ABSTRACT Antoinette Cosway Mason in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), whom her English husband later calls Bertha—the name of a mad white Creole woman in Jane Eyre—has been a focus of discussion of Rhys’s novel, particularly regarding her madness and its implications of feminism and (post)colonialism. However, although largely neglected, depicting the post-emancipation British West Indies around

ABSTRACT By taking further the celebrated reading of the disaster video clips in DeLillo’s Zero K as part of the sales pitch designed by the Convergence to convert nonbelievers, I examine the unforeseen inspiration and comfort afforded by these video clips in light of Mitchell’s notion of ekphrasis. Jeffrey’s ekphrastic efforts enable him to understand the entanglement of the real and the fictive,

ABSTRACT Gish Jen’s novel World and Town (2010) questions a liberal-individualist ideal in American society into which migrants and refugees are expected to assimilate. This article draws on trauma theory to explore the ways in which this neoliberal ideal creates connection bias that prevents the witnessing and healing of minority cultural memories. The novel fleshes out the contradictions within a

ABSTRACT This paper builds upon previous cybernetics scholarship to explore the neuroscience in The Crying of Lot 49, focusing on the neuronal action potential. In 1952, the cybernetics-influenced action potential was elucidated, a process which decreases entropy through feedback loops to transmit information. Lot 49 exemplifies what happens when the action potential stops properly communicating. This

ABSTRACT This article reads Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) in dialogue with Édouard Glissant’s concept of “opacity”, an ethical and esthetic stance that values impeding comprehension. This novel’s opacity arises from various limiting mechanisms – linguistic, translational, and formal – which both invite and inhibit interpretation, and in so doing open up a space in which readers can

ABSTRACT This article provides a poststructural reading of the character of Wesley in Nicola Barker’s 2002 novel Behindlings, which is broadly informed by Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on being and community and Jacques Derrida’s thinking on khōra, as well as other established poststructural paradigms. It contends that the novel simultaneously engages with these ideas and exceeds them. Wesley is the void-at-the-heart

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys through the prism of the tension between concealment and unveiling, and its impact on the text’s rhetorical, narrative and ideological structure. The novel focuses on its main character’s experience of confinement at Nickel School, a juvenile correction institution. Like most prison narratives, it conceptualizes such experience

ABSTRACT Age of Iron is the only novel in J. M. Coetzee’s oeuvre that makes explicit references to the context of late-apartheid South Africa. Strictly speaking, the novel is about the challenges of overcoming the iron logic of the age, i.e. the very rationality of the apartheid regime. Thus, the novel has important implications not only for the context within which it is situated but also for the

ABSTRACT On 7 January 2018, Francine Prose posted a message in which she urged her Facebook followers to compare what she saw as the alarming similarities between Sadia Shepard’s New Yorker fiction “Foreign Returned” (2017) and the earlier New Yorker story “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” (1963) by Mavis Gallant. In doing so, Prose set off a critical controversy over the issues of intertextual

ABSTRACT This essay considers the relations between physical infrastructure and the politics of literary form in Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 (2014). Although the novel initially seems to suggest that literature is irrelevant to the context of infrastructural dysfunction that it depicts, I argue that Tram 83 articulates a specific (yet highly circumscribed) role for the literary. In order to make

ABSTRACT Released at an unintentionally timely moment, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit its setting, New York City, the novel The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (2020) serves this article as a case study to demonstrate how fiction develops urban scripts for the ways we live in and imagine cities. The article focuses on its intertextual storytelling practices that seek to rescript previous literary and

ABSTRACT Within Mishima’s autobiographical essay entitled Sun and Steel, he explored his growing unease and dissatisfaction with his ability to fully convey his meaning through the written word and that he had begun to seek a means of collapsing the divide between the materiality of his bodily phenomenology and the abstraction of words – a conundrum only resolved by his suicide in late November of

ABSTRACT ‘Artfulness’ provides a new perspective on contemporary esthetics which uses Ali Smith’s Artful as both a conceptual resource and primary text to correspond to recent developments in experimental fiction. Alongside Artful, Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Eley Williams’s collection Attrib and Other Stories show how textual play can emphasize possibility and relationality beyond

ABSTRACT Gary Pak’s Children of a Fireland (2004) provides a rather panoramic view into contemporary Hawaiian culture through its depiction of a fictional town on the brink of disaster. The multi-layered novel, which interweaves cultural, geopolitical, and socio-historical threads, remains largely unexplored and is thus fertile ground for this study. Focusing on Hawaiian spirituality, this paper traces

ABSTRACT Both Don DeLillo and Jean Baudrillard have been critical of American culture, presenting it as a vapid culture fixated on the image – whether that means the actual products disseminated by film, television, print media and advertising, or the erecting of the imagined edifice of American exceptionalism and superiority that these products support. However, this article aims to show, through

ABSTRACT This essay builds on Walter Benjamin’s allegory of the ruin to explore how W.G. Sebald’s work draws on ruination as a structural esthetic. The prevalence of destruction, wastelands, and discarded matter in Sebald’s writing has been criticized as a shortcut to signification playing into the hand of the melancholic rambler, with the Holocaust in the role of master signifier. The present essay

ABSTRACT As Heather J. Hicks suggests, recent post-apocalyptic fiction has engaged with modernity and its perceived problems. Frequently read alongside or even categorized into this emergent genre, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) recycles and yet appropriates its conventions to create small fissures in the predominance of negative feelings about modernity in our imagination, without falling for

ABSTRACT When prompted to reflect on her own status as an esthete as opposed to an ethical thinker, Selin Karadağ, the protagonist of Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot, muses that she “thought ethics were aesthetics. ‘Ethics’ meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called ‘golden,’ like the golden ratio.” As it will turn out, The Idiot is a novel that is singularly

ABSTRACT The notorious length of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is the result of an ever-increasing preoccupation with speed: as much time went into the first few pages as went into all of the final volume’s 1,248 pages. Not surprisingly, critics’ appraisals were inversely related to this speed, beginning with nearly unanimous praise and ending with nearly unanimous condemnation. But it is the final

ABSTRACT American cultural and political presentations of 9/11 often resort to the easily recognizable narrative convention of Bildungsroman, intensifying the nostalgia for an illusory, ideal past before the crisis. Evoking the classic novel Jane Eyre as well as the history of its reading, Patricia Park’s Re Jane and Susan Choi’s My Education disrupt the narrative scheme of initiation, destabilizing

ABSTRACT This article emerges from exhausted readings of controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s notorious portrayals of sex and sexuality to observe the relationship between the monstrous, the sexual, and extinction. Rather than dwell on what I call the “Houellebecq, pornographer” trope (that there are either too many, or too graphic, or too obscene depictions of sex in his novels), this

ABSTRACT The image of Jerusalem in contemporary Hebrew literature offers a new concept of history, religion, and the flow of time. From the turn of the twenty-first century, literary works have brought the city to the fore as a cornerstone of their cultural and political examination of the Israeli situation following the second Intifada and its aftermath. In the second decade of the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT This article explores the controversial reception of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) through the framework of trauma theory. The polarizing novel earned both acclaim and contempt for its extreme portrayal of sexual abuse in the protagonist Jude’s childhood and the haunting effect thereof on him as a self-harming adult. For many readers, the excessive amount of violence and the highly

ABSTRACT In this essay, I use Ian McEwan’s 1997 novel Enduring Love to indicate the way McEwan turns the theme of appearance and reality established in Don Quixote from a herald of radical freedom into an instrument of skepticism, containment, and control. Whereas the Quixote used fictionality to open liberatory pathways not only for Don Quixote and other characters but also for readers, McEwan’s novels

ABSTRACT In this article, I address the religious significance of American writer Elizabeth Strout’s work, arguing that she manifests many of the characteristics of postsecular fiction. Drawing on a close analysis of several of her stories, I argue that in her imagining of a barely there God she comes into a close proximity with negative theology.

ABSTRACT This article considers Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success as a literary exploration of alienation that is set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. It exposes alienation as involving and also transcending immigrant identity, the central subject of most of Shteyngart’s works. By putting Lake Success into conversation with Rahel Jaeggi’s theory of alienation

ABSTRACT The prevailing tendency among critics is to read the fiction of Hari Kunzru through a postcolonial lens, emphasizing either his themes of fluidity and hybridity, or his cosmopolitan resistance to national boundaries. This essay takes a different approach by examining how Kunzru engages notions of political theology. Kunzru uses computer programming, for instance, as a metaphor for divine creation

ABSTRACT McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me was met with lukewarm reviews and open hostility of the sci-fi genre adherents. It seemed to have appropriated some of the key issues of the genre discourse – the question of what constitutes humanity, of the possibility of coexistence between humans and AI, of the problems of morality and consent. It also made use of time-honored devices of alternative history

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Colm Tóibín’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Blackwater Lightship (1999) juxtaposes the AIDS crisis with our currently-unfolding and similarly life-destroying environmental crisis. Both AIDS and climate change wreak their havoc largely on marginalized groups, both are murderous “pandemics” to which the first-world elite (at least initially) turns a blind eye and

ABSTRACT This article explores the “unsettling” qualities of American writer Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams. It explores the book’s engagement with environmental crises and indigenous cosmologies to show how the metaphysical insecurities, common to much of Johnson’s fiction, come in this context to challenge the very concept of American nationhood itself – or as the novella’s title parodies

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian offers a model of radical non-mastery and transnational feminist world-being through protagonist Yeong-hye’s will to arboreality and Kang’s immersive aesthetics. I begin by drawing on feminist new materialisms to establish the philosophical and formal significance of Yeong-hye’s willed arboreality and the model of sociality it thus establishes

ABSTRACT A defining feature of the current “golden age” of Irish literature is its attention to capitalism, online culture and precarity in contemporary society. This article brings together four “millennial” Irish women writers – popular novelists Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan, and critically acclaimed but lesser-known short fiction writers Nicole Flattery and Lucy Sweeney Byrne – and examines their

ABSTRACT In The Book of Illusions, Auster juxtaposes three ways of understandings the word-world relation. The postmodernist belief in the self-sufficiency of language finds its spokesperson in the narrator-protagonist David Zimmer. Alma Grund, by contrast, is a stanch realist. She strives after a strict correspondence between words and their referents in the physical world. Different from both Zimmer

ABSTRACT Foe (1986) is one of the most ambiguous and controversial novels written by J.M. Coetzee, and has been discussed extensively by criticism from a great variety of theoretical positions. This essay purports to contribute another intertextual reading of the novel, trying to elucidate some of its dark points, particularly section IV, which has been so much debated and for whose ambiguity no wholly

ABSTRACT This article analyzes Auster’s employment of the second person in his twenty-first-century prose texts – Invisible, Sunset Park, Winter Journal and Report from the Interior – in order to challenge familiar humanistic readings of his work. Using theories of second-person narration, these texts are read with reference to other works that use the second person, including Ben Lerner’s 10:04, to

ABSTRACT This first novel of Mexican film director, scriptwriter, poet, multi-award-winning playwright, journalist, and political activist, Sabina Berman, appeared in English translation in 2012. Berman’s autistic narrator, Karen Nieto, uses notebooks and diaries to produce a memoir-style narrative that undercuts Cartesian understandings of rational human(ist) subjectivity; Nieto is embodied, and embedded

ABSTRACT The present study seeks to analyze Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel The Doors of Eden (2020) to describe how posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism can go hand-in-hand in contemporary speculative fiction. The novel itself is a masterpiece in world-building where the action takes place against the background of an eternally proliferating multiversal reality. Parallel worlds, sentient monsters, posthuman

ABSTRACT The article sets out to explore what role Burroughs’ critique of language, his famous “word virus” theory plays in his overall social commentary present in his Nova Trilogy. It argues that even though Burroughs can be called a fresh social critic of his times, anticipating and being in dialogue with a number of influential cultural theories, what makes him distinct is his placing language

ABSTRACT Jeff VanderMeer’s writing has been widely described as ecofiction, responsive primarily to anthropogenic climate change. My reading of the Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), Borne (2017), and Dead Astronauts (2019) differs substantially, emphasizing the importance to VanderMeer of spy genres rather than science fiction, and exploring the influence of open-world digital gaming on VanderMeer’s narrative

ABSTRACT Drawing on an unorthodox approach to desire, Belkacem Meghzouchene’s second novel, The overcoat of Virginia (2013), finds that opposition activists are probably more frustrating than the regime they contest. Specifying “a lack-based” desire, the trope of sodomy in the novel articulates the ways in which the Algerian postcolonial ruling elites allegedly embezzle the country’s resources without

ABSTRACT How do we read? For critics, now a few years deep into what has been called “the method wars”, the approaches are numerous, but most of all, are collective. Whether critique or postcritique, or the idiosyncratic in between, what is undeniable about the explosion of methods beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion is that it renders us, critics, in the plural. In his first collection of essays

ABSTRACT The United Nations Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children (1996) remains the global template for the wholesale denunciation of the participation of children in war. This is based on the virtual ossification, in mainstream discourse, of the assumption that child soldiers are vulnerable victims of adult manipulation and exploitation for their lack of agency and consciousness. In spite

ABSTRACT Though the title of Nuruddin Farah’s Links suggests the language of network often invoked in theories of globalization, the 2003 novel instead questions this discourse through its focus on the affective responses of characters to a series of dead bodies. The links Farah explores in the novel are the affiliations and lived experiences, often unacknowledged, that stress the limits of an individual

ABSTRACT What is the place of the excluded memories, stories, and narratives in the historical imagination of a nation? This study approaches the multiple temporalities and spatialities that constitute the time-space of history through Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopia. While a chronotopic approach to the past grounds its experience in time and space, the network of chronotopes and their inter-relationships

ABSTRACT Drawing upon the critical views of hypertext theory, this paper seeks to investigate the genre of hypertext fiction, analyzing some of its aspects, especially the domination of narrative nonlinearity and the birth of the wreader. The paper argues that computer technologies have revolutionized the form and representation of literary texts as well as the relationship between writer and reader

ABSTRACT Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission imagines a future in which a Muslim party wins the 2022 election and begins to turn France into an Islamic country. This story initially led critics to accuse Houellebecq of reproducing a far-right narrative about Muslim immigration. More recently, however, other critics have argued that the novel does not denigrate Islam but depicts the new regime as

ABSTRACT This article seeks to problematize the presupposition, central to critical engagement with espionage fiction, that the spy has a stable sense of self. Through a comparative reading of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911), I will argue that spies cannot separate their identities from their involvement with espionage. My investigation

ABSTRACT Violence manifests itself in a multitude of forms leaving survivors with psychological damage. Gwyneth Jones’s Life (2004) portrays myriad acts of violence against women in science with a specific critique of patriarchy that devalues women’s place in science as the “second sex.” The novel depicts “genderization of science,” questioning whether there are essential biological sexual differences

ABSTRACT The instance postcolonialism becomes hinged on liberalism, the liberating promise which postcolonialism propels considerably shrinks. This essay explains that in predicating the liberal ideology as a tool for self-determination, a crippling standstill awaits a given cause. The Palestinian question as recently imagined by the American Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa in Mornings in Jenin

ABSTRACT Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) has remained the most widely discussed of his novels in the five decades since its publication. However, the volume of critical work produced on it far outweighs the unique lines of thought investigated. The critiques have mostly been limited to – diagnoses of Billy Pilgrim’s mental disorder, locating the sources of the diagnosed ailments, examinations

ABSTRACT Africa in general and South Africa in particular remain entangled in colonial power matrices which some decolonial writers have described as “coloniality.” Coloniality refers to the perpetuation of quasi-colonial relations between the West and former colonized territories long after the official end of colonialism. Decoloniality is a theoretical paradigm that seeks to identify and critique

ABSTRACT This article coins the term “transcultural trauma fiction,” proposing that it constitutes a useful conceptual lens through which to examine the Finnish author Katja Kettu’s 2018 novel, Rose on poissa (Rose is Gone). Set in a Minnesotan world of mixed Ojibwe and Finnish heritage, Rose on poissa narrates a story of historical, intergenerational, and individual trauma, focusing on the Missing

ABSTRACT In discussions of post-truth, writers have on the whole assumed that it is primarily a new phenomenon related to the 2016 election. However momentous that election was, the proliferation of post-truth was hardly novel. Rather, evidence of post-truth clearly influenced the discussions that lead up to the U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. With this in mind, this essay offers a reading of Ben Fountain’s

ABSTRACT This paper argues that resonating with references to the 1980 coup and inspired by the 2013 Gezi Park Protests, Ece Temelkuran's The Time of Mute Swans creates a cross-temporal communication and gives insight into both the past and the present contexts of Turkey. The novel represents the past in ways to revisit, contest and reconstruct its hegemonic and silenced spaces. By doing so, it brings

ABSTRACT Michel Foucault has enumerated four locales as institutional “sites” from which a physician operating in a medical setting makes their discourse. Yet it is a typology that neglects somewhat recuperative locations falling outside the conventional parameters of therapeutic care. Non-traditional sites such as hotels functioning as sanatoria, island retreats, isolated villas, and other similar

ABSTRACT This article examines the female serial killer in relation to horror and trauma in Stephen King’s horror fiction with a particular interest in two of his novels that feature female protagonists, Carrie and Misery. This article argues that King’s work presents a unique case for the female serial killer; she is ruthless and capable of committing acts of murder, yet she is tied to her own and

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the feminist use of space in Aritha van Herk’s self-identified mixed work of geography and fiction. It fundamentally draws on scholarly work that has already focused on the spatial importance in van Herk’s fiction. For example, using Marlene Goldman’s insights, I examine the crucial role of space in women’s search for freedom and the interrogation of traditional gender

ABSTRACT J.M. Coetzee’s late global fictions regularly offer formal experiments with fleetingness – works designed to become dated, superannuated – yet repeatedly return to the theme of enduring, almost transcendental, literary value. These are works that illustrate a crisis point in literary history, when the global and the digital inflict on authors an imperative to be timely while older institutional

ABSTRACT This essay aims at exploring, from a Deleuzean perspective, the issue of ethics in Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle (1957) and how it is related to the central character’s struggles for making his life meaningful. The event that disrupts the subjectivity of the major characters of this novel (Mor and Rain) and poses serious ethical problems for them is an extra-marital love affair. The major

ABSTRACT In the present essay, the focus is laid on literary allusions in The Book of Evidence, as I argue that the novel thematizes Freddie Montgomery’s consistent exploration of the ways in which he might endow the world around him with at least a transient order and meaning. It is as part of this quest that he repeatedly adverts to the view of life as a performance analogic to a theater play. I