Category Archives: Wiley: Literature Compass

Letters for Ukraine. Textual and institutional forms of global responsibility

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Abstract

This essay analyses the epistolary correspondence between six Ukrainian and German-speaking authors published by WeiterSchreiben, a literary platform that belongs to the non-profit organisation WIR MACHEN DAS and which seeks to promote the work of exiled writers from regions affected by war and other humanitarian crises in the German cultural field. The essay argues that the collaborative, self-reflexive, and short form of the letters is particularly suitable to promote global responsibility and to quickly adapt to situations of political immediacy, thus accelerating literature's reaction capacity to ongoing conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine war. While tracing the connections between the genre and the human rights discourse and looking at the politics of address that create a bond of communion between the correspondents and have the potential to foster various kinds of political identification among readers, the essay also explores this literary initiative from a sociological perspective, challenging strict distinctions between textual and contextual dynamics. By drawing attention to the literary and political dimension of non-profit organisations such as WIR MACHEN DAS, the essay demonstrates that literature constitutes an important tool in civil society, which helps create forms of transnational solidarity and shape collective debates around migration and social injustice that transcend the borders of states.

Rainbow in Gethen: Queer utopia and community collectivism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Coming of Age in Karhide”

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This essay seeks to examine how Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction short story “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995) set in the planet of Gethen in the fictional Hainish universe envisions a political utopia of sequentially hermaphroditic humans to offer a succinct critique of traditional gender roles and conventional sexual customs while celebrating the potential of collective responsibility. While maintaining that the recent scholarship on queer utopias in SF has largely geared toward posthumanist articulations, the present essay argues that Ursula K. Le Guin who laid the genre conventions of queer utopic narratives unabashedly places her short story “Coming of Age in Karhide” within the ideals of humanism by upholding community as a unifying entity, at the same time carefully avoiding the pitfalls of anthropocentrism. Drawing from queer theorists and social scientists, this essay, while exemplifying the implications of a futuristic gender-neutral society, albeit partially, examines Le Guin's celebration of community collectivism in “Coming of Age in Karhide” to argue that the integration with the values and expectations of the larger community occasions individual growth and identity formation of the teenage protagonist and thereby, attests to the author's humanistic temperament.

The supply‐chain sublime: Spectacles of unagency in fictions of planetary economy

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This paper is about the literary representation of supply chains: the political-material pathways by which goods are produced and delivered to consumers. It considers the ethical and aesthetic problems posed by the fact that the daily lives of people living in consumer societies in the Global North are deeply dependent on material networks that sustain violent relations between people and with earth’s ecologies. How can we be ethical global citizens when we are already material global subjects? The paper considers how literature confronts this ethical-representational challenge, and asks whether literature might help us take responsibility over the material economic networks that structure our everyday lives. I examine two novels that make use of strikingly similar techniques for narrating their characters’ immersion in globalized economies: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018). Both novels strive to represent the incomprehensible global economy by calling attention to their inability to represent it. I argue that this technique—which I call the “supply chain sublime”—ultimately reflects the incapacity of current forms of collective political agency to manage our material lives.

Bequeathing “new sincerity” in the age of the homo digitalis: Confessionalism and authorial self‐consciousness in David Foster Wallace and Bo Burnham

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The notion of “New Sincerity” has become central to the study of David Foster Wallace's prose over the years. The present article explores how the tonal arrangement that characterises the movement has lived on to influence contemporary art, examining Bo Burnham's popular comedy musicals as a notable example of this influence. Wallace and Burnham's common stance concerning cultural reception is argued to be indissociable from their socio-cultural setting, with the two authors articulating parallel responses to an ongoing, multifaceted process of massification of public opinion, as well as to the consequences to cultural poiesis therein entailed.

Tracing social connections in the Victorian Jewish Writers Project

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Abstract

In March 2022, we launched the Victorian Jewish Writers Project (VJWP), a digital collection of texts written by nineteenth-century British Jews accompanied by short articles on significant authors, places, and events of the Anglo-Jewish world. When we began building the collection in 2021, our conceptual framework was clear: Victorian Jewry is underrepresented both in Jewish Studies and Victorian Studies, so we would create a resource to supply primary texts and some analytical information to anyone interested. Despite our familiarity with archive theory, we considered our role in the project as little more than what Latour calls intermediaries, or “mere informants.” Yet, the process of digitizing and publicizing a canon, particularly a canon tied to a cultural heritage, is an inherently social act, and in this article we will explore the modes of social engagement inherent in creating and maintaining digital archives. In particular, we make use of Latour’s actor-network theory to understand the relationships forged by archives in digital spaces.

Importing Arcadia into 18th‐century Madras: Poetics of the contact zone and the politics of genre in Eyles Irwin’s Saint Thomas’s Mount

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Eyles Irwin (1751–1817), an East India Company official who spent much of his life in the British settlement of Fort St. George, Madras, was one of the earliest practitioners of anglophone belles lettres in the Indian subcontinent, and his writings predate the development of a robust culture of English-language literary composition in the colony by quite a few years. The scant scholarly attention he has received belies his importance as an anticipator of the momentous literary-historical processes that would transform India's public sphere in the 19th century. This essay offers a contextual reading of Saint Thomas's Mount (1774), his earliest extant poem, which is avowedly modelled on canonical English topographical poems like Alexander Pope's Windsor-Forest (1713) and makes use of a host of neoclassical conventions, but which also differs from them in terms of the kind of landscape that is represented (Irwin's is a tropical landscape, with abundant mangoes, palms, and Oriental fauna, unlike Pope's pleasant, idyllic British park). However, Irwin's target readership being chiefly metropolitan, he contends with the difficulty of highlighting India's irreducible foreignness while simultaneously trying to ensure that readers in London do not find the Oriental descriptions too alien, incredible, and unrelatable. The authorial strategies he adopts to navigate this difficulty constitute the focus of the first part of the essay. The second (and final) part seeks to shed light on his hybrid, hyphenated identity as an Indian-born Irish poet, and on his perception of himself as somehow fundamentally unlike those Britons who never ventured beyond the geographical confines of Europe, let alone setting down roots in places on the very fringes of the British empire. The affiliative bonds he forges with expatriate colonial officials living in and confronting the hardships of life in the monsoonal tropics mark him as a member of the steadily growing community of Anglo-Indians in the Indian subcontinent. While noting the shifting connotations of the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, this essay will also examine the implications of identifying Irwin as a member of this initially amorphous but steadily growing community.

“The heat of a multitudinous assembly”: Striking short fiction and the rise of feminist potencia

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This article considers how a recent wave of Latin American short fiction captures with immediate topicality new forms of transversal political subjectivity engendered by the international feminist reinvention of the strike in the 21st century. Drawing on Verónica Gago's theorization of the political cartography of feminist potencia (power), alongside the work of Silvia Federici, Rita Segato and Sayak Valencia, it considers how the short story form facilitates a strategic recognition of interconnected violences perpetrated against women and feminized bodies, “mapping forms of violence based on their organic connection, without losing sight of the singularity of the production of the nexus between them” (Gago, 2020, p. 58). In particular, the article examines two exemplary short story collections, Cars on Fire (2020) by Mónica Ramón Ríos and Things We Lost in the Fire (2017) by Mariana Enríquez, considering how these writers repurpose the potential for socio-criticism embedded in the fantastical short story by offering a multi-focal critique of how patriarchy and gender violence interact with the structural inequalities unleashed by neoliberal capitalism. The article also considers how these riotous collections mediate the transversal fabric of communitarian struggle in feminist imaginaries, drawing narrative energy from the localised proliferation of neighbourhood assemblies and solidarity networks, while speaking to transnational feminist movements more broadly.

Seeing Shakespeare: Narco narratives and neocolonial appropriations of Macbeth in the US–Mexico Borderlands

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This essay examines the racializing logics and consequences of drawing analogies between the works of William Shakespeare and the devastatingly violent realities of the drug trade in the Americas. The particular prominence of Macbeth in the wide range of Shakespearean invocations and appropriations in contemporary US narratives about narcotrafficking cannot be attributed simply to the fact that it is a tale of bloody ambition. Rather, the repeated mapping of a play that comes to its conclusion with an English military invasion of its “barbarous” Scottish neighbors onto the US–Mexico Borderlands speaks to much deeper histories of colonial conquest and to neocolonial interventionist policies and actions of the present. The essay concludes by turning to two recent instances in which theater artists have translated and significantly revised Macbeth in order to reframe dominant narratives about narcotrafficking, racial supremacy, and the border. These productions demonstrate the disruptive and transformative potential of Shakespearean appropriations that resist neocolonial power structures and ideologies.

Philology and racist appropriations of the medieval

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Recent decades have seen an increase in white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages. While many medievalists have sought to distance medieval studies from racist appropriations, these appropriations echo positions advanced and legitimized by philologists especially during the nineteenth century. Medieval studies as a discipline developed in the nineteenth century during the rise of nationalist movements, which often manifested as racial nationalism in Europe and the United States, and philologists actively participated in these movements by projecting contemporary national identity unto a constructed medieval past. These philologists often conflated language and race, and their nationalist scholarship helped justify imperialism. Although the ideas of these philologists are considered outdated, they set the foundation for racist appropriations of the Middle Ages and established nationalist frameworks that continue to influence the academy.