DOCSLIB.ORG

Bruce Robbins INFORMATION and EMOTION: on the AMBITIONS OF

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Bruce Robbins INFORMATION and EMOTION: on the AMBITIONS OF Bruce Robbins INFORMATION AND EMOTION: ON THE AMBITIONS OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION “Information has become the new character.” James Wood, “Hysterical Realism” ritic James Wood, in a review of Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, objects Cto such features as “a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN) . a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica in 1907, a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992, and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time.” These are among the signs, he says, that “a genre is hardening,” the genre of “the big ambitious novel.” I quote: “A parody would go like this. If a character is introduced in London (call him Toby Aknotuby, i.e. “To be or not to be”—ha!), then we will swiftly be told that Toby has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt: an anagram of Toby, of course) who, like Toby, has the very same curious genital deforma- tion, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell’s Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell’s Angels group, devoted only to the fanatical study of very late Wordsworth), and that their mad left-wing aunt, Delilah, was curiously struck dumb when Mrs Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, and has not spoken a word since.” He then asks: “Is this a caricature, really?” It is quite a good caricature, I think—so good that I would like to claim it as a piece of perhaps unintended intertextuality, in other words as an applica- tion for membership in the genre it caricatures. (This is hardly an outlandish claim given that Wood names Dickens as the “parent” of this genre and adds that “Dickens makes caricature respectable in an age in which, for various reasons, it has become hard to create character.” In other words, Wood knows that in offering a caricature he himself is doing what he accuses the genre of doing.) When Wood complains that this kind of writing is incompatible with “tragedy or anguish,” that it does not do “scenes,” that it is awkward in its representation of “character,” that its stories are “inhuman stories,” one feels a certain formal and moral banality in the criticism, and one might be tempted The Romanic Review Volume 100 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 94 Bruce Robbins to dismiss it as a banal anti-modernism that has not been new or enlightening since it frst scoffed at Woolf and Joyce. What distinguishes it, and provokes me to think of Wood as keeping company with his targets, is the common ground of realism. It is within what he calls “the conventions of realism” that Wood places his targets, whom he accuses not of “abolishing” those conven- tions but merely of “overworking” them. And it’s within the conventions of realism that we would have to place his own criteria. Wood is not merely rant- ing in a familiar way about modernism or postmodernism; he is talking about the requirements of realism to novelists who clearly intend to do realism. As he notes, these realists are trying to do something that is usually considered mor- ally impeccable: trying to follow Forster’s dictum “only connect.” For Wood, it just doesn’t work. To summarize a long argument: we get information about how we are all connected, but we don’t get to feel those connections. Is it simply too ambitious to aim at investing a reader’s feelings in connec- tions between people who are separated by half a planet? Is this an ambition that novelists should renounce as beyond their technical means? The same argument is of course made not just about the novel but about cosmopolitan- ism itself, which is judged to be an impossible and misguided ideal. It is dif- fcult enough to function as the citizen of a given nation, it is often repeated; no one can be a citizen of the world. The feeling of connectedness will not stretch so far. And yet it is unclear that one can be even a half-decent citizen of a nation like the United States if one does not make some effort to be more than a US citizen. And I would propose that the same holds for the novel. I gave my frst lecture on the novel at Columbia on the 12th of September, 2001. The events of the previous day were of course very much on everyone’s mind and in everyone’s feelings. I asked the class whether they wanted to talk about the attack on the World Trade Center or to try for business as usual. By a very large majority, they opted for business as usual. But some sort of segue seemed unavoidable. The text on our syllabus for that day was a dramatically intertextual novel from Sudan called Season of Migration to the North. Season of Migration to the North rewrites Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with a geo- graphical reversal: an Arabic-speaking North African travels up the Thames to London, and in that northern heart of darkness he commits a series of violent acts against white women, women who end up dead although they are very explicitly described as well-intentioned, non-racist, having done nothing to deserve such treatment. This came a bit too close to the events of September 11th to pass unremarked. So I invited the students to imagine a secretary in the frm of Cantor Fitzgerald who was at her desk in the World Trade Cen- ter bright and early the day before and who therefore lost her life in a way that could hardly be described as anything but meaningless. The planes that crashed into the World Trade Center had nothing to do with her life, with On the Ambitions of Contemporary Fiction 95 her personal relationships, with her character. I asked them to imagine that nothing in her life, nothing of the stuff that novels are ordinarily made out of, would seem to connect in any way with the event that ended her life. And then I told the students that one reason for paying attention to the novels we were going to be reading, beginning with Season of Migration to the North, was that at their best, this is precisely the challenge they set themselves: making the sort of meaning that novels make, but making it out of historical materials or situations that, like the planes that attacked the World Trade Center, seem to come from nowhere, seem to defy the whole project of novel writing. The fact that I told the students this doesn’t make it so. Still, I quote myself because my unrehearsed, somewhat desperate gambit on September 12, 2001 suggests a line of argument that might answer Wood in a vocabulary that he could be expected to recognize. The challenge of producing emotively-charged meaning out of encounters that seem arbitrary and indeed stretch the sense of connection, but are not utterly arbitrary: this is a more sympathetic way of describing the ambition of the “big ambitious novel” that Wood sees hard- ening into a contemporary genre.1 To frame the argument in this way is to think of the conventions of realism as formal resources that realism has at its disposal, resources that may be stretched thin or overworked by the extreme social conditions to which they are applied, even to the point of parody, but that are the self-conscious tools of a self-conscious community of writers. I think these people are reading each other—not in exactly the same spirit in which Wood reads them, but while asking some of the kinds of questions he is asking. Ironically, Wood’s parody isolates a number of tropes which are like signature devices of a club of novelists, internally self-conscious, binding these writers both to the outside world of social information and, at the same time, to each other, and thus making possible (or so I hope) an internal literary his- tory of literature. Realists are not supposed to look at other realists; realism is supposed to be a mirror on a path, an unmediated look at the world itself. But here is a new mini-tradition of writers clearly looking at each other, recipro- cally self-quoting, joined together by common borrowings—yet joined in the common purpose, one might say, of a better representation of today’s global, strenuous social connectedness. There is both internal and external evidence for the kind of self-conscious intertextuality I’m proposing here. I am going to leave aside the external evi- dence—Garcia Marquez paying his debts to Faulkner, Rushdie paying his 1. One could say that the principle of harm experienced as coming from nowhere, yet not totally random, takes a not unfamiliar form in Smith’s White Teeth when a fellow waiter tells a Bangladeshi man who’s having trouble with an English woman: “it ain’t you she’s angry with”—it’s history (169). This is a version of the World Trade Center experience. 96 Bruce Robbins debt to Garcia Marquez, and so on.2 To show how these ambitious writers are looking at each other, and to what end, I’d like to focus on connection-making at the level of the sentence.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Thought of Literature: Notes to Contemporary Fictions
    The Thought of Literature Notes to contemporary fictions Jason Childs A dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Technology Sydney, February 2018. Certificate of original authorship I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as acknowledged within the text. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. This research is supported by an Austalian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Signature of Candidate: Production Note: Signature removed prior to publication. February 20, 2018 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to Robyn Ferrell for taking over my supervision at a late stage in my candidature. Her feedback on my ideas and drafts, always generous and incisive, was invaluable in completing this work. Without Berndt Sellheim’s encouragement, I would not have begun this project; without his support, I would not have finished it. I am blessed to call him my friend. Martin Harrison was an important mentor for several years prior to starting this work and my supervisor during its defining early stages. Fellow students of Martin's will understand when I say that, despite his untimely death in 2014, there is not a sentence here that wasn’t written in conversation with him.
    [Show full text]
  • A Contemporary Representation of Reality: the Hysterical Realist Novel
    Dissertação de Mestrado Erasmus Mundus em ‘Crossways in Cultural Narratives’ A Contemporary Representation of Reality: the Hysterical Realist Novel Cristina Liseţchi Orientadores: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela: Dr César Domínguez Universidade Nova de Lisboa: Dr Maria Fernanda de Abreu Lisboa, Julho 2015 1 “I, Cristina Liseţchi, hereby certify that this dissertation, which is 21559 words in length, has been written by me, that it is a record of work carried out by me, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. All sentences or passages quoted in this dissertation from other people's work (with or without trivial changes) have been placed within quotation marks, and specifically acknowledged by reference to author, work and page. I understand that plagiarism – the unacknowledged use of such passages – will be considered grounds for failure in this dissertation and, if serious, in the degree programme as a whole. I also affirm that, with the exception of the specific acknowledgements, these answers are entirely my own work." Signature of candidate 2 ABSTRACT Literary critics are faced with the difficult task of categorizing a wide corpus of contemporary narratives that have conquered the hearts of millions of readers worldwide, through their sardonic way of representing today’s reality and their particular interpretation of the novel’s traditional form. It is the case of hysterical realist novels, a new literary genre that constitutes the object of this present study, which explores the main aspects of this type of narratives by considering their perspective of the world and their means of achieving the effect of reality.
    [Show full text]
  • Samir Sellami
    HYPERBOLIC REALISM IN THOMAS PYNCHON'S AND ROBERTO BOLAÑO'S LATE MAXIMALIST NOVELS AGAINST THE DAY & 2666 presented by / présenté par Samir Sellami to principal supervisor / au directeur de thèse Prof. Jonathan Pollock (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia) to co-tutelle supervisor / au co-directeur (co-tutelle) Prof. Fernando Resende (Universidade Federal Fluminense) and to external experts / et aux experts externes Prof. Pascale Amiot (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia) Prof. Ingrid Hotz-Davies (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) Prof. Benjamim Picado (Universidade Federal Fluminense) in partial fulfillment of a Doctorate in the Humanities Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones January 31, 2018 Université de Perpignan Via Domitia / Universidade Federal Fluminense DECLARATION OF GOOD ACADEMIC CONDUCT I, SAMIR SELLAMI, hereby certify that this dissertation, which is 99841 words in length, has been written by me, that it is a record of work carried out by me, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. All sentences or passages quoted in this dissertation from other people's work (with or without trivial changes) have been placed within quotation marks, and specifically acknowledged by reference to au- thor, work and page. I understand that plagiarism – the unacknowledged use of such passages – will be considered grounds for failure in this disser- tation and in the degree program as a whole. I also affirm that, with the ex- ception of the specific acknowledgements, the following dissertation is en- tirely my own work. Berlin / Perpignan / Rio de Janeiro: January 31, 2018 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like every piece of labor, this research project was made possible with the great help and support of many individuals and institutions.
    [Show full text]
  • Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman: 9/11 As a Crisis of Confidence in American Literary Aesthetics
    Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman: 9/11 as a Crisis of Confidence in American Literary Aesthetics by Daniel Davis Wood On September 11, 2001, with the Twin Towers reduced to rubble, the novelist Jay McInerney fled to the home of his friend and fellow novelist Bret Easton Ellis. On September 15, with McInerney’s 1984 debut Bright Lights, Big City billed as “the definitive modern New York novel,” The Guardian asked him to consider the literary implications of ‘9/11.’ To that end, he recalled his conversation with Ellis: ‘I’m glad I don’t have a book coming out this month,’ I said - a selfish and trivial response to the disaster, but one I thought he would understand. Nobody was going to be talking about fiction this week. […] ‘I don't know how I’m going to be able to go back to this novel I’m writing,’ I said. The novel is set in New York, of course. The very New York which has just been altered forever. ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he said. (2001) But what exactly did he mean? Underpinning McInerney’s lament are several assumptions in need of explication - assumptions about the nature of literary fiction; about its relationship to social, political, and cultural actuality; and about what readers of literary fiction expect of those who write it - which have informed not only his own fiction after 9/11 but also the fiction of many of his contemporaries. Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays 134 9/11/2011 – 11/2011 In this essay, I chart the differing responses to those assumptions amongst those who share them and those who do not - writers and readers alike.
    [Show full text]
  • Diligent Realism in the Works of Roland Barthes, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Valeria Luiselli, and W
    City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 6-2021 Object Expression: Diligent Realism in the Works of Roland Barthes, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Valeria Luiselli, and W. G. Sebald John Knight The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4358 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] OBJECT EXPRESSION: DILIGENT REALISM IN THE WORKS OF ROLAND BARTHES, ELENA FERRANTE, KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD, VALERIA LUISELLI, AND W. G. SEBALD by JOHN KNIGHT A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2021 © 2021 JOHN KNIGHT All Rights Reserved ii Object Expression: Diligent Realism in the Works of Roland Barthes, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Valeria Luiselli, and W. G. Sebald by John Knight This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date André Aciman Chair of Examining Committee Date Bettina Lerner Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: André Aciman John Brenkman Giancarlo Lombardi THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Object Expression: Diligent Realism in the Works of Roland Barthes, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Valeria Luiselli, and W. G.
    [Show full text]
  • The Myth of 9/11
    THE MYTH OF 9/11 Zoë Formby Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2011 Abstract Conceptualisations of modern literary history are premised upon a series of dynastic successions, whereby one is able to trace, albeit simplistically, the evolution of the novel through its realist, modernist and postmodernist manifestations. Considered in this linear manner, the emergence of altered cultural movements is ordinarily attributed to a crisis within the former mood; as society ruptures and alters, existing modes of representation prove inadequate to reflect, or else engage with, the emergent structure of feeling. As an event with far-reaching implications, many critics and cultural commentators have attributed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 with the inception of an altered global mood. Moreover, in the days and weeks following 9/11, the publication of a number of articles penned by authors emphasised the extent to which the event had precipitated a profound crisis in representation. As an ever greater number of articles and studies emerged proclaiming the final death knell of postmodernism and the emergence of a more anxious global mood, so the myth of 9/11 quickly developed. The thesis rests upon a very simple question: to what extent has 9/11 precipitated a change in the novel? Through examining a wide range of fictions published largely within Britain in the last fifteen years, the study explores and ultimately dispels the assumptions of the myth. Rather than examining the fictional representation of 9/11, the study’s focus is on assessing the significance of the novel after the event, and moreover on interrogating the manner in which the terrorist attacks might have engendered a shift in the contemporary mood that is reflected in the subsequent novels published.
    [Show full text]
  • Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of ‘Metamodernism’ Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?
    ARTICLE Volume 1, Number 1 Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of ‘Metamodernism’ Post-millennial Post-postmodernism? MARTIN PAUL EVE University of Sussex, UK Open dissemination of this article from 2020 was made possible through the Philip Leverhulme Prize generously awarded to the author by The Leverhulme Trust. This article is openly distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. ARTICLE Volume 1, Number 1 Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of ‘Metamodernism’ Post-millennial Post-postmodernism? MARTIN PAUL EVE University of Sussex, UK ABSTRACT David Foster Wallace’s long standing ambition was to move beyond postmodern irony, which he claimed introduced ‘sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct’ into literature and culture. This article disturbs and troubles the concept of a millennial turning point for notions of a revived, ethically viable fiction. Arguing that if twenty-first-century fiction is easiest to categorize as metamodern, it is because of a shift of critical perspective overly rooted in positivist historical thinking, seeking a parallel progression in its object of study. Rather, this shift should now recognize that metamodern ontology and epistemology are also applicable to many postmodern fictions to their fictions. KEYWORDS metamodernism • postmodernism • post-postmodernism • Thomas Pynchon • utopia • David Foster Wallace ‘in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on,
    [Show full text]
  • CCI3 LITERATURE 1308 from TRADITIONAL to HYSTERICAL REALISM Ofelia Tofan (Al-Gareeb), Phd Student, ”Al. Ioan Cuza” Universit
    CCI3 LITERATURE FROM TRADITIONAL TO HYSTERICAL REALISM Ofelia Tofan (Al-Gareeb), PhD Student, ”Al. Ioan Cuza” University of Iași Abstract: We are living in a tormented world, and living itself became problematic, troublesome, tensioned. Such being the circumstances, the artists depict in their works an almost unrecognizable world. The artistic universe, echoing reality, is an amalgam of realisms rendering the complexity of the contemporary world, offering a synthetic and totalizing representation of it. Consequently, the actual state of affairs in art (literature included) oscillates between the traditional emotion and the postmodern incongruity, between completeness and rupture, it swings between hysteria and paranoia. Hysterical realism (phrase coined by the critic James Wood) or recherché postmodernism (phrase coined by the critic Dale Peck), subsumed to maximalism, falls under the literary tendencies of postmodernism, in its amalgam of styles and literary techniques. The maximalist genre is a creation of the American literature in the 20th century, further spreading to Europe, and it originates in the classic literature of the 19th century, hence, in the very traditional realism. Keywords: hysterical realism, recherché postmodernism, maximalism, realism, postmodernism. Humankind inhabits, nowadays, a convulsed world – economic, social or political crises threaten the so fragile order and peace, natural disasters concur at destroying an already precarious balance of the everyday life, apathetic, sceptic, blasé people are rushing around in a ceaseless Brownian motion, alienated, tormented by all sorts of needs, permanently in search of something and apparently never finding it. Mundane reality is fragmented, turned upside-down, traditional values are abandoned or transformed, adapted, the earth itself seems to decline, the water or the spontaneous fires consuming it, the atmosphere is rarefying, becoming unbreathable, adding to the sensation of suffocation.
    [Show full text]
  • The Theater of Moral Instruction in David Foster Wallace’S Infinite
    POST-POSTMODERN DIDACTICISM: THE THEATER OF MORAL INSTRUCTION IN DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S INFINITE JEST A RESEARCH PAPER SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE MASTER OF ARTS BY DAVID SPENCER DR. PATRICK COLLIER – ADVISOR PROF. MARK NEELY – ADVISOR BALL STATE UNIVERSITY MUNCIE, INDIANA MAY 2014 “If there are real values, and if those real values help sustain human life, then literature ought sometimes to mention them” — John Gardner (On Moral Fiction, 24) Can a return to morally responsible fiction salvage the authority of the contemporary novel? In the 21st century, the potential for a serious novel to have a measurable social impact seems intangible. Out of the ashes of postmodernist literature, a new brand of fiction is slowly starting to emerge with morally engaging writers such as Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, and the late David Foster Wallace making their mark. The current literary landscape is still heavily influenced, however, by postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo who still publish novels consistently, reminding us of their stature. Postmodernism is a slippery term for a movement that, in some ways, emphasized the futility of synthesizing objective truth from overwhelming amounts of subjective information. The formalist experiments which became prevalent in the post-1950s literature of Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and many others helped create new modes of criticism and led to new inquiries into the effects of mass media, technology, and postcolonial institutions. The idea of a novel following a hero through a conflict with a linear beginning, middle, and end became practically frivolous to a world recovering from a war that redefined conventional notions of morality, justice, and freedom.
    [Show full text]
  • New Realities of the Contemporary Novel
    Cultural Intertexts Year 2 Vol. 4 2015 New Realities of the Contemporary Novel Ofelia AL-GAREEB Abstract The aim of the present paper is to introduce some of the latest developments in the contemporary novel. In order to attain our goal, we shall proceed to firstly survey the cultural background, namely the (post)postmodernist period, then some tendencies concerning the literary genres, with an emphasis on three of the recent modes/genre – “hysterical realism”, “recherché postmodernism”, and the maximalist novel. In contemporary (literary) reality, the past is revisited, reconsidered, repeated, incorporated and modified, given a new meaning, and not necessarily imitated or copied, or negated; a reworking of the past to call for a new way of being in the future. The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first are characterized by an effusion of many new versions of realism, sometimes hybridized; the multi-faceted realism is a reality. Keywords: post-postmodernism, “hysterical realism”, “recherché postmodernism”, the maximalist novel, the multi-faceted realism. According to theorists, critics, historians and artists, the actual state of affairs in art (literature included), be it postmodernism, or post-postmodernism, digimodernism or pseudomodernism (Kirby 2009: 1) [1], automodernism (Samuels 2008: 219) [2], post-millennialism [3], altermodernism (Bourriaud 2009: 12) [4], metamodernism (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010) “oscillates between the modern and the postmodern, between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity”(Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010), swings between past and present, between hysteria and paranoia.
    [Show full text]
  • Savvas, T., & Coffman, C. (Eds.) (2019). Introduction: American
    Savvas, T. , & Coffman, C. (Eds.) (2019). Introduction: American Fiction after Postmodernism. Textual Practice, 33(2), 195-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1505322 Peer reviewed version Link to published version (if available): 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1505322 Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the author accepted manuscript (AAM). The final published version (version of record) is available online via Taylor and Francis at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1505322?scroll=top&needAccess=true. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. University of Bristol - Explore Bristol Research General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ Introduction: American Fiction after Postmodernism Theo Savvas & Christopher K. Coffman In a number of essays published between 1988 and 1993, David Foster Wallace presented a vision of contemporary American fiction that broke in some important regards from then-typical definitions of postmodernist writing. The most influential articulations of his various claims are those of ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,’ which appeared in a 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction and later in his 1997 collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. In this piece, Foster Wallace argues for what he variously labels ‘hyperrealism,’ ‘fiction of the image,’ and ‘post-postmodernism,’ a rejection of ironic modes and attitudes, which he sees as characteristic of postmodernist literature, and for a shift in the direction of a ‘single-entendre’ fiction, one that finds authenticity by supplanting or supplementing the generally unproductive impulses of critique with those of constructive moral engagement and the recovery of language’s referential function.
    [Show full text]
  • Novels of Immigration in London and Paris a Dissertation in Partial Satisfac
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Other Cities: Novels of Immigration in London and Paris A dissertation in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Nasia Anam 2016 © Copyright by Nasia Anam 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Other Cities: Novels of Immigration in London and Paris by Nasia Anam Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Aamir R. Mufti, Co-Chair Professor Ali Behdad, Co-Chair Other Cities: Novels of Immigration in London and Paris compares the formal differences of 20th and 21st century British South Asian novels and French North African novels that depict the lives and spaces of urban immigrant communities while attending to historical contingency, legal archives, and public debates. This dissertation argues that novels of immigration bridge a transition from the categorical binaries of (post)coloniality to the multitudes of globalization. Fluctuations in legal and public discourse surrounding immigration profoundly affect the lived spaces of immigrant populations, and the literary rendering of these communities and neighborhoods reveals the volatile and productive forms of identity, solidarity, and radicalness that arise in the immigrant enclave. I examine not only the encounter between Europeans and postcolonial immigrants in the enclave, but also different kinds of immigrant figures—the ii intellectual and the laborer, the urban and the rural, the Caribbean and the South Asian, the Antillean and the North African, the Muslim and the Hindu. The confrontation between different categories of immigrants plays out not only in the content of novels of immigration, but also on the level of form.
    [Show full text]