Late Fiction Research Articles

The Mob: J. G. Ballard's Turn to the Collective

Abstract The article identifies a shift in J. G. Ballard's work from a preoccupation with the individual to a preoccupation with the collective. It reads Ballard's late fiction as being part of a wider turn in the culture of Western, neoliberal states toward a reignition of a spirit of collectivism. With Ballard's work, this is most striking in the novels' depiction of neoliberal societies themselves, and so the essay begins with a treatment of how they are figured. What emerges from this is that Ballard's depiction of potentially new collective forms of life is at once utopian and dystopian. In fact, the dystopian elements identified lead on to a much deeper trait of the work. That is the reactionary tendency to portray the collective as a violent mob, which, as is demonstrated, has a long history and an increasingly prominent present.

The writer and the terrorist: on Michel Houellebecq

ABSTRACT This essay attempts to bring the politics of anti-humanism up to date with the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by juxtaposing the humanistic figure of the realist writer with the anti-humanism of the terrorist, a figure that is pervasive in late twentieth century fiction. A prominent public intellectual in his native France, since the atrocities of 9/11 and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks Houellebecq has been inextricably associated with terrorism and this essay attempts to establish why. Looking both inside and outside his writing, it suggests ways in which Houellebecq has been used by discourses of power to construct terrorism as a political reality. It also considers how far the author himself has played a knowing role in this process, examining – with reference to fellow contemporary writers Yann Moix, Martin Amis and theorists Guy Debord and Bifo Berardi – signs of his ambiguous sympathy for terroristic impulses. I end by comparing Houellebecq to other novelists who also employ the figure of the terrorist – among them Paul Auster and Don DeLillo – and by illustrating a larger trend in twenty first century literature towards the radical reworking of a Romantic association between writing and terror.

Timely, Untimely, Timeless: Temporal Limits in J.M. Coetzee’s Late Global Fiction

ABSTRACT J.M. Coetzee’s late global fictions regularly offer formal experiments with fleetingness – works designed to become dated, superannuated – yet repeatedly return to the theme of enduring, almost transcendental, literary value. These are works that illustrate a crisis point in literary history, when the global and the digital inflict on authors an imperative to be timely while older institutional literary values demand that they be timeless. In these works, joined together in one present we find threads of timeliness (actions and ideas that are a propos of the moment), untimeliness (actions and ideas that are retrograde or avant-garde, out of joint with the times or, from the perspective of the untimely one, that reveal time to be out of joint with itself), and timelessness (intimations of ever-lasting, extra-temporal, permanence). This article examines these temporal figures in Elizabeth Costello , Summertime , and some of J.M. Coetzee’s shorter fictions, tracing the limits of the present they produce, oppose, or, in trying to surpass, reenforce.

Narrative Crisis and Renewal in the Age of Information: David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy”

ABSTRACT David Foster Wallace’s late fiction powerfully dramatizes twenty-first-century information saturation and its dehumanizing effects. In “Mister Squishy,” the lead story in Oblivion (2004), the threat of information overload and the attendant crisis of narrative are thematized through the story’s staging of a central tension between statistical (quantitative) and narrative (qualitative) significance. Despite its numerous “anti-narrative” features, “Mister Squishy” is rather ingeniously designed to compel the reader’s narrative interest and participation by exploiting natural readerly “needs” – for narrative relevance, coherence, and closure. Wallace activates these readerly needs through his careful manipulation of how and when key information is revealed. The story’s dramatic shifts in pacing and perspective, and its oscillations between narration and description, combine to create extraordinary moments of suspense and surprise which drive both plot and reader forward. In this way “Mister Squishy” plays with the cognitive-affective dynamics of storytelling throughout, foregrounding them for our reflection. Ultimately, the story’s thematic concerns and the reader’s enactive performance of the text work together to reinforce the story’s ultimate affirmation of narrative as an essential meaning-making act and a central aspect of what it means to be human.

The Seeds of Destruction: Naturalism, Hysteria, and the Beautiful Soul in Lewis Nkosi’sMating Birds

If V. S. Naipaul’s late fiction demonstrates the crisis of narrative in the arrested dialectic of what I have called postcolonial naturalism, then the work of South African novelist, playwright, and critic Lewis Nkosi epitomizes the intersection of postcolonial naturalism with the double-voiced discourse of the hysteric. Situated between a post-independence melancholy and the registration of globalization’s volatile new dispensation and refracted through the racial politics of apartheid and its end as well as the lived experience of exile, Nkosi’s apartheid-era debut novelMating Birdsarticulates in both form and content the noble self-exemption of Hegel’s “Beautiful Soul” and the subversive anxiety of the hysteric, to whom no satisfaction can be given. Such an accounting helps to reframe split critical appraisal of the novel by reading its complex of form and content as the living crystallization of historical processes.

The Paranoia of Travel: American Tourists in Henry James’s Late Fiction

The Paranoia of Travel: American Tourists in Henry James’s Late Fiction

Tim Groenland. The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace

Enthralled by a notion of solitary authorship promoted by self-effacing editors, profit-seeking publishers, and posterity-conscious authors, critics and scholars have generally paid little attention to the role played by editors in literary production. By contrast, Tim Groenland’s thoroughly researched and elegantly written study, The Art of Editing, seeks to place the figure of the editor front and centre. Taking advantage of archival materials that have recently been made available, Groenland combines genetic criticism with close reading as he explores author-editor relationships and the differences those relationships make in understanding the work of Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace. The unlikely pairing of the minimalist Carver with the maximalist Wallace proves rewarding in several ways. Their relationships with Gordon Lish and Mike Pietsch, respectively, are compared and contrasted so as to provide a sense of the variety of ways in which author-editor relationships can operate. Wallace’s surprisingly energetic interest in Carver’s stories also comes into view. Last, the distance between them helps lend credibility to Groenland’s intriguing notion of the ‘anxiety of editorial influence’ (p. xiv). Different though they are, both Carver and Wallace come to internalize the editorial function as their careers proceed. The result is that their late fiction is animated by a tension between author and (internalized) editor that corresponds to a maximalist tendency and a minimalist one—opposing styles that can thus be seen as interdependent.

Bothering to Believe: Acts of Faith in J. M. Coetzee's Late Novels

Abstract J. M. Coetzee's late fictions display a recurrent fascination with attitudes of faith and belief. This preoccupation has been read sometimes as an effort to reinvigorate the novel's engagement with materiality and embodied life, other times as an elegy to the waning power of belief in fiction. But belief is not a monolithic term in Coetzee's late work, nor does his disposition toward it remain static. This article examines two texts that display a related yet evolving concern with faith and belief—Elizabeth Costello (2003) and The Childhood of Jesus (2013). These works not only share a thematic interest in various forms of belief; they are also linked by the scene of a petitioner “at the gate.” In the final lesson of the earlier novel, aging novelist Elizabeth Costello finds herself in a purgatorial border town, where she must produce a statement of belief in order to pass on. In the opening paragraphs of Childhood, the characters arrive on the other side of a similar portal, entering a world whose institutions reject belief as a form of unreasoned, passionate commitment. Where Costello refuses the institutional demand for belief, insisting that belief in fiction is incompatible with the stronger form of commitment in excess of reason, Childhood's characters attempt a reconciliation between reading and believing. Read together, these texts present an apocalyptic vision of the novel after the end of formal realism, when readerly belief requires more than a weak trust in fiction's mimetic capacities.

Miejsca bezpieczne: Kafka, Walser, Schulz

The paper begins with a reference to Franz Kafka’s unfinished long short story “The Burrow,” which has been chosen as a starting point of a series of intertextual associations focusing on futile efforts made by various modernist literary narrators and characters to find a sense of safety in some specific settings. The route from “The Burrow” runs through selected short stories by Martin Walser toward late fiction by Bruno Schulz, in particular “The Republic of Dreams” and “The Homeland,” revealing affinities connecting the Polish writer from Drogobych with two writers of the German language, who shared his fears and obsessions.

The peculiarities of the military themes explication in the lexical-semantic space of the latest British literary texts

The article contains an integrated linguistic analysis of the genre composing lexical units and structures in contemporary British fiction, namely in literary prose texts on military themes (TMT), on the basis of pragmatic-stylistic, pragmatic-discourse and interpretative approaches. The research aims at the study of the lexical-semantic space of the latest British prose literary TMT, with the focus on the peculiarities of the trinity of its expansion, which includes lexical-semantic, lexical-thematic and lexical-associative directions of the military themes (MT) explication.The peculiarity of contemporary texts on military themes is a different degree of a war theme representation. It can be observed on the levels of macro-, meso- and micro-inclusions in the outline of a literary text. The leitmotiv idea (the problem of military conflicts and their destructive consequences) is encoded in the lexical structures thoroughly chosen by the author. The popularity of MT in the latest fiction texts is predetermined by the conflict actions taking place nowadays. Thus, from the pragmatic-discourse and anthropocentric points of view, the study of these fictional prose texts is extremely relevant given their lexical-semantic peculiarities.The outlining of the lexical-semantic, lexical-thematic and lexical-associative groups contributes to the detailed analysis of the functional representation of the lexical structures in the literary text at the deep and surface levels. The results of the research open the new perspectives to the study of the lexical-semantic structure of British fiction of the beginning of the XXI century from the points of new scientific paradigms.

Spark, trauma and the novel

ABSTRACTWhat is clear from even a cursory reading of Muriel Spark’s dazzling and cunning fictions is that she engages with a bewildering range of literary modes but only in so far as they can be subsumed by her singular vision. Spark’s quirky and playful voice refuses to be contained by any one doctrine or identity. First among the philosophies and identities which she finds absurd is that of the conventional realist novel with its humanist assumptions that the plot of a novel, with the individual at its heart, can be confused with life. This essay will juxtapose Spark’s scepticism in relation to the conventional novel form with the fierce self-protection of her life-story (before she was a novelist) which she, paradoxically, refigures in many of her imaginative works. The focus is on her fictions set in Africa where she felt at her most vulnerable as the potential object of various ‘shooting affairs’. It will show the ways in which she redeems such trauma in her late fiction. In the dismissal of the human-centred realist novel, and the fantasy that individuals can control the world, Spark, is equally anarchic and orthodox; playful and controlling.

Something Extraordinary Keeps Happening: J. G. Ballard's Enclave World

AbstractThis essay considers a late novel sequence by the British speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1930–2009). Although Ballard is often celebrated as a great iconoclast, there is arguably no postwar novelist with a more recognizable style. The essay analyzes Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006) as a programmatic fictional project. It identifies five key formal and thematic elements of the late sequence, paying particular attention to the question of setting. In Ballard's late fictions, the gated enclave figures as a privileged spatial agent within the diegesis; the central quality of these enclaves is that they are at once ordinary and extraordinary—set off from any shared social fabric and representative of general psychic and material qualities. Methodologically, the essay begins with critical description, following the grain of Ballard's late novels to show how their plots, themes, and characters relate to their settings. The essay then explores Ballard's autocritical explanation of his mature fiction as a belated response to his childhood in the extraterritorial International Settlement of Shanghai, drawing on his autobiographies as well as new research in his personal manuscripts, now collected at the British Library. Any full exploration of the late novels' autocritical energies must go beyond the project of critical description, which by itself produces a historically flat and argumentatively recursive account of Ballard's extraordinary literary accomplishment.

“Vast Impropriety”

This article proposes that the tragic intensity of Henry James’s major phase—an intensity marked by highly recursive nuances of represented psychology, by a frankness about the power of erotic love both to redeem and to destroy, and by elaborate metaphoric conceits that in their mysterious richness remain unrivaled in the history of the novel—is always accompanied by, is indeed deeply enmeshed with, a contrary tendency that is bawdy, unserious, low. It isolates the obscene double entendre as the linguistic device by which James most directly conducts the bawdy countercurrent in his late fiction, a countercurrent the article reads in terms of Jamesian camp. Combining the reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser with recent work in affect theory—specifically Sianne Ngai’s work on tone—the article offers readings of James’s The Sacred Fount (1901) and The Golden Bowl (1904) in terms of the strategic unseriousness enacted by his use of the double entendre. Engaging with recent queer-theoretical scholarship on James, the article suggests that the category of “camp” can help clarify James’s mischievous recourse to bawdy double entendres across his corpus and especially in his late work. Camp, it suggests, names an interpretational hesitation between generic frames like comedy and tragedy. In his bawdy double entendres, James provides a kind of resting place from what Susan Sontag has called the “excruciating” tonal textures of his major phase.

ВСЕМИРНАЯ ЭСХАТОЛОГИЯ В РОМАНЕ Ч.Т. АЙТМАТОВА «ТАВРО КАССАНДРЫ»

World eschatology in Aitmatov’s late fiction “Cassandra’s Brand” (1996) addresses the problem of death expectation of mankind at the genetic level in the context of a worldwide catastrophe. In this case writer’s transition to rationalistic eschatology acting within the framework of secular culture, anthropogenic factors and science-like phenomena, is of great interest along with mythological and Abrahamic eschatology. First of all, it is necessary to distinguish the motive of dystopia through analyzing similar features of eschatology, dystopia (and futurology) as specific forms of attitude to the mode of future, and to disсern traditional features of this literary genre as well. For example, a geneticist from space, who calls himself as a space monk, is perceived by society as the antichrist, attempting a sacrilege against the sacrament of procreation and the divine commandment “Be fruitful and multiply”; an undesirable brand on the pregnant women’s forehead is considered as a mark of the beast, since laser exposure in folk culture is perceived as an ability to control people’s psyche and soul. In the background, the novel illustrates the dystopia model of a technocratic state in which inhuman experiments in creating an artificial human, lynching, mass wars and murders occur. Further, the motive of the “noosphere” is considered, which interprets the genesis of world eschatology as world’s harmony destruction and division of the world mind into the antinomy of space and chaos, where the first epitomizes the natural beginning of nature and animals, meanwhile the chaos is relating to social destructive actions. The impossibility of constructing a noospheric, cosmopolitan consciousness assumes its evolutionary completion, the end of the world, according to Aitmatov. Aitmatov’s world-building in his novel largely resembles the theories of Teilhard de Chardin, Nikolai Fedorov, Vladimir Vernadsky. In the end, the final image of world eschatology is devoted to the motive of the universal death, endangering both human existence and all nature, the cosmic universe as a whole. In the novel for the first time, besides the suicide of the protagonist, Aitmatov describes the mass suicide of whales, as radars of cosmic intelligence, predicting the world’s catastrophe. The aspect of the forced death of a prophet-man as a potential death for society is also analyzed Abstracts. World eschatology in Aitmatov’s late fiction “Cassandra’s Brand” (1996) addresses the problem of death expectation of mankind at the genetic level in the context of a worldwide catastrophe. In this case, of great interest is the writer’s transition, along with mythological and Abrahamic eschatology, to rationalistic eschatology, which acts within the framework of secular culture, anthropogenic factors and science-like phenomena.

Queer Elasticity: Imperial Boyhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Boys' Adventure Fiction

Queer Elasticity: Imperial Boyhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Boys' Adventure Fiction

Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories by Matthew L. Potts

Reviewed by: Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories by Matthew L. Potts Mark Steven Matthew L. Potts. Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 219 pp. An old scalp hunter hesitates before gunning down his teenage adversary. A surveyor marks out a perimeter fence across plains strewn with the carcasses of slaughtered bison, his slow progress tracked by roaming bone pickers. A defeated sheriff, his county in bloody chaos, dreams that his father rides on ahead, through the mountains and into the night, establishing an encampment in wait for his son. A fisherman shares his catch with the goatman and a boy hands a dipper of water down to construction workers in a riverside ditch. A young family takes in a timeworn cowboy: he shares his stories, his skills; they grant hospitality. Somewhere in a world of pure terror, of inescapable violence, a man washes the coagulating brains of a hostile stranger from his son's hair. Elsewhere in that world, perhaps long ago, brook trout in a stream suggest a life made impossibly precious by its own finitude. By reading episodes such as these—taken from the middle and late fiction of Cormac McCarthy—Matthew L. Potts establishes his thesis for the primacy of sacrament in an exemplary body of literature. Potts's book, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament, explores the titular author's presentation of sacramental and eucharistic imagery across multiple novels. It argues that McCarthy's writing adventures a "cruciform logic toward the development of a distinct moral vision, a sacrificial ethics" (2), a morality bound up in a wholly theological worldview. For Potts, McCarthy's prose testifies to an unspoken belief that "there is a holiness embodied in the quotidian; that there is a sacredness in, with, and under the profane" (13). Demonstration of this belief is no small task given the apparent ruthlessness of the subject matter, but the argument here has been developed persuasively and for that reason is all the more transformative. It might seem, at first glance, willfully counterintuitive to scour McCarthy's resolutely horrific fiction for signs of grace. Yet this is precisely what makes McCarthy such a rewarding case study for a literature of sacrament. "Just as the cross does not compromise the holiness of Christ for Christian theology," we are dutifully reminded, "nor the stale wafer impede the presence of his body to the church, McCarthy can—through deploying these eucharistic images—at once articulate in his fiction a cruelty absolutely without compromise while yielding no ground for the enduring worth of goodness" (14). The holy, the sacred, and the simply good thus appear from within climates [End Page 195] of unremitting horror, doing so consistently in two guises: narratively, in fleeting acts of tenderness, forgiveness, and generosity; and stylistically, in moments when the prose form, the words and sentences with which these books are written, ramifies a sense of incalculable mystery. What these manifestations of the sacred enkindle, we are told, is a literary aesthetic consonant with Theodor Adorno's sense of philosophical vocation: a literature with the capacity to "contemplate despair from the perspective of redemption" (79). According to Potts, these books preserve quotidian and corporeal instances of human warmth over and against their darkness implacable. There is more going on with McCarthy than scalping, cannibalism, and catamites. The first chapter, "Knowledge," begins with an excursion through McCarthy's Southwest, surveying instances when the Christian Church has failed to protect its community against the forces of historical contradiction, and whose febrile members have been subject to death and desecration by the indigenous population and the frontiersmen alike. Potts reads this narrative tendency of routing the parish as exemplary of the American Western, a genre that finds its historical predicate in heathen reprisals on the embodiments of the European Enlightenment. There is, he argues, a transatlantic inversion at work in this, whereby "the European Gothic mutates and bastardizes itself in the American Western, a genre wherein the enemies (once enemies by virtue of class, now monsters by virtue of race) of enlightened reason are battled and ultimately bested...

Environmental Depredation and Aesthetic Reflection in Wilhelm Raabe’s Late Fiction

In the winter of 1890 to 1891 the city of Braunschweig experienced a precipitous decline in the quality of its drinking water. The cause: beet sugar factories in the surrounding duchy were releasing hydrogen sulfide—the major byproduct of beet sugar production—into the Oker River watershed in quantities that exceeded the capacity of local water purification facilities. Wilhelm Raabe described the town’s situation in a letter to his daughter on January 17, 1891: “Be glad that you are not in Braunschweig. An absolute pigsty! We no longer bathe, we no longer brush our teeth, even in our cooked food you can taste the water from the Oker, spoiled by twelve sugar factories: Pfister′s Mill in its most terrible completion!” (Stadtarchiv Braunschweig, H III 10 : 2).1 The letter describes the intrusion of a byproduct of modern industry into a city that Raabe had once praised for the “ancient magnificence and beauty of lower Saxon bourgeois splendor.”2 In the letter Raabe understands environmental crisis as an aesthetic crisis, one that then precipitates a civilizational crisis: quotidian habits of hygiene and consumption are suddenly disrupted as the ugly signs of modern industry move from the duchy’s peripheral industrial settlements into the beautiful, pre-industrial urban core. Pfister’s Mill (Pfisters Mühle) is Raabe’s 1884 novel about water pollution from a beet sugar factory driving a mill out of business. If Pfister’s Mill reaches its “most terrible completion” in the calamity of 1891, then it is because what appeared in the novel as an individual tragedy has grown into a disaster for an entire city.

From Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft: The Social Transformation as Reflected inThe Hamlet

Popular criticism tends to consider that Faulkner is preoccupied with formal experimentation to the pint of obliviousness and indifference to the tenor of the times. However, Faulkner's works especially his late fiction is not only socially challenging but also politically radical. Based on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, two key concepts by Ferdinand Tonnies’,this paper analyzed the social transformation in American South through the portrayal of FlemSnopes’ economic reform and innovation in Faulkner's The Hamlet and revealed it's profound effect on the whole society on which the identity of the modern American South are founded.In the dramatization of FlemSnopes and his kin, Faulkner depicts them as an allegory and challenges the blind faith in the so called progress of human society.

The other side of silence: realism, ecology and the whole life in Don Delillo’s late fiction

ABSTRACTThis article locates a form of literary realism adapted to the event of climate change in Don DeLillo’s late fiction. The social element of the realist novel is shaped by limits in human empathy. ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life’, writes George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’. That ‘roar’ has become intelligible as global warming, and the world fashioned by the sensations of the bourgeois body is now vulnerably, imperfectly separated from a larger ecological reality. DeLillo’s late fiction attunes itself to this reality through its emphasis on the contingent character of sensation. In ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, Libra, Underworld and other works, momentary impressions gleaned from an environment capture the ‘whole life’ – a figure’s past, future and life’s meaning. A tension between these ‘whole lives’ and the consistently disruptive environments from which they are drawn expands the receptive field of DeLillo’s fiction, producing an ecological realism that suggests future possibilities for extending the range of human empathy to objects as big as global warming and the planet.

Royal Apologetic in the Ancient Near East by Andrew Knapp

Reviewed by: Royal Apologetic in the Ancient Near East by Andrew Knapp David A. Bosworth andrew knapp, Royal Apologetic in the Ancient Near East (WAW Supplements 4; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015). Pp. xx + 419. $59.95. Knapp provides a valuable study of royal apologetic in the ancient Near East. He reviews the scattered scholarship on the subject and then turns to scholars of rhetoric for some much-needed clarity and borrows a definition of apology as "a public speech of self-defense" (p. 18). Ancient Near Eastern apologies are propaganda and therefore public, and K. strives to discern the intended audiences of ancient texts to determine whether they meet [End Page 325] this criterion (e.g., building inscriptions buried in foundations could be public in the sense of existing in many clay copies circulating among scribes). Apologies are speech in the broad sense that includes writing. The self-defensive nature of apologetic may be divided into defenses against specific allegations (called justifications) and wider defenses of legitimacy (called legitimations). Most importantly, K. clarifies that apology is not a literary genre but rather what scholars of rhetoric call a mood or mode, analogous to satire as a generally useful rhetorical category that may find expression in a wide variety of genres or forms (e.g., novel, lyric poem). Once the groundwork on apology in general is completed, K. offers in chap. 2 a list of motifs that commonly appear in ancient Near Eastern apologies, such as divine election, popular acclamation, and military success. He then lists sixteen ancient Near Eastern texts that qualify as apologies, from which he selects seven for analysis in the subsequent chapters, specifically: Proclamation of Telipinu, Autobiography of Hattusili III, Traditions of David's Rise and Reign, Succession Narrative of Solomon, Tel Dan Inscription, Accession of Esarhaddon, and The Rise of Nabonidus. K. limits himself to these texts because they include both legitimations and justifications, whereas the others lack the specificity of justifications. K. then outlines his approach to each text in subsequent chapters: summary of the ruler's accession, description of the text, transliteration and translation of the text (except the biblical texts, which are source-critically analyzed and summarized), analysis of apologetic motifs, and the circumstances of each text. The discussion of the biblical texts receives the most attention due to the length of the texts and the wealth of scholarship concerning them. K. notes that the biblical texts differ from the other ancient Near Eastern apologies in that they are composite texts whose earliest copies date to centuries after the events they purport to describe, and that they are not royal inscriptions. Without the two chapters on the biblical narratives, the monograph would be more focused with a more coherent collection of related texts. Although the biblical materials get the most attention, K. does not treat the ancient Near Eastern texts as "background" to the biblical narratives. K. does not seek to reconstruct an alleged singular narrative that was an apology for David. Rather, his "Tradition of David's Rise and Reign" (TDRR) consists of 1 Samuel 16–2 Samuel 24 minus those passages that seem late. For example, 2 Sam 11:2–12:25 presents an unusual interaction between the king and the prophet Nathan that K. thinks derives from a later prophetic source (it also happens to be hard to reconcile with an apologetic purpose). Knapp states, "Methodologically, I privilege the apologetic mode because I can coherently explain (to my mind, anyway) all other aspects of the Samuel narrative in light of this, but I cannot account for the apology with other models (such as those that treat 1–2 Samuel as a late fiction" (p. 195). Here and elsewhere, he notes the connection between the apologetic mode and historical reconstruction. If the text is apologetic, then it must be early and represent historical events (albeit in distorted fashion). He thinks that no such apology was needed centuries after the events, yet even in recent times many people have a vested interest in defending David from reasonable suspicions about his character that may be derived from the biblical text. Consider, for example, the many attempts to read Bathsheba as a dangerous seductress...