Literary Mode Research Articles

Privileging Oddity and Otherness: A Study of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

The concept of otherness in literature usually comes under the broad purview of postcolonial studies, relating to the subaltern and the displaced. This paper, however, focuses on the concept of the ‘other’ and the ‘odd’ in the light of magical realism and how the characters which are generally side-lined by society on the basis of their sexual preference, mental capability, physical deformity, gender fluidity and age find a clear and distinct voice in these fictions. Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore is taken up for this study. The unique blend of surrealism (the progenitor genre) with magical realism (the offspring mode) in the novel creates an oneiric landscape which is still very much rooted in reality, in present day Japan. The paper concentrates on the trauma of certain characters and how their exclusion from society leads to their subsequent recovery. The paper through a detailed and critical study of the novel’s unusual characters and their non-deterministic status of being typified in traditional categories posits magical realism as an apt literary mode for those who lack a voice and are underrepresented in conventional texts. Here ostracism is not portrayed as pessimistic but as a locus for growth and self-discovery.

Políticas de vida nas margens: resistência e reexistência ante as desigualdades e o racismo nada cordial das cenas urbanas brasileiras

Este artigo pretende discutir os modos literários de resistência às desigualdades sociais. Para tanto se dispõe a analisar dois contos Espiral e O ônibus branco escritos respectivamente por Geovani Martins e Ferrez. Estes dois autores contemporâneos expressam nas suas produções literárias o cotidiano de desigualdade e racismo encarado por jovens periféricos dos grandes centros urbanos. A leitura proposta se alimenta do repertório teórico das Ciências Sociais, articulando e aproximando os dois escritos ao mesmo tempo que evoca categorias de análise eficazes para compreensão do fenômeno social apresentado e descrito poeticamente. Nosso entendimento é que mais do que uma mera tendência estética, a escritura periférica é ela própria um ato de resistência, uma forma artística que não hesita em apontar suas armas para as persistentes desigualdades e para o racismo estrutural que marcam o Brasil contemporâneo.

Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media. Edited by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. vii+289.

<i>Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media</i>. Edited by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. vii+289.

CAN A LITERARY READING BE A LIBERATIVE READING?

Situating itself within liberation hermeneutics, this paper discusses whether a literary mode of reading can offer a theoretically well-grounded biblical hermeneutics of liberation. This question arises from the work of two black South African writers, Allan A Boesak and Itumeleng J Mosala, particularly from their readings of the Cain and Abel story. The focus of the paper, however, is a discussion of the literary mode of reading of the feminist interpreter Phyllis Trible. The paper argues that by viewing her literary readings of the Old Testament as deconstructions of patriarchy, we have a theological framework for grounding a literary biblical hermeneutics of liberation. Finally, the paper sketches why it is that such analysis matters, particularly in the South African context, but also within biblical studies generally.

Militant Complaint in Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo

ABSTRACT In Bell in Campo, the complaints of women left behind in wartime become the complaints of grieving war widows, namely Madam Jantil and Madam Passionate. Cavendish juxtaposes these laments with depictions of a new female army that emerges from – or perhaps truncates what begins as – complaint, with Lady Victoria issuing a call to arms in her fury at being transported, for her safety, away from her husband and the battlefield. While the “Generalless” ostensibly identifies two very different motivations for enlisting, “discontent” and “honour and fame” intertwine in the mode of complaint (I:3.2, p. 51). “Honour” is often interchangeable with “pride” in the period, but “pride” is also frequently feminised, sometimes in contradistinction to masculine honour. Moral tracts described sinful pride as mistaking one’s place, an error to which women were thought to be especially prone. This definition resonates with Lady Victoria’s troops seeking “renown” on the battlefield despite the men’s insistence that the women do not belong there (I:3.2, p. 55). Bell in Campo reveals how complaint, as a literary mode, participates in the gradual shift from notions of pride as a particularly feminine sin to more positive understandings of pride as legitimate self-assertion.

Apprehending Global Civilisation in The Magic Lamp: Giving the World a New Literature

The argument in this article is that Ben Okri’s ekphrastic The Magic Lamp: Dreams of Our Age (London: Apollo, 2017) reveals an ontopoietic or heightened awareness literature of the “imagiNation”, to borrow a neologism from Dieter Riemenschneider, the purpose of which is a Heideggerian transformation of our global intelligence through a mythic conjunction between poetic text by Okri and art images by Rosemary Clunie. In this new kind of literature, healing accrues from a creative rising above the unnatural boundaries that separate human beings from one another and from their globalised eco- phenomenological environments. Okri envisages a special brand of spatial- temporal coexistence to be found in the bordering of our state of consciousness with our subconscious mind, melding our past with our present. The article situates global civilisation within the notion of globalisation, terms that cover a whole range of distinct political, economic, and socio-cultural trends, embedded within which are ideological connotations that encompass regional, national, and international topographies as well as aesthetic, ethical, and psychological domains. Four excerpts from The Magic Lamp, in which Okri adopts a fabulist literary mode that invites comparison with the world of dreams—as suggested by the book’s subtitle, Dreams of Our Age—serve to illustrate an international literature that tends to transcend the borders between the realist or mimetic and the fantastic or magical, by blending, juxtaposing, interposing, or contrasting the cerebral with realism, as happens during dreamtime.

Chris Kraus’ Auto-Fictional Strategies of Failure

La production écrite de Chris Kraus, notamment son ouvrage de 1997 désormais devenu culte I Love Dick , est marqué par une fascination pour la figure de l’artiste ratée. Cet article interroge les modalités d’écriture mises en place pour témoigner de cette fascination qui s’écrit sur un mode mineur, le journal, tout en s’insérant dans une tradition intellectuelle et artistique de la marge. L’artiste se pense en termes de rivalité avec ses propres ambitions tout autant qu’avec les institutions artistiques qu’elle tente d’intégrer. En célébrant la figure de l’artiste ratée, Chris Kraus revient sur la tradition de la culture de la subversion pour penser l’échec comme une position éthique radicale.

Resurrecting ‘Metaphor’ inside the EFL Poetry Classroom: a Nudge towards an Integrated-Model

‘Metaphor’ captures the zeitgeist of the 21st Century for reaching a climactic scene on the stage of cognitive linguistics, literary studies, and Second Language (L2) teaching. Important though, in Algerian English as Foreign Language (EFL) literature classrooms, metaphor plays a peripheral role in education, as it scarcely appears either as part and parcel device in literature analysis or as a means for strengthening the understanding of poetry. However, even in those literary spaces where it visibly manifests itself, learning the metaphoric language does not touch a chord with the learners. The persistent issue is that many Algerian instructors are still employing threadbare, transmissive modes of instruction that fail deceptively to reach satisfying scholarly ends. In this sense, the fulcrum aim of this study is to explore the effectiveness of re-positing metaphor inside the poetry curriculum. Correspondingly, it proposes the integrated-model as a state-of-art teaching framework. The primary question that this study seeks to answer is whether teaching poetry via an integrated approach may act as a stimulus for enhancing students’ Metaphoric Competence (MC). The secondary subsidiary endeavour is to diagnose the different intricacies that the learners confront along that process. Guided by these incentives, the researcher has carried an empirical study (pre/posttest) with forty-first year EFL Algerian students from Tlemcen University using four poems as evaluative materials. To analyze the effectiveness of the experiment using SPSS, the inquirer has opted for the Paired-Samples t-Test to check whether the paradigm shift in the same group of participants’ grades is statistically significant or not. Substantially, this study reveals that the implementation of an integrated framework to instruct poetry provides a springboard for remarkable betterments in the area of MC. This progress is evidenced by its ability to revitalize the learners’ cognitive potentials to comprehend, interpret, and evaluate conceptual metaphors embedded in poetry. In an unfavourable note, this study has also dropped the veil on some language difficulties that the students face in the course of metaphor analysis, that stem mainly from the low exposure to the target language (TL), and the poor engagement with the different literary modes of expression. Finally, for the hope of honing (MC) inside the Algerian EFL classes, it is fervently recommended that the teachers assist their learners actively in well-defined figurative-oriented assignments that focus on raising the awareness of the L2 conceptual mapping. Technological aids are also a solicited constructive teaching material that may make poetry draw a new breath of life inside the classroom and beyond.

‘It aye like London, you know’: The Brexit Novel and the Cultural Politics of Devolution

This paper takes Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017) as its central focus, a novel commissioned by European publisher Peirene Press as a fictional response to the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote. I provide a discussion of what I term the ‘cultural politics of devolution’ in Cartwright’s text, suggesting that it offers a critique of the British centralised state form and makes demands for the decentralisation of political power. Focussed on a small deindustrialised town, The Cut is an English regional polemic exploring how uneven development played a decisive role in the outcome of the European Union referendum. Building on Doreen Massey’s insight that places are not simply physical locations but ‘articulations of social relations’ (Massey, 1994: 22), my discussion of Cartwright’s novel is concerned with the way a discursive, cultural version of ‘the North’ was mobilised ideologically as a fulcrum of the Leave vote within Brexit media and political discourse. I trace the ways in which The Cut responds to this manoeuvre in an ambivalent deployment of nostalgia as both a vehicle for regional devolution and a literary mode associated with a parochial version of ‘the North’ that continues to exist in the national imagination. As this paper demonstrates, the text equivocates between a radical nostalgia that highlights the need for constitutional reform and a reactionary turn to the industrial past. Ultimately, I propose that The Cut forecloses its own devolutionary potential in an aesthetic and thematic reliance on cultural stereotypes of Northernness, suggesting the limitations of nostalgia as a resource for constructing alternatives to the present.

Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean by Jonathan Decter

Reviewed by: Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean by Jonathan Decter Michael Rand Jonathan Decter. Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 387 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001016 Jonathan Decter's book on panegyric focuses on that part of the medieval Hebrew literary tradition that represents a special Jewish subtype within the larger framework of medieval Arabo-Islamic poetry and adab. It joins a number of other works that deal with Jewish poetry and literature more generally against the background of the Arabic context—chief among these, perhaps, Ross Brann's Compunctious Poet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Together, these books provide nuanced insights into the workings of Hebrew poetics from the Spanish Golden Age and into later developments in Iberia, Provence, the eastern Mediterranean (especially Egypt), and Iraq. Decter and Brann are both students of Raymond Scheindlin, himself a Hebraist and Arabist, and I do not think that it would be an exaggeration to say that their work is evidence of a robust American tradition of philologically rooted literary research in Golden Age Hebrew poetry that is profoundly informed by a full command of the Arabic matrix from which it sprang. Decter provides a systematic and methodologically well-grounded overview of his topic: performance contexts of Jewish panegyric (chapter 1); panegyric as gift (chapter 2); panegyric tropes (humility, generosity, eloquence, etc.; chapter 3); regionalism as reflected in panegyric (i.e., Spain versus the eastern Mediterranean; chapter 4—for this topic see also the recently published U. Kfir, A Matter of Geography [Leiden: Brill, 2018]); ethical considerations in the composition and consumption of panegyric (chapter 5); hyperbole and sacral imagery in panegyric (chapters 6–7); the evolution of the panegyric tradition in the Christian Mediterranean (chapter 8); and panegyric by Jewish poets for non-Jewish recipients, including some Arabic examples and one in Castilian, as well as a Hebrew poem showing troubadour influence (chapter 9). Throughout, Decter's discussions are based on copious examples—in English translation—drawn both from the relevant poetic corpora as well as from medieval discussions of [End Page 200] literary criticism (reaching back, as relevant, to Aristotle). The result is an integrated treatment of a topic that constitutes a major (though not a particularly exciting—at least not to modern tastes, as Decter stresses in several places) component of the Golden Age Hebrew poetic tradition. As Decter passes freely and seamlessly between Hebrew panegyric and the world of Arabic poetics whence it sprang, he succeeds in establishing that the former is in large part a confessionally and linguistically specialized extension of the latter. Another, equally fundamental, notion that runs like a red thread through the book is the idea that Jewish panegyric is a Mediterranean phenomenon, that is, it is not a literary mode restricted to the formal Hebrew qas.ida poetry of Spain, but also takes in the eastern offshoots of the Golden Age poetic tradition, and in fact pervades medieval Jewish social exchanges in the Mediterranean littoral as mediated through other literary genres, in particular the epistolary. Thus, he succeeds in drawing a clear connection via the panegyric mode between material that is traditionally treated as poetic-literary on the one hand, and as documentary on the other. The notion of an interface between these two categories is, of course, not radically new, but what is new here is its incorporation as the principle guiding a holistic treatment of an important aspect of medieval Hebrew literary and social culture. Against the background of the embeddedness of Jewish panegyric in a dominant Arabo-Islamic matrix, Decter's concluding chapter on instances of boundary-crossing—Jewish panegyric for gentile recipients—is particularly intriguing. By highlighting the incorporation of Jewish-Hebrew references to referents existing within the prevailing Islamic (or Christian) milieu, it simultaneously underscores the degree to which the Hebrew tradition had in fact become an organic semiotic unity—that is, praise for non-Jews could be the occasion for introducing new elements referring to the external culture. This may be compared with Arabo-Muslim panegyric addressed to a Jewish recipient. The two examples...

황석영의 『장길산』에 나타난 전통 문예장르의 수용 양상 연구

이 논문은 『장길산』에서 시도된 다양한 전통 문예 장르들이 집적․변용된 양상을 살펴보고 그 의의를 살펴보고자 하였다. 『장길산』은 역사적 사실과 허구가 교차되는 복합적인 서술구성을 통해, 장길산이 살았던 17세기 후반의 민중들의 삶과 연계된 전통 문예장르들을 집적하였으며, 그러한 집적을 통해 민중들의 삶 속에서 살아 움직이는 문화를 재현하고자 하였다. 그 결과 『장길산』은 인쇄문화에 바탕을 둔 장편소설 안에서 다양한 전통문화 요소들을 집체화하였으며, 구술적이며 연행적인 서술특성을 도입하여 역동적인 복합장르적 성향을 강화하였다.<BR> 특히 창우, 광대, 무당 등 다양한 인물들의 연행이나 활동 공간 및 이동 경로들은 다양한 놀이와 풍속, 굿, 탈춤, 옛이야기들, 판소리, 가사, 잡가, 타령 등이 사건의 전개과정에서 빈번하게 삽입되어 장르 변용과 혼용이 빈번하게 발생하는데 기여하였다. 구술 문예장르들은 사건의 전개과정에서 다양한 변용과 및 혼용의 대상이었다. 서술과정에 수용된 전통 문예장르들의 구술적 특성들은 소설 장르에 연행적 요소들을 포괄시키는 매개 역할을 하였다. 서술과정에서 인물의 언어와 서술자 언어를 공존시키거나 다양한 전통 문예장르들을 모방․삽입․짜깁기하면서 전통문예장르들을 포괄․압축하였을 뿐 아니라 역동적으로 변형하고 집체화하였다. 서술과정에서 인물의 언어와 서술자 언어를 공존시키는 기법은 인물의 마음을 표면화하여 드러내고 서술과 노래(청각)를 연동시켜 서술에 복합 장르(연행 장르)적 성격을 가미하는 역할을 하였다.<BR> 이와 같이 『장길산』은 다양한 전통 문예장르들을 모방, 혼용, 변용하여 현대 소설장르 안에 포괄․압축하였으며, 다양한 전통 문예장르들과 현대소설의 역동적 결합들을 선보이고 있다. 『장길산』에 수용된 방대하고 다양한 전통 문예장르들은 훌륭한 문화콘텐츠로서의 가치가 있을 뿐 아니라 모방, 짜깁기, 변형을 통해 현대 문학 속에서 살아 숨 쉬는 장르들로 접목되는 중요한 모델이 되고 있다.<BR> 이와 같이 『장길산』은 한국의 다양한 전통 문예장르들을 역동적으로 집적시키면서 그것들에 내재된 민중의 문화적 역량과 실천적 역량을 결집하고 지속시키는 역할을 하였다. 나아가 『장길산』에서 보여주는 다양하고 방대한 전통 문예장르들의 수용은 굿이나 서사무가, 민담 등의 전통 문예장르들과 소설 장르의 교배, 다양한 전통 문예장르들의 현대 소설화에도 기여한 바가 매우 크다. 그러한 작업들은 『장길산』에서 시도되었던 전통 문예장르들에 포함된 민중의 문화적 역량과 실천적 역량을 현대소설 장르에 결집하고 재점화하려는 노력의 연장선상에 있는 것으로 보인다.

“Much to Do with Hate, but More with Love”: Temporal Relations in Troilus and Cressida

This article argues that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida demonstrates how the (historical or geographical) Other is performatively created—and, simultaneously, subverted—in the way the two opposing parties are drawn. While Troy represents a medieval world of chivalry, honesty, and humility, the Greek camp, set in binary opposition, appears as a Renaissance world of cynicism, dissimulation, and arrogance. They are also attached to different literary modes of expressions: poetry and drama. Especially the two archetypal heroes of their parties, Hector and Achilles, form a complementary unit up to the point where they become indistinguishable: in the scene of Hector and Achilles’ final encounter on the battlefield, the dichotomy that had been established throughout the play collapses when, in a sonnet-like sequence that aligns the two with the loving couple of Romeo and Juliet and a corresponding scene in that play, the lines of demarcation collapse and the two opposites, paradoxically, become one.

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (c. 1928)

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (<i>c</i>. 1928)

Metaphor, Metamorphosis and Meaning: ‘All the Possibilities of Language’ inDifference and Repetition

In this paper I explore two distinct but related emphases in Deleuze's later philosophy, both on his own and in collaboration with Félix Guattari, having to do with literature. The first is the emphasis on the work of literature as an assemblage whereby the author constructs lines of flight in the pursuit of self-experimentation and self-transformation. The second is the rejection of metaphor across Deleuze's work. I use Difference and Repetition to chart the origins of these emphases, by unpacking the metaphysics of language contained in Difference and Repetition. I first recount the basic structure of Deleuze's intensive ontology, before going on to discuss the way in which the ‘fundamental encounter’ forces thought to formulate Ideas, which, as they are transmitted through the subject, alter her nature. This self-transformation is tantamount to a kind of ‘death’, whereby one is continually explicated, but this explication implies the transcendental Other-structure at the end of Difference and Repetition, wherein the Other, through language, gives birth to ‘possible worlds’. I end with the development of an unexplored concept in Difference and Repetition, the loquendum, which is what must be spoken precisely because it is inexpressible, the purely intensive. Language comes closest to this intensive use in its aesthetic, poetic, literary modes whereby authors distort their own languages.

Literalität in kinderund jugendliterarischen Werken

The article starts with a discussion of the essential theories of literature. It focuses on the historical development of books for children and young-adults. Worldwide there are three childhood myths, which are unfolded in successful children's books and which correspond to socially conditioned concepts of childhood. The Enlightenment childhood utopia sees children as promising for the future and improving human relationships. This idea explains the phenomenal resonance of books with educational and instructive concepts. In the 20th and 21st centuries this concept has become very popular again. By contrast, Romanticism developed another, second childhood myth, which combines not a future but a paradisiacal past with the image of childhood. In doing so, the holistic and naïve childlike world reference is stylized into an ideal that expresses the backward-looking yearning of adults. In addition to the Enlightenment and the Romantic childhood myths, there is a third, a negative view of childhood, which has also found expression in children's classics worldwide. This refers to the myth of the evil child, who is originally committed to the Christian doctrine of original sin. In the next step the article traces different modes of reading. These are the literary mode and documentary/pragmatic mode. Then, based on fragments taken from children’s and juvenile books from different periods, the article demonstrates the role of literacy in texts written for children and young adults, and the role of children and young-adult books for reading competence. While the paper examines these ideas within different novels though history, it also raises questions about the aesthetics and epistemic value of literature

“Breaking language”: Performance and community in Suheir Hammad’s poetry

ABSTRACTThis article examines Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad’s strategy of “breaking language” across literary and performative modes, with a particular focus on the community structures that she establishes among her audiences and readers. It argues that her poetry – especially in its online remediation – challenges reactionary, nationalistic appeals to identity in the wake of public crisis by incorporating the disruptive action of “breaking” as a literary and performative device. In doing so, her work helps build more open, heterogeneous, and transnational affective bonds, both across and between established community lines. Reading performativity and community as major themes across Hammad’s work, the article tracks these influences from her performance of “first writing since” in 2002 to her 2008 poetry collection, breaking poems. An exploration of the connection between performativity and community in Hammad’s work is vital to understanding her contribution to contemporary American poetry and the broader literary landscape of postcolonial diaspora.

Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic by Ezra Tawil

Reviewed by: Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic by Ezra Tawil Thomas Koenigs (bio) Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic ezra tawil University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018 257 pp. Ezra Tawil’s Literature, American Style traces the transatlantic origins of American literary exceptionalism. The initially counterintuitive, but persuasive, insight at the center of this book is that many of the earliest and most influential arguments for the distinctiveness of American literature were deeply indebted to European, and especially English, aesthetic theories and literary modes. This central argument has a revelatory obviousness to it: when one thinks about it, it is not especially surprising that claims to American originality had European precedents and origins. “Of course,” says the twenty-first-century scholar steeped in recent transatlantic and hemispheric accounts of early US literature, “this idea would have transatlantic origins!” The fact that no one has thought or written about this fact [End Page 245] in a sustained way before, however, suggests the incredible power—even as it has been variously debunked—of the very cultural fantasy of literary Americanness that Tawil analyzes. Literature, American Style undertakes a significant methodological revision in the study of American literature’s distinctiveness by shifting focus from the originality or derivativeness of early US literature to the (much) longer intellectual and literary histories that underpinned the conceptions of originality embraced by these works. Literature, American Style’s accounts of such histories are impressive for both their scope and detail, as Tawil often traces a given aesthetic theory or literary style back to such distant figures as Chaucer, Augustine, or the Ancients, while also tracking how such ideas circulated in the early Republic. Tawil is well aware that a book focused on “what makes American literature American” risks seeming (at best) old-fashioned or (at worst) complicit in the exceptionalism that is its subject. He makes clear at the outset that his ambitions are genealogical: Literature, American Style does not aspire to evaluate the accuracy of early national claims to literary distinctiveness, but to trace and analyze the “fantasy of national originality” (33). One of this book’s significant achievements is to put two opposed lines of criticism—accounts of American literature’s distinctiveness and the transatlantic approaches to American literature that have revised such studies— into a compelling conversation with each other. Literature, American Style argues that neither the venerable “Anglophobia thesis”—the idea that early US culture emerged out of a desire to distance and distinguish itself from Britain—nor the more recent “Anglophilia thesis”—the idea that early US culture is best understood as an attempt to reproduce English culture outside England—can fully capture what Tawil calls the “inverted form of affiliation” that defined early US culture: the very terms on which American writers made their claims to national originality were themselves largely borrowed from British culture. In Tawil’s account, American claims to literary originality “sutured the fantasy of autochthony to the reality of allochthony” by arguing that Englishness itself had been transformed by the American setting (17). This reconceptualization of national literary originality depends on re-framing the question in two distinct, but related, ways. First, Tawil shifts the historical focus from the familiar manifestos of literary nationalism of the 1840s and ’50s to the comparatively “quaint” declarations of national originality from the 1780s and ’90s. This not only allows Literature, American [End Page 246] Style to offer a fresh prehistory of this crucial later moment, but also, far more interestingly, enables it to recover the alternative, less familiar conceptions of literary originality that we often miss because of our own comfort with the conception of originality that predominated in the antebellum period and beyond. Literature, American Style highlights a pre-Romantic conception of originality as repetition with difference rather than radically new or unprecedented creation. The idea of an “original imitation” might seem profoundly paradoxical to modern readers, but, as Tawil convincingly shows, this is exactly how early US writers understood the process of creating a distinctive American literature: they sought to achieve national originality by adapting English materials to the American context. This shift in historical focus is intimately...

"Master Metaphor": Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency

"Master Metaphor"Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency April Anson (bio) On October 27, 2016, Ammon Bundy and other members of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (CCF) were acquitted of all charges stemming from their armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. While at Malheur, CCF's occupiers declared the rule of law unconstitutional, a state-of-emergency summons supported by right-wing militia groups invoking apocalyptic fears of white genocide.1 In contrast, on the same day of the acquittal verdict and with the visual drama of an apocalyptic dystopian film, a militarized police force arrested 141 water protectors in Standing Rock, North Dakota—an area secured by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and by the state of emergency that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council declared in August 2016.2 Though many decried the unequal consequences of each occupation, the disparity was not an isolated occurrence, nor is it limited to rural or reservation boundaries. Rather, its incongruence continues a racialized distinction fundamental to the state of emergency itself. The state of emergency's implicit inequality is entrenched in apocalyptic appeals that rely on its logic, reinforcing the ongoing emergency of settler colonial capitalism even when they aim to disturb it. The uses and abuses of apocalyptic rhetoric are, by now, regularly acknowledged. Narratives of apocalypse too often overwhelm, immobilize, and instill a sense of futility. However, these criticisms frequently fail to consider the diverse and even divergent aspects of the literary mode. Rather than asking whether to apocalypse or not, this essay investigates by what means and to what ends. Placing the emergent subfield of catastrophe studies into conversation with political theory, this [End Page 60] essay parses the apocalyptic for problematic pivots around an emergency event. In a comparison of the 2016–17 Malheur occupation and the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock, this essay finds that apocalyptic stories of single disastrous moments shelter the settler state of emergency, protecting the logic of the settler colonial capitalism's continuous creation of and dependence upon the emergency event. This comparison clarifies the master metaphor lurking in the apocalyptic state of emergency—the ways apocalyptic emergency appeals reinforce the exclusionary violence and ecological devastation they so often seek to diagnose and disrupt. Ultimately, I suggest the exigency of an event-versus-structure distinction in apocalyptic environmental storytelling. Following Indigenous and Black feminist futurisms' invocations of apocalypse, which indict the structure of the settler state(s) of emergency, I suggest that stories that both summon and see beyond the structures of settler colonial capitalism's past, present, and future ends of worlds constitute a state of emergence for an antiracist politics of storytelling in the context of climate change.3 Emergency Now In the chaos of changing climates, the racialized extinction imperatives of the state of emergency become even more literally, and literarily, evident. The disparities attending the state of emergency are frequently implied in the literary mode of apocalypse as it habitually links to crisis, catastrophe, and environmental disaster. From the Greek word apokalypsis, meaning "something revealed or uncovered," the apocalyptic mode of storytelling is often associated with a Judeo-Christian tradition that narrates revelation and judgment day, the promise of the end of the world and a new beginning for a particular people. This genealogy of apocalypse tellingly traces the same colonial and capitalist epistemologies associated with the anthropocentric Western literary tradition that Amitav Ghosh recently credited with the lead role in "our" tragic failure in the face of global climate chaos.4 Though Ghosh diagnoses this as a universal epistemological deficit he deems The Great Derangement, the insufficiency is more precisely placed within the story of catastrophe that is, according to René Girard, a formula bound to the martial logics of Western politics.5 In truth, while the apocalypse can refer to an immense variety of storytelling traditions, in the one specific to Western [End Page 61] literature, apocalypse remains exceptionally consistent with the racialized realities of the state of emergency. Fictional appeals to the apocalypse that rely on a state-of-emergency logic are wedded to the exceptionalism of the white settler state. The state of emergency is more often than not...

The Weird Time of Fossils: Irrational Ontologies

In its common usage, weird describes something strange or out of place, a break from the expected order of things. This disruption of order is also essential to the weird as a literary mode, creating a sense of disorientation in both characters and readers through encounters with the "irrational" and inexplicable. This article contemplates time as one form of order that weird fiction disrupts through two related figures—the fossil and the found manuscript—in texts by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Stephen King. Where the fossil represents an object-figure of temporal rupture, the found manuscript serves as both an object and a formal structure: a layered text whose metafictional irruptions suggest deeper ontological instability. Both the fossil and the found manuscript frustrate a linear sense of time, introducing alternate possibilities for reality that challenge dominant Western logics.

James Joyce's "The Dead" and Macrobius's Saturnalia: The Menippean Encyclopedic Tradition and the Mythical Method

This essay focuses on James Joyce's "The Dead" in the context of Menippean Satire—a philosophical literary mode that emerged in the Hellenistic period. It shows that the final story of Dubliners presents an intertextual dialogue with the Saturnalia composed by the Roman philosopher and grammarian Macrobius in the early fifth century A.D.. Living in a time when the culture of ancient Greece and Rome is about to be displaced by the rise of the Christian world picture, Macrobius applies the Menippean tradition as "a kind of encyclopaedia" to keep the pre-Christian world from oblivion.