To track the bildungsroman’s travels into modernism is to encounter a period in which a classically optimistic genre begins instead to produce, across the board, “failed” developmental narratives—ones which end in either premature death or terminal adolescence. In this article, I focus on one such antidevelopmental narrative: that of Lois Farquar, of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September. Building from and extrapolating the theory of the modernist bildungsroman established by Jed Esty in Unseasonable Youth (2012), I argue that The Last September’s “failures” are symptomatic of its broader refusal to instate the nation as a cohesive and fulfilling guarantor of personal development. I go on to suggest that, in problematising the cohesive national totalities of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Bowen is in fact aiming idiosyncratically at a “modernist” form of realistic representation; faced with the contradictions of early-twentieth-century Anglo-Irish experience, she senses the incompatibility of the classical bildungsroman form and attempts to develop a narrative form commensurate to the social conditions of the period.
This essay examines Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (1961), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) through the application of Adrienne Rich’s concept of maternal altruism and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) and Technologies of the Self (1988). I argue that the aforementioned novels destabilise and subvert mythologies of motherhood and the nuclear family to expose the role of the twentieth-century American mother as a performative act. This subversion is exemplified through an array of central characters who undertake this performativity reluctantly and as the result of a societal coercion reinforced by a patriarchal hegemony that posits Rich’s maternal altruism as the universally-approved feature of womanhood. This essay seeks to demonstrate that what ensues as a result of the central characters’ failed attempt to perform motherhood intuitively is, in part, the rupture of the mother-child dynamic, enforced through the violent death of the child or childlike figure, a spectacle made public in line with Foucault’s theory on the nature of punishment.
The authors examine how social media contribute to the fight of Quebec's Indigenous women. After the Val-d'Or scandal, which hit officers of the Quebec Police with allegations of sexual assault against women from the Cree and Anichinabe nations, the researchers conducted an ethnographic observation of the Twitter and Facebook accounts of leading activists and associations of Indigenous women who used social media to denounce this police violence. The analysis, together with multiple interviews, shows that the variety of actions taken online provides an unprecedented visibility of their struggles and opportunity to promote their voices. These actions are proving to be effective means of decolonisation of the patriarchal social order and forging a "space for the cause of Indigenous women" online.
This paper applies scholarship in the environmental humanities specifically related to oceanic imaginary in order to examine tourist narratives portrayed in two science fiction stories from the anthology, Drowned Worlds: Tales from the Anthropocene and Beyond. The two stories in question are Ken Liu's "Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit-Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts" and Nalo Hopkinson's "Inselberg". Both stories explore the intersecting difficulties brought about by tourist demand and rising sea tides. The meeting point of these two phenomena in the context of "Dispatches" and "Inselberg" depicts traumatised individuals, communities, and landscapes. These stories are unique in their portrayal of the particular vulnerabilities of islands. They explore both individual and collective trauma set against the backdrop of climate catastrophe, which acts as an allegory for the real-world uncertainty faced by humans due to climate change. While the futurity in each story overlaps in a shared narrative of traumatic existence for the individuals and communities they depict, there is one key difference: "Dispatches" emphasises large-scale, exterior systems of power, while "Inselberg" looks inward to one island's struggle for autonomy. Together both stories criticise systems of social and environmental exploitation, which binds the narratives, settings, and characters in cycles of trauma.
Michel Foucault's influence on Stephen Greenblatt is a subject that has apparently gone out of date. Paul Stevens argues that Greenblatt's attempt to fashion the self through narration is influenced by Sartrean existentialism. An examination of Greenblatt's work, however, will demonstrate that it is the Foucauldian notion of self-constitution of the subject that has provided the conceptual framework. Moreover, Greenblatt's conception of history is quite different from Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist history. In comparison with Sartre, Greenblatt puts more emphasis on impersonal forces and remains deeply sceptical of the Sartrean notion of absolute freedom in our actions. The fear of the loss of identity, as a malaise of modernity, has led to Greenblatt's impulse to fashion his identity through narration and can only be addressed by a materialistic account of the origin of the human subject.
This article explores the female experience of World War One (WWI) as depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby. Particularly, I consider the experiences of Daisy Fay as a domestic figure traumatised by war. My exploration of this is underpinned by a more expansive definition of war-related trauma beyond the battlefield, as posited by several prominent trauma theorists. In a gendered, parallel study of various characters' responses to WWI, I demonstrate that Daisy displays previously unstudied indicators of war-related trauma. Her suffering continues to resurface in her behaviour following the War in a Freudian cycle of repetition. This bears striking similarities to the suppression of trauma resulting from WWI by the male characters of The Great Gatsby. I extend traditionally androcentric interpretations of the novel as a product of a war-wounded American society to also bring women's experiences to the fore.
Labeled the "national emergency" we had to have, the Northern Territory Emergency Response was a federal action in which Indigenous Australians were cast as heavily in need of "management" by a paternalistic State. Interventionist and racially exclusive, the Emergency Response highlights the ongoing role of State/settler colonial interference in the lives of Indigenous people in Australia. I describe this event as a case study highlighting the self-fashioning of Whiteness through the refashioning of Aboriginality. This fashioning was premised on the language and imagery of deficit and heavily perpetuated a mythology of the noble savage. Employing a range of secondary sources on the matter of the Northern Territory Emergency Response, including media reports along with academic texts, this offers insight into how the history and representations of Indigenous Australians have resulted in the perpetuation of the noble savage imagery in settler colonial discourse, there is little that is noble about the contradictory turn of phrase "noble savage". This paper argues that the violence conveyed by the term "noble savage" and its utility throughout the Intervention are illustrative of the ongoing attempts by settler society to domesticate Aboriginality.
This article seeks to show how literary texts can expand, challenge, and advance existing understandings of empathy. In this article I discuss Australian author Jennifer Mills' novel, Dyschronia. Through excursions into the thought of Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur I demonstrate how Dyschronia can reconfigure existing ideas about what it means for humans to empathise with nonhuman animals.
Article. Displacing Presumptive Heterosexuality: Reading Queer (?) Characters using Thin Description.
Article. Vegetarian Vampires of the Anthropocene: Re-reading the animal blood diet in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga
