STUDIES IN THE NOVEL最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair by Michael Dango
• Yueling Ji

Crisis Style 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, Crisis Style 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.

Borrowing a popular culture vocabulary, Crisis Style 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).

Notably, the four styles are identified and categorized by the action each undertakes. Here lies the major distinction between the theory of style in Crisis Style 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

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.

Reviewed by:

• Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem by Jennifer L. Fleissner
• Justine S. Murison

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s 1995 Critical Inquiry 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.

Jennifer Fleissner’s Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem 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, Maladies of the Will is at once an intellectual history, a new history of the novel, and a much-needed intervention for the general field of literary studies.

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 Pilgrim’s Progress) 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

Reviewed by:

• Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science by Patrick Whitmarsh
• Erin James

In the opening pages of Patrick Whitmarsh’s Writing Our Extinction, 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.

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 Earthrise 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

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.

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.

• The Author As Social Production
• Sarah Brouillette

1. Superorganism

The general claim of Dan Sinykin’s blockbuster study Big Fiction 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” [End Page 99] (99), while marketing “eroded the editor’s power” (99) toward a “systematic intelligence, a systematic authorship” (103).

The most extensive corroboration of Sinykin’s point would be found in Claire Squires’s UK-based book Marketing Literature (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

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.

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.

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.