Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139267
D. Sergeant
The discourses of planetarity and globalization are both governed by the relationship between the maximal scale of the world and the subsidiary scalar levels that constitute it. However, if in globalization those subsidiary levels are envisioned as converging on a homogenous whole, in planetarity the aim is to maintain them in a dialogic relationality. On the face of it, such a recalibration seems relatively straightforward. However, the three novels discussed in this essay suggest that the retention of the maximal scale as a constituting frame for representation risks forestalling any attempt to move beyond the paradigms of globalization. In both Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City (1969) and Ben Lerner's 10:04 (2015), the relationship between parts and whole takes shape via the medium of affect, as the defining characteristic of the part becomes a desire for the whole that is seemingly destined to extinguish it. Consequently, both novels turn to a formal modeling in which individual and collective can supposedly blend without either suffering reduction—a maneuver also characteristic of many theoretical discussions of planetarity. Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora (2015), in contrast, self-consciously repudiates the possibility of representing the maximal scale, instead prioritizing narrative over the kinds of formal modeling seen in the other texts. This point of difference allows the periodization entailed by the planetary turn to engage with the work of that preeminent theorist of periodization, Fredric Jameson: in particular, with his account of the relationship between spatiality, temporality, and the utopian impulse.
行星和全球化的话语都是由世界的最大尺度和构成它的附属标量层次之间的关系所支配的。然而，如果在全球化中，这些附属的层次被设想为汇聚在一个同质的整体上，那么在行星化中，目标是使它们保持对话关系。从表面上看，这种重新校准似乎相对简单。然而，本文讨论的三部小说表明，保留最大尺度作为表征的构成框架有可能阻止任何超越全球化范式的尝试。在多丽丝·莱辛的《四门城市》(1969)和本·勒纳的《10:04》(2015)中，部分与整体之间的关系都是通过情感的媒介形成的，因为部分的定义特征变成了对整体的渴望，而这种渴望似乎注定要消灭整体。因此，这两部小说都转向了一种正式的模型，在这种模型中，个人和集体可以融合在一起，而不会遭受任何减少——这也是许多行星理论讨论的特点。相比之下，金·斯坦利·罗宾逊(Kim Stanley Robinson)的《极光》(Aurora, 2015)自觉地否定了表现最大尺度的可能性，而是优先考虑叙事，而不是其他文本中看到的各种形式建模。这一点差异使得行星转向所带来的周期化与杰出的周期化理论家弗雷德里克·詹姆逊的工作相结合，特别是他对空间性、时间性和乌托邦冲动之间关系的描述。
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139321
Katherine Kruger
By foregrounding the difficulties with reading the child, Henry James's What Maisie Knew reconfigures the relationship between simplicity, transparency, and opacity to create reparative “styles of knowing” in the novel. This article proposes that the difficulty with reading the child is tied to the child as reader; childlike reading in James uses style as an entry point through which to join in with lies, to repair them by making them performatively true. The author suggests that by analyzing texts that challenge the “supreme simplicity” of childhood and expose transparency as a strategy for obfuscation, we can develop a new practice of reading that is capable of interpreting performances of transparency, performances that currently work to deflect suspicious modes of interpretation. This article demonstrates how James's development of a childlike reading practice, which is founded in and embraces interpretative struggle, can provide possible ways forward in this regard.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139285
T. Persson
This article begins by noting that recent debates about the relevance of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to contemporary American culture enact an opposition between historicism (the idea that the novel is a Jim Crow artifact) and universalism (the idea that it transcends the circumstances of its production). The author then argues that Ellison's novel models a contemporaneity that cannot be equated to either the assertion or disavowal of contemporaneousness. At the heart of this account stands the narrator's sense that he “must emerge,” which follows from his perception that he has failed to communicate the nature of his invisibility to his reader, and that his act of writing has therefore disarmed him. The article shows that the narrator's emergence—an event that is necessitated by the narrative but which the narrative, by the very logic of that necessity, cannot itself contain—constitutes the hinge between the textual temporality of his underground existence and the social temporality that abuts it. As such, it offers the possibility that these two temporalities—which may be thought of as referring to the temporality of writing and the temporality of reading, respectively—may be linked, and that this linkage could lead to forms of recognition that appear only at the limit of narrative form.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139411
S. Samuels
{"title":"Forgetting to Be Nice","authors":"S. Samuels","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8139411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8139411","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43806896","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 : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139447
J. Ho
{"title":"How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature","authors":"J. Ho","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8139447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8139447","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44833343","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 : 2020-02-18DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8624552
M. Christou
At center stage in Kazuo Ishiguro's work is the figure of the nonactor: a character type that confronts us time and again with scenarios in which action is devalued. This essay shows that, despite finding themselves in situations that mandate action, Ishiguro's characters opt instead for risk-averse and mechanical-like behaviors that are antonymous to change. This, however, is not a solely aesthetic phenomenon, and the essay examines the figure of the nonactor in Ishiguro's novels as part of a broader turn toward nonaction. It does so by considering this figure in relation to a distinctly twentieth-century context within which, as Hannah Arendt has it, human action came to be seen as more dangerous than ever before. Ishiguro's nonactors can be seen as the legacy, but also as the mutations, of this understanding in our own era and in the contemporary novel. This legacy, the essay demonstrates, reveals an underexamined aspect of the neoliberal mind-set that dominates the post–Cold War world. Rather than promote the worthiness of individual, self-serving action, Ishiguro's novels bring to the forefront something different though no less pernicious: a wholescale devaluation of the individual's capacity to act.
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Pub Date : 2018-08-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-6846174
L. Saint
{"title":"From a Distance: Teju Cole, World Literature, and the Limits of Connection","authors":"L. Saint","doi":"10.1215/00295132-6846174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-6846174","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66060373","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 : 2018-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-4357397
Kfir Cohen
{"title":"From World to Globe: The Transformation of Israeli Cultural Production in the Time of Neoliberal Globalization","authors":"Kfir Cohen","doi":"10.1215/00295132-4357397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-4357397","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43841408","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 : 2018-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-4357381
David A. P. Womble
{"title":"Phineas Finn, the Statistics of Character, and the Sensorium of Liberal Personhood","authors":"David A. P. Womble","doi":"10.1215/00295132-4357381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-4357381","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47012005","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 : 2018-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-4357365
Matthew Krumholtz
{"title":"Nella Larsen's Etiquette Lesson: Small Talk, Racial Passing, and the Novel of Manners","authors":"Matthew Krumholtz","doi":"10.1215/00295132-4357365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-4357365","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44662463","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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