Broken Novels: Reflexivity, Authorship, and New Ethics in Contemporary Literature of the Americas

BROKEN NOVELS: REFLEXIVITY, AUTHORSHIP, AND NEW ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS As A thesis submitted to the faculty of 3G San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of -2oR- The Requirements for The Degree HUMM •AU Master of Arts in Humanities by Spencer Gregory Armada San Francisco, California May 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Broken Novels: Reflexivity, Authorship, and New Ethics in Contemporary Literature o f the Americas by Spencer Gregory Armada, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in Humanities. Professor and Chair, School of Humanities and Liberal Studies Laura Garcia Moreno Assistant Professor, Humanities Christopher Weinberger Assistant Professor, Comparative and World Literatures BROKEN NOVELS: REFLEXIVITY, AUTHORSHIP, AND NEW ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS Spencer Gregory Armada San Francisco 2017 This thesis examines the narrative techniques and representational strategies of four “experimental” novels published in the last decade by Ben Lemer, Valeria Luiselli, and Alejandro Zambra. I argue that these texts, which self-consciously raise concerns of their own efficacy in contemporary media landscapes, negotiate various formal authorities in order to elucidate spaces for ethical attentions within the cracks of dominant discursive modes. I take up Pieter Vermeulen’s notion of the “end of the novel” and Shameem Black’s notion of “border-crossing” fiction to push beyond the insights of “the ethical turn” in literary studies, which tend to suggest that the ethical value of literary adhere either to the demands liberal pluralism or the recognition of an unknowable alterity. “Broken authenticity” refers to a narrative possibility in which alterity remains an organizing principle in new forms of potential, collective or otherwise, relationships. I propose that these novels theorize the role of the author as one that initiates and mediates this oscillatory relationship between optimistic participation and detachment. Furthermore, I suggest that this relationship may constitute a way of bearing oneself in the world sincerely without becoming subsumed by totalizing discourses of moral or political responsibility. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis Chair, Thesis Committee Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to begin by thanking two lecturers in the Humanities department who have, without any professional obligation to do so, took it upon themselves to nurture my curiosity in world literature and critical theory beyond the scope of their undergraduate courses: Dr. Rob Thomas and Dr. Sean Connelly, thank you for going out of your way to help me experience firsthand certain aspects of academia one does not see in the classroom. I would also like to thank the faculty, emeritus faculty, and staff of the College of Humanities and Liberal Studies for their tireless support, with special thanks to Professor Mary Scott for agreeing to read my lackluster first attempts at cover letters, statements of purpose, and so on. The department of Comparative and World Literatures was a home away from home, so to speak, and I will be forever grateful for the many hours, unyielding patience, and scintillating passion of Professor Dane Johnson. I’d also like to thank Professor Ellen Peel for giving me the grammar lessons I somehow missed in secondary school and for pointing me in the direction of current discussions in narrative theory that pertained to my interests. I owe a special gratitude to the Kauffman and Magalios Foundation scholarships for giving me the time and space to amplify my scholarly pursuits in the last year and a half. I would like to thank all of the musicians I have had to opportunity to play with over the years, as well as the booksellers, writers, and very patient coffee-shop patrons for giving me a chance to construct a world-view that relates to, but is not bound to, the lessons learned in books. There will always be a special place in my heart and in my thinking for Professors Laura Garcia Moreno, Cristina Ruotolo, and Christopher Weinberger. I have not the space to detail the many contributions you have each made to who I am today, but I will say here that the thesis writing process was edifying and enjoyable, and I believe that to be in no small part a result of your being my committee. Finally, I’d like to thank my parents, who somehow predicated—many years ago— that this is where I would want to be and have stopped at nothing to help me find my way here. My brother also deserves recognition here, for he was the first to demand that my arguments, both about literature and otherwise, be grounded in facts. Last, but by no means least, I owe a great deal of gratitude to Miranda Saenz and our little pup who, among other things, have had to suffer my constant quotation from the texts of Ben Lemer more than anyone should ever have to. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Part One:.....................................................................................................................1 Part Two.....................................................................................................................41 Conclusion.................................................................................................................79 Works Cited................................................................................................................81 v 1 Part I: Contemporary Literature and “New Ethics” “It’s the motion that stays with you, not a stable set of meanings.” -Ben Lemer, “Robert Walser’s Disappearing Acts”, 2013 I. Productive Anxieties in Contemporary Writing Shameem Black opens her first monograph, published in 2010 and entitled Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels, by asking: “at the turn of the millennium, might it be possible to imagine an other without doing violence to one’s object of description?” (Black 1). This question is, in my view, paradigmatic of urgent concerns for both contemporary novelistic practice and theory, if not the humanist enterprise writ large. It is an understatement to describe the condition of literary and theoretical engagement in the historical present as anxiomatic, Lauren Berlant writes about how this anxiety compels her to be dissatisfied with current modes of writing as follows: The problem of detaching from the normal applies to writing criticism as much as it does to any object that coordinates intensities of projection into the historical present... in relating animating events to analytic generalization, I become progressively less clear about how best rhetorically to manage the problems as they crystallize, and more certain o f the need to invent new genres for the kinds of speculative work we call “theory” (Berlant 21, emphasis mine). At this moment literary and theoretical discourses are reflexively re-defining their legitimacy within a fractured social and political world by self-consciously exploring 2 new formal horizons they might take up. A brief gloss of recent titles in literary criticism— Wolfgang Iser’s “Why Literature Matters (1999), Deleuze’s Literature and Life (1997), Rita Felski’s Uses o f Literature (2008)— reveal this anxiety as being not only a condition of study, but an object of study as well. Two recently published monographs polemicize this anxiety paradigmatic of contemporary writing about the arts with their explicitly denunciatory titles: Ben Lemer’s The Hatred of Poetry (2016) and Pascal Quignard’s The Hatred of Music (1996/2016). Both texts meditate on the state of their respective crafts at or just beyond the turn of the new century to suggest radical practices of reception to rethink the efficacy of each form in light of their near total appropriation into the capitalist market. It isn’t that poetry or music have failed to open spaces for new types of living historically or in the present, but that a poem or a composition will never constitute “Poetry” or “Music”. In the gaps between artistic impulses and their articulation exist potentials that may, if attended to, open or gesture toward new orientations in our moment. At the vanguard of contemporary modes of address, writers and theorists are experimenting with new forms of writing—often across generic borders—to respond to and participate in the present by self-consciously occupying those gaps between discursive gaps. Maggie Nelson’s groundbreaking work, often described as “autotheory”—a term borrowed from Beatriz Preciado—typifies this longing for new forms, as it blends elements of queer memoir, critical theory, and poetry to situate contemporary creative writing between “free expression” and theoretical “negotiation” 3 to balance both the creative impulse and the very real but often imprecisely articulated demands of the present. (Nelson qtd in McCrary 2015). As this thesis goes on to address questions I feel are important when considering “contemporary” literature it is this anxious preoccupation with formal legitimacy that serves as my metric for contemporaneity. Though each of the novels studied here are published no more than one decade ago, contemporary also signifies herein a formal and thematic concern with how literature corresponds with, or perhaps responds to, the demands of its present. My primary end is to work through how each work studied manipulates or transcends novel

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