STUDIES IN THE NOVEL最新文献

Abstract:

Previous scholarship on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland (1915) has compellingly argued that the ecological space in the novel reflects an extension of an idealized domestic sphere, as a site where Gilman’s problematic eugenic beliefs manifest through the careful conservation of a park-like space. This analysis tends, however, to be wholly ocularcentric, grounded in the aesthetics of the verdant environment that features in Gilman’s narrative. As a necessary sensory departure from a visually preoccupied body of scholarship, I examine the barren sonic portrait that Gilman creates through her essayistic prose, arguing that female autonomy, individual orality, and bio-diverse ecological space become problematically compromised. Drawing on the intersections between feminist scholarship on Gilman’s novel, soundscape studies, and ecocritical frameworks in the environmental humanities, this essay aims to sonically deconstruct the problematic eugenic discourse that underpins Gilman’s ultimate human fantasy.

Abstract:

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder foregrounds speculation as a prominent theme, not least in the narrator’s financial investments. This essay uses those risky wagers as means of exploring the intersecting resonances of speculation in terms of its philosophical, financial, and narrative (speculative fictional) resonances. The novel’s interweaving of these senses reveals competing speculative strategies: on the one hand, a wager that takes limited information but attempts to delve into the unknown and return with a profit; on the other, a loss that nonetheless informs as to what supposedly established givens ultimately do not work.

Abstract:

This essay argues that Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 (2014) employs “implicated realism” to represent the environmentalism of the rich. Implicated realism is a self-reflexive aesthetic that reveals how the foundations of literary realism—narrative description, bourgeois settings, an emphasis on daily life—rely upon the forms of exploitation that have also produced the climate crisis. I demonstrate that implicated realism in 10:04, paradoxically, consists of both hyperrealism and realist failure. Lerner’s novel applies hyperrealist description to seemingly innocuous scenes, uncovering their implication in the uneven distribution of environmental harm. Such hyperrealism exists alongside realist failure, which 10:04 both thematizes and performs. Through realist failure, then, implicated realism confronts the compromised history of realism and its association with possessive individualism and extractive capitalism. Consequently, although many ecocritics discount realism’s ability to represent climate change, this essay identifies implicated realism as a self-reflexive and adaptive mode.

• Contributors

Leila Braun is a PhD candidate in English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Everyday Apocalypse: Minor Realism in the Contemporary Climate Novel,” examines how contemporary novels engage partial and contingent forms of literary realism to depict climate change and environmental disaster.

Bridget Chalk is Professor of English at Manhattan College, where she teaches modernism and twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and Anglophone literature. She is the author of Modernism and Mobility: The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience (Palgrave, 2014), as well as essays and reviews in Modernism/Modernity, The Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on Novel Schooling, a book about the relationship between education and narrative form.

Eliza McCarthy was in the final year of her undergraduate degree in English at the University of Exeter at the time of writing this article, and she began an MSt in World Literatures at the University of Oxford in October 2023 before pursuing doctoral study. Eliza’s research interests lie in the intersection between literature and cultural geography, notably ocean studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, sound studies, and the Black Diaspora.

Aaron Schneeberger received his doctorate in American Literature in 2018 from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he currently teaches as a postdoctoral scholar. His scholarship has also appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and College Literature.

Ryan Trimm is Professor of English and Film Media at the University of Rhode Island. He has authored the book Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain and numerous articles on contemporary British fiction and film.

Abstract:

This article reads the trope of waste in Don DeLillo’s Underworld through the lens of theories of affect and embodied cognition. Specifically, it examines how the bodily and perceptual habits of the novel’s characters are shaped through encounters with waste. Furthermore, it argues that these changing perceptions, attitudes, and dispositions toward waste demonstrate broader shifts in the development of capitalist subjects during the latter half of the twentieth century. Specifically, the novel depicts a transition from a desire to reconcile capitalist growth with traditionalism, not unlike the “fusionism” that dominated conservative thought during the middle of the twentieth century, to a more utopian vision of boundless capitalist growth popularized in post-Reagan America. The novel thus suggests that the political dispositions of its characters are better understood in terms of their affects and bodily habits than more traditional metrics like ideology.