Papers by Chris Holmes
The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee , 2023
Public Books, 2023
In "After the Quake," Chris recalls living in Japan during the year of the Kobe Earth Quake and t... more In "After the Quake," Chris recalls living in Japan during the year of the Kobe Earth Quake and the Tokyo subway gas attacks, and later reading Murakami's attempts to come to grips with that violent moment in Japan's post-war years. He considers why these stories are so often overlooked even by the most zealous readers of Murakami's work, arguing that their proximity to real trauma makes Murakami's typically hallucinatory style feel like realism.
Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2021
Despite its 18th century origins, the novel appears remarkably resilient in adapting to the globa... more Despite its 18th century origins, the novel appears remarkably resilient in adapting to the global demands of the 21st century. Largely distanced from concerns of the domestic comedy, studies of the contemporary novel tend to focus on the form’s ability to engage and respond on a global scale to transnational capitalism, neocolonialism, international warfare, and the ecological pressures of a beleaguered planet. Critics routinely approach the novel as a nexus for trans-historical understanding and a model for scalar thinking about the planet in crisis. What these approaches overlook are the myriad ways in which the novel quite ostentatiously theorizes a limit to its own vantage on the world. In a so-called age of the world, the novel appears to be a partisan of blindness over insight. Even as we become increasingly entangled within networks of global connection, our experience of the world and context for the knowledge we claim of that world continues to be mediated locally. As such, the failure to know describes one of the most salient features–and representational strengths–of the contemporary novel.
Oxford University ORE Literature, 2021
In the particular and peculiar case of the Booker Prize, regarded as the most prestigious literar... more In the particular and peculiar case of the Booker Prize, regarded as the most prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom (as measured by economic value to the author and publisher, and total audience for the awards announcement), the cultural and economic valences of literary prizes collide with the imperial history of Britain, and its after-empire relationships to its former colonies. From its beginnings, the Booker prize has never been simply a British prize for writers in the United Kingdom. The Booker's reach into the Commonwealth of Nations, a loose cultural and economic alliance of the United Kingdom and former British colonies, challenges the very constitution of the category of postimperial British literature. With a history of winners from India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Nigeria, among many other former British colonies, the Booker presents itself as a value arbitrating mechanism for a majority of the English-speaking world. Indeed, the Booker has maintained a reputation for bringing writers from postcolonial nations to the attention of a British audience increasingly hungry for a global, cosmopolitan literature, especially one easily available via the lingua franca of English. Whether and how the prize winners avoid the twin colonial pitfalls of ownership by and debt to an English patron is the subject of a great deal of criticism on the Booker, and to understand the prize as a gatekeeper and tastemaker for the loose, baggy canon of British or even global Anglophone literature, there must be a reckoning with the history of the prize, its multiplication into several prizes under one umbrella category, and the form and substance of the novels that have taken the prize since 1969.
Modern Fiction Studies, 2021
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature, 2020
A Companion to World Literature: Wiley Blackwell, 2020
My chapter analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s attraction to genres of speculative fiction according a theo... more My chapter analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s attraction to genres of speculative fiction according a theory of world literature that relies upon epistemological limits. My contention is that this shift in his novelistic project can be understood as a career-spanning interest in the dynamic between constraint and freedom that generic conceits force upon us in any conceptualization the world. The genre conventions of The Buried Giant, and Never Let Me Go signify not unbounded fantasy, but indeed the opposite: a writer hemming his style and characters into worlds in which structures necessary for understanding have been reduced to
the barest elements by which meaning might be produced. Such constraints flag a parallel concern about the way the novel can and should be read as it concerns knowledge gleaned about the world. Thinking with the structures of the novel’s limits are in this way the
beginning of meaning-making, rather than the end.
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 2019
The early twenty-first century has seen a radical shift in how the aesthetic form of the novel ad... more The early twenty-first century has seen a radical shift in how the aesthetic form of the novel addresses the abstraction of labor and the precarity of minority communities that have come to epitomize neoliberal capital. Novels increasingly attempt to formulate institutions apart from the privatizing drive that seeks to corporatize all civil society. This ambition to differentiate the novel from the primary ideology of this period has been marked by the emergence of a particular mode of critical rejoinder to the pervasive corporatist mind-set, a mode called limit thinking, in which novels draw attention to themselves as texts with which to produce new forms of thinking rather than as storehouses of information or political treatises. The writer Kazuo Ishiguro's novels Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go present limit thinking as a means to offset the prevailing form of totalizing thinking in the West: corporate personhood. That corporate body, with its obvious intentions toward absolute privatization, has been allowed a unique form of embodiment. The imagined body of the corporation has been gifted the presumption of thought. Understanding the limits of the novel—and by contrast the seeming limitlessness of the corporate state of mind—prepares us to understand how the novel resists an epistemological system into which it incorporated and how, in doing so, it shifts the kinds of questions we ask of the novel from those of what does the novel know? to how is the novel thinking?
South African Writing in Transition, 2019
This essay examines recent work on world literature theory, with a particular focus on those theo... more This essay examines recent work on world literature theory, with a particular focus on those theorists who treat individual texts as in dialogue with the circulations of linguistic and cultural translation. I treat world literature as the theory without an object and make the counterintuitive claim that its objectlessness makes it well suited for leaving behind antiquated modes of categorizing and canonizing so-called world texts, in order to make room for new kinds of structured thinking about the world. The essay begins with an introduction to the manifold interconnections of the new world literature, including its broad overlap with fields of globalization, translation studies, comparative literature, and postcolonialism. I position four key theorists of 21st century world literature – Emily Apter, Rebecca Walkowitz, Berthold Schoene, and David Palumbo-Liu – in oppositional pairs in order to show the underlying commonality in their thinking about the value of a literature of and for the world. My entry point into the " thinking machine " of the world literature text is the concept of the limit. Far from the commonplace understanding of limit as a limitation or boundary, I argue that understanding world literature at the limit allows literary texts and theory to be read as an event of thinking that is in-process, in-common, and incomplete, an analogue to the necessary impossibility of knowing the world. " in der beschränkung zeigt sich der meister " (" It is in the limit that the master is proven. ") Goethe I will begin with the premise that world literature does not exist. Or, more specifically, the object of world literature, much like the concordance in Jorge Borges's " Library of Babel, " cannot be located. The term itself is a stand-in for a constellation of loosely aligned fields of comparative literary studies, 1 and in its most recent iteration as the literary parallel to social/political/ economical globalization, it has become elastic to the point of transparency. 2 Indeed, world literature has, rightly or wrongly, been the bête noir of literary criticism for some time, " treated, " as Mads Rosendahl Thomsen reminds us, as " too antiquarian, too idealistic and almost void of any methodical ideas for handling what is obviously too much for any individual or group, even, to master " (5). With the exception of some vestigial efforts, that project of labeling and categorizing particular texts from national literatures into a world system of location and classification has largely been abandoned. 3 But the lingering suspicion that world literature retains much of its retrograde, neoliberal undergirding (the homogenizing of culture; the processes of globalization ; a naïve anglophilia; and conservative canon protection) has shadowed the recent emergence of a number of newly rebranded forms of world literature theory. 4 It comes as no surprise then that each of the theorist/critics that touched upon in this essay identifies themselves as operating in fields distinct from world literature; these include the following: new comparative literature, translation theory, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. Despite arguments to the contrary, each of these modes of reading and mapping global systems and
When A. S. Byatt prefaced her selections for The Guardian’s best books of 2012 with the declarati... more When A. S. Byatt prefaced her selections for The Guardian’s best books of 2012 with the declaration that British fiction is “going through an extraordinarily various and imaginative period,” she was unwittingly claiming Patrick Flanery, the Nebraska-raised, Oxford-educated author of a novel about postapartheid South Africa, as a Brit. This kind of extranational imaginary is not unique in the life of British fiction; indeed, the Man Booker Prize makes an annual show of reconstituting the Empire as a literary territory, prizing postcolonial literatures as its own. But Byatt’s recommendation of Flanery’s extraordinary first novel, Absolution, says something further about the state of world literature, specifically the actual production of literatures that imagine cultures and geographies unbound by national borders. In this revitalized moment for world literature, the place of production and the writer’s national affiliation(s) are more often than not marginalized by discussions of what Wai Chee Dimock, in Through Other Continents, calls the “complex tangle of relations” bound up in the “shorthand” of national literatures (3). Dimock specifically argues for American literature, long chided for its provincial navel-gazing, as a national literary tradition ironically forged from its relations with the transnational languages, cultures, and influences of the world. Flanery grows that argument exponentially to include the South African landscape in American literature.
Absolution contributes to the growing canon of Anglophone literatures that imagine the historical circumstances of non-Western peoples and places, while simultaneously challenging the discursive capabilities of history, politics, memory, and story to narrate the most fraught moments in the life of a nation. Set during the interregnum just before and after the fall of the apartheid government in South Africa, Flanery’s Absolution is a Rash-omon of interdependent narratives, each claiming some territory of the elusive truth about two killings of familial and national consequence. The failure of those narratives to draw a complete picture of the events and their aftereffects forms the heart of the novel’s conviction that the novelist, the memoirist, the historian, and even the censor share a common responsibility and peril: when faced with the failure of narrative to adequately capture human events, an account must still be written, however fragile and incomplete. Absolution chronicles the story of the aging writer Clare Wald and her would-be biographer, Sam Leroux, as they wrestle with the ghosts of a conjoined history overshadowed by the legacy of apartheid, and with the fragile narrative pieces of a nation in transition. Flanery’s refusal to resolve those compelling fragments, to bind the characters to a rigid ethics, characterizes the thoughtfulness with which he approaches such delicate source material.
Absolution casts its drama across the landscapes of Johannesburg and the Eastern and Western Cape provinces with what the South African writer and literary critic Michael Titlestad calls an “impeccably local” idiom and diction. This is a novel concerned with historical reckonings, with the individual’s attempt to craft a narrative from the manifold discourses and voices that lay claim to the truth of social and institutional violence and its aftershocks. Flanery’s focal character, Clare, remarks on her own attempts to make sense of her conflicted past and present in South Africa:
There are two things to say about that. First, that history is not always correct, because it cannot tell all the stories that have been, cannot account for everything that happened. . . . Second, that the record of memory, even a flawed memory, has its own kind of truth.
And indeed the novel reads as a series of interwoven, elegant, and terrifying flawed memories. Flanery’s novel works between gut and intellect with a brutal beauty that seems at once precisely attuned to apartheid’s setting while portraying a broader geography of state atrocities, as in this description of torture: “Before killing you they would burn the names from your mouth, pull syllables from your fingernails, soak vowels and consonants from your nostrils, remind you of their authority with steel and wire, electricity and fire” (88). Absolution is also a crime story— corporeal, institutional, and literary—intertwined with documents and accounts from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission...
I begin with the supposition that Zadie Smith's writing on the novel is contiguous with, and co-d... more I begin with the supposition that Zadie Smith's writing on the novel is contiguous with, and co-determinate of, her novel writing. Smith's larger project of advocating for literary form that both responds to, and produces our contemporary moment is manifest in the proliferation of novelistic experiments that have distinguished her as one of Britain's great stylistic
chameleons: from comic realism in White Teeth (2000), to pastiche in On Beauty (2005), to
'constructive deconstruction'in Autograph Man (2003) and NW (2012), and back again, ...
Once upon a time, world literature was quite easy to identify, even at a distance. As a generaliz... more Once upon a time, world literature was quite easy to identify, even at a distance. As a generalizing term for virtually anything non-Western, or anything translated, the designation “world literature” made distinguishing one’s literary others a rather transparent enterprise. Despite Marx’s and Goethe’s idealism in describing the nineteenth century as the end of national literatures, world literature began its life as a thinly veiled stand-in for the colonial epistemology of legible, digestible difference. The influence of postcolonial studies on departments of literature helped to replace the naïveté that once epitomized the organizing principles of world literature with increasingly rigorous, if still problematic, methodologies for reading and classifying narratives that cross the borders of language, culture, and geography. With the return of the world to respectability in literary studies has come a protean lexicon for describing the objects and processes of a world system. Texts become cosmopolitan, trans- and international, and global under rubrics ranging from David Damrosch’s “mode of circulation” in the world to Franco Moretti’s admonition that the literature “around us is now unmistakably a planetary system” and Emily Apter’s “translation zones.” This fluidity of vocabulary is symptomatic, in part, of the continual need for new modes of describing encounters and relations with others, needs unfulfilled by any single approach to a text or critical practice. David Palumbo-Liu’s The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age reads in contemporary Anglophone literature a methodology for exceeding the limitations of terminology and reframing the way we constitute otherness in our global moment.
“To conceive of literature in a global context,” as Stefan Helgesson reminds us, “is no natural or neutral operation.” Indeed, the works that have given birth to a lineage of so-called global literature are most often defined as such by their engagement with the constructedness of these new forms of relationality. Palumbo-Liu’s incisive study of the contemporary novel speaks to this burgeoning field. With rich and persuasive readings of contemporary Anglophone literature, Palumbo-Liu cuts through the arbitrary dividing lines that have for so long separated aesthetic and ethical responses to otherness to ask what he calls the fundamental question for contemporary literature: “if literary narratives can still help us imagine others across global discourses . . . can they also exceed the ways those specific modes determine the shape and form of understanding?” (26). Rather than feeling derivative of the many other “global age” books newly in press, Deliverance reconfigures our perspective on contemporary literature more broadly to ask whether an attention to the discourses that give rise to the very category of otherness might allow one to see novels as “thinking through being together in the world.”
Teaching Documents by Chris Holmes
A Scan of the Theoretical Landscape 2008-2018
Is there any single American object more demanding of our critical attention than the gun? Whethe... more Is there any single American object more demanding of our critical attention than the gun? Whether we ever hold or fire one, the gun fundamentally affects the ways in which we understand our rights and liberties, privacy and community, and the very sovereignty of the physical body. Over the course of the semester we will seek to examine this most fundamental and overdetermined cultural object by treating it as just that, an object. The proliferating forms of the gun that enter American life as toys, ghosts, laws, and stories will offer us a way to understand precisely how the gun came to be attached to our national identity. The aim of this class, while not polemical, will not be even-handed in its treatment of the gun. Nor should it be. We begin with the understanding that the cultural history of the gun is inseparable from development of weapons designed kill people with increasing efficiency and lethality. The American obsession with firearms too often seeks to eclipse this fact, but our exploration will always return to the cost in lives of the proliferation of guns in the country. Indeed, as we are a first-year seminar, we will take stock of what it means to be a student in the age of school shootings and open-carry laws. The historical and cultural sensitivity of this course will give us the opportunity to both explore the outlandishness of allowing guns to pervade every space in our contemporary life, while making it clear that the many manifestations of the gun in our lives, very often packaged in non-lethal forms, have extraordinary, and sometimes hidden histories. This course will teach you to read academic and popular texts with a rigorous critical eye. As we discuss the evolution of the Colt as the so-called " Indian Killer " of the frontier, the haunting of the Winchester family house, the legal life of the gun in the 2 nd amendment and other precedents, the gun in works of literature, how the water pistol became the Nerf assault weapon, the AR15 and the marketing of military weapons as home defense, " cop-killer bullets " , gun safety and the transformation of the NRA into a lobbying corporation, and the gun as ornamental/ugly freedom, you will be called upon to pursue independent research and to become experts in certain facets of this object's history.
Syllabus COURSE DESCRIPTION: The artistic movement known as Modernism has died and been reborn en... more Syllabus COURSE DESCRIPTION: The artistic movement known as Modernism has died and been reborn enough times in the 20th and 21st centuries to qualify as the literary undead. Framed historically by the world wars in the West, Modernism grew from trauma and discontent into one of the most productive periods of literary innovation since the Renaissance. Modernist literature is marked by an aesthetic avant garde that baffled some and bewitched others, spawning imitators and outgrowths all over the world. Since its historical moment of prominence in the first half of the Twentieth-Century, Modernism's exact geographical, temporal, linguistic, and cultural lineage has come into question. New progenitors of the British and American models have been located and brought into the fold, while other "bad modernisms" have been dissected with glee. This course will begin with the understanding that the literary field of Modernism can and should be understood as always already influenced by its global inheritance and inheritors, and that studying the global forms of Modernism will radically impact how we read contemporary literatures. We will start by studying the literature and theory of Anglo-American Modernism and
"Globalization" most often refers to the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and is characte... more "Globalization" most often refers to the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and is characterized by intense cross-cultural interaction, facilitated by technology and the mass migration of peoples across national territories. Our seminar will consider how the contemporary novel in English grapples with globalization in its broadest political, economic, and cultural terms, and how an emergent literary genre, the " global novel, " may or may not be the most sensitive form for describing our particular historical moment. We will be reading some of the most influential global stories of the last three decades, looking to literature and film from India and Pakistan, South and West Africa, and the US and the UK for innovation of form and content. And we will put these narratives into the context of a literary world system, a system of circulation of goods and ideas that is particularly interested in texts that translate linguistically and culturally outside of their place of origin.
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Papers by Chris Holmes
the barest elements by which meaning might be produced. Such constraints flag a parallel concern about the way the novel can and should be read as it concerns knowledge gleaned about the world. Thinking with the structures of the novel’s limits are in this way the
beginning of meaning-making, rather than the end.
Absolution contributes to the growing canon of Anglophone literatures that imagine the historical circumstances of non-Western peoples and places, while simultaneously challenging the discursive capabilities of history, politics, memory, and story to narrate the most fraught moments in the life of a nation. Set during the interregnum just before and after the fall of the apartheid government in South Africa, Flanery’s Absolution is a Rash-omon of interdependent narratives, each claiming some territory of the elusive truth about two killings of familial and national consequence. The failure of those narratives to draw a complete picture of the events and their aftereffects forms the heart of the novel’s conviction that the novelist, the memoirist, the historian, and even the censor share a common responsibility and peril: when faced with the failure of narrative to adequately capture human events, an account must still be written, however fragile and incomplete. Absolution chronicles the story of the aging writer Clare Wald and her would-be biographer, Sam Leroux, as they wrestle with the ghosts of a conjoined history overshadowed by the legacy of apartheid, and with the fragile narrative pieces of a nation in transition. Flanery’s refusal to resolve those compelling fragments, to bind the characters to a rigid ethics, characterizes the thoughtfulness with which he approaches such delicate source material.
Absolution casts its drama across the landscapes of Johannesburg and the Eastern and Western Cape provinces with what the South African writer and literary critic Michael Titlestad calls an “impeccably local” idiom and diction. This is a novel concerned with historical reckonings, with the individual’s attempt to craft a narrative from the manifold discourses and voices that lay claim to the truth of social and institutional violence and its aftershocks. Flanery’s focal character, Clare, remarks on her own attempts to make sense of her conflicted past and present in South Africa:
There are two things to say about that. First, that history is not always correct, because it cannot tell all the stories that have been, cannot account for everything that happened. . . . Second, that the record of memory, even a flawed memory, has its own kind of truth.
And indeed the novel reads as a series of interwoven, elegant, and terrifying flawed memories. Flanery’s novel works between gut and intellect with a brutal beauty that seems at once precisely attuned to apartheid’s setting while portraying a broader geography of state atrocities, as in this description of torture: “Before killing you they would burn the names from your mouth, pull syllables from your fingernails, soak vowels and consonants from your nostrils, remind you of their authority with steel and wire, electricity and fire” (88). Absolution is also a crime story— corporeal, institutional, and literary—intertwined with documents and accounts from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission...
chameleons: from comic realism in White Teeth (2000), to pastiche in On Beauty (2005), to
'constructive deconstruction'in Autograph Man (2003) and NW (2012), and back again, ...
“To conceive of literature in a global context,” as Stefan Helgesson reminds us, “is no natural or neutral operation.” Indeed, the works that have given birth to a lineage of so-called global literature are most often defined as such by their engagement with the constructedness of these new forms of relationality. Palumbo-Liu’s incisive study of the contemporary novel speaks to this burgeoning field. With rich and persuasive readings of contemporary Anglophone literature, Palumbo-Liu cuts through the arbitrary dividing lines that have for so long separated aesthetic and ethical responses to otherness to ask what he calls the fundamental question for contemporary literature: “if literary narratives can still help us imagine others across global discourses . . . can they also exceed the ways those specific modes determine the shape and form of understanding?” (26). Rather than feeling derivative of the many other “global age” books newly in press, Deliverance reconfigures our perspective on contemporary literature more broadly to ask whether an attention to the discourses that give rise to the very category of otherness might allow one to see novels as “thinking through being together in the world.”
Teaching Documents by Chris Holmes
the barest elements by which meaning might be produced. Such constraints flag a parallel concern about the way the novel can and should be read as it concerns knowledge gleaned about the world. Thinking with the structures of the novel’s limits are in this way the
beginning of meaning-making, rather than the end.
Absolution contributes to the growing canon of Anglophone literatures that imagine the historical circumstances of non-Western peoples and places, while simultaneously challenging the discursive capabilities of history, politics, memory, and story to narrate the most fraught moments in the life of a nation. Set during the interregnum just before and after the fall of the apartheid government in South Africa, Flanery’s Absolution is a Rash-omon of interdependent narratives, each claiming some territory of the elusive truth about two killings of familial and national consequence. The failure of those narratives to draw a complete picture of the events and their aftereffects forms the heart of the novel’s conviction that the novelist, the memoirist, the historian, and even the censor share a common responsibility and peril: when faced with the failure of narrative to adequately capture human events, an account must still be written, however fragile and incomplete. Absolution chronicles the story of the aging writer Clare Wald and her would-be biographer, Sam Leroux, as they wrestle with the ghosts of a conjoined history overshadowed by the legacy of apartheid, and with the fragile narrative pieces of a nation in transition. Flanery’s refusal to resolve those compelling fragments, to bind the characters to a rigid ethics, characterizes the thoughtfulness with which he approaches such delicate source material.
Absolution casts its drama across the landscapes of Johannesburg and the Eastern and Western Cape provinces with what the South African writer and literary critic Michael Titlestad calls an “impeccably local” idiom and diction. This is a novel concerned with historical reckonings, with the individual’s attempt to craft a narrative from the manifold discourses and voices that lay claim to the truth of social and institutional violence and its aftershocks. Flanery’s focal character, Clare, remarks on her own attempts to make sense of her conflicted past and present in South Africa:
There are two things to say about that. First, that history is not always correct, because it cannot tell all the stories that have been, cannot account for everything that happened. . . . Second, that the record of memory, even a flawed memory, has its own kind of truth.
And indeed the novel reads as a series of interwoven, elegant, and terrifying flawed memories. Flanery’s novel works between gut and intellect with a brutal beauty that seems at once precisely attuned to apartheid’s setting while portraying a broader geography of state atrocities, as in this description of torture: “Before killing you they would burn the names from your mouth, pull syllables from your fingernails, soak vowels and consonants from your nostrils, remind you of their authority with steel and wire, electricity and fire” (88). Absolution is also a crime story— corporeal, institutional, and literary—intertwined with documents and accounts from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission...
chameleons: from comic realism in White Teeth (2000), to pastiche in On Beauty (2005), to
'constructive deconstruction'in Autograph Man (2003) and NW (2012), and back again, ...
“To conceive of literature in a global context,” as Stefan Helgesson reminds us, “is no natural or neutral operation.” Indeed, the works that have given birth to a lineage of so-called global literature are most often defined as such by their engagement with the constructedness of these new forms of relationality. Palumbo-Liu’s incisive study of the contemporary novel speaks to this burgeoning field. With rich and persuasive readings of contemporary Anglophone literature, Palumbo-Liu cuts through the arbitrary dividing lines that have for so long separated aesthetic and ethical responses to otherness to ask what he calls the fundamental question for contemporary literature: “if literary narratives can still help us imagine others across global discourses . . . can they also exceed the ways those specific modes determine the shape and form of understanding?” (26). Rather than feeling derivative of the many other “global age” books newly in press, Deliverance reconfigures our perspective on contemporary literature more broadly to ask whether an attention to the discourses that give rise to the very category of otherness might allow one to see novels as “thinking through being together in the world.”
By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited."