Sarah Moss Research Articles

Heterogeneous texts, hybrid genres and Anthropocene poetics: Juliana Spahr’s ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’ (2011) and Sarah Moss’s Summerwater (2020)

Juliana Spahr’s generically hybrid ‘Unknown Dragonfly Species’ and Sarah Moss’s composite novel Summerwater are here read in the light of their textual hybridity and with a focus on their short fiction qualities. Different in form, style and content, the two texts share a confrontation of plots concentrating on social concerns – a group of New York friends, an anonymous ‘they’, in Spahr’s ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’, old and young couples, families, groups of friends on holiday in Scotland in Moss’s Summerwater – with short texts (chapters in Moss, proper names of endangered species in Spahr) that point to a world beyond the human and that ironically subvert the anthropocentrism and egocentrism that drives many of the characters involved. Read against the backdrop of Ricardo Piglia’s ‘Theses on the short story’, the confrontation of different text types is shown to avoid a one-dimensional focus on human affairs and thus helps to transcend the scope each individual genre – short story, poetry or novel – might cover on its own. Looking at ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’ and Summerwater as textually hybrid environmental short fiction, the article argues how the genre perspective may help to produce scenarios in which the human and the more-than-human worlds permeate each other in ways that presage a poetics for the Anthropocene.

The boring apocalypse: The representation of flat affects in contemporary British pandemic novels

In his 2021 opinion article in The New York Times, Adam Grant called the COVID-19 pandemic the ‘boring apocalypse’. Indeed, while pre-pandemic imaginaries of global pandemics tended to focus on spectacular killer viruses, for many people in the Global North, the challenge of the pandemic was, if not boredom, then a sense of recurring routine. Although the pandemic also created strong affects like fear and anger, this article will look at the ‘flat affects’ that grew out of the sense of stasis. The theoretical framework of the article is based on the thinking of Lauren Berlant. My theoretical reflection is followed by an analysis of three British novels written during the pandemic: Sarah Moss’ The Fell, Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat and Clare Pollard’s Delphi. I will, above all, focus on the representations of affective responses to the routines of the pandemic in the often overlooked private sphere.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on The COVID-19 Pandemic in Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat and Sarah Moss’s The Fell

Globally, pandemics and epidemics have been largely argued in literature. The calamity of COVID-19 has largely paralyzed individuals and societies. The research deals with fictional responses of individuals who are infected by coronavirus and the impact of the virus on the way of coping with each other and with the surrounding. The research deals with two English novels; Burntcoat (2021) by Sarah Hall and The Fell (2021) by Sarah Moss. These novels are chosen for the critical analysis due to the variety of themes. The texts chosen depict experiences of the victim characters during quarantine. The objectives of the research are to identify the characters that experienced the pandemic, analyzing their unconscious behavior. This will be done according to the Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Also, to examine the responses of the infected characters to the calamity based on Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory. And to show the impact of coronavirus on the selected characters in coping with others relaying on Judith Herman’s PTSD. The aim is to explore themes of isolation, dislocation, unconsciousness, and hysteria. This will be discussed within the limits of the main concepts of the psychoanalytic theory.

Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories: Spectres, Revenants, Ghostly Returns

Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories continues the work Gina Wisker has previously published on women’s gothic and the ghost story. It offers a critical view of works from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) to Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018). Although largely Anglocentric, works from Singapore and Malaysia are analysed at length, alongside brief discussion of other global literatures. Wisker makes reference to Emma Liggins’s The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850–1945 in the introduction and throughout, and this monograph feels like a natural progression from that work, bringing the research deeper into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and extending the discussion of ghosts beyond the haunted house. Wisker highlights how the ghost stories of women are often overlooked, although they “peel away the deadly cladding or torn wallpaper revealing abjection, dismissal to silence, and the liminal spaces of traumatic, oppressive histories and stories” (30). Wisker’s first theme is the women’s ghost story as warning against the dangers of traditional romantic values, whether imposed by patriarchal society or sustained by the hopes of women dreaming of escape, as in Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Wisker reminds us that although these ideals originate in a pre-war way of life, they persist in romanticised contemporary desire for domestic bliss as expressed in romantic fiction, and in reimagined fairy tales, a range of which are covered in the chapter “True Love As Possession.” As Wisker’s attention moves forward in time, she addresses novels that depict an old “romanticised England” (163) that refuses to move on and similarly holds back its characters with hauntings, such as The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Besides romantic ideals of lifestyle, Wisker examines romantic ideals of Empire and toxic nostalgia for an earlier age of comfort, and suggests that ghost stories provide a voice for those for whom the past is not a source of nostalgic comfort.

Probabilistic Truth, Relativism, and Objective Chance

AbstractIn Probabilistic Knowledge Sarah Moss proposes that our credences and subjective probability judgments (SPJs) can constitute knowledge. Mossean probabilistic knowledge is grounded in probabilistic beliefs that are justified, true, and unGettiered. In this paper I aim to address and solve two challenges that arise in the vicinity of the factivity condition for probabilistic knowledge: the factivity challenge and the challenge from probabilistic arguments from ignorance (probabilistic AIs). I argue that while Moss's deflationary solution to the factivity challenge formally works, it leaves us ill-equipped to handle probabilistic AIs. An account of probabilistic knowledge that cannot overcome probabilistic AIs makes knowledge of thoroughly probabilistic contents a rare and unstable phenomenon, at best, or, at worst, impossible. I hold that establishing a metaphysically enriched account of probabilistic truth is therefore mandatory. I go on to develop a truth-conditional approach on probabilistic factivity that is relativistic in its nature and centers on objective chances. I show that while the approach is still compatible with Moss's overall semantics for probabilistic knowledge, it provides us with a simple but forceful answer to probabilistic AIs.

The “Cruel Absurdity” of Human Violence and Its Consequences. A Vegan Studies Analysis of a Pandemic Novel

This article teases out what a Vegan Studies theoretical framework can offer a literary analysis of a selected pandemic novel, “The Fell” (2021), by Sarah Moss. Pandemic fiction accommodates texts from a wide range of genres, and these types of literary texts have seen a resurgence in the wake of the spread of the corona virus. While literary engagements with pandemics have often been relegated to the realms of dystopian science fiction, our current realities have shifted to such an extent that they can now comfortably be read alongside more realistic fictional representations of contemporary societies. The causal relationships between anthropocentric abuse of the environment in general and of animals in particular, and pandemics have been energetically contested in the media and in scholarly disciplinary fields ranging from Virology to Critical Animal Studies. The argument that I will develop is that Vegan Studies is a theoretical rubric with unique and salient generative capacity and that it allows for the emergence of fresh and necessary insights when we start unpacking how to make sense of pandemics through fiction. I will use Moss’s novel to anchor and illustrate my argument in favour of the value of Vegan Studies in these discussions.

“The little links are broke”: Ethnocentrism and Englishness in contemporary British fiction

Abstract This article contrasts three different ways of understanding contemporary British communal life: interpretive accounts based on quantitative political science which stress division and rising ethnocentrism; an account drawing on Arendtian political theory, which again stresses division and loneliness; and accounts developed from three very different contemporary novels: Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018); Barney Farmer’s Drunken Baker (2018); Bernard Cornwell’s, Warlord (2020). Each explores the current bleak state of the UK in different ways.

On Edge: Liminality and the COVID Pandemic in Sarah Moss’s The Fell

Sarah Moss’s novel The Fell (2021) is a fictional reflection upon the second UK lockdown in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to its topicality, the novel is likely to be read as a “time capsule,” preserving the unprecedented experience of social isolation, anxiety and domestic incarceration. Starting with the assumption that living in a time of pestilence may be characterised as a borderline experience, this article argues that The Fell revolves around the paradigm of liminality. For the characters portrayed in the book the threshold is social, psychological and existential. Nevertheless, for the main protagonist the metaphorical and the literal merge when, driven to the limit of endurance, she falls off the edge of a cliff while taking a walk on the fells of the Peak District, in defiance of the quarantine restrictions. The article analyses various meanings of liminality in Moss’s novel.

Walking to Stay Alive: Sarah Moss’s Lockdown Novel The Fell

Sarah Moss’s novel The Fell (2021), set during the second lockdown in Britain, is an instance of fiction’s engagement with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Written in the midst of the calamity, the novel presents events from the limited perspective of an individual whose personal crisis is intensified by her enforced isolation and confinement. Spanning only one night, the story recounts the protagonist’s quarantine-breaking walk on the hills of the nearby Peak District as her way of coping with the overwhelming situation. This article analyses the character’s retreat into nature as her instinctive reaction to societal pressures. Drawing on Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking and Henry David Thoreau’s essay Walking, this article centres on the trope of walking in Moss’s novel, positing that the heroine is an incarnation of Thoreau’s “walker errant.” It is argued that for Kate communing with nature, perceived as a site of otherness and an ever-renewing cycle of life and death, is vital for her spiritual balance, but it has also become a survival strategy during the current crisis.

Editor’s Note

We are excited to announce that ISLE 29.4 is almost a double issue. The volume opens with Rebecca S. Oh’s “Apocalyptic Realism: ‘A New Category of the Event,’” which examines how “apocalyptic realism both traces the ways in which world-ending closures are historically produced and the ways in which worlding goes on from within imposed forms of futurelessness.” Oh’s article “considers Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People as an example of apocalyptic realism.” Then, Swaralipi Nandi, in “Speculating the Carbon Rift: Capitalistic Dystopias and the Ecological-Noir in ‘Carbon,’” “analyze[s] Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan’s short film Carbon (2017) as a fictional resistance to the cultural amnesia of climate change.” Nandi also explores “the unsuitability of literary realism as a mode for the representation of climate change and the possibilities of speculative fiction as a narrative vehicle to convey the vagaries of a future thriving on present fossil capitalism.” Angelo Monaco’s article “Archives of Environmental Apocalypse in Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth: Archaeology, Viruses and Melancholia” focuses on how Moss’s novel Cold Earth (2009), which is set in the Arctic, is “concerned with the dread of obliteration and the yearning for recovering time” and how “archaeological excavation, environmental apocalypse, temporal disarray, and memory frictions function as archiving vehicles.” Staying in the polar regions, in “The Silent Continent? Textual Responses to the Soundscapes of Antarctica,” Carolyn Philpott and Elizabeth Leane study “the soundscapes of Antarctica—especially its silence—and their role in human experiences of the continent, as captured in written narratives from the ‘Heroic Era’ (1895–1922), when the continent was first explored on foot, to the present day” in order “to draw greater attention to the role of the sonic in human engagements with Antarctica and to the importance of written texts in capturing the essence and meaning of these experiences.”

Desiring Walls: Fantasies of Containment and Reimagined British Pasts

Abstract In Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018), an archaeology class pitches camp near Hadrian’s Wall, where they are joined by a local family in an experimental re-enactment of Iron Age Britain. The novel explores nostalgic nationalism, fantasies of nativism and racial supremacy, and the wish for containment and boundaries in a contemporary world perceived as having lost its cultural core. Following Wendy Brown’s suggestion to read the desire to erect border walls as the symptom of a hysterical obsession with ‘the alien,’ this essay focuses on the construction of borders as ritual spectacles aimed at securing deeply gendered fantasies of innocence, regulation, and containment, and how this aligns with contemporary British national and cultural nostalgia. It will also explore the thematic connections and differences between Moss’s critical probing of reimagined old ways of life and the yearning for a wistful version of bygone Britishness perceptible in recent British nature and travel writings.

Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice by Thomas F. Curran

Reviewed by: Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice by Thomas F. Curran Elle Harvell (bio) Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice. By Thomas F. Curran. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2020. Pp. 258. Paper, $26.50.) Thomas Curran’s Women Making War is a desperately needed addition to the fields of Civil War military occupation, treason, and women’s studies. Embracing the recent trend in Civil War scholarship to disentangle Civil War history from Lost Cause mythology, the author sets out to dispel the pervasive belief, plaguing both popular and academic literature on Confederate women, that “attributes no actual military offenses” to Confederate women arrested by Union military officials “that would warrant their arrests” (182). His examination of incarcerated “Southern partisan women” and the federal military prison complex in St. Louis during the war demonstrates clearly that some women did act in deliberately political and partisan capacities and suffered the consequences of arrest, imprisonment, and sometimes banishment for their rebellious activities (1–2). They were increasingly classified as dangerous to the Union war effort over the course of the conflict. The critical intervention of this study lies in its clear demonstration that the arrest and imprisonment of women for disloyalty was not an anomaly but a pervasive reality. This was especially true for the St. Louis area, where the author found evidence for the arrest of at least 440 women. He reveals the details of many of these cases and examines them in chronological order to emphasize “the escalation of partisan women’s wartime activities,” as well as “the evolution of the Union military response” (12). This approach makes clear that military officials gradually and reluctantly embraced a more punitive policy, placing greater and greater significance on the actions of rebellious, southern-sympathizing women and accelerating arrests during particularly tense periods of the war in Missouri, such as during General Sterling Price’s raid to recapture the state for the Confederacy in the fall of 1864. Union military officials believed the words, actions, and deeds of the accused to be deliberately and intentionally disloyal, and the firsthand testimony of the women gives credence to this judgement. The author relies heavily on the Union Provost Marshals’ Files as well as Record Group 109 of the National Archives, both of which contain a seemingly endless collection of documents relating to the arrests of civilians. In these documents, Curran uncovered evidence to support his argument that these women made “conscious decisions” to deliberately aid the Confederacy (3). Most convincing of all is the unflinching testimony of women under interrogation by Union provost marshals. Many of these women expressed similar [End Page 280] sentiments proclaimed by one woman during her interrogation: “[I] would do all I could to aid the Southern Confederacy” (5). The author’s stated purpose is to focus only on those women who aided the Confederate cause “with deadly earnest” (2), yet he also includes a few cases in which the female arrestee’s intentions and loyalties are uncertain or even variable. The best example of this is the riveting case of the detention of a woman with the alias Mary Ann Pitman, who went from being a female Confederate soldier to a rebel smuggler and spy and finally to a prisoner of war. She then pragmatically switched sides and served as a loyal U.S. informant. Then there are the cases of such women as Isabella and Melissa Fox and Susan Bass, all arrested for “harboring and feeding bushwhackers” (97), whose motivations and intentions along with their political loyalties are harder to discern and for whom coercion might help to better explain their compliance with guerrilla demands. Curran has revealed an area ripe for future exploration: female arrest-ees whose political views sat somewhere closer to the middle of the spectrum of wartime political ideology or resembled those of the northern “Peace Democrats.” The author does briefly detail a few women, such as Sarah Moss and Eliza Spencer, whose contempt for the Lincoln administration stemmed not from undying devotion to the Confederacy, but rather from disagreement with emancipation. Another interesting example is the case of Mary Byrne, arrested in May 1863. She...

Making sense of the rural white working class: the contemporary novel of rural retreat and the politics of resentment

ABSTRACT A widespread centrist and conservative explanation for the ongoing rise of racist and xenophobic populism has been that progressives have been too preoccupied with identity politics, and not attentive enough to rural economic precarity. This narrative has been particularly popularised in two high-profile memoirs, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Tara Westover’s Educated, which both attempt to explain the realities of the rural, white working class and its particular resentments. Simultaneous to the publication of these memoirs, there has been a number of contemporary Anglophone novels about rural retreat published, all of which similarly suggest that rural living offers an alternative or challenge to contemporary life. This paper focuses on two British iterations of this genre, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall and Fiona Mozley’s Elmet, that suggest the rural as a site of communal possibility, rather than a retreat into melancholic resentment. I argue, then, that not only do Ghost Wall and Elmet call into question how a prevailing argument about the current global rise of racist populism is spatialised, but that they frame this as a question that is inextricable from the arrangements of space that structure access to life chances beyond simply those of liberal institutions.

Incompatibility, inconsistency, and logical analysis in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Statements of degree appear to falsify basic doctrines in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I offer a fresh formulation of the challenge and assess a solution proposed on Wittgenstein’s behalf by Sarah Moss. I find that Moss’s proposal fails. The proposal rides in part on novel interpretations of pronouncements by Wittgenstein on the nature of the elementary proposition. I find that the interpretations cannot be sustained but that Moss’s textual case hints at important and overlooked features of the Tractarian program. I develop Wittgenstein’s comparison of propositions to measuring instruments and apply it throughout, showing that it captures philosophical commitments in Tractatus that otherwise tend to slip from view.

Color incompatibility in Wittgenstein and its relationship with Arithmetic

After Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein realized that elementary propositions may logically conflict with each other, due to the fact that the most elementary measurements may contradict each other. This led to the view that logic consists of various calculi. A calculus consists of measurement scales, each scale being a rule for the application of numbers. These scales determine logical relationships between elementary propositions by reason of arithmetical relations. Attempts to reject Wittgenstein's change in viewpoint, which ignore the relevance of measurement and arithmetic, are remiss. In this light, I discuss Sarah Moss’s criticism of intermediate Wittgenstein.

Reconsidering the Rule of Consideration: Probabilistic Knowledge and Legal Proof

AbstractIn this paper, I provide an argument for rejecting Sarah Moss's recent account of legal proof. Moss's account is attractive in a number of ways. It provides a new version of a knowledge-based theory of legal proof that elegantly resolves a number of puzzles about mere statistical evidence in the law. Moreover, the account promises to have attractive implications for social and moral philosophy, in particular about the impermissibility of racial profiling and other harmful kinds of statistical generalisation. In this paper, I show that Moss's account of legal proof crucially depends on a moral norm called the rule of consideration. I argue that we have a number of reasons to be sceptical of this rule. Once we reject the rule, it is not clear that Moss's account of legal proof is either plausible or attractive.

The View from the Sea: The Power of a Blue Comparative Literature

This paper advocates for a blue comparative literature that uses the view from the sea to provide new axes for comparison. Roy Jacobsen’s De usynlige (The Unseen, 2013) and Sarah Moss’s Night Waking (2011) explore subsistence lives on small islands in the northern Atlantic at different moments in the past, when inhabitants were dependent on the sea for food and transport. By looking at them together, as texts linked by their engagement with the physical world of the northern Atlantic, the two novels show how marginal populations on small islands can represent a space for the imagination of the human past and future in the Anthropocene.

Credence, Conditionals, Knowledge and Truth

Epistemology, strictly speaking, is the theory of knowledge: what it is, when we have it, why it is valuable, what we can do with it. But the term has come to be used more widely, to include the theory of reasonable belief, rational belief change, non-conclusive inference, etc., in cases where knowledge may not be obtainable. Especially under the heading ‘formal epistemology’, probability theory typically plays a prominent role here, while it typically does not play much of a role in traditional, knowledge-centred epistemology, because, it is natural to think, probability theory typically governs something weaker than knowledge. It is about the management of uncertainty. Sarah Moss’s book Probabilistic Knowledge is revolutionary. It shares with traditional epistemology the claim that knowledge is the central concept. On the other hand, it is probabilistic through and through. In short, our ordinary probability judgements can be knowledge. There are different kinds of probability. Maybe we can know objective chances, but that is not Moss’s target. Maybe we can know that a certain body of evidence renders probable a conclusion, but that is not the target either. Our ordinary probability judgements are not statements about their relation to a body of evidence. The subject may not be capable of such second-order judgements. ‘Fido can believe that you are probably about to take him outside without being capable of any second-order belief about what is consistent with his evidence’ (23).1 The target is our ordinary credences – degrees of closeness to certainty, expressed by ‘probably’, ‘more likely than not’, etc. Recurrent examples are ‘Jones probably smokes’ and ‘it is 0.6 likely that Jones smokes’.

Probabilistic Knowledge , by Sarah Moss

Probabilistic Knowledge is ambitious, original, and extremely wide-ranging. From epistemic modals to imprecise probabilities, from the content of beliefs to the knowledge norm on action, from loose speech to peer disagreement to statistical evidence to the relation between credence and full belief, Sarah Moss discusses a huge array of cutting edge issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language. Tying the discussion together is the titular phenomenon of probabilistic knowledge: the knowledge we attribute with phrases such as ‘He knew that they might be home’ or ‘She realized her phone was probably in the car’. Moss argues that such knowledge involves not an ordinary belief, but a credence (roughly: a positive credence that they are home in the first case, a high credence that her phone is in the car in the second) – and that, so understood, the notion is both coherent and theoretically fruitful. The case is made in three parts. Chapters 1–4 develop and defend the underlying philosophy of mind and language, on which words such as ‘probably’ and ‘might’ let us directly express credences. Chapters 5–7 motivate and defend Moss’s account of sentences like ‘She knew her phone was probably in the car’ as attributing credences that constitute knowledge. And chapters 8–10 apply the idea that credences can constitute knowledge to a variety of topics.

The logic of probabilistic knowledge

Sarah Moss’ thesis that we have probabilistic knowledge is from some perspectives unsurprising and from other perspectives hard to make sense of. The thesis is potentially transformative, but not yet elaborated in sufficient detail for epistemologists. This paper interprets Mossean probabilistic knowledge in a suitably-modified Kripke framework, thus filling in key details. It argues that probabilistic knowledge looks natural and plausible when so interpreted, and shows how the most pressing challenges to the thesis can be overcome. Most importantly, probabilistic knowledge can satisfy factivity in the framework, though we are not forced to accept a specific account of probabilistic “facts”. The framework also reflects Moss’ claim that old-fashioned propositional knowledge is just a limiting case of probabilistic knowledge, and all knowledge is fundamentally probabilistic. Finally, Moss endorses a failure of contraposition: for example, p implies probably p, but not probably p does not imply not p. The framework makes clear the sense in which the valid inferences regarding probably p are as Moss claims.