Conclusion: Fredric Jameson, the Novel and Contemporary Reading Practices

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-170
Author(s):  
Jarrad Cogle
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Fredric Jameson

Stranger Fictions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic

Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, this book offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. This book rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century translation practices, the book argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. The book shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. It affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

Rushdie and the Art of Modernism

2018 ◽  
pp. 125-143
Author(s):  
Richard Begam
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Accelerated Aging ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Commitments ◽  
Fredric Jameson

This chapter positions The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)—the first full-fledged novel Salman Rushdie wrote following the 1989 fatwa—in relation to criticisms of modernism advanced not only by Ayatollah Khomeini but also by scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. It is significant that the novel’s subject is modernism itself, represented by Aurora Zogoiby, whose work synthesizes virtually every avant-garde movement, from fauvism, surrealism, and Dadaism to cubism, expressionism, and abstractionism. In offering a history of twentieth-century art, Rushdie explores how modernism can retain its aesthetic autonomy while giving voice to its social and political commitments. The chapter concludes by examining two aspects of the novel that are usually considered postmodern: the figure of the palimpsest and Moraes’s accelerated aging. The former is associated with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot’s mythic method, while the latter—with its sense of accelerated temporality—functions as a metaphor for modernism itself.

George Eliot's Estuarial Form

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-217
Author(s):  
Kyle McAuley
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Ecological System ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Ecological Form ◽  
Near Future

This essay recasts the central locale of The Mill on the Floss in order to show how the geography and society of George Eliot's novel function together as a conjoined ecological system. I show that the port at St. Ogg's is set on an estuary, and from this observation, I claim that the entanglement of multiple estuarial waters provides a formal model for the overall ecology of the novel. Referring to this system as “ecological form,” the essay shows how the characters’ misunderstanding of the estuarial nature of the St. Ogg's hydrography is the primary source of the communal divisions with which the novel is so famously riven. In so doing, this essay makes two methodological interventions, one local, and one slightly more global. In the first, I show how unsticking the progression of our criticism from that of a novel's plot—especially one with such a catastrophically strong telos as Mill’s—can allow us to view form and, particularly, geography as newly vital to literary history. This leads to the second intervention, in which I suggest that reading practices in an age of environmental collapse should look beyond disaster itself and toward affected communities’ systemic ties to those extraneous systems—economic, legal, imperial—that aid and abet disasters elsewhere and even ignore the potential for catastrophic reoccurrence in the near future. In other words, reading for water readily yields a wide-ranging map of global capitalism perhaps unexpectedly centered on a small town in Lincolnshire.

Readers and Reading Practices

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Colclough
Keyword(s):  
Reading Aloud ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Illustrated Novel ◽  
The Mind

This chapter explores reading diaries to illustrate the bibliographic world in which individual readers encountered novels. From the recording of a baffled enjoyment of Tristram Shandy, through the conjuring up of the ‘excessive’ teenage delights taken in the illustrated novel, and on to the pleasures of dismissing emergent new genres as ‘too Highlandish’, the evidence presented here suggests just how much pleasure readers gained from novels. Readers engaged with fiction in a number of different forms during this time and textual context subtly altered the kind of reading that it was possible to produce. Similarly, anecdotal accounts of reading aloud recognizes reading as a material act, which brings the body as well as the mind into play. Moreover, it is worth remembering those everyday gestures of reading, such as hurrying to the library for the next volume, that were such an important part of the novel reader's experience during this period.

Synecdoche's Obloquy: Beckett and the Performance of Indecency

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-195
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kastleman
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Strategy ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Direct Address

In Beckett's Ireland, the practice of censorship was bound up with the workings of literary genre. The fact that printed matter was subject to censorship, while theatre was not, meant that the censor played a role in maintaining the distinction between dramatic and nondramatic writing. Many Irish authors responded to these conditions by remediating censored narratives as theatre. Beckett adopted an alternative strategy, rejecting the legal premises of Irish censorship and crafting his literary style around a critique of the censor's reading practices. Beckett's responses to the Irish censor track his turn from the novel to the drama. Across genres, Beckett's writing in English was shaped by the climate of post-publication censorship in Ireland, the effects of which are legible even in works that were never banned. Beckett's rejoinder to the censor was articulated using terms set out by the Irish Free State's Committee on Evil Literature, which held that censors could prohibit a text based on one ‘indecent’ passage, rather than evaluating that excerpt in the context of the work as a whole. For Beckett, the literary trope of synecdoche—that is, the rhetorical substitution of a part for the whole—became associated with the censor's mode of reading. Beckett harnesses the trope of synecdoche to impugn Irish censorship practices, a pattern evident from the direct address to the censor in Murphy to the dramaturgical evocation of self-censorship in Not I. The use of synecdoche illuminates Beckett's reckoning with his cultural inheritance as an Irish writer and indexes his shift towards a cosmopolitan literary identity.

Naval Impressment in Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-247
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Ennis
Keyword(s):  
Empty Space ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Political Unconscious ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
Extraneous Material ◽  
Work And Life

In his discussion of Joseph Conrad's fiction in The Political Unconscious Fredric Jameson writes: the sea is the empty space between the concrete places of work and life; but it is also, just as surely, itself a place of work and the very element by which an imperial capitalism draws its scattered beachheads and outposts together, through which it slowly realizes its sometimes violent, sometimes silent and corrosive, penetration of the outlying precapitalist zones of the globe.This linkage of the sea with capitalism allows Jameson to deal with Conrad's novels (especially Lord Jim and Nostromo) as, to use Jameson's own phrase, socially symbolic acts—the sea is “the privileged place of the strategy of containment” and it provides Conrad a laboratory where “human relations can be presented in all their ideal formal purity.” Jameson has identified nautical fiction's important place in any story of the novel—the confining (yet paradoxically freeing) nature of the sea (and the ship) screens out the extraneous material of the world, forcing confrontation, laying bare power relations and allowing the writer to focus on the human condition. The sea allows for only the essentials: clearly defined hierarchies, and life and death on easy terms. Jameson links Conrad with high modernism and thus with capitalism, but his positioning of the sea in relation to power and history can be, I believe, “read back” and then applied (in a necessarily nascent form) to the literary sea of the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals The International Settlement: The Fantasy of International Writing in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Jerrine Tan
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Historical Moment

Abstract I identify two general approaches to the reception of Ishiguro’s novels: World Literature critics writing on cosmopolitanism exalt what I am calling Ishiguro’s “post-Japan novels” for their consideration of universal ethical dilemmas that transcend their historical moment and place; conversely, most criticism on his “Japan novels” performs problematically culture-specific exoticizing and Orientalist readings. Widely read as a detective novel about a British detective, Christopher Banks, solving the mystery of his parents’ disappearance, When We Were Orphans is in many ways Ishiguro’s most underwhelming novel. But, set in Shanghai, it is an anomaly among Ishiguro’s “post-Japan novels.” Its lackluster reception may be explained by simply acknowledging from the start that When We Were Orphans is just not a very good detective novel at all. The refusal or discomfort around doing so, this essay argues, is because the excuse of bad genre provides (like Japaneseness does for the Japan novels) precisely the convenient veil for why the novel does not work, or is not well liked. In other words, by historicizing the novel and reading it (with)in its political and historical moment, I argue that When We Were Orphans forces an exposure of the double standard and aestheticizing reading practices that critics often bring to their readings of Ishiguro’s works.

scholarly journals Mansfield as 'Man Alone?' Katherine Mansfield's Reading Experiences in Wartime Britain and France

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perrine Gilkison ◽  
Sydney Shep
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Masculine Identity ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
The World ◽  
First Arrival ◽  
Rugged Individualism

John Mulgan's novel Man Alone (1959) has perpetuated the iconic Kiwi myth of masculine identity founded on isolation, solitude, and rugged individualism.  However, the novel is replete with descriptions of Johnson's reading practices connecting this man 'alone' to the world around him.  From his first arrival in Auckland to his departure for Spain, newspapers play a key role, linking Johnson to job opportunities and workers' rights, informing him of events beyond New Zealand, situating him in the here and now.  Reading provides moments of distraction from the stultifying routine on Stenning's farm and frames his employer's death.  And from a store of old magazines and illustrated papers, reading aloud becomes a defining act of sociability that links Johnson to the old loner Bill Crawley.  Johnson may warn his reader against spending too much time alone, but it is a solitude punctuated by print and one that, through print, defines his relationship to others and the world at large. 

scholarly journals The Produced Self: Conflicts of Depersonalization in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 259-274
Author(s):  
Jesús Blanco Hidalga
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
Social Views ◽  
Textual Strategies ◽  
Mode Of Production

American critic Fredric Jameson has referred to the modern centred subject as a consequence of the historical development of capitalism: both a product of and compensation for the processes of reification and fragmentation brought about by our mode of production. For the critic, realism and modernism played a fundamental part in the consolidation of modern individuality through the use of textual strategies such as point of view and free indirect discourse, which conjure up the literary illusion of a unified self. These are procedures deftly used by Edith Wharton to build our novel’s central character, Lily Bart. At the same time, however, this individuality is inevitably threatened by Wharton’s particular views of society, influenced by social Darwinism, and by her acute awareness of social processes of reification and commodification. This article explores the conflict between Wharton’s proposal of a unified self and the reality of depersonalization reflected by the novel. Likewise, this essay examines the strategies of containment through which the novelist seeks to assuage this contradiction and compensate for the almost unbearable loss that her social views entail for the subject.

Reflections on Literary Studies in South Africa

Matatu ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 208-227
Author(s):  
Hermann Wittenberg
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Future Challenges ◽  
Zakes Mda

AbstractZakes Mda is not only one of South Africa’s most significant post-apartheid novelists, but has worked in diverse media such as theatre, film, opera, painting and music. His prolific creativity in forms other than the novel needs to be taken into account when evaluating his writings. This article proposes an intermedial analysis of Black Diamond (2009), a novel which has largely been given unfavourable critical attention, and suggests that it needs to be considered as a mixed medial text that is shaped by a cinematic mode of narration. The novel is also re-interpreted in the light of a postcolonially inflected “surface reading,” which makes the pervasive visuality of Mda’s prose visible. Finally, it is argued that texts such as Black Diamond raise questions about the interpretive methodologies and reading practices in English literary studies, pointing to future challenges and opportunities in the discipline.

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