STUDIES IN THE NOVEL最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive by Sean O'toole
• Kristin Mahoney

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891) is a novel that can feel at once too legible and strangely obscure. Critics have wrestled with what to do with the novel's conclusion, which seems to transform a Decadent novel into an overly pat cautionary tale, supplanting all the sinister hedonism that preceded with simplistic moralism, leading readers to struggle as to how to bring the text into accord with the movement from which it emerged. The novel's treatment of desire, which famously underwent numerous revisions, manifests in wildly different ways within different chapters, and critics have struggled as well with how to render coherent this unruly thematic within the text. Sean O'Toole's Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive provides a way out of some of these challenges, not by simplifying or reducing the novel, but by foregrounding the fragments of which it is composed, the fact that it is a collage arranged from a network of transnational influences. In illuminating what the novel is made from, he also demonstrates the function of these borrowings and adaptations, the manner in which its fragmentation and bricolage disguised the text's queer project, allowing Wilde to avoid the censoring of its representation of same-sex desire and "circumvent dominant ideology" (38).

O'Toole argues that our tendency to see The Picture of Dorian Gray as an outgrowth of Victorian Aestheticism and French Decadence has obscured the broader array of international influences from which Wilde was drawing in his composition of his only novel. In his preface, O'Toole connects this move to place Dorian Gray within a broader transnational and transhistorical framework to recent efforts to "undiscipline" Victorian studies as well as to what has been referred to as "new Decadence studies," which locates Decadence across a wider range of geographic locations, time periods, and media. However, while recent work on the Decadent Movement's global reach by, for example, Stefano Evangelista, Matthew Potolsky, Regenia Gagnier, and Robert Stilling has focused upon Decadence's cosmopolitan networks at the fin de siècle as well as its transnational afterlives in the twentieth century, O'Toole takes a somewhat different tack by disinterring Wilde's international source materials, turning our eyes back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to Irish Gothic, European historical romance, and nineteenth-century American short fiction.

Reviewed by:

• Novels By Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century by Kate Marshall
• Adrienne Ghaly

Realism's enduring cultural presence in contemporary American literature is not the result of variations on the bourgeois subject, free indirect discourse's dialectic of intimacy and alienation, the structure of a political unconscious, or its treatment of sociomaterial environments. Instead, argues Kate Marshall in this vibrant work of novel theory and the nonhuman, this persistence derives from realism's tendency to decenter human experiences, often in highly 'weird' ways. On one level, this book might be understood as a lively response to new materialism, theories of the nonhuman, and the Anthropocene; on another, as an engaging and welcome addition to current critical re-engagements with realism. Over the better part of two decades scholars from Fredric Jameson to Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, from Debjani Ganguly to Ramón Saldívar, have interrogated realism's flourishing in contemporary Anglophone literature, often identifying its permeability and propensity for fusion with its putative others, from the romance to the complex generic hybridities of 'speculative' and 'planetary' fiction. [End Page 331]

Marshall's opening chapters seek to track "a longing for the nonhuman" (3) in twenty-first-century fiction and theory by establishing an alternate genealogy found in the modes with which American fiction since the later decades of the nineteenth century sought to imagine nonhuman perspectives. The new weird thinkers—novelists and theorists of new materialism, proponents of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism—share a commitment to "modalities of indifference, the cosmic, and external or object agencies" (31). From Poe to pulp to new materialisms, through American naturalism, para-modernist texts, and post-extinction narratives: in Marshall's vision all are "novels that want to be written by aliens" (13). This animating idea encompasses "shifts of perspective and unlikely experiments with sentience" (3), "build[ing] worlds that feel weird" (4), and "construct[ing] a nonhuman point of view" (9) without consigning such weirdness to the domains of genre fiction. Marshall does not dissolve the category of genre, but argues instead that in the novels under examination "genre becomes mood," a "reflexive knowing" and "feeling…the limitations of the human vantage" (5). This genre shift, Marshall contends, "is doing the work of theory in the novel" (5).

This perspective means that Novels by Aliens participates in broader efforts to expand

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.