STUDIES IN THE NOVEL最新文献

{"title":"Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive by Sean O'toole (review)","authors":"Kristin Mahoney","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a935481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a935481","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive</em> by Sean O'toole <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kristin Mahoney </li> </ul> O'TOOLE, SEAN. <em>Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive</em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 170 pp. $94.95 hardcover; $34.95 paperback; $34.95 e-book. <p><em>The Picture of Dorian Gray</em> (1890/1891) is a novel that can feel at once too legible and strangely obscure. Critics have wrestled with what to do with the novel's conclusion, which seems to transform a Decadent novel into an overly pat cautionary tale, supplanting all the sinister hedonism that preceded with simplistic moralism, leading readers to struggle as to how to bring the text into accord with the movement from which it emerged. The novel's treatment of desire, which famously underwent numerous revisions, manifests in wildly different ways within different chapters, and critics have struggled as well with how to render coherent this unruly thematic within the text. Sean O'Toole's <em>Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive</em> provides a way out of some of these challenges, not by simplifying or reducing the novel, but by foregrounding the fragments of which it is composed, the fact that it is a collage arranged from a network of transnational influences. In illuminating what the novel is made from, he also demonstrates the function of these borrowings and adaptations, the manner in which its fragmentation and bricolage disguised the text's queer project, allowing Wilde to avoid the censoring of its representation of same-sex desire and \"circumvent dominant ideology\" (38).</p> <p>O'Toole argues that our tendency to see <em>The Picture of Dorian Gray</em> as an outgrowth of Victorian Aestheticism and French Decadence has obscured the broader array of international influences from which Wilde was drawing in his composition of his only novel. In his preface, O'Toole connects this move to place <em>Dorian Gray</em> within a broader transnational and transhistorical framework to recent efforts to \"undiscipline\" Victorian studies as well as to what has been referred to as \"new Decadence studies,\" which locates Decadence across a wider range of geographic locations, time periods, and media. However, while recent work on the Decadent Movement's global reach by, for example, Stefano Evangelista, Matthew Potolsky, Regenia Gagnier, and Robert Stilling has focused upon Decadence's cosmopolitan networks at the fin de siècle as well as its transnational afterlives in the twentieth century, O'Toole takes a somewhat different tack by disinterring Wilde's international source materials, turning our eyes back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to Irish Gothic, European historical romance, and nineteenth-century American short fiction.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142224484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Novels By Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century by Kate Marshall (review)","authors":"Adrienne Ghaly","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a935479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a935479","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Novels By Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century</em> by Kate Marshall <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Adrienne Ghaly </li> </ul> MARSHALL, KATE. <em>Novels By Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. 232 pp. $26.00 paper; $99.00 cloth. <p>Realism's enduring cultural presence in contemporary American literature is not the result of variations on the bourgeois subject, free indirect discourse's dialectic of intimacy and alienation, the structure of a political unconscious, or its treatment of sociomaterial environments. Instead, argues Kate Marshall in this vibrant work of novel theory and the nonhuman, this persistence derives from realism's tendency to decenter human experiences, often in highly 'weird' ways. On one level, this book might be understood as a lively response to new materialism, theories of the nonhuman, and the Anthropocene; on another, as an engaging and welcome addition to current critical re-engagements with realism. Over the better part of two decades scholars from Fredric Jameson to Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, from Debjani Ganguly to Ramón Saldívar, have interrogated realism's flourishing in contemporary Anglophone literature, often identifying its permeability and propensity for fusion with its putative others, from the romance to the complex generic hybridities of 'speculative' and 'planetary' fiction. <strong>[End Page 331]</strong></p> <p>Marshall's opening chapters seek to track \"a <em>longing</em> for the nonhuman\" (3) in twenty-first-century fiction and theory by establishing an alternate genealogy found in the modes with which American fiction since the later decades of the nineteenth century sought to imagine nonhuman perspectives. The new weird thinkers—novelists and theorists of new materialism, proponents of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism—share a commitment to \"modalities of indifference, the cosmic, and external or object agencies\" (31). From Poe to pulp to new materialisms, through American naturalism, para-modernist texts, and post-extinction narratives: in Marshall's vision all are \"novels that want to be written by aliens\" (13). This animating idea encompasses \"shifts of perspective and unlikely experiments with sentience\" (3), \"build[ing] worlds that <em>feel</em> weird\" (4), and \"construct[ing] a nonhuman point of view\" (9) without consigning such weirdness to the domains of genre fiction. Marshall does not dissolve the category of genre, but argues instead that in the novels under examination \"genre becomes mood,\" a \"reflexive knowing\" and \"feeling…the limitations of the human vantage\" (5). This genre shift, Marshall contends, \"is doing the work of theory in the novel\" (5).</p> <p>This perspective means that <em>Novels by Aliens</em> participates in broader efforts to expand","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142189731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon by Alexander Manshel (review)","authors":"Hardeep Sidhu","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928660","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon</em> by Alexander Manshel <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Hardeep Sidhu </li> </ul> MANSHEL, ALEXANDER. <em>Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon</em>. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 352 pp. $35.00 paperback; $140.00 hardcover; $34.99 e-book. <p>For much of the twentieth century, the genre of the historical novel didn’t rank high in literary esteem. The popular form was part of a previous era’s paraliterature, “condemned,” Henry James once wrote, to a “fatal <em>cheapness</em>” (qtd. in Manshel 16–17). Alexander Manshel’s <em>Writing Backwards</em> tells the fascinating story of how historical fiction has now become the most prized mode in American letters. Consider the numbers: Of contemporary novels taught in American universities, 70 percent are historical fiction. Around three-quarters of novels shortlisted for major American literary prizes in recent decades are historical fiction (4). Historical fiction earns 50 percent more scholarly citations than do novels set in the present (250n10). While most popular fiction continues to be set in the present, the fiction that elite cultural institutions consecrate as literary is overwhelmingly set in the past (253n32). “[H]istorical fiction,” writes Manshel, “now stands at the very center of the American literary canon” (5).</p> <p><em>Writing Backwards</em> is an excellent addition to theorizations of the historical novel, from Walter Scott and Georg Lukàcs up through Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, and Amy Elias. However, Manshel’s idea of what constitutes historical fiction is much roomier than these writers’, more a “literary mode” than a “single, monolithic genre” (12). Instead of ticking boxes to see if novels belong, Manshel uses a common-sense criterion that spans genres: is a novel clearly set in the past? There are some risks to this approach. As the set of objects of study grows, so do the anomalies that undercut generalizations. And when we redefine historical fiction in this way, more of the literature of previous eras (Henry James’s era, say) should now qualify, which in turn <strong>[End Page 212]</strong> raises the question of how sharp Manshel’s “historical turn” really is. For the most part, Manshel’s data go back only to 1950 or so, making it hard to know the longer-term baseline of historical fiction as a share of the literary field. Some of Manshel’s earliest data show that, from 1950 to 1979, historical fiction made up half of novels shortlisted for major prizes (4)—not as many as today, but still a significant proportion. Moreover, even a cursory glance at earlier literary history shows that Manshel’s broadly conceived “mode” of historical fiction—including most of the subgenres analyzed in <em>Writ","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141150880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"A Little Happy Sound\": Collective Labor, Ecocide, and Soundscapes in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland","authors":"Eliza McCarthy","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928652","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Previous scholarship on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel <i>Herland</i> (1915) has compellingly argued that the ecological space in the novel reflects an extension of an idealized domestic sphere, as a site where Gilman’s problematic eugenic beliefs manifest through the careful conservation of a park-like space. This analysis tends, however, to be wholly ocularcentric, grounded in the aesthetics of the verdant environment that features in Gilman’s narrative. As a necessary sensory departure from a visually preoccupied body of scholarship, I examine the barren sonic portrait that Gilman creates through her essayistic prose, arguing that female autonomy, individual orality, and bio-diverse ecological space become problematically compromised. Drawing on the intersections between feminist scholarship on Gilman’s novel, soundscape studies, and ecocritical frameworks in the environmental humanities, this essay aims to sonically deconstruct the problematic eugenic discourse that underpins Gilman’s ultimate human fantasy.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141150911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Implicated Realism and the Environmentalism of the Rich in Ben Lerner's 10:04","authors":"Leila Braun","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928656","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay argues that Ben Lerner’s novel <i>10:04</i> (2014) employs “implicated realism” to represent the environmentalism of the rich. Implicated realism is a self-reflexive aesthetic that reveals how the foundations of literary realism—narrative description, bourgeois settings, an emphasis on daily life—rely upon the forms of exploitation that have also produced the climate crisis. I demonstrate that implicated realism in <i>10:04</i>, paradoxically, consists of both hyperrealism and realist failure. Lerner’s novel applies hyperrealist description to seemingly innocuous scenes, uncovering their implication in the uneven distribution of environmental harm. Such hyperrealism exists alongside realist failure, which <i>10:04</i> both thematizes and performs. Through realist failure, then, implicated realism confronts the compromised history of realism and its association with possessive individualism and extractive capitalism. Consequently, although many ecocritics discount realism’s ability to represent climate change, this essay identifies implicated realism as a self-reflexive and adaptive mode.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141153795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Speculation's Profit and Loss: Philosophical, Financial, and Fictional Wagers in Tom McCarthy's Remainder","authors":"Ryan Trimm","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928654","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Tom McCarthy’s <i>Remainder</i> foregrounds speculation as a prominent theme, not least in the narrator’s financial investments. This essay uses those risky wagers as means of exploring the intersecting resonances of speculation in terms of its philosophical, financial, and narrative (speculative fictional) resonances. The novel’s interweaving of these senses reveals competing speculative strategies: on the one hand, a wager that takes limited information but attempts to delve into the unknown and return with a profit; on the other, a loss that nonetheless informs as to what supposedly established givens ultimately do not work.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141150879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928662","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p>Leila Braun is a PhD candidate in English Language &amp; Literature at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Everyday Apocalypse: Minor Realism in the Contemporary Climate Novel,” examines how contemporary novels engage partial and contingent forms of literary realism to depict climate change and environmental disaster.</p> <p>Bridget Chalk is Professor of English at Manhattan College, where she teaches modernism and twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and Anglophone literature. She is the author of <em>Modernism and Mobility: The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience</em> (Palgrave, 2014), as well as essays and reviews in <em>Modernism/Modernity</em>, <em>The Journal of Modern Literature</em>, <em>Twentieth-Century Literature</em>, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on <em>Novel Schooling</em>, a book about the relationship between education and narrative form.</p> <p>Eliza McCarthy was in the final year of her undergraduate degree in English at the University of Exeter at the time of writing this article, and she began an MSt in World Literatures at the University of Oxford in October 2023 before pursuing doctoral study. Eliza’s research interests lie in the intersection between literature and cultural geography, notably ocean studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, sound studies, and the Black Diaspora.</p> <p>Aaron Schneeberger received his doctorate in American Literature in 2018 from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he currently teaches as a postdoctoral scholar. His scholarship has also appeared in <em>Modern Fiction Studies</em> and <em>College Literature</em>.</p> <p>Ryan Trimm is Professor of English and Film Media at the University of Rhode Island. He has authored the book <em>Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain</em> and numerous articles on contemporary British fiction and film.</p> Copyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of North Texas ... </p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141257986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian Realism by Carra Glatt (review)","authors":"Priyanka Anne Jacob","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928659","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian Realism</em> by Carra Glatt <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Priyanka Anne Jacob </li> </ul> GLATT, CARRA. <em>Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian Realism</em>. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2022. 232 pp. $95.00 cloth; $39.50 paper; $39.50 e-book. <p>The pages of the Victorian novel are strewn with half-expressed desires and waylaid intentions. As a narrative progresses, it leaves in its wake a number of <em>other</em>, possible, outcomes. Those abandoned plots lurk in the complex form of the novel. In <em>Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian Realism</em>, Carra Glatt demonstrates how these unfulfilled possibilities trail and disrupt the central tale. The Victorian novel, Glatt tells us, “contains within itself the specter of its own discarded alternatives” (50).</p> <p>Glatt’s book joins recent work shining light on the non-dominant elements of the Victorian novel: its lengthy middles, stray impulses, and narrative antinomies. Glatt takes a narratological approach, highlighting the “unwritten plots” that lie in tension with a novel’s main plot. She focuses especially on endings: examining, for instance, the sense that Pip and Estella <em>ought</em> to part, which shadows the veiled implication that they will marry; or how Hardy’s sidelined character Marty is granted not a marriage plot but, at least, the final words of <em>The Woodlanders</em>. Glatt articulates three models for how “the Victorian novel is created out of an interaction between its written and unwritten plots” (7): the shadow plot, the proxy narrative, and the “hypothetically realist” plot. In a thoughtful epilogue, she also offers a glimpse into how realism itself has become an underplot in contemporary fiction.</p> <p>Nineteenth-century realism channels and “demote[s]” the persistent influence of romance into the shadow plot (44). Glatt’s first chapter provides an exhaustive literary history of realism. It is difficult, Glatt points out, to locate a Victorian text strictly in the realist mode, without debts to Gothic, romance, sensation, reform, urban, or other literary conventions. The “hybridity of Victorian form” (17) expands the range of paths a story might take, including “highly melodramatic and sensational ones” (20). Yet, these “radical” options will ultimately be rerouted, as realist novels trend toward the “condition of plausibility” (20). Glatt defines realism not by its concrete descriptiveness, representation of ordinary life, or rejection of romance. Realism is for Glatt a particular relationship to narrative possibility: what at first feels like an open field of possibilities narrows into a limited path of compromise. More than a narrative tendency, this is","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141153792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk by Amy R. Wong (review)","authors":"Parama Roy","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928661","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk</em> by Amy R. Wong <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Parama Roy </li> </ul> WONG, AMY R. <em>Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk</em>. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. xii+228 pages. $70.00 hardcover. <p>Amy R. Wong’s ambition in <em>Refiguring Speech</em> is an expansive one. She seeks, through an examination of late-Victorian fictions of empire, to effect a reconsideration of commonly held assumptions about the place of speech and communication in the novel in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Such a reconsideration is meant to function as a template for counter-intuitive readings of linguistic fluency and political possibility in Victorian fiction. Four novels—R. L. Stevenson’s <em>Treasure Island</em> (1883), Bram Stoker’s <em>Dracula</em> (1897), George Meredith’s <em>One of Our Conquerors</em> (1891), and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s <em>The Inheritors</em> (1901)—make up her archive. These, she suggests, are rich with intimations of the surprising political possibilities of imperial fictions. There is much to be commended in readings that engage imperial fictions as complex rather than ideologically transparent productions. All too often, when it comes to narratives of empire or of race, we read as if our default critical positions must be diagnostic—that they must involve either deprecation or admiration, rather than anything more open-ended. Wong, then, deserves praise for seeking to disabuse us of the foregone (and, I should add, almost invariably censorious) <strong>[End Page 214]</strong> conclusions to which we often take recourse when we read fictions of empire, especially by those of European origin.</p> <p>Wong begins by demarcating certain distinctions between modes of utterance and communication that she identifies, it must be said somewhat idiosyncratically, as “speech” and “talk.” Speech, she avers, is what names “a certain proprietary fantasy in the Anglo-American imagination that prizes a perfect tethering of expression to intent” (1). Speech in this schematic is the property of the sovereign and self-possessed individual, and it emerges in distinction to racial and animal others. Nineteenth-century manuals on the art of conversation, along with the centrality of fluent speech in novels from Austen to James, are adduced as instances of the “quasi-magical, capital-generating” qualities of speech (5). In contrast to the putative racial and colonial logics of speech, talk in the novels functions under the sign of failure, being wayward, inarticulate, and sometimes plethoric in its excess. But can speech as defined in this monograph really be set apart from talk? For one thing, manuals of conversation (or conduct) have always been und","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141150884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Affective Subjects and Perceptions of Waste in Don Delillo's Underworld","authors":"Aaron F. Schneeberger","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a928653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928653","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article reads the trope of waste in Don DeLillo’s <i>Underworld</i> through the lens of theories of affect and embodied cognition. Specifically, it examines how the bodily and perceptual habits of the novel’s characters are shaped through encounters with waste. Furthermore, it argues that these changing perceptions, attitudes, and dispositions toward waste demonstrate broader shifts in the development of capitalist subjects during the latter half of the twentieth century. Specifically, the novel depicts a transition from a desire to reconcile capitalist growth with traditionalism, not unlike the “fusionism” that dominated conservative thought during the middle of the twentieth century, to a more utopian vision of boundless capitalist growth popularized in post-Reagan America. The novel thus suggests that the political dispositions of its characters are better understood in terms of their affects and bodily habits than more traditional metrics like ideology.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141150881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}