This article reconsiders David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) with a special focus on the fictional polity of ONAN (the Organization of North American Nations) in which its narrative is set, reading the novel’s increasingly salient satirical treatment of US–Canadian “Interdependence” as the basis for a multivalent allegory that weaves together themes of imperial expansion and decay, waste externalization, addiction, and depression. Drawing on concepts of “imperial metabolism,” “blowback,” and “codependency,” the author examines how Wallace maps geopolitical dynamics onto individual psychology via concentric “closed” loops of violence and despair. In this respect as in others, the novel’s much-celebrated prescience is apparent—as indeed are the limits of its vision, the particular contours of which bear the imprint of a socio-historical impasse that has since shaped our own. As the author argues, Wallace’s valorization of “sincerity” and his rejection of political engagement help account for Jest ’s doubly pessimistic depiction of therapeutic individualism (embodied by Kate Gompert) and sovereigntist militancy (embodied by Rémy Marathe) as symmetrically inadequate responses to late-capitalist crisis. This symmetry, in turn, reflects Jest ’s entrenchment in the very post-historical consciousness that it half-diagnoses, evincing a depressively “realist” foreclosure of popular sovereignty, even as imperial dysfunction becomes plain to see.
While Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones have both received significant critical attention, no work yet exists that reads these novels in relation to each other, despite the fact that they share many of the same themes and concerns. This article offers a comparative reading of these bildungsroman texts, with a specific focus on their depictions of light and darkness. In both novels, an ambiguous duality is established between these themes, and it is in this space of luminous ambiguity that the protagonists of these novels formulate their identities as racialized subjects in white post-war America. While light has traditionally been associated with truth and goodness and darkness with uncertainty and strife, especially within the hegemony of Christian tradition, both novels challenge this hierarchy. Marshall’s protagonist, Selina, comes to embrace the symbolic importance of both light and darkness for her identity formation, while Ellison’s protagonist, by the end of his narrative, favours light over darkness.
This article argues that Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys (2019) offers a model of narrative pessimism that contends with conflicting models of philosophical pessimism . The novel aligns with Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (1818) through its belief in a universally governing logic of suffering within human experience, but it connects with Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimism (2020) by identifying the embodied particularities of suffering perpetrated on Black Americans. Its frame structure employs strategic deception to foreground its pessimism, building toward the catharsis innate to its narrative formula before finally withholding that release. However, unlike the pessimism posited by Schopenhauer and, even more pressingly, by Wilderson, Whitehead’s novel implies the possibility of recuperation. The Nickel Boys thus offers an urgent, distinct, and complicated narrative expression of Black suffering.
Anthony N.B. Garvan (1917–1992), first Professor and Chair of the Department of American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), helped establish the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s by creating a new and unified approach to American materials of every sort. He argued that closely observed objects provide visual data about the people who made them and lived with them, evidence largely ignored by previous researchers. He was also an innovative teacher, offering experiences for students that connected the classroom with organizations and at historic sites in the region. His perspective and these experiences had a transformative impact on students, who went on to prominent careers in academia, museums, and the arts.
This paper argues that Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) marks a decisive shift in Cold War satire, away from the mockery and cartoon-based humour of the conflict’s earlier decades and toward a dark, realist mode of comedy calibrated to the psychological weight of nuclear anxiety. Drawing on psychological research into laughter (Gervais and Wilson; Dolzani; Papousek et al.) alongside film-historical and production accounts of Kubrick’s work, the paper contends that the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed satire past incongruity and detachment as its operative mechanisms, demanding instead an unflinching realism that made nuclear annihilation both thinkable and laughable. Contrasting Dr. Strangelove with Sidney Lumet’s dramatically “straight” Fail Safe , released the same year and treating nearly identical material, the paper shows how satire’s indirection allowed audiences to process a horror that earnest drama could not. Ultimately, the film is read as a form of gallows humour that functioned, at a societal scale, as catharsis for a decade and a half of “psychic numbing” under the threat of mutually assured destruction.
