Pub Date : 2023-12-27DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2294811
Sarah Dimick
To reflect on guerrilla gardening and the narratives sprouting from it, I intersect a literary work – the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, published in 2023, loosely based on ...
{"title":"Guerrilla Gardening: At the Intersection of Birnam Wood and Minneapolis","authors":"Sarah Dimick","doi":"10.1080/00111619.2023.2294811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2023.2294811","url":null,"abstract":"To reflect on guerrilla gardening and the narratives sprouting from it, I intersect a literary work – the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, published in 2023, loosely based on ...","PeriodicalId":44131,"journal":{"name":"CRITIQUE-STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION","volume":"170 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139062723","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-22DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2282522
Sam Goodman
This article is a critical exploration of how three of Graham Swift’s novels - Waterland (1983), Last Orders (1996), and Here We Are (2020) – offer a literary representation of the (south) east of ...
{"title":"Eastern Premise: Writing the East of England in the Novels of Graham Swift","authors":"Sam Goodman","doi":"10.1080/00111619.2023.2282522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2023.2282522","url":null,"abstract":"This article is a critical exploration of how three of Graham Swift’s novels - Waterland (1983), Last Orders (1996), and Here We Are (2020) – offer a literary representation of the (south) east of ...","PeriodicalId":44131,"journal":{"name":"CRITIQUE-STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138517064","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-14DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2279046
Fidan Cheikosman
This article explores the possession-possessor dichotomy in the Turkish museum-novel. The process of curation presents itself as an aesthetic concept refracted between literary and visual perceptions of everyday life. The research presented focuses on the relationship between curatorial practices and storytelling, and its aesthetic importance to the process of archiving the identity of nations. The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk and The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak will be portrayed as literary institutions that resemble museums as re-imagined reconstructions of the nation’s social life. The collector figure in the literary and visual imaginations find themselves at the forefront of existential questions: Are the resulting collections controlled by the collectors, or is there a point in which the collections themselves begin possessing their original creators? Furthermore, this article argues that within the selected texts, the practice of collecting is institutionalized through the moving of an accumulation of objects from the private space to the public, manifested through museums, which can be otherwise thought of as memory institutions. Novel-writing originates from the same compulsive obsession as collecting: each process represents and equal effort to create, control, and manipulate one’s perceptions of the world and of their recollection of the past.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-06DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2279052
Vladimir Biti
The British Empire’s disintegration drove its many residents into an enclosure of illusions of sovereignty. As McEwan’s works emerged amid such developments, his characters respond to the rising disintegration either by imposing control patterns on others or by taking the needy into protection. The novel Black Dogs focuses on the protagonist-narrator Jeremy, who is determined to redeem his adoptive parents’ ruined familial intimacy. However, his considerate attitude to them is gradually disclosed by the author as an attempt to solidify his unbelonging self. His generous opening to them by means of a mobile plot that meanders through European history gradually turns into a self-protective consolidation. Indicatively, his plot’s sleepwalking through historical perils recalls the ancient Greek love romances, whose readers were equally frightened by the whims of an unchained history. Yet unlike them, who used to attach themselves to the ups and downs of the imperiled lovers, Jeremy’s addressees are attracted by his wandering plot that occupies the individual and collective territories of others. In a final twist, the author even surpasses this self-consolidating expansion into foreign territories by his clandestine plotting of an intertextual space and thus reveals the appropriative, conspirational character of his pact with the readers. A complicit alliance with them comes into being, which he keeps controlling and steering.
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Pub Date : 2023-10-17DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2270895
Kui Zeng, Hongbin Dai
ABSTRACTThis article extends previous readings of Atonement’s representation of the English country house by examining it in relation to a nostalgic version of Englishness that still appeals to a contemporary audience. It argues that the novel both deconstructs and reconstructs the idea of rural Englishness endorsed by the heritage culture. By disclosing the constructedness of the timeless England, Atonement shows that rural Englishness is crafted out of a fantasy of seamless historical continuity that has never existed. McEwan indicates that the projection of the aristocratic patriarch’s private property as a repository of English values and culture obscures the class and gender oppression embedded in the country-house power structures. The progressive politics of Atonement is further seen in its refiguration of the elitist, exclusive version of Englishness as a more democratic and inclusive form of Britishness. It justifies the vision of multicultural British identity by appealing to the shared past of Heritage England and immigrants from the old empire. This shared past is revealed in the novel through subtle allusions to the hidden connections between English estate houses and Britain’s colonial enterprise. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. See Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 292; and Susie L. Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 22.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China [20BWW041].Notes on contributorsKui ZengKui Zeng is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, China. His research interests include British rural novels (with a focus on English country-house novels), Sino-British literary relations, and postcolonial criticism. His work has appeared in international journals such as the Journal of Language, Literature and Culture and Renaissance Studies.Hongbin DaiHongbin Dai is a professor at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, China. He specializes in the fields of modern English literature and has published three monographs and more than thirty articles in various journals at home and abroad, such as Critique, Scottish Literary Review, Modernism/modernity, Foreign Literature Studies, Religions, and Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature.
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Pub Date : 2023-10-16DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2270413
Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice
ABSTRACTThis essay proposes to label the current moment, characterized by biomass loss and global ecological catastrophe, as “the Misanthropocene,” and it presents two literary examples in which misanthropic attitudes are found. It focuses on Susan Straight’s Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights (1994) and Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), comparing their representations of California and its characteristic elements such as the jacaranda tree or the state’s symbol, the poppy. Following Kantian discussion of the concept, misanthropy is understood as a negative assessment of (and not an emotional attitude toward) humanity’s moral shortcomings such as racism, greed, or deceitfulness. Finally, the conclusions present the resolution of the misanthropic attitudes in the light of Michael Marder’s vegetal ontology, arguing that while Didion offers a partial solution of the misanthropy she portrays, it is Straight’s novel that suggests a way beyond the impasse of the Misanthropocene by thinking with plants. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. For instance, in Blue Nights, an autobiographical text in which Didion movingly writes about her daughter’s death shortly after losing her husband, she asks, “Could I seriously have construed changing my driver’s license from California to New York as an experience involving ‘severed emotional bonds’? Did I seriously see it as loss? Did I truly see it as separation?” (11); to which questions she does not, characteristically, provide a straightforward answer. My point here is that even in a text ostensibly focused on a deeply personal and traumatic event, Didion writes about her home state: a return to the topic that even she questions.2. “The ‘Anthropocene’ has emerged as a popular scientific term used by scientists, the scientifically engaged public and the media to designate the period of Earth’s history during which humans have a decisive influence on the state, dynamics and future of the Earth system. It is widely agreed that the Earth is currently in this state” (http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/).3. “For the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from natural behavior for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene – the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia” (2002: 23).4. “the Capitalocene does not stand for capitalism as an economic and social system. […] Rather, the Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing nature – as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology” (2016: 6).5. Donna Haraway: “The Plantationocene continues with ever greater ferocity in globalized factory meat production, monocrop agribusiness, and immense sub
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Pub Date : 2023-10-16DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2270418
Rick de Villiers
ABSTRACTThis article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its function is explained by situating the novel within that niche known as the “you-text.” But the generic function must also be accounted for within the thematic tensions of the novel, specifically those oscillations of avowal and disavowal. So a second concern is this: how does the novel speak back to narrative theory? How does its “compulsion to tell the truth” – shadowed by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – trouble, expand or extend the typologies used to talk about texts where “you” consolidates narrator and narratee? Considering this consolidation as part of what might be called a narratology of the self, I suggest that Agaat’s “you” can be seen as further collapsing the roles of confessor and penitent. Such collapse reinforces the interiority of Milla’s self-addressed excoriations, since it mirrors the doubled consciousness of Protestant confession. But it also inaugurates a new type of address – the “implied you” – which turns on the reader as much as on the novel’s protagonist. AcknowledgmentI wish to thank David Attwell for his input on a draft version of this essay.Disclosure statementI confirm that there are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.Notes1. Hereafter A. When referring to the Afrikaans original, I will give it as A Afr.2. Excluded here are the “Prologue” and “Epilogue”.3. “Not all critics are sensitized to what one ‘does’ (or effects) in the literary field, or how one ’sounds’ amidst the hubbub, they only care about what one ’means’ by a reference or an image” (Van Niekerk, “Interview”). The same sentiment occurs elsewhere: “My hypothesis is that the true ethical importance of a certain caliber of artwork lies not in the ‘messages’ that could be extracted from it, but in the autonomy and singularity that makes it ‘stand on its own’ through nothing but its own internal conceptual complexity and formal cohesion” (Van Niekerk, “Literary Text” 1).4. A notable exception is Forter’s excellent chapter, mentioned below.5. My approach aligns with Rothberg’s (23): “ … in the aesthetic realm, revealing the conceptual contributions of these materials entails reading them closely: their most powerful contributions to conceiving and responding to implication emerge not primarily from their content but from their form”.6. “Antagonym” describes a word that contains opposite or antonymic meanings. It belongs to the same class of words as enantiosemes, contranyms and autonyms.7. See Fludernik (288) and Richardson (19).8. It is worth mentioning here that Hedley Twidle rightly calls you “immersive” (50) when speaking of the present-tense second-person passages in Hugh Lewin’s Apartheid memoir, Stones Against the Mirror. He is also right to call them “confrontational,” though it should be added that this is only because of autobiographical writing’s implicit use of the past tense. In Twidle’s example
作者简介rick de Villiers是自由州大学英语系的高级讲师。他是艾略特和贝克特的《低级现代主义:谦卑和羞辱》(EUP 2021)的作者。欲了解更多信息，请访问www.rickdevilliers.com。
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Pub Date : 2023-10-13DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2269840
Longyan Wang
ABSTRACTThis essay explores how key characters from James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain exhibit psychological passing and performative identity formation in relation to race, religion, and sexuality. By analyzing Florence’s performing of interior whiteness, Gabriel’s performing of surface-level morality and shifting versions of exterior Blackness, and John’s performing of religiousness, straightness, and Blackness, this paper argues that Baldwin’s character development shows identities to be a performative process of multifaceted passing which on the one hand compels people to reiterate and reinforce relevant identity norms under the interpellation of hegemonic ideology in race, religion, and sexuality, but which on the other hand invites people to gain agency by challenging and subverting these regulatory norms and stereotypes through strategic performance. Through the novel, Baldwin conveys that identity formation is inherently dynamic and unstable, that passing is about interiority and religion and sexuality as well as about exteriority and race, and that the ability to see both the stage and the backstage, the ability to exhibit a surface exterior which mismatches with interior thought, is a key resource for Black survival, especially for queer Black survival. AcknowledgmentsThis article could not have been completed without the insightful and constructive feedback and reviews from Prof. Trudier Harris and Prof. Mark A. Reid as well as the anonymous reviewers.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. W. E. B Du Bois says in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” (8) and “[i]t is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, ––an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (8). See more in W. E. B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007).2. Shakespeare says in his play As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players/They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time plays many parts,/His acts being seven ages … ” (Act II, Scene 7, Lines 139–42).3. Goffman develops the concept of dramaturgy in his 1950s monograph The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life to indicate the dynamics of human social interaction as the performance between the performer and observer. According to his theory, people are actors acting out roles on social stages and carefully manage their impressions given-off to fulfill the basic social roles required by the society, which constitutes the “front-stage” aspect of human lives. In c
摘要本文探讨詹姆斯·鲍德温的小说《上山去说吧》中的主要人物如何在种族、宗教和性方面表现出心理传递和表演身份的形成。通过分析弗洛伦斯对内在白的演绎，加布里埃尔对表面道德和外在黑的转换版本的演绎，以及约翰对宗教性、直性和黑性的演绎，本文认为鲍德温的人物发展表明，身份是一个多面传递的表演过程，一方面迫使人们在种族、宗教、文化、文化等霸权意识形态的追问下，不断重申和强化相关的身份规范。性，但另一方面，它邀请人们通过挑战和颠覆这些监管规范和刻板印象来获得代理通过战略表现。通过小说，鲍德温传达了身份的形成本质上是动态的和不稳定的，传递是关于内在、宗教、性以及外在和种族的，同时看到舞台和后台的能力，展示与内在思想不匹配的表面外表的能力，是黑人生存的关键资源，尤其是酷儿黑人生存的关键资源。如果没有Trudier Harris教授和Mark A. Reid教授以及匿名审稿人富有洞察力和建设性的反馈和评论，本文就不可能完成。披露声明作者未报告潜在的利益冲突。w·e·B·杜波依斯在《黑人的灵魂》(1903)中说，“黑人就像是第七个儿子，生来就戴着面纱，在美国的世界里天生具有第二视力”(8)，“这是一种特殊的感觉，这种双重意识，这种总是通过别人的眼睛来看待自己的感觉，这种总是用嘲笑和怜悯的眼光来看待自己的灵魂的感觉。”一个人总是感到自己的两面性——一个美国人，一个黑人;两个灵魂，两种思想，两种不调和的努力;在一个黑暗的身体里有两种交战的理想，只有顽强的力量才能使它不被撕裂”(8)。参见W. E. B .杜波依斯的《黑人的灵魂》(牛津:牛津出版社，2007)。莎士比亚在他的戏剧《皆大欢喜》中说:“整个世界是一个舞台，/所有的男男女女都只是演员/他们有退场和入场，/一个人在他的一生中扮演许多角色，/他的表演分为七个时代……”(第二幕，第七场，139-42行)。戈夫曼在他20世纪50年代的专著《日常生活中的自我呈现》中发展了戏剧的概念，以表明作为表演者和观察者之间表演的人类社会互动的动态。根据他的理论，人是在社会舞台上扮演角色的演员，并精心管理自己所发出的印象，以履行社会所要求的基本社会角色，这构成了人类生活的“前台”方面。相比之下，人们有“后台”区域，他们可以放松和准备表演。3 .参见欧文·戈夫曼的《日常生活中的自我表现》(纽约:Anchor Books, 1959)。尽管Butler说“种族和性别不应该被简单的类比对待”(gender xvi)，但她在她关于Nella Larsen的《重要的身体》(Bodies that Matter)的文章中只对种族进行了初步的考察，因此值得一读其他人对种族表现的分析。对种族遗传的看法是多种多样的，并且随着时间的推移而发生了变化。艾莉森·霍布斯(Allyson Hobbs)指出，通过考试既可以是一种特权，也可以是一种种族“放逐”(4)，“到20世纪40年代，更多的非裔美国人拒绝通过考试，并将自己从被发现的恐惧和焦虑中解放出来”(226)，“到20世纪70年代，许多非裔美国人认为通过考试要么是过去的遗物，要么是最糟糕的种族背叛形式”(263)。然而，也有许多人表达了同情的理解，认为传承是一种拒绝痛苦的方式，是“一种机智的——甚至是道德上合理的——对超出个人选择的情况的反应”(Wald 8)。朱莉·卡里·内拉德(Julie Cary Nerad)说，种族传承是“在美国历史上颠覆美国种族分类制度的工具”(12)。Nikki Khanna和Cathryn Johnson发现，“今天的通过有一种惊人的相反的模式——只有少数受访者在某种情况下以白人的身份通过，而大多数受访者描述了他们以黑人的身份通过的情况”，这与吉姆·克劳时代的情况形成鲜明对比，当时通过意味着以白人的身份通过(382)。这篇文章没有假定对死亡的伦理判断，而是集中在鲍德温将死亡描述为双重意识的杜波依斯式“面纱”和颠覆机构的机会。在南北战争前的美国南方，强迫黑人家庭中相爱的伴侣分离以及在奴隶拍卖中出售黑人儿童是司空见惯的(Blassingame 174)。
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Pub Date : 2023-10-13DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2244876
Heather Ray Milligan
With this article, I explore the insurgent aesthetic embedded in Alexis Wright’s 2006 novel Carpentaria. Building upon recent scholarship on forms, infrastructuralism, Indigenous aesthetics, and grounded normativity, I demonstrate how contemporary fiction can expose the contradictions inherent to infrastructure and reveal the inseparability of material and narrative forms. While thematically concerned with the destruction of fossil-capitalist infrastructure and the repurposing of wreckage, Wright also adapts the literary forms of the settler state and reconstitutes them into an anti-colonial Waanyi epic infused with ethics of Indigenous sovereignty and environmental defense. In doing so, she models a capacious narrative form capable of holding together heterogenous accounts of Land attentive to the relations of humans, animals, spirits, and claypans in the Gulf country. In an ecocritical contribution to literary and infrastructural studies, I propose an expansive understanding of form that includes not only aesthetic and sociopolitical arrangements, but nonhuman lifeways, migrations, and interdependencies, too: in other words, ecological infrastructures.
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Pub Date : 2023-10-13DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2269833
Abir Hamdar
This essay focuses on the trope of the missing corpse in two contemporary Iraqi novels: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) and Muhsin al-Ramli’s Daughter of the Tigris (2019). Drawing mainly on critical work on the corpse and death studies as well as critical ideas on relics and hauntology the essay asks: What place does the missing corpse occupy in a body of contemporary literary outputs that have witnessed a significant engagement with the materiality of the dead body? How is the narrative of the absent corpse structured and framed? How is it experienced and accounted for? What forms and shapes replace the absent body? The essay argues that the missing corpse takes on an “absent presence” that haunts the narrative while the dead body’s very disappearance is compensated for through relics, surrogates, replacements, and repetitions. In conclusion, the essay contends that this absent presence further signals a haunted futurity that is entangled in Iraq’s history of violence but which, nonetheless, offers the potential for a radically new and democratic vision for the country’s future.
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