Recent Fiction Research Articles

Sissy the Archive: Ambivalent Intimacies between “Sissy” and “Trans” in Trans* Archives and Contemporary Fiction

Abstract: In this article, I examine the ambivalent relation between sissies and trans women in historical and contemporary trans cultural production. Sissification porn depicts a forced-feminization fetish in which a man is “nonconsensually” transformed into a girlish bimbo. His masculinity and selfhood are “negated” through fantasies of masochistic feminized embodiment. Trans-exclusionary feminists claim that sissy porn induces gender dysphoria in its viewers and converts unsuspecting cis men into trans women through sissification. Rather than simply repudiating any relation between the trans woman and the sissy, I insist on tarrying with the negativity of sissification and the bad affects saturating this relation as the figure of the sissy haunts trans archives. Recent fiction and criticism by Imogen Binnie, Torrey Peters, Alison Rumfitt, and Andrea Long Chu reveal an ambivalent intimacy between the trans woman and the sissy. In sitting with this ambivalence, I critique a desexualized (trans)gender identity without dissolving the negativity of the sissy into a countercultural, queer pleasure.

Standpipes, Chimmeys, and Memorialization in the Caribbean

In this essay I read debates about amenities of water and waste in the British Caribbean in the late and immediate post-Victorian period through histories of intimacy and kinship centered in fiction by Caribbean writers of the last twenty years. In these novels and short stories, collecting water at a stream or a standpipe or emptying a chamber pot are actions that produce or recall moments of desire and aspiration, shame and punishment, in storylines that move between a past of enslavement and indentureship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a present of political and psychological stasis or upheaval in the 1950s, 1970s, or the early twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discussions about fire hydrants or standpipes index a British Caribbean colony's evolving landscape of modernization and the disagreements about what shape and speed this process should take, and recent fiction allows us to discern how these amenities inherit and bequeath associations of trauma.

Towards the Cli-Fi Historical Novel; Or, Climate Futures Past in Recent Fiction

Abstract In The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson argues that the historical novel of the future will have to be science-fictional. My essay contends that it will have to be climate-fictional. Like Jameson, I focus on the connections between late capital’s reification of the present and the forms of time-consciousness that such reifications foreclose. But, I place Jameson into dialogue with Jonathan Crary and Andreas Malm to show that the foreclosed modes of time are intimately linked to a natural world that contemporary capital purports to have vanquished. This essay discusses two examples of cli-fi historical fiction—Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021) and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019)—in this context. Despite important differences, these works are both concerned with thinking the climate crisis historically. Both explore how the natural world persists in our “postnatural” present in the form of an uncanniness that denaturalizes the social. This uncanniness liberates traces of the past and future from a present that declares itself bereft of such ghosts. Each novel develops a fantastical form to grasp this temporal heterogeneity, and each retrieves the kernels of utopian futurity from the material history of our present—even and especially, from the climate-devastated and inexorably destructive tendencies of that present.When the deep time of the natural-historical negates yet preserves the historical time of intensified reprisal . . . then and only then will a new universality of the planetary be born.

Polypharma Fiction

Abstract This article examines how the rise of polypharmacy changes the novel genre’s response to the pain of anxiety and its narrative interest. Necessarily focusing its scope while also registering the fluidity, complexity, and exigency of contemporary psychopharmacological experience, it focuses specifically on how anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications are activating an ongoing reassessment among contemporary novelists of ingrained assumptions regarding the centrality of mental suffering to aesthetics. The books I discuss as “polypharma fictions”—by Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Anelise Chen—each challenge the idea of psychic pain as a precondition of narrative development—whether the pain of existential anxiety (Heti), capitalist aspiration (Moshfegh), or willful determination (Chen). Moving beyond the extremes of alarmism and advocacy that have largely structured scholarly responses to the rise of psychotropics, I attend to the formal significance of psychotropics for narrative temporality, tension, and plot. In this more recent fiction, the question is not whether psychotropics presage the end of the novel genre but, rather, what kind of novel it is that incorporates psychopharmaceuticals and, yet . . . goes on.

Youth Culture in Spanish and Mexican Cinema and Television: Studies and Sources

ABSTRACT This article gives an account of four studies of youth culture in the areas of recent fiction film and television in Spain and Mexico. It argues that, although the primary texts are different in medium, format and audience address, they coincide in their treatment of such themes as friends and family, and sex and violence. The article also suggests that much-criticized youth TV series in both countries deserve both close textual analysis and sympathetic reading of the social media that they have provoked and with which they have converged. These give evidence of an active and sophisticated audience response.

Shakespeare for Women: Middlebrow Feminism in Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters

This essay examines how two recent Shakespeare novels exemplify a group of recent fiction that explores how women’s selves form in relation to Shakespeare. I argue that a “middlebrow feminism” emerges in Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008) and Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011) as their female protagonists both rely on and react against Shakespeare to shape their identities. Working in tandem with their paratextual promotional apparatus, the novels imply that women readers possess a similar ambivalence toward Shakespeare. I suggest that this fiction redefines for a new era an American middlebrow tradition that has long construed the reading of Shakespeare as a vehicle for self-education, improvement, and advancement. In the essay’s conclusion, I investigate the feminist possibilities and limitations of the identities, both individual and collective, that women’s Shakespeare novels cultivate.

Pain and Pandemics: Infected and Excluded Bodies in Young Adult Fantasy Literature

Illnesses can highlight inequalities in young adult fantasy literature as characters undergo exclusion and self-empowerment tied to diseases, disabled bodies, and death. In recent fictions by Marissa Meyer, Marie Lu, and Margaret Owen, heroines navigate epidemics and pandemics inciting either mistrust or mutual aid. In Cinder (2012), the protagonist experiences bodily vulnerabilities via her cyborg prosthetics and a worldwide plague. The Young Elites (2014) shows survivors of a fever facing ostracism, while The Merciful Crow (2019) depicts immunity as a boon and a burden. These books on the interpersonal impact of sickness can resonate intimately with readers today due to COVID-19.

Breast augmentation and artificial insemination: Monstrous medicine and the female body in recent fiction

Recent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.

The Archeology of a Good Ragù: Discovering Naples, My Father, and Myself by John Domini

Reviewed by: The Archeology of a Good Ragù: Discovering Naples, My Father, and Myself by John Domini Robert L. Shuster (bio) the archeology of a good ragù: discovering naples, my father, and myself John Domini Guernica World Editions https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771835534 285 pages; Print, $17.95 Imagine a terrace above a city of antiquity, a view of a glittering bay, a Campari in hand, and across the table an engaging fellow regaling you with savvy cultural observations, tasty reminiscences, and eye-opening wartime tales. If that sounds appealing but you can't swing the airfare, fix the drink yourself and crack open a copy of The Archeology of a Good Ragù, wherein the affable jack-of-all-trades John Domini (novelist, critic, poet, journalist, translator) will tell you about Naples. Author of three novels set in this complex, melting [End Page 81] pot of a city—famous for pizza, postcard views, and Vesuvius; notorious for crime and grit—Domini now delivers a freewheeling memoir to explain how and why the place has come to mean so much to him. If you're wondering about the title, the book is not a tour of Italian cuisine (though the region's pleasures don't go unnoticed). Rather, the sauce is mostly metaphorical—a bubbling mix of lives, sights, and feelings that Domini encounters and discusses, turning up surprises and a couple of shockers. "The Neapolitan ragù," the author writes, "is always in ferment, yielding briny intrigue." Much of the book's intrigue centers around Domini's father, Enzo Vicedomini, who grew up in Naples under the Fascists and the Nazis and then fled his country in 1948, at age twenty-three, for Manhattan. He shortened his last name to a word of the church and went on to prosper in the food industry, putting an Italian spin on American standards. His success had always accounted for his eagerness to emigrate, but had there been another reason? He'd hardly ever spoken about his teenage years in the war. It was not until Domini was forty, in a mid-career malaise with a failing marriage, that he felt an urge to dig into his family's past, to make more meaningful connections to his heritage. "In order to get a handle on the rest of my life," he writes, "I needed to know my father and his city." Domini begins the account of his quest like an easygoing raconteur, less concerned with chronological sequence than with capturing what he calls the "confounding total immersion" of Naples, where "there's no end of 'now.'" Impressions stream into memories, which bring on sudden thoughts, confessions, literary references, and historical asides. Early on, a description of votive figures leads to octopus in an insalata, margherita pizza, an old photo of Domini's father, women's shoes, Margherita the queen, the suicide of the Siren Partenope, Sibyl of the Aeneid, roughnecks with facial scars, and finally back to that photo—all within a few pages. The sentences themselves keep you on your toes, too, mixing the fine-tuned perception exhibited in Domini's literary criticism (see his excellent The Sea-God's Herb [2014]) with the punchier, improvisational style of his more recent fiction. Here's one view of Naples (with "monkey" referring to an ancient Greek settlement): [End Page 82] Whenever I pull out of downtown on a ferry, headed for the monkey islands, the retreating urban landscape looks like a palimpsest: a tattered sedimentary buildup. The heights west of the docks present a stipple of ridges and colors, a slope known as Pizzofalcone, the falcon's hood. I can just see it, the bird in its hood. Or maybe not (what do I know about falcons?), and anyway this quarter too has more than one story to tell. So does the book. As the family's harrowing experiences in World War II gradually come to light, Domini brings you scenes from modern-day Naples, notably in romance, immigration, and organized crime. One afternoon he ends up in a cramped studio apartment, posing without a shirt for a woman who's painting portraits of male artists and writers. The scene reads like a...

The “bare germs of things to come”: H. G. Wells’s Utopias, Ecological Risk, and the Anthropocene

Recent fiction that portrays future climate-changed worlds might be seen as the foremost cultural expression of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck calls the “speculative age.” For Beck, such an age began as “risk society” emerged with recognition of the unprecedented dangers that modernity brought about as well as its benefits; this reflexive phase of modernity is characterized

The Matter of Manual Traces: Letters, Photographs and Bean Paste in Naomi Kawase’s Cinema of Touch

This article explores the representation of the hand in three recent fiction films by Naomi Kawase: Sweet Bean (2015), Radiance (2017) and True Mothers (2020). Extending current scholarship that discusses the director’s use of haptic visuality, I argue that Kawase’s haptic cinema further exhibits its hapticity by framing the hand as both a Derridean trace and conduit that leaves behind traces in objects such as bean paste, letters, photo cameras, and photographs. Kawase’s framing of these objects in close-up shots emphasizes not only their materiality and haptic texture but also their foreshadowed physical absence. By reading Kawase through Jacques Derrida’s notion of trace, the article highlights not only the relevance behind understanding Kawase’s recent fiction films through a Derridean lens but also how the director’s own attitude towards cinema, as one that aims to simultaneously frame absence and presence, can also be read as a Derridean approach to cinema.

Beyond the “‘recruitable’ narrative”? The fictive portrayal of Pakistani Christians in Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend

ABSTRACT In seeming response to rising global interest in the condition of non-Muslims in parts of the Muslim world, recent fictions by anglophone Pakistani writers have explored how Pakistani Christians are positioned as lesser subjects. Such literature speaks to legitimate concerns about the welfare of religious minorities in Muslim-majority contexts, but also risks reproducing “‘recruitable’ narratives” which situate Christians and Muslims on either side of a religio-cultural divide. This article investigates how Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend (2017) depicts Christian experiences of religious discrimination and coexistence within the Islamic Republic. It argues that Aslam’s fiction revisits savages–victims–saviour trichotomies and demystifies religious offence, bringing to light alternative configurations of Muslim–Christian relationships and ways of understanding points of contention. Acknowledging the limitations of Aslam’s liberal humanist vision, it hopes to identify how his novel extends available representations at a time when critical perspectives on interfaith cohabitation require careful articulation.

There are no tricks in translation: wordplay and similarity in the writings of Tawada Yōko

Tawada Yōko publishes in both Japanese and German: while much scholarship on Tawada has examined difference in her work by focusing on topics such as migration, foreignness, and exophonic authorship (writing in a language other than one’s first language), the present essay considers her writing as an exploration of similarities. I examine similarities at three scales: word-to-word, text-to-text, and oeuvre-to-oeuvre. One of the salient formal traits of Tawada’s work is its incorporation of wordplay based on coincidental resemblances between words in unrelated languages (e.g., German and Japanese). Tawada’s work on wordplay adapts Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the interpretation – or translation, in his occasional metaphor – of dreams and thus embraces a capacious understanding of translation. But – here is the intertextual comparison – when Tawada translates her own work, as when she rewrites her novel Yuki no renshūsei in German as Etüden im Schnee, sometimes a wordplay that is central to one version is omitted in the other, with important consequences for interpretation. Finally, Tawada’s polyglot oeuvre, taken in the aggregate, is characterized as a strategic continuation of a tradition of polyglot authorship – a claim that is, I argue, further underscored by themes in Tawada’s recent fictions.

Narratives of Healing in Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008)

Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize before being named the 2008 Costa Book of Year and winning the Irish Book Awards Best Novel, the Independent Booksellers Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The novel is an exquisite example of trauma narrative in Irish recent fiction. Almost one hundred years old and still in the mental hospital where she was committed as a young woman, Roseanne revisits the tragedies and passions of her life through her secret journal. Raised in rural Ireland in the 1930s, her life is marked by civil war and a troubled family life. When she marries Tom McNulty, she believes she has found love and security, but her dreams are shattered. Through her journal and that of the doctor in charge of her, the reader is gradually revealed how the process of trauma healing could be achieved.

WE versus Us: Dystopias in Russia, China, and Maybe the USA

Evgeny Zamyatin’s novel WE, blocked from publication by Soviet censors in 1921, has been published in several translations since the 1920s – most recently in 2021. An inspiration for Orwell’s 1984, WE anticipated many features of the totalitarian dictatorships that emerged under Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler and have reemerged in Communist China and Putin’s Russia, and may be taking root in the United States and other Western countries where modern technologies bolster government capacities to watch and control one another and their subjects. This essay highlights parts of WE as rendered in a fresh translation and suggests how it illuminates some trends in today’s world. It also offers snapshots of dystopias in recent Russian and Chinese science fiction – many of which warn of a totalitarian future. The Russian snapshots are supplemented with an analysis of what the magazine GQ Rossiia in February 2022 termed the eight controversial books everyone must read – beginning with Zamyatin’s WE and ending with several dystopian novels by American writers such as The Giver by Lois Lowry. Most of the eight are dystopian. None is primed to encourage young Russians to adopt a fight-for-the fatherland outlook determined to wipe out Ukrainian traitors. The upshot: Zamyatin and Orwell predicted our realities more accurately than, say, Walt Whitman or even Jack London.

Stranger Things, Plant Life, and Posthuman Endgames: Reading Beckett with Others

This essay reads work by Samuel Beckett, especially his prose, with a focus on vegetal ontology and plant life, soil, mud, and dirt. By juxtaposing Beckett with recent fiction, e.g., the Netflix series Stranger Things, contemporary plant theory, and the general ecology of Erich Hörl, posthuman entanglements and relations are discussed as part of an ontological infrastructure in the texts, which can also be linked to Beckett’s interest in prosthetics and technical media. It is suggested that an approach of this kind might offer new perspectives on the dispersed subjectivity in Beckett’s texts.

The Iron Age looks at Rome for the first time in audiovisuals: fiction, cultural imaginary and historical reality in Barbarians and Britannia

Two recent fiction series produced for video-on-demand (VOD) platforms show the conflict between the Roman Empire and indigenous peoples from the perspective of the latter for the first time. Thus, transforming the traditional Roman historical genre into a more diverse and multifocal space. But, in Barbarians and Britannia this new audiovisual optic manages the representation of this historical reality in completely opposite ways.

Corporate personhood and artists-in-consultancy in recent fiction

ABSTRACT This essay considers the figure of the artist-in-consultancy in the recent novel in the context of the concept of ‘corporate personhood’. Beginning with a reading of the work of the poet and novelist Ben Lerner, it explores the idea of a frustrated will towards collectivity which might be achieved or understood through the organisational fabric of the corporation and a virtual poetics of failure, a formation which Lerner outlines in his poem ‘Dilation’. I track the development of corporate personhood over the twentieth century and define it through a reading of Reinhold Martin’s The Organizational Complex before tracing Lerner’s idea of a virtual poetics of the corporate in three recent novels: Emily Segal’s Mercury Retrograde (2020), Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015), and Elvia Wilk’s Oval (2019). These works follow protagonists who work on behalf of corporations as consultants, their positions making them archetypal corporate persons. Through narratives of failure and refusal, these novels both embrace and eschew corporate personhood, indulging metafictional tendencies to manifest Lerner’s idea of virtual collectivity while further complicating it and suggesting a new configuration of the corporate person and the collective.

Autocratic Fatherhood, Violent Sexuality, and Critique in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples

The recurrence of the theme of sexual violence in recent South African fiction has elevated sexual violence to a symbol of apartheid’s legacy of patriarchy. Although texts that feature sexual violence are often analysed as allegories of the legacy of apartheid’s patriarchal control and racial domination, I argue that texts like Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples de-allegorise and/or de-politicise sexual violence. Rather than read The Smell of Apples as an exculpatory narrative of white South Africa’s complicity in apartheid’s atrocities, I argue that Behr’s depiction of sexual violence in a space where the child is supposed to be safe and by a perpetrator who is known to the victim and from whom the victim expects protection complicates the South African rape narrative. Thus, I contend that Behr crafts an ingenious and nuanced register for his witness-protagonist to subvert the muzzling power of the rapist-father to disclose the horror of sexual abuse for both victim and witness.

Particles of Light

This article addresses recent science fiction films about the colonization of outer worlds, or space-steading, in the context of the longer colonial history of the frontier. Paying particular attention to Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005) and The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, 2005), I argue that colonizing outer space is not only a race to the new frontier, but that this takes place because technologies that picture space have quickened the pulse. Through its imagining of the end of times as a reiteration of colonizing adventure, and the emptying of people from their place, the technology of film has itself produced the accident (Virilio, 2007) of an uninhabited earth. As suggested by the cinematically derived kinesis of wormholes, space wrinkles, and warp speeds, what might be left as a form of life is none other than film itself. The hyper-kinesis of film spectacle takes on a non-human life of its own, which, in science fiction film, constitutes a form of self-alienation, removing viewers from the places they actually inhabit and displacing the histories they unfold. In this way, I address what is truly cinematic about the film frontier traversed by the new space of uber-masculine adventurer-settlers.