Narrative Momentum Research Articles

The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward ed. by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner

Reviewed by: The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward ed. by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner Matthew Karp The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner. Foreword by Edward L. Ayers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 276. $38.95, ISBN 978-0-19-086395-1.) In the early 1950s, C. Vann Woodward released a burst of scholarship whose intellectual and political impact has probably never been equaled in southern history: The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), a field-defining survey; Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, 1951), an influential monograph on the Compromise of 1877; “The Irony of Southern History,” his 1952 Southern Historical Association presidential address that was an iconic exploration of southern identity; and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955), a subversive account of segregation’s origins that Martin Luther King Jr. is famously said to have called “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” When Strange Career was published, Woodward was just forty-six years old. He worked actively for another four decades, giving lectures, writing essays, leading organizations, and training graduate students. Yet Woodward, at the peak of his powers, never produced another book of original historical research. It was not for lack of trying: across the 1960s and beyond, Woodward persevered with a number of book projects, chief among them a long-promised, much-discussed, and lucratively contracted narrative of Reconstruction. It never appeared. For biographers and close readers of his scholarship—a category that includes a fair portion of all southern historians since 1955—the interlocking stories of Woodward’s efflorescence and its eclipse retain intrinsic interest, above and beyond the rich content of the work itself. This volume of previously unpublished writing, skillfully edited and introduced by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner, sheds considerable light on both sides of the Woodward conundrum. It is principally drawn from two series of invited university talks Woodward delivered at the summit of his career: the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, given at Louisiana State University in his scholarly annus mirabilis of 1951; and the Messenger Lectures on the Evolution of Civilization, given at Cornell University in 1964, as he attempted to shape his research into a book on Reconstruction. A 1969 lecture Woodward delivered at Yale University, on “The Problem of Failure in American History,” serves as a kind of coda. As Ring, Gardner, and Edward L. Ayers (who contributes a foreword) all note, Woodward’s interest in the idea of failure—during Reconstruction and across U.S. history— overlaid his own intellectual struggles with a kind of tragic irony that Woodward himself would have appreciated, if not exactly relished. [End Page 383] The lectures printed here easily justify the work of restoration undertaken by Ring and Gardner. Many of Woodward’s lavish talents as a historian are on display: his flair for arresting, sharply framed topic sentences—“Never in history had the franchise been conferred on a proletariat so utterly deprived” (p. 221); “The advent of Republicanism marked the advent of class politics in the South” (p. 225)—and his gift for compact characterization, marked by a telling anecdote, as when he introduces the unworldly antislavery prophet Theodore Dwight Weld, who “often had to go to the window to see whether it was winter or summer” (p. 61), or the formidable southern abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who announced their new religious commitments with a ceremony: “Then one solemn morning the sisters destroyed a set of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, which Angelina had purchased, according to Sarah, ‘before she was serious’” (p. 65). At his best, as in the irresistible Origins, Woodward’s sentences and characters together conjure a kind of narrative momentum seldom achieved by other great historians, even those whose interpretations we now find more persuasive. Enough hints of that mysterious alchemy are visible here, in this raw form, for scholars today to take note. When we read Woodward’s editors at Louisiana State University Press, contracted to publish the revised Fleming lectures, urging him to keep “coining the golden prose”—practically...

Review: Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang, by Nicholas de Villiers

Review: <i>Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang</i>, by Nicholas de Villiers

Mannequin and Wife by Jen Fawkes, and: Tales the Devil Told Me by Jen Fawkes

Reviewed by: Mannequin and Wife by Jen Fawkes, and: Tales the Devil Told Me by Jen Fawkes Laura Jok (bio) mannequin and wife Jen Fawkes Louisiana State University Press https://lsupress.org/books/detail/mannequin-and-wife/ 210 pages; Print, $24.95 tales the devil told me Jen Fawkes Press 53 https://www.press53.com/short-fiction/tales-the-devil-told-me-by-jen-fawkes 196 pages; Print, $17.95 Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me, the story collections of Jen Fawkes, demonstrate the breadth and depth of the author's imagination to be, like her fabulist fictions, nothing short of remarkable. Fawkes is such a master of sustaining our enchantment, I could not resist reading the stories—and both of the books—one right after the other and then looking forward to more. Delays resulting from COVID-19 caused Tales the Devil Told Me to be released shortly after Mannequin and Wife, and their coincidence only displays Fawkes's rare gift for developing narrative momentum, novelty, and richness across a substantial repertoire—Mannequin numbers twenty stories, Tales eleven—of short fiction. The stories share a commitment to suspense, musical sentences, retold tales, and the fantastic through a constantly shifting and evolving blend of conceit, allegory, and realism that is never quite what we would anticipate. Tales the Devil Told Me and Mannequin and Wife read beautifully together, and seem, indeed, to finish each other's sentences. Tales, originally the author's MFA thesis, revisits canonical and archetypal stories from the Brothers Grimm to the penny dreadful to Shakespeare with a focus on their villains. The Tales retell from refreshing perspectives and reimagine the untold sides of the story, and at the same time, insightfully mine the source material for the universal experience or sentiment that makes the original deservedly archetypal [End Page 73] and reset it in a new realistic or hyperreal context that allows us to experience, in the familiar story, the shivers of recognition for heroes and villains alike, and the revelatory potential of the tale itself. Fawkes reminds us throughout Tales that interpretation can serve as a mechanism of forgiveness that reveals, or empathetically invents, our common humanity. In "Dynamics," the sinister and arcane codes of Professor Moriarty can be read, and rewritten, as a romance by the young mathematician determined to love him, who performs a similar feat for her father, the estranged failed theoretician who leaves her his papers. Rumpelstiltskin wants only to be known and loved like anyone else; Medusa is bitter because men become immobilized by her stunning appearance and can proceed no further in their relationship; Mowgli wishes a better life for his son, who grows up as wild as the tiger whom he reluctantly killed to protect his future and his descendancy. A gem of this collection, "Never, Never" asks not only that its Peter Pan figure, the aimless stoner narrator, grow up and get a real job but delivers this message through his stepfather, a draconian embarrassment who is, on top of everything else, Captain Hook. The pirate reinvents himself as a husband and a humble civil servant who turns his talents to sorting mail and spearing work orders on the end of his hook and appearing in full buccaneer regalia on his weekends. His paternal admonishments and advice, rendered in platitude and pirate speech, may sound laugh-out-loud funny—"What are ye going to do with yer life?"—but the insight of the story hides in plain sight, in how we, like the narrator, can initially dismiss Hook as amusing, ridiculous, the villain and the stepfather figure that we all know, only to be staggered later by his wisdom. Hook, like his stepson, like Peter Pan, like every one of us by extension of the metaphor, has learned from hard-won experience to move past juvenile evasions of responsibility on his voyages and obsession with the revenge for the wrongs done to him in youth, by recognizing his younger self in the angry stepson who shares the first name of the boy who maimed him. After Hook dies, Peter the narrator finally realizes what he was trying to tell him all along: to retain...

Soma

Soma is an abstract comic exploring the relationship between the creative act and mental health with an emphasis on embodiment. The title derives from the Greek term as used in Homer’s Iliad, where the word is used to refer not simply to the body, but to the dead body and also refers to the intoxicant used in Vedic ritual. As an abstract comic, the emphasis is not on narrative momentum or the development of an argument, but rather the cultivation of a tone or mood. In line with this, the comic’s visual approach partly takes its inspiration from black metal and other extreme forms of music, where the lyrics’ deliberate indecipherability recasts them as pure musical elements rather than conveyors of information. In a similar vein Soma’s use of words is intended as primarily rhythmical rather than information-bearing; rendered in such a way as to make them at times illegible, they become subsumed into the design. This strategy lies parallel to the aim of the comic as a whole: the reintegration of mind and body through the creative act here imagined as an act of self-cannibalization, recasting, in the terms of the title, the dead body as a ritual intoxicant.

How Not to Drown by Jaimee Wriston

Reviewed by: How Not to Drown by Jaimee Wriston Em Williamson (bio) how not to drown Jaimee Wriston Alcove Press https://alcovepress.com/book/how-not-to-drown/ 336 pages; Cloth, $27.99 Amid a swirl of aquatic imagery and metaphor, Jaimee Wriston's new novel How Not to Drown ekes out a heartfelt message about climate change and [End Page 97] the ineluctability of family. The novel climaxes with a hurricane that feels as much like an omen for its readers as it does for its characters, though the intrinsic messaging never comes across as didactic or finger-wagging. Instead, through generous and lushly rendered prose, Wriston brings this message to life in the form of a northeastern American family that—sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally—seems constantly on the verge of drowning. The novel follows the frayed family dynamics of the MacQueen-French household along a particularly tumultuous year. We are introduced to the matriarch, Amelia, in the aftermath of her younger son's alleged murder (you guessed it—drowning), after which her unfortunately named granddaughter, Heaven, has moved in to live with her. What unfolds in the course of their unexpected and troubled cohabitation is an occasionally poignant, often messy family drama that has a tendency to lose sight of its own undeniable charms. Wriston is at her best when breathing life into the cast of characters that people her novel. Along with Amelia and Heaven, we are introduced early on to Amelia's forty-something agoraphobe son, Daniel, who has been bound to his childhood bedroom ever since nearly drowning in his youth (are you sensing a theme here?), and Leo, Amelia's photographer ex-husband, who has recently begun a slow decline into dementia. Wriston imbues each of these characters with a fully realized humanity; the MacQueen-Frenches are knotty and complicated people, demanding a reader's attention in the urgency with which they are depicted on the page. Though each of them comes equipped with some noxious trait or another, their flaws never veer into the quirky territory that plagues so many contemporary family dramas. Instead, Wriston writes her characters to life with utmost candor and nurturing attentiveness; observant readers will find themselves sympathizing with each of the disparate worldviews on display, sometimes troublingly so. Oddest among Wriston's cast of characters is Maggie MacQueen, a distant ancestor of Amelia and Heaven. A Scottish emigrant, Maggie exists apart from the contemporary sections of the rest of the novel, narrating her life to us from all the way back in 1852. Through Maggie's first-person narration, we are clued into the family's New England roots and ostensibly provided with some ancestral logic to the family's constant bouts with drowning. Unfortunately, this intergenerational crossover never fully integrates into the novel as [End Page 98] a whole; though no less well written, the Maggie chapters feel excrescent and unfocused when compared to those of the other MacQueen-Frenches. Wriston attempts to adhere these sections by weaving in a discussion of Scottish folklore into the novel's narrative present—Daniel exchanges tales of selkies and sirens with the susceptible Heaven until she determines to become a siren herself—but all this achieves in the end is a wonky sense of the fantastic that isn't quite seen to a satisfying end. What How Not to Drown most successfully depicts is a family at odds with itself, undone by the bonds that tie them all together. Ultimately, Maggie's analeptic chapters only ever feel like a distraction from the novel's more cogent proclivities. Even in its baggier moments, however, How Not to Drown is enlivened by a propulsive verbal energy. Wriston's prose is at once fleet-footed and comprehensive, filled with vivid imagery and stunning observation. Her ability to mine small, awkward interactions for narrative momentum calls to mind writers like Joy Williams or Peter Taylor. One can see this energy at its most crystalline in the interactions between Amelia and Heaven, whose intimately rendered differences and disagreements make for impossible-to-put-down reading. The only handicap to the novel's sharp, forward-moving sentences is its somewhat clunky expository impulse. Occasionally, the novel...

From Capitalist Aspirations to the National Project. The Inter-Imperial Transylvanian Compromise

In the present article, I address two novelistic productions set in late 19th century and early 20th century Transylvania, discussing the different intersections of class, ethnicity, and culture underlying the constructed image of Empire in the periphery. Drawing on Manuela Boatcă and Anca Pârvulescu’s work on Transylvanian inter-imperiality – borrowed, in turn, from Laura Doyle –, the paper discusses Ioan Slavici’s Mara and Liviu Rebreanu’s Forest of the Hanged as stages of imperial downfall. The main argument is that, whereas Mara and other similar works present the interclass and interethnic conflict as negotiable compromise functioning as narrative momentum for the novelistic plot, the compromise comes undone in Forest of the Hanged, where the capitalist aspirations of the former work is put aside in the forging of national identity.

The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves

Reviewed by: The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves Bernhard Malkmus The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary. By Jason Groves. New York: Fordham University Press. 2020. x+208 pp. $105. ISBN 978-0-8232-8810-6. Human civilization's geological agency in transforming the biosphere has been reframing the epistemologies of all academic disciplines, in particular in the humanities. Reflection on what it means to be human no longer takes place on a stage for which the natural world is a mere backdrop; it is complicated by the myriad feedback loops between human cultures and anthropogenically transformed natures that mark our human condition today. The geological imaginary in the Anthropocene is closely tied to the history of Earth systems sciences that emerged during the hottest phase of the Cold War and to the epistemic construction of a global environment by the United Nations and international diplomacy. It is thus a form of planetary thinking, for which the Austrian writer and polymath Raoul Schrott has forged the new literary genre of a 'scientific epic' in his Erste Erde Epos (Munich: Hanser, 2016). However, as Jan Volker Röhnert reminds us in his Über das Gehen im Karst (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2021), the geological imaginary has a much longer history, in particular in German-language letters. Geology is, of course, the discipline that revolutionized the human sense of time; it opened up the vista of unimaginable natural histories that allowed humans to conceive of life as an evolutionary development. Geology has also provided a plethora of metaphors for rethinking the human on the threshold to modernity; it has offered ambivalent imagery between the biotic and the abiotic, the latent and the manifest, the exploitable and the uncanny. Grounded in this ambivalence, geology in modern German literature functions also as a mode of thinking about alternative modernities. This is evident in Jason Groves's new study, which traces the signs of a planetary ecological reflexivity in the archive of German literature in modernity, aiming to unearth 'those imaginaries in which other earths emerged' (p. 1). His close readings of a 'mineral imaginary' add up to a genealogy of the discovery of a climatologically volatile and unreliable Earth. In the process, the study becomes a cryptogram of a planetary imagination that enables us to consider alternative genealogies of modernity and trace the roots of Anthropocene thinking. His point of departure is the observation that the climax of modern Subjektphilosophie coalesces with an unprecedented fecundity of scientific and imaginative thinking about minerality and geology. He thus complicates the conventional narrative of an intrinsically teleological post-Enlightenment concept of the subject by revealing the degree to which the reflection on human subjectivity around 1800 was modulated by creatureliness—and the degree to which that creatureliness encompassed both [End Page 308] animality and minerality. Intense efforts to imagine deep earth and deep time reframe the standardized genealogy of the modern subject. The Germanic obsession with foundlings, in particular, and the multiple attempts to reassemble historical narratives around these erratic witnesses to Earth's history offer a particularly compelling way of rethinking modern human self-reflection through the lens of 'the lithic' (p. 6). Groves is engaging in an exercise of ichnology; he is reading what was never written, he is tracking traces such as foundlings to piece together the hidden geology of intellectual history. In claiming a 'geophilological turn', however, he is probably overstating the case. In his Introduction one gets the impression that Groves wanted to synthesize his considerable theoretical acumen as early as possible. However, a more gradual argumentative approach that links theoretical inferences to concrete close readings and thus creates a narrative momentum would have been more reader-friendly. In spite of the apparent theoretical ambition, some of the references remain underexplored, for example trauma theory and colonialism. Some readers might find Groves's choice of authors somewhat eclectic and wonder why, for example, there are no in-depth discussions of Jean Paul and E. T. A Hoffmann or Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin. Others might bemoan the fact that the book does not strictly adhere to the format of a traditional academic...

Nuevas narrativas periodísticas entre la información y la simulación lúdica: los docuwebs y los newsgames

Este artículo tiene por objetivo analizar cómo cooperan el periodismo digital y la cultura del videojuego moderno en dos formas de simulación lúdica e inmersión periodística: los docuwebs y los newsgames. Para ello, se ha establecido una metodología de análisis cualitativo con una doble perspectiva: el nivel del discurso informativo-periodístico (es decir, los contenidos y sus formas de proyección) y a nivel de retórica procedural (esto es, a través de las mecánicas de juego) que se aplica a dos casos de estudio de RTVE Lab: el newsgame MonteLab y el docuweb Guerra a la mentira. Los principales resultados muestran cómo el diseño de MonteLab establece un diálogo entre un rico sistema de fuentes periodísticas y unas mecánicas de juego que habilitan la toma de decisiones ante los problemas sociales de la actualidad. En una línea similar, el docuweb Guerra a la mentira establece un conjunto de casos reales y usa la verificación de la información y las fake news como motor periodístico sobre el que construir una propuesta lúdica de resolución de puzles e impulso narrativo. Por todo ello, y a modo de conclusiones, podemos comprobar que el newsgame contemporáneo busca empoderar al jugador como un ciudadano informado que explota las dinámicas lúdicas para proveer soluciones sociales basadas en informaciones periodísticas. Por otro lado, el docuweb supera el estaticismo hipertextual para adentrarse en dinámicas más complejas y diseños lúdicos más inmersivos gracias a la superación de la mera descripción periodística de la realidad.

The Passage of Love by Alex Miller

Reviewed by: The Passage of Love by Alex Miller Jennifer Popa The vessel of Robert Crofts: autobiographical fiction as a palimpsest Alex Miller. The Passage of Love. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2017. 585 pp. n.p. ISBN 978-1-76029-734-3 The Passage of Love opens with first-person modern-day Robert Crofts, who at the end of his career as a writer is struggling to find the creative impulse for his next book. He visits a women's prison to give a talk and is captivated by a particular inmate who explains his previous work to him, saying, "I thought he was explaining himself to his mother as a way of explaining himself to himself" (12). This is an on-ramp [End Page 174] to what the bulk of the novel will grapple with: Robert Crofts telling himself his own story. The back cover situates this novel in the murkiest of territories with regard to genre: "The Passage of Love is Miller's own story brilliantly cast in the mould of fiction." Autofiction, or autobiographical fiction, resists landing squarely within fiction or nonfiction. It feels like a memoir but is delivered in the style of a novel; it has some degree of truth but is also not beholden to the truth in the way that nonfiction would demand. Just as essays often circle around a question, this book circles around the self-directed reflection of how Robert was molded into a writer. Which moments, however innocuous they might have seemed at the time, accumulated and shaped Robert's path? In this case, a first love, an almost-stranger's suggestion that he attend college, a gifted copy of Doctor Faustus, among others. The novel breathes like the memoir of a thoughtful writer who lets his audience glimpse behind the curtain, though it is hardly a glimpse, as the novel is a tome at almost six hundred pages. Miller is dissecting his life, taking stock, investigating the relationships he had with a few select women that ultimately informed the man he became. Though The Passage of Love is reminiscent of memoir, Miller employs such devices from the novelist's toolbox as switching point of view and compressing time. After two chapters with elder Robert, we jump back in time and are introduced to a young Robert, who at twenty-one has moved to Melbourne after a stint as a cowboy in Australia's north: "He had no money, no friends, no family and no connections in Melbourne. He had stopped drifting because he had run out of money and had also run out of Australia. He was at the bottom. There was no further down to go" (29). He takes up residence at a boarding house and begins the menial routine of his work and isolation. He meets an older, more experienced woman, Wendy, who encourages him to write, specifically the story of his Aboriginal friend and fellow stockman. When a fellow boarder reads Robert's first draft, he tells the latter to attend university. While these moments are significant, the real thrust of narrative momentum occurs when Robert the aspiring writer meets Lena, a middle-class girl who has grown weary of the bondage of her upbringing. There were places where the novel lagged and I wanted a bit more compression. The pacing at the beginning of the novel made it challenging to immerse myself. Fortunately, the bulk of the novel is spent examining the enigmatic relationship of Robert and Lena, one that is ripe for analysis—as they are seemingly unfulfilled yet cling to each other. The elder first-person Robert interjects periodically, disrupting the story of a young Robert Crofts. Miller's decision to jump between the distant third-person narrative and the first-person present-day voice of Robert Crofts feels more cumbersome under the guise of autofiction, which is to say that it draws attention to itself. Autofiction is a tricky form, one with an inherent tension for both writer and reader. The writer is fashioning a truth of course, but he is also somewhat off the hook as there is no required truth ratio or fact checking or accountability when the work is...

Der Erd-Erzähler: Peter Handkes Prosa der Orte, Räume und Landschaften by Alexander Honold

 Reviews Der Erd-Erzähler: Peter Handkes Prosa der Orte, Räume und Landschaen. By A H. Stuttgart: Metzler. .  pp. €.. ISBN – –––. In  the Romantic landscape painter Carl Gustav Carus introduced the concept of ‘Erdlebensbilder’ into the aesthetic debate, thus infusing Alexander von Humboldt ’s physiognomic approach to landscape with a sense of deep time and deep structure. Obviously, the felicitous coinage is also a pun on ‘Erleben’ and thus inherits the geographic tradition of thinking about landscape in transcendental terms, i.e. by negotiating the conditions for the possibility of perceiving landscape. e contemporary author who has put this quintessentially modern epistemological concern at the heart of a lifetime’s aesthetic explorations is Peter Handke. Much ink has been spilt on Handke—aer all, he has worn many hats over the course of his long career: enfant terrible, pop writer, ascetic aestheticist, writers’ writer, among others. His commentators have busily explored anything from intertextuality to global social imaginaries, from an aesthetics of difference to a poetics of meta-reflexivity. However, except for a range of specialist essays and Carsten Rohde’s study Träumen und Gehen: Peter Handke’s geopoetische Prosa seit ‘Langsame Heimkehr’ (Hanover: Wehrhahn, ), there has been no sustained effort to understand the entire Handke from within his poetics of space. Alexander Honold’s magisterial monograph offers a fascinating investigation of Handke’s obsession with space. is begins, he argues, much earlier than , when Handke wrested himself from the stranglehold of a major crisis by adopting the narrative lens of a geologist (Langsame Heimkehr ()). He shows how Handke’s increasingly complex art of rooting the temporal drive behind his narratives in a dramaturgy of space, place, and movement is underpinned by an ‘Ethik der Nähe’ (p. ). roughout Handke’s rhizomatic œuvre Honold traces patterns of humane attention that are pitted against the prerogatives of disembodied mobility . Increasingly, Handke’s narrative perspective commands a reception attitude of ‘rückwärts fortgehen’—a contradictory movement of concurrent ‘departing from’ and ‘looking back to’; an epiphanic moment of assuring oneself of one’s place in the here and now; a gesture of emancipation and political resistance. is oen leads to moments of tripping, stumbling, or falling, including comic moments of katabasis, where the protagonist has to confront his or her mortality in an accelerated social space that is marked by an oblivion of death. In nuanced close readings Honold shows how geological forces, e.g. the Yukon River or the Sierra de Gredos, infiltrate writing processes and become active textual agents. e resulting ‘Raumvertrautheit ’ (p. ) is established by giving up total artistic control—and ultimately prevents both narrator and reader from gaining a Humboldtian total perspective on landscape. Honold carefully investigates the underground watercourses that nourish Handke’s writing project, ranging from medieval epics to eighteenth-century aesthetics and Goethezeit morphology, from the poetic realism of Stier to the dramaturgy of tactile friction in Hofmannsthal. e conversation with these traditions is unified by one central goal, the commensurability of the eidos of space and its MLR, .,   aesthetic reflection. Both the narrator’s gaze and the narrative momentum adapt to the forces manifest in the geological reliefs. is includes the waterways that define and concurrently open up historic Serbia in Handke’s controversial essays on Yugoslavia that are inspired by his ideal of a multiethnic state that blinded him to Serbia’s ethnocentric realpolitik (pp. –). In many of Handke’s texts, Honold shows, narrator and reader are united in the movement of a wanderer or pilgrim who exposes himself to spatial forces rather than superimposing their preconceived notions on them. is leads to a contemplative training of attentiveness, an aesthetic veneration of the thingness of objects (akin to Rilke or Hofmannsthal), a phenomenological piety of reality that comes with its own blind spots: for all its intuition and sanity, Handke’s attempt to endow his narrators with a primordial trust in their senses, codified during the s, also comes across as strangely out of sync with the challenges of a ‘global risk society’, which Ulrich Beck analysed during the same time. In an age of global digital industrialism...

The vessel of Robert Crofts: autobiographical fiction as a palimpsest

Reviewed by: The Passage of Love by Alex Miller Jennifer Popa The vessel of Robert Crofts: autobiographical fiction as a palimpsest Alex Miller. The Passage of Love. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2017. 585 pp. n.p. ISBN 978-1-76029-734-3 The Passage of Love opens with first-person modern-day Robert Crofts, who at the end of his career as a writer is struggling to find the creative impulse for his next book. He visits a women's prison to give a talk and is captivated by a particular inmate who explains his previous work to him, saying, "I thought he was explaining himself to his mother as a way of explaining himself to himself" (12). This is an on-ramp [End Page 174] to what the bulk of the novel will grapple with: Robert Crofts telling himself his own story. The back cover situates this novel in the murkiest of territories with regard to genre: "The Passage of Love is Miller's own story brilliantly cast in the mould of fiction." Autofiction, or autobiographical fiction, resists landing squarely within fiction or nonfiction. It feels like a memoir but is delivered in the style of a novel; it has some degree of truth but is also not beholden to the truth in the way that nonfiction would demand. Just as essays often circle around a question, this book circles around the self-directed reflection of how Robert was molded into a writer. Which moments, however innocuous they might have seemed at the time, accumulated and shaped Robert's path? In this case, a first love, an almost-stranger's suggestion that he attend college, a gifted copy of Doctor Faustus, among others. The novel breathes like the memoir of a thoughtful writer who lets his audience glimpse behind the curtain, though it is hardly a glimpse, as the novel is a tome at almost six hundred pages. Miller is dissecting his life, taking stock, investigating the relationships he had with a few select women that ultimately informed the man he became. Though The Passage of Love is reminiscent of memoir, Miller employs such devices from the novelist's toolbox as switching point of view and compressing time. After two chapters with elder Robert, we jump back in time and are introduced to a young Robert, who at twenty-one has moved to Melbourne after a stint as a cowboy in Australia's north: "He had no money, no friends, no family and no connections in Melbourne. He had stopped drifting because he had run out of money and had also run out of Australia. He was at the bottom. There was no further down to go" (29). He takes up residence at a boarding house and begins the menial routine of his work and isolation. He meets an older, more experienced woman, Wendy, who encourages him to write, specifically the story of his Aboriginal friend and fellow stockman. When a fellow boarder reads Robert's first draft, he tells the latter to attend university. While these moments are significant, the real thrust of narrative momentum occurs when Robert the aspiring writer meets Lena, a middle-class girl who has grown weary of the bondage of her upbringing. There were places where the novel lagged and I wanted a bit more compression. The pacing at the beginning of the novel made it challenging to immerse myself. Fortunately, the bulk of the novel is spent examining the enigmatic relationship of Robert and Lena, one that is ripe for analysis—as they are seemingly unfulfilled yet cling to each other. The elder first-person Robert interjects periodically, disrupting the story of a young Robert Crofts. Miller's decision to jump between the distant third-person narrative and the first-person present-day voice of Robert Crofts feels more cumbersome under the guise of autofiction, which is to say that it draws attention to itself. Autofiction is a tricky form, one with an inherent tension for both writer and reader. The writer is fashioning a truth of course, but he is also somewhat off the hook as there is no required truth ratio or fact checking or accountability when the work is...

Slow burn: James M. Cain, slow cinema and György Fehér’s Szenvedély

Abstract Few novels have proven as alluring to filmmakers as James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which since its publication in 1934 has been adapted to the screen seven times in six different countries. This article focuses on one such adaptation – a film that has to date received little critical attention: György Fehér’s Szenvedély (or Passion) from 1998. More precisely, it positions Szenvedély as a work of ‘slow cinema’, arguing that Fehér’s film draws heavily on the aesthetic practices of this emergent genre in its creative engagement with Cain’s story of lust and murder, its engagement with the affective economy generated by Cain’s text, and the intensities this fosters. With an emphasis on affect and lived time over narrative momentum and causality, Szenvedély’s affords viewers a temporally engrossing, viscerally arresting cinematic experience that – in its own distinctive, insinuative manner – is downright Cainsian in its power to move and shock.

Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt

Reviewed by: Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber LOVE AND NARRATIVE FORM IN TONI MORRISON'S LATER NOVELS, by Jean Wyatt. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 248 pp. $74.95 cloth; $29.95 paper; $29.95 ebook. Jean Wyatt's new book, Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, is that rare combination of nuanced textual analysis and cutting-edge critical theory. In her meticulous readings of Morrison's novels from Beloved (1987) to God Help the Child (2015), Wyatt weaves multiple areas of theory—psychoanalysis, rhetoric, and call-and-response—to tease out [End Page 225] the differences as well as the progressions in Morrison's conceptions of love. Starting with the research question, "What is the effect on narrative structure if it is love, not desire, that moves narrative forward—or, perhaps, imposes stasis and brings narrative momentum to a halt? Or pushes the parameters of narrative convention to reflect heretofore unrepresented kinds of love?" Wyatt creates a fascinating study of narrative structure and preconceived notions of love (p. 1). Morrison's readers, she argues, respond to concepts of love through her varying narrative forms. Reading Morrison's novels necessitates sometimes tentative, sometimes bold conclusions on the reader's part. According to Wyatt, Morrison's trademark technique of inviting the reader to participate in the creative act of story-telling coincides with her varying narrative strategies. Wyatt's study of a narrative's connection to a reader's notion of love explains how Morrison's texts force readers to call into question "customary values," "fixed beliefs about love," or preconceived ideas about "love, race, and gender" (p. 2). To illustrate how Morrison's structure mirrors content, Wyatt utilizes psychoanalytical concepts—including Freud's Nachträglichkeit (afterwardsness); Jacques Lacan's parable of the Fort! Da!; and Jean Laplanche's notion of the "enigmatic parental message"—to consider how narrative form works on readers (p. 3). She concludes that "delayed disclosures" in Morrison's texts cause the reader to go back and forth in time and in the text, "between the two scenes of her reading," and these delayed disclosures shift a reader's response to reassess motive and character (p. 3). Thus, Wyatt merges psychoanalytic theory with rhetorical narrative theory to suggest that various narrative components—"author, implied author, narrator, implied reader, and flesh-and-blood reader"—connect with African American call-and-response "oral art forms" to reinforce the reader's participation in discerning Morrison's messages (p. 4). For example, Wyatt claims that the complicated use of narrators reflects the complexity of moral questions necessary for "critiquing systems of oppression" (p. 5). If Morrison's early style is "mimetic realist discourse," the later writings use "expressive language and experimental form" to examine the effects of history on the shape of character and narration (pp. 7, 9). Wyatt asks, if Morrison's "call" in the text is unclear, how can there be an appropriate reader response? By challenging belief systems, Morrison forces readers to examine "entrenched convictions about gender, race, and love," and her later novels question conventional thinking about a reader's engagement with love (p. 13). Working through Morrison's novels in chronological order, Wyatt describes the different discussions of love and the effects of those renderings on the reader. She links Morrison's exploration of love to her inventions of "new narrative form[s] to express the new complexities of her subject" [End Page 226] (p. 18). In Beloved, Morrison examines maternal love in an uncanny way and, through the delayed telling of Sethe's killing, forces the reader to delay judgment. As a result, Morrison delivers the presence of the trauma of slavery. In Jazz (1992), Morrison begins with the "Western tradition of the love-death plot" only to end the novel with "freely chosen scenarios" of alternative versions of love that challenge the reader (pp. 16, 68). Looking at the problematic narrator of Jazz as the voice of the city, Wyatt illustrates how Morrison reveals collective African American trauma to be grounded in historical context. Having focused on the call-and-response framework of Jazz, Wyatt shifts to the...

Z: The Beginning of Everything

Z: The Beginning of Everything

Shoah Et Bande Desinée

Shoah Et Bande Desinée

"That Magic Box Lies": Queer Theory, Seriality, and American Horror Story

The unusual temporality of the FX series American Horror Story (2011–) prompts the authors to ask, what would a queer theory of television look like if it took as its starting point not the identity of the queer, but rather queerness itself as temporality? The series’ radical antisocial queerness is anchored as much in its form —its structural belatedness and disruptive imagery—as in its queer iconography and characters. Rejecting historical verisimilitude, each season examines the historicity of its diegetic present by enchaining it within the historical past, creating “temporal drag.” If politics is propped on the fantasy of the (reproductive) future, then AHS ’s freaks, witches, and ghosts refuse that future at every turn through spectacles of sex, death, and stomach-churning violence. The third season, “Coven,” exemplifies the queerness of temporal drag as a formal structure, communicating the pain of history through its nauseating effects that interrupt the flow of narrative momentum.

The End of Extreme Cinema Studies

The End of Extreme Cinema Studies Troy Michael Bordun Kerner, Aaron Michael, and Jonathan L. Knapp. Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. Pp. vii+179. Frey, Mattias. Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers UP, 2016. Pp. viii+298. Despite critic James Quandt's insistence that "extreme cinema" had been effectively ended by Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void (2009) (Quandt 212), both filmmakers and scholars continue to work in and on this 21st-century art cinema production trend. 2016 marked the appearance of two scholarly volumes on extreme cinema. Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp's Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media investigates the affective potential of the trend, that is, by assessing a number of films' graphic and explicit representations and the implications these representations have for spectatorship theory. Conversely, Mattias Frey's Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture unravels the production trend in terms of its "industrial systems, regulatory systems, [and] reception" (9). Frey's research includes but is not limited to extreme films' exhibition at festivals, their home-market distribution, and importantly, a homogeneous discourse from directors, critics, and academics. Although there is no denying that extreme films share affinities with horror, pornography, and exploitation fare, Frey observes that each of the players in extreme cinema discourse mark the trend "high art" rather than one of the so-called low genres. On the one hand, Kerner and Knapp rehearse theoretical arguments found in much extreme cinema scholarship over the last decade or so and, on occasion, acknowledge the tension between high and low genres. Frey, alternatively, shifts the focus of recent scholarship: his empirical study of the industrial workings of the trend is a direct [End Page 122] response to the speculations of authors such as Kerner and Knapp. I Each volume begins by defining extreme cinema. Kerner and Knapp concede to the definition of extreme cinema as a body of international films with little narrative momentum that nevertheless make use of "abrupt [narrative] ruptures" which include heightened displays of "brutal violence" and "graphic sexual imagery" (1). Strangely, for a trend that is apparently not too concerned with narrative, these two authors will summarize and assess film narratives at great length. Kerner and Knapp also expand the heretofore applied definition of the trend as a body of international art cinema films to include "extreme" representations in comedy films, animated comedy programs, reaction videos, and online pornography of (perhaps) the most disgusting sort. With this addition to the repertoire of extreme cinema, the volume is neither explicitly about art cinema nor auteurism, an institution and a theory often studied by extreme cinema scholars. A few chapters in Extreme Cinema focus on films and directors associated with the production trend as defined by Quandt and the authors in Tina Kendall and Tanya Horeck's edited volume The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (2011), also published by Edinburgh UP. However, for their study, Kerner and Knapp provide no justification for their use of "extreme cinema" and repeatedly confuse a number of trends and subgenres such as "torture porn" and international art house fare.1 It is worth quoting Horeck and Kendall here, for already in 2012 extreme cinema scholars were beginning to think beyond the observed negative affects a single film may have on an ideal spectator. In their introduction to the Cinephile special issue on "Contemporary Extremism," Horeck and Kendall present the following warning: A key task for scholarly work on extreme cinema is to think through fine-grained distinctions between the range of spectatorial dynamics that underpin [the recent] shift from art house extremism to multiplex or horror film festival circuit extremisms. While these [latter] films might share a desire to push the boundaries of the watchable, they are addressed to different audience demographics, and operate according to their own distinctive narrative and genre paradigms, to produce dissimilar affective responses. Again, while recognizing affinities between films that seek to test the spectator's mettle through relentless exposure to graphic horror, it is vital to recognize...

Utopian Passport Control

The argument presented in this article addresses a conflict that is fundamental to the eighteenth‐century transformation of the novel namely that between the mobility restrictions imposed by the modern state and the novel's traditional dependency on the free mobility of its characters. J. G. Schnabel's Insel Felsenburg is a striking literary manifestation of this conflict. As I argue, the narrative logic of this voluminous and somewhat bizarre novel can only be fully appreciated when taking into account its complex negotiations of mobility and movement control. Marking the confluence of two novelistic traditions, the utopian novel and the adventure novel, it is equally reliant on the settledness and the nomadism of its central characters, the former being the precondition for social order, the latter the basis for the novel's narrative momentum. The structure of the novel results from an attempt to resolve this conflict by channelling mobility into politically and morally acceptable paths – that is, by inventing a literary movement control regime.

The language of stories: Modelling East African fiction and oral narratives

Few corpus-based studies have looked at the linguistic features that co-create narrative focus in a text. In this article, a corpus-based narrativity model with four feature groups is proposed that reflects the underlying structure of narratives: Agency, contextualisation, evaluation and causation. Agents affect events or are in turn affected by them; events are contextualised in space and time; the affective impact is reflected by evaluative language; and cause and effect give the narrative momentum. The aim was to illustrate how the narrativity model could be used to identify and map linguistic features associated with narratives in a corpus of East African English. A quantitative approach was followed to analyse and compare East African English fiction and oral narratives. The four feature groups included 16 linguistic features and WordSmith Tools 4.0 was used for the analyses. The results show that eight linguistic features frequently co-occur in fiction and oral narratives. However, some of the features are more frequent in fiction, whereas others are typical of oral narratives. First, fiction and oral narratives are discussed independently and then these registers are compared. Overall, the model is sufficiently robust to identify texts with a narrative focus.

Corporal Hauntings

This narrative focuses on the use of fiction in conjunction with autoethnography in order to possibly change narrative inheritance. I use speculative autoethnography to seek out alternate outcomes of past life events. In this writing, fictionalized conversations take place with the hauntings of my child self during fragments of past experiences that I consider contributors to a failed familial relationship. I use this method to offer an alternative to the assumed social constructs of needing to “repair” such relationships. Through this account, I suggest ways to redirect the narrative momentum that pushes narrative inheritance into the future.