Literature Compass最新文献

This article argues that three prominent recent works of Los Angeles climate fiction—Maria Amparo Escandon's L.A. Weather (2021), Alexandra Kleeman's Something New Under the Sun (2021) and Paul Beatty's The Sellout (2016)—generate a sense of planetary responsibility. Despite their regional settings, these novels possess a planetary consciousness, illuminating the local-global connectivity of climate change and the Anthropocene. As one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitting cities in the world, L.A. drives climate injustice, with its gargantuan energy consumption having an adverse impact on populations both within and far beyond its own borders. This article explains how literature, and climate fiction particularly, can highlight this inequality at micro and macro scales, and encourage collective opposition to it. I argue that the novels of Escandon, Kleeman and Beatty conjure the impression of responsibility identified by Kristian Shaw and Sara Upstone in their overview of post-postmodern fiction, while also exhibiting the ‘planetarity’ discussed by Amy Elias and Christian Moraru: a term to describe the global worldview of contemporary culture. In applying these concepts to the novels examined here, I ultimately contend that Los Angeles climate fiction demystifies the spatial and political dimensions of the Anthropocene, generating planetary responsibility and addressing local and global injustice.

This paper is about the literary representation of supply chains: the political-material pathways by which goods are produced and delivered to consumers. It considers the ethical and aesthetic problems posed by the fact that the daily lives of people living in consumer societies in the Global North are deeply dependent on material networks that sustain violent relations between people and with earth’s ecologies. How can we be ethical global citizens when we are already material global subjects? The paper considers how literature confronts this ethical-representational challenge, and asks whether literature might help us take responsibility over the material economic networks that structure our everyday lives. I examine two novels that make use of strikingly similar techniques for narrating their characters’ immersion in globalized economies: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018). Both novels strive to represent the incomprehensible global economy by calling attention to their inability to represent it. I argue that this technique—which I call the “supply chain sublime”—ultimately reflects the incapacity of current forms of collective political agency to manage our material lives.

This essay seeks to examine how Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction short story “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995) set in the planet of Gethen in the fictional Hainish universe envisions a political utopia of sequentially hermaphroditic humans to offer a succinct critique of traditional gender roles and conventional sexual customs while celebrating the potential of collective responsibility. While maintaining that the recent scholarship on queer utopias in SF has largely geared toward posthumanist articulations, the present essay argues that Ursula K. Le Guin who laid the genre conventions of queer utopic narratives unabashedly places her short story “Coming of Age in Karhide” within the ideals of humanism by upholding community as a unifying entity, at the same time carefully avoiding the pitfalls of anthropocentrism. Drawing from queer theorists and social scientists, this essay, while exemplifying the implications of a futuristic gender-neutral society, albeit partially, examines Le Guin's celebration of community collectivism in “Coming of Age in Karhide” to argue that the integration with the values and expectations of the larger community occasions individual growth and identity formation of the teenage protagonist and thereby, attests to the author's humanistic temperament.

This essay analyses the epistolary correspondence between six Ukrainian and German-speaking authors published by WeiterSchreiben, a literary platform that belongs to the non-profit organisation WIR MACHEN DAS and which seeks to promote the work of exiled writers from regions affected by war and other humanitarian crises in the German cultural field. The essay argues that the collaborative, self-reflexive, and short form of the letters is particularly suitable to promote global responsibility and to quickly adapt to situations of political immediacy, thus accelerating literature's reaction capacity to ongoing conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine war. While tracing the connections between the genre and the human rights discourse and looking at the politics of address that create a bond of communion between the correspondents and have the potential to foster various kinds of political identification among readers, the essay also explores this literary initiative from a sociological perspective, challenging strict distinctions between textual and contextual dynamics. By drawing attention to the literary and political dimension of non-profit organisations such as WIR MACHEN DAS, the essay demonstrates that literature constitutes an important tool in civil society, which helps create forms of transnational solidarity and shape collective debates around migration and social injustice that transcend the borders of states.

The notion of “New Sincerity” has become central to the study of David Foster Wallace's prose over the years. The present article explores how the tonal arrangement that characterises the movement has lived on to influence contemporary art, examining Bo Burnham's popular comedy musicals as a notable example of this influence. Wallace and Burnham's common stance concerning cultural reception is argued to be indissociable from their socio-cultural setting, with the two authors articulating parallel responses to an ongoing, multifaceted process of massification of public opinion, as well as to the consequences to cultural poiesis therein entailed.

In March 2022, we launched the Victorian Jewish Writers Project (VJWP), a digital collection of texts written by nineteenth-century British Jews accompanied by short articles on significant authors, places, and events of the Anglo-Jewish world. When we began building the collection in 2021, our conceptual framework was clear: Victorian Jewry is underrepresented both in Jewish Studies and Victorian Studies, so we would create a resource to supply primary texts and some analytical information to anyone interested. Despite our familiarity with archive theory, we considered our role in the project as little more than what Latour calls intermediaries, or “mere informants.” Yet, the process of digitizing and publicizing a canon, particularly a canon tied to a cultural heritage, is an inherently social act, and in this article we will explore the modes of social engagement inherent in creating and maintaining digital archives. In particular, we make use of Latour’s actor-network theory to understand the relationships forged by archives in digital spaces.

Eyles Irwin (1751–1817), an East India Company official who spent much of his life in the British settlement of Fort St. George, Madras, was one of the earliest practitioners of anglophone belles lettres in the Indian subcontinent, and his writings predate the development of a robust culture of English-language literary composition in the colony by quite a few years. The scant scholarly attention he has received belies his importance as an anticipator of the momentous literary-historical processes that would transform India's public sphere in the 19th century. This essay offers a contextual reading of Saint Thomas's Mount (1774), his earliest extant poem, which is avowedly modelled on canonical English topographical poems like Alexander Pope's Windsor-Forest (1713) and makes use of a host of neoclassical conventions, but which also differs from them in terms of the kind of landscape that is represented (Irwin's is a tropical landscape, with abundant mangoes, palms, and Oriental fauna, unlike Pope's pleasant, idyllic British park). However, Irwin's target readership being chiefly metropolitan, he contends with the difficulty of highlighting India's irreducible foreignness while simultaneously trying to ensure that readers in London do not find the Oriental descriptions too alien, incredible, and unrelatable. The authorial strategies he adopts to navigate this difficulty constitute the focus of the first part of the essay. The second (and final) part seeks to shed light on his hybrid, hyphenated identity as an Indian-born Irish poet, and on his perception of himself as somehow fundamentally unlike those Britons who never ventured beyond the geographical confines of Europe, let alone setting down roots in places on the very fringes of the British empire. The affiliative bonds he forges with expatriate colonial officials living in and confronting the hardships of life in the monsoonal tropics mark him as a member of the steadily growing community of Anglo-Indians in the Indian subcontinent. While noting the shifting connotations of the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, this essay will also examine the implications of identifying Irwin as a member of this initially amorphous but steadily growing community.

This article considers how a recent wave of Latin American short fiction captures with immediate topicality new forms of transversal political subjectivity engendered by the international feminist reinvention of the strike in the 21st century. Drawing on Verónica Gago's theorization of the political cartography of feminist potencia (power), alongside the work of Silvia Federici, Rita Segato and Sayak Valencia, it considers how the short story form facilitates a strategic recognition of interconnected violences perpetrated against women and feminized bodies, “mapping forms of violence based on their organic connection, without losing sight of the singularity of the production of the nexus between them” (Gago, 2020, p. 58). In particular, the article examines two exemplary short story collections, Cars on Fire (2020) by Mónica Ramón Ríos and Things We Lost in the Fire (2017) by Mariana Enríquez, considering how these writers repurpose the potential for socio-criticism embedded in the fantastical short story by offering a multi-focal critique of how patriarchy and gender violence interact with the structural inequalities unleashed by neoliberal capitalism. The article also considers how these riotous collections mediate the transversal fabric of communitarian struggle in feminist imaginaries, drawing narrative energy from the localised proliferation of neighbourhood assemblies and solidarity networks, while speaking to transnational feminist movements more broadly.

This paper introduces a teaching experiment that uses a set of local translations of a European medieval text—in this case, Korean translations of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—as teaching texts in the Korean classroom alongside the original work. Students compare a range of translations dating from all periods of the 20th century, including one from as early as 1915 and others from the 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s. Tracking the variety of translation methods and different linguistic and artistic choices employed by these multiple translations allows even students unfamiliar with Middle English to gain a better sense of the particulars of Chaucer's language and character-making. Treating translation itself as a creative mode, this paper argues that even bad translations and messy histories of linguistic interference can be put to productive pedagogical use. Recuperated local translation archives can be used in the teaching of Middle English literature by helping students understand Chaucer's own positionality as a translator and compiler. Such archives also contribute to the study of comparative literature more broadly as they present case studies of how ideas of world literature are formed over time and space, and encourage a critical engagement with the canon even as it is being taught.

Pedagogies of the premodern in anglophone contexts face many obstacles, like cultural differences, linguistic remoteness, and stereotypical representations. In EFL learning and teaching settings, student motivation, cultural adequation, and historical imagination are also needed. In Tunisia, this was further complicated after the Jasmine Revolution when newly radicalised students of English resented aspects of premodern literature which they considered inaccurate, uninteresting, or inappropriate. In this paper, the author presents a learning and teaching model developed to help post-revolutionary Tunisian learners with diverse backgrounds and orientations better understand and appreciate the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Combining elements of cognitive studies, comparative literature, and digital codicology, this bricolage was used in graduate seminars at the University of Sousse to study digitised manuscripts and texts in Arabic, Latin, and (Middle) English. Informed by active pedagogy and enhanced by audio-visual aids, activities based on this model effectively addressed challenges, helped achieve learning outcomes, and made Tunisians more at home with Chaucer.