Contemporary American Literature

Rooted partially in the US sentimental tradition, neo-slave narratives often feature lyrical language, emphasize the emotional experience of enslaved characters, and evoke the read-er's sympathy and empathy. Highlighting the use of sentimental conventions in neo-slave narratives including Alex Haley's Roots (1976), Octavia E. Butler's Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007), and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! (2008), this essay explores the tension between sentimentality and the radical political goals of neo-slave narratives. This essay analyzes Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) as a neo-slave narrative that rejects rather than revises sentimental conventions. The novel's central conceit, a literal subterranean rail network, illustrates how anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism interlock to materially and discursively enable the US nation-state and liberal citizenship; sentimental conventions facilitate processes of containment and capture that allow this infrastructure to function smoothly rather than disrupting it. In contrast, Underground foregrounds the prosaic over the lyrical, veils the interiority of its characters, and unsettles the reader's desire to feel with or for the humanity of the enslaved. The novel models an alternative way of engaging slavery as an infrastructure, gesturing toward a mode of fugitive affiliation premised on acts of tangible care rather than affective identification or the possession of interiority.

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.

This article explores the “unsettling” qualities of American writer Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams. It explores the book’s engagement with environmental crises and indigenous cosmologies to show how the metaphysical insecurities, common to much of Johnson’s fiction, come in this context to challenge the very concept of American nationhood itself – or as the novella’s title parodies, the “American Dream.” Train Dreams unsettles what I call the narrative infrastructures undergirding the story of the American frontier-becoming-nation-state: the transcontinental railroads, and the colonial property regimes that those railroads both pursued and opened up. In three central sections, the article explores Johnson’s unsettling of notions of property, then empire, and finally race. Through these readings, it shows how the novella finds its way to an indigenous critique of America as a settler-colonial state. While previous critical discussions of the “unsettling” qualities of Johnson’s work have until now meant that word affectively, in this article my aim is therefore to emphasize its decolonizing momentum as well.

This essay explores the reframing of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in light of the changing cultural dominant in the literary period succeeding postmodernism. It investigates the connection between sincerity, intersubjectivity and the breaking down of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in hybrid-genre narratives such as memoirs and autofictional novels. It then focuses on the link between these literary narratives and digital media presenting a study of social media platform Instagram as a (possible) prolific area of an emergent post-postmodernism. This exploration is further illustrated through the rhetorical analysis of Michael Chabon’s Instagram feed. Finally, this essay calls attention to how the blurring of the fiction/nonfiction distinction is becoming a technique employed to foreground issues of sincerity and intersubjective author-audience communication rather than of postmodern ontology.

Prominent writers have faulted Styron for making the protagonist of his novel Sophie's Choice a Christian.  Their argument goes like this: the Nazis targeted Jews.  Therefore, Styron implicitly de-Judifies the Holocaust by making a Christian the primary victim in the novel.  I argue that this argument only makes sense if we see Sophie exclusively as a victim.  However, if we understand that Sophie is not a Christian victim but a Christian anti-Semite (perpetrator), and that it was her version of Christian anti-Semitism that in part made Hitler and the Nazis possible, then the critiques of Styron's novel would make no sense.  The idea in this essay is more fully developed in the final chapter of my book The Modernist God State.  That chapter is titled: "William Styron's Sophie's Choice: Locating the Christian Theology of the Nazis' Genocidal Anti-Semitism."

In this article, I argue that Jesmyn Ward deploys a road trip in her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing as a literary formula through which she demonstrates the immobilizing effects of racism and incarceration on contemporary black lives. The association of the American road-trip novel with freedom and free movement is strong in the American imaginary, and Ward manipulates this association to explore what happens when automobile travelers are precarious rather than privileged. The road trip in Ward's novel makes visible various forces of mobility and immobility that differentiate citizens by race. She conjures two dimensions of the African American experience that are immobilizing: the carceral system and the risk of “driving while black.” Sing, Unburied, Sing already critiques the traditional road trip in its plot and narrative structure; for Ward, it is the linkages of dimensions of African American immobilization around the road trip that are powerful. Ward's novel demonstrates that black automobility, or the unique experience of the road for racialized drivers, reveals the political and social dynamics that shape our conception of the road for all drivers. Furthermore, I analyze how the road trip within the novel “unburies” a story about the violence of incarceration. I explore how Ward finesses that iconic American narrative trope, the journey by car that ought to be freeing, to heighten her critique of racist, anti-black structures of oppression in the United States.

Mental disorders have become the topic of numerous contemporary American novels. Attesting to the ongoing fascination with the workings and the sciences of the human mind, many of these texts turn to neuroscientific questions. This paper offers a close reading of one of these ‘neuronarratives’ – Joshua Ferris’s acclaimed 2010 novel The Unnamed, a story in which the protagonist is afflicted with an utterly mysterious condition that disrupts his sense of self as his mind appears to be separated from his body. In this paper, I aim to show how such a dualist conception problematizes not only the concepts of self and agency as the unnamed disease is linked to contemporary lifestyles in corporate America, but also helps to craft a counternarrative that challenges recent materialist conceptions and neuroscientific theories.

Criticism on Thomas Pynchon’s post-Vineland novels has, to a remarkable degree throughout the years since Vineland was released, examined those novels primarily in critical terms – paranoia, indeterminacy, absent centres, etc. - that were established through the canonising of his first three novels. 
Against such readings, this paper provides grounds for examining Pynchon’s post-Vineland work through preoccupations that differentiate it from, rather than yoking it to, the earlier novels.  It takes as an exemplar the recent novels’ increasing focus on questions of obligation and competing duties, addressing how such a focus situates Pynchon’s work in relation to the dominant discourses in contemporary literary ethics, with their emphases on alterity and indeterminacy at the expense of decision-making.
The essay first shows how the relationship between paranoia and obligation shifted between Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, then demonstrates how acknowledging the centrality of obligation to the recent work allows a coherent and systematic cross-novel treatment of recurrent plot mechanics such as those relating to debt and patronage.

This essay demonstrates that Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake goes beyond conventional wisdom about immigrant experiences in so far as it explores how the South Asian diaspora participates in transnational connections, shaping and transforming the notion of American identity in the contemporary global era. Lahiri’s novel offers us a striking account of transnational identity in which South Asian immigrants and their American-born children import practices from their country of origin, which they adapt in the new environment and, in turn, adopt practices from the new environment, which they adapt in innovative ways to help them feel more at ease.

This chapter argues that Richard Powers's 1998 novel Gain establishes a relationship between its two main characters--a corporation called Clare International and suburban mom named Laura Bodey--that has often been misread. Readers mistake the hints Laura encounters that Clare is responsible for her ovarian cancer for facts, assuming an antagonism between this corporation and this citizen. Such readings overlook the basic science of ovarian cancer as well as the particular way Powers frames Laura's analysis of her relationship with Clare.
My chapter looks at Laura''s understudied half of the novel, framing it as a cancer narrative that reworks important conventions of that genre. In considering the experience of cancer in  broad social, economic, and environmental contexts, Powers offers a corrective to the individualist strain that often runs though illness narratives. In so doing, the novel also pushes us to engage with questions of consumer agency and  bodily frailty in the face of corporate dominance.

This article examines the history of the translation into Japanese of perhaps the most quintessentially American children's author – Theodor Geisel or ‘Dr. Seuss’. As this article argues, there have been several waves of translation, but at all times larger ideological currents have played a big role in determining which books were translated and how. This article pays attention to the ways that the choice of text and translation style reflect larger ideas at work within society. For instance, the Japanese version of The 500 hats of Bartholemew Cubbins, translated by Ōmori Takeo in 1949, was published during the postwar SCAP Occupation, an era in which Dr. Seuss’ liberal, anti-imperialist story held special resonance for the Japanese population. Later, during the 1970s, the prominent translator Watanabe Shigeo translated a dozen Seuss works, but in ways that modify the messages in order to better match the zeitgeist of the era in which he was working. The newest translations have been spearheaded by the feminist poet Itō Hiromi, who has translated Seuss in ways that decenter and destabilize the male privilege implied in the original texts, thus carrying his liberal agenda in a new direction appropriate for our contemporary moment.

Covering the time span from 2021 to 16000 N.C., Dale Pendell’s speculative novel The Great Bay chronicles the profound climatic, geological and ecological transformations that California undergoes during these fourteen millennia. Human life becomes unimaginably small on such a time scale, and Pendell responds to that representational challenge by compiling a wide variety of texts that zero in on individual humans at different points in the future rather than offering a continuous story or central character. In a way, that place is taken by the geographical region that is the focus of the narrative and gives the book its title. Timothy Morton has argued that because we live in the Anthropocene we can no longer understand history as exclusively human. Pendell’s “Chronicle of the Collapse” suggests that the same is true for storytelling,
offering readers the story of a nonhuman protagonist that changes slowly over time. The result is a highly fragmented narrative that is interesting for what it tries to achieve but at the same time remarkably unengaging. In its distant and distanced rendering of future ecological change and human anguish, The
Great Bay is a grave reminder not only of the incalculable risks of the Anthropocene, but also of the basic tenets of realist storytelling.

Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest anticipates what John Bellamy Foster calls the accumulation of catastrophe in the current stage of capitalism. The narrative demonstrates the inherent contradictions of global neoliberal capitalism and speculates about what will happen when these tendencies overwhelm all technocratic countermeasures. The novel also demonstrates how imagining the collapse of the current system allows us to glimpse its exterior. After the text's dystopian elements have reached their peak, the novel concludes with a multipronged ending that suggests several possibilities for the imaginary reconstitution of society or utopia. Crucially, all of these hopeful futures emerge from the "radical potential of catastrophe." Yamashita's novel demonstrates how humanity's despair is also likely to contain our best hope of reconfiguring society, our personal relations, and our orientation to the natural world.

Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades—from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I—and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. The book’s eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, address a significant aspect of the novel's manifold interests. By focusing on three major thematic trajectories (the novel's narrative strategies; its commentary on science, belief, and faith; and its views on politics and economics), the contributors contend that Against the Day is not only a major addition to Pynchon's already impressive body of work, but also a defining moment in the emergence of twenty-first century American literature.

Reviewers and critics of The Dying Animal (2001) have tended to see this novella as a work of pornography in the prosaic sense, accusing Roth of creating a tired simulacrum of his earlier, disturbing examinations of human sexuality. This essay, by contrast, argues that The Dying Animal is Roth’s exploration of an existential “pornography of destruction,” one that both encompasses and transcends the realm of the sexual in its fascination with witnessing the event of its own death.

Yates's novel Revolutionary Road (1962) is typically read as a story of suburban malaise and critique of the American (suburban) life in the 1950s. This paper provides a Lacanian reading of the text as a story of lack (of identity) and of the unattainable desire to create an identity regardless or in spite of the Law (the socially constructed Symbolic order).
Frank and April Wheeler live in the “manifest absence” of what they desire but cannot have. Dissatisfied with their loveless marriage and drab existence, they blame their frustrations on the conformity of the suburban way of life. The real cause of their frustration, however, is the hysteria which ensues, according to Lacan, when a subject begins to question or feel dissatisfied with his or her symbolic identity. Both of the Wheelers are confused about who they are, that is, about what their true desire is, and about what others see and desire in them. They feel dissatisfied with the world of the Other – the culturally constructed reality upon which they are dependent. Family life, both as a place of intense interaction with others and a place of giving birth to others, serves as a catalyst for their attempts to resolve the discomfort of their own existence. Their dream of going to Europe represents the elusive desire for completeness which can never become true.

"Archival Reflections explores the works of critically acclaimed contemporary New World writers - Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Julio Cortazar (Argentina), Ishmael Reed, and E. L. Doctorow (United States) - from two innovative perspectives: the new historical novel of recent decades and the current postmodernist debate." "Due to its scope and perspective this work has a relevance that extends far beyond the conventional bounds of literary studies. Concerned as it is with issues of historical understanding, culture, and politics, it has implications for the literary histories of Spanish America and the United States, as well as for the fields of inter-American and cultural studies, literary theory, and historiography."--BOOK JACKET.

Author, etc.: Juan Navarro, Santiago 1960-
Title: Archival reflections : postmodern fiction of the Americas (self-reflexivity, historical revisionism, utopia)
Santiago Juan-Navarro.
Published: Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press ; London <England> : Associated University Presses, c2000.
Description: 367 p.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 336-3540 and index.

ISBN: 0838754279
0838754279 (alk. paper)
Subjects, general: American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Historical fiction, American -- History and criticism
Historical fiction, Spanish American -- History and criticism
Postmodernism (Literature) -- Latin America
Postmodernism (Literature) -- United States
Spanish American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Format: Book

From the logical focus of The Broom of the System, through the cultural and political dimensions of Infinite Jest, to the historical arguments that shape The Pale King, the novels of David Foster Wallace are constructed through close engagement with sets of ideas. These ideas are often explored in the novels through character dialogue, and this essay highlights the relevance to Wallace’s work of two specific models of dialogue – the Socratic and the Dostoevskian – with reference to their characterization in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. By comparing key scenes of dialogue in Wallace’s novels, the essay also explores those novels as engaged in dialogue with one another, each novel addressing conceptual questions remaining behind from the novel before. The essay therefore maintains a dual focus: on Wallace’s development as a writer, and on his claim to the title of novelist of ideas.

“This bold triangulation of six Chinese, Russian, and American poets advances lively current debates about global literature by exploring encounters that challenge the old binarisms and chart possibilities of literary singularities for a future poetics. Edmond’s shrewd account of literary crossings in post-Cold War history helps us imagine how we can experience the challenge of new literary configurations.”
—Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, author of The Literary in Theory, Structuralist Poetics, and On Deconstruction

“A Common Strangeness is unique among studies of contemporary poetics in being genuinely global in its perspective and its reach. At home in Russian and Chinese as well as American poetry and that of his native New Zealand, Jacob Edmond pinpoints the crucial relationships that exist between what are seemingly disparate poetic cultures. The Chinese poet Yang Lian, who lived in exile in Auckland, is read under the sign of Benjamin and Baudelaire. The American Language poet Lyn Hejinian’s important dialogue with the Russian avant-gardist Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is studied carefully, and Bei Dao, Dmitri Prigov, and Charles Bernstein are treated as representative figures of cross-cultural thinking in the age of globalism. Edmond’s is a provocative, exciting, and genuinely original study of the new poetics; we will all be learning from it!”
—Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University, author of Unoriginal Genius and Wittgenstein’s Ladder

“Jacob Edmond addresses what he calls ‘forms of textual strangeness’ across contemporary poems of beautiful complexity and staying power. This theoretically astute book challenges us to read with a keener eye and to recognize how much poetry can tell us about political catastrophes, national dislocations, and promises of cultural renewal.”
—Stephanie Sandler, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, author of Commemorating Pushkin and Distant Pleasures

“One of this book’s secrets: it is, above all, a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular after deconstruction. What is it possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual? As an antidote to these dichotomies, A Common Strangeness gives us triangles, operating in varied scales. Edmond’s analysis of poets from the US, Russia, and China allows him to shed new light on the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that drive the aesthetics of globalization today. Overlapping, Edmond’s philosophical and linguistic triangles become hexagons, enneagons, dodecagons. These multiplying shapes provide fertile new ground for anyone interested in comparative poetics after 1989.”
––Eric Hayot, Penn State University, author of The Hypothetical Mandarin and Chinese Dreams

“Edmond differs from most scholars who make a point of crossing national and linguistic boundaries to speak of a new ‘world literature’ in that he deals with non-Anglophone as well as Anglophone writers and can give close readings of the former as well as the latter because he knows their languages and the histories of their literatures. The fact that he applies this knowledge to a number of representative poems makes his study unique. . . . He makes significant contributions in the areas of literary history, textual analysis, and a theory of comparative literature that ‘negates commensurability in favor of superimposition, encounter, and touch.’”
—Michael Heim, University of California, Los Angeles

“Ultimately the readings support an interpretation of Benjamin as authority for interpreting the experience of globalization, or ‘common strangeness’ as that experience appears in poetry. The close readings are . . . also very worthwhile in the context of critical discussion of world literature.”
—Edward M. Gunn, Cornell University, author of Rendering the Regional and Rewriting Chinese""

To pick up an American literature anthology is to pick up a political and educational tool.  Its editorial craftwork emerges against an ideological matrix that determines the basis of inclusion.  In constructing a representative literature anthology the possible set of exclusions is nearly limitless.  Instead, the genre demands a political consciousness of anthology editing that does not merely expand the table of contents but rather encourages reading practices that connect literatures with geopolitical histories and futures.

This paper looks at the way in which Robbins uses second person in his novel Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994) in order to subvert the reader. I argue that Robbins, who is notorious for his alternative views on society and his lack of shyness in proclaiming them, is not quite so obvious in the way he presents arguments as he might seem at first. Aware of the fact that simply telling people to think for themselves does not lead to true independence, I examine some of the strategies by which Robbins tricks his readers into thinking critically.

Paperback edition: June 2017

"Since the early 1990s, evolutionary psychology has produced widely popular visions of modern men and women as driven by their prehistoric genes. In Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives, Venla Oikkonen explores the rhetorical appeal of evolutionary psychology by viewing it as part of the Darwinian narrative tradition.

Refusing to start from the position of dismissing evolutionary psychology as simply reactionary or scientifically invalid, the book examines evolutionary psychologists’ investments in such contested concepts as teleology and variation. The book traces the emergence of evolutionary psychological narratives of gender, sexuality and reproduction, encompassing:

- Charles Darwin’s understanding of transformation and sexual difference
- Edward O. Wilson’s evolutionary mythology and the evolution-creationism controversy
- Richard Dawkins’ molecular agency and new imaging technologies
- the connections between adultery, infertility and homosexuality in adaptationist thought.

Through popular, literary and scientific texts, the book identifies both the imaginative potential and the structural weaknesses in evolutionary narratives, opening them up for feminist and queer revision. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the humanities and social sciences, particularly in gender studies, cultural studies, literature, sexualities, and science and technology studies."

The nameless father of Cormac McCarthy’s _The Road_ is repeatedly faced with the difficulty of having to account for a world left desolate after a global catastrophe. The father remains committed to such a world despite pervasive cannibalism and an almost-certain violent death. How can he account for or justify existence in such a world? How can he explain it to his son? Why pass on such a way of life? This essay enlists the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein and Cavell in an effort to account for the father’s commitment. In particular, the category of tragedy and Cavell’s notion of acknowledgment clarify the novel’s unaccountable narrative world.

"The question of where ghosts live can hardly be addressed without speaking of a haunted house. This essay reads Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist, in which there is a ghost called Mr. Tuttle who haunts the house of Lauren Hartke, the body artist, as a text grafted onto Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. The essay takes as its starting point the first words spoken in DeLillo’s text, ‘I want to say something but what’, a quasi-question directed to Lauren by her husband Rey, in order to ask if it can ever be said what lies on the other side of ‘what’, or if it remains forever unknowable, or unheard, at an ‘infinite remove’, even if it is one’s self.
It is Rey’s suicide, and Lauren’s subsequent work of mourning, which locates DeLillo’s phrase within the context of Derrida’s efforts, again and again, to give words to those whose voices are absent: the lost friend, the other self, the dead. To Lauren’s question, ‘What am I supposed to say?’ Derrida replies, ‘Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence’. Through the ghostly form of Mr. Tuttle, DeLillo’s work tells of the various mimetisms by which the silent speaker is heard and remembered."

"In their fictional critiques of colonialism/imperialism, both Thomas Pynchon and J.M. Coetzee emphasize the ways in which the colonial powers misrepresent their intent through the conscious misuse of metaphorical language, especially that surrounding the paternal relationship. Pynchon's _V._ (1966) and Coetzee's _Dusklands_ (1974) address the issue by presenting a number of settings in which such a distortion of language occurs. These disparate sections within the works span more than two hundred years of history, illustrating the longevity of such an approach on the part of European colonizers as well as the growing violence associated with this strategy.

This article examines the manner in which Pynchon and Coetzee deal with the subject of colonialism, primarily using Georges Bataille's _Erotism: Death and Sensuality_ (1986) and Keith Booker's _Literature and Domination_ (1993) to derive a critical formula concerning the linkage between the desire for domination, violence and the metaphor surrounding various forms of love. This formula is then used as the filter through which the two aforementioned novels are read, isolating instances in both authors’ writing that demonstrate the specific ways in which colonial powers intentionally blur, or thoroughly obscure, the line between fatherly and sexual love to justify their efforts at political and cultural supremacy."

[NOTE: What is appended here is a preliminary draft of the essay that was ultimately published. This document should NOT be quoted as being the original essay as published in the journal.]

This paper reviews the nature and intensity of some external forces that shape and re-shape headteachers' school improvement efforts in the mountainous and rural Gilgit-Baltistan of Pakistan. The external forces emanating from the outside world of the schools are categorized under three themes: divisions within the school community, influences of the district office, and issues of communication with parents. The divisions within the school community were clear and deep. The major divisions included the uneven socioeconomic levels, the various tribal systems, the sense of local and non-locals, and the different religious denominations. The challenges related to the District Office were: monetary challenges, monitoring and supervision, and a surfeit of assignments given to schools. The issues of communication with parents were: parents' lack of interest in school improvement issues and the low socioeconomic background of parents. The paper also examines headteachers' roles in addressing these ongoing school improvement challenges.

The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields.

Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right's strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and “Christian postmodernism.” Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.

This article offers a reading of American Pastoral (1997) as a portrait in mythic history, or creative misremembering, and as an example of the considerable transformative power such an enterprise exercises over the social imaginary of modernity. If the serious activists of the sixties and their nonviolent protests are misremembered as the act of a deranged adolescent bomber, as in the case of the novel, the threat such protesters pose to the established order is neutralized. Such a mythic re-storying must be read in political terms, for the historical analogues it calls to mind and for the imperial perspective from which it descends. The result of this discursive maneuvering is that mythic history persists at the end of Roth’s novel despite the wish of its narrator, Zuckerman, to critique that structure. As Roth’s novel makes clear when read through the lens of contemporary theory, the resilience of post-sixties mythic history has much to do with precisely this form of familial psycho-drama that personalizes rather than politicizes systemic social issues.

This essay shows how the Language poet Lyn Hejinian came to relate her experiences of Russia and her poetics of the ‘‘person’’ to Victor Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement (ostranenie). I argue that in The Guard (1984), Oxota (1991), Leningrad (1991), and in other writings about Russia, Hejinian came to conflate poetic estrangement with the estranging effect of Russia itself and, in so doing, developed her poetics of the person, which linked the material text of poetic estrangement with the social poetics of everyday life. Everyday life in Russia seemed to take on the very qualities that she associated with estrangement: the dissolution of defined objects and essential selfhood and their replacement with the dynamic experience that Hejinian defined as ‘‘personhood.’’ At the same time, Hejinian found in this dynamic personhood a means to oppose essentialist national identities, so that Russian estrangement also became central to her utopian vision of bridging the ColdWar divide between Russia
and the United States.

Historically, the first-person plural narrator has been rare in US fiction, and it is both enigmatic and technically demanding. Yet an increasing number of American novelists and short story writers have turned to this formal device over the past 20 years and particularly since 9/11. How might one account for this rise in “we” narration, a trend that surprisingly few commentators have identified, questioned or examined at any length? What are the implications of telling a story in this difficult, even risky way? And in light of the formal challenges it poses to reader as well as writer, why have contemporary works of fiction that are told collectively often been critically and commercially successful? In this essay, I attempt to answer such questions, examining how US writers from William Faulkner to Jeffrey Eugenides, and Kate Walbert to Julie Otsuka have used the collective narrator in short stories and longer fiction and finally reflecting upon the use of “we” in recent American political discourse. 􏰷􏰎􏰐􏰑􏰃􏰂􏰎􏰏􏰆􏰊􏰊􏰨􏰖􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰅􏰈􏰋􏰎􏰂􏰐􏰑􏱁􏰄􏰅􏰂􏰐􏰃􏰇􏰈􏰄􏰊􏰁􏰂􏰆􏰊􏰈􏰇􏰆􏰂􏰂􏰆􏰑􏰃􏰂􏰈􏰢􏰆􏰐􏰈􏰩􏰅􏰅􏰇􏰈􏰂􏰆􏰂􏰅􏰈􏰎􏰇􏰈􏰫􏰜􏰈􏰋􏰎􏰏􏰑􏰎􏰃􏰇􏰖􏰈􏰆􏰇􏰒􏰈􏰎􏰑􏰈􏰎􏰐􏰈􏰩􏰃􏰑􏰢􏰈􏰅􏰇􏰎􏰝􏰍􏰆􏰑􏰎􏰏 􏰆􏰇􏰒􏰈􏰑􏰅􏰏􏰢􏰇􏰎􏰏􏰆􏰊􏰊􏰨􏰈􏰒􏰅􏰍􏰆􏰇􏰒􏰎􏰇􏰝􏰥􏰈􏰱􏰅􏰑􏰈􏰆􏰇􏰈􏰎􏰇􏰏􏰂􏰅􏰆􏰐􏰎􏰇􏰝􏰈􏰇􏰁􏰍􏰩􏰅􏰂􏰈􏰃􏰋􏰈􏰌􏰍􏰅􏰂􏰎􏰏􏰆􏰇􏰈􏰇􏰃􏰡􏰅􏰊􏰎􏰐􏰑􏰐􏰈􏰆􏰇􏰒􏰈􏰐􏰢􏰃􏰂􏰑􏰈􏰐􏰑􏰃􏰂􏰨 􏰬􏰂􏰎􏰑􏰅􏰂􏰐􏰈􏰢􏰆􏰡􏰅􏰈􏰑􏰁􏰂􏰇􏰅􏰒􏰈􏰑􏰃􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰎􏰐􏰈􏰋􏰃􏰂􏰍􏰆􏰊􏰈􏰒􏰅􏰡􏰎􏰏􏰅􏰈􏰃􏰡􏰅􏰂􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰅􏰈􏰄􏰆􏰐􏰑􏰈􏰗􏰕􏰈􏰨􏰅􏰆􏰂􏰐􏰈􏰆􏰇􏰒􏰈􏰄􏰆􏰂􏰑􏰎􏰏􏰁􏰊􏰆􏰂􏰊􏰨􏰈􏰐􏰎􏰇􏰏􏰅􏰈􏰳􏰴􏰔􏰔􏰥􏰈􏰷􏰃􏰬 􏰍􏰎􏰝􏰢􏰑􏰈􏰃􏰇􏰅􏰈􏰆􏰏􏰏􏰃􏰁􏰇􏰑􏰈􏰋􏰃􏰂􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰎􏰐􏰈􏰂􏰎􏰐􏰅􏰈􏰎􏰇􏰈􏰮􏰬􏰅􏰯􏰈􏰇􏰆􏰂􏰂􏰆􏰑􏰎􏰃􏰇􏰖􏰈􏰆􏰈􏰑􏰂􏰅􏰇􏰒􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰆􏰑􏰈􏰐􏰁􏰂􏰄􏰂􏰎􏰐􏰎􏰇􏰝􏰊􏰨􏰈􏰋􏰅􏰬􏰈􏰏􏰃􏰍􏰍􏰅􏰇􏰑􏰆􏰑􏰃􏰂􏰐 􏰢􏰆􏰡􏰅􏰈􏰎􏰒􏰅􏰇􏰑􏰎􏰋􏰎􏰅􏰒􏰖􏰈􏰲􏰁􏰅􏰐􏰑􏰎􏰃􏰇􏰅􏰒􏰈􏰃􏰂􏰈􏰅􏰧􏰆􏰍􏰎􏰇􏰅􏰒􏰈􏰆􏰑􏰈􏰆􏰇􏰨􏰈􏰊􏰅􏰇􏰝􏰑􏰢􏰰􏰈􏰸􏰢􏰆􏰑􏰈􏰆􏰂􏰅􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰅􏰈􏰎􏰍􏰄􏰊􏰎􏰏􏰆􏰑􏰎􏰃􏰇􏰐􏰈􏰃􏰋􏰈􏰑􏰅􏰊􏰊􏰎􏰇􏰝􏰈􏰆 􏰐􏰑􏰃􏰂􏰨􏰈􏰎􏰇􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰎􏰐􏰈􏰒􏰎􏰋􏰋􏰎􏰏􏰁􏰊􏰑􏰖􏰈􏰅􏰡􏰅􏰇􏰈􏰂􏰎􏰐􏰹􏰨􏰈􏰬􏰆􏰨􏰰􏰈􏰌􏰇􏰒􏰈􏰎􏰇􏰈􏰊􏰎􏰝􏰢􏰑􏰈􏰃􏰋􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰅􏰈􏰋􏰃􏰂􏰍􏰆􏰊􏰈􏰏􏰢􏰆􏰊􏰊􏰅􏰇􏰝􏰅􏰐􏰈􏰎􏰑􏰈􏰄􏰃􏰐􏰅􏰐􏰈􏰑􏰃􏰈􏰂􏰅􏰆􏰒􏰅􏰂
􏰩􏰊􏰋􏰈􏰪􏰔􏰕􏰋􏰈􏰁􏰏􏰈􏰉􏰊􏰋􏰈􏰢􏰚􏰋􏰘􏰈􏰫􏰃􏰇􏰇􏰃􏰉􏰁􏰇􏰈􏰔􏰂􏰈􏰞􏰁􏰅􏰋􏰇􏰂􏰈􏰧􏰌􏰋􏰇􏰔􏰨􏰃􏰂􏰈􏰟􏰔􏰨􏰉􏰔􏰁􏰂 􏰦􏰬
􏰑􏰒􏰇􏰁􏰠􏰋􏰃􏰂􏰈􏰮􏰁􏰒􏰇􏰂􏰃􏰄􏰈􏰁􏰏􏰈􏰧􏰌􏰋􏰇􏰔􏰨􏰃􏰂􏰈􏰕􏰉􏰒􏰅􏰔􏰋􏰕􏰍􏰈􏰯􏰁􏰄􏰈􏰦􏰰􏰍􏰈􏰂􏰁􏰈􏰬􏰈􏰱􏰈􏰬􏰰􏰦􏰲
􏰆􏰐􏰈􏰬􏰅􏰊􏰊􏰈􏰆􏰐􏰈􏰬􏰂􏰎􏰑􏰅􏰂􏰖􏰈􏰬􏰢􏰨􏰈􏰢􏰆􏰡􏰅􏰈􏰏􏰃􏰇􏰑􏰅􏰍􏰄􏰃􏰂􏰆􏰂􏰨􏰈􏰬􏰃􏰂􏰹􏰐􏰈􏰃􏰋􏰈􏰋􏰎􏰏􏰑􏰎􏰃􏰇􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰆􏰑􏰈􏰆􏰂􏰅􏰈􏰑􏰃􏰊􏰒􏰈􏰏􏰃􏰊􏰊􏰅􏰏􏰑􏰎􏰡􏰅􏰊􏰨􏰈􏰃􏰋􏰑􏰅􏰇􏰈􏰩􏰅􏰅􏰇 􏰏􏰂􏰎􏰑􏰎􏰏􏰆􏰊􏰊􏰨􏰈􏰆􏰇􏰒􏰈􏰏􏰃􏰍􏰍􏰅􏰂􏰏􏰎􏰆􏰊􏰊􏰨􏰈􏰐􏰁􏰏􏰏􏰅􏰐􏰐􏰋􏰁􏰊􏰰􏰈􏰞􏰇􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰎􏰐􏰈􏰅􏰐􏰐􏰆􏰨􏰖􏰈􏰞􏰈􏰬􏰎􏰊􏰊􏰈􏰆􏰑􏰑􏰅􏰍􏰄􏰑􏰈􏰑􏰃􏰈􏰆􏰇􏰐􏰬􏰅􏰂􏰈􏰐􏰁􏰏􏰢􏰈􏰲􏰁􏰅􏰐􏰑􏰎􏰃􏰇􏰐􏰖 􏰅􏰧􏰆􏰍􏰎􏰇􏰎􏰇􏰝􏰈􏰢􏰃􏰬􏰈􏰫􏰜􏰈􏰬􏰂􏰎􏰑􏰅􏰂􏰐􏰈􏰋􏰂􏰃􏰍􏰈􏰸􏰎􏰊􏰊􏰎􏰆􏰍􏰈􏱂􏰆􏰁􏰊􏰹􏰇􏰅􏰂􏰈􏰑􏰃􏰈􏱆􏰅􏰋􏰋􏰂􏰅􏰨􏰈􏰀􏰁􏰝􏰅􏰇􏰎􏰒􏰅􏰐􏰖􏰈􏰆􏰇􏰒􏰈􏱇􏰆􏰑􏰅􏰈􏰸􏰆􏰊􏰩􏰅􏰂􏰑􏰈􏰑􏰃 􏱆􏰁􏰊􏰎􏰅􏰈 􏱈􏰑􏰐􏰁􏰹􏰆􏰈 􏰢􏰆􏰡􏰅􏰈 􏰁􏰐􏰅􏰒􏰈 􏰑􏰢􏰅􏰈 􏰏􏰃􏰊􏰊􏰅􏰏􏰑􏰎􏰡􏰅􏰈 􏰇􏰆􏰂􏰂􏰆􏰑􏰃􏰂􏰈 􏰎􏰇􏰈 􏰐􏰢􏰃􏰂􏰑􏰈 􏰐􏰑􏰃􏰂􏰎􏰅􏰐􏰈 􏰆􏰇􏰒􏰈 􏰊􏰃􏰇􏰝􏰅􏰂􏰈 􏰋􏰎􏰏􏰑􏰎􏰃􏰇􏰈 􏰆􏰇􏰒􏰈 􏰋􏰎􏰇􏰆􏰊􏰊􏰨 􏰂􏰅􏰋􏰊􏰅􏰏􏰑􏰎􏰇􏰝􏰈􏰁􏰄􏰃􏰇􏰈􏰑􏰢􏰅􏰈􏰁􏰐􏰅􏰈􏰃􏰋􏰈􏰮􏰬􏰅􏰯􏰈􏰎􏰇􏰈􏰂􏰅􏰏􏰅􏰇􏰑􏰈􏰌􏰍􏰅􏰂􏰎􏰏􏰆􏰇􏰈􏰄􏰃􏰊􏰎􏰑􏰎􏰏􏰆􏰊􏰈􏰒􏰎􏰐􏰏􏰃􏰁􏰂􏰐􏰅􏰥

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People have by and large not liked Updike’s penultimate novel very much. For many early reviewers, Updike had simply written a bad, even a very bad, book, and literary critics have generally followed suit. At worst, Updike is accused of racial profiling; at best, we have tepid, almost patronizing approval. However, just as more sober, less hyperbolic assessments of 9/11 are now starting to appear, answering at a distance David Simpson’s 2006 call for a more measured, thoughtful response, so a more positive understanding of Updike’s novel seems to be developing. Terrorist, I propose, has been seriously underestimated, and in this essay, I explore how Updike’s novel  allows for a broader, more informed, and more troubling understanding of Islamic terrorism.

H.G. Wells wanted his epitaph to be 'God damn you all, I told you so'. But how accurate were his predictions of industrial warfare and global conflict, especially as his descriptions of an aerial bombing of New York in War in the Air has been compared to the terrorist attacks of 9/11? Did the late Victorians really 'discover the future' or did the 1990s simply recycle the 1890s? At the aftermath of 2012, this book is 'looking backward' and identifies startling connections between the apocalyptic fantasies of the last two centuries' ends and traces intriguing links between Nietzsche and chaos theory, Dracula and The X-Files, the Borg Queen and H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha, among others.

Arguing against the prevalent but mistaken notion that Tyler Durden is the mouthpiece of Chuck Palahniuk, this paper examines the underlying critique of politics that underlies Fight Club. It focuses in particular on how Palahniuk takes aim at an underlying fascism in contemporary society that has little to do with conventional definitions of left and right.

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.