Category Archives: Wiley: Literature Compass

Illusions of textuality: The semiotics of literary memes in contemporary media

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Abstract

This article seeks to account for the phenomenon where cultural productions are able to transcend different chronotopes and masquerade in myriad forms while sustaining an illusion of itself as a text. Using the Barthian distinction between work and Text as its framework, the article argues that multimodal semiotics offers a theoretically viable perspective on the global circulation of cultural artifacts by way of the concepts of memes, distribution, resemiotization, and assemblage. The central argument is this: what we call a text in common parlance is in fact a node within a networked assemblage of individually constituted works loosely connected through a substrate recognizability of memes. Operating at the level of this network is the Barthian Text that is always in-progress and can never really be completed. The article concludes by proposing that with the imminence of Web 5.0 and in light of the ever-pervasive influence of artificial intelligence in cultural production, it is imperative that we adopt nonlinear thinking to understand the shifting semioscapes in digital space and their impact on contemporary textuality.

Social network analysis, habitus and the field of literary activity

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Abstract

Social network analysis that draws upon the correspondence of writers has the potential to indicate aspects of the writers' habitus, that is, the economic, social and cultural capital represented by the relations between authors, poets and dramatists, and their correspondents. Social network analysis can visualise and reveal otherwise covert aspects of the field of literary activity. In particular, it can show the flow of cultural, symbolic, social and economic capital through the literary ecosystem. The article presents an introduction to social network analysis, describes a modest case study, and identifies possible future research directions.

‘Delicate ironies quite imperceptible on its surface’: Henry S. Whitehead’s weird tales and American empire in the Caribbean

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Abstract

This article mounts an initial exploratory engagement with the weird fiction of Henry S. Whitehead, framed by American imperial expansion into the Caribbean in the interwar years. It situates Whitehead and his work within the wider historical context and shows how Whitehead himself used and played with history as part of his fiction. The article considers the role of light in Whitehead's fiction and imperial projects, as well as the way that Whitehead's work, as horror fiction, both shapes and seeks to dispel notions of the Caribbean as a space of horror. As well as offering some initial conclusions, the article seeks to open further lines for future investigation.

Can’t read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

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Abstract

Based on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close-ups of expressive faces vis-à-vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these “broker faces” become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face-screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of “broker faces” as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a “broker face” in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge.

Futures of english studies: Australia

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Abstract

This paper considers the professionalization of literary studies in Australian universities. It traces ways in which its interdisciplinary formations have been shaped not only by the cultural contexts of colonialism and postcolonialism, but also by institutional factors and budgetary pressures. Nevertheless, it argues this framework has also created intellectual opportunities for positively reshaping the subject so as to bring it into discursive conversation with cognate fields. It suggests that the repositioning of Australian literature and literary studies in relation to World Literature may offer the prospect of opening up the field for the benefit of scholars the world over.

The Africa paradox: Locating Africa in eighteenth‐century studies

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Abstract

This article is about why Africa is overlooked in eighteenth-century literary studies. Africa’s neglect is not merely a problem of attention. Neither the parameters of the field nor the tools of the discipline appear particularly suited for engaging Africa as anything other than an invention of the European imagination. In what follows, I seek to bring more clarity to the origins of this paradox and to contextualize some of its governing assumptions not in order to solve it but to show that having already solved it can’t and doesn’t need to be a prerequisite for scholars of eighteenth-century literature to face it head-on. The first section offers a brief account of how this paradox arose from the political and intellectual matrix of the mid-twentieth century when African Studies was first institutionalized in the West. The subsequent sections highlight the way this history has shaped—both directly and indirectly—the way scholars and teachers of eighteenth-century literature have understood Africa and their obligations to it and suggests some ways we might begin to rethink Africa’s place in the field

“For the planet. For home”: Generating planetary responsibility in the climate fiction of Los Angeles

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Abstract

This article argues that three prominent recent works of Los Angeles climate fiction—Maria Amparo Escandon's L.A. Weather (2021), Alexandra Kleeman's Something New Under the Sun (2021) and Paul Beatty's The Sellout (2016)—generate a sense of planetary responsibility. Despite their regional settings, these novels possess a planetary consciousness, illuminating the local-global connectivity of climate change and the Anthropocene. As one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitting cities in the world, L.A. drives climate injustice, with its gargantuan energy consumption having an adverse impact on populations both within and far beyond its own borders. This article explains how literature, and climate fiction particularly, can highlight this inequality at micro and macro scales, and encourage collective opposition to it. I argue that the novels of Escandon, Kleeman and Beatty conjure the impression of responsibility identified by Kristian Shaw and Sara Upstone in their overview of post-postmodern fiction, while also exhibiting the ‘planetarity’ discussed by Amy Elias and Christian Moraru: a term to describe the global worldview of contemporary culture. In applying these concepts to the novels examined here, I ultimately contend that Los Angeles climate fiction demystifies the spatial and political dimensions of the Anthropocene, generating planetary responsibility and addressing local and global injustice.