“In came the self-evident and luminous little mess”: Ethical Life Writing in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent i

Starting from a brief examination of Muriel Spark’s position as a Scottish novelist within the framework of her anti-essentialist, anti-authoritative aesthetics, my essay will take a seemingly abrupt, but in fact consequential turn to investigate the complex antinomies involved in her fictional representation of the lives of others. Although at home and abroad she is hailed as Scotland’s most celebrated author of the twentieth century, Spark’s writerly practice consists of regularly dismantling grand narratives or fixed, stable identities, often clashing with more localized or prescriptive views on the social and national functions of narrative. My argument, however, is that it is the very unease of her “Scottishness” that acts as one of the foundations of her literary ethics, embodied in her acute awareness of the antinomies involved in textualizing the lives of others. Spark’s shrewdly metafictional Loitering with Intent (1981) openly thematizes both the obligation, and the risks of telling one’s own and other people’s stories, performing a radical ethics of narrative alterity through its staging of the enmeshments of writing, (auto)biography and experience.

Violence, Innocence and Redemption in Irvine Welsh’s Chemical Mythos

Scottish author Irvine Welsh has crafted an internally cohesive cosmology, grounded in mapping a somewhat loosely defined “chemical generation” that helped spearhead a personal brand of anti-Thatcherite counterculture (with an especially heavy focus on the marginalized, disgruntled and boisterous youths of Edinburgh). Examining some of the writer’s most recent and lesser-known works, my essay will argue that a series of archaic mythical patterns, symbols and cosmological coordinates can be shown to guide a large number of the axioms that Welsh employs to refine his own vision of a modern, emergent mythos.

The Battle Within and the Battle Without: The Posthuman Worldview of Ken MacLeod’s The Corporation Wars Trilogy

The present essay seeks to analyze Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod’s The Corporation Wars trilogy (2016-2017) as an amalgam of politico-philosophical ideas set against the background of posthumanism. MacLeod’s far-future posthuman world-building relies on the conventional tropes of science fiction (man-machine hybrids, brain uploading, digital resurrection, and the agency of sentient machines) to engage with pressing ideologies (the master-slave dialectics, the historical perpetuation of age-old conflict between progressive and reactionary forces, the ethics of machinic consciousness). MacLeod’s novels project a postbinarist worldview where outmoded binary oppositions between life and death, the real and the virtual, the human and the machinic are constantly abolished, but which still preserves persistent ideological divisions.

The Future as a Scenario of Hospitality in Ali Smith’s There But For The

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how Ali Smith’s novel There But For The (2011) foregrounds a temporality in which the scenario of hospitality is encoded into the characters’ perception of the future, while the welcoming scenarios in which they engage are themselves marked by the awareness of futurity. To this end, I rework Levinas’s equation of the future as the Other, as well as Derrida’s notions of conditional and unconditional hospitality, of the future as the expected/unexpected event, and of “choratic space.” The subsequent analysis of the novel proves how these notions are thematized both through the characters’ inner and intersubjective discourse, and via the authorial construction of imagery and the deictics of the spaces they inhabit. As such, the characters’ conversations bear the marks of an uncertain causality springing from the welcoming scenario; attitudes towards futurity are faced with the disquieting awareness of the conflict between the expected and the unexpected event; while the choratic space acts as the possibility of an ethical reaction to the strangers’ singularity, through a linguistic reorientation which employs the contingency of the linguistic sign as a site for hospitality.

Modernism, Postmodernism and the Nature of the Times: A Conversation with Randall Stevenson

The interview offers a comprehensive, paradigmatic overview of the experience of literary modes within the broad frameworks of modernity and postmodernity. It invites reflection and rethinking of epistemic change from a major literary historian and theorist whose work in the Anglo-American context has become synonymous with the examination of temporality, historicity, and poeticality in twentieth century experimentation with form. Revisiting central concepts and aesthetic categories in literary criticism and theory, Randall Stevenson contributes a highly contemporary, ground-breaking vision of the literary act against the backdrop of the new structures of knowledge pertaining to the digital age and the post-humanist crisis.