Gothic depictions of early childhood and its antecedents from conception to childbirth stand to fundamentally shape readers’ understanding of colonialism across the transnational and translinguistic space of the Caribbean. This effect is particularly visible in contemporary novels such as Maryse Condé’s La Migration des coeurs (1995) and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), which not only have been interpreted as rewritings of Wuthering Heights but also draw on a larger, more multicultural Gothic literary tradition. In their renderings of sexual violence, doomed pregnancies, and motherless infancy, Condé and Kincaid appropriate and edit Gothic conventions, highlighting persisting ramifications of the colonial project for women and children. Gothic youth also functions as a subversive site of resistance with the potential to dismantle imperialist ideologies and systems.
{"title":"Fearsome Worlds and Uncanny Children: Gothic Early Childhoods in Condé’s La Migration des coeurs and Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother","authors":"Suzanne Manizza Roszak","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpab035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpab035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Gothic depictions of early childhood and its antecedents from conception to childbirth stand to fundamentally shape readers’ understanding of colonialism across the transnational and translinguistic space of the Caribbean. This effect is particularly visible in contemporary novels such as Maryse Condé’s La Migration des coeurs (1995) and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), which not only have been interpreted as rewritings of Wuthering Heights but also draw on a larger, more multicultural Gothic literary tradition. In their renderings of sexual violence, doomed pregnancies, and motherless infancy, Condé and Kincaid appropriate and edit Gothic conventions, highlighting persisting ramifications of the colonial project for women and children. Gothic youth also functions as a subversive site of resistance with the potential to dismantle imperialist ideologies and systems.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49273275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article traces the critical reception of Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) to argue that both neoliberal and neoconservative interpretations of her work (and personal celebrity) have distorted the novel’s critique of contemporary biopolitics as a project of debilitating inclusion and racial eugenics. Rather than treating White Teeth as a “hysterical” or “naive” celebration of multiculturalism, this essay, focused on the ending of the novel, instead argues that White Teeth not only anticipates criticisms of multiculturalism as an inadequate model of belonging but also, more importantly, demonstrates a biopolitical understanding of race as a category that manages the distribution of life chances in postcolonial Britain. Drawing on work by Jasbir Puar, Achille Mbembe, and Luce Irigaray, this reframing of White Teeth opens new connections between her early work and her more recent “pessimistic” novels, such as Swing Time.
{"title":"Multiculturalism, Biotechnology, and Biopolitics in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth","authors":"J. Johnston","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpab019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpab019","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article traces the critical reception of Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) to argue that both neoliberal and neoconservative interpretations of her work (and personal celebrity) have distorted the novel’s critique of contemporary biopolitics as a project of debilitating inclusion and racial eugenics. Rather than treating White Teeth as a “hysterical” or “naive” celebration of multiculturalism, this essay, focused on the ending of the novel, instead argues that White Teeth not only anticipates criticisms of multiculturalism as an inadequate model of belonging but also, more importantly, demonstrates a biopolitical understanding of race as a category that manages the distribution of life chances in postcolonial Britain. Drawing on work by Jasbir Puar, Achille Mbembe, and Luce Irigaray, this reframing of White Teeth opens new connections between her early work and her more recent “pessimistic” novels, such as Swing Time.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43106608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Focusing on Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998) and Affinity (1999), this article examines how the reader-pleasure afforded by contemporary reimaginings of Victorian lesbianism accommodates the complicated emotional response of shame. Through an investigation of how both texts relate queer experience to shame and what narrative strategies facilitate or induce shame in the reader during their reading experience, this article argues that Waters’s work invites a more sophisticated analysis of shame: one that relates to, and arguably reproduces, the empathetic engagement between the text and the reader. In so doing, this article demonstrates the importance of affect and narrative studies in unpacking the complicated reading pleasure afforded by Waters’s writings and its political potentials.
本文以Sarah Waters的《Tipping the Velvet》(1998)和《Affinity》(1999)为重点，探讨了当代对维多利亚时代女同性恋的重新想象所带来的读者愉悦是如何适应复杂的羞耻情感反应的。通过调查这两篇文章是如何将酷儿经历与羞耻联系起来的，以及读者在阅读过程中哪些叙事策略促进或诱发了羞耻，本文认为沃特斯的作品引发了对羞耻的更复杂的分析:一种与文本和读者之间的移情参与有关，并且可以说是再现的分析。在此过程中，本文展示了情感和叙事研究在解开沃特斯作品所提供的复杂阅读乐趣及其政治潜力方面的重要性。
{"title":"Awkward Encounters with Sarah Waters: Shame, Reading, and Queer Subjectivity","authors":"Muren Zhang","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpab014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpab014","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Focusing on Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998) and Affinity (1999), this article examines how the reader-pleasure afforded by contemporary reimaginings of Victorian lesbianism accommodates the complicated emotional response of shame. Through an investigation of how both texts relate queer experience to shame and what narrative strategies facilitate or induce shame in the reader during their reading experience, this article argues that Waters’s work invites a more sophisticated analysis of shame: one that relates to, and arguably reproduces, the empathetic engagement between the text and the reader. In so doing, this article demonstrates the importance of affect and narrative studies in unpacking the complicated reading pleasure afforded by Waters’s writings and its political potentials.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46325145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Other Words (2016) is the first of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings to be published in Italian, charting the journey to self-expression enabled by her twenty-year relationship with this foreign language. Tracing Lahiri’s literary production, this article argues that the autobiographical prose of In Other Words is facilitated by a series of “willful” displacements, reworking and revising the notion of displacement, which is a pervasive theme of Lahiri’s earlier work. Moreover, it is precisely by means of these self-conscious geographical, bodily, linguistic, and literary dislocations that Lahiri articulates a kind of shifting or nomadic subjectivity, where otherness and multiplicity are re-privileged as sources of creative energy and self-affirmation.
{"title":"A Language of Her Own: Willful Displacement and Nomadic Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri","authors":"rebecca walker","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpab013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpab013","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In Other Words (2016) is the first of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings to be published in Italian, charting the journey to self-expression enabled by her twenty-year relationship with this foreign language. Tracing Lahiri’s literary production, this article argues that the autobiographical prose of In Other Words is facilitated by a series of “willful” displacements, reworking and revising the notion of displacement, which is a pervasive theme of Lahiri’s earlier work. Moreover, it is precisely by means of these self-conscious geographical, bodily, linguistic, and literary dislocations that Lahiri articulates a kind of shifting or nomadic subjectivity, where otherness and multiplicity are re-privileged as sources of creative energy and self-affirmation.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49111534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this essay, I read Jennifer Egan and Alexandra Kleeman’s work within a distinct strand of contemporary literature, characterized by a turn away from skepticism as regards the transparency of language, a revitalized faith in literary form, and a pronounced interest in the capacity of the novel form as well as a centering of the existential experience of the subject socialized as “woman.” Charting a shift from the paranoid mode of the high postmodernists to the contemporary moment in which appearance – visibility – is a necessary and even desirable form of sociality, I suggest that the turn “from the outside in” is fruitfully understood through consideration of the memoir boom of the 1990s and the “specular moment” of autobiography, reconsidering the dyadic dynamic of the reader–author relationship.
{"title":"I Can See Through You: Double Vision in Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me and Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine","authors":"Patricia Malone","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpab032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpab032","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this essay, I read Jennifer Egan and Alexandra Kleeman’s work within a distinct strand of contemporary literature, characterized by a turn away from skepticism as regards the transparency of language, a revitalized faith in literary form, and a pronounced interest in the capacity of the novel form as well as a centering of the existential experience of the subject socialized as “woman.” Charting a shift from the paranoid mode of the high postmodernists to the contemporary moment in which appearance – visibility – is a necessary and even desirable form of sociality, I suggest that the turn “from the outside in” is fruitfully understood through consideration of the memoir boom of the 1990s and the “specular moment” of autobiography, reconsidering the dyadic dynamic of the reader–author relationship.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48221819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer Troublemakers: The Poetics of Flippancy","authors":"Rosamund Campbell","doi":"10.1093/CWW/VPAB027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/CWW/VPAB027","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48157418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contemporary Feminist Life Writing: The New Audacity","authors":"Nell Osborne","doi":"10.1093/CWW/VPAB024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/CWW/VPAB024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42235303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ludics and Laughter as Feminist Aesthetic: Angela Carter at Play","authors":"Karima Thomas","doi":"10.1093/CWW/VPAB026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/CWW/VPAB026","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42062022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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