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Female (Mis)representation in Moroccan Male-Authored Postcolonial Literature: The Madwoman Trope in Mohamed Mrabet’s The Big Mirror Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-03-17 Meriem Ait Bbih, Brahim Barhoun
Through a feminist postcolonial theoretical lens, this article puts forth a new reading of Mohamed Mrabet’s novella The Big Mirror. Written by a male Moroccan writer in 1977, a short while after Mo...
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Discard Ecologies and the ‘Hyposubject’ in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Paromita Patranobish
This article posits the concept of excremental toxicity as a critical lens with which to explore the resistive and subversive ways in which pollution that is dumped onto precarious ecologies is rei...
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Why is this (K)night Different: Passover, Blood, War, and the Conflict Between Jewish and American Identity in Jo Sinclair’s Wasteland and Dara Horn’s All Other Nights Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Ohad Reznick
For hundreds of years, non-Jews have accused Jews of dual identity. Living in the diaspora, Jews were often accused of loyalty to their own religion or people, which sometimes collided with allegia...
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Second-Person Narration and Self-Reflectivity: The Effectivity of the Narrative Technique in Empathizing with and Identifying the “Other” in N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth (2015-17) Trilogy Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Monika Mishra, Joe Varghese Yeldho
The paper aims to disabuse the critics of their consensus regarding the strangeness and unpredictability of the second-person “you” and subsequently highlight the potential that it possesses. While...
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“This Sense of Otherness”: The Horrors of the Countryside in Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Erin Mercer
In novels The Loney (2014), Devil’s Day (2017) and Starve Acre (2019), contemporary British author Andrew Michael Hurley locates threat in the British countryside where primitive superstition conti...
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“Do You Love Him yet?”: The Aesthetics of Post-Traumatic Recuperation and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-18 Kevin Goddard
This article uses a reading of three works by J. M. Coetzee to argue for a literature of recuperation. Much of trauma theory has debated the “unspeakableness” of trauma, and the near impossibility ...
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Vampire Aesthetics in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-18 Harriet Kramer Linkin
Despite critical attention to the many vampiric texts Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire invokes, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner has received barely any notice, although it is the one ...
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Wayward Plots: Public Transport and Abolition Narratology in Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Ben De Bruyn
This article examines the infrastructural imagination of Namwali Serpell’s grief narrative The Furrows. Building on existing research about public transport, carceral geography, and the infrastruct...
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From the Obstructive “Mountain” to the Free “Water”: Examining the Evolution of Transculturalism in Ling Zhang’s Immigrant Narratives Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Yifan Jin
Ling Zhang, a well-known overseas Chinese author in contemporary Sinophone literary circles, has written extensively about Chinese immigrants in Canada. However, the Anglophone versions of her rema...
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Insignificant Inheritance: Repairing Domestic Interiors Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Lucy Benjamin
Drawing on James Clammer’s novel Insignificance, this paper explores the intersection of inheritance and repair. Marking its difference from 20th century concerns with the historiographical conditi...
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Global Forms in Bolaño’s 2666: Genre, Race, Capital Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Jack Weizhe Cao
Roberto Bolaño’s posthumously published 2666 is a novel split into five parts without a clear logic of organization. I argue that its unity lies in the way each section takes up and then dissolves ...
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Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island: The Climate Crisis and Planetary Environmentalism Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Rakibul Hasan Khan
Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), in addressing the planetary scale of the climate crisis, gestures to the possibility of, and the imperative for, multispecies as well as multi-ethnic and cross-cul...
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Do It Yourself Dystopia: The Digital Future in Dave Eggers’s The Every Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga
The article analyses the nightmarish vision of the near future in Dave Eggers’s 2021 novel The Every as a digital dystopia. Read as a dialogue with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Every i...
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The Carnivalesque in Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men and Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel: A Bakhtinian Reading Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Jinan F. B. Al-Hajaj, Salma Abdul Hussein Dawood
Two contemporary novels, namely, Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men (2011) and Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel (2020) are given a Bakhtinian reading in an attempt to trace the presence of carni...
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Reviving from the Archive: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Modern Ghost Stories and Memory Writing Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-01-24 Anni Shen
The first four works of the Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro were all ghost stories, and they are crucial to shaping his signature unreliable narratives and writing of memory. Based on the ...
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Neoliberal Humanism: Never Let Me Go and the Value of the Humanities Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Dale Pattison
This essay addresses the neoliberal turn in the humanities through Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, which describes a world in which human clones have been created for the purpose of ha...
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Arboreal Obliquity or Trees Doing the Human in Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Berthold Schoene
Tapping into Australian writing on arboreality, with a focus on Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus (1998), this investigation intervenes in Critical Plant Studies by exploring a dendrographic alternative to ...
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World Literature Sickness: Exile and Dissent in Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Lorna Burns
This article explores “literature sickness”, a term coined by the contemporary Iranian-American writer Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and developed, I suggest, in her novel Call Me Zebra (2018). In d...
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Rescuing Precarious Bodies: Biopolitics and Haitian Health in Edwidge Danticat’s Diasporic Writing Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Yi Cai
Centering on the precarious bodies that are diseased or faced with health problems in Danticat’s oeuvre, this article from a biopolitical perspective examines how the malfunction of power exacerbat...
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The Urban Essential Solitude of the Hunger Character: A Blanchotian Reading of PAUL Auster’s Moon Palace Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2024-01-02 María Laura Arce Álvarez
The aim of this article is to analyze Paul Auster’s Moon Palace through the lens of philosopher and critic Maurice Blanchot, whose literary theory provides a theoretical frame to study this novel a...
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Guerrilla Gardening: At the Intersection of Birnam Wood and Minneapolis Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Sarah Dimick
To reflect on guerrilla gardening and the narratives sprouting from it, I intersect a literary work – the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, published in 2023, loosely based on ...
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Eastern Premise: Writing the East of England in the Novels of Graham Swift Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-11-22 Sam Goodman
This article is a critical exploration of how three of Graham Swift’s novels - Waterland (1983), Last Orders (1996), and Here We Are (2020) – offer a literary representation of the (south) east of ...
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The Possession-Possessor Dichotomy in the Turkish-Museum Novel Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Fidan Cheikosman
This article explores the possession-possessor dichotomy in the Turkish museum-novel. The process of curation presents itself as an aesthetic concept refracted between literary and visual perceptio...
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Yearning for the Plot Enclosure in Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Vladimir Biti
The British Empire’s disintegration drove its many residents into an enclosure of illusions of sovereignty. As McEwan’s works emerged amid such developments, his characters respond to the rising di...
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You Equals Not-I: Avowal, Disavowal, and Second-Person Narration in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Rick de Villiers
This article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its function is explained by situating the novel within that niche known as the “you-text.” But the generic fu...
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Performativity and Performance: Identities and Multi-Dimensional Psychological Passing in Go Tell It on the Mountain Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Longyan Wang
This essay explores how key characters from James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain exhibit psychological passing and performative identity formation in relation to race, religion, and sexuality...
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How to Blow Up a Novel: Pipeline Insurgency and Narrative Form in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Heather Ray Milligan
With this article, I explore the insurgent aesthetic embedded in Alexis Wright’s 2006 novel Carpentaria. Building upon recent scholarship on forms, infrastructuralism, Indigenous aesthetics, and gr...
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Climate Crises, Ruined Islands, and British Metamodernism Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-10-12 Emily Arvay
This article contends that popular acceptance of Anthropogenic climate change in early 2000s Britain coincided with cultural efforts to redefine the historical present via transhistorical phenomena...
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The Missing Corpse in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad and Muhsin Al-Ramli’s Daughter of the Tigris Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Abir Hamdar
This essay focuses on the trope of the missing corpse in two contemporary Iraqi novels: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) and Muhsin al-Ramli’s Daughter of the Tigris (2019). Drawing m...
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Lacan, Shadow Feminism, and Paul Auster’s City of Glass Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Marcus Richey
This essay engages Paul Auster’s novel from 1985, City of Glass, with Lacan and feminism, in order to venture beyond the more business-as-usual formal aspects of postmodernism and propose that the ...
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When the Powerpolis Paused: Representations of Political Trauma of Indian Emergency in Delhi Calm Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-09-19 Nikhitha Mary Mathew, Smita Jha
Indian emergency is a period that is often counted among the dark days of post-Independent Indian history. Apart from the repeal of fundamental rights, this period also witnessed an autocratic rule...
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Paul’s Imaginary Revenge in Teddy Wayne’s The Great Man Theory Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Peter D. Mathews, Kyung Min No
ABSTRACT Although Teddy Wayne’s The Great Man Theory (2022) is most obviously a response to the Trump presidency, this essay explores how the novel also engages larger questions about political critique and a meaningful response to power. We analyze, in particular, the protagonist’s closing attack on a right-wing pundit in the context of the novel’s exploration of magical thinking, drawing special
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“Technocratic Fiction, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Counter-Insurgent Infrastructure” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Adam Carlson, Michael Truscello
ABSTRACT This intervention in the discussion of literary infrastructuralism identifies technocratic fiction as an important but reactionary genre in the imagining of national infrastructure and the colonial settler state project of capitalist extractivism. Behind the technocratic texts we are looking at here is the goal of articulating and solving political, social, and economic problems through rational
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“Posthuman Intersections in BrexLit: Representing Migration in Contemporary British Fiction” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-09-06 María Alonso Alonso
ABSTRACT The United Kingdom European Union membership or, in common parlance, Brexit referendum, held in the United Kingdom on 23rd June 2016, was an unprecedented event in European politics. This article analyses a literary corpus of long fiction, known as BrexLit, which have all drawn inspiration from this poll and its subsequent consequences for British society. Novels such as Ali Smith’s Autumn
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The Warped Bildung: Parody, Postmodern Gothic, and the Bildungsroman in Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-09-08 Mona Jafari, Maryam Soltan Beyad, Zohreh Ramin
ABSTRACT Iain Banks’s first published novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), set the scene for a literary career renowned for playful transgressions of genre and form. The novel addresses the topical debate on human subjectivity by capitalizing on the Gothic and postmodernism, both of which demonstrate a mutual concern with human subjectivity with a distinctly anti-humanist slant. This study argues that the
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“A Question, in the End, of Vision”: Pessimism and the Paradox of Marriage in Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Lance Conley
ABSTRACT This article argues that Lauren Groff’s 2015 novel Fates and Furies engages with distinct conceptions of pessimism – cosmic pessimism as defined by Eugene Thacker and metaphysical pessimism as defined by Joshua Foa Dienstag – via the depiction of a deteriorating American marriage. The essay considers how the text’s representations of pessimism allows Groff to consider multiple philosophical
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The Failure of Imagination and its Redemption: John Banville‘s The Book of Evidence Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Asya Sakine Uçar
ABSTRACT This article focuses on John Banville’s The Book of Evidence in which art serves as an intrinsic thematic concern for the narrating character Freddie Montgomery who becomes captivated by a 17th century Dutch portrait, tries to steal it, and savagely kills the servant who interrupts him. Besides offering a story of crime and punishment, the confessional monologic form inexorably establishes
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The Poetics of Re-Enchantment: Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
ABSTRACT The essay offers a reading of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring (1988) and relates it to the cultural conception of Modernity as an age of “disenchantment,” and to the potential contribution of the “subtler language” of literature (to borrow Charles Taylor’s phrase) to a “re-enchantment” of the world. Following a brief theoretical introduction of the concept of Disenchantment,
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“Sharing the Same Soil”: The Critique of Post-Feminist Gender Identity and the Materiality of Body in Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-08-27 Jasmine Gege Yang
ABSTRACT Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) examines gender normality in a Post-Celtic Tiger Irish social context and a post-feminist cultural milieu, through detailed depictions of the material body and its manipulation by Millennial Irish youth. Employing Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory and post-feminist theories, this article explores the materiality of the body by analyzing the depictions of the female
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“Something Else Already Opening up.” The Utopian Impulse and the Novum of Disability in Missouri Williams’s The Doloriad Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Justyna Laura Galant
ABSTRACT The article focuses on a close analysis of The Doloriad, a 2022 debut novel by Missouri Williams. The post-apocalyptic text is read as a critical dystopia, which, while representing a destroyed world inhabited by degenerated humanity, implies a possibility of a better reality in the future. Examining the novel’s employment of disability in the context of disability studies, in particular,
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Monstrous Technology in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge: The Internet as Terror and Transformation Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Jiří Šalamoun
ABSTRACT This article argues that Pynchon’s portrayal of technology and the Internet in Bleeding Edge (2013) should be read as an example of the monstrous since it embodies its two key features: the ability to terrorize and transform. The paper shows that the Internet in Bleeding Edge is not only monstrous, as it can devour the life essence of its users, but also transformative, as it shocks them to
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Subversive Triviality: John Ashbery’s and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Mikołaj Wiśniewski
ABSTRACT In a recent study, Christopher Schmidt has analyzed an aspect of James Schuler’s poetry, which he calls “dark camp:” the reevaluation of “waste,” both in the sense of linguistic material which the poet incorporates into his work (phrases gleaned from advertising or the media), and the subject matter which he focuses on (“material detritus:” trashy, kitschy, unpoetic stuff). Schuyler’s “poetics
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Graphic Capitaloscenes: Drawing Infrastructure as Historical Form Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Dominic Davies
ABSTRACT This article describes “graphic Capitaloscenes” – narrative moments in which graphic novels draw infrastructure as a material expression of capitalism’s historical development. Drawing on work that has described graphic narrative as both an “infrastructural” and “scenographic” form, it contends that graphic novels are particularly adept at representing infrastructure as historical content
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Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Literary Resistance to Right-Wing Populist Discourse in Grand Hotel Europa (2018) Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-08-06 Guylian Nemegeer
ABSTRACT Right-wing populism has been on the rise in Europe for the past two decades. The success of populist strategies has generated a broader discursive shift in news coverage about immigration as simplifying and polarizing strategies have been incorporated into mainstream media. This paper discusses how Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer offers resistance to the discursive structures of right-wing populist
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A Bastard’s Confession: National Forgetting, Remasculinization, and the Ethics of Just Memory in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Joohee Seo
This paper examines the representation and critique of Asian masculinity and patriarchy in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. In his written confession, the narrator retraces the events after the...
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Autism and Post-Human: A Cyborgian Reading of Sabina Berman’s Me Who Dove into the Heart of the World Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Sara Saei Dibavar, Alireza Neyestani
ABSTRACT The concept of “cyborg” in Donna Haraway’s much-discussed “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) is outstanding in its depiction of the hybrid body that is untouched by long-standing polar dichotomy stemming from a hierarchal mode of thinking founded on prehistoric anthropocentricism: a worldview embedded mostly in western cultures which considers (normal11. Meaning neurotypical.) human beings to be
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Narrative Complicity in Evelio Rosero’s Stories of Violence from Colombia Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Mark Piccini
ABSTRACT From The Armies (2007/2008) to Toño the Infallible (2017/2022), work by the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero that has been translated into English has brought something that exceeds the popular (to the point of clichéd) story of Colombian violence. Specifically, Rosero’s writing reveals our narrative or readerly complicity in violence: not only that for which Colombia became notorious during
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Homebound: Compromised Petroculture Criticism in American Neoliberal Family Novels Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-07-14 Wenjia Chen
ABSTRACT This article argues that the neoliberal family novel is by genre compromised to criticize fossil fuel extraction. I situate the claim against the rise of petrocultures studies, especially of novels consciously engaged with the post-9/11 extractivist boom. A good number of these novels are family saga, and this article focuses on two of them: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Lamar Herrin’s Fractures—the
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Memory and the Jungian Unconscious in J. G. Ballard’s Autobiographical Narratives Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-07-06 Kevin Hart
ABSTRACT This paper offers a comparative analysis of J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, and Miracles of Life in their engagements with the psychological theory of Carl Jung. The first half of the paper explores Jung’s suggestions that psychology is to some extent ethnically determined and Eastern and Western consciousness in many ways antonymous. Challenging this view, Empire
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Theory (And/Or) Fiction: Academic Writing, Inhuman Horror, and the New Weird in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Matt Graham
ABSTRACT H.P Lovecraft’s inhuman horror represents a site of both creativity and controversy, complicating his innovative depictions of the unknown by his racially problematic politics. This article presents Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia as a dramatic reappraisal of Lovecraftian horror from a twenty-first century non-Western perspective. Negarestani’s academic prose – specifically concepts and footnotes
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“Console Us for Our losses”: Representing Dementia in Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-06-28 Viktorija Krombholc
ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze the portrayal of dementia in Emma Healey’s novel Elizabeth Is Missing (2014), which brings together fictional exploration of dementia and the detective genre framework. This pairing may seem curious, even counterintuitive, yet it foregrounds important issues regarding subjectivity and personhood in the context of cognitive decline. In Healey’s novel, the
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A Postsecular Reading of Nonsensical Caring in Ali Smith’s Fiction Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-06-26 Joanna Klara Teske
ABSTRACT Caring is the theme Ali Smith pursues consistently throughout her fiction. She seems particularly concerned with all kinds of nonstandard caring situations, care that apparently cannot make any difference included. In Like Kate offers her orange kangaroo to the dead girl living in the drain, in Hotel World Clare tries to intensely experience life for the sake of her dead sister, in How to
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Faulty Power in the Faculty Tower: James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale as a Parody of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-06-18 Noureddine Friji
ABSTRACT The current article takes established theoretical postulates about parody as a point of departure for examining how James Hynes’s postmodern novel, The Lecturer’s Tale (2001), contributes fresh fictional angles to the field of campus literature by building on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth to chart its own protagonist’s transition from victim to victor and to sound a cautionary note about ill-advised
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From Other to Posthuman: Meiji’s Journey in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape and The Island of Lost Girls Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Simran Mittal
ABSTRACT This paper examines Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape and The Island of Lost Girls using the agential realist and philosophical posthumanist methodologies of Karen Barad and Francesca Ferrando. While Escape has received some critical attention within academic circles, scholarly examination of this duology as a whole is surprisingly missing. I examine the conflict between transhumanist Generals
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Abjecting the Racial Agency in Damon Galgut’s The Promise Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Hesna Laboudi
ABSTRACT Being a South African post-apartheid novel, The Promise (2021) by Damon Galgut is a narrative whose characters are caught up in a nation torn by racial divisions. The novel bids a sharp comment on racial supremacy ideologies and the dead-ends such dogmas engender. As a white writer who is cognizant of the appalling racial condition of his nation, Galgut brawls to find hope in post-apartheid
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“From Plátano Player to Questioning Chronicler—Historiography in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Lisa LeBlond
ABSTRACT Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao) is a decolonial project that recognizes coloniality specific to the Dominican Republic and its diaspora. Coloniality is the aftereffect of colonialism – the systems of hierarchy and systems of knowing established 500 years ago that still function today. This article argues that Oscar Wao attempts to undo colonial systems by
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Forced Migration Narratives and the Nation-State: ‘Out’ and ‘Go, Went, Gone’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Daniel Hourigan
ABSTRACT This article offers a critical comparison of representations of forced migration and law in Out (1964) by Christine Brooke-Rose and Go, Went, Gone (2015) by Jenny Erpenbeck. The literary value of forced migration themes can be seen in how they act as a pivot point between literary imaginaries, the representation of trauma, and the real-world effects of law and politics on displaced people
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Tension Between Embodied Structures and the Pursuit of Change: Exploring the Metaphysical Underpinnings of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Konrad Werner
ABSTRACT Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece Flights highlights one of the most profound metaphysical, moral and religious conundrums – a tension, but also an intimate bond, between stability and structuredness, on the one hand, and the power of change, movement and transgression on the other. The paper is devoted to unveiling what I dub the paradox of embodied agency. In simple terms, structuredness makes
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From a Pin to an Elephant: Politics of Consumption and the Debordian Spectacle in James Lovegrove’s Days Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Guangzhao Lyu
ABSTRACT This article starts with a historical account of the general decline of class consciousness in the UK throughout the 1980s, when the vision of personal affluence was increasingly connected to people’s choice in the marketplace, rather than their class identity at the sites of mass production. Personal desires were recognized by the Thatcher governments and taken as the motivation to pursue
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Doris Lessing’s Ethical Narrative in The Diary of a Good Neighbor Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Pub Date : 2023-05-14 Huifang Li, Ying Li
ABSTRACT With the “Ethical Turn” from the end of the last century, ethical narratology has become an inspiring guide in narrative studies. This essay examines how Doris Lessing carries out her ethical exploration on elderly care through the narrative forms in The Diary of a Good Neighbor. With a double-seeing narrative, Lessing shows her sympathy toward the elderly group and reveals the pervasive ageism