{"title":"Narrating Wonder in Mark Anthony Jarman’s Stories","authors":"Jason A. Blake","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.12.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.25","url":null,"abstract":"Mark Anthony Jarman’s characters are often down and out, and often wandering and wondering. Using theories of wonder, this essay argues that wonder plays a key role in many of Jarman’s stories—stories that are marked not by narrative or psychological closure, but by a sense of wonder as characters muse on their lot in life. After briefly considering Jarman’s role within Canadian literature, including his innovative approaches to the short story form, and his odd status as an influential yet often ignored writer, the essay moves to a discussion of the various ways that wonder is at play in his works, both as a verb and a state. Jarman’s characters are frequently in doubt, and the act of wondering takes us into their drifting, self-reflecting minds. However, there is also the sense of wonder as the miraculous. Jarman’s narrators find optimism in the world around them, thanks to flashes of the beauty of the unlikely. Wonder, thus, has a crucial structural function.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87624110","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":"Appositions: The Future in Solarpunk and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction","authors":"K. Więckowska","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.12.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.21","url":null,"abstract":"The essay discusses images of the future in solarpunk and post-apocalyptic fiction, focusing on their distinct approach to the narratives of progress, science, and individualism. The dystopian perspective of post-apocalyptic fiction is juxtaposed with the hopeful stance of solarpunk stories in order to outline the attempts to move beyond environmental pessimism and to imagine a liveable future. A reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes’s The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014), and Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) provides an overview of early 21st-century dystopian motifs and visions, while the ideas and development of solarpunk fiction are discussed on the basis of three anthologies of short stories: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Ecospeculation (2017), Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (2018), and Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures (2021). The aim of the essay is to argue that apocalyptic and solarpunk fiction stand in a relationship of apposition to one another, representing dominant and emergent structures of feeling.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81196101","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":"Prophesying the End of Human Time: Eco-Anxiety and Regress in J. G. Ballard’s Short Fiction","authors":"D. Oramus","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.12.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.10","url":null,"abstract":"Despite being written half a century before the term “eco-anxiety” (Gifford and Gifford) was coined, J. G. Ballard’s disaster fictions can be read in the context of the social psychodynamics of climate change. My aim in this article is to demonstrate that in J. G. Ballard’s fiction, climate catastrophes and the devastation of nature cause the characters to realize that the Earth is not going to be able to sustain human life much longer, and their psychological reaction is either subdued anger or strange numbness. In order to do this, I analyze two short stories by Ballard: “Deep End” (1961) and “Low-Flying Aircraft” (1975) and show how their protagonists are affected by the landscape they inhabit: de-populated wastelands whose wildlife is extinct or mutated. I argue that it is their awareness that human civilization on earth is coming to its end that results in the state of mind akin to eco-anxiety. The characters are immersed in their own inner space and in these stories clocks mark not the passage from past to future but a countdown to the end.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"173 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73162002","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":"Ecotopia. Based on Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. Adapted by Elizabeth Watson","authors":"E. Watson","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.12.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.19","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"2015 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74019685","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 Nature of Irrevocability: Anthropocene Nostalgia in Hayley Eichenbaum’s Photography Series The Mother Road","authors":"Alicja Relidzyńska","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.12.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.11","url":null,"abstract":"The recent acknowledgement of the Anthropocene, resulting from the increasingly visible human-induced effects on the biosphere, has ultimately obliterated the nature/culture division (Latour; Chakrabarty), prompting sociocultural changes (Autin). Hayley Eichenbaum’s photography series The Mother Road (2015–19) serves as a prominent example of a contemporary American cultural text which reinterprets existing aesthetic strategies and shows symptoms of what I propose to identify as Anthropocene nostalgia. This new sentiment is characterized by the awareness that a return to the past is impossible and would be pernicious, given the detrimental effects of reckless capitalism fuelled by twentieth-century American consumer culture. This article aims to analyze this distinctive type of nostalgia and its juxtaposition with the Anthropocene in Eichenbaum’s series. An analysis of The Mother Road identifies why and how this new sentiment corresponds with the aesthetics of previous decades, as well as notions of temporality and time. Building on previously conceptualized traditions as codes of reference, Eichenbaum reinterprets the representation of Route 66 by playing with its iconography, creating images which evoke desolate, quasi-post-apocalyptic landscapes. With the use of synthetic colours, digital manipulation, kitsch imagery, and mindful deconstruction of past aesthetic strategies, the analyzed series demythologizes the past and displays the loss of both nature itself and of pre-Anthropocene perception.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77109796","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":"Firing up the Anthropocene: Conflagration, Representation and Temporality in Modern Australia","authors":"P. Hayward","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.12.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.09","url":null,"abstract":"The European colonization of Australia introduced a new population into a continent in which Indigenous people had practiced cyclic burning as a form of ecosystem maintenance since time immemorial. The settlers’ complete disdain for Indigenous knowledge and related practices caused these customs to largely fall into disuse. One result of this was an increased vulnerability of landscapes to bush fires, a factor that has risen to the fore in the early twenty-first century. The fires that have swept across the landscape with increasing frequency and ferocity have provoked fears of a rolling, fiery apocalypse that might make living in many areas of the continent untenable. This marks a new phase of settler anxiety that has been fuelled by extensive coverage of fires on broadcast and digital media platforms. Blending discussions of Indigenous culture, 19th-21st-century European settler visual art, literature and modern communications media, this article begins by examining the nature of Anthropocene modernity and the very different worldviews and practices of Australian Indigenous peoples. Particular attention is given to senses of time and of living and working with fire. Subsequent sections open up the topic with regard to the planetary present and how we might adjust to the future.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89764455","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":"Nec Tecum Nec Sine Te: The Inseparability of Word and Image in Virginia Woolf","authors":"Małgorzata Hołda","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.12.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.29","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the interaction of verbal and visual art in Virginia Woolf’s fiction, exemplified by her novel, To the Lighthouse. The narrative of the novel not only features scenes of the painting of the Ramsays’ portrait, but it unfolds as the creative process advances and concludes with Lily’s final stroke of her brush. While words are used to enact the process of creation, visual art serves as both a frame and a basis for the verbal. The synergistic movement of storytelling and the act of painting a picture “within the narrative” is more than an interesting instance of ekphrasis. In To the Lighthouse, words operate like pictures—according to Horace’s maxim, ut pictura poesis—and pictures work like words. Art’s resonance in the novel extends beyond depicting the process of painting. I examine Woolf’s aesthetic sensitivity and creative talent in relation to Paul Cézanne’s and Paul Klee’s art. The proximity between Woolf’s novel and the works of the two painters encourages us to view the role of shape and color in the two seemingly separate arts as the space for uncovering some vital truth about our being-in-the-word.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88153465","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 Only Way Out Is In”: Transcending Modernity and Embracing Interconnectedness in Gary Snyder and Kenneth White","authors":"M. Kocot","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.12.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.15","url":null,"abstract":"It seems that in order to overcome the current ecological crisis we need a new (global?) narrative. If the narrative of “progress” that has functioned as one of the Western cultural myths is linked to the notions of modernity and Enlightenment, then perhaps we need a new vision of modernity and “enlightenment.” This change might become part of a paradigm shift associated with a new view of ecology and the natural world, as proposed by Thich Nhat Hanh, the father of engaged Buddhism in the West. This paper aims to show how Gary Snyder and Kenneth White, two like-minded world-renowned poets and environmental activists, contribute to a new cultural paradigm: transmodernity. The non-dualism and Eastern philosophy that White and Snyder find valuable represent a rejection of Western modernity, and its cult of progress and telos. The emphasis will be placed on the importance of the Hua-Yen Buddhist philosophy, centred upon the metaphor of “Indra’s net,” and the ways in which it informs Snyder’s and White’s writing and Earth-centred activism. Snyder’s Buddhist anarchism is nowadays, more than ever before, intertwined with deep ecology. White’s radical geopoetics is becoming more and more popular, showing that the paradigm is shifting. As I will argue, the impact of “Indra’s net” on the dynamics of this gradual process is undeniable.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74528750","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":"Environmental Neocolonialism and the Quest for Social Justice in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were","authors":"B. Gasztold","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.12.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.12","url":null,"abstract":"The article addresses the problems of environmental degradation, as illustrated and explored in Imbolo Mbue’s recent novel How Beautiful We Were (2021), which juxtaposes the fictional oil company Pexton’s corporate greed with the push for rapid economic growth in a less developed world. Intrusions into the fictional African country’s sovereignty are manifested by foreign capital’s extraction of its most valuable natural resource—oil—which results in environmental harm and the disruption of Indigenous, communal life. The novel critiques the hazardous methods of crude oil exploitation, which put human health and life at risk. It demonstrates how uneven distribution of oil’s benefits sanctions corruption and fosters economic injustice, while all attempts at restoring justice are thwarted as much by local as by foreign culprits. The novel’s defense of traditional ways and the critique of Western modernity and capitalism encourage the search for grounds on which alternate epistemologies could be built. At the intersection of Western dominance and Indigenous response, the novel explores how local groups mobilize the visions of the past to oppose extractive projects. As the novel’s nostalgic title signals the happy times now bygone, its multigenerational interest brings modernity into focus. Finally, I argue that the novel’s memories of colonial extractive practices not only highlight the importance of resource temporalities around resource extraction but also emphasize their impact on the future of local communities.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"30 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72471440","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":"“. . .delivered from the lie of being truth”: The Affective Force of Disinformation, Stickiness and Dissensus in Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing","authors":"Vincent Pacheco, Jeremy C. De Chavez","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.06","url":null,"abstract":"Waged in 2016, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has claimed over 20,000 lives according to human rights groups. The Duterte administration’s own count is significantly lower: around 6,000. The huge discrepancy between the government’s official count and that of arguably more impartial organizations about something as concretely material as body count is symptomatic of how disinformation is central to the Duterte administration and how it can sustain the approval of the majority of the Philippine electorate. We suggest that Duterte’s populist politics generates what Boler and Davis (2018) call “affective feedback loops,” which create emotional and informational ecosystems that facilitate smooth algorithmic governance. We turn to Patron Saints of Nothing, a recently published novel by Randy Ribay about a Filipino-American who goes back to the Philippines to uncover the truth behind the death of his cousin. Jay’s journey into the “heart of darkness” as a “hyphenated” individual (Filipino-American) allows him access to locally networked subjectivities but not its affective entanglements. Throughout the novel, he encounters numerous versions of the circumstances of Jun’s demise and the truth remains elusive at the end of the novel. We argue that despite the constant distortion of fact and fiction in the novel, what remains relatively stable or “sticky” throughout the novel are the letters from Jun Reguero that Jay carries with him back to the Philippines. We suggest that these letters can potentially serve as a form of “dissensus” that challenges the constant redistribution of the sensible in the novel.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86862763","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}