Novels of Martin Amis: A Review of the Critical Reception

Short article – no abstract.

Phenomenological Criminology

Phenomenological knowledge is knowledge of what a particular lived experience is like. This is sometimes abbreviated as knowledge-what (something is like) and contrasted with both knowledge-that (such and such is so) and knowledge-how (to perform some act). The phenomenological value of an exemplary narrative is the extent to which the narrative representation provides knowledge of the lived experience of perpetrating crime or social harm. This chapter demonstrates that narrative fictions can be valuable to criminology in this way using two case studies: Martin Amis’ (2014) novel, The Zone of Interest, which provides phenomenological knowledge of collaboration in the National Socialist genocide; and Tom King and Mitch Gerads’ (2018) graphic novel, The Sheriff of Baghdad, which provides phenomenological knowledge of collaboration in the Coaluition Forces occupation of Iraq.

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes (b. 1946) is an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist who received considerable praise in 1984 with the publication of Flaubert’s Parrot, a book that, together with A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), defies categorization. Barnes belongs to a generation of British writers (including Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Graham Swift) who came to prominence in the 1980s at a time when suspicion toward the main tenets of realism, foundational grand narratives‚ and the figure of the stable and reliable narrator led many authors to disrupt and subvert conventional modes, favor historiographical metafiction and postmodernist skepticism‚ and experiment with narrative strategies. Thus, a number of scholars have examined Barnes’s work through the prism of postmodernism on the grounds of the metafictional dimension of some of his books, his transgression of realist strategies and reliance on various forms of intertextuality, and his mistrust of truth claims and fondness for fragmentation, polyphony‚ and generic hybridity. Several of his books (fictional and nonfictional) have been analyzed for the way in which they challenge the borders that separate existing genres, texts, arts‚ and languages and, thereby, oscillate among novel, essay, biography‚ and meditation. However‚ the restrictive label of postmodernism can apply to only part of Barnes’s production‚ as other novels published throughout his career are inscribed within a more conventional and realistic framework—in particular, such early books as Metroland (1980), Before She Met Me (1981), and Staring at the Sun (1986)—and his most recent production is marked by a less ironic and subversive mood and a more personal, subdued‚ and melancholy tone, for example in The Sense of an Ending (2011), which won the Man Booker Prize; The Noise of Time (2016); and The Only Story (2018). Barnes has also been praised for his art as an essayist and a short-story writer. Drawing from a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, scholars have examined such recurrent themes and concerns in Barnes’s work as memory, art, love, longing, death, or Englishness. They have also probed his self-reflexive questioning relating to the evasiveness of truth, the irretrievability of the past, the construction of national identity‚ and the relationship between fact and fiction.

Modernity, Mass Culture, and Self-Delusion in Nabokov’s Lolita and Martin Amis’ Money

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Martin Amis’ Money (1984) discuss the disadvantages of mass media. Amis uses John Self to reflect the disintegration of the self in the modern, Capitalist society of England in 1980s. Self represents the failure of the postmodern world by portraying a dystopian society. Amis and Nabokov tackle subjects pertaining to money, incest, delusion, and disappointment. Lights are shed on the moral aspect of the characters. The modernity of Amis’ fiction lies in its double deception of its characters; there is the American motif and a character who is not able to resist the magic of such motif. It is about consumerism or how aspects of post modernity and the consumer culture are portrayed. This paper aims to show the impact of mass media on the characters who are self-deluded and indulged in loving money, advertisements, and sex. It also aims at showing duality and corruption in both texts, John Self is bankrupt and wants to commit suicide. Humbert cheats many and is imprisoned and Lolita dies. Lolita becomes the victim of incest. It is an attempt to urge human beings to refuse cultural divisions and encourage human spirituality instead of Materialistic point of view.