Troubling Immediacy in Bret Easton Ellis's The ShardsMurphet, Julian
doi: 10.1215/00295132-12346634pmid: N/A
Bret Easton Ellis's novel The Shards (2023) continues his now familiar metafictional, postironic, quasi‐autobiographical trawl through a parallel universe of his own past. But something has changed. Finally “coming out” in his own name, Ellis has also slackened his rigorous commitments to stylistic precision to the point of near unrecognizability and produced a bloated, overwritten, generically schizophrenic bad book. Why? This article argues that there are three overlapping reasons why this might be something more interesting than a simple failure. First, by teasing away at the moment in his past just before he became the brand name Bret Easton Ellis, and by seeking to preserve it in an amber bubble of indeterminacy, Ellis indemnifies himself against himself. Second, by teasing readers with shocking “revelations” of a psychosexual nature, he baits his audience into a recognition of their own complicity with Anna Kornbluh's culture of “immediacy.” Third, and most consequentially, this “novel” is the printed text of a multipart subscription‐based podcast on Patreon, a fact with enormous formal consequences for this book and this literary moment in time.
Document Style and Fictional Minds After ModernismBradford, Jack
doi: 10.1215/00295132-12346651pmid: N/A
As critics of both realism and modernism have argued, the history of the modern novel may be read as a series of aesthetic responses to the epistemological problem of other minds. Beginning with a reading of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, this article argues that some contemporary novelists, driven by the same impulse to sweep away residual storytelling conventions that led modernists to limit and complicate narratorial omniscience, have chosen to write in a first‐person present tense, discarding free indirect discourse and the interior monologue. This present‐tense style—which the author calls “document style” to include those fictions, like Nabokov's, that are conscious of their own textuality without being strictly epistolary—derives from eighteenth‐century, prerealist models that refuse to grant readers a superhuman intersubjective knowledge. Rather than staging the opacity of other minds at the level of plot, document‐style novelists withhold traditional novelistic closure, abandoning their readers to a state of unknowing that formally reproduces the privacy of other minds. Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being serves as an allegory of reading this document mode, demonstrating that limiting the traditional avenues of access to the inner lives of fictional characters does not necessarily weaken the illusion that these characters are real people with psychological depth.
A Sublime Fantasy: Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby and Populist Desiredel Valle Alcalá, Roberto
doi: 10.1215/00295132-12346668pmid: N/A
This essay suggests that Benjamin Disraeli's “Young England” novel Coningsby (1844), often dismissed as a reactionary instance of early Victorian political and social‐problem fiction, is actually an instructive case of populism in the novel from which important critical—and political—lessons may be drawn. The fundamental problem Coningsby confronts us with, through its insistent rehearsal of libidinal dynamics and phantasmatic scenarios in the midst of a conscious and emphatically intentional political argument, is the notion that fantasy is ultimately indissociable from an agonistic conception of politics (whether of the Left or the Right).
Genre and Futurity in the Historical Novel: Georg Lukács with Sylvia Townsend WarnerPrigozhin, Aleksandr
doi: 10.1215/00295132-12346685pmid: N/A
Can the novel teach readers how to live in history? Put slightly differently: What do historical novels as influentially theorized by Georg Lukács reveal about the relation between history and futurity today? The answers to those questions depend on whether Lukács's account of the novel is reduced to a plot‐heavy master narrative of progress—which is the prevailing tendency. Following the work of Lauren Berlant, this article advances an alternative version of Lukács's historical poetics that is focused on the historicity of distributed affective atmospheres. It makes a case for the continuing critical force of Lukács's account of the historical novel by shifting the focus away from the heroic categories of protagonist and event (the basis of recent critiques of the disabling of the dialectic through the decay of the nation‐state as matrix for progressive history) and toward atmospherically dispersed affect. Rather than insisting on a binary separation of narrative typification and atmospheric causality, however, the article reads Lukács's The Historical Novel and his contemporaneous essays together with the historical novels of Sylvia Townsend Warner—particularly Summer Will Show and The Corner That Held Them—in order to develop a more dialectical account of their interrelation. A better view of history on offer in Lukács's theory and Warner's practice replaces the singular promise of history with many smaller promissory structures. This mode of attachment to history searches the past for the sense of alternative possibilities it might possess, orienting readers toward livable futures without the false reassurances of progress.
From Alienation to Fictionality: Writing Depersonalization as High Modernism Turns LatePowell, Josh
doi: 10.1215/00295132-12346702pmid: N/A
This article argues for the significance of modernist fiction to the history of depersonalization, a psychiatric concept that describes the feeling of estrangement or detachment from one's own thoughts, feelings, sensations, body, or actions. It also suggests that reading modernism with a focus on depersonalized experience helps to distinguish “high” from “late” modernism, and to nuance existing critical understandings of the latter term. It begins by looking to the personal journal and psychoanalytic studies of Edith Jacobson, making the case that Jacobson's work exemplifies a persistent tendency to relate and conflate depersonalization with a more familiar term in literary studies, alienation. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is then found to anticipate and extend Jacobson's work by exploring the degree to which depersonalization derives from alienation and by considering aesthetic experience as a way of negotiating both. Next, through readings of Woolf's Between the Acts and Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing, the article argues that late modernist engagements with depersonalization turn away from questions of alienation and instead foreground those of fictionality. These readings challenge established critical views of late modernism that emphasize its (outward) turn from epistemological questions of the mind or associate it with postwar linguistic negativism. Ultimately, a focus on depersonalization produces a formally self‐conscious late modernism that explores a narrow space between fictionality and reality, as well as the sense in which the self is fictional.
Typical Roundness: Fictional Character and the Culture Concept in Howards EndAttridge, John
doi: 10.1215/00295132-12346719pmid: N/A
This essay examines the relationship between the idea of national character—a historically influential vocabulary for thinking about national identity—and character in fiction. Taking Howards End as its case study, the article argues that E. M. Forster's condition‐of‐England novel draws on an emergent ethnographic concept of culture in order to model the intersection between particular individuals and the social whole. In this respect, the article suggests, Forster's attempt to map the fragmented landscape of contemporary Englishness anticipates the studies of national character undertaken by anthropologists of the culture and personality school in the 1940s and 1950s. Reading Howards End as autoethnography suggests a revision to Forster's own equation of fictional types with characterological flatness. In Howards End, on the contrary, ethnographic thick description allows typical characters to be seen in the round.