scholarly journals Competing Fantasies and Alternative Realities: Salman Rushdie's The Golden House

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
DOLORES RESANO
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
Lauren Berlant

This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new “American reality.” Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has “left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe,” a turn to fantasy that precedes the final irruption of a wealthy vulgarian who calls himself the Joker, and who subverts any previous sense of identity and of what is “real.” Drawing from the notion of national fantasy as argued by Lauren Berlant (1991), Jacqueline Rose (1996), and Donald Pease (2009), the article suggests that Rushdie's novel performs and invites a rare self-examination in the context of early literary responses to the rise of Trumpism.

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

scholarly journals Students' Use of Languaging in Rewriting Events from The Things They Carried

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Beach
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
High School Students ◽  
The Novel ◽  
School Students ◽  
Shared Intentionality ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Social Actions

This article describes high school students’ responses to events in the novel, The Things They Carried, leading to their collaborative rewriting to create their own narrative versions of these events. It draws on “enactivist” theory of languaging, an approach to language that focuses on its use as social actions to enact and build relationships with others (Cowley, 2011; Linell, 2009). The focus is on “in-between” meanings constituted by “shared intentionality” (Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2012) in readers’ transactions with authors’ portrayals of events in texts as well as in responding to uses of languaging in characters’ interactions. Analysis of four students’ rewriting events from the novel indicated that they drew on their responses to the novel to portray tensions in their characters’ interactions as well as their own experiences of coping with these tensions. Students also benefitted from collaboratively creating their narratives through sharing their different perspectives on events in the texts, suggesting the value of using collaborative rewriting activities to enhance students’ literary responses and awareness of how languaging functions to enact relationships.

Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

2019 ◽  
pp. 241-266
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Ladyga
Keyword(s):  
Book Industry ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ideological Critique ◽  
Lauren Berlant

David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011) employs the trope of acedia as the mode of its literary subjectivity. The analysis in this chapter focuses on Wallace’s detailed study of psychosomatic and bodily disorders by means of which his characters (IRS officers) manifest their resistance to their Bartlebesque lives. Given the consistency with which the bodies of the novel’s characters are exposed to hypertension, both from without and from within, it is clear that the object of The Pale King’s ideological critique is not capitalism in general, but its intervention into our biological life. In this way, the haptic serves as a poetic means in Wallace’s critique of biopower, the extent of whose intrusion into the intimate sphere of his characters’ lives is laid bare in the disorderly ways their bodies’ muscular, digestive and neurological systems respond to external and internalized discipline. The result of this poetic strategy is that the novel creates a series of micro events of what Lauren Berlant calls “self-interruption” which guard the agency of the subject and the author against interpellative calls of the book industry for self-exploitation and productivity

FRENCH CROSSINGS: I. TALES OF TWO CITIES

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Success Story ◽  
The Social ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Personal Attitudes

ABSTRACTUnder the general title, ‘French Crossings’, the presidential addresses over the next four years will explore intersections and relationships between cultures, periods, disciplines, approaches, historiographies and problems, all within the general field of early modern and modern French history. ‘Tales of Two Cities’ takes as its approach both comparative history andl'histoire croisée. It compares and contrasts the very differing cultural impact on each side of the Channel of one of the most influential British novels about Franco-British political culture, namely, Charles Dickens'sA Tale of Two Cities(1859). The novel has been conventionally hailed in England, especially from the end of the nineteenth century, as a parable unfavourably contrasting France's revolutionary tradition with the allegedly more humane political evolutionism of England. In France, the novel has been largely ignored or else viewed as a Burkean rant. Yet Dickens's personal attitudes towards France and in particular Paris suggests a more ambiguous and complicated history. For Dickens, modern Paris, as regenerated under Haussmann, was a brilliant success story against which he contrasted both Paris in the 1790s and the social and political circumstances he claimed to detect within English metropolitan culture in the recent past and present. Dickens views the radical and disinherited workers’ suburb of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine less, it is suggested, as quintessentially French than as quintessentially plebeian, and the prospect of a slide into revolutionary politics as a lurking threat within England as well as France.

scholarly journals IL CONFLITTO TRA INDIVIDUO E SISTEMA: VERSO LA COSTRUZIONE DELLA NUOVA IDENTITÀ CULTURALE NEL ROMANZO „I GRANDI OCCHI DEL MARE” DI LEONARD GUACI

2017 ◽  
pp. 177-193
Author(s):  
Karol Karp
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Italian Culture ◽  
Sense Of Identity

The aim of the article is to analyse the theme of cultural identity in the novel „I grandi occhi del mare” by Leonard Guaci. Starting from Gioia di Cristofaro Longo’s theoretical assumptions concerning the connection between identity and culture, we stress the influence of Italian culture on the sense of identity felt by the characters who represent Albanians living in the period of Enver Hoxha’s communist dictatorship. The analysis also draws on the theories of scholars such us Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Dominique Chancé, Giovanni Marchetti, Nora Moll.  

Uneven Temporalities of Modernity: The Portrayal of Modernisation in E. M. Forster’s Howards End and Füruzan’s 47'liler

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Burcu Alkan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Societal Transformation ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Howards End ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
Similarities And Differences

Arguably a cultural consequence of the extensive societal transformation that is modernisation, the novel is a literary form that bears witness to, embodies and reveals its extent. Each literary tradition has its own version of the modern novel that seeks to make sense of the complexities of such an immense force. This paper compares two novels, E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Füruzan’s 47’liler (1974, Generation of ’47), in order to explore some of the similarities and differences between the English and Turkish literary responses to modernisation. The incentive for such an uncommon comparison comes from the uneven temporalities of the modernisation process in varying geographies that accentuate unique probabilities alongside general patterns. By choosing two temporally disparate novels from cultures that have differing experiences with modernity, it aims to challenge conventional approaches and encourage alternative perspectives in both literary traditions.

scholarly journals A Dark, Inner Life and a Society in Crisis: Nina Bouraoui’s Standard

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Lisa Marchi
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
Critical Questioning ◽  
Lauren Berlant

Situating close readings of Nina Bouraoui’s latest novel Standard (2014) within the context of a critique of neoliberalism and of the ongoing geopolitical uprisings in the Arab world, this essay presents the novel as a fine literary and affective exploration of personal concerns relating to sex, gender, and desire as well as a sociohistorical chronicle detailing how representations of personal and intimate relations may illuminate wider social ills together with the mechanism of contemporary political life. Drawing on critical work on affect by Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, and Judith/Jack Halberstam, this article argues that through its focus on affect, the text contributes to the unveiling and critical questioning of the biopolitical maneuvers that dispose life to precarity and of the ensuing desire for freedom, dignity, and rebellion.

scholarly journals Hungry Unlike the Wolf: Ecology, Posthumanism, Narratology in Fred Vargas’s Seeking Whom He May Devour

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Parham
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Ecological Complexity ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
Nonhuman Species

   This paper examines posthumanism as a philosophical position equipped to inform ecocriticism and the potential of popular fiction to articulate ecological complexity. Posthumanism will be reappraised as a dialectical model that decentres the human in relation to ‘evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates’ (Wolfe 2010: xvi) while nevertheless retaining a sense of the integrity of, and boundaries between, human and nonhuman species or phenomena. It will be argued that a novelistic emphasis on human being, agency, and action, coupled with devices of genre, plot, and narrative – are consistent with the process of human self-examination engendered by posthumanism. The essay will, thereafter, illustrate and examine this approach through the French crime writer Fred Vargas’s1999 novel Seeking Whom He May Devour. Identifying two human protagonists – the Canadian conservationist Johnstone and his girlfriend Camille – an initial decentring of the human subject will be examined in relation to two equivalent, nonhuman protagonists, the French Alps and the wolf. Utilising newspaper interviews that highlight Vargas’s own posthumanist perspective (grounded in her profession as an archaeologist), I will examine a) how the novel explores appropriate relationships between human and nonhuman animals; b) how Vargas utilises both the generic features of the crime novel – e.g. the resolution of a ‘crime’ – and the subtle narrative manipulations of character focalisation to construct (via the preferred ‘point of view’ offered by Camille) a posthumanist position on human/animal relations which Vargas explicitly opposes to the inhumanism represented by Johnstone.   Resumen             Este artículo examina el posthumanismo como una posición filosófica dotada para contribuir con la ecocrítica y el potencial de la ficción popular para articular la complejidad ecológica. El posthumanismo será revaluado como un modelo dialéctico que descentra al ser humano en relación con “las coordinadas evolutivas, ecológicas o tecnológicas”  (Wolfe, Posthumanism xvi), mientras que aún así retiene un sentido de la integridad de, y de las fronteras entre, las especies o fenómenos humanos y no-humanos. Se argumentará que un énfasis novelístico en el ser humano, la agencia y la acción, junto con los recursos del género, argumento y narración, son consistentes con el proceso del auto-examen engendrado por el posthumanismo.         Después, este ensayo ilustratá y examinará este enfoque a través de la novela Seeking Whom He May Devour (1999), del escritor francés de novela policíaca Fred Vargas. Identificando a los dos protagonistas humanos, el conservacionista canadiense Johnstone y su novia Camille, el de-centramiento inicial del sujeto humano será examinado en relación a los dos protagonistas no-humanos equivalentes: los Alpes franceses y el lobo. Usando entrevistas en periódicos que destacan las perspectiva posthumanista de Vargas (basada en su profesión como arqueólogo), examinaré: a) cómo la novela explora las relaciones apropiadas entre animales humanos y no-humanos; b) cómo Vargas utiliza tanto las características genéricas de la novela policíaca (e.g. la resolución de un crimen) y las sutiles manipulaciones narrativas en la focalización de los personajes para construir (a través del favorecido “punto de vista” que ofrece Camille) una posición posthumanista en las relaciones humanas/animales que Vargas explícitamente opone al inhumanismo que Johnstone representa.

scholarly journals Diaspora and Culture: A Study of Indian Immigration and Integumentary Anxiety in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2S12) ◽  
pp. 87-91
Keyword(s):  
Second Generation ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian Diaspora ◽  
The People ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
Foreign Land ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
First And Second Generation ◽  
Indian Immigration

This research aims at capturing the sense of identity, loneliness and untold anxiety among the immigrants from the writing of one of the prominent authors writing in English from Indian subcontinent. The Namesake, a well-knit novel by the author Jhumpa Lahiri. The novel “The Namesake” depicts it the best kind of reference to classify Diaspora as the word ‘Diaspora’ as well as its prime role in this present era, the first and second generation who are struggling for identity, loneliness and the most prominent one is integumentry anxiety among them. It is that untold anxiety which the people can’t disclose to anyone. It remains in the very heart of them untold and unexpressed. In fact Jhumpa Lahiri the novelist is child of Indian immigrates and she is also migrated from her birthplace England to America. The effect of both made her Diaspora writer and a migrant one. She mirrored the life of the Indian Diaspora, who are struggling for identity and the integumentary anxiety. They construct unhomely home in the foreign land.

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