With Stillicide (2019), Cynan Jones moves away from the rural world of his previous novels to tackle the interaction between the human and the nonhuman in an unnamed city affected by climate change and riven by social unrest. The novel pivots around a severe drought that has exacerbated the inhabitants of the city as a way to concentrate on the sensory experience offered by the interface of human and nonhuman, especially celebrating the primacy of auditory perceptions. To this end, I will first focus on the overarching polyphonic organisation of the narrative and, second, on the formal strategies that specifically contribute to the disclosure of what we might call ‘sonic texture’. On the one hand, the multiplicity of voices, shifting focalisation, the erosive and transformative power of water, the constant repetitions and the interconnection of various temporal layers point to a polyphonic form that blurs the border between human and nonhuman. On the other, by means of such poetic devices as alliteration, reiteration, rhyme, onomatopoeia and prosopopoeia, Stillicide exhibits a lyrical texture where ecological degradation and a collective sense of loss are recorded and thematised.
Archives of Environmental Apocalypse in Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth: Archaeology, Viruses, and Melancholia Angelo Monaco Angelo Monaco Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isab017, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isab017 Published: 04 March 2021 Article history Received: 29 June 2019 Revision received: 03 January 2021 Editorial decision: 12 February 2021 Accepted: 18 February 2021 Published: 04 March 2021
From his debut novel, The Long Dry (2006), to his most recent, Stillicide (2019), the non-human has played a prominent role in Cynan Jones’ fiction. Of Jones’ texts, The Long Dry and The Dig (2014) specifically engage with cultivation, farming, and raising livestock in a Welsh rustic setting. Both novels present a rural world that resists idealised forms of representing nature as some kind of idyll, thus calling into question the separation between human and non-human. Starting from this premise, my working hypothesis is that the relationship between human and non-human constitutes a relevant trope in Jones’ fiction since they are both caught in the very same moment of crisis, change and transformation. To this end, I would like to read The Long Dry and The Dig through Timothy Morton’s idea of the mesh that connects human to non-human. Firstly, I will discuss the generic features of the novels, such as shifting focalisation and temporal disorientation which can be said to favour an encounter between storytelling and material reality. Secondly, I will address Jones’ interest in the erosion of the border between human and non-human, illustrating the affective bonds and sensory ties that connect both dimensions. Taken together, Jones’ novels entail a deep eco-georgic stance in that rural life is recast in terms of a thematic and material space that brings together human and non-human, conflating change and crisis, failure and success.
Nadeem Aslam’s latest novels bring the politics of post-9/11 terror to the fore by exploring various manifestations of trauma and vulnerability in the wake of 9/11. In The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) and The Golden Legend (2017), the British Pakistani author combines vulnerability with empathy to build up postcolonial narratives where the state of contemporary global terror is juxtaposed to empathic responses in intricate plotlines where Islamic culture and Islamophobia overlap. Thus, Aslam novels analysed here can be read as studies in vulnerability and empathy, and this is what the article aims to demonstrate. To do so, my essay will focus on such formal features as shifting focalisation, narrative gaps, and disjointed temporal structure, to show how empathic connections can be aroused. By embracing wounds and loss, the novel therefore favours an ethical model predicated on a practice of a dialogic structure between self and other.
This essay engages with the relationship between ethics and literature. To this end, it addresses the theoretical framework of narrative empathy as illustrative of the supposed ethical power of literary writing. Using a corpus of William Trevor’s fiction, Reading Turgenev (1991) and Love and Summer (2009) as case study, the essay suggests that Trevor’ use of metafictional devices (metalepses and the disnarrated), temporal disarray and multifocal perspectives tends to complicate the general assumption of empathy as necessarily easy and spontaneous. These formal strategies of literary representation manifest the underlying manipulative nature of narrative empathy, confronting readers with the ethical effects of empathy. In so doing, Trevor’s fiction edges towards the aesthetics of vulnerability in that it entails an ethics of reading and writing that reminds the reader of the darkest sides of human existence.
This essay explores Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift (2019) through the lens of ‘palimpsestic memory’, contending that the novel articulates an interconnectedness between memory and migration. Firstly, I will investigate how the tension between aeonic temporality and some paratextual elements that attempt to install order and direct the reader’s orientation mimic and resonate with the intricate motif of the palimpsest. Then, I will illustrate how the alternation between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narration and the format of the multigenerational novel contribute to create a palimpsestic tale where several generations and different stories are inextricably intertwined, generating a spiral pattern where the multiple and invisible trajectories of temporality are refracted and eventually converge.
My chapter investigates the influences of the transmodern paradigm on Tom McCarthy's latest novel, Satin Island (2015), which features U., a corporate anthropologist working on the questions of contemporaneity. In particular, I examine how the tangled web of data proliferation and the saturation of ideas tend to affect U.'s ontological status, revealing a crisis of agency in the age of the Anthropocene. Then, by drawing on the theoretical framework of the novel of ideas, I analyse how the novel can be said to engage with the metafictional paradox of "finding shape," showing that U.'s anthropological inquiries inhabit a buffer-zone, a temporal frame where stasis and acceleration, past and future are intertwined. I finally argue that McCarthy's linguistic and formal solutions situate Satin Island at the crossroads of transmodernity: while stretching the fictional representation to the limit, the narrative succumbs neither to detailed observation nor centrifugal alienation. By invoking a problematic relation between human and post-human, through a transmodern critique of our present age, the novel thus hints at a vision of humankind that resists the aesthetics of an evacuated subjectivity.
Recensione a: Biancamaria Rizzardi e Giovanni Bassi (a cura di). 2020. La luce e l’inchiostro. Scritture e fotografie in dialogo. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 172 pp., € 18,00, ISBN 978-88-4675-749-4
This article explores William Trevor’s depiction of hagiography and insanity in a body of novels and short stories portraying the violent intrusions of history in the lives of ordinary individuals. It is contended that at the core of Trevor’s fiction lie traumatic experiences coming to the surface when controversial Anglo-Irish history penetrates personal identities and that, in portraying the vulnerability of such precarious human conditions, an elegiac mode emerges. On the one hand, the article illustrates how hagiography and insanity contribute to amplify and mimic the destructive effects of historical frictions. By this it is meant that the fragmented syntax, the temporal disarray and the almost mute perspective of Trevor’s elegiac characters provide instances through which public traumas are acted out into the realm of the private. On the other hand, it is claimed that the very fact of embracing the wounds is an ethical gesture reminding readers of the restorative power of hagiography and insanity. It is finally suggested that one possible function of Trevor’s elegiac temper is to raise consciousness, implying that his eccentric characters issue an invitation to take account of the sense of loss informing his œuvre, where political violence is eventually compensated.
In his latest novel Clade (2015), Australian author James Bradley portrays apocalyptic scenarios in the aftermath of the ubiquitous climate change that is affecting our planet, while following the human conflicts of three generations of the Leith family. And yet, this article argues that the novel privileges an optative mood instead of the traditional collective catastrophe of canonical eco-fiction. To do so, the article scrutinises some formal strategies of narrative empathy, such as character identification and multiple focalisation, which favour the reader's emotional engagement. In the novel, vulnerable manifestations disclose a profound empathic orientation, addressing an ethics of care that implicates the reader affectively.
Drawing upon the convergence of ecocriticism and postcolonialism, my article explores Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), a novel that bridges human loss and environmental degradation. It is my contention that a green postcolonial aesthetics animates Desai’s complex novel that weaves fiction, history, realism and imagination. By staging human violence, gleaming landscapes and a rich ecological wealth of flora and fauna, The Inheritance of Loss exposes a critique of the anthropocentric positions, blurring the border between human and non-human.
A number of contemporary Indian novels in English, such as The Lowland, The Inheritance of Loss and Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, explore territorial conflicts in recent Indian history. Combining realist modes with postcolonial allegories, these novels offer a glimpse of gloomy post-Partition upheavals, such as the Naxal riots, the separatist movements for Gorkhaland and the Emergency, highlighting the ethical power of transnational fiction.
This article explores William Trevor’s Big House trilogy that is set against the backdrop of the early twentieth century Anglo-Irish tensions. By interweaving postcolonial theory and trauma studies, my investigation seeks to unveil the melancholic and anti-melancholic stance in Trevor’s fiction. Through narrative experimentalism, intertextual and intratextual links and symbolism, Trevor subverts the traditional features of the Big House literary tradition, showing that traumatic colonial history can offer a redemption of sort that discloses the transformative power of literary (postcolonial) imagination.
My article investigates Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines and Jhumpa Lahiri's story "When Mr. Pirzada came to dine" so as to propose an analysis of narratives which best capture the antagonisms of post-Partition India. The long shadow of the 1947 Partition entailed further small-scale partitions which have marked recent Indian history. Diasporic dislocations are hence documented in such narratives which, revolving around memories of loss and tensions, unveil the transformative and ethic power of transnational literature.
