“The Quickening Virtue”: Reiterating the Work of the Literary Text

This article pursues the reiteration of reading as a practice that circumscribes the work of the literary text. In doing so, it responds to particular assertions made in Kate Highman’s “Close(d) Reading and the ‘Potential Space’ of the Literature Classroom.” More pertinently, though, it seeks to reposition the value of reading as a vital attribute in engaging with the humanities and emphasizes that analyzing and the interpreting of the text is the practice indisputably central to the humanistic endeavor. The discussion reiterates that any ways in and through the text are available only by reading, making it necessary to encourage and inculcate it as a central objective so that the work of the text, in accordance with Attridge’s qualification of it, remains productive. Finally, it argues that situating this critical practice as a deliberate objective within the teaching of literature must be reprioritized as a matter of urgency.

Violence, Memory, and History: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Kazuo Ishiguro has suggested that his work of medieval fantasy, The Buried Giant (2015), draws on a “quasi-historical” King Arthur, in contrast to the Arthur of legend. This article reads Ishiguro’s novel against the medieval work that codified the notion of an historical King Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1139). Geoffrey’s History offered a largely fictive account of the British past that became the most successful historiographical phenomenon of the English Middle Ages. The Buried Giant offers an interrogation of memory that calls such “useful” constructions of history into question. The novel deploys material deriving from Geoffrey’s work while laying bear its methodology; the two texts speak to each other in ways sometimes complementary, sometimes deconstructive. That Ishiguro’s critique can be applied to Geoffrey’s History points to recurrent strategies of history-making, past and present, whereby violence serves as a mechanism for the creation of historical form.

Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature: Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines

Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force.

Reading Postcolonial Animals with the Animist Code: A Critique of “New” Materialist Animal Studies

This article looks at the challenges that animist materialism offers to reading strategies in new materialist animal studies scholarship. Where Rosi Braidotti’s vitalist materialism calls for a neoliteral, anti-metaphorical mode of relating to animals, Harry Garuba identifies metaphor as a primary feature of animist materialist practice in African material culture. After critiquing Rosi Braidotti’s dismissal of the “old” metaphorical ways of relating to animals, the article offers a reading of animals and the animist code in two southern African novels, Alex La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird (1979) and Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2000), to consider the potential of animist codings of animals for resisting colonial necropolitics. Animist materialism offers the potential to raise animals and humans into ethical status by affirming the very knowledges and worldviews that Cartesian, colonial humanism wrote off as nonsense and as a marker of inhumanity.

A Perpetuity of Lesser Emptiness: The Social Space of the Postcolonial Small Town and Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Naukar kī kamīz

The article provides an analysis of the spatial configuration of the Hindi novel Naukar kī kamīz by Vinod Kumar Shukla (translated into English as The Servant’s Shirt). In highlighting the argumentative and structural similarities between the content of the novel and various concepts of social space and literary spatiality developed by Catherine Régulier, Henri Lefebrve, Edward Soja, Mikhail Bakhtin, and others, the article proposes to read the novel not only as a rare example of a detailed engagement with the social space of a postcolonial small town, but also as a text that provides a useful method and indeed a theory for the analysis of such a small town and its literary representation.