Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8624642
A. Glassie
This essay explores the intertwined oceanographic and spiritual imaginations structuring Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being, which she rewrote in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. A Tale for the Time Being's new, metafictional frame story dramatizes a citizen-science response to marine debris and theorizes marine science as a mode of witnessing and a mode of reading. Furthermore, by bringing her depictions of marine science into conversation with the Zen Buddhist practice of not-knowing, Ozeki meditates upon the idea that attempts to know or understand necessarily mean coexisting with what cannot be known, discovered, or recovered.
{"title":"Ruth Ozeki's Floating World: A Tale for the Time Being's Spiritual Oceanography","authors":"A. Glassie","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8624642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8624642","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the intertwined oceanographic and spiritual imaginations structuring Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being, which she rewrote in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. A Tale for the Time Being's new, metafictional frame story dramatizes a citizen-science response to marine debris and theorizes marine science as a mode of witnessing and a mode of reading. Furthermore, by bringing her depictions of marine science into conversation with the Zen Buddhist practice of not-knowing, Ozeki meditates upon the idea that attempts to know or understand necessarily mean coexisting with what cannot be known, discovered, or recovered.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"452-471"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46501496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8624715
C. Stan
{"title":"Modernity and a Day","authors":"C. Stan","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8624715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8624715","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"485-489"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49259012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8624751
D. Glover
{"title":"Lines of Fracture, Lines of Flight","authors":"D. Glover","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8624751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8624751","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"495-500"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43887453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8624570
K. Wilkinson
Daily communication today is predominantly digital, but contemporary novels continue to be interested in paper letters. Why? What do letters, written on paper, offer to the novel in the twenty-first century? This essay explores the material letter's contemporary value as metaphor, reading as a case study Ian McEwan's The Children Act. McEwan's novel dramatizes a conflict between religion and the secular law, which is an example of the type of dispute that Jean-François Lyotard identifies in The Differend: a dispute that is unresolvable because the process for regulating it is unable to register the wrong that one side suffers. In their different modes, these two texts consider intractable conflict and the ethics of its regulation, the workings of which are analyzed here through the suggestive correspondences between the dynamics of Lyotard's differend and those of letters. These correspondences derive, this essay argues, from the letter's material properties, which underlie its ability to function as metaphor. The letter's temporal structure of delay and the silences and instability that delay produces, in particular, have productive affinities with the workings of the differend. These correspondences help to delineate the conflicts of The Children Act and to reveal the value of the letter as metaphor more generally. This case study presents an example of the letter as a metaphorical resource, whose possibilities are distinct from those of digital communications and whose flexibility and nuance help to account for contemporary novels' continued interest in the letter.
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Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309713
S. Waldschmidt
{"title":"Words, Everyday and Key","authors":"S. Waldschmidt","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8309713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8309713","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"299-302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49204942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309551
Kristen H. Starkowski
More can be done in minor character studies to account for the strong sense of being that emerges at the edges of the nineteenth-century novel. By pairing traditional readings of the minor character in narrative theory with sociologist Erving Goffman's writings on disengagement, this article offers a different perspective on the competition for narrative attention as we know it. For example, when disengagement is taken into account, Alex Woloch's losers in the competition for narrative attention become winners in the formulation of a fulfilling social life. Dickens's minor characters take part in central spaces while not being contained by them. Their distance from main scenes and settings, captured in passing by a gaze that has no interest in registering these elsewheres in any level of depth, has the effect of making minor characters appear strange, memorable, or other, even though their worlds are quite rich. But Dickens's minor characters define the ingenuity of counterintuition, pointing toward a suppressed energy that belies the flatness of a minor character. Drawn with care, these characters build alternative, codependent ways of surviving on the edges of the characterological field.
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Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309695
Marta Figlerowicz
{"title":"The Cybernetic Victorians","authors":"Marta Figlerowicz","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8309695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8309695","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"295-298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41541871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309605
John Sampson
“Untimely Love” reassesses the aesthetic choices and political implications of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), first by highlighting a surprising overlap between Wharton and the anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman. Wharton's novelistic critique of New York society's marriage rituals, spurred by an unconsummated affair between Newland Archer and his wife's cousin Ellen Olenska, follows Goldman in positing an antagonism between the hierarchies of marriage and the equalizing nature of love. For Wharton, however, this antagonism will not be resolved with free love one day triumphing. To explain her position, the article turns to Jacques Rancière's unresolvable antagonism between “politics” and “the police,” which has an aesthetic analogue in the clash between the formally anarchic modern novel and premodern hierarchies of genre. Wharton unearths 1870s New York like an archeologist to expose how its patriarchal logic polices women's sexuality within and outside marriage, making expressions of love quite rare. Wharton unleashes the disruptive power of love through formal experimentation, temporarily subverting her own historical realism, when she has Ellen and Archer visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, which did not yet exist in the novel's timeframe. The Met's impossible location and its uncataloged holdings open to public viewing upset New York's social and aesthetic hierarchies. It is in this anachronistic and democratic context that Archer first sees “love visible” in the world, rearranging his entire worldview. Wharton, in a related political gesture of aesthetic dissensus, aligns her untimely lovers with the museum's suddenly visible ghosts of history.
{"title":"Untimely Love: The Aesthetics and Politics of Anachronism in The Age of Innocence","authors":"John Sampson","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8309605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8309605","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 “Untimely Love” reassesses the aesthetic choices and political implications of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), first by highlighting a surprising overlap between Wharton and the anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman. Wharton's novelistic critique of New York society's marriage rituals, spurred by an unconsummated affair between Newland Archer and his wife's cousin Ellen Olenska, follows Goldman in positing an antagonism between the hierarchies of marriage and the equalizing nature of love. For Wharton, however, this antagonism will not be resolved with free love one day triumphing. To explain her position, the article turns to Jacques Rancière's unresolvable antagonism between “politics” and “the police,” which has an aesthetic analogue in the clash between the formally anarchic modern novel and premodern hierarchies of genre. Wharton unearths 1870s New York like an archeologist to expose how its patriarchal logic polices women's sexuality within and outside marriage, making expressions of love quite rare. Wharton unleashes the disruptive power of love through formal experimentation, temporarily subverting her own historical realism, when she has Ellen and Archer visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, which did not yet exist in the novel's timeframe. The Met's impossible location and its uncataloged holdings open to public viewing upset New York's social and aesthetic hierarchies. It is in this anachronistic and democratic context that Archer first sees “love visible” in the world, rearranging his entire worldview. Wharton, in a related political gesture of aesthetic dissensus, aligns her untimely lovers with the museum's suddenly visible ghosts of history.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"254-273"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44915751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309641
A. Gibson
{"title":"The Matter of Aesthetic Experience","authors":"A. Gibson","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8309641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8309641","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"280-284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41966489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8309533
Laura Strout
What insights into literary realism can be found by dwelling in the empty rooms and abandoned spaces of Bleak House, a novel more often read for its representation of overcrowded environments? Traveling between and imaginatively inhabiting empty houses of Charles Dickens's and Virginia Woolf's construction, this article proposes empty-house-time as a distinctive narrative chronotope, one that nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers use to investigate the processes of realist fiction, especially its affective dimensions. Taking the character-less built environment as a figure for the novel form, the article shows that the chromatic present that characterizes narratives of spaces like Chesney Wold when the Dedlocks are absent throws into flux boundaries between the fictional and the real, the reader and the world of the text, and different modes of imagining. It opens up continuums along which strategies of realist characterization and world-building are dramatized and interrogated. Most powerfully, empty-house-time reveals how affects associated with imagining the world going on without you shape encounters with fiction. Identifying the vital, ongoing existence of unoccupied rooms in Dickens's writing can in turn revitalize studies of the relationship between Victorian and modernist novels and theories of realism. This article concludes by turning to the Ramsays’ abandoned coastal home in To the Lighthouse, in which Woolf, like Dickens, links an interrogation of realist fictionality to a historically specific reimagining of the household.
{"title":"Casting Shadows at Chesney Wold: Empty-House-Time and Realism in the British Novel","authors":"Laura Strout","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8309533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8309533","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What insights into literary realism can be found by dwelling in the empty rooms and abandoned spaces of Bleak House, a novel more often read for its representation of overcrowded environments? Traveling between and imaginatively inhabiting empty houses of Charles Dickens's and Virginia Woolf's construction, this article proposes empty-house-time as a distinctive narrative chronotope, one that nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers use to investigate the processes of realist fiction, especially its affective dimensions. Taking the character-less built environment as a figure for the novel form, the article shows that the chromatic present that characterizes narratives of spaces like Chesney Wold when the Dedlocks are absent throws into flux boundaries between the fictional and the real, the reader and the world of the text, and different modes of imagining. It opens up continuums along which strategies of realist characterization and world-building are dramatized and interrogated. Most powerfully, empty-house-time reveals how affects associated with imagining the world going on without you shape encounters with fiction. Identifying the vital, ongoing existence of unoccupied rooms in Dickens's writing can in turn revitalize studies of the relationship between Victorian and modernist novels and theories of realism. This article concludes by turning to the Ramsays’ abandoned coastal home in To the Lighthouse, in which Woolf, like Dickens, links an interrogation of realist fictionality to a historically specific reimagining of the household.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"165-192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48720511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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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