Fictive Archive, Temporal Reparations, and Italy’s “Postcolonial Now”

The Whole Field of Postcolonial Literature John Marx (bio) Keywords postcolonial literature, postcolonial studies, Marxist criticism, globalization and literature, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson The Postcolonial Unconscious. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Neil Lazarus describes a field of postcolonial literature that is both too big and too small. Too big, in that this "vast and hitherto unevenly and indifferently theorized corpus" contains too many works published in too many places and circulating in too many ways to be neatly summed up (35). The field is too small, however, in that few postcolonial works actually garner anything like meaningful scholarly attention. Saying he is "tempted to overstate the case," Lazarus declares "that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie, whose novels—especially Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses—are endlessly, not to say catechistically, cited in the critical literature" (22). The point remains even if one is inclined to supplement this canon with another likely suspect or two—J.M. Coetzee, say, or Arundhati Roy. Many literary fields combine sublime abundance with restrictive canonicity, which means the situation Lazarus describes is hardly unique. As it might for any other field, furthermore, Lazarus believes that in postcolonial studies shuttling between too big and too small has produced intellectual stasis. The field's band of privileged authors and works has become so stock as to breed boredom, if not outright contempt. At the same time, the idea that a much larger range of works might be included in the postcolonial canon can only appear as a threat to supporters of the curriculum's current composition. Given that postcolonial literary studies has historically embraced its reputation as a [End Page 389] scholarly insurgency, it is noteworthy to find Lazarus arguing that the field has transformed into yet another subdiscipline interested more than anything else in policing its own boundaries. The goal of The Postcolonial Unconscious is to figure out how and why this has happened and what to do about it. After his Introduction frames the project with a telling history of the field, Lazarus's two most substantial chapters tackle the prospects for revising scholarship's relationship to postcolonial literature. The remaining three chapters of The Postcolonial Unconscious consider how the field might revisit three major theorists: Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Fredric Jameson. When he distinguishes between postcolonial literature in all of its incipient variety and postcolonial studies in its increasingly narrow institutional form, Lazarus makes clear that he is not against institutionalization per se. To the contrary, what he would like is to build a postcolonial studies that is adequate to its literary objects. Adequacy is a key term in The Postcolonial Unconscious, and captures the ideal of a "vast, scattered, heterogeneous, but still, in principle, systematisable archive of literary works" (115). Adequacy will only be achieved, Lazarus supposes, by opposing "the ideological and epistemological assumptions that have tended to frame postcolonial studies" while avoiding the pitfall of replacing one programmatic set of assumptions with another (36). It also means specifying what a postcolonial studies informed not only by literary criticism but also by philosophy, art history, sociology, anthropology, and various area studies has to learn from such a diverse, but "systematisable" body of literary works. "There is a clear discrepancy or disjunction," Lazarus explains, "between what a very large amount of this literature has tended to show and what most postcolonialist critics have tended to register as significant. My proposal is that where the two forms of discourse (that is, '"postcolonial" literature' and 'postcolonial criticism') diverge, we would do well to think hard about the understandings in play in the former before moving to ratify those prevailing in the latter" (115). The task at hand, he argues, is figuring out the best method for discovering what literature can show scholars across the interdisciplinary range of postcolonial studies. Developing a cultural materialist perspective, Lazarus tests the limits of what postcolonial studies has been able to think about its foundational theoretical texts as well as its literary ones. The notion that postcolonial studies should have conceptual limits to test is not necessarily intuitive. Even though postcolonial in...

A robust body of research using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has explored the effect of external messages on individual affective responses and behavior, typically at a single point in time. Missing from this micro-level analysis is a careful assessment of the ways in which individuals process information, whether their internal cognitions are communicated in narrative structure, and what the durability of any narrative structure is over time. We address this gap by examining (1) the extent to which individuals recall "memorable messages" in narrative form (e.g., the use of characters and morals) and with what content (e.g., who is cast in these character roles) and (2) whether individuals' narrative form and content change across time. Memorable messages are pieces of information that are remembered for an extended period of time. We draw on data derived from a multi-wave panel survey of residents in six U.S. states (Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Washington) during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents were asked to recall a memorable message, anything they heard or read that has shaped how they think about the risk of COVID-19. We find that participants articulate recalled memorable messages in narrative form about two-thirds of the time, consistent with how the NPF expects homo narrans to make sense of complex information. However, narratives containing morals are articulated less frequently than those using characters alone. Additionally, individuals' narrative content changes over time to include new information such as new policy solutions (e.g., mask wearing). Notably, recalled messages lose their narrative form over time.

IntroductionThe perception of the archive as the warehouse of tradition is inflected with the notion that what it stores is also removed from the everyday, at once ancient but also irrelevant, standing still outside time. Yet, if the past is of any relevance, the archive cannot maintain a rigid fixity that does not intersect with the present. In the work of the Atlas Group, the fabrication of “archival material” reflects what Hal Foster has termed an “archival impulse” that is constructed of multiple temporalities. The Atlas Group archive interrogates forms that are at once still, excavated from life, while still being in the present. In the process, the reductive singularity of the archive as an immobile monument is opened up to the complexity of a radical stillness through which the past enters the present in a moment of recognition. What is still, and what is still there, intersect in the productivity of a stillness that cuts through an undifferentiated continuity. This juncture echoes the Benjaminian flash which heralds the arrival of past in the presentTo articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. (Benjamin, Theses)Klee’s Angelus Novus stands still between past and future as a momentary suspension of motion brings history and prophecy into the present. For “the historian of the dialectic at a standstill”, Walter Benjamin, historical materialism was not simply a means of accessing the past in the present, but of awakening the potential of the future (Tiedemann 944-945). This, Rolf Tiedemann suggests, was the revolution of historical perception that Benjamin wanted to bring about in his unfinished Arcades Project (941). By carrying the principle of montage into history, Benjamin indicates an intention “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event” (Benjamin Arcades 461). This principle had already been alluded to in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” where he had written that a historical materialist cannot do without a present in which time stands still, and later, that it is in the arrest of thought that what has been and what will be “crystallizes into a monad” (Benjamin “Theses” 262-263).Everywhere in Benjamin’s writings on history, there is something of the irreducibility of the phrase “standing still”. Standing still: still as an active, ongoing form of survival and endurance, still as an absence of movement. The duality of stillness is amplified as semantic clarity vacillates between one possibility and another: to endure and to be motionless. Is it possible to reduce “standing still” to a singularity? Benjamin’s counsel to take hold of memory at the “moment of danger” might be an indication of this complexity. The “moment of danger” emerges as the flash of the past in the present, but also the instant at which the past could recede into the inertia of eternity, at once a plea against the reduction of the moment into a “dead time” and recognition of the productivity of stillness.Something of that “flash” surfaces in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Michel Foucault: “a first light opens up things and brings forth visibilities as flashes and shimmerings, which are the ‘second light’” (Deleuze 50). The first flash makes “visibilities visible” and determines what can be seen in a given historical period, while the second makes “statements articulable” and defines what can be said (Deleuze 50). These visibilities and statements, however, are distributed into the stratum and constitute knowledge as “stratified, archivized, and endowed with a relatively rigid segmentarity” (Deleuze 61). Strata are historically determined, what they constitute of perceptions and discursive formations varies across time and results in the presence of thresholds between the stratum that come to behave as distinct layers subject to splits and changes in direction (Deleuze 44). Despite these temporal variations that account for differences across thresholds, the strata appear as fixed entities, they mimic rock formations shaped over thousands of years of sedimentation (Deleuze and Guattari 45). Reading Deleuze on Foucault in conjunction with his earlier collaborative work with Felix Guattari brings forth distant shadows of another “stratification”. A Thousand Plateaus is notably less interested in discursive formations and more concerned with “striation”, the organisation and arrangement of space by the diagrams of power. Striated space is state space. It is offset by moving in the opposite direction, effectively turning striated space into smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari 524).Whether on striation or stratification, Deleuze’s work exhibits more than a cautionary distrust of processes of classification, regulation, and organization. Despite the flash that brings visibilities and statements into being, stratification, as much as striation, remains a technique of knowledge shaped by the strategies of power. It is interesting however, that Deleuze sees something as indeterminate as a flash, creating structures that are as determined as stratum. Yet perhaps this is a deceptive conjecture since while the strata appear relatively rigid they are also “extremely mobile” (Deleuze and Guattari 553). Foucault had already given an indication that what the archaeological method uncovers is not necessarily suspended, but rather that it suspends the notion of an absolute continuity (Archaeology 169). He suggests that “history is that which transforms documents into monuments” (7). The task of archaeology, it would seem, is to recover documents from monuments by demonstrating rather than reversing the process of sedimentation and without necessarily relying on a motionless past. While there is a relative, albeit interstratically tentative, stillness in the strata, absolute destratification proceeds towards deterritorialisation through incessant movement (Deleuze and Guattari 62-63).If A Thousand Plateaus is any indication, the imperative for the creative thinker today seems to be stirring in this direction: movement, motion, animation. Whatever forms of resistance are to be envisioned, it is motion, rather than stillness, that emerges as a radical form of action (Deleuze and Guattari 561). The question raised by these theoretical interventions is not so much whether such processes are indeed valuable forms of opposition, but rather, whether movement is always the only means, or the most effective means, of resistance? To imagine resistance as “staying in place” seems antithetical to nomadic thinking but is it not possible to imagine moments when the nomad resists not by travelling, but by dwelling? What of all those living a life of forced nomadism, or dying nomadic deaths, those for whom movement is merely displacement and loss? In Metamorphoses Rosi Braidotti reflects upon forced displacement and loss, yet her emphasis nonetheless remains on “figurations”, mappings of identity through time and space, mappings of movement (2-3). Braidotti certainly does not neglect the victims of motion, those who are forced to move, yet she remains committed to nomadism as a form of becoming. Braidotti’s notion of “figurations” finds a deeply poignant expression in Joseph Pugliese’s textual maps of some of these technically “nomadic” bodies and their movement from the North African littoral into the waters of the Mediterranean where they eventually surface on southern European shores as corpses (Pugliese 15). While Braidotti recognizes the tragedy of these involuntary nomads, it is in Pugliese’s work that this tragedy is starkly exposed and given concrete form in the figures of Europe’s refugees. This is movement as death, something akin to what Paul Virilio calls inertia, the product of excessive speed, the uncanny notion of running to stand still (Virilio 16).This tension between motion and stillness surfaces again in Laura Marks’ essay “Asphalt Nomadism.” Despite wanting to embrace the desert as a smooth space Marks retorts that “smooth space seems always to be elsewhere” (Marks 126). She notes the stability of the acacia trees and thorny shrubs in the desert and the way that nomadic people are constantly beset with invitations from the “civilising forces of religion and the soporific of a daily wage” (Marks 126). Emphatically she concludes that “the desert is never really ‘smooth’, for that is death” (Marks 126). On this deviation from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the desert as smooth space she concludes: “we who inherit their thinking need to stay on the ground: both in thought, moving close to the surface of concepts, and literally, remaining alert to signs of life in the sand and the scrub of the desert” (Marks 126). In Marks’ appeal for groundedness the tension between motion and stillness is maintained rather than being resolved through recourse to smoothness or in favour of perpetual movement. The sedentary and still structures that pervade the desert remain: the desert could not exist without them. In turn we might ask whether even the most rigorous abstraction can convince us that the ground between radical nomadism and perpetual displacement does not also need to be rethought. Perhaps this complexity is starkest when we begin to think about war, not only the potentiality of the war-machine to destabilize the state (Deleuze and Guattari 391), but war as the deterritorialisation of bodies, lives and livelihoods. Is the war of nomadism against the state not somehow akin to war as the violence that produces nomadic bodies through forced displacement? One of the questions that strikes me about the work of the Atlas Group, “an imaginary non-profit research foundation established in Beirut to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon” (Raad 68) through the production and exhibition of “archival” material, is whether their propensity towards st

<i>Neil Lazarus</i> The Postcolonial Unconscious<i>The Postcolonial Unconscious</i>. Neil Lazarus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+299.

The article is a first survey of studies concerning immigrant literature in Italy in the second half of the 20th century. The phrase ‘immigrants’ literature' here means all those texts which have been written and published in Italian by individuals who have immigrated since the 1970s, but whose first works have been published in the late 1980s. More specifically, the essay attempts to focus on how Italian and foreign critics - be they academic or independent - have mostly approached the relationship between literature and immigration in Italy since the 1990s. The article aims at highlighting the main issues and outlining the development of some critical trends which have made visible and tried to interpret the interaction of two apparently extraneous ambits: on the one hand the experience of immigration and the production of texts in Italian by immigrants, on the other hand its interrelationship with the canon of contemporary Italian literature.

In his book The Postcolonial Unconscious , Neil Lazarus writes that postcolonial scholars today ought … to redress a long-standing imbalance in postcolonial literary studies by focusing anew on realist writing. The point is that, inasmuch as the dominant aesthetic dispositions in postcolonial literary studies have from the outset reflected those in post-structuralist theory generally, the categorical disparagement of realism in the latter field has tended to receive a dutiful – if wholly unjustified and unjustifiable – echo in the former… There is no good reason for scholars in postcolonial studies to hang on to this dogma today.(82) It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that postcolonial studies – as an academic field based mainly in literary departments – has generally demonstrated a lack of interest in the formal complexities of literary realism. To many postcolonial critics, realism as a literary form fits poorly with the field's dogmas and values – the established theoretical concepts that characterize the orthodox postcolonial text analysis. The theoretical vocabulary – mainly derived from poststructuralist theory, as Lazarus points out – has on the one hand been crucial in terms of the formation of postcolonial studies as an academic field; on the other hand, the at times exaggerated use of concepts such as hybridity, mimicry, catachresis, the in-between, and so on means that many postcolonial literary readings have tended to say more about postcolonial studies as an academic institution and as a theoretical orientation than about the texts themselves. Often, postcolonial critics have focused on anti-realist literary forms – that is, forms seen as corresponding to the institutionalized postcolonial vocabulary – whereas literary forms belonging to the so-called realist tradition have typically been read along a thematic register or labeled inherently Eurocentric, essentialist, and homogenizing. Realism as a literary form constitutes, in other words, a kind of blind spot in postcolonial studies, despite the fact that a considerable amount of postcolonial literature belongs to this tradition.

Postcolonial studies have addressed issues of identity, resistance, and imperial legacy. The book 'Navigating Boundaries: A Comprehensive Study of Postcolonial Theory and Literature' by Dr. Shuchi Agrawal, Professor of English at Amity University, Noida, is an insightful contribution to the field of postcolonial studies, analysing literary works from a variety of geographical regions. The book broadly covers the intersections of cultures, history, and societies and vividly talks about the theoretical frameworks that have risen as the outcome of colonialism. It includes Africa, the Caribbean, and India, and provides in-depth research on key postcolonial theories. The book is rich in its use of vernacular languages practiced by postcolonial critics and theorists representing a new wave of authenticity and originality in writing. The book's title aptly emphasizes the role of navigating boundaries in postcolonial literature, as it explores and reflects the intricacies of identity, history, power, migration, cultural hybridity and resistance in the aftermath of colonialism. The book empowers marginalized voices and give space for alternative perspectives, in order to challenge dominant narratives of power and identity. The book talks about variety of theorists ranging from ancient to modern in a systematic manner. The division of the book into eight chapters along with an introduction and conclusion makes it easier for the readers to select the topic as per their areas of interest.

Readers of Oz:Young and Old, Old and New Historicist M. David Westbrook (bio) Before he published his first Oz book in 1900, L. Frank Baum spent much of his working life in sales. At various times during his pre-Oz career he ran a retail outlet for his father's "Oil Works," owned a five and dime in the Dakota territory, worked as a traveling salesman, and published a professional journal for window dressers (Baum and MacFall 53, 59, 79, 93). It is not surprising, then, that much of the academic writing on Baum highlights his consistent concern with economic issues and with the culture of consumption. Henry Littlefield and Hugh Rockoff have each developed interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a populist allegory that uses the images of the yellow brick road and the Emerald City to address the debate between advocates of the gold standard and advocates of "greenbacks." William Leach, in turn, has discussed Baum as a theorist of consumer culture. Focusing on Baum's professed ambition to write "a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out" (Wizard Introduction), Leach reads this goal as an attempt to counter the Puritan work ethic with a philosophy more appropriate to the pleasures of consumer culture (251). These approaches to the economic subtext of the Oz books could safely be classified as "historicist"; Littlefield, Rockoff, and Leach all use Oz to shed light on the economic philosophies and commercial cultures of turn-of-the-century America, devoting little attention to the questions of language or narrative form that might characterize a more "literary" approach. Thus while they perform the admirable work of placing Oz in a historical context, these authors run the risk of ignoring what is unique about Oz in particular and narrative more generally as a cultural form. Trends in the literary criticism of the last two decades ostensibly offer an antidote to the dangers of purely historicist use of literature. Drawing on poststructuralist literary theory, the tradition of twentieth-century radical critique, and the historian's breadth of contextual knowledge, new historicists portray literature's relation to a broader cultural history as a complex encounter between diverse but interwoven texts and discourses. While trying to avoid the ahistoricism of formalist new criticism, new historicists have generally attended not only to problems of language in literature, but also to the "literary" language (metaphor, rhetorical figures, plot, and so on) in nonliterary texts in an effort to bridge the gap between the literary and the historical. Oz has its own new historicist treatments, including two excellent articles by Stuart Culver entitled "What Manikins Want" and "Growing Up in Oz." Like some of the "old historicist" approaches to Oz, these treatments focus on the economic dimension of Baum's fantasies. Rather than viewing the Oz books as transparent reflections of history or doctrine, however, Culver shows Baum synthesizing contemporaneous discourses in order to construct narrative sense and forms of subjectivity appropriate to his position within a consumer economy. I would like to suggest, however, that a new historicist approach such as Culver's does not offer the only or the best solution to the problem of bridging the gap between the disciplines of history and literary studies. Nor does such an approach fully equip us to deal with the special issues and problems raised by children's literature. Through a critique of the first of Culver's two essays and through my own analysis of the economic subtext in Baum's stories, I hope to show that Culver's distinctly new historicist habit of stitching together economic discourse and Baum's own narrative discourse actually works to obscure the literary economy of the Oz books. With our critical gaze focused more closely on the local specificity of Baum's writing than on a textuality that encompasses all economy, we can see that Baum was exploring the discourses that shaped the specific industry in which he made his living—the business of producing and reproducing texts. In this context, Baum's characteristic plots and metaphors appear as literary forms that have material effects. In using his...

This paper addresses the ways in which performative imagination in a restless social context operates through a case study of the dancer and performer Mihran Tomasyan’s performance You’re Not a Fish After All. Originally created in 2010 after the assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, the artist developed and adapted his work throughout the years following a series of assassinations and traumatic historical events in Turkey. This paper particularly analyses its reinterpretation within and after Istanbul’s Gezi Park movement, an event that became a pillar of a democratic revival of Turkish society where the Gezi Park in Taksim was occupied by activists and ‘creative performativity’ inhabited the space-time of action. The question arises as to how performance, both as an artistic genre and in the form of political action, challenges the present circumstances and contributes to the construction of alternative space-times. I argue that Tomasyan’s work-in-progress performance reveals the ongoingness of events (Robin Wagner-Pacifici, What is an Event?, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017) while holding an element of surprise. It also incorporates an ‘archival impulse’ (Hal Foster, ‘An archival impulse’, October 110: 3–22, 2004) to revive the present through the acts of remembering and reminding collectively. This article analyzes the ways in which the artist fostered a performative social imagination that transcended the time and space of the physical performance.

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

In this thesis, I inquire into the viability of approaching postcolonial fiction through an interrogation of literary form, in lieu of reading postcolonial fiction through a primary focus on historicity and thematic references to socio-political events. At the heart of my thesis is a consideration of the “contradiction” (Boehmer, “A Postcolonial Aesthetic” 170) between the aesthetic form and political content of postcolonial literature, which frustrates attempts at approaching postcolonial literature through an aesthetic appraisal premised upon the interrogation of form. I begin by examining the ontological complications of postcolonial literature that give rise to the “contradiction” mentioned above. Next, I postulate a possible approach to a formal, aesthetic appraisal of postcolonial literature consonant with the latter’s function as political art. In particular, I depart from a consideration of (postcolonial) literary form as a mere examination of the way a work appears; instead, I forward the argument that postcolonial literary form operates as an organising strategy that structures the relation between the reader and the subject matter of the text, and which additionally subjects the reader to the political concerns of the text. By extension, I make the suggestion that the aesthetic form of postcolonial literature itself does political work. With a close examination of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), then, I test the viability of my claim: that the essence of the postcolonial literary aesthetic is not situated in the appearance of the work – but that it, more importantly, is situated in the political work that the postcolonial text does.

The following thesis surveys artistic utilizations of the archive and underscores its role as a tool for knowledge disruption. Fluctuating between theoretical meanderings, autobiographical reflections, and the analysis of artwork, I propose one avenue in which to reinvigorate conversations around the archive began by Derrida in Archive Fever and by Hal Foster in “Archival Impulse.” Approaching the archive as both a theoretical container and as a charged artist medium, I argue for a new archival impulse — one that embraces opaqueness and mess over clarity and order. Comprised of eight individual sections, and a parallel dialogue presented in the form of extended footnotes, the thesis borrows formal and stylistic strategies from arenas of creative non-fiction, diaristic writing, and art historical analysis. Archive scholars — Derrida, Foster, Michel Foucault, Annet Dekker — are cross-examined with thinkers in fields of queer theory, ecology, art history, philosophy, media studies, performance studies, and cultural studies — Jose Munoz, Lee Edelman, Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Hito Steyerl, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Nicholas de Villiers. Contextualizing artwork made during my time in graduate school through contemporary artists working in the fields of painting, performance and installation, I outline how this research has led me to define a particularly artistic subcategory of archival discourse capable of capturing the pulse of an American undercurrent. Artists building with and through the counter-archive look backward to engage with the potentiality of what has not yet come to pass. Their unorthodox strategies for collecting and sharing history employ the archive not as merely a bank of historical knowledge, but in fact, as a formally antagonistic counter to the ways in which history and other forms of knowledge production are weaponized as systems of oppression.

Narrative is the primary medium through which experience is represented, remembered and shared with others. It has the tendency to unify experience in an abstract linear form. The degree to which this is done is designated narrative form. Mori uses a multidimensional single case analysis to explore how the form of a narrative differs between an experience of real contact with the environment and an experience communicated by another or a 'real' experience repeated several times in conversation. I commend Mori's experimental setup as modeling everyday life activities and for arriving at a theory that applies to all cases. However, I argue (using data from my own experiment on narrative and remembering) that the idiographic approach can be fruitfully supplemented with (1) an analysis of the sample as a whole and (2) narrative content in addition to form.

Ben Okri, the Aesthetic, and the Problem with Theory Sarah Fulford (bio) I'm all for enriching the deep roots of our continuing aesthetic experience. We shouldn't despair. Capitalism wins but capitalism also loses. Capitalism will always breed its resistance—its anti-capitalism. —Ben Okri Ben Okri's publication of his Booker Prize winning novel, The Famished Road, in 1991 hailed the creation of a new aesthetic that goes beyond the traditional nationalist post-colonial agendas of his Nigerian predecessors Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. While interviewing Okri it came as no surprise that he shrugs off not only national labels, but also the theoretical categories of post-colonial, postmodernist, and magic realist.1 In an interview with Jane Wilkinson, he offers an explicit statement about how he sees the relation between colonialism and the aesthetic which is worth quoting at length: There's been too much attribution of power to the effect of colonialism on our consciousness. Too much has been given to it. We've looked too much in that direction and have forgotten our own aesthetic frames. Even though that was there and took place and invaded our social structure, it's quite possible that it didn't invade our spiritual and aesthetic and mythical internal structures, the way in which we perceive the world. Because if one were going to be investigative, one would probably say that a true invasion takes place not when a society has been taken over by another society in terms [End Page 233] of its infrastructure, but in terms of its mind and its dreams and its myths, and its perception of reality. If the perception of reality has not been fundamentally, internally altered, then the experience itself is just transitional. There are certain areas of the African consciousness which will remain inviolate.2 Okri undermines the tacit idea of much post-colonial criticism, which is that colonialism has an all-pervasive impact on the colonized culture. By challenging the importance of colonialism within "the African consciousness," Okri also questions the most Marxist of Marxist thought as he imagines an uncolonized cultural space within the spirit of the people that can be both reached and confirmed by the aesthetic.3 If Okri were English, we might mistake him for a Leavisite or Arnoldian liberal humanist, but his view of the power of art is far more complicated than that of traditional English literary criticism. As Okri draws on Yoruban culture, aesthetics and spirituality are inextricably linked and colonialism has the power to overwhelm neither. But as C. D. Balzer has argued, post-colonial criticism and post-colonial literature is often driven by the assumption that a post-colonial culture is inevitably oppressed by the colonial conditions in which it has been produced. Worse still is the utilitarian approach of some post-colonial critics as they measure the value of post-colonial writers in terms of their ability to offer us a decolonizing politics.4 A key culprit within this school of post-colonial criticism is Jacqueline Bardolph, whose article on The Famished Road receives an impassioned critique by Balzer. Turned off by Bardolph's prescriptive post-colonial agenda, Balzer draws our attention to the way it "compels her to seek closure and overt political statement, and blinds her to the wedge of possibility for spiritual progress that Okri's novel drives into post- Independence, post-Civil war Nigeria."5 As she explores Okri's adoption of a Yoruban aesthetic within his writing, Balzer calls for us to read The Famished Road "in its particularity" rather than in accordance with "an assumption of some vague 'post-colonial situation.'"6 Once again, the unfashionable word "spiritual" emerges as Balzer recognizes how in Okri's writing, the aesthetic and the spiritual mutually co-exist. Balzer's article is important because it raises questions about the relation between aesthetics and politics in Okri's work. Her article suggests that if we assess the politics of Okri's writing according to an exclusively post-colonial agenda we miss the impact of his aesthetic vision. By way of developing Balzer's thinking further, the thesis of this essay is that we can begin to distinguish between...

The editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Stig Abell, recently remarked: "I'm just dreading . . . a great British novelist—Ian McEwan springs ineluctably to mind—doing his lockdown novel where three families across the country, each experiencing lockdown differently, learn something about the human condition . . . a sort of state-of-the-nation novel" (The TLS Podcast). Abell's interviewee, the novelist Will Eaves, conceded that "there are obviously people who like to write very close to the grain of events and to do it . . . very consciously" (TLS). The coronavirus crisis has prompted many readers to turn to literary texts for insights, with Defoe's A Journal of a Plague Year and Camus's The Plague flying off the shelves (TLS). Abell and Eaves's comments also refer to the peculiarly overt—you might even say artless—ways in which recent novelists have recorded "the grain of events."One of the dominant literary strategies for addressing contemporary crises is the speedily written and quickly published novel. Howard Jacobson wrote Pussy: A Novel (2017) in "a fury of disbelief" after Donald Trump's election, with the book coming out a scant five months later (Scholes). Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel (2008) chronicles the summer and autumn of 2007 and was published a mere six months after the last event it depicts. This article focusses on Ali Smith's Autumn (2016) and Olivia Laing's Crudo: A Novel (2018), both of which were written and published with unusual speed to make them feel as contemporary as possible. Situating these novelistic experiments in the context of growing fears about the novel's diminishing cultural power in the age of instant communication, my readings of Autumn and Crudo consider how Smith's and Laing's aesthetics of immediacy bring age-old questions about contemporaneity and temporality to the fore.The new proclivity for quickly written novels focuses particular questions about the writing we call contemporary fiction. How close to the present does a novel have to be in order to be considered contemporary? Is the novel still a contemporary form? Can anything written in such an off-the-cuff way as Autumn and Crudo be considered a novel at all? After all, three of the four books named above assert their status as novels in their titles, as if there was some doubt. The speedily written novels of the late 2000s and 2010s emerged in the context of prevalent anxieties in the literary press about the apparent outdatedness of the novel. The genre was once about newness, about novelty, but with the advent of the internet and its new modes of instant communication and publication, many commentators seem to feel that the novel's time has passed. In response, Smith's and Laing's up-to-the-minute representations of contemporary life, bristling with tweets and current affairs, bring the genre's original connotation of newness to the fore. As we shall see, both authors have described their works as attempts to render twenty-first-century modernity's accelerated temporality in novelistic form. Matthias Nilges, on the other hand, has objected that the contemporary experience of "immediacy" is produced by neoliberalism (362), so novels that "simply replicate" this experience are "not only bad at dealing with neoliberalism," but "bad at being novels" (361).1I propose that neither the authors' rationales nor Nilges's argument offer sufficient accounts of Autumn and Crudo. Rather, to read these texts is to experience the impossibility of temporal, communicative, and representational immediacy. The authors argue that their novels attempt to replicate the feeling of an eternal instantaneity, an oversaturated now. However, my readings will show that these attempts are bound to fail. Rather than successfully rendering immediacy, the novels stage writing's inherent failure to be immediate. They foreground the fact that all writing, communication, and experience are structured by a kind of gap or spacing. This is just as true of apparently instantaneous media such as tweets and blogs as it is of the novel. The novel, as a kind of writing in which this non-immediacy is simply more obvious, therefore reemerges as a peculiarly relevant form for thinking about the illusoriness of contemporary immediacy. Smith's and Laing's fictions of immediacy, then, are about the fictionality of immediacy.Autumn begins: "It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again" (Smith 3). Rewriting the first passage of A Tale of Two Cities, Smith makes a broad-brush characterisation of her historical moment—but, like Dickens, she ironizes such statements. The object of Dickens's facetiousness is the kind of pat epochal thinking that results in generalisations like "it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair" (1). Smith's version overbalances the cadence of Dickens's oppositions by forcing the repetition of "worst," substitutes meaningless tautology in place of his rhetorical contrasts, and punctures any notion of historical exception or specificity with that eye-rolling "again." Autumn's opening lines, then, announce the novel's preference for capturing atmosphere and mood rather than undertaking historical analysis. They also point to the difficulty of such analysis when the "times" are so chaotic.Smith wrote Autumn over the course of a few months in 2016, and her publisher agreed to bring it out almost as soon as she delivered her manuscript, with the publication date falling in October of that year. Smith says, "I knew now it was possible, after Hamish Hamilton made such a beautiful finished book-form for How to Be Both in a matter of weeks (!), to turn a book around quite speedily compared to the usual time it takes, and this excited me about how closely to contemporaneousness a finished book might be able to be in the world, and yet how it could also be, all through, very much about stratified, cyclic time" (Anderson). Smith's experiment to discover "how closely to contemporaneousness a finished book might be able to be in the world" recalls the original meaning of the designation "novel"; as Smith notes, "the name we've given to the novel form also means new, something new, something so new it's news" (Anderson). Autumn is a response, a riposte, to the feeling registered by "death of the novel" polemics that the novel has become exhausted and outmoded (Vermeulen 1).By framing the possibility of Autumn in terms of her publisher's capacity to physically produce the "book-form" of her texts in short order, Smith hints at one of the key reasons for the apparently waning cultural relevance of the genre of the novel. The internet allows for the instantaneous publication and dissemination of texts; the capacity for these writings to capture and respond to the moment puts them in contention for what was formerly the novel's status as the genre of the new. As a result, the novel is increasingly imagined as a slow and lumbering genre; for example, when introducing Smith on a BBC radio program about topicality in literature, cultural historian Matthew Sweet argued that the digital and news media were now facing "competition from more literary forms of writing, forms that have not always been known for their agility and topicality: the novel, the poem, the play" ("Writing Real Life"). There is an irony here, of course: Sweet's wording slightly glosses over the fact that the novel's apparently newfound topicality is in fact a return to its original animating spirit.Crudo is born of a similar impulse. The fabric of Laing's novel is woven from Kathy Acker citations, tweets, current affairs, and autobiographical material—hence the title, which refers to a style of raw cuisine: these are found materials, put together quickly and without editing. In conversation with Smith, Laing said of writing Crudo that "the now pours onto you day by day, and I just wanted to write down what it feels like to be wrenched under it" ("Crudo: Olivia Laing and Ali Smith"). Her process was designed to reflect this feeling: "I was writing down everything that came my way, everything that happened went in, so if Trump tweeted something about the troops or nuclear war it went in in his own words, nothing's in quote marks" ("Crudo"). Recalling David Shields's description in Reality Hunger of works that incorporate "larger and larger chunks of reality," Crudo is made up of the stuff of the now (3).2Smith's and Laing's experiments also bring to mind the historical precedent of Samuel Richardson's "writing to the moment" (Dale 57), which he describes in his preface to Clarissa as "letters . . . written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects . . . abound not only with critical situations, but with what may be called instantaneous Descriptions and Reflections. . . . Much more lively and affecting" (qtd. in Dale 57). Like the letters in Clarissa—and like the originally serialized chapters of A Tale of Two Cities—Smith's and Laing's texts have the feeling of installments, dispatches. Both novels are the first in a proposed quartet, with Smith's "Seasonal" project now completed, though it is unclear if Laing will follow suit (Briggs). We are waiting to see what happens next, both in life and in these novel series. As with Richardson's theory of "writing to the moment," so an aesthetics of the "instantaneous" or immediate is central to Autumn and Crudo.Both novels formally mimic the internet's apparently immediate dissemination of texts. They represent a contemporary sense of speeded-up, disordered time, emphasizing the ways in which rolling news, mobile phones, and the internet seem to accelerate experience to the point of absolute simultaneity, with everything happening at once and news reaching us through our phones as soon as it occurs. Elisabeth, the protagonist of Autumn, reflects: "Someone killed an MP. . . . But it's old news now. Once it would have been a year's worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff" (Smith 38). Crudo's Kathy "missed the sense of time as something serious and diminishing, she didn't like living in the permanent present of the id" (Laing 43). The "permanent present" is associated with the infantile demand for immediacy, the closing of the gap between desire and gratification, because the id is the part of the psyche that demands the instant realisation of desire. It is the ego which manages the necessities of waiting for fulfilment and tolerating disappointment. Laing's use of psychoanalytic vocabulary points to the widespread fear (which I will discuss more fully later on) that the immediacy of the internet allows cognitive and psychic resources like attention and patience to wane, causing both personal and cultural regression.Reflecting the contemporary experience of a "permanent present" in their writerly processes, Smith and Laing both frame twenty-first-century temporality as an oversaturated now. My readings of these texts ultimately suggest that, in fact, their representations of this temporality cannot help but foreground the philosophical impossibility of immediacy. However, since there is no question that the novels do also mimic the feeling of an accelerated, disordered temporality, I first want to establish both what this putative experience of immediacy feels like and how it has been conceptualized in public discourse and literary theory. Peter Boxall describes this experience and its potential consequences for fiction as follows: "The increasingly frictionless synchronisation of global culture, rather than delivering an increasingly secure sense of location, of homeliness in our space and time, has delivered us to a condition in which time, as in Hamlet's Denmark, is out of joint, in which the narrative forms we have available seem no longer to be well adapted to articulating our experience of passing time" (21). This is, for Boxall, a particularly twenty-first-century habitus. However, as Boxall also notes, Giorgio Agamben argues that contemporaneity always involves a certain anachrony: "Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time" (Agamben 40). As such, while our present sense of out-of-jointness is exacerbated by modern technology, it can also be seen as a general truth about the experience of the contemporary, which necessarily entails a disjointed relation with the present.While contemporaneity is always paradoxically untimely, there is a widespread belief that we inhabitants of the twenty-first century suffer from a particularly disordered experience of temporality. Following David Harvey, Mark Currie calls this the narrative of "time-space compression," which apparently "extends the span of the present to encompass places once thought to be at a considerable spatial, and therefore temporal, distance" (9). Another purported aspect of contemporary experience, in Currie's view, is "accelerated recontextualization," wherein the gap between the first instance and the citation of a style "becomes increasingly, if not infinitely, short, so that the temporal distance between an original and its recontextualisation is abolished altogether" (10). Currie also groups what Jacques Derrida calls "archive fever" with these phenomena; this is his name for "the frenzied archiving and recording of contemporary social life which transforms the present into the past by anticipating its memory" (11). Currie is very clear that these are narratives about the contemporary, and that they are premised on basic assumptions about temporality that are unavoidably structured by an age-old philosophical difficulty with thinking the present (12). Working from Derrida's critiques of phenomenology, Currie argues that attempts to describe the disordered time of modernity privilege the experience of the temporal present and the ontological framing of being as presence (12). By contrast, I will be using Currie's descriptions as he intended them: not to reify, but to identify, these narratives where they appear in the contemporary discourse of the death of the novel.As Boxall notes, the widespread feeling that something has gone haywire in our relation to time has consequences for literary or narrative form. Various critics have addressed a growing sense that the temporality of the novel is out of step with contemporary experience. In his article on the effects of Amazon on literary culture, Mark McGurl argues that "what makes the novel so interesting as a 'neoliberal' commodity is its partial temporal disjunction from the real-time regime" (465). McGurl juxtaposes this regime with the notion of "quality time," which the novel renders in its "narrative dilation of human intimacy and intrigue" (465). Yet the disjunction is only partial: in fact, "the original real-time medium is sensory perception, the relation of subject to object, experience itself," which is susceptible to monetization (466). The novel's limited capacity to oppose neoliberalism proceeds from its distinctively slow temporality, but the time of the novel could yet be subsumed by the accelerated "real-time regime" that Amazon's business practices exemplify. This raises the question of whether the novel really must adapt to the new accelerated reality in order to adequately represent the contemporary world, or whether its power of critique proceeds from its autonomy—its disjunction—from the rhythms and speeds of everyday life.Another concern is that the instantaneous communication and dissemination of texts online will institute new models of textuality that will outcompete the novel. Will Self uses Marshall McLuhan's concept of a "Gutenberg mind"—a mind organized by or orientated toward information presented in a "codex"—to argue that, as we shift from mostly presenting information in books to mostly presenting it online, we will lose the desire or ability to read novels. As a consequence, Self argues, "if you accept that [in 20 years' time] the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web," then "the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth." Self's argument rests on two assumptions: first, that the internet ways of and texts; that readers will the new to that of the argues that "the of we to the internet will "the very for a of the forms of cultural to the internet will us for the as a result, he feels called to I will out on a with a the novel of of and will to up into and more where we can time The larger novel, or the novel of narrative will be more with and to make it and after to not a but a argument is by the that the internet a and of one that is certain to that of the novel. his description of the "larger novel" could almost as to Dickens's serialized novels as to the of imagined Smith's to A Tale of Two at the of Autumn the fact that her quickly written is an and a to an novelistic the then, are not as new or as for the novel as he has the very sort of that Self and make on the that fears that new will certain cultural forms are premised on of historical This that happens and in one so forms like are seen as more in fact these to be and can with new and have given the name to this that new like the will simply do with like real-time or argues, there is to the that the internet will to the that the or the novel will one the internet experience is organized by with the This that certain of up by the internet in our models of even if it was not to them all the advent of digital argues the that the of new media is "a new or regime" thought to be from the and global now in The about by the internet and mobile phones, he argues, is not but "the speeds and of accelerated and are experience and "a an apparent between what is available . . . and what this is only an As I argue not immediacy but an experience of immediacy, of is also about the over the internet's potential effects on the novel. that and attention in the first two of the twenty-first become part of a of about and as a discourse of crisis capacity for (1). In other words, these anxieties are not necessarily of a new, with attention and so much as they are of The way these to of to suggest that they have more to do with of and than they do with to of the have in for example, argues that about the or of the novel a to the form that is at with the that in The of the to be to it" the novel with a power to its contemporary that is because it was a to the the new novelistic in the of the of the an that once the genre of the novel of the novel's to into the very that it and it to the of the novel's in the age of instantaneous communication to the context for Smith's and Laing's experiments with speed and immediacy in novel Autumn and Crudo an of contemporary about the supposed outdatedness of the novel. In Autumn, when the at his she his to her you would it that old new to (Smith calls the book old he hints at the very possibility that might be a of the that has gone out of such of the is always susceptible to while was supposed to us where we were we may have gone there or way, the A is also a or on its contemporary but us that it can out of date by no longer being contemporary with the it was In this way, Autumn raises the question of the relevance of novels their contemporary The novel, as a literary form that is supposed to relevant and in after or particularly susceptible to this kind of riposte, on the other hand, the kind of made about it is as relevant as it was in its own This notion that a novel can be of its time and therefore the right for its time not much when it recalls that contemporaneity is always also a Smith with this relation to the present when she her state-of-the-nation book and the "I was right up my for Hamish so I my if I could have an because I knew the book to I up to what was happening if the of contemporaneousness in it were to anything at (Anderson). the novel out just after the with no of the it would have been out of in in order to a new Smith the immediacy of her This to one of the philosophical with the present to The present is "a of and it both the past and the the present is structured by this to the any of the present is always this is Smith to publication to follow the of the present moment as it Smith's "Seasonal" to fears about the novel by the general and that in the of immediacy the novel is susceptible to then this is only because of a general truth about and not a particular of the novel also on the cultural relevance of the novel, of and with which Kathy to have as as The historical Acker her materials, and Laing in turn her name and wrote but she it with the the and was in many ways at a a to what she but also in the that there was no to you could make anything from out of the of the the as put it new, it was also to help to the of the (Laing the novel and fiction are and the stuff of life is available for This one right to the it is But if us to the this raises the question of Laing Crudo as a novel. the very this that the novel to be a form even cultural power to sense of the novel's waning is central to twenty-first-century novelistic argues that as the of and associated with the novel lose the genre has to of forms of and and of the and of by from a and of the novel as a genre in order to what forms of life and after the of that (Vermeulen the its on the genre's cultural and Crudo description of texts that themselves in the of the contemporary novel.As Self's and anxieties about the contemporary death of the novel are in terms of to the dominant modes of communication and Autumn and Crudo prevalent cultural about what the new of dissemination are to our experience of the present and the consequences of this for the novel, the ways in which we are by published from on social media to news. and Self's how this experience is thought to an to the novel. I want to suggest that Smith's and Laing's texts to the that the novel as a form is well to reflect on the illusoriness of the contemporary experience of first Autumn and Crudo might seem to into two that I they seem to the narrative of the internet's to the novel, because they have by the genre's narrative of time and its publication process to mimic internet forms more the novels seem to privilege formally the very speed and immediacy that their so Kathy this about the temporality of twenty-first-century toward the difficulty of from the experience of immediacy when it as cultural "The speed of the news the of the she was to those as they (Laing Yet while Crudo and Autumn are with the of and representational immediacy in contemporary life, I to show how these novels stage of immediacy. In as I will they foreground the fact that all writing, communication, and experience is structured by what Derrida called and Laing's accounts of their writing that their novels are attempts to replicate the contemporary experience of accelerated temporality and immediacy. this is the novels to the other hand, we must consider the possibility that Smith and