(2021). Chasing David Copperfield’s Memory of a Stained Glass Window: Or, Meditations on the Postsecular and Postcritical. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 32, “Religion, Criticism, and the Postcritical”, pp. 1-9.

(2021). Natural Theology and the Revelation of Little Dorrit. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 32, “Religion, Criticism, and the Postcritical”, pp. 10-23.

(2021). Finding Hope in the “Radical Ordinary”: Charles Dickens’s Perspectives on Christianity in Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 32, “Religion, Criticism, and the Postcritical”, pp. 24-40.

(2021). Children of the Culture Wars: Secularism, Aesthetics, and Judgments of Value in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 32, “Religion, Criticism, and the Postcritical”, pp. 41-58.

(2021). The Trouble with Talking to God: Devotional Address in Jorie Graham’s Prayer Poetry. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 32, “Religion, Criticism, and the Postcritical”, pp. 59-77.

(2020). “Food Becomes a Measured Thing”: Family, Food, and Violence in Latina Memoir. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 279-296.

(2020). Archives, Asylums, and Remembering Landscapes in Barry’s The Secret Scripture. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 297-312.

(2020). Jennifer Egan’s Digital Archive: A Visit from the Goon Squad, Humanism, and the Digital Experience. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 313-327.

(2020). Fanny’s Place in the Family: Useful Service and the Social Order in Mansfield Park. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 328-344.

In September 2018, the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, the largest natural history museum in Latin America, with an archive of more than 20 million items, burned down. The Argentinean author Pola Oloixarac, one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-language Novelists of 2010, posted a picture of the museum in flames on her Instagram page. Next to it, she invented a story about the burning of the museum

In a time of instant archiving and ongoing planetary collapse, literature’s engagement with the archive no longer automatically has the political purchase it had as late as the end of the twentieth century. If the first half of this double special issue foregrounded how contemporary literature is coming to grips with this new archival landscape, this second half sees it attempt to reimagine political

We first encounter Georges Danton – one of the three main characters in Hilary Mantel’s 1992 novel A Place of Greater Safety – as a young boy, shortly after he has been gored by a bull. On the one hand this can be read as a straightforward act of characterization: Danton’s injurious childhood becomes formative for his revolutionary future. Yet, the description of Danton’s childhood injury is also crucial

Can the traces of one’s life be exhaustively registered, archived, and accumulated? Total Recall is the title of a 2009 best-selling nonfiction book that believes this is now the case. Written by Gordon Bell, a hi-tech leader, and Jim Gemmell, a senior researcher at Microsoft, the book portrays a world where memory is fully digitalized, and where e-memories, as they term the recording of data and impressions

Memory is typically understood as an essentially psychological process, tied to humans, their cognition, and their bodies. In a more metaphorical sense, memory is also conceived as a social and col...

The citation of found text and the incorporation of archival materials into poetry have been characteristic of some of the more innovative poetics in English since at least the publication of The Wasteland in 1922. The turn to found text in modernist poetics is comparable with the turn to objet trouvé in visual art from the same period, perhaps most famously represented by Marcel Duchamp’s presentation

Despite a strong pedigree of textual scholarship in literary studies, the study of contemporary literature often eschews such methods on the grounds that there is an insufficient archive to fully comprehend the production of just-published work. In this article I argue for a turn to textual scholarship in the field of contemporary literary studies through the comparison of geographically diverse publications

In recent years, critics and novelists alike have questioned literature’s potential to represent, register, and challenge environmental disaster. Perhaps the most-discussed interventions into this debate are Amitav Ghosh’s lectures on literature and climate change, published as The Great Derangement in 2016, in which Ghosh posits that contemporary novels are failing to come to terms with the “unthinkable”

Archiving has become an increasingly ubiquitous part of everyday life. Every e-mail we receive is instantaneously stored in the cloud, and every Google search we begin is autocompleted by an algorithm that draws on the archive of our past searches, clicks, messages, and purchases. The archive, in other words, not only stores the present even as it unfolds, it also actively produces the present and

With regard to art and the Anthropocene, literary critics have extensively discussed fiction, but theater, in its evanescence, offers a unique opportunity to think through the pressures and challenges of the Anthropocene as well. Very little attention has been paid to the strategies used within contemporary theater to tackle the challenges the Anthropocene poses to the human imagination, even though

In the afterword to the 1989 reissue of The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith writes of the overwhelmingly positive responses she had received from readers since the novel’s initial publication in 1952: “Many of the letters that came to me carried such messages as ‘Yours is the first book like this with a happy ending! We don’t all commit suicide and lots of us are doing fine’” (311). This reaction

At the turn of the 20th century, Franz Kafka’s literary productions provide a keen illustration of unraveling times, lives, and identities in the face of a hostile world full of riddles, uncertaint...

When Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2013) appeared fourteen years after Helen Fielding’s second Bridget Jones novel, even Fielding’s most loyal readers likely had mixed feelings: excitement to recover a beloved character and her engaging comic voice tempered by trepidation that the recovery would be incomplete, that this third novel would not meet expectations created by Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996)

In a 1937 letter to his friend Axel Kaun Samuel Beckett vents his frustration with language. He claims that “more and more language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it” (Beckett, “German Letter” 171). In this context, language is at best a disturbance, a barrier between the speaker and thing (or nothing). In this same letter

The eco-apocalyptic novel is arguably one of the most popular contemporary genres, evidenced by the quantity of literary publications preoccupied with climate change and the viability of species and planetary survival in the age of the Anthropocene (LeMenager 221–22). Literary critic James Berger observes that apocalypse primarily speaks to fears concerning human survival, typically represented by

The prevalence of the pastoral tradition in modern Irish poetry may be among the most enduring influences of the Irish Revival. W. B. Yeats, a spectre of influence as polarizing as he is inescapable, continuously championed the peasant and peasant life over the budding early twentieth century Irish petit bourgeoisie, asserting in a valedictory poem “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” that “John Synge

In 2009, Levi’s Jeans launched the “Go Forth” campaign, a series of commercials and print advertisements drawing on the poetry of Walt Whitman. As Wieden + Kennedy, the marketing firm that designed the campaign explains, “The campaign is inspired by the passion Walt Whitman felt for the potential of America and promise of the future. Films were created to demonstrate Levi’s awareness and relevance

In the second half of this special double issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, we continue to explore the forms and effects of violent feeling in contemporary literature, film, and culture. Taken together, the essays in this issue help us to connect violence and feeling through the vectors of racial identity, spatial politics, trauma, neoliberalism, and embodiment. Working at a number of

Two examples index a century-long obsession with an uncanny aesthetics of respiration in modern and contemporary art. In Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s collection Contes cruels (1883), there is a satire called “L’Appareil pour l’analyze chimique de dernier soupir” (“The Apparatus for Chemical Analysis of the Last Breath”). The narrator of the satire promotes an apparatus that can alleviate the pain of bereavement

In the 1956 melodrama Written on the Wind, director Douglas Sirk introduces the spectator to a Texan oil family, the Hadleys, matched in their wealth only by their dysfunction. Opening on a sports car speeding through dark, empty roads against a skyline dominated by oil wells and derricks, one by one we meet the main characters as they react to the arrival of Kyle Hadley, the drunk driver of the car

In the climactic hurricane scene in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrator depicts southern black migrant workers waiting in silence for the attack of the storm: “The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He

In the spring of 2006, one of my lovers wanted to experience what it would be like to cross-dress in public. Having been assigned female at birth (AFAB) and having spent the majority of her life subscribing to a hyper-feminine expression and embodiment, her endeavor was to understand, for at least a moment, the affective aspects of passing as a man. Upon her transformation, she decided to go out to

Contemporary film-making is faced with a challenge: as news of violence, mass murder, and criminal horror constantly flood an ever-increasing number of screens worldwide – from cinema to television to cell phones – film violence risks being labelled irrelevant. Olivier Assayas and Yorgos Lanthimos respond to this challenge not by depicting ultraviolence in their films, as other contemporary film-makers

After the cascade of allegations of sexual assault made against Harvey Weinstein, Quentin Tarantino’s longtime producer, what can one say about Tarantino or the violence of his films? According to Uma Thurman, star of his reputation-making Pulp Fiction (1994), Tarantino learned that Weinstein tried to sexually assault her prior to shooting Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003); Thurman has indicated that this may

Yet it is this entirely a-referential, a-phenomenal, a-pathetic formalism that will win out in the battle among affects and find access to the moral world of practical reason, practical law, and rational politics. [...] Theoreticians of literature who fear they may have deserted or betrayed the world by being too formalistic are worrying about the wrong thing: in the spirit of Kant’s third Critique

The monster is a ubiquitous figure in transgender rhetorics. Mary Shelley’s nameless creature, who has circulated under the name of his scientistcreator ‘Frankenstein’ since the 1830s, is often the specific trope used to cast transgender people as “monstrous, crazy, or less than human” (Rubin 12). Shelley’s nameless creature has been used to denounce transgender people as “synthetic products” of a

This special issue began as a panel at the 2016 convention of theModern Language Association. A conversation that began as an early morning conference presentation feels present in ways we could not anticipate at the time. Between then and now, theUnited States has witnessed the ascendance of right-wing populist leaders both at home and abroad, a series of high-profile domestic terror attacks rooted

In a restaurant scene during the 2008 film In Bruges, after Ray punches a woman in the face who is defending her date, whom he has also punched, he deflects: “I would never hit a woman! I’d hit a woman who was trying to hit me with a bottle!” (33). The second statement immediately undercuts the first, retracting Ray’s stated values and calling attention to Ray’s idea of himself as the kind of man who

Recent revelations of sexual abuse in Hollywood have brought attention to the way in which sexual exploitation has been materially embedded as an instrumental function in the production of movies and, by extension, American culture. While feminism has amply focused on the representation of women as contributing to their socialization as objects of male desire, the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have

Francis B. Nyamnjoh is a Cameroonian author of scholarly texts as well as works of fiction. His major scholarly works include: Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (2005), Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006), “C’est l’homme qui fait l’homme”: Cul-de-Sac Ubuntu-ism in Côte d’Ivoire (2015); Rhodes Must Fall: Nibbling at Resilient

In a letter written in 1930 to Herbert Weinstock, an editor whose favorable review of The Bridge appeared in an issue of the Milwaukee-based Journal, Hart Crane briefly discusses the religious implications of his poetry. Acknowledging Weinstock’s accurate sense of his “objectives in writing,” “particular symbolism,” and “intentional,” occasionally achieved “condensation and ‘density’ of structure,”

Herman Melville’s 1849 novel Redburn: His First Voyage offers fertile ground for developing a pleasure-oriented reading practice drawn from queer theory because several of its strangest linguistic events are both perceptibly erotic and not about human subjectivity (nor even the human bodies subjectivity inhabits) at all. The novel follows Wellingborough Redburn on his “first voyage” from a sheltered

As with many historical novels, one of the first questions that Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy raises concerns the relationship between two historical periods: the time in which the novel takes place and the time in which it was written. A Mercy tells the story of Florens, a young woman born into slavery in the last decades of the seventeenth century, severed from her mother and attempting to forge

At the 2009 TEDTalk, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie spoke insightfully about “the danger of a single story.” She argued that when we characterize people as one thing, that is who they become. Amidst Europe’s refugee crisis, the media and other information sources circulated a single story about refugees where they were univocally characterized as abject, miserable, and helpless. Such stories

Since the 1980s, Caryl Phillips has developed a reputation as a “cosmopolitan traveller,” “knowing, sophisticated, independent,” as James Procter puts it (185). By the same token, Phillips has, as John McLeod emphasizes, tended to write “at a remove” from the “preoccupations” of his fellow secondgeneration Black British writers, more concerned with imagining the migrant experience of his parents’ generation

Truman Capote’s self-proclaimed “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965) and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), a fictional retelling of a nineteenth-century Canadian multiple murder and its consequences, share a grisly focus. Capote’s text documents the murders of four members of the Clutter family by the ex-convicts Perry Smith and Dick

Charged with ethical and political purpose, disassociated from traditional cosmopolitan detachment, and distanced from the naivety of post-Cold War cosmopolitan perspectives, post-9/11 literary cosmopolitanism offers a composite picture of the world that uniquely accounts for contemporary crises concerning forced displacement and humanitarian failure (Schoene 2–3, 27). As an emblematic work of cosmopolitan

In Crossing the Sea with Syrians on the Exodus to Europe, the journalist Wolfgang Bauer narrates the journey of a group of Syrian refugees as they flee their homes amidst the country’s worsening conflict, and look for freedom and stability in Europe. In documenting their journey, Bauer reports undercover, and along with photographer Stanislav Krupar they pose as English teachers as they join other

What follows is familiar to those who earned—by way of familial affiliation and location—the designation “military brat”: my father, Charles Raymond Schlund, was a Chief Master Sargent (CMSGT) in the United States Air Force. His “over there” assignments involved militarized coordinates in western Europe, stations in north and southeast Asia, and bases in the southern United States. These deployments

Contemporary literary depictions of refugees are often written as “life narratives,” which Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith describe as “one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims” (1). The life narrative genre, as defined by Schaffer and Smith, comprises “emotive stories often chronicling degradation, brutalization, exploitation, and physical violence” designed to “invite an ethical

On October 3, 2013, over 360 people—mainly from Eritrea, Somalia, and Ghana—perished in a shipwreck just off the coast of Lampedusa, the Italian island now most associated with the arrival of boat refugees into Europe. Contemporaneously deemed the deadliest shipwreck in the Mediterranean, this tragic incident presages what is now identifiable as the current ‘refugee crisis’ in and around Europe. In

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize win has fundamentally changed the way Vietnamese American writing is read. Or at least Nguyen is actively trying to change the way that Vietnamese American writing is read. Leveraging the access that his Pulitzer Prize win has garnered, over the past two years he has toured the book tirelessly to educate readers, reviewers, editors, and interviewers about the literary

During the Six Day War of June 1967, Israeli forces conquered Gaza and the West Bank, extending the State of Israel’s control over Palestine to the Dead Sea and further displacing hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians. Ten years later, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin absorbed 66 Vietnamese refugees—a number that would grow to 369 by 1979. Under Israel’s selfdefinition as a Jewish democracy

For refugees, and for many refugee narratives, camps have become a common concept, especially as the term “refugee” often implies large-scale displacement and tragic circumstances which necessitate massive and structured responses. Indeed, the urgent rush of displaced communities and collectives entering foreign lands has made large, temporary camps indispensable. As anthropologist Liisa Malkki notes

In 2012, the Guggenheim Museum in New York embarked on a five-year financing initiative with Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), a global wealth management entity, to curate traveling regional exhibits that would assemble work from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Guggenheim Foundation and UBS thus announced the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, which

As the script called for the deaths of several hundred Viet Cong and Laotians, while there were only a hundred extras, most died more than once, many four or five times...It was here that the living went to sleep but the undead awoke as for three dawns the set rang to cry, Dead Vietnamese, take your places! An obedient tribe of zombies rose from the earth, a score of disremembered dead men stumbling

When James Truslow Adams popularized the term “American dream” in 1931, it was not to label the emergence of the notion that one could achieve prosperity through personal industry but rather to mark that notion’s demise. Ironically, to Adams, this was in part due to legal rather than cultural Americanization; the demise, that is, corresponded to the development of an organized, bureaucratic state that

In his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin famously described Paris as “the promised land of the flâneur,” largely because of the city’s dialectical ability to flower into a broad “[l]andscape” or to close into a sheltered “room” (417). This description evokes mutually influential contemplations of public social histories and of more private erotic engagements, the former frequently morphing into the

In her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979), Jean Rhys describes her young adulthood in pre-World War I London. Set adrift from the support of family, Rhys recounts the lovers and friends of those days, and the many boarding houses, rented rooms, and cafés through which she passed: “Going from room to room in this cold dark country, England, I never knew what it was that spurred me on and

Having been criticized for the violence and sexuality depicted in his young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), Sherman Alexie swiftly underscored the ideological and historical naiveté of his detractors. In an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, the SpokaneCoeur d’Alene writer insisted that these reviewers of his National Book Award–winning work were disconnected

Late in 1948, an article appeared in the Jefferson County Union newspaper that celebrated the local industries of the town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. The town boasted an economy that included “the manufacture of hose, dairy equipment, canned goods, barn equipment, poultry supplies, and saws,” as well as “the famous ‘Little Pig Sausages’” produced by Milo Jones II (Derleth, qtd. in Penberthy 156)