Claire Barwise, Brian May, Iva Ančić, Timothy Lem-Smith, Alaina Kaus, Yuan Shu, Pieter Vermeulen, Jade M. Becker, Justin Gifford, Emily M. Hall, Tod Hoffman, Abigail Moreshead, Riti Sharma, Kelli D. Zaytoun
{"title":"A Girl Like We: Narrative Doubling and the Politics of Femininity in Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes","authors":"Claire Barwise, Brian May, Iva Ančić, Timothy Lem-Smith, Alaina Kaus, Yuan Shu, Pieter Vermeulen, Jade M. Becker, Justin Gifford, Emily M. Hall, Tod Hoffman, Abigail Moreshead, Riti Sharma, Kelli D. Zaytoun","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2023.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2023.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay reconsiders the feminist potential of Anita Loos's best-selling novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It argues that Loos' allusions to her own authorial persona—aligned with both the ostensibly airheaded Lorelei and her drolly-intelligent companion Dorothy—invite a reading of the pair as a fictional double. As such, Lorelei and Dorothy satirize the male response and act as a bifurcated presentation of a femininity not yet socially legible. By reading Loos's novel alongside her autobiographical writing and early screen treatments, readers can better understand her satiric agenda and engagement with mass culture's gender politics.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"79 1","pages":"1 - 117 - 118 - 142 - 143 - 162 - 164 - 167 - 167 - 170 - 170 - 173 - 173 - 176 - 176 - 178 - 179 -"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76133969","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":"Katherine Mansfield, Postimpressionist","authors":"Brian May","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:On \"Woolf's literary impressionism,\" Ann Banfield asserts, \"Katherine Mansfield was the decisive influence yet exemplified Impressionism's limits\" (\"Time Passes\" 471) Mansfield never achieved \"a post-impressionist 'modern fiction,'\" not even in \"Prelude\" or \"At the Bay.\" But Banfield overlooks Mansfield's elaboration of an alternative postimpressionism that consists not in Woolfian design in which moments are crystallized and kaleidoscopically arranged, but rather in visions of an incipient, preternatural motility. Mansfield's postimpressionism, less formally complex than Woolf's, is more metaphysical. Its most vibrant instance lies within the tidal pool in \"At the Bay,\" a tidal pool taken over, stilled, and solemnized by Woolf for the beach-combing scene in To the Lighthouse.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":"22 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90467137","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":"To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry","authors":"Riti Sharma","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2023.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2023.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74069899","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":"Frankenstein's Monster Goes West: Hernan Diaz's In the Distance, Cli-Fi, and the Literature of Limitation","authors":"Pieter Vermeulen","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2023.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2023.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay reads Hernan Diaz's novel In the Distance as both a rewriting of the traditional western (especially John Ford's The Searchers) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in a climate-changed world. Over and against the insistence on transcendence and conquest in those documents of nineteenth-century imperial and technological overreach, In the Distance both formally and thematically conveys an ethos of limitation. By insisting on the exhaustion of former possibilities, the novel provides a new template for climate fiction beyond its current dominant speculative and realist modes.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":"143 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88197593","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":"Global Weirding and Paranoid Worlding in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange","authors":"Timothy Lem-Smith","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2023.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2023.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange deploys an aesthetics of global weirding. Yamashita's novel relates a series of increasingly bizarre phenomena that occur across Los Angeles in a single week. Tying these occurrences together is the motif of the orange, a strange fruit whose persistent presence in the novel provides the key to the conspiratorial cartographies of climate change's globally weird effects. Tropic of Orange ultimately deploys the orange as a tropic figure that conceptualizes the multiple scales of the ecoapocalypse as one predicated on the paranoid faith that everything is connected.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"73 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74379510","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":"Resampling (Narrative) Stream of Consciousness: Mind Wandering, Inner Speech, and Reading as Reversed Introspection","authors":"M. Bernini, Charles Fernyhough","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay promotes the idea that current cognitive models of mind wandering and inner speech can help us better understanding the phenomenological constituents of what Joyce calls “the mystery of the conscious” as simulated by modernist literary investigations. In our essay, we rework a model of perceptual decoupling (how attention disengages from perception) and peripheral awareness (the interplay of focus and periphery in perception). At the same time, we argue that modernist introspective explorations can challenge, correct, and update cognitive models. We also reflect on reading as a process reversing authorial introspective quests (presenting a model of reading as reversed introspection).","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"53 1","pages":"639 - 667"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87409366","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":"The New Feeling Omniscience: Imperial Affects, Publicness and Narrative Style in Mrs Dalloway","authors":"Jess Cotton","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0051","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Through a reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I argue that the modernist novel’s charting of intense emotions pushes narrative to a new level of feeling. An affective reading of modernist narrative allows us to see how free indirect style, which is understood primarily as evidencing individual subjectivity, has a public face, and how cognitive processes are inseparable from the shared affect that impinges on private thought. In this reading, the modernist novel is not only an inward affair but is also concerned with how the affect and politics operate at the heart of what is considered most inward.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"771 - 791"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74775359","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":"Deixis and Dissociation: On the Adaptive Power of Dissociated “I”s","authors":"Sowon S. Park","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0046","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that a continuous and unified sense of self is, at times, achieved by cognitive dissociation and that deixis facilitates these dissociated states of consciousness. Making this argument illuminates a primary part of ordinary cognition that is underexamined. By rethinking dissociation as basic, not psychotic, this essay highlights the powerful cognitive tool that is personal deixis and attends to the cognitive strategy of self-separation that is, among other things, so foundational to the writing and reading of fiction. The aim is to provide a more expansive cognitive framework with which to view modernism.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"75 1","pages":"668 - 686"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86361789","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}