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Studies in the Novel
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.101 ![]() Number of Followers: 20 ![]() ISSN (Print) 0039-3827 - ISSN (Online) 1934-1512 Published by Project MUSE ![]() |
- “A Little Happy Sound”: Collective Labor, Ecocide, and Soundscapes in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland-
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Abstract: In his foundational study Noise Water Meat, Douglas Kahn asserts that “[s]ound inhabits its own time and dissipates quickly. Its life is too brief and ephemeral to attract much attention, let alone occupy the tangible duration favored by methods of research” (5). As a result, vision largely dominates scholarly discussion, with sound retreating imperceptibly into the background as academic attention is preoccupied with aesthetic descriptions in literature. To read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) is to engage in an experience defined by the “frenzy of the visible” (Frattarola 24), in which the taxonomically preoccupied narrative becomes entranced by the aesthetic appeal of the verdant landscape of Herland. ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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- Affective Subjects and Perceptions of Waste in Don Delillo’s
Underworld-
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Abstract: If the early paper waves were slightly hostile and mocking, and the middle waves a form of fan commonality, then this last demonstration has a softness, a selflessness. It is coming down from all points, laundry tickets, envelopes swiped from the office, there are crushed cigarette packs and sticky wrap from ice-cream sandwiches, pages from memo pads and pocket calendars, they are throwing faded dollar bills, snapshots torn to pieces, ruffled paper swaddles for cupcakes, they are tearing up letters they’ve been carrying around for years pressed into their wallets, the residue of love affairs and college friendships, it is happy garbage now, the fan’s intimate wish to be connected to the event, undeniably, in the ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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- Speculation’s Profit and Loss: Philosophical, Financial, and Fictional
Wagers in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder-
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Abstract: Fredric Jameson suggests Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder circulates as a highly specialized vehicle for investing literary energies, a derivative of sorts functioning as formalist “one off”: the novel fails to devise “a form that can be used over and over again....It is [instead]...a one-time device which must be thrown away once the trick—a singularity—has been performed” (“Aesthetics” 113). Remainder thus resembles specialized financial instruments, complicated devices bound to highly specified situations and outcomes, often incorporating calculations and algorithms themselves reflecting particularized scenarios that will not and could not be repeated, “more like a unique event than a contract” (118). ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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- Novel Lessons In NW
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Abstract: Over halfway through NW (2012), Zadie Smith links the classic novel of education to one of her protagonist’s childhoods:21. Jane EyreWhen being bullied Keisha Blake found it useful to remember that if you read the relevant literature or watched the pertinent movies you soon found that being bullied was practically a sign of a superior personality, and the greater the intensity of the bullying the more likely it was to be avenged at the other end of life, when the qualities that Keisha Blake possessed—cleverness, will-to-power—became ‘their own reward,’ and that this remained true even if the people in the literature and the movies looked nothing like you, came from a different socio-economic and historical ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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- Implicated Realism and the Environmentalism of the Rich in Ben
Lerner’s 10:04-
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Abstract: Rob Nixon lauds writer-activists who enact an “environmentalism of the poor” (4), amplifying the environmental-justice movements that resist neocolonial and neoliberal extraction. Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04, in contrast, depicts an environmentalism of the rich. 10:04’s protagonist—perhaps also named Ben1—is a successful writer and professor living in New York City. Ben spends his days writing, walking around the city, drinking coffee, and attending art shows. He also worries about global warming, though his life remains largely safe from its consequences. The conclusion of 10:04 emphasizes this disjuncture between Ben’s knowledge of climate change and his material relationship to it. Watching television after a ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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- Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair by Michael Dango (review)
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Abstract: Crisis Style proposes a new approach to the old enigma of “style” in literary and aesthetic theory; it also provides a new taxonomy of the styles of contemporary American literature and art, with particular attention to the genre of the novel, while drawing analogies between the form of the novel and that of other media. In doing so, it identifies and analyzes four major styles in contemporary American culture, four distinct aesthetic tendencies that transpire across media. While the aesthetic tendencies are distinct and the corresponding styles look different, Crisis Style argues that they originate from a shared context and serve a similar end: They are all coping tactics for a permanent perception of crisis that ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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- Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem by
Jennifer L. Fleissner (review)-
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Abstract: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s 1995 Critical Inquiry essay “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins Now” brashly opened with a list of “a few things theory today knows,” and the first was that the distance of “any account of human beings or cultures” from “a biological basis is assumed to correlate almost precisely with its potential for doing justice to difference, to contingency, to performative force, and to the possibility of change.” What they were describing was a field predominated by explanations via cultural and linguistic construction, and what they initiated was a turn back to the material: human biology, affects over “feelings” and “emotions,” nonhuman animals, things, enmeshments ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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- Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian
Realism by Carra Glatt (review)-
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Abstract: The pages of the Victorian novel are strewn with half-expressed desires and waylaid intentions. As a narrative progresses, it leaves in its wake a number of other, possible, outcomes. Those abandoned plots lurk in the complex form of the novel. In Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian Realism, Carra Glatt demonstrates how these unfulfilled possibilities trail and disrupt the central tale. The Victorian novel, Glatt tells us, “contains within itself the specter of its own discarded alternatives” (50).Glatt’s book joins recent work shining light on the non-dominant elements of the Victorian novel: its lengthy middles, stray impulses, and narrative antinomies. Glatt takes a ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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- Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American
Canon by Alexander Manshel (review)-
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Abstract: For much of the twentieth century, the genre of the historical novel didn’t rank high in literary esteem. The popular form was part of a previous era’s paraliterature, “condemned,” Henry James once wrote, to a “fatal cheapness” (qtd. in Manshel 16–17). Alexander Manshel’s Writing Backwards tells the fascinating story of how historical fiction has now become the most prized mode in American letters. Consider the numbers: Of contemporary novels taught in American universities, 70 percent are historical fiction. Around three-quarters of novels shortlisted for major American literary prizes in recent decades are historical fiction (4). Historical fiction earns 50 percent more scholarly citations than do novels set in ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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- Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of
Talk by Amy R. Wong (review)-
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Abstract: Amy R. Wong’s ambition in Refiguring Speech is an expansive one. She seeks, through an examination of late-Victorian fictions of empire, to effect a reconsideration of commonly held assumptions about the place of speech and communication in the novel in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Such a reconsideration is meant to function as a template for counter-intuitive readings of linguistic fluency and political possibility in Victorian fiction. Four novels—R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors (1891), and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors (1901)—make up her archive. These, she suggests, are rich with intimations of ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-05-24T00:00:00-05:00
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