Contemporary American Fiction Research Articles

‘It's all there in the language’—a conversation with Garrett Stewart

AbstractWhat does a famed literary theorist have to say about the interaction between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’? Well, if he's Garrett Stewart, the celebrated agent of pyrotechnic style in the service of durable insights across disparate disciplines and media, then we have much reason to lean in and listen. Stewart is the author of 20 books that range with uncanny competency across Victorian narrative, contemporary American fiction, written auralities, poetics and prose stylistics, cinematic evolution from silver oxide to screen pixel, book art, scenes of reading in painting, and most recently, the vocal drama of Barbra Streisand. The distances between his disciplinary terrains are as vast as his close readings of them are coordinated and trenchant. Here, sitting down before a shared conversational canvas, Stewart fields questions from David LaRocca, who asks how he, if he, thinks about the program of literature and philosophy. LaRocca, editor of the recent Attention Spans: Garrett Stewart, a Reader (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the forthcoming Bandwidths: Reading Across Media with Garrett Stewart (Bloomsbury), tracks the urgency of our moment—in which literature and philosophy are independently besieged and yet may concede little rapprochement. Where does philosophy happen in literature (a philosopher's question) is turned around by Stewart such that we see literature conjuring philosophy at the level of the sentence. We are not peering ‘in’ so much as looking ‘at’ the art of literature teaching philosophy through refined reading and the analytical inquest of the syllable and the sayable. Anyone who works at the fraught fissure of these realms will benefit from the ways Stewart makes literature and philosophy sensible to one another—even as he productively unsettles the terms and conditions of their affiliation.

Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton, editors. Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom. Teaching and Texts

Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton, editors. Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom. Teaching and Texts

Melancholia and Traumatic Reenactment in Contemporary American Fiction: A Caruthian Reading of Gillian Flynn's Novels

Gillian Schieber Flynn's fiction is laced with such recurring themes as dysfunctional nature of families, childhood abuse and neglect, and tragic murder of the loved ones. The current study, therefore, will set out to prove that the central characters of Flynn's Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl have been traumatized in their childhood, the effect of which still haunts them through hallucinations, traumatic flashbacks, and nightmares. It will be contended that the characters are still melancholic after many a year, thus fixated on past traumatic events, which they reenact through diverse psychological phenomena. In addition, it will be averred that the traumas of individuals and a collective body of people are ineluctably intertwined with each other in Flynn's fiction; consequently, not only are the characters' traumas transferred to the other members of society, but also the collective trauma of fictional communities gets transmitted into the private sphere of characters' lives. To that end, the article will have recourse to Cathy Caruth's trauma theory and terminology as the underpinning theoretical framework of the foregoing study. Furnishing a novel Caruthian reading of Flynn's novels, the current research intends to contribute to the existing literature addressing the said author's narratives.

The post‐9/11 novel revisited: Reading three perspectives in contemporary American fiction

AbstractThis essay on the Ground Zero novel offers three perspectives on one of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching the effects of the most notable 21st century event on the American novel. It presents a scholarly analysis of the American novel of the past 20 years and provides a discussion for readers who are divided by geography, ideology, and religion to understand how the 9/11 novel reflects both geopolitical relations and conflicts of our collective present. It sets two necessary provisos for the analysis of post‐9/11 American narrative: terrorism and counter‐terrorism. This analysis approaches the post‐9/11 novel from two opposing perspectives/voices—neutral narratives and political narratives—to provide a neutral cultural territory divorced from geopolitical strategy to understand this new version of American literature and explore the common beliefs and values in it. A third focus, on the literature of immigrants, is emerging in American literary studies and offers a bridge to those interested in exploring the cultural contributions of Muslim immigrants to American culture. It would be a mistake to conclude without referring to the contributions of Arab American writers because the concepts of culture and coexistence are interlinked.

Foregone

Russell Banks is arguably one of the most important writers of contemporary American fiction. In the course of his career, he has written many novels and short stories that are at times highly psychological in nature and lend themselves to psychoanalytic modes of understanding. In his most recent novel, Foregone, Banks focuses his attention on the inner life of an old man, a documentary film-maker, who is dying of cancer. The man is consumed with guilt and feels compelled to reveal to his wife for the first time information about his past transgressions, which center upon his lies as well as his betrayal and abandonment of other people. He believes she should know about these experiences before he dies in order to allow her to assess her love for him. In speaking of these matters, he is particularly concerned with the way that he has shaped his inner life and his behavior in order to fulfill others’ expectations of him, which is a major issue that is confronted by those engaged in clinical work. He tries to explore these problems by engaging in a form of free association in the presence of his wife and a film-maker who is making a documentary about him. In this book review essay, I examine Banks’s novel by providing an overview as well as a discussion of its psychoanalytic dimensions. Quite often, the form of the novel and the language that Banks utilizes reflect psychoanalytic perspectives.

The knowing child’s quest in contemporary American fiction

The knowing child’s quest in contemporary American fiction

Geomemory and Genre Friction: Infrastructural Violence and Plantation Afterlives in Contemporary African American Novels

Abstract This essay argues that contemporary African American novels turn to the gothic in order to dramatize the uncanny infrastructural and spatial afterlives of the plantation through a literary strategy it identifies as geomemory: a genre friction between mimetic and gothic modes in which postplantation spaces in the US South are imbued with temporal slippages such that past and present meet through the built environment. Tracing the plantation’s environmental and infrastructural presence in the Gulf Coast and throughout the US South, this essay argues that the plantation’s presence is fundamentally gothic. Geomemory, a trope evident across the emerging canon of contemporary African American fiction, allows writers to address the representational challenge of infrastructural and spatial violence via a defamiliarizing chronotope in which past, present, and future come into uneasy contact. Further, geomemory’s particular enmeshment with spatial design and infrastructure means that it moves from identifying the modern afterlife of the plantation to situating the present in the long context of plantation modernity.

Identity and Ability

Research Article| July 01 2021 Identity and Ability: An Interview with Lennard J. Davis Jeffrey J. Williams Jeffrey J. Williams Jeffrey Williams has interviewed more than seventy critics, philosophers, and writers, appearing in journals including the minnesota review, Symploke, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He has written on the history of the interview, notably “The Rise of the Critical Interview” (New Literary History, 2019). He also writes on contemporary American fiction, the history of modern criticism and theory, and critical university studies. His book, How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University (2014), calls for a more public criticism, and he is an editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3rd ed., 2018). He is professor of English and of literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2021) 17 (2): 163–174. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8947865 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jeffrey J. Williams; Identity and Ability: An Interview with Lennard J. Davis. Cultural Politics 1 July 2021; 17 (2): 163–174. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8947865 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search By the 1990s critics had shown the ways that race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality shape identity. Yet, as Lennard J. Davis pointed out, disability was largely invisible on the spectrum of identity. With Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995) and the anthology The Disabilities Studies Reader (1st ed., 1997; 5th ed., 2016), Davis helped establish the field of disability studies.He further explored the representation and politics of disability in Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (2002), The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era (2013), and Enabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the American with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights (2015), a trade book that tells the story of that landmark legislation, as well as the collection Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions (coedited, 2012). More generally, he has argued for a “biocultural” approach in... Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Strategies of investigating and translating poetical prose of the classical and contemporary English short stories

The article considers the notion of prose poeticalness from linguistic and translation points of view. Prose poeticalness can be defined as the introduction of poetic features into the prose text with the help of such devices as extended metaphors, intertextual allusions, stylistic convergence, syntactical and phonetic repetitions. The investigation involved the analysis of the fairy tales by Oscar Wilde, the short stories by Kate Chopin and Dylan Thomas, which are referred to as classical prose, and the contemporary American flash fiction stories. The strategy of investigating prose poeticalness involved determining the devices of prose poeticalness in each text, defining the linguistic and stylistic components of these devices and their functions. As a result of our research, it is determined that the most foregrounded device of poeticalness is stylistic convergence. In the classical short stories, convergences function in bigger text fragments, they are based on the extended antropomorphic metaphors or similes in the interaction with alliterations. The stylistic convergences are used for poetical description of nature as human beings possessing the ability to speak, to think, to love (Wilde, Thomas), and even as gods (Rob Carney). Biomorphic tropes are used as the core of convergences, as a device of poetical description of people in the stories by Thomas, fairy tales by Wilde, in the flash fiction stories by John Updike, Grace Paley, Leigh Wilson and other writers. In the contemporary flash fiction stories, convergences foreground the ideas of sympathy, tolerance; they help to create a strong emotional effect. The strategy of rendering stylistic convergences in translation of the poetical prose consists in the exact reproduction of images applying literal translation or synonymic substitution and retaining the sound effect in trope components. Mythological and biblical allusions used as a system in the text are a device of poeticalness typical for Thomas's stories. The strategy of translating implicit allusions involves retaining the intertextual comments and giving explication in the text or in the footnotes. It is suggested that the prospects of further research lie in investigating poeticalness in the novels of contemporary writers.

It is More than a Bunch of Numbers: Trauma, Voicing and Identity in Jennifer Chow’s The 228 Legacy

This paper explores how Jennifer Chow’s The 228 Legacy (2013) recaptures the buried hi/stories of the 228 Massacre with a trauma narrative about Silk’s deep-kept secrets. It first delineates the evolution of trauma theory and trauma fiction highlighting the significance of articulating trauma and its relevance in healing, hi/storytelling and identity construction. This demarcation shall frame a critical lens to illustrate how Chow innovates distinct insulated narratives on the protagonists to mimic intergenerational ramifications of trauma in the Lu family, to represent their psychological healing and to express the association between silence-breaking, remembering and identity construction. This critical endeavor will also demonstrate that Silk’ story of survival promises the survival of hi/story. Thus, the novel proper not only portrays the traumatic impact, a nightmarish “legacy,” of 228 but also renders Silk’s trauma narrative as the “legacy” to connect with Taiwanese heritage and construct Taiwanese American identities. Given Chow’s innovative form and unique themes about trauma and Taiwanese American diaspora, the article situates her novel in the emerging Taiwanese American literature, Asian American literature, contemporary American diasporic literature and trauma fiction.

Introduction—Historical Fiction and the 1960s: Mediating the Past and Reimagining the Future

Abstract This introduction to the special issue on contemporary ethnic historical fiction considers recent trends in the field, as well as the critical history of this popular genre. Over the last two decades, historical fiction, particularly by writers of color, has gone mainstream, gaining large audiences as well as critical admiration. These works challenge the conservatism of the genre, both formally and thematically. Combining historical research with speculative elements, these works tell new stories about US history, centering on the lives of those too often sidelined or ignored in mainstream version of American history and in literary fiction. These various formal and thematic features suggest a distinctive generational moment, shaped by the nation's changing demographics and shifting political conditions. Contemporary ethnic American historical novelists focus simultaneously on the past and the present, bringing current preoccupations—such as the omnipresence of white supremacy, the unresolved trauma of war, and the demonization of refugees and immigrants—to light through their detailed re-creation and reimagining of historical events. In this way, contemporary ethnic American historical fiction operates as a means of representing, and attempting to work through, national traumas.

Along the Wayside

AMERICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, JULY 7–11, 2021The following panels are planned:Hawthorne and FatherhoodOrganized by the Nathaniel Hawthorne SocietyChair: Charles Baraw, Southern Connecticut State University “Divided Paternity: The Scarlet Letter's Unstable American Father,” Muhammad Imran, University of Sahiwal“The Sacred Father De-gendered: Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter,’” Eitetsu Sasaki, Momoyama Gakuin University [Virtual Presentation]“‘The Death of the Father and the Death of Romance in Hawthorne,” Ariel Silver, Columbus Ohio Institute of ReligionHawthorne and AestheticsOrganized by the Nathaniel Hawthorne SocietyChair: Ariel Silver, Columbus Ohio Institute of Religion “Come Home, Dear Child—Poor Wanderer”: Hawthorne's Struggles with Theological Aesthetics,” Amy Oatis, University of the Ozarks [Virtual Presentation]“‘Playing (with) Fantasy: Hawthorne's Aesthetics of Reading in The House of the Seven Gables,” Yuta Ito, University of Utah“Hawthorne's Notebooks and The Marble Faun: The Aesthetics of Revolution,’” Sharon Worley, Houston Community CollegeKLAUS P. STITCH COMMENTS ON HESTER PRYNNE IN BERLIN AND THE SCARLET LETTER AS SUBTEXTKLAUS P. STICH, A FORMER MEMBER OF THE NHR EDITORIAL BOARD, HAS SUBMITTED THE FOLLOWING THREE PARAGRAPHS ABOUT A RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOK, JENNIFER CHIAVERINI’S RESISTANCE WOMEN (2019), THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST TO HAWTHORNE SCHOLARS:“There is no remoteness of life and thought,” declares Hawthorne's Peaceable Man, “no hermetically sealed seclusion, …., into which the disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate.” His 1862 comments on the American Civil War are no less fitting as a response to Hitler's war against humanity. Today's readers of Hawthorne do not often chance upon connections to his work in contemporary American fiction, especially not in a historical novel about Hitler's social, cultural, and military wars. In Jennifer Chiaverini's Resistance Women (New York: William Morrow, 2019), The Scarlet Letter becomes a subtext in her delineation of the marriage in 1926 of Mildred Fish, a U. of Wisconsin graduate student, to Arvid Harnack, a visiting German scholar, their move to Berlin in 1930, and their pivotal role in the underground resistance during Hitler's rise to Power. The Harnacks and several others in the novel such as the U.S. Ambassador William Dodd and his daughter Martha are historical characters who became active in the resistance movement against Hitler.Mildred's well-received lectures at the U. of Berlin on American literature, especially her talk on “Romantic and Married Love in the Works of Hawthorne,” turn Hester Prynne into a quasi-icon of sexual and political rebellion. Her scarlet letter “A” implicitly comes to stand for Anti-authoritarianism: rejecting Hitler's ideal of “Kinder, Kirche, Kűche [Children, Church, Cuisine]” for women's social role and rebelling against his virulent totalitarianism. Moreover, the unexpected power of Hester's boldly embroidered “A” makes one of the Jewish women of the resistance toy briefly with the idea of transforming her yellow cloth star, a Star of David to be worn by Jews in public, into “a gorgeous [one] … of golden satin embellished with beads and elaborately embroidered with ebony silk thread.” Yet, what created mere outrage in the Puritans’ Boston would surely have meant death in Hitler's Berlin.Inevitably, death by execution is the fate of the Harnacks and most others in the resistance movement, except for a very few only gazing as quasi-Hawthornean bystanders at the margin of social upheaval. Side-stepping, I am thinking here of, for instance, Robin Molineux witnessing the “inflammation of the popular mind” and “trumpets vomit[ing] a horrid breath,” as well as Faith Brown's husband who, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, lacked a microscope in his emergencies. And I am certainly thinking of more than a few for whom Hester's letter “A” started Chiaverini's narrative of their resistance.

Unfulfilled vocations in contemporary American fiction

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the representation of unfulfilled creative vocations in contemporary American fiction using career construction theory, which emerged after the 2007 economic crisis when large numbers of people sought new forms of vocational guidance. It argues that a number of American novelists started to portray changing or unfulfilled creative vocations in fiction as a response to the overall changes in American society caused by the crisis. This means that career construction theory and the fictional portrayal of frustrated vocations have a common origin, so that the former can usefully be applied to our interpretation of the latter. The paper undertakes such work by applying specific components of career construction theory to interpretation and analysis of particular texts. Specifically, it applies theoretical insight by Mark Savickas, John Holland, Peter McIlveen and Kobus Maree to analysis of Joshua Ferris's novel Then We Came to the End (2007); Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World (2014); Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings (2013) and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Overall it argues that career construction theory is a potentially fertile body of work capable of informing our understanding of the fictional portrayal of creative vocations in new and innovative ways.

Национально-маркированная лексика в современной американской художественной литературе: особенности и возможности перевода на русский язык

Национально-маркированная лексика в современной американской художественной литературе: особенности и возможности перевода на русский язык

Aspects of postmodernism and humour. A glimpse on Raymond Federman’s work

The purpose of this paper is to review aspects of postmodernism in the work of the American writer Raymond Federman, in which humour plays a very important part. This paper demonstrates that Raymond Federman’s literary work is a typically postmodern creation, through the challenges towards the conventions of literature, through the use of discontinuity, fragmentation, metafiction and self-referentiality. The French-American writer captures the way in which the contemporary human being perceives reality in today’s society. Raymond Federman’s novel “The Twofold Vibration” illustrates very well the features of the postmodern novel. Humour is a means of reviving contemporary American fiction.

Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism by Christina Bieber Lake

Reviewed by: Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism by Christina Bieber Lake Liliana M. Naydan Christina Bieber Lake. Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism. U of Notre Dame P, 2019. 1 + 212 pp. From where do artistic impulses come and what is the purpose of narrative art? According to Christina Bieber Lake in Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism, three camps present possible answers to this question. First, sociobiologists, such as Ellen Dissanayake and Jonathan Gottschall, suggest that material explanations can sufficiently account for the production and celebration of narrative. They extend on Darwinian evolutionary theory, positing that humans create and appreciate literary works in order to survive. Second, metaphysical naturalists, such as Richard Kearney, [End Page 795] argue that humans tell stories in order to make meaning of a life that is otherwise meaningless. Third, classical theists, most notably Christian ones, suggest that we tell stories to express the dignity and significance of humanity as God’s creations. Arguably controversial in our largely secular academic contemporary moment, this theist perspective, which binds art to divinity, functions as the springboard for Lake’s argument that “storytelling is a theological activity because it continually affirms and reaffirms the transcendent value of personal being” (7). As Lake continues, “regardless of authorial intent, stories invariably activate the part of a reader’s imagination that suspects that this world is neither accident nor conclusion.” And the works of “contemporary American fiction” on which she chooses to focus underscore the notion that “love for persons is the fulcrum that moves the art of the story” (8). Ultimately, her book analyzes works by American authors such as Philip Roth, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison to expose nuances of human relationships with stories and to reveal implicit human relationships with theology. In her book, Lake comes into conversation with phenomenologists such as Gabriel Marcel; literary critics, such as John McClure and Amy Hungerford; literary theorists, such as Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bakhtin; and theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Henri de Lubac. She organizes the seven chapters of her book according to the three theological concepts that American philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart identifies as fundamental to the human experience: being, consciousness, and bliss. For Lake, these concepts shape the aesthetic and rhetorical purposes of literary works. She focuses the first two chapters of her book on the concept of being. She focuses chapter three, four, and five on consciousness. And she addresses the notion of bliss in her final two chapters. In the two chapters that focus on being, Lake proposes that all stories center on relationships between individuals, be they characters, writers, or readers. In chapter 1, she argues that Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story, “Baby Shoes,” exemplifies the rhetorical nature of storytelling. She observes that Hemingway creates a sense of mystery for his readers while also inviting them to view his story as “an act of love” for persons (18). As Lake explains, “when we imaginatively enter into the lives of the parents who put the baby shoes up for sale, we, too, participate in that act” (28). Along the same lines, Roth’s Everyman, which Lake analyzes in chapter 2, exposes Roth’s investment in “capturing our interest in a man we otherwise would [End Page 796] not care about” (33) while presenting a parody of a medieval morality play that apparently devalues particular personhood. Admitting that Roth likely would have resisted her reading, Lake believes the novel’s protagonist may masquerade as a contemporary version of the medieval Everyman, a character intended to embody any and every man, but his position as the novel’s protagonist implies that “every person is worth a novel” (31) and that personality exists as a noteworthy mystery. Lake’s chapters on Lydia Davis, O’Connor, and Morrison address the concept of consciousness. In chapter 3, Lake analyzes stories from Davis’s Varieties of Disturbance, suggesting that first-person consciousness in fiction reveals the relationship between persons and communities in the world. According to Lake, Davis invites readers to see that stories welcome us to recognize...

“Some Black, Cracked Mirror, Barely Surviving Its Own Sharp Edges”: Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn and the “Twinned,” Fractured Nature of Contemporary America

“Some Black, Cracked Mirror, Barely Surviving Its Own Sharp Edges”: Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn and the “Twinned,” Fractured Nature of Contemporary America David Buehrer (bio) Steve Erickson’s experimental contemporary American fiction has always blurred the lines between realism and surrealism on one hand and the historical and fantastic on the other. Much like the late Denis Johnson, Erickson is best known for his “visionary, post-apocalyptic novels” that “combine features of the magical realists’ exaggeration of the familiar with Faulkner’s mesmerizing rhetoric and ability to explode time and space” (McCaffery and Tatsumi 395). In fact, Erickson himself, in a 1997 interview for Contemporary Literature, has described his penchant for such skewed chronologies in his works: “Faulkner [and then García Márquez] taught me how reality ticks not to the clock of time but the clock of memory . . . ” (qtd. in McCaffery and Tatsumi 415). As critic Lee Spinks describes them, “The radical discontinuities of Erickson’s fictional narratives are . . . a consequence of his commitment to describe an incident simultaneously from the perspectives of history and memory, which no longer occupy the same imaginative space, and which often project antagonistic versions of a common future” (222–23). This simultaneity1 is certainly central to his 2017 novel Shadowbahn, the author’s tenth,2 a fictional “dreamscape of contemporary American culture” (Spinks 224) reflecting Erickson’s “concern with the relation between different historical periods [which] is underlined by the continual movement of his narrative [ ] between past, present, and future” (Spinks 225–26). As David Leo Rice, reviewing the book for The Believer, explains: “Shadowbahn marks a culmination of . Erickson’s . vision of history as a porous entity, full of glitches, wormholes, and ‘Rupture Zones,’” with the novelist’s “simultaneous histories excavat[ing] buried layers of how our reality actually is, not alternate paths it could have taken or could one day take” (Rice). Two of the main characters’ (that is, Parker and Zema’s) father, later referred to “as music’s Supreme Sequencer” (SB 211)3 and writer of the liner notes for countless song pairings he has compiled for his future-directed playlists, puts it similarly (and this reads like a succinct synopsis of Erickson’s narrative trajectory for the novel): [End Page 1] “time is a shadow-highway of successive roundabouts with After occasionally preceding Before” (SB 125). Moreover, in a 2019 interview for The Believer, Erickson comments upon the “American obsession” underlying many of his fictions, saying, “it’s particularly exhausting these days when a pall hangs over everything that I think and feel about this country that’s become . some black, cracked mirror, barely surviving its own sharp edges” (qtd. in Knipfel). The trope of the mirror, as well as other reflective dualities and “twinnings” (Maazel BR 18), takes on both self-reflexive and inter / metatextual resonances in Shadowbahn. In fact, binaries and mirror / shadow images seem to structure the novel’s otherwise fragmented, disjointed narrative, “composed [as it is] of lists, snippets of dialogue, newspaper clippings, and free-floating paragraphs” (Rice). After the “Twin Towers” of the World Trade Center materialize inexplicably in the Dakota Badlands twenty years after their fall, everyone who makes the pilgrimage there—including the interracial brother and sister pair of Parker and Zema (who first appeared with their father Alexander “Zan” Nordhoc, a stand-in for “the world-famous author” himself [that is, Erickson], as he self-deprecatingly quips, in Erickson’s 2012 novel These Dreams of You)—“simply bears witness to the twin ghosts and whatever three thousand human ghosts haunt it” (SB 16). Throughout Shadowbahn, the name for “the secret highway . . . that cuts through the heart of the country with impunity” (SB 53), Erickson posits with his multiple pairings or twins—including the ghost of Jesse Garon Presley, the stillborn twin brother of Elvis, among others—“an alt-history that redefines the trajectory of American [culture and society]” at large (Maazel BR 18). More somberly if presciently, Erickson’s “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 5) also looks ahead to an extremely near future in which the once-United States (now split into separate “Union” and “Disunion” territories) is socially, racially, and politically divided or rent beyond repair— that is, to...

Disentangling the American Christian Right: An Interview with Dr. Christopher Douglas | Decifrando a direita cristã norte-americana: uma entrevista com o Prof. Dr. Christopher Douglas

Christopher Douglas is one of the most prominent scholars who has studied the rise of the conservative Christian Right in the American political arena and the links of this complex movement to American culture. Prof. Douglas taught at the University of Toronto and, for five years, at Furman University, South Carolina before transferring to University of Victoria in 2004. He teaches American literature, particularly contemporary American fiction, religion and literature, multicultural American literature, postmodernism, and the Bible as Literature. In the interview below, Prof. Douglas talks about his research and the idea behind his book “If God Meant to Interfere”, published in 2016; the explanatory concepts of Christian Multiculturalism and Christian Postmodernism; the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories, and alternative facts among Christian fundamentalists; the American political context. Prof. Douglas also offers interesting comments on the current Brazilian situation. His critical insights provide interesting and new perspectives that give fresh vitality to the debates about Christian fundamentalism. Prof. Douglas is committed to “public-scholar engagement” that is, research-based critical writings for non-academic audiences.Links to his public academic activity are inserted throughout the interview.

Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction

Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction

American fiction after postmodernism

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...