’ War, and the History of the Future in The Bone Clocks","authors":"J. Parker","doi":"10.16995/C21.47","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.47","url":null,"abstract":"David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) features a complex temporal scheme. Critics have discussed the novel as an allegory of mortality and in terms of labyrinthine time and reincarnation time. I herein discuss it in terms of elided time, examining the ellipses or breaks in temporal continuity that the novel so prominently highlights. Although what we might arguably call the main narrative covers Holly Sykes’s lifetime, most of that span is not narrated. Drawing on current discussions of the Anthropocene and climate change, I explore how The Bone Clocks, through its narrative ellipses, spurs readers to link past causes and future effects and to pay attention to the attritional environmental destruction that is taking place across a vast time-scale. Mitchell writes a history of the future that cautions us to mind the gaps.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"316 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116120672","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 work includes two texts on the themes of gardens and slow time presented in a reading with David Mitchell at the University of St Andrews 2017 conference on Mitchell. These works of ‘truthful fiction’ extend from an ongoing project, The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin. Written in dialogue with The Bone Clocks and featuring a collaboration with Mitchell, they explore the Cretan labyrinth as a cultural and topological motif and recount Jardin’s designing a garden with a meditative labyrinth. The afterword situates the texts in a broader context of bringing the ‘slow’ movement to academic institutions and teaching Mitchell’s work in connection with contemplative pedagogies.
这项工作包括两个关于花园和慢时间主题的文本，在圣安德鲁斯大学2017年米切尔会议上与大卫米切尔一起阅读。这些“真实的小说”作品延伸自一个正在进行的项目，皮埃尔花园的彼得诗。在与The Bone Clocks的对话和与Mitchell的合作中，他们探索了克里特岛迷宫作为文化和拓扑主题，并讲述了Jardin设计的一个带有冥想迷宫的花园。后记将文本置于更广泛的背景下，将“慢”运动引入学术机构，并将米切尔的工作与沉思教学法联系起来。
{"title":"In the Labyrinth of Slow Time: “A Perturbation in the Deep Stream” and “A Perambulation in the Deep Stream”","authors":"P. Harris","doi":"10.16995/C21.61","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.61","url":null,"abstract":"This work includes two texts on the themes of gardens and slow time presented in a reading with David Mitchell at the University of St Andrews 2017 conference on Mitchell. These works of ‘truthful fiction’ extend from an ongoing project, The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin. Written in dialogue with The Bone Clocks and featuring a collaboration with Mitchell, they explore the Cretan labyrinth as a cultural and topological motif and recount Jardin’s designing a garden with a meditative labyrinth. The afterword situates the texts in a broader context of bringing the ‘slow’ movement to academic institutions and teaching Mitchell’s work in connection with contemplative pedagogies.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"12 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123793115","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 essay analyses the relationship between myth and modernity in The Burial at Thebes (2004), Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Antigone. It focuses on the poet’s cultivation of what T.S. Eliot, in his review of Ulysses, called the mythic method; that is, ‘the art of holding a classical safety net under the tottering data of the contemporary.’ If, for Eliot, the mythic method was part of a reactionary disavowal of modernity, for Heaney it belongs to a more progressive political and aesthetic agenda. Drawing on debates from New Modernist Studies, the article traces and interrogates the significance of the mythic method within Heaney’s landmark play. In doing so it demonstrates the ways in which the legacies of modernism continue to shape Irish writing in the twenty-first century.
{"title":"Heaney’s Mythic Method: Modernist Afterlives in The Burial at Thebes","authors":"M. McGuire","doi":"10.16995/C21.72","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.72","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyses the relationship between myth and modernity in The Burial at Thebes (2004), Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Antigone. It focuses on the poet’s cultivation of what T.S. Eliot, in his review of Ulysses, called the mythic method; that is, ‘the art of holding a classical safety net under the tottering data of the contemporary.’ If, for Eliot, the mythic method was part of a reactionary disavowal of modernity, for Heaney it belongs to a more progressive political and aesthetic agenda. Drawing on debates from New Modernist Studies, the article traces and interrogates the significance of the mythic method within Heaney’s landmark play. In doing so it demonstrates the ways in which the legacies of modernism continue to shape Irish writing in the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114185642","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 explores Zoe Lambert’s short story collection, The War Tour (2008), in relation to the debates surrounding the public intellectual and the literary response to the War on Terror. It makes a claim for Lambert’s collection to be considered not only as the work of a public intellectual but that it also contests what it means to be an intellectual at a time of historical crisis. In dwelling upon real-life figures such as the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and the physicist Lise Meitner, Lambert also reflects upon her own position as a supporter of the Stop the War Coalition. The relationship to the public sphere is complicated by Lambert’s gender, and of the women that she writes about; a complication which not only unsettles the definition of a public intellectual but is also articulated through the oblique strategies of the short story collection.
{"title":"Arms and the Woman: The Public Intellectual in Zoe Lambert’s The War Tour","authors":"P. March-Russell","doi":"10.16995/C21.71","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.71","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores Zoe Lambert’s short story collection, The War Tour (2008), in relation to the debates surrounding the public intellectual and the literary response to the War on Terror. It makes a claim for Lambert’s collection to be considered not only as the work of a public intellectual but that it also contests what it means to be an intellectual at a time of historical crisis. In dwelling upon real-life figures such as the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and the physicist Lise Meitner, Lambert also reflects upon her own position as a supporter of the Stop the War Coalition. The relationship to the public sphere is complicated by Lambert’s gender, and of the women that she writes about; a complication which not only unsettles the definition of a public intellectual but is also articulated through the oblique strategies of the short story collection.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121339108","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 examines the changing representation of technology in three of DeLillo’s novels, White Noise, Cosmopolis and Zero K, and traces the conceptual and philosophical developments in his writing concerning the two key themes of disaster and mortality. Disasters witnessed through technological means consistently distance the ‘real’ from the event in earlier work such as White Noise, whereas in Cosmopolis, Eric Packer, the central character, yearns for disasters to happen to himself. DeLillo’s latest novel Zero K represents a clear sense of ending and longing for disaster. Secondly, technology changes from promoting a fear of death in earlier works, to a fear of life in Zero K, highlighting the bleakness of life in a world ruled by technology. This article will discuss these two progressions in detail across the three novels, followed by a conclusion of the comparisons titled ‘Changing Channels’ for each theme, producing an original perspective of the diachronic changes through DeLillo’s work.
{"title":"Changing Channels of Technology: Disaster and (Im)mortality in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Cosmopolis and Zero K","authors":"Yugin Teo, Ross Maffey","doi":"10.16995/C21.74","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.74","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the changing representation of technology in three of DeLillo’s novels, White Noise, Cosmopolis and Zero K, and traces the conceptual and philosophical developments in his writing concerning the two key themes of disaster and mortality. Disasters witnessed through technological means consistently distance the ‘real’ from the event in earlier work such as White Noise, whereas in Cosmopolis, Eric Packer, the central character, yearns for disasters to happen to himself. DeLillo’s latest novel Zero K represents a clear sense of ending and longing for disaster. Secondly, technology changes from promoting a fear of death in earlier works, to a fear of life in Zero K, highlighting the bleakness of life in a world ruled by technology. This article will discuss these two progressions in detail across the three novels, followed by a conclusion of the comparisons titled ‘Changing Channels’ for each theme, producing an original perspective of the diachronic changes through DeLillo’s work.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123133597","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 paper examines the novels Malarky (2012) and Martin John (2015), by the Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield, which portray the internal states of damaged subjects of modernity: in Malarky, the text is overwhelmed by the grief of its central character, a bereaved wife and mother. In Martin John, the text is subordinated to more sinister mental damage; the impulses and obsessions of a sexual predator. In both novels, Schofield explores her central characters’ damaged consciousnesses using narratological techniques descended from the ‘high modernist’ literature of the 1920s. I argue that Schofield’s novels are themselves twenty-first century modernist novels: drawing upon Marshall Berman’s analysis that modernism aims ‘to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization’, this paper demonstrates the continued political efficacy of this aim in Schofield’s narratology, and locates Schofield’s work within a wider argument that contemporary modernism takes representations of damaged or a-normative consciousnesses as a key tenet.After first demonstrating how Malarky’s central character’s mental a-normativity is represented using a combination of Free Indirect Discourse with subjectivist focalisation, this paper then investigates Schofield’s more radically experimental work, Martin John, in terms of two prior arguments concerning the politics of modernism: Gyorgy Lukacs’ polemic against the perceived immorality of modernist ‘psycho-pathology’, and the later argument by Catherine Belsey and Colin MacCabe that modernism refuses the ‘meta-language’ which governs realist texts, creating an ‘interrogative text’ which demands active interpretation, thus querying the normative boundaries by which damaged consciousnesses are excluded from cultural discourse.
{"title":"The Politics of 21st-century Modernism in Malarky and Martin John by Anakana Schofield","authors":"A. Sell","doi":"10.16995/C21.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.43","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the novels Malarky (2012) and Martin John (2015), by the Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield, which portray the internal states of damaged subjects of modernity: in Malarky, the text is overwhelmed by the grief of its central character, a bereaved wife and mother. In Martin John, the text is subordinated to more sinister mental damage; the impulses and obsessions of a sexual predator. In both novels, Schofield explores her central characters’ damaged consciousnesses using narratological techniques descended from the ‘high modernist’ literature of the 1920s. I argue that Schofield’s novels are themselves twenty-first century modernist novels: drawing upon Marshall Berman’s analysis that modernism aims ‘to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization’, this paper demonstrates the continued political efficacy of this aim in Schofield’s narratology, and locates Schofield’s work within a wider argument that contemporary modernism takes representations of damaged or a-normative consciousnesses as a key tenet.After first demonstrating how Malarky’s central character’s mental a-normativity is represented using a combination of Free Indirect Discourse with subjectivist focalisation, this paper then investigates Schofield’s more radically experimental work, Martin John, in terms of two prior arguments concerning the politics of modernism: Gyorgy Lukacs’ polemic against the perceived immorality of modernist ‘psycho-pathology’, and the later argument by Catherine Belsey and Colin MacCabe that modernism refuses the ‘meta-language’ which governs realist texts, creating an ‘interrogative text’ which demands active interpretation, thus querying the normative boundaries by which damaged consciousnesses are excluded from cultural discourse.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123332623","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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