doing without Africa––its darkness, its dangers, and its infectious diseases do not diminish its alluring otherness. In the Naipaulean vein, Postcolonial Disaster also applies the master-slave trope, reproducing an already exposed and explained Africa. Africans prefer to be fed––“Better Fed than Free” (79)––than have a freedom that starves them, perpetuating the exhausted idea that colonized people, like children, are incapable of looking after themselves. The choice between food and freedom is not a real choice; one will invariably choose food––whether African or Western. Thinking of postcolonial discourse in general, one should pay attention to who is developing the theoretical frameworks to engage with the postcolonial world, as well as why and where these frameworks are being developed. An African scholar working in an African university will probably emphasize what Rastogi’s book suppresses: the external interventions into Africa that produced disasters in the first place. Also, the work that Indian postcolonial scholars develop in Western locations is different from those of researchers based in India. This is not to dismiss the works of Indian or African postcolonial scholars working in the West, but to stress the significance of keeping such facts in mind when examining or receiving postcolonial scholarship. Rastogi applies her key concepts to describe the impact of disasters on the postcolonial world, but her descriptions of the postcolonial situation invite more questions and further debate.
{"title":"Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins (review)","authors":"J. Wagner-lawlor","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0038","url":null,"abstract":"doing without Africa––its darkness, its dangers, and its infectious diseases do not diminish its alluring otherness. In the Naipaulean vein, Postcolonial Disaster also applies the master-slave trope, reproducing an already exposed and explained Africa. Africans prefer to be fed––“Better Fed than Free” (79)––than have a freedom that starves them, perpetuating the exhausted idea that colonized people, like children, are incapable of looking after themselves. The choice between food and freedom is not a real choice; one will invariably choose food––whether African or Western. Thinking of postcolonial discourse in general, one should pay attention to who is developing the theoretical frameworks to engage with the postcolonial world, as well as why and where these frameworks are being developed. An African scholar working in an African university will probably emphasize what Rastogi’s book suppresses: the external interventions into Africa that produced disasters in the first place. Also, the work that Indian postcolonial scholars develop in Western locations is different from those of researchers based in India. This is not to dismiss the works of Indian or African postcolonial scholars working in the West, but to stress the significance of keeping such facts in mind when examining or receiving postcolonial scholarship. Rastogi applies her key concepts to describe the impact of disasters on the postcolonial world, but her descriptions of the postcolonial situation invite more questions and further debate.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74737133","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}
Abstract:In the 1930s, C. L. R. James and Jean Rhys wrote of London lodging houses—spaces that challenged imperialist narratives idealizing the private home and white nuclear family. Both writers also dramatized the difficulty of imagining Caribbean futures that dispense with the hierarchies of the colonial past and the imperialist logics of their surroundings. Enjambing the London lodging house with Caribbean geographies, James's essays for The Port of Spain Gazette and Rhys's novel Voyage in the Dark generate an anticolonial imagination that resists prescriptive visions of a postcolonial Caribbean and, instead, implicate readers in the making of an alternate future.
摘要:20世纪30年代，詹姆斯(c.l.r. James)和里斯(Jean Rhys)描写了伦敦的寄宿屋——挑战帝国主义理想化的私人住宅和白人核心家庭的空间。两位作家还戏剧化地描绘了想象加勒比海未来的困难，那里没有过去殖民时期的等级制度，也没有周围的帝国主义逻辑。詹姆斯为《西班牙港公报》(Port of Spain Gazette)撰写的随笔和里斯的小说《黑暗航行》(Voyage in the Dark)将伦敦的寄宿公寓与加勒比海的地理联系在一起，产生了一种反殖民主义的想象，这种想象抵制了对后殖民加勒比海的规范愿景，相反，暗示读者参与到另一种未来的创造中。
{"title":"Rooms Not One's Own: C. L. R. James, Jean Rhys, and Caribbean Anticolonialism in 1930s London","authors":"Kate Perillo","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the 1930s, C. L. R. James and Jean Rhys wrote of London lodging houses—spaces that challenged imperialist narratives idealizing the private home and white nuclear family. Both writers also dramatized the difficulty of imagining Caribbean futures that dispense with the hierarchies of the colonial past and the imperialist logics of their surroundings. Enjambing the London lodging house with Caribbean geographies, James's essays for The Port of Spain Gazette and Rhys's novel Voyage in the Dark generate an anticolonial imagination that resists prescriptive visions of a postcolonial Caribbean and, instead, implicate readers in the making of an alternate future.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84516497","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}
Abstract:Both of the books reviewed consider the contemporaneity and the current relevance of the literary utopia and dystopia. Adam Stock's Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought traces the history of the dystopia by examining both well-known and less familiar twentieth-century literary texts, demonstrating how they provoke a counterfactual reflection on the social and cultural politics of their readers' present. Caroline Edwards's Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel focusses on more recent literary fiction, tracing themes of hopefulness and community as forms of resistance to hegemonic capitalism.
{"title":"Better Futures Needed","authors":"Simon J. James","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Both of the books reviewed consider the contemporaneity and the current relevance of the literary utopia and dystopia. Adam Stock's Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought traces the history of the dystopia by examining both well-known and less familiar twentieth-century literary texts, demonstrating how they provoke a counterfactual reflection on the social and cultural politics of their readers' present. Caroline Edwards's Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel focusses on more recent literary fiction, tracing themes of hopefulness and community as forms of resistance to hegemonic capitalism.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87836166","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}
folk practices with cutting-edge research” (183). While noting that Joyce found Russell’s concerns for food security in times of war and emphasis on older farming techniques to be tainted with nationalist mythologizing, Martell also acknowledges Russell’s agriculturally informed expertise. In contrast to Russell, Joyce’s characters enjoy imported “weak tea” (195) and “sugared white bread,” thumbing their nose at “Revitalist milk drinkers” like Russell. Martell presents an astute reading of how Ulysses’s infamous penchant for gustatory, abject bodily profusions—in all its rule-breaking, defiant splurge of abundantly inclusive populations—should be read as an example of defying social control to rewrite famine scarcity as profundity. Her analysis of the “‘Oxen’ episode” (202) keenly illustrates how “Joyce triangulates food, birth, and death in an arrangement that positions sterility as slaughter and carnality as life-giving” by using Thomas Carlyle as an ironic speaker who imbues images of vegetables with sterility in contrast to the “red, raw, bleeding” beef fed to expectant mothers. This scene is then related to Odysseus’s sacrifice of divine cattle in defiance of Zeus, allowing Martell to show how these strategies rewrite Irish defiance of the British “gods of empire” (203). Farm to Form’s coda, “From a Morning World,” playfully combines scenes of milking with homages to modern-world pagan presences that appear in multiple authors’ texts, suggesting alternating energies of loss and promise. Using Joyce’s homophones mourning and morning as touchstones, Martell reminds us that the fraught modernist struggles with industrial food production, control, and farming resilience are poignantly relevant today. Indeed, the cultural and literary revelations within Farm to Table provide important insight for contemporary readers as we reckon with the capitalist forces mandating farming production goals amidst the threat of global climate change and food scarcity.
民间实践与前沿研究”(183)。马泰尔指出，乔伊斯发现罗素对战争时期粮食安全的关注和对古老农业技术的强调带有民族主义神话色彩，但他也承认罗素在农业方面的专业知识。与罗素形成鲜明对比的是，乔伊斯笔下的人物喜欢进口的“淡茶”(1995)和“加糖的白面包”，对罗素这样的“喝牛奶的人”嗤之以鼻。马泰尔对尤利西斯臭名昭著的嗜好进行了精辟的解读，他对味觉、卑鄙的身体奢靡——在所有这些违反规则的、充满包容性的人群中肆无忌惮的挥霍——应该被解读为藐视社会控制、将饥荒的匮乏改写为深刻的一个例子。她对“‘牛’那一集”(202)的分析敏锐地说明了“乔伊斯如何将食物、出生和死亡三角化，将无菌定位为屠杀，将肉欲定位为赋予生命”，她使用托马斯·卡莱尔(Thomas Carlyle)作为讽刺的演讲者，将蔬菜的无菌形象与喂给孕妇的“红色、生的、流血的”牛肉形成鲜明对比。这一场景随后与奥德修斯(Odysseus)为反抗宙斯(Zeus)而牺牲神牛有关，这让马泰尔(Martell)展示了这些策略如何改写了爱尔兰人对英国“帝国之神”的蔑视(203)。《从农场到形式》(Farm to Form)的结尾，“来自一个清晨的世界”(From a Morning World)，将挤奶的场景与对现代世界异教存在的敬意顽皮地结合在一起，这些场景出现在多位作者的文本中，暗示了失去与希望交替的能量。马泰尔用乔伊斯的同音异义词“哀悼”和“早晨”作为试金石，提醒我们现代主义者与工业化食品生产、控制和农业弹性的斗争在今天有着深刻的意义。事实上，《从农场到餐桌》中的文化和文学启示为当代读者提供了重要的见解，因为我们在全球气候变化和粮食短缺的威胁下，考虑到资本主义力量强制农业生产目标。
{"title":"Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg (review)","authors":"Steve Tomasula","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"folk practices with cutting-edge research” (183). While noting that Joyce found Russell’s concerns for food security in times of war and emphasis on older farming techniques to be tainted with nationalist mythologizing, Martell also acknowledges Russell’s agriculturally informed expertise. In contrast to Russell, Joyce’s characters enjoy imported “weak tea” (195) and “sugared white bread,” thumbing their nose at “Revitalist milk drinkers” like Russell. Martell presents an astute reading of how Ulysses’s infamous penchant for gustatory, abject bodily profusions—in all its rule-breaking, defiant splurge of abundantly inclusive populations—should be read as an example of defying social control to rewrite famine scarcity as profundity. Her analysis of the “‘Oxen’ episode” (202) keenly illustrates how “Joyce triangulates food, birth, and death in an arrangement that positions sterility as slaughter and carnality as life-giving” by using Thomas Carlyle as an ironic speaker who imbues images of vegetables with sterility in contrast to the “red, raw, bleeding” beef fed to expectant mothers. This scene is then related to Odysseus’s sacrifice of divine cattle in defiance of Zeus, allowing Martell to show how these strategies rewrite Irish defiance of the British “gods of empire” (203). Farm to Form’s coda, “From a Morning World,” playfully combines scenes of milking with homages to modern-world pagan presences that appear in multiple authors’ texts, suggesting alternating energies of loss and promise. Using Joyce’s homophones mourning and morning as touchstones, Martell reminds us that the fraught modernist struggles with industrial food production, control, and farming resilience are poignantly relevant today. Indeed, the cultural and literary revelations within Farm to Table provide important insight for contemporary readers as we reckon with the capitalist forces mandating farming production goals amidst the threat of global climate change and food scarcity.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81791336","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":"Tragedy and the Modernist Novel by Manya Lempert (review)","authors":"G. Hankins","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83470386","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}
Abstract:This essay analyzes narrative reliability in Nella Larsen's Passing by putting it in the context of early-twentieth-century ideas about gendered modernity and the scientific racism of eugenics discourse. Larsen's use of focalization—the formal separation of narrating voice and focalizing consciousness—illuminates how bias against raced and gendered subjects are naturalized in ascriptions of reliability. Through such formal strategies, Passing asks readers to interrogate the systems of oppression the novel's Black women navigate, making visible the frame structures (both narrative and sociopolitical) that function to undermine their articulations of independence and intelligence.
{"title":"Race, Gender, and \"Real Brains\": Interrogating Unreliability in Nella Larsen's Passing","authors":"V. Román","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay analyzes narrative reliability in Nella Larsen's Passing by putting it in the context of early-twentieth-century ideas about gendered modernity and the scientific racism of eugenics discourse. Larsen's use of focalization—the formal separation of narrating voice and focalizing consciousness—illuminates how bias against raced and gendered subjects are naturalized in ascriptions of reliability. Through such formal strategies, Passing asks readers to interrogate the systems of oppression the novel's Black women navigate, making visible the frame structures (both narrative and sociopolitical) that function to undermine their articulations of independence and intelligence.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80102832","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}
Abstract:Graham Greene's short story, "The Basement Room" (1936), and its later film adaptation, The Fallen Idol (1948), tell the story of how a young boy realizes the fallibility of his childhood hero. Although Greene has been lambasted as a middlebrow writer, his work offers an important critique of the lasting influence of imperial gender roles during the mid-twentieth century. Using the perspective of a young boy, the two works critique the Orwellian decent man as irrelevant and a façade for imperialism, insisting that the perpetuation of this form of middle-class English masculinity leads to individual alienation and self-destruction.
{"title":"Behind Barriers, Living a Man's Life: Imperial Masculinity in Graham Greene's \"The Basement Room\" and The Fallen Idol","authors":"Elizabeth Floyd","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Graham Greene's short story, \"The Basement Room\" (1936), and its later film adaptation, The Fallen Idol (1948), tell the story of how a young boy realizes the fallibility of his childhood hero. Although Greene has been lambasted as a middlebrow writer, his work offers an important critique of the lasting influence of imperial gender roles during the mid-twentieth century. Using the perspective of a young boy, the two works critique the Orwellian decent man as irrelevant and a façade for imperialism, insisting that the perpetuation of this form of middle-class English masculinity leads to individual alienation and self-destruction.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83777110","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}
amount of sleeves-rolled-up historical work—and by knowing just about everything there is to know about Cather’s fiction, her letters, and the scholarly tradition that has grown up around her work (a tradition that Stout treats with scrupulous generosity). Paradoxically, it is this very authority that yields the book’s welcome freedom from the biographer’s customary tendentiousness, its fully earned sense that, when considering a writer’s relation to her inordinately varied era, exploration is often more valuable than certainty.
{"title":"Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire by Jessica Martell (review)","authors":"K. Sultzbach","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"amount of sleeves-rolled-up historical work—and by knowing just about everything there is to know about Cather’s fiction, her letters, and the scholarly tradition that has grown up around her work (a tradition that Stout treats with scrupulous generosity). Paradoxically, it is this very authority that yields the book’s welcome freedom from the biographer’s customary tendentiousness, its fully earned sense that, when considering a writer’s relation to her inordinately varied era, exploration is often more valuable than certainty.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80148468","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":"The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland (review)","authors":"Marshall Boswell","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76849981","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}
Abstract:My essay argues that Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land (1992) constitutes an aesthetico-political reflection on a form of citizenship in the world; a way of sharing and taking part in it through a mode of freedom and equality. Conjoining Étienne Balibar's concepts of civility and heresy to Jacques Rancière's formulation of the dissensual logic of fiction, I study the incongruous cosmopolitics of Ghosh's text. Analyzing its poetics and politics of knowledge, I argue for the capacity of fiction to etch heretical forms of subjectivation that diverge from what Balibar designates as the anthropology of the (modern) political subject.
{"title":"Cosmopolis, Civility, and the Practice of Heretical History in Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land","authors":"Rajeshwari S. Vallury","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:My essay argues that Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land (1992) constitutes an aesthetico-political reflection on a form of citizenship in the world; a way of sharing and taking part in it through a mode of freedom and equality. Conjoining Étienne Balibar's concepts of civility and heresy to Jacques Rancière's formulation of the dissensual logic of fiction, I study the incongruous cosmopolitics of Ghosh's text. Analyzing its poetics and politics of knowledge, I argue for the capacity of fiction to etch heretical forms of subjectivation that diverge from what Balibar designates as the anthropology of the (modern) political subject.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88603161","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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