Pub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a928347
C. N. Serpell
Abstract: This essay stages a critique of Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment , raising problems with its theoretical assumptions, interpretive methods, and literary readings. At the same time, the essay offers a counterproposal for a theory of judgment premised on incommensurability, meaning attuned to the contingency of aesthetic values, to the context of their perception, and to their uses for different purposes. The anticapitalism of this pragmatic (and pragmatist) view derives from neither a presumed equality of artworks nor from a hierarchy that ranks them, but rather from a radical embrace of the sociality and incommensurability of art—particularly in the classroom.
{"title":"Aesthetic Judgment: A Pragmatic View","authors":"C. N. Serpell","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a928347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a928347","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay stages a critique of Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment , raising problems with its theoretical assumptions, interpretive methods, and literary readings. At the same time, the essay offers a counterproposal for a theory of judgment premised on incommensurability, meaning attuned to the contingency of aesthetic values, to the context of their perception, and to their uses for different purposes. The anticapitalism of this pragmatic (and pragmatist) view derives from neither a presumed equality of artworks nor from a hierarchy that ranks them, but rather from a radical embrace of the sociality and incommensurability of art—particularly in the classroom.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141234098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a921552
Bren Ram
Abstract: In its narrowness and adherence to temporal bounds, the form of the novel often struggles to represent the climate crisis accurately. I propose a technique of reading novels through the apocalyptic as an alternative to accuracy, realism, and verifiability. Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being shows what we gain from this technique, inviting questions about the role of fiction in representing disaster and the unique temporal warping that climate change engenders. I use media theory and ecocriticism as lenses through which to study metafiction, establishing a theory of realism/realistic-ness as a form of interface or relation.
摘要:小说形式因其狭隘性和对时间限制的坚持,往往难以准确地表现气候危机。我提出了一种通过世界末日来阅读小说的技巧,以替代准确性、现实主义和可验证性。露丝-奥泽克(Ruth Ozeki)的小说《暂时的故事》(A Tale for the Time Being)展示了我们从这一技巧中获得的收获,引出了关于小说在表现灾难中的作用以及气候变化引起的独特时间扭曲的问题。我将媒体理论和生态批评作为研究元小说的视角,建立了作为一种界面或关系形式的现实主义/现实性理论。
{"title":"Realism and Interface: Reading Ruth Ozeki Apocalyptically","authors":"Bren Ram","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921552","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In its narrowness and adherence to temporal bounds, the form of the novel often struggles to represent the climate crisis accurately. I propose a technique of reading novels through the apocalyptic as an alternative to accuracy, realism, and verifiability. Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being shows what we gain from this technique, inviting questions about the role of fiction in representing disaster and the unique temporal warping that climate change engenders. I use media theory and ecocriticism as lenses through which to study metafiction, establishing a theory of realism/realistic-ness as a form of interface or relation.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140278623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a921553
Chris Gabbard
{"title":"Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire by Akemi Nishida (review)","authors":"Chris Gabbard","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921553","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140276546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a921551
Stephen Knadler
Abstract: “Trans*-itional Longings” argues that the neglected Black Arts Movement writer Rosa Guy traces out a model of trans* Black childhood in her essays and fiction that is informed by the materiality and lived experience of antiblack necropolitics in “ghetto” ecologies. Guy offers a different entry point and genealogy for a “quared” Black childhood studies that is more than an extension of white queer childhood studies. In her essays and fiction, Guy witnesses that the trans* Black child of Harlem is a figure of improvisational Black aliveness “trans-itioning” into alternative Black futures.
{"title":"Trans*-itional Longings of the “Dark Ghetto”: Rosa Guy and a Trans* Black Childhood Studies","authors":"Stephen Knadler","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921551","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921551","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: “Trans*-itional Longings” argues that the neglected Black Arts Movement writer Rosa Guy traces out a model of trans* Black childhood in her essays and fiction that is informed by the materiality and lived experience of antiblack necropolitics in “ghetto” ecologies. Guy offers a different entry point and genealogy for a “quared” Black childhood studies that is more than an extension of white queer childhood studies. In her essays and fiction, Guy witnesses that the trans* Black child of Harlem is a figure of improvisational Black aliveness “trans-itioning” into alternative Black futures.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140268428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a921548
Janet Eunjin Cho
Abstract: This essay traces Virginia Woolf’s metaphoric and structural employment of Asian or Asiatic food in portraying race in and beyond the third chapter of Woolf’s mock-biography, Orlando . The relationship between food and feminist aesthetics in Woolf scholarship has mainly been discussed based on their prescribed meanings within Western cultural and political contexts. This essay challenges the dominant reading by analyzing how Woolf’s construction of white feminist authorship in the novel owes much to her Orientalist rendering of Asian or Asiatic food as a racial trope that heightens the visual exotica and racial arbitrariness of non-Western bodies.
{"title":"Edibles into Scribbles: Writing Asia through Food in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography","authors":"Janet Eunjin Cho","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921548","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921548","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay traces Virginia Woolf’s metaphoric and structural employment of Asian or Asiatic food in portraying race in and beyond the third chapter of Woolf’s mock-biography, Orlando . The relationship between food and feminist aesthetics in Woolf scholarship has mainly been discussed based on their prescribed meanings within Western cultural and political contexts. This essay challenges the dominant reading by analyzing how Woolf’s construction of white feminist authorship in the novel owes much to her Orientalist rendering of Asian or Asiatic food as a racial trope that heightens the visual exotica and racial arbitrariness of non-Western bodies.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140280848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a921556
Christopher Krentz
{"title":"The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature by Peter J. Kalliney (review)","authors":"Christopher Krentz","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921556","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140272220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a921550
Isavella Vouza
Abstract: This essay examines the representation of psychological estrangement as an enabler, rather than inhibitor, of diasporic togetherness in two Black British-Caribbean diaspora novels, George Lamming’s The Emigrants and Beryl Gilroy’s In Praise of Love and Children . Both texts illustrate the condition of being “alone together,” which foregrounds the role of emotional dissociation as being, paradoxically, conducive to creating social bonds. By reworking the binaries of estrangement and relationality as complementary conditions in a diasporic context, these novels enable a reorientation and therefore expansion of typical forms and modalities of connection in diasporic spaces.
{"title":"Alone Together: Connecting through Estrangement in the Black British Novel","authors":"Isavella Vouza","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921550","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921550","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay examines the representation of psychological estrangement as an enabler, rather than inhibitor, of diasporic togetherness in two Black British-Caribbean diaspora novels, George Lamming’s The Emigrants and Beryl Gilroy’s In Praise of Love and Children . Both texts illustrate the condition of being “alone together,” which foregrounds the role of emotional dissociation as being, paradoxically, conducive to creating social bonds. By reworking the binaries of estrangement and relationality as complementary conditions in a diasporic context, these novels enable a reorientation and therefore expansion of typical forms and modalities of connection in diasporic spaces.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140274710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a921557
Bill V. Mullen
{"title":"Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory by Mark Christian Thompson (review)","authors":"Bill V. Mullen","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921557","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140269203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a921546
Aarthi Vadde, Richard Jean So
Abstract: Web-based fanfiction is an increasingly important species of modern fiction that is necessary to understanding contemporary literary culture in a multimedia world. Using the Harry Potter fandom on the platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) as our case study, we combine close reading and computational analysis to examine the narrative features of fanfiction and the rhetorical commentary surrounding it. Our approach models a rapprochement between literary studies and fan studies, offering a new data-driven method for analyzing the relationship between traditionally published fiction, web-based fanfiction, and empirical forms of reader response.
{"title":"Fandom and Fictionality after the Social Web: A Computational Study of AO3","authors":"Aarthi Vadde, Richard Jean So","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921546","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Web-based fanfiction is an increasingly important species of modern fiction that is necessary to understanding contemporary literary culture in a multimedia world. Using the Harry Potter fandom on the platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) as our case study, we combine close reading and computational analysis to examine the narrative features of fanfiction and the rhetorical commentary surrounding it. Our approach models a rapprochement between literary studies and fan studies, offering a new data-driven method for analyzing the relationship between traditionally published fiction, web-based fanfiction, and empirical forms of reader response.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140274048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2024.a921558
Lingfeng Nie
{"title":"Lives beyond Borders: US Immigrant Women’s Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice by Ina C. Seethaler (review)","authors":"Lingfeng Nie","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921558","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140276178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}