Orbit (Cambridge)最新文献

{"title":"The Flight of the Junky: Existential Posthumanism and Immanent Life in Early Burroughs","authors":"Tod Hoffman","doi":"10.16995/orbit.8454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8454","url":null,"abstract":"William Burroughs early book Junky is generally separated from his later experimental fiction.  Stylistically it accords much more to realism than the postmodern aleatory method he later innovated.  However, Burroughs’ preoccupation with resisting all forms of subjectification, his disenchantment with bourgeois life and his simultaneous literal and tropic use of addiction as a form of flight from powers of normalization and conformity are strongly present in this early work.  This paper explores Junky on three fronts.  First, it shows the novel as an elaboration of a posthumanist existentialism by emphasizing the materiality of the body through Burroughs’ explanation of the physiological mechanisms of addiction.  Through this existentialist posthumanism, the novel critically responds to Sartrianexistentialism, which was so fashionable at the time of Burroughs’ writing, and repudiates the Jeffersonian idealization of the transcendental subject and its middle class figurations.  The emphasis on the material body simultaneously challenges post-structuralist renderings ofBurroughsian readings.  This leads to a conception of strategies of flight from all forms of conformity by utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body without Organs and immanent Life.  Junk is a vehicle of flight and self-affirmation, a means of highly individualized, libertarian modes of subjective deterritorialization.  Addiction and habitual use are not mere uncontrolled thirsts, but forms of actualizing a wholly detached social and independent individual.  But the danger of junk lies in its reterritorializing of the body through new assemblages of need and dependence, leading the protagonist to ultimately seek a different mode of escape.  Junk illuminates our posthuman existential condition and leads Burroughs to seek new experimental forms of aesthetic expression.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48272186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Forget-me-not: Giving Voice to Memory in Mark Z. Danielewski's \"The Familiar\" and Elsa Morante's \"La Storia\"","authors":"Corey Flack","doi":"10.16995/orbit.8322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8322","url":null,"abstract":"Among the many, intertwining motifs spanning the volumes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, the repeated reference to forget-me-nots is not one that leaps off the page to the reader. Its presence in Xanther’s seizure in Volume 4: Hades speaks to larger notions of memory of tragedies such as the Armenian Genocide, or even the chronomosaic timelines present in Danielewski’s earlier novel, Only Revolutions. This paper, while exploring notions notions of memory through Adriana Cavarero’s theory of the narratable self, will argue that their root is in Elsa Morante’s 1974 novel La Storia, which centers on a Jewish mother and her son, both epileptic, in Rome during World War II. Yet, while both works utilize their characters’ epilepsy as a way to better acknowledge the suffering and tragedies occurring around them, Morante’s articulation of the crushing wheel of history differs from the more hopeful presentation Danielewski provides. Through her epilepsy, Xanther instead emerges as a character who highlights the importance of giving voice to others, especially those unable to speak for themselves.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47651012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Becoming Familiar with The Familiar, or, The Imaginary Novel and the Imagination","authors":"S. Pöhlmann","doi":"10.16995/orbit.8645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8645","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is the introduction to the special issue of Orbit: A Journal of American Literature on Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar. As a starting point for readers, it places the the five novels in the context of a longer literary history of multimodal writing. I argue that this alternative history undermines the realist monomodal paradigm that still persists in literature and literary criticism and challenges their normativity that has, for example, mainly excluded multimodal forms such as children's literature or comics. At the same time, I identify a corresponding narrative bias in considerations to multimodal literature, as I connect The Familiar to poetic models of meaning-making. I also argue that the imagination is a central concern of Danielewski's pentalogy, connecting plot elements such as VEM to readerly engagement and empathy. Finally, the introduction includes summaries of all the contributions to this special issue as well as a link to a bibliography of Danielewski criticism.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48628803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Into the Catsum. Mark Z. Danielewski's Arithmopoetics","authors":"B. Sezer","doi":"10.16995/orbit.8226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8226","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyzes Danielewski's poetics of numbers and digits in the first season of The Familiar. I argue that Danielewski's recent work signals a balance shift from the topological to the arithmetical. In this regard, numbers fulfill a crucial role (1) in the serial makeup of the volumes, which could be labelled as his exorithmetic; (2) in the plot of the novel itself, his endorithmetic; and (3) as a recursive device that conjoins the materiality of the novel with the numbers in the plot, his mesorithmetic. While Danielewski's exorithmetic provokes hypotheses about the voluminousness of the project, the staggering numbers in the world of The Familiar are related to Xanther's epilepsy, Dov's teachings, and Anwar's trauma.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46920684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘Questionable + Intelligence’: Inter + Legere","authors":"Mark Z. Danielewski","doi":"10.16995/orbit.8563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8563","url":null,"abstract":"This transcript recounts █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ none of which has been altered or redacted","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48356407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“The worst of both worlds\": The Familiar e-books and their unhandy limitations.","authors":"Ian Ezerin","doi":"10.16995/orbit.8335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8335","url":null,"abstract":"The commercial longevity and actual continuity of Mark Z. Danielewski’s series The Familiar was, by default, subject to the audience’s enthusiasm about it. But the latter hinges on a number of factors, which include not only the appeal of the plot and the author’s cult status, but also, importantly, the material conditions of the reading experience and the broader patterns of the economics of contemporary publishing industry. The argument of this essay considers the characteristics and effects of The Familiar’s somewhat inglorious digital incarnation, to infer that the absence of a ‘proper’ (i.e. medium-specific) and functional (i.e. responsive to highlighting, annotations, word selection and search, translation, and other functions afforded by digital devices) e-book edition significantly factored into the causes of the “pause” in the series’ progression, announced by the writer on February 2nd, 2018.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45250463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Albert Rolls, Thomas Pynchon: The Demon in the Text (Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2019). 156 pp.","authors":"D. Benea","doi":"10.16995/orbit.4810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4810","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48934012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Headley’s The Mere Wife: Diffused Satire in a troubling piece of Beowulfiana","authors":"K. Hume","doi":"10.16995/orbit.3445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.3445","url":null,"abstract":"Focus on Grendel's Mother leads us to expect a feminist attack on male heroic narrative, but Maria Dahvana Headley offers us a complex and nuanced look at parent-child, upper-lower class, and male-female patterns of interaction in this novel symbiotic upon the Anglo-Saxon BEOWULF. Since the attacks sometimes seem contradictory, I use diffused satire theory to separate the various kinds of satire, show where contradictions and ambiguities occur, and show how they can be resolved. Headley makes the point that you need to hear from all the voices in an event, not just from the last one who writes the history. What she does is give us those various voices and goad us to work out our personal positions on the issues for which she offers no easy satiric answer. <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face{font-family:\"Cambria Math\";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face{font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:swiss;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073732485 9 0 511 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:\"\";margin:0in;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:\"Calibri\",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:\"Times New Roman\";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-family:\"Calibri\",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:\"Times New Roman\";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in;margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;mso-header-margin:.5in;mso-footer-margin:.5in;mso-paper-source:0;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42888513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Becoming-Signiconic: Emergence and Territory in The Familiar","authors":"Luka Bekavac","doi":"10.16995/orbit.4752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4752","url":null,"abstract":"The Familiar is densely structured by divisions and hierarchies in terms of plot, focalization, vocabularies and layout, but it is primarily a book of interconnectedness. This is a principle that propels its narrative and poses the biggest challenge in its execution: is it possible to describe a genuinely new and disruptive entity, a “monster” unreadable in terms of existing codes and concepts, arriving as a series of glitches, a system breach, a breakdown of defenses, an enforced encounter with the Other?The Familiar itself could be conceived as an arena where a new genus comes into being through the corporeality of text, not represented as a character or recounted as an event, but assuming flesh on the page within the suspended temporality of print. A specific signiconic lexicon was devised to blur the borders between the textual and the pictorial, to give a voice to the voiceless (“the waves, the animals, the plants”), and to “surpass or bypass the mind” (Danielewski). Placing this enlarged semiotic spectrum of the sensible and the intelligible within the traditional frame of a multi-volume novel makes its ambition even more radical. Pushing the book-as-archive beyond its historical confines of mimesis and expression, The Familiar envisions literature as a process, a distribution of forces across an ontologically heterogeneous field, suggesting a nonlinear continuum motivated by a “non-subject-centered mode of agency” (Bennett).Starting with notions of the book to come as a locus of futurity and unexplored possibility (Blanchot, Derrida) and assemblage as a multiplicity, a corpus of becoming or a zone of emergence (Deleuze and Guattari), this article attempts to examine the tension between storytelling demands and the very materiality of The Familiar (including its asemic borders or cores) in view of its own signiconic and inherently post-anthropocentric goals.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44405040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reading Novels, Reading Networks: Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, Social Media, and the Digital Literary Sphere","authors":"Julia L. Panko","doi":"10.16995/orbit.4799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4799","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the theme of social networks in Mark Z. Danielewski’s serial novel The Familiar, as well as the social networks involved in the work’s reception, as a means of assessing the contemporary novel’s imbrication in social networks and social media. It contributes to critical discussions about The Familiar—and to broader conversations about the novel in the social media age—on two fronts. First, it analyzes Danielewski’s diegetic social networks. I argue that, in The Familiar, the planetary social is largely represented as a source of anxiety, as the existential threat of violence is amplified and perpetuated through social media. Yet the novel also explores how social networks offer the potential for resistance and protection from such violence. Second, the article describes how Danielewski’s real-world socially networked communities have impacted the interpretation of his writing. The analysis centers on the Facebook “Reading Club” dedicated to The Familiar and on the online discussion, conducted through WordPress, wherein students and faculty at multiple universities blogged about The Familiar, Volume 1. The WordPress discussion pushes the classroom into the blogosphere, troubling distinctions among academic interpretation, social networking, and public discourse. The Facebook group harnesses the conventions of both social media and book clubs, demonstrating how academic-adjacent interpretation may flourish in contexts not typified by such reading. At stake is a more nuanced understanding of the power and potential violence of communities constituted through social media; of the novel’s ability to represent and theorize such communities; and of the ways that reading communities’ emergence across social media has problematized longstanding conceptualizations of contemporary reading culture as characterized by a series of divisions (such as that between amateur and professional readers).","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46293628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}