Contemporary American Literature

Graham Greene, the twentieth century British author, demonstrated an interest in the
problems of evil, violence and alienation from the very beginning of his writing career. In his
novels he created a unique world of isolation, oppression and mistrust, which was later given
the name of Greeneland. It reflects Greene’s belief in the reality of another world, which is
removed from people in the same way God is, but which undoubtedly exists and represents
the rich material for human imagination to feed on. Since for Greene imagination and
intuition are significantly more important than objective measurement, the ordinary, run-down
and third-rate are given deeper, almost allegorical significance, as the three analysed novels
(The Heart of the Matter, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor) show. As a
consequence of the Greenean method of permeating the facts of reality in an omnipresent
sense of suffering, unhappiness and impending catastrophe, the border between reality and
imagination becomes blurry, fades and finally disappears.
Key words: Greeneland, reality, imagination

This paper contains quotations that some readers may find offensive. It is a critique of the novel Fear Of Flying (1974) and its representation of sexuality, in the context of sexological writing by Freud, Kinsey, Laing, and Masters and Johnson.

The aim of this paper is to establish a link between the code-switch "tags" in Junot Díaz's work and some formal resources of graffiti artists, in particular their emblematic "tagz." These elements are read together to attest to a battle of the discursive sort being waged in the discursive frontiers of North America, as well as globally in the contact zones between cultures.


RESUMEN
En este trabajo se analiza la relación entre el la alternancia de lenguas en las narraciones de Junot Díaz y ciertos recursos formales empleados por artistas del graffiti. Estos elementos revelan una batalla por el estilo discursivo que se libra en las tierras fronterizas de América del Norte, y globalmente en zonas de contacto cultural.

These is the syllabus for LITR 451, which was taught as part of a pair of concurrent courses taught entirely virtually at the intermediate and advanced level during the pandemic-era Spring 2021 semester. At both levels, the course offered students a sampling of fiction by nine different African American (defined broadly as being an author with some measure of personal, familial, and/or cultural association with both Africa and North America) authors who published within the last ten years, including Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Esi Edugyan, Akwaeke Emezi, Tope Folarin, Yaa Gyasi, Okey Ndibe, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead.

Equine fiction is an established genre in the English juvenile literary canon. Current works in the field appeal to adolescent readers thanks to their interface between classic motifs of vintage and contemporary forms of equine narratives. Performing a close reading of selected passages in Miranda Kenneally's Racing Savannah (2013), this paper acknowledges how this novel is a revitalization and a challenge to this pattern. Savannah, who is more gifted than her companions, is subordinate to the decisions of the junior of the household where she works. Jack Goodwin, the protagonist's romantic lead, educated in a neocolonialist background of male jockeying, becomes Savannah's marker of difference according to her sex and lower socioeconomic status, which lay at the root of her later racialization despite her being a white character. My analysis attempts to expose how these difficulties encountered by the protagonist to become a professional jockey articulate past and present constraints of the horse-racing ladder.

Many critics of Doctorow have classified him as a postmodernist writer, acknowledging that a wide number of thematic and stylistic features of his early fiction emanate from the postmodern context in which he took his first steps as a writer. Yet, these novels have an eminently social and ethical scope that may be best perceived in their intellectual engagement and support of feminist concerns. This is certainly the case of Doctorow’s fourth and most successful novel, Ragtime. The purpose of this paper will be two-fold. I will explore Ragtime’s indebtedness to postmodern aesthetics and themes, but also its feminist elements. Thus, on the one hand, I will focus on issues of uncertainty, indeterminacy of meaning, plurality and decentering of subjectivity; on the other hand, I will examine the novel’s attitude towards gender oppression, violence and objectification, its denunciation of hegemonic gender configurations and its voicing of certain feminist demands. This analysis will lead to an examination of the problematic collusion of the mostly white, male, patriarchal aesthetics of postmodernism and feminist politics in the novel. I will attempt to establish how these two traditionally conflicting modes coexist and interact in Ragtime.

Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to major critical and popular acclaim in 1993. It has since been translated into thirty-four languages and adapted on screen by Sofia Coppola. His second novel, Middlesex (2002), was awarded the Pulitzer Price, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the French Prix Medici. The Marriage Plot (2011), his third novel to date, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. First published in various magazines (The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, etc.), Jeffrey Eugenides’s short stories were collected in Fresh Complaint in 2017. Eugenides is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. He has taught creative writing at both Princeton and NYU.

In September 2018, Jeffrey Eugenides was a guest of the Festival America in Vincennes, France, where he kindly agreed to discuss his work with me. The interview was conducted by email between May and October 2020.

https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/15228?lang=en

This paper considers Sergio Troncoso's _From This Wicked Patch of Dust_ as a resistance novel. I argue that Troncoso relies on form, language, and indigenous myths and symbols to resist dominant American linguistic authority and popular imagination and to embrace his mestizo and Chicano heritage. Yet, he does not call for a complete return to old Mexico, which is itself plagued by problems of androcentrism. Instead, he calls for a Chicano identity that is defined by hybridity, ambiguity and fluidity.

This essay engages in a close textual reading of Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor. Senna and Whitehead’s work is particularly useful in understanding this debate about authenticity as the main characters in these coming-of-age novels struggle against essentialist and reductive notions of African American identity in their quest for self-understanding. Drawing on Trey Ellis’s articulation of the “New Black Aesthetic” (or NBA) Charles Johnson’s recent critique of African American literature, and Michael Eric Dyson’s analysis of hip-hop’s reliance on authenticity, this essay argues that Whitehead and Senna both reiterate the importance of race as a social construct in contemporary American culture and challenge narrow definitions of authenticity in African American life.  These novels seek to reveal the “mask of authenticity” connected with much contemporary African American cultural production and make room for “authentic” or “real” narratives that do not fit essentialist, Black Arts, hip-hop or perhaps even Ellis’s NBA’s articulations of Black identity.

Human trafficking in Nigeria has assumed unimaginable dimension in the last two decades due to several factors which include globalization, economic recession, poverty, conflicts, weak legal system, and lack of adequate legislation and of political will. Human trafficking is an organised crime. It is a modern form of slavery. The two weapons used by traffickers to get their victims are deception and through force. Human trafficking has continued to strive in Nigeria because of collusion among security, immigration, embassy, airline officials and traffickers. Human trafficking had become a major source of concern to all societies in recent time. Human trafficking has put Nigeria on the map of the notorious. In view of the above, we recommend that the Nigerian government should address the issue of massive unemployment and poverty in Nigeria as well as create enabling environments for entrepreneurship for the citizens.

In 1692, 20 people are executed and more than 200 are imprisoned for witchcraft in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts. Over time, the only organized witch trials in American history have not only become a strong metaphor for mass hysteria and scapegoating, as ‘the Halloween capital of the world’, the town today feeds on its contested past. Moreover, the Salem witch trials have generated innumerable cultural works – films, tv series, and, most prominently, books. To this day, more than 70 works of fiction tell and retell the ‘Salem story’. This talk explores not only what happened in 1692 as well as its touristic exploitation, but why and how this dark chapter is remembered in the American cultural memory, from classics such as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.

Title:  "A Rose for Emily" ("Een roos voor Emily")
Author: William Faulkner
Translators: Martijn Boven and Maarten Jansen
Original language: English
Target language: Dutch

William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", presented her in a Dutch translation, was first published in 1930, in the April issue of Forum magazine. By 1930, Faulkner had already authored four novels; however, "A Rose for Emily" marked his debut in the short story genre. While not as experimental as his novels The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, it nonetheless incorporates certain characteristic Faulknerian elements, such as an unconventional narrative perspective and a non-linear chronology. Consistent with the majority of Faulkner's oeuvre, this narrative is situated in the fictional Southern setting to which Faulkner gave the name Yoknapatawpha County.

In Dutch: Wiliam Faulkners 'Een roos voor Emily’ (‘A Rose for Emily’) werd voor het eerst gepubliceerd in 1930, in het aprilnummer van het tijdschrift Forum. Faulkner had in 1930 al vier romans op zijn naam staan, maar ‘Een roos voor Emily’ was het eerste korte verhaal dat hij publiceerde. Het is niet zo experimenteel als zijn romans The Sound and the Fury (Het geraas en gebral) en Absalom, Absalom! Desondanks bevat het toch enkele karakteristieke Faulkneriaanse elementen, zoals een ongebruikelijk vertel perspectief en een gefragmenteerde chronologie. Net als het merendeel van Faulkners oeuvre speelt ook dit verhaal zich af in het fictionele Zuiden waar Faulkner de naam Yoknapatawpha County aan gaf. "

Typically, weather appears either as a specific instance of climate (it rains a lot here in the winter) or as an object that moves through a location (the storm hit Greeley last night, damaging houses and uprooting trees). This paper uses Jane Bennett’s ideas in Vibrant Matter to imagine weather as vital and animate, a kind of “vibrant water.” Using weather to understand water helps water transcend its status as a resource or as a necessity of human life, and instead figures it as a force that shapes human and non-human life in a given location through either its presence or its scarcity. This paper examines the implications of imagining human inhabitation as response and reaction to water and weather instead of as efforts to harness and manage it, or mitigate its negative effects. By examining these ideas in two specific Native-American texts, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and William Least Heat-Moon’s River-Horse, this paper explores these ideas of “vibrant water” from a New Materialist perspective and through a body of indigenous literature and scholarship that discusses animating forces moving through the environment. The goal is not to equate the two, but rather to provide a pair of related perspectives on the importance of considering weather as a vital, animate part of any given environment.

This book review of Emma Young's important monograph calls for more inclusivity in short story theory.
Article also accessible here: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/14/1/144/5316465

Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 14, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 144–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpy028

The last decade has seen a revival of interest in novels that follow a fragmentary structure. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2005), J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here (2014) are among the most notable examples of recent works that reject a linear plot narrative and a set of standard " readerly " expectations. This article outlines the scope of the current proliferation of fragmentary writing —a category which rarely features in Anglophone (as opposed to French) literary criticism— and delineates its characteristic ingredients. After introducing the main tenets and examples of the six most common categories of fragmentary texts, the article discusses two theoretical frameworks for analysing such works: Joseph Frank's notion of the spatial form and Sharon Spencer's idea of the architectonic novel. The latter conception is applied to a close analysis of the structural variety and randomised composition of one of the most recent and critically acclaimed fragmentary novels —Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation (2014), which offers a non-linear and highly intertextual account of a marriage crisis narrated with the use of several hundred loosely connected paragraphs, composed of narrative snippets, multiple quotations, seemingly unrelated anecdotes and scientific curiosities.

Work of fiction: contemporary literature.

About the book:

"Set in New York and New Jersey during the early 1990s, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly reveals the story of Katherine Walsingham, the only daughter of the CEO and Chairman of Walsingham Industries, an international  cosmetic and pharmaceutical company that has been in the family for generations. 

Daunted by its global proportions, she has no real interest in the business other than its sentimental value.  An artist by calling and temperament, a lover of literature, a philosophical idealist and animal rights activist  unafraid to speak her mind, Katherine  has a talent for leaping ahead with anything that seems like a good idea at the time ... often landing in hot water with her sharp tongue and allegorical paintings to the consternation and amusement of everyone around her. 

Setting her heart on opening her own gallery when she graduates from an elite art college, life is good. With a trust fund to secure her, she has no real worries that are the plague of struggling artists, but soon discovers wealth does not guarantee a smooth passage in life, for all her plans do not turn out exactly as she expected.

Opening a gallery is not an easy task, and Katherine must quickly learn to balance art and business, demanding customers and harsh art critics, family tragedies and disappointments.  With so much to do, romance is the last thing on her mind, and despite her best efforts to avoid any entanglements, falls in love with one of New York's most eligible bachelors.  From her own reticence to become involved with anyone, to the rumours spread about his family, it is a relationship that seems doomed, but Katherine finds that love will blossom where it will and cannot be controlled or stifled, nor the joy and heartache that accompanies it.

Brushstrokes of a Gadfly is a story brimming with vibrant and entertaining characters that only New York's High Society and art circles can provide.  It is a colourful and amusing novel tinged with human tragedy."

Features 1,040 pages of non-stop reading in a continuous chapter format.

This paper involves an in-depth reading of John Cheever's short story "Goodbye, My Brother," focusing on the way in which the narrator struggles with - and finally reconciles - the question of paternal discourses, ranging from God through to his own late father.

At the heart of McCarthy's novel resides a tremendous interpretive challenge: how can we reconcile the ending, which is hopeful about the future, with the fatalism that dominates the text? This paper explores how Søren Kierkegaard's treatment of Abraham and Isaac, found in his work, Fear and Trembling, can help elucidate the tension between hope and nihilism in The Road. Based on a note referring to Kierkegaard found in an early draft of McCarthy’s novel, this paper argues that the father in The Road displays an absurd faith in goodness and the future which can be best explained in relation to Kierkegaard's depiction of Abraham’s faith in Fear and Trembling.

In his article on Don DeLillo’s novel 'Ratner’s Star' G. S. Allen describes terrorism as a language that is constantly dismissed by society’s interior discourse as incomprehensible and “insane“. It rejects any concerted idiom and does not belong to the sphere of possible enunciations. Although terrorism – like any other communication – is a manipulation of symbols, it therefore has to be mediated in order to become audible/visible. In the first instance this allows to retrace the close interdependence of terrorism and media representations, the impact of reports and images trying to “translate” the violent statement, as well as the terrorist tactics of staging their acts for media consumption. In addition Allen’s thesis implicitly calls on the arts and literature as inter- and possibly transdiscoursive tools “that produce a vent in the canopy of conventions and beliefs in order to admit a little free and windy chaos.” Thus, artistic practice might realize the bridging between the otherwise indiscernible fact of terrorism and public perception and at the same time is essentially qualified to reflect on its own strategies of visualization.
While certainly all of DeLillo’s fiction is characterized by such critical reflection, his early short story 'The Uniforms' foregrounds the respective mediation process in an outstanding way. The text does not directly refer to terrorism but to an intermediary representational system; it is a loose “transcription” of Jean-Luc Godard’s movie 'Weekend' (1969) whose protagonists happen to be kidnapped by a band of antibourgeois and ultra violent Hippie-terrorists. The film’s random atrocities, its main motifs, distanced narrative attitude and fragmented montage style are unvariably adopted by DeLillo. However, the story does not simply repeat the movie but inserts a referential stance by emphasizing its derivational and meta-character. Moreover, it accentuates the rhetorical as well as ideological implications of mediating terrorism by turning Godard’s “theoretical rifle” (R. Stam) against the director himself: 'The Uniforms' hyperbolizes the formal traits of 'Weekend' in such a way that Godard’s movie is shown to transform terrorism – or any political action – into pure aestheticism and thereby ironically becomes a terrorist act itself.
Similarly, Don DeLillo’s latest short story 'Baader-Meinhof' deals with terrorism as a phenomenon filtered by visual media and then re-mediated by literature. In order to display the inexpressible content of terrorist and state violence and at the same time install an allegory for the failure of interpersonal communication, it refers to the 'October 18, 1977' series of paintings by Gerhard Richter which in turn is based on newspaper and police photographs of the RAF-terrorists killed at Stammheim. But in contrast to the earlier text that exposes the aspect of aesthetic trivialization in any artistic rendition of violence as well as in terrorism itself, Baader- Meinhof seems to advance another view: here, painting and literature appear as paradoxical amplifying systems which – precisely because they abstract from the “real” – are predestined to reach out for its unrepresentable chora.

This essay reads Colson Whitehead’s novels John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Underground Railroad as articulating a frustration with foreclosed possibilities for Black Americans’ flourishing outside the North-South binary. His metafictions grapple with a paradox of historical representation: narrativizing the past requires subordinating its incomprehensible enormity to familiar forms, at once explaining and erasing significant details. Literalizing the Underground Railroad, restoring connections between moneyed patrimony and barbed wire as metonym for American economic biases, and showcasing railroads as sites of Black history’s erasure, Whitehead’s fictions depict infrastructure’s role in the disfranchisement of Black Americans. Highlighting mechanisms that transform land into a nation that works to efface Black history, and how tropes such as metaphor and metonymy inadvertently complement those processes, Whitehead’s poetics reminds his readers that the African American past literally surrounds all Americans every day, in objects and idioms that simultaneously manifest and obscure Black history.

This article offers a fresh examination of Mitch Albom's bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) from a perspective of literary age studies, with a special focus on the concept of later-life mentorship. The classic mentor figure, commonly seen as the archetype of a wise old teacher, is revived through the healing power of an end-of-life narrative. The mentorial relationship between a young man and an old man shows that the personal growth is as an ongoing and ageless process of becoming that can lead to wisdom and a better understanding of aging and living-with-dying. It also reveals that later-life narratives of mentorship are an integral part of the transmission of knowledge and humanistic values to establish solid relationships between generations. Life lessons with Morrie, collected in the form of a memoir, provide readers with important tools to learn to accept life in all its dimensions, and show how literary narratives of growing older can help deconstruct negative western notions of old age and lead to more meaningful lives in all life stages.

In American cultural history, men have typically been categorized as oppressors, asserting power and dominance through the 'othering' of women, and by implication, those who possess weak or 'feminine' qualities. In his essay, Signs of Masculinity: Men in Literature, Antony Rowland outlines the traditional concept of masculinity as something that cannot exist without its binary opposition, femininity. However, it is masculinity that functions as 'the standard, the norm,

This paper examines how contemporary literary fiction responds to the climate crisis and the attendant call for a seemingly universalist "species view" of human beings. What does it mean to think of the human as a species, how can we find traces of species being in literature, and how do they interact with other dimensions of human lives? To address these questions, the paper confronts recent accounts of historical context, animal characters, and capitalist time with Annie Proulx's Barkskins (2016). As this confrontation shows, Proulx's novel teaches its readers to be a specieswithout ignoring differences of race, class, and gender. abstract © FRAME NO. 29.2 NOVEMBER 2016 | 71 -90

This article explores two detective stories featuring protagonists with neurological conditions. Lionel Essrog, the narrator of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999), suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome, and Mark Genevich, hero of Paul Tremblay’s The Little Sleep (2009), has narcolepsy. Each character is unusually attached to his home neighborhood: Essrog to Court Street in Brooklyn and Genevich to South Boston. Indeed, Genevich still lives in his grandparents’ brownstone. What is striking in both novels is how closely their conditions are also connected to these neighborhoods. Essrog’s tics and outbursts mirror the chaos of his Brooklyn, but his obsessive, smoothing-over tendencies reflect his guilt over his orphan status, his desire to reach back into and repair the past. Genevich’s narcolepsy keeps him in “Southie” partly because of his reliance on his mother and partly, in practical terms, because it is dangerous for him to drive. Most importantly, his unpredictable sleep puts “more unconscious space between [him]self and the events [he] experienced”—traumatically induced, his “little sleeps” are “fraudulent extra days, weeks, years,” disruptions in time, when the past invades his dreams. It is significant that Genevich’s condition arises after a car accident in which his friend was killed. In fact, cars are important in both novels. I argue that, as symbols of modernity and American mobility, cars signify in complex relation with the protagonists’ homes and neurological conditions. The “auto body,” to quote one of Motherless Brooklyn’s chapter titles, puns on the involuntary, automatic behaviours of the tourettic and narcoleptic body, but also offers the possiblity of mobility both physical and metaphorical: an escape from the neighborhood and associated obsessions, a way for the detective to connect a wider set of locations and relations, to remap himself beyond the confines of a narrowly imagined community and the restrictions of his condition.

New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2011. Ed. Robert L. Fastiggi. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2011. 614-615.
The article traces the Protestant Norris's career as a poet and nonfiction writer, locating her primary importance to the Catholic intellectual and literary tradition in what one critic calls her “general project of autobiography by exemplar," in which her discovery and exploration of Benedictine and Desert spirituality allows a new look in the midst of 20th and 21st century life.

In You Think It, I’ll Say It, Sittenfeld’s teenagers have grown into women navigating an openly hostile political landscape where, as one character says, “our country decided to elect an unhinged narcissist over an intelligent, experienced, qualified woman.”