LAUREEN MYRACLE'S INTERNET GIRLS AND CENSORSHIP: DIGITAL COMMUNICATION AS A CHALLENGE TO IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL THROUGH LANGUAGE AND AS A FIELD FOR FACING GENDER ROLES

Taking L. Myracle’s Internet Girls novel series as a starting point, this article tries to investigate and hopefully unveil the reasons behind the censorship imposed on the series by the “gatekeepers of canonicity and morality.” The article is a literature review and semi-content analysis. After a brief discussion about the term Young Adult literature and the subversion of the argumentut forws pard as a justification of the banning of the books, we examine the relationship between the epistolary novelistic form and the female voice. Finally, we focus on the most distinctive feature of the novels: the exclusive use of online chatting to advance the narrative. The role of digital communication in Y.A. literature and the youth’s idiomatic language on the net are also discussed. Our main argument is that the root causes triggering the adult censors’ distress and challenging their standards are not the controversial sexuality and attitudes of the characters. Rather, it is their language and writing in internet chatting. Digital communication is imbued with webspeak. It becomes a field of intergenerational tension, a vehicle of undermining pedagogical censorship. This type of communication evades the absolute control of some adults not savvy in webspeak. A number of these individuals -possibly a social group that is over-represented in the teaching and school librarian professions- perceive digital communication as a threat to traditional language codes. Their reaction to the Internet Girls concerns not only the content of the books but –first and foremost– the style and the code these books are written. What is more, the girls’ “digital” conversations allow for free self- expression. Prescribed boundaries of politically correct female attitude are transgressed leading to harsher adult public outcry.

Felipe Delgado, otro de los Robinsones

Robinson Crusoe, the extraordinary ship-wrecked protagonist of Defoe’s novel, is actually a modern transfiguration of the old myth of the “savage man,” a myth that this article revisits. Robinson is brought by Defoe into a savage existence because the author intends to demonstrate that it is possible to defeat savagery in one’s own land, turning Robinson into the virtuous and modern homo economicus. But there are other Robinsons that challenge the original: that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the urban Robinson, conceived in novelistic form by Antonio Muñoz Molina. Both serve as models for my reading of Felipe Delgado as a novel that exemplifies the marginal Robinson. As happens to some of the characters in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novels, the Bolivian poet and novelist Jaime Saenz creates an urban, marginalized and eccentric Robinson that, unlike the previous mentioned, without a rational goal motivating him, secretly celebrates his incurable shipwrecks. Felipe is the Robinson born out of the lucid necessity of alcohol. Clairvoyant and repentant of his future, he is born for the night, a space and time that permits him to delve into the heart of the memory of his city.

Walter Scott’s Long-Distance Fiction

Innovations in novelistic form that appear at the end of the Napoleonic Wars do so in the context of a national discussion about colonial emigration, and an uprooting and dispersing of British people on a profound scale, that provoked a reimagining of global space. Poverty, unemployment, and security, both domestically and in the colonies, were concerns about which emigration was proposed as a possible solution. This helps to explain two influential formal innovations made by Walter Scott in Guy Mannering (1815). The first is the invention of a new geographical imaginary. The novel is distinctive for its international backstory that takes place in India outside the main temporal and geographical frames of the novel, as well as a mode of calibrating distance in relation to details of size and scale, and through manipulating levels of readerly attention. The second innovation is its eccentric character, the gypsy, Meg Merrilies, who specifically derives from these spatial concerns. Her character is especially topical as it draws on contemporary beliefs about gypsies, a displaced people thought to have originated in India, but who are also identified with Scottish peasants displaced during the Highland Clearances, and other indigenous displaced people. Through the character of Meg, the novel examines contemporary questions about property, place, and belonging, as well as race and indigeneity. Meg’s persistence in print culture through the next several decades, reimagined in theatrical renditions, poems, print commodities, and travel writings, turns her into a celebrity character, and constituent element of a migratory British culture.

Wastepaper Modernism

At the same time that writers were becoming infatuated with new technologies like the cinema and the radio, they were also being haunted by their own pages. From Henry James’s fascination with burnt manuscripts to destroyed books in the fiction of the Blitz, from junk mail in the work of Elizabeth Bowen to bureaucratic paperwork in Vladimir Nabokov, modern fiction is littered with images of tattered and useless paper that reveal an increasingly uneasy relationship between literature and its own materials over the course of the twentieth century. Wastepaper Modernism argues that these images are vital to our understanding of modernism, disclosing an anxiety about textual matter that lurks behind the desire for radically different modes of communication. Having its roots in the late nineteenth century, but finding its fullest constellation in the wake of the high modernist experimentation with novelistic form, “wastepaper modernism” arises when fiction imagines its own processes of transmission and representation breaking down. When the descriptive capabilities of the novel exhaust themselves, the wastepaper modernists picture instead the physical decay of the book’s own primary matter. Bringing together book history and media theory with detailed close reading, Wastepaper Modernism reveals modernist literature’s dark sense of itself as a ruin in the making.

The Shabaḥ of Modernity: World-Systems, the Petro-Imperium, and the Indigenous Trace

This chapter provides a new reading of Abdelrahman Munif’s five-volume epic of Gulf petro-modernity, Cities of Salt, in the context of the world literature debate. Considering how this novel has been framed for international audiences since its translation into English, I start with John Updike’s response to Munif as “insufficiently Westernized” to have produced a novel. This response, I argue, is symptomatic of a world literature that conceives of “the literary” only according to “Western” norms and models. I then offer a corrective based on what I show to be Munif’s spectral characterization of Bedouin resistance leader Miteb al-Hathal. A “shabaḥ” (specter), this figure hovers at the interstices of modern oil state that had overwritten or incorporated his world, and, unassimilable, haunts it – indeed, the novel – with the revolutionary memory of its own abuses. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, I trace Munif’s spectral inf(l)ection of novelistic form through a discussion of questions of indigeneity; Bedouin oral poetic tradition; and the dialectics of Gulf “petro-modernity” in relation to Bedouin history, politics, and culture. In sum, this chapter articulates the linkage between world literature, Orientalism, modernity, the novel, and spectrality at the heart of this book.

‘The End is No Longer Hidden’: News, Fate and the Sensation Novel

Victorian commentators saw the sensation novel--a sub-genre known for fast-paced plots drawn from real life--as symptomatic of the newspaper’s growing influence on the reading public. In a famous 1860 review, H. L. Mansel conflated this new novelistic form—which he called ‘The Newspaper Novel’--with crime news. This chapter argues, however, that the sensation novel makes the newspaper into a source of superstition and exclusion, one that problematises similar exclusions practiced by Dickens and Trollope. By experimenting with newspaper time and form, as well as the temporal structure of narrative, these sensation novels highlight characters whose experience of time and community is not presentist, as Anderson suggests, but rather more akin to dynastic time and a sense of history beyond the nation. Throughout Wilkie Collins’s and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novels, the newspaper becomes a part of the mysterious, the uncanny, and ‘atmospheric menace’ for which the sensation novel is so famous. Rather than drawing upon newspapers for a sense of realism, as critics have argued, these novels make their newspapers integral to their providential plots.

The novel and the myth of the epic: Balestrini, Lukács, and the cathartic experience

In this article, I address the critical reception of Nanni Balestrini's narrative work, focusing in particular on the novel Vogliamo tutto (1971). I compare the interpretative model, which sees this text as overcoming the novelistic form and moving toward the epic, with a similar model in György Lukács' foundational text The Theory of the Novel (1916), which sets up an opposition between the novel, understood as an expression of the irrelevance of private existence in our society, and the idea of a “rebirth” of the epic as a redemptive collective dimension. In order to investigate the textual mechanisms that generate a reading experience that has been defined resorting to the cliché of the epic, I draw on Lukács' later Aesthetics (1962). In this work, he offers a response to the impasses of his earlier thought by using the concept of catharsis, which explains the effects of a work of art on the reader/viewer through the pathetic energy generated by the dissolution of the subjective perspective. Through a close reading of key passages from Vogliamo tutto, I show how the rhetorical structure of the text is grounded in a repeated dissolution of the narrative point of view (the narrator's voice) in the collective voice of the workers. I argue that the “pathetic intensity” produced by this loss of subjectivity inscribes the communal existence of the political struggles of the time in the immediacy of the reading experience.

Al-Shidyaq’s Decadent Carnival

This chapter shows how al-Shidyaq’s novel, Al-Saq ‘ala al-Saq (Leg Over Leg), produces a radical critique of the supposed philological decadence of the Arabic language. The text does this through a carnivalization of Arabic, where the author generates the kind of ambivalence that is constitutive of the category of grotesque realism in Bakhtin’s account of the carnivalesque. By articulating the subaltern status of Arabs under Ottoman rule in a language marked by dynamism, excess, and proliferation, al-Shidyaq is able to make powerlessness and disease signify awakening and renaissance. The novel challenges the Eurocentric origins of the novelistic form while simultaneously disproving, in raucous fashion, both the Orientalist thesis of the decadence of Semitic languages and cultures and the self-diagnosis of the Arab nahda that sought to cleanse Arabic of tradition to modernize it.

The Philosophy of Furniture, or Light in August and the Material Unconscious of Mississippi Modernity

Chapter 2 turns from agriculture to silviculture to trace the unexpectedly comprehensive way in which the modernization of the timber and lumber industries in the US South leaves its mark on Faulkner’s 1932 novel Light in August. The modern economy of wood in all its phases, from timber extraction to lumber manufacture to the production, distribution, circulation, and even the occasional destruction of furniture, underpins, and at key moments surfaces to undercut, Faulkner’s anatomy of Jim Crow’s psychological and social orders. The turbulent forces of this extractive economy shadow the novel’s principal figures at every step, setting them in motion, by turns shaping and upsetting their itineraries—and haunting novelistic form and technique.

The Rainmaker’s Mistake

This paper explores the ways in which Erna Brodber’s The Rainmaker’s Mistake reshapes the genre of the historical novel to pose philosophical questions of being, and to interrogate the concept of freedom within the matrix of Caribbean emancipatory discourse. This chosen novelistic form examines history as that of human consciousness as well as expands the conception of time as a spiritual category. Brodber’s work poses and responds to philosophical questions regarding black ontology and existence, offering through the intricate and complex plot structure and phenomenological exploration that she deploys in the historical narratives an in-depth treatment of themes of redemption and liberation of the human.