Pub Date : 2024-05-23DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2024.a928655
Bridget T. Chalk
Abstract:
With a mixture of structural homage and ironic reference, Zadie Smith’s fragmentary, polyvocal novel NW (2012) cannily adapts the imperatives of the classic bildungsroman from a nineteenth-century national-industrial context to a contemporary global frame. Within NW’s four main narratives of formation, education and individual ambition serve not to cultivate and fulfill, but to frustrate, fail, or fragment. As a counterpoint to its negative assessment of education and linear progression, however, NW’s thorough manipulation of the logic of formation highlights the novel’s capacity to reorient readers’ modes of attention and empathy as conditioned by alterity, to use Dorothy Hale’s term. Drawing on Smith’s essays, I suggest that NW’s experimental novelistic techniques present alternative forms of education for the reader: a range of indeterminate and uncertain “lessons,” dependent on singular encounters with the text.
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Pub Date : 2024-05-23DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2024.a928658
Justine S. Murison
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem</em> by Jennifer L. Fleissner <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Justine S. Murison </li> </ul> FLEISSNER, JENNIFER L. <em>Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem</em>. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 504 pp. $105.00 hardcover; $35.00 cloth; $34.99 e-book. <p>Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s 1995 <em>Critical Inquiry</em> essay “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins Now” brashly opened with a list of “a few things theory today knows,” and the first was that the distance of “any account of human beings or cultures” from “a biological basis is assumed to correlate almost precisely with its potential for doing justice to difference, to contingency, to performative force, and to the possibility of change.” What they were describing was a field predominated by explanations via cultural and linguistic construction, and what they initiated was a turn back to the material: human biology, affects over “feelings” and “emotions,” nonhuman animals, things, enmeshments and entanglements with the material world, and so on. Indeed, since their essay “entanglement” has become a privileged word in literary criticism, signaling a determination not to hierarchize cause and effect, actor and actant, human over the nonhuman and material world.</p> <p>Jennifer Fleissner’s <em>Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem</em> challenges these theoretical and methodological assumptions tied to the new materialisms. Fleissner’s main contention is that the struggle with and over the human will—that is, the capacity to make decisions, initiate action, and control impulses—is the central concern of the novel form and what drives modernity itself. As such, <em>Maladies of the Will</em> is at once an intellectual history, a new history of the novel, and a much-needed intervention for the general field of literary studies.</p> <p>Fleissner’s first step is to widen the historical perspective of scholars of the American novel. Her history, in fact, begins with Augustine. She argues that scholars of the novel tend to position the eighteenth century’s relationship to the will in a way that occludes rather than explains what the novel does. Here’s her main point: since Augustine (and through such Protestant steady sellers as John Bunyan’s <em>Pilgrim’s Progress</em>) internal struggles of the will have been the main feature of the first-person introspective narratives that influenced the novel form. And, as a reader of Augustine, Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, or Mary Rowlandson would recognize, these struggles were about how to make sense of the peculiar phenomenon of knowing what is morally right but still doing the opposite. Edgar Allan Poe famously dubbed this the “imp of the per
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要：评论者： 意志的弊病：Jennifer L. Fleissner 著，Justine S. Murison 译 FLEISSNER, JENNIFER L. Maladies of the Will：美国小说与现代性问题》。芝加哥和伦敦：芝加哥大学出版社，2022 年。504 pp.精装本 105.00 美元；布本 35.00 美元；电子书 34.99 美元。伊芙-科索夫斯基-塞奇威克和亚当-弗兰克 1995 年发表的《批判性探索》（Critical Inquiry）一文《网络褶皱中的羞耻》（Shame in the Cybernetic Fold：一开篇，他们就肆无忌惮地列举了 "当今理论所知道的几件事情"，其中第一件就是 "关于人类或文化的任何论述 "与 "生物学基础 "之间的距离，"被假定为几乎恰好与其公正对待差异、偶然性、表演力和变革可能性的潜力相关联"。他们所描述的是一个以通过文化和语言建构进行解释为主导的领域，而他们所倡导的则是回归物质：人类生物学、对 "感觉 "和 "情感 "的影响、非人类动物、事物、与物质世界的缠绕和纠结，等等。事实上，自他们的文章发表以来，"纠缠 "已成为文学评论中的一个特权词，表明人们决心不再将因果、行为者与被行为者、人类与非人类和物质世界分等级。詹妮弗-弗莱斯纳（Jennifer Fleissner）的《意志的弊病》（Maladies of the Will：美国小说与现代性问题》挑战了这些与新唯物主义相关的理论和方法假设。弗莱斯纳的主要论点是，与人的意志--即做出决定、发起行动和控制冲动的能力--的斗争是小说形式的核心问题，也是现代性本身的驱动力。因此，《意志的弊病》既是一部思想史，也是一部新的小说史，更是文学研究领域亟需的介入之作。弗莱斯纳的第一步是拓宽美国小说学者的历史视野。事实上，她的历史始于奥古斯丁。她认为，研究小说的学者往往将十八世纪与意志的关系定位在遮蔽而非解释小说的作用上。她的主要观点如下：自奥古斯丁（以及约翰-班扬的《朝圣者的进步》等新教畅销书）以来，意志的内部斗争一直是影响小说形式的第一人称自省叙事的主要特征。而且，正如奥古斯丁、班扬、乔纳森-爱德华兹或玛丽-罗兰森的读者所认识到的，这些挣扎是关于如何理解明知道德上正确的事情却仍然反其道而行之的奇特现象。埃德加-爱伦-坡（Edgar Allan Poe）将这种现象称为 "反常的小恶魔"。[弗莱斯纳认为，十八世纪的英美思想家和作家发展出两种相关的方法来管理这种 "反常的小恶魔"。第一种是理想化自由主体--自我拥有和理性选择。第二种是通过情感--对有感情、有同情心的主体的珍视。在弗莱斯纳的论证中，这些并不构成现代主体性的发明，而只是管理现代意志困境的两种模式：在一个世俗的世界中，我们既感到自己拥有自我创造的所有自由和权力，又被我们无法控制的结构所完全限制。弗莱斯纳深入研究了德国哲学和跨大西洋医学理论，解释了意志的弊病--它的疾病和幽灵--是如何构成这种新兴现代感的标志。她的章节以美国经典中的主要文本或作家为基础，通过这一思想史重新叙述和诠释：第一章重点介绍了纳撒尼尔-霍桑的《红字》；第二章介绍了赫尔曼-梅尔维尔的《白鲸记》；第三章介绍了伊丽莎白-斯托达德的《莫吉森一家》；第四章介绍了詹姆斯兄弟；第五章介绍了弗兰克-诺里斯的《凡多弗和野蛮人》以及其他自然主义作家；第六章介绍了二十世纪之交的黑人写作，特别是查尔斯-切斯纳特的《传统的骨髓》。正如上述提纲所示，弗莱斯纳在很大程度上关注的是例外情况，以及如何理解传统上被归类为 "浪漫主义 "的小说（《红字》、《白鲸》）与那些...
{"title":"Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem by Jennifer L. Fleissner (review)","authors":"Justine S. Murison","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928658","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem</em> by Jennifer L. Fleissner <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Justine S. Murison </li> </ul> FLEISSNER, JENNIFER L. <em>Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem</em>. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 504 pp. $105.00 hardcover; $35.00 cloth; $34.99 e-book. <p>Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s 1995 <em>Critical Inquiry</em> essay “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins Now” brashly opened with a list of “a few things theory today knows,” and the first was that the distance of “any account of human beings or cultures” from “a biological basis is assumed to correlate almost precisely with its potential for doing justice to difference, to contingency, to performative force, and to the possibility of change.” What they were describing was a field predominated by explanations via cultural and linguistic construction, and what they initiated was a turn back to the material: human biology, affects over “feelings” and “emotions,” nonhuman animals, things, enmeshments and entanglements with the material world, and so on. Indeed, since their essay “entanglement” has become a privileged word in literary criticism, signaling a determination not to hierarchize cause and effect, actor and actant, human over the nonhuman and material world.</p> <p>Jennifer Fleissner’s <em>Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem</em> challenges these theoretical and methodological assumptions tied to the new materialisms. Fleissner’s main contention is that the struggle with and over the human will—that is, the capacity to make decisions, initiate action, and control impulses—is the central concern of the novel form and what drives modernity itself. As such, <em>Maladies of the Will</em> is at once an intellectual history, a new history of the novel, and a much-needed intervention for the general field of literary studies.</p> <p>Fleissner’s first step is to widen the historical perspective of scholars of the American novel. Her history, in fact, begins with Augustine. She argues that scholars of the novel tend to position the eighteenth century’s relationship to the will in a way that occludes rather than explains what the novel does. Here’s her main point: since Augustine (and through such Protestant steady sellers as John Bunyan’s <em>Pilgrim’s Progress</em>) internal struggles of the will have been the main feature of the first-person introspective narratives that influenced the novel form. And, as a reader of Augustine, Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, or Mary Rowlandson would recognize, these struggles were about how to make sense of the peculiar phenomenon of knowing what is morally right but still doing the opposite. Edgar Allan Poe famously dubbed this the “imp of the per","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"219 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141150904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-23DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2024.a928657
Yueling Ji
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair</em> by Michael Dango <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Yueling Ji </li> </ul> DANGO, MICHAEL. <em>Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair</em>. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 336 pp. $140.00 hardcover; $35.00 cloth; $35.00 e-book. <p><em>Crisis Style</em> proposes a new approach to the old enigma of “style” in literary and aesthetic theory; it also provides a new taxonomy of the styles of contemporary American literature and art, with particular attention to the genre of the novel, while drawing analogies between the form of the novel and that of other media. In doing so, it identifies and analyzes four major styles in contemporary American culture, four distinct aesthetic tendencies that transpire across media. While the aesthetic tendencies are distinct and the corresponding styles look different, <em>Crisis Style</em> argues that they originate from a shared context and serve a similar end: They are all coping tactics for a permanent perception of crisis that characterizes the lived experience of our contemporary era, even though the nature of the specific crisis varies, as well as the specific tactic employed.</p> <p>Borrowing a popular culture vocabulary, <em>Crisis Style</em> terms the four styles “detox,” “filter,” “binge,” and “ghost.” Detox stands for “the attempted removal of a kind of risk that is primarily environmental” (75) and the creation of a space where the environmental toxins are temporarily under control. Filter, in the sense of the image-modifying tool provided by social media applications, is marked by a logic of “coordinating the form of an overlay and the content of a subject in the production of a genre” (143); it produces “new roles, new genres of subject, that, even if they cannot partition the hegemony of economization, can at least deliver the fantasy of its punctuation” (110–11). Binge refers to “a strategy of holding everything in one place when people cannot decide what to select from the whole” and “stealing from across institutions and discourses when neither institutions nor discourses are able to shore up their borders” (172). Lastly, ghost can be summarized as “withdraw[ing] from recognition instead of obsessively filtering new scenes in which to appear, and belong, to a public” (251).</p> <p>Notably, the four styles are identified and categorized by the action each undertakes. Here lies the major distinction between the theory of style in <em>Crisis Style</em> and prior scholarship on stylistics. Conventionally, literary or artistic styles can be categorized in a number of ways. They can be categorized by association with an artistic movement or school (“minimalist”); by association with a historical period or location (“Victorian”); or by aesthetic categories, that is, adjectives such as “terse” or “verbos
{"title":"Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair by Michael Dango (review)","authors":"Yueling Ji","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928657","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair</em> by Michael Dango <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Yueling Ji </li> </ul> DANGO, MICHAEL. <em>Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair</em>. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 336 pp. $140.00 hardcover; $35.00 cloth; $35.00 e-book. <p><em>Crisis Style</em> proposes a new approach to the old enigma of “style” in literary and aesthetic theory; it also provides a new taxonomy of the styles of contemporary American literature and art, with particular attention to the genre of the novel, while drawing analogies between the form of the novel and that of other media. In doing so, it identifies and analyzes four major styles in contemporary American culture, four distinct aesthetic tendencies that transpire across media. While the aesthetic tendencies are distinct and the corresponding styles look different, <em>Crisis Style</em> argues that they originate from a shared context and serve a similar end: They are all coping tactics for a permanent perception of crisis that characterizes the lived experience of our contemporary era, even though the nature of the specific crisis varies, as well as the specific tactic employed.</p> <p>Borrowing a popular culture vocabulary, <em>Crisis Style</em> terms the four styles “detox,” “filter,” “binge,” and “ghost.” Detox stands for “the attempted removal of a kind of risk that is primarily environmental” (75) and the creation of a space where the environmental toxins are temporarily under control. Filter, in the sense of the image-modifying tool provided by social media applications, is marked by a logic of “coordinating the form of an overlay and the content of a subject in the production of a genre” (143); it produces “new roles, new genres of subject, that, even if they cannot partition the hegemony of economization, can at least deliver the fantasy of its punctuation” (110–11). Binge refers to “a strategy of holding everything in one place when people cannot decide what to select from the whole” and “stealing from across institutions and discourses when neither institutions nor discourses are able to shore up their borders” (172). Lastly, ghost can be summarized as “withdraw[ing] from recognition instead of obsessively filtering new scenes in which to appear, and belong, to a public” (251).</p> <p>Notably, the four styles are identified and categorized by the action each undertakes. Here lies the major distinction between the theory of style in <em>Crisis Style</em> and prior scholarship on stylistics. Conventionally, literary or artistic styles can be categorized in a number of ways. They can be categorized by association with an artistic movement or school (“minimalist”); by association with a historical period or location (“Victorian”); or by aesthetic categories, that is, adjectives such as “terse” or “verbos","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"191 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141150945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","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/sdn.2024.a921065
Erin James
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science</em> by Patrick Whitmarsh <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Erin James </li> </ul> WHITMARSH, PATRICK. <em>Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science</em>. Stanford University Press, 2023. 209 pp. $80.00 hardcover; $26.00 paper. <p>In the opening pages of Patrick Whitmarsh’s <em>Writing Our Extinction</em>, native Greenlander Arnarulunnguaq stands atop a newly-built New York City skyscraper in 1924 and looks upon the city below. Bewildered, she puts to words the uncanny vision of humanity that this vertical perspective allows: “I see things more than my mind can grasp; and the only way to save oneself from madness is to suppose that we have all died suddenly before we know, and that this is part of another life” (3). For Whitmarsh, Arnarulunnguaq’s terror neatly summarizes the affordances of a vertical perspective: viewing the world—and ourselves— along the vertical plane, he argues, necessitates engaging with speculative understandings of the planet and the place of humans in it, as well as grappling with our own absence from it. The rest of Whitmarsh’s provocative and illuminating book fleshes out Arnarulunnguaq’s experience, reorienting post-WWII narrative fiction along an up-and-down axis. His survey foregrounds aerial representations of the earth from above and subterranean explorations of the earth from below and persuasively accounts for the way that this orientation illuminates increasing environmental precarity and anxieties about human extinction.</p> <p>In the titular “vertical science,” Whitmarsh refers to postwar-era advancements in air and space travel, resources extraction, and nuclear experimentation that we most clearly see in the decade spanning 1957–1958’s International Geophysical Year and the publication of the <em>Earthrise</em> photo ten years later. For Whitmarsh, the “vertical decade” not only ushers in radical scientific developments and their affiliated technological and militaristic projects, but also “a vertical thematics of cultural progress” (10). This vertical science, in turn, coordinates with a post-1960 Anthropocene fiction that offers readers “vertical perspectives on the planet, an increased attention to the ecological connectivity between human development and geophysical systems, and a sense of the earth as a script for humankind’s accelerating extinction” (11). By reconceptualizing “Anthropocene fictions” not as texts that feature explicit representations of the epoch or anthropogenic climate change but as those that foreground a vertical imagination, Whitmarsh nicely expands what novels we might place in this category. He argues that “Anthropocene fiction is not ostensibly about climate change at all,” but rather “works to focalize vertically the geophysical mesh in which
{"title":"Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science by Patrick Whitmarsh (review)","authors":"Erin James","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a921065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a921065","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science</em> by Patrick Whitmarsh <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Erin James </li> </ul> WHITMARSH, PATRICK. <em>Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science</em>. Stanford University Press, 2023. 209 pp. $80.00 hardcover; $26.00 paper. <p>In the opening pages of Patrick Whitmarsh’s <em>Writing Our Extinction</em>, native Greenlander Arnarulunnguaq stands atop a newly-built New York City skyscraper in 1924 and looks upon the city below. Bewildered, she puts to words the uncanny vision of humanity that this vertical perspective allows: “I see things more than my mind can grasp; and the only way to save oneself from madness is to suppose that we have all died suddenly before we know, and that this is part of another life” (3). For Whitmarsh, Arnarulunnguaq’s terror neatly summarizes the affordances of a vertical perspective: viewing the world—and ourselves— along the vertical plane, he argues, necessitates engaging with speculative understandings of the planet and the place of humans in it, as well as grappling with our own absence from it. The rest of Whitmarsh’s provocative and illuminating book fleshes out Arnarulunnguaq’s experience, reorienting post-WWII narrative fiction along an up-and-down axis. His survey foregrounds aerial representations of the earth from above and subterranean explorations of the earth from below and persuasively accounts for the way that this orientation illuminates increasing environmental precarity and anxieties about human extinction.</p> <p>In the titular “vertical science,” Whitmarsh refers to postwar-era advancements in air and space travel, resources extraction, and nuclear experimentation that we most clearly see in the decade spanning 1957–1958’s International Geophysical Year and the publication of the <em>Earthrise</em> photo ten years later. For Whitmarsh, the “vertical decade” not only ushers in radical scientific developments and their affiliated technological and militaristic projects, but also “a vertical thematics of cultural progress” (10). This vertical science, in turn, coordinates with a post-1960 Anthropocene fiction that offers readers “vertical perspectives on the planet, an increased attention to the ecological connectivity between human development and geophysical systems, and a sense of the earth as a script for humankind’s accelerating extinction” (11). By reconceptualizing “Anthropocene fictions” not as texts that feature explicit representations of the epoch or anthropogenic climate change but as those that foreground a vertical imagination, Whitmarsh nicely expands what novels we might place in this category. He argues that “Anthropocene fiction is not ostensibly about climate change at all,” but rather “works to focalize vertically the geophysical mesh in which","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140019560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","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/sdn.2024.a921060
Brian J. Williams
Abstract:
This article argues that US war literature hinges on nationalistic, exclusionary narratives that are inadequate for the complexities of globalized warfare. Drawing on theories of the global novel, with its focus on individual action within complex systems, this piece considers Phil Klay’s Missionaries as a global war novel that foregrounds how an embrace of chaos and contingency enables new ideas of responsibility and destabilizes the categories “combatant” and “war story.” Klay forces a confrontation with individual and shared culpability, conceptualizing war as a process of implication, laying the groundwork for ethical local action within global systems.
{"title":"War's Implications: Missionaries and the Global War Novel","authors":"Brian J. Williams","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a921060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a921060","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article argues that US war literature hinges on nationalistic, exclusionary narratives that are inadequate for the complexities of globalized warfare. Drawing on theories of the global novel, with its focus on individual action within complex systems, this piece considers Phil Klay’s <i>Missionaries</i> as a global war novel that foregrounds how an embrace of chaos and contingency enables new ideas of responsibility and destabilizes the categories “combatant” and “war story.” Klay forces a confrontation with individual and shared culpability, conceptualizing war as a process of implication, laying the groundwork for ethical local action within global systems.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140019673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","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/sdn.2024.a921058
Peter Morey
Abstract:
Sunjeev Sahota’s novel Ours Are the Streets tells the story of a young British Muslim man’s path to radicalization. It appears to be another fictional attempt to ‘get inside’ the terrorist mind. This essay argues, however, that the text dramatizes the pitfalls of empathic identification via a focalizing character whose mental state becomes unstable and his narrative increasingly unreliable. The protagonist’s uncontrolled Theory of Mind causes him to misrecognize others and their motives, even as he seeks solidarity. The reader too is led into an interpretative labyrinth which raises questions about the ethics of reading fiction and empathizing across cultural difference.
摘要:孙吉夫-萨霍塔（Sunjeev Sahota）的小说《我们的街道》（Ours Are the Streets）讲述了一名英国穆斯林青年的激进化之路。这似乎是另一部试图 "深入 "恐怖分子内心的虚构作品。然而，本文认为，文本通过一个精神状态变得不稳定、叙述越来越不可靠的焦点人物，戏剧化地揭示了移情认同的陷阱。主人公不受控制的 "心智理论 "导致他误认他人及其动机，甚至在他寻求声援时也是如此。读者也被带入了一个阐释的迷宫，提出了关于阅读小说和跨越文化差异产生共鸣的伦理问题。
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Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2024.a921061
Sarah Brouillette
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Author As Social Production <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sarah Brouillette </li> </ul> SINYKIN, DAN. <em>Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature</em>. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 328 pp. Paperback $30.00; hardcover $120.00; e-book $29.99. SAPIRO, GISÈLE. <em>The Sociology of Literature</em>. Trans. Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman. Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2023. 212 pp. Paperback $25.00; hardcover $100.00. <h2>1. Superorganism</h2> <p>The general claim of Dan Sinykin’s blockbuster study <em>Big Fiction</em> is that the age of industry conglomeration has had a significant effect on the very nature of contemporary American literature. Increasingly accustomed to working with agents and other intermediaries, and subject to aggressive competition and marketing, authors are now induced to “internalize” the rules of the marketplace via acts of “anticipatory socialization” (10). As a result, Sinykin argues, to grasp this contemporary situation scholars need to do away with a particular “villain”: “the romantic author, the individual loosed by liberalism, the pretense to uniqueness, a mirage veiling the systemic intelligences that are responsible for more of what we read than most of us are ready to acknowledge” (25). Because “conglomerate era fiction displays properties attributable not to any one individual but to the conglomerate superorganism” (12), the figure of the individual author is quite simply inadequate to its analysis. With its chain store buyers, literary agents, and publicists and marketing departments, conglomeration has eroded authorial autonomy. For writers working within these conditions, success depends “less on simply knowing the right people...and more on one’s capacity to accommodate in one’s work the demands of the system” (97). The “relatively autonomous author-editor duo” has given way to “the work of many hands” <strong>[End Page 99]</strong> (99), while marketing “eroded the editor’s power” (99) toward a “systematic intelligence, a systematic authorship” (103).</p> <p>The most extensive corroboration of Sinykin’s point would be found in Claire Squires’s UK-based book <em>Marketing Literature</em> (Palgrave). Published in 2007, it was one of the first major works applying techniques from book history to the contemporary scene. Squires drew upon her own experiences working in publishing, interviewed publishers, agents, and journalists, and consulted the trade press, bestseller lists, marketing materials, and reports by industry analysts. She used these resources to document changes in the British industry since the 1970s, including conglomeration and globalization, the demise of the Net Book Agreement, which had allowed publishers some control over retail prices, and the triumph of the literary agent and the book prize. Her p
{"title":"The Author As Social Production","authors":"Sarah Brouillette","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a921061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a921061","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Author As Social Production <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sarah Brouillette </li> </ul> SINYKIN, DAN. <em>Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature</em>. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 328 pp. Paperback $30.00; hardcover $120.00; e-book $29.99. SAPIRO, GISÈLE. <em>The Sociology of Literature</em>. Trans. Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman. Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2023. 212 pp. Paperback $25.00; hardcover $100.00. <h2>1. Superorganism</h2> <p>The general claim of Dan Sinykin’s blockbuster study <em>Big Fiction</em> is that the age of industry conglomeration has had a significant effect on the very nature of contemporary American literature. Increasingly accustomed to working with agents and other intermediaries, and subject to aggressive competition and marketing, authors are now induced to “internalize” the rules of the marketplace via acts of “anticipatory socialization” (10). As a result, Sinykin argues, to grasp this contemporary situation scholars need to do away with a particular “villain”: “the romantic author, the individual loosed by liberalism, the pretense to uniqueness, a mirage veiling the systemic intelligences that are responsible for more of what we read than most of us are ready to acknowledge” (25). Because “conglomerate era fiction displays properties attributable not to any one individual but to the conglomerate superorganism” (12), the figure of the individual author is quite simply inadequate to its analysis. With its chain store buyers, literary agents, and publicists and marketing departments, conglomeration has eroded authorial autonomy. For writers working within these conditions, success depends “less on simply knowing the right people...and more on one’s capacity to accommodate in one’s work the demands of the system” (97). The “relatively autonomous author-editor duo” has given way to “the work of many hands” <strong>[End Page 99]</strong> (99), while marketing “eroded the editor’s power” (99) toward a “systematic intelligence, a systematic authorship” (103).</p> <p>The most extensive corroboration of Sinykin’s point would be found in Claire Squires’s UK-based book <em>Marketing Literature</em> (Palgrave). Published in 2007, it was one of the first major works applying techniques from book history to the contemporary scene. Squires drew upon her own experiences working in publishing, interviewed publishers, agents, and journalists, and consulted the trade press, bestseller lists, marketing materials, and reports by industry analysts. She used these resources to document changes in the British industry since the 1970s, including conglomeration and globalization, the demise of the Net Book Agreement, which had allowed publishers some control over retail prices, and the triumph of the literary agent and the book prize. Her p","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140019732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","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/sdn.2024.a921059
Trevor Jackson
Abstract:
This essay interrogates the carceral geography of the California Central Valley by examining Rachel Kushner’s novel The Mars Room (2018), which unfolds the life and limiting circumstances of a woman serving two life sentences. With capitalism as the driving force and background of this novel, this article examines the problem of representation posed by the prison in American society. Does the novel allow for a sharper perception of the loss wrought by the carceral state? I argue that Kushner uses the novel form to represent the slow violence of incarceration, which is a biopolitical project of the United States.
{"title":"Slow Violence and the California Central Valley Prison in Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room","authors":"Trevor Jackson","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a921059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a921059","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay interrogates the carceral geography of the California Central Valley by examining Rachel Kushner’s novel <i>The Mars Room</i> (2018), which unfolds the life and limiting circumstances of a woman serving two life sentences. With capitalism as the driving force and background of this novel, this article examines the problem of representation posed by the prison in American society. Does the novel allow for a sharper perception of the loss wrought by the carceral state? I argue that Kushner uses the novel form to represent the slow violence of incarceration, which is a biopolitical project of the United States.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140019769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","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/sdn.2024.a921056
Anne Stiles
Abstract:
In Science and Health (1875), Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) discouraged followers from reading “nauseous fiction,” that is, “[n]ovels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity” (195). This essay examines Eddy’s views on fiction alongside Christian Science novels written around 1900 by followers such as Clara Louise Burnham, Mrs. Georgie Sheldon, and Katherine Yates. Eddy tentatively supported these authors’ literary productions but refused to grant them the endorsement of The Christian Science Publishing Society. Had Eddy endorsed their fictions, she might have attracted more followers and strengthened her religion’s place in literary history.
{"title":"\"Nauseous Fiction\": Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science Novel, 1900–1910","authors":"Anne Stiles","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a921056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a921056","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>In <i>Science and Health</i> (1875), Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) discouraged followers from reading “nauseous fiction,” that is, “[n]ovels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity” (195). This essay examines Eddy’s views on fiction alongside Christian Science novels written around 1900 by followers such as Clara Louise Burnham, Mrs. Georgie Sheldon, and Katherine Yates. Eddy tentatively supported these authors’ literary productions but refused to grant them the endorsement of The Christian Science Publishing Society. Had Eddy endorsed their fictions, she might have attracted more followers and strengthened her religion’s place in literary history.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140019737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","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/sdn.2024.a921057
Ivan Kreilkamp
Abstract:
This essay considers Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent in relation to what I will suggest are several relevant intertexts or sources for it—including Upton Sinclair’s famous muckraking 1906 exposé of the conditions in the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle, as well as Classical mythological tales depicting “cannibal feasts.” I point to these sources in order to argue that Conrad uses the novel to consider the question of the overlap between the direct violence of terrorism and the less direct violence of meat production. The novel, I suggest, can be read as an extended meditation on the embodied nature of human flesh.
{"title":"Meat, Flesh, Skin: The Carnality Of The Secret Agent","authors":"Ivan Kreilkamp","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a921057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a921057","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay considers Conrad’s novel <i>The Secret Agent</i> in relation to what I will suggest are several relevant intertexts or sources for it—including Upton Sinclair’s famous muckraking 1906 exposé of the conditions in the Chicago stockyards, <i>The Jungle</i>, as well as Classical mythological tales depicting “cannibal feasts.” I point to these sources in order to argue that Conrad uses the novel to consider the question of the overlap between the direct violence of terrorism and the less direct violence of meat production. The novel, I suggest, can be read as an extended meditation on the embodied nature of human flesh.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140019747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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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