Abstract: This essay examines a horror topos deployed by Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, and other Elizabethan writers in which bodies become suddenly and violently legible. It argues that such transformations, which Spenser uses to theorize allegory in The Faerie Queene , provide a mechanism for writers to interrogate the nature of literary character more broadly. The essay revisits Thomas Nashe's proto-novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), to examine how its character-system constitutes its subject in different ways—as printed texts, liquid bodies, costumes, conjurations, heraldic devices—before invoking this topos to dramatize characterization as the outcome of violent silencing and forcible signification.
Abstract: This paper reconsiders the idea of climate fiction as speculative fiction, arguing that this categorization has reached an impasse in the context of contemporary climate crisis. Tracing the genealogy of speculative fiction from mid-twentieth-century SF debates onwards, I situate climate fiction as the paradigmatic speculative fiction of the early 2000s, valued for its proleptic warning—this is what happens if we do not act. As climate change emerges as a pervasive condition of life today, however, the speculative premise underpinning this warning begins to collapse. I turn to the ethical and political pressures placed on climate fiction by authors, critics, and popular discourse that have accompanied—and, indeed, helped to construct—normative prolepticism as the sine qua non of climate fiction. The paper ends with brief readings of Jeff VanderMeer and Kim Stanley Robinson, identifying two ways forward for a post-speculative climate fiction.
Abstract: Engaged with the medieval philosophical tradition of speculatio , this article emphasizes the importance of mental perception to speculation about the world. The problematics of speculation emerge by way of literary equivocation: in Chaucer's account of Dorigen's fretful thinking in The Franklin's Tale as well as in Kazuo Ishiguro's treatment of Gawain's confusions in his speculative novel, The Buried Giant . Both texts demonstrate the difficulties of pondering the material things of the world. Considering them together clarifies the complex vicissitudes that perception poses to speculation as an activity in the here and now, emphasizing the difficulties of understanding what is right before our eyes.
Abstract: Hawthorne's fiction dramatizes the difficulty of processing information in literature. Readers jump to conclusions and do not correct them; they make wrongful inferences and statements unsupported by evidence. This is achieved through simple but effective methods—appeals to prejudice and self-righteousness, repeated assertion, insinuation, and basic unreliability—and through complex designs that require more explanation. These include setting equally important messages at odds with each other at the level of evidence, wrapping up plots in a way that encourages inferential forfeiture, and experimenting with near-identicality and confounding similarity. This essay recreates how this happens in Hawthorne's short stories "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Young Goodman Brown," "Alice Doane's Appeal," and "Wives of the Dead," and his novels The Scarlet Letter and House of the Seven Gables . It also pieces together Hawthorne's general interest in these difficulties from lesser-known works including Tanglewood Tales , his personal and family history, and the unique way he continued the project of Puritanism.
Abstract: This article takes Joshua Clover's argument that poetry gives different speculative ways of charting shifts in cultural production since the economic crisis as its point of departure: the 1970s, which marks a global recession, the emergence of neoliberalism, and the end of the Civil Rights/Black Power era, as well as the emergence of the personal computer, is an important antecedent for the present conjuncture. The article considers the rise of computational poetics as an outgrowth of the earlier Conceptual poetry, on the one hand, and a longer history whereby both computational techniques, data, and the idea of poetic expression have been racialized. Considering the ways makalani bandele and Lilian-Yvonne Betram respectively use computational techniques to randomize output and declare affiliation with the past, the ultimate argument is that the computational is also an affective posture for managing unwanted intimacies.
