LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory最新文献

{"title":"Structural Racism and Just War Theory in Post-World War II America: Susan Choi and Toni Morrison on Violence, Imagination, and Human Flourishing","authors":"Jennifer Haytock","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2209499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2209499","url":null,"abstract":"conceives of a constellation of persons and their social relations ordered around and towards a common good. Their community is defined by shared culture and language, common experiences and memories that provide fundamental meaning to their lives as individuals and as a people. These are great goods; perhaps even the greatest human goods as without them other goods are simply unintelligible. They are goods of such magnitude one can imagine dying for them and, short of that, they justify the exercise of ordering power by those in positions of governing authority. (73)","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"34 1","pages":"30 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48370148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Innocence, Provocation, and Moral Injury: The Problem of Discrimination in Phil Klay’s Redeployment","authors":"Ashley Kunsa","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2209500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2209500","url":null,"abstract":"Although riddled with the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and firefights that have characterized the United States’ 21st-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the stories of Phil Klay’s National Book Award-winning collection, Redeployment (2014) feature only one central character who suffers from war’s devastating physical wounds. In “War Stories,” Jenks, a former Marine Corps engineer, shares his memories of the IED blast that left him with lasting pain and destroyed his looks. Despite fifty-four surgeries, when he smiles, “[t] he left side of his face is twisted up, the wrinkled skin over the cheeks bunched and his thin-lipped slit of a mouth straining toward where his ear should be. The right side stays still, but that’s standard for him, given the nerve damage” (Klay 215). According to Sarah, the woman to whom Jenks tells his story, “‘IEDs cause the signature wounds of this war,’” by which she means burns and traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) (222). No doubt, the number of these wounds is staggering: the Department of Defense and the Defense and Veteran’s Brain Injury Center estimate that more than 20% of the injuries from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan take the form of TBIs (Summerall), and, as of 2006, 368 burn casualties had been recorded in Iraq (Pruitt). Aside from “War Stories,” however, the majority of the pieces in Klay’s collection of Iraq War tales focus on a different sort of injury. The soldiers, marines, and veterans in these stories suffer damage that goes largely unseen by those around them—damage not to their bodily selves but to their moral selves, or what theorists call “moral injury.” Nearly all of Klay’s stories include a character contending with some form of moral injury, which, according to Brett Litz and others, occurs as a result of someone “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"34 1","pages":"47 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42688904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vietnam Vet Noir After 9/11: Quarry, Dog Soldiers, and the Anti-Ethical Appeal of a Contemporary Subgenre","authors":"T. Hawkins","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2209501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2209501","url":null,"abstract":"Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, American noir has demonstrated striking permutations. This essay concerns itself with a subset of those changes, whose multimedia manifestations include pulp comics, prestige television shows, big-budget films, and critically acclaimed novels. I posit that these texts are part of a subgenre of hardboiled crime fiction, which I propose to name, “Vietnam Vet Noir.” Vietnam Vet Noir centers as protagonists traumatized American war veterans and their families, generally, and Vietnam War veterans and their children, in particular. As we will see, the subgenre’s emergence predates the era of war on terror. In fact, Vietnam Vet Noir appeared before the 1975 collapse of the American War in Vietnam. That said, the number of and consumer interest in Vietnam Vet Noir texts exploded only in the 21 century. Post-9/11 examples of the subgenre include Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), in which one of our protagonists, Llewellyn Moss, is a two-tour Vietnam War combat veteran. One thinks, too, of the first and third seasons of HBO’s True Detective (2014 and 2017, respectively), written by Nic Pizzolatto. Likewise, one considers another HBO series, Barry (2018-present), popular with audiences and wildly popular with critics, which stars Bill Hader playing an Afghanistan War veteran-turned-hitman. Vietnam Vet Noir sometimes has critiqued American involvement in the war on terror, such as when Tommy Lee Jones starred in 2007’s anti-Iraq War film, In the Valley of Elah, which Paul Haggis directed. Likewise, any number of post-9/11 texts have blended aspects of Vietnam Vet Noir—already a hybrid of noir and war fiction—with other generic or sub-generic elements. Resulting texts include all four seasons of the Netflix international drug-crime series Ozark (2017-present); two of Ozark’s most intriguing supporting characters are","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"34 1","pages":"60 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44400473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Maimed and Naked Monks in the Bloodslaked Dust”: Augustine, Aquinas, and Cormac McCarthy on Just War","authors":"J. Dever, L. Cooper, Richard B. Woodward","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2209498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2209498","url":null,"abstract":"Perhaps no modern novel describes warfare better than Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (1985), the “bloodiest book since The Iliad,” according to Richard B. Woodward. The novel’s depiction of warfare is a remarkable achievement of prose. William Dalrymple, a British historian, claims that he studied McCarthy’s literary technique in order to write his history of the Anglo-Afghan wars; Blood Meridian’s descriptions of atrocity and warfare, he says, are the handiwork of “a master.” McCarthy scholar Steven Frye argues that it is precisely the aesthetic qualities of the novel that encode its moral vision, a vision “that might seem otherwise absent” (“Blood Meridian” 109). War is rendered in exquisite, even sublime, beauty, transforming the historic record on which the narrative is based into technicolor, panoramic grotesquery. Those stylistic choices are subjective choices, demanding evaluative interpretation. Building on Frye’s assertion that the novel’s aesthetics encode its moral vision, we contend that Blood Meridian’s aesthetically rendered violence offers critical insight into its arguments about the ethics of war. Specifically, we read Blood Meridian’s aesthetic treatment of war through the lens of the tradition of just war theory. Just war theory (JWT) is predicated on the notion of proportionality, authority, and intent, all of which create conditions which must be met in order for war to be just. Read through this lens, Blood Meridian’s bombastic descriptions of the orgiastic mindlessness of","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"34 1","pages":"7 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48302087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reading Contemporary American Warfare with Just War Theory","authors":"T. Hawkins, Andrew Kim","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2209497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2209497","url":null,"abstract":"In late 2021, we published a coauthored book with Palgrave Macmillan’s American Literature Readings in the Twenty-first Century series called, Just War Theory and Literary Studies: An Invitation to Dialogue. This text is the culmination of years of thinking on our parts, both individually and jointly, about the relationship between warfare, ethics, aesthetics, cultural memory, and American national identity. Myriad concerns—or more to the point, frustrations—animate our work on this project. Both of us, but Hawkins in particular, believe that much of today’s worthy scholarly reflection about the human experience, and the human costs, of modern and contemporary conflict occurs under the auspices of humanities disciplines wherein scholars actively work through representations of warfare to arrive at ethical claims about warfare. At the same time, many of these scholars, lacking systematic education in ethics proper, appear confused about the first principles on which their axiological claims rest, to say nothing about the habits of thought and action the effectuation of said principles might demand. As a result, we believe that much of today’s humanistic research on war would benefit greatly from direct conversation with scholarship from those disciplines in which the ethics of warring are engaged systematically—namely, philosophy and theology. At the same time, as Kim proves keen to note, conversations about warfare and ethics from within philosophy and theology frequently play out in manners so far removed from what we term the “acting person” in our book as to seem “academic” in the worst sense (3). In fact, much of the work currently being published in philosophy and theology on Just War Theory (JWT), as well as work which engages alternative approaches to questions of warfare and ethics, is virtually unreadable not only from outside those disciplines but even from outside certain of their niche sub-disciplines. Thus, it is our further belief that philosophical and theological reflections on justice and warfare would benefit from direct engagement with scholars whose work on war and ethics principally engages texts that center lived human experience. Given these twinned contestations, we wrote Just War Theory and Literary Studies to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students, in hopes of achieving","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"34 1","pages":"1 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46986132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Prestige Horror","authors":"Karen J. Renner","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2166311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2166311","url":null,"abstract":"Though the importance of psychoanalysis to horror studies is common knowledge in the field, the extent of its influence is easily underestimated. Critics typically trace the birth of horror film scholarship back to Robin Wood’s essays in The American Nightmare (1979), which were then expanded upon and collected in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan in 1986. Wood’s approach informed other psychoanalytical approaches, most famously Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992) and Barbara Creed’s The MonstrousFeminine (1993), both of which were also expansions of essays published in the 1980s. Psychoanalytical approaches to horror continued to proliferate in the 1990s, including Tony Williams’s Hearths of Darkness (1996) and Harry Benshoff ’s Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997). Barry Keith Grant solidified the influence of these critics and their approaches in his collection Dread of Difference (1996), which contained essays by Creed, Clover, Benshoff, Williams, and Wood in addition to essays with comparable approaches by himself and Christopher Sharrett, with whom he had edited the collection Planks of Reason in 1984. The appearance of a revised edition of Planks of Reason in 2004 signaled the continued significance of psychoanalytically informed criticism into the new millennium. In fact, in Horror Film and Psychoanalysis, published the same year, Stephen Jay Schneider declared that “despite the often vitriolic criticisms of psychoanalysis both inside and outside academic film studies, the horror genre has continued to see a steady stream of new psychoanalytic approaches, as well as new variations on existing ones” (1). His claim is well supported by major studies that followed, such as Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking Representations and Linnie Blake’s The Wounds of Nations. Recent works continue to tip their hats to psychoanalysis and its most well-known scholars, and companions and introductions to the genre give it prominence . Equally telling is that so many of the seminal works of horror criticism have received second editions, including Williams’s in 2014 and Creed’s, Grant’s, and Clover’s in 2015. In addition, a collection of Wood’s essays on horror earned its own volume in 2018, and Creed’s book was revisited in 2019 in","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"296 - 316"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44408246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“You Can’t Stop Picturing that Beautiful Handset”: The Found Phone Trope in Twenty-First-Century Media","authors":"Vicky Brewster","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2166305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2166305","url":null,"abstract":"Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, popularly held to be the first gothic text, also offers one of the first examples of the found document trope, the story revolving around a manuscript that, within its own fiction, is claimed to be an “authentic” document from the twelfth century. Since then, this trope has been enthusiastically reimagined in cinema as “found footage.” Although found footage has a rich history stretching back to silent cinema, Alexandra HellerNicholas credits its modern beginning with The Blair Witch Project (loc. 105), which Adam Daniel also acknowledges as “ignit[ing] the rebirth” of the found footage subgenre (39). Found footage films continued into the twenty-first century with the Paranormal Activity franchise, Cloverfield, and many others. The “found” trope has once again transformed in the twenty-first century into what might be termed “found phone.” Many of the devices that rule twenty-first-century life in heavily technologized societies—laptops, tablets, smartwatches, smart house devices, and so on—have become inextricable from our personal identities. Lindsay Hallam notes that “[o]ur identity and sense of self, and certainly our fears, are now bound to the digital realm” (117), while Steen Christiansen agrees that “human subjectivities are dispersed across media technologies, entangling the sense of self with those same technologies” (43). If, as Adam Hart argues, “our ghosts take on the forms and qualities of our media” (3), then it only makes sense that as society has become more dependent on the smartphone, it would serve as the perfect talisman for contemporary gothic haunting. The phone’s portability compared with other devices means that it can be easily carried in a pocket or purse, and one seldom leaves the house without one’s phone; this cannot be said of the majority of the other devices. A phone app is necessary in order to set up smart home products such as the Amazon Echo, and many apps and sites, like banking apps, PayPal, and Steam, require text message or two-factor phone verification in order to log in or carry out transactions. The phone not only holds the most personal information about an individual, but it also acts as a sort of extension of that individual. Furthermore, the extent to which the smartphone has","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"233 - 253"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47909452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"After Peele: Get Out’s Influence on the Horror Genre and Beyond","authors":"Mikal J. Gaines","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2166306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2166306","url":null,"abstract":"In a 2021 article for The New York Times, Gabrielle Bellot seeks to explain “How Black Horror Became America’s Most Powerful Cinematic Genre.” The lead image features a now iconic close-up of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), the protagonist of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, paralyzed with fear. His eyes appear almost grotesquely widened, his mouth hangs agape, and tears stream down his face. The moment, of course, comes from one of the film’s most powerful scenes in which Chris gets hypnotized and then cast down into “the sunken place,” a metaphysical plane of Black subjection that has since become pop culture shorthand for endemic racial oppression. Peele’s landmark feature has already prompted a considerable body of scholarly analysis from critics such as Joshua Bennett, Dawn Keetley et al., Alison Landsberg, Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Francesca Sobande, and others. Although these studies offer a rich array of critical interpretations, they all confirm that Get Out marks a vital moment in the history of horror because of how it centers the inner life of its Black protagonist and because of the incisiveness with which it targets liberal white racism as a source of monstrosity. As Robin Means Coleman has argued, Black horror films can be distinguished from “Blacks in horror” films by the former’s prioritization of Black experience, characters, culture, community concerns, and more careful attention to the fraught history of raced representation both within and beyond the genre (7). Get Out indeed goes to great lengths to present itself as a Black horror film invested in Blackness (and in Black audiences) rather than as a Blacks in horror film that likely would not have resonated in the same ways. In this essay, however, I am less interested in offering another reading of Get Out than in further exploring its impact on the horror genre more broadly. Could we have even imagined an article title like Bellot’s prior to Get Out’s release? Would any critic have been willing to make such an audacious claim about the power of any single cinematic genre as Bellot does if not for Get Out’s momentous critical and commercial success? The answer seems like an emphatic no. Bellot’s","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"254 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46483093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Emerging Trends in Horror Film and Television: Part 2","authors":"Karen J. Renner","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2166304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2166304","url":null,"abstract":"In the introduction to Part 1 of “Emerging Trends in Horror Film and Television,” I described the essays gathered there as encouraging us to “rethink a range of presumptions and practices that may limit horror criticism.” The four pieces included in this issue do the same. The issue begins with Vicky Brewster’s “‘You Can’t Stop Picturing that Beautiful Handset’: The Found Phone Trope in Twenty-First-Century Media.” Brewster presents the “found phone” trope as an extension of the “found manuscript,” common to gothic fiction, including Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, often credited as being the first of its kind. Brewster identifies significant successors of found manuscripts in found footage and desktop horror (the focus of Chera Kee’s essay in part 1) but considers “found phone” a distinct incarnation due to the particular nature of the cell phone and its role in our lives. Unlike desktop computers and laptops, cell phones are uniquely portable, making them function almost like an extension of the body. This sense is furthered by the fact that cell phones are so often used to access social media, which Brewster also considers “an extension or projection of the individual” (250-51). Brewster examines a range of texts, including fiction (e.g., Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Visible Filth” and Jason Arnopp’s Ghoster), video games (e.g., Sara is Missing, A Normal Lost Phone, and unrd), as well as film (Searching, Unfriended, and Wounds, an adaptation of Ballingrud’s short story) in order to uncover the common plot elements in these stories. Prominent among them is the ability of the supernatural presences that haunt these narratives “to not only access the characters’ private digital information but also pose as the characters disseminating it, leaving apparently no trace of the supernatural entity itself” (245). Brewster argues that “these entities stand in for the corporations that can access this data and potentially sell it or utilize it for profit, as happens with targeted advertising” (245). As the title of Mikal Gaines’s essay, “After Peele: Get Out’s Influence on the Horror Genre and Beyond,” suggests, its focus is Jordan Peele’s 2017 genreredefining film. In Gaines’s own words, his essay offers “a cartography of","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"229 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45833765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Processes of Abjection: Toward a Marxist Theory of Horror","authors":"R. Jones","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2023.2166308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2166308","url":null,"abstract":"The gruesome mis-en-scène of Turkish filmmaker Can Evrenol’s surrealist horror film Baskin lends itself both to a psychoanalytic perspective that draws upon an abject taxonomy of disgusting objects and a Marxist analysis of the film’s formal representation of processes of socio-economic abjection and racialization. The film is set in modern-day Turkey and follows the protagonist, Arda, and his fellow police officers as they face a night of horror. After a violent altercation with a restaurant owner and his son, the five officers drive to a distress call from a police station in the fictionalized Inceağaç region. On their way to the station","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"277 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47605900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}