The weird: a dis/orientation Luckhurst, Roger
Textual practice,
09/2017, Letnik:
31, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This essay attempts to explore the recent resurgence of interest in 'weird fiction' from Arthur Machen in the 1890s via H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s to the rise of the New Weird in 2003 and beyond in ...the works of China Miéville, M. John Harrison and Jeff VanderMeer. It aims to provide an overview of its slippery genre status, existing as it does in the interstices of gothic and science fiction, decadent and pulp fiction. But it also recognizes that the very slipperiness of the genre insidiously undermines any fixity of definition, constantly shifting boundaries and defying the act of ever being fully 'introduced'. An orientation in this emergent field is also about acknowledging disorientation.
The most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China todayIn this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant ...surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee-whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can only be reached underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions.Can Xue's masterful love stories for the new millennium trace love's many guises-satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling-against a kaleidoscopic backdrop drawn from East and West of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, sex and romance.
To many Muslims The Satanic Verses constitutes an utterly negative representation of Islam. ...this negative representation has been linked to the author's personal ideological hostility to Islam. ......the one good thing to have come out of this controversy may well be the revitalization of the debate on the "worldliness" of the literary system: the politics of textuality and representation, as well as the politics of interpretation. ...the novels, as I shall demonstrate, express at once the novelist's interpretation (representation) of social reality and articulate the writer's various alternatives for the overall reform of society. ...concepts as "Sufi Islam," "orthodox Islam," "revolutionary Islam," "Asharism," and "Mu'talizism" are used to provide explanation for attitudes and actions taken by characters in different social and historical contexts.
This is the first book ever to present a comparative reading of East Asian-Australian and East Asian-Canadian novels while addressing the literary and political cultures of Australia and Canada. ...Generally, the book examines the limits and possibilities fo
Filling in a blank spot in the history of twentieth-century women's writing, Carole Sweeney examines the work of five experimental writers, whose writing has been neglected in accounts of the ...development of post-1945 British literature.
Sandy Petrey here looks at the emergence of nineteenth-century French realism in the light of the concept of speech acts as defined by J. L. Austin and as exemplified by the history of the French ...Revolution. Through analysis of the techniques of representation in works by Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola, Petrey suggests that the expression of a truth depends on the same collective forces necessary to change a regime. According to Petrey, political legitimacy in the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration was established by means of a series of demonstrations that what words say cannot be interpreted without reference to the community to which they speak. Petrey first discusses the creation of France's National Assembly in 1789 as a foundational example of how speech acts can bring about historical transformation. He then challenges the most powerful twentieth-century assault on realist aesthetics, Roland Barthes's S/Z , and also considers the views of such contemporary critics as Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and Stanley Fish. During the Revolution, Petrey says, statements of truth were not descriptions of what was, but rather exhortations to produce what was not. Nineteenth-century French fiction represents in literary form a similar collectively authorized linguistic performance; the real in realism comes from representing facts not as they are in themselves but as they are produced and rejected in society. In the course of illuminating readings of three central realist works—Balzac's Pere Goriot , Stendhal's The Red and the Black , and Zola's Germinal —Petrey takes the position that the dilemmas of representation, far from being one of realism's blind spots, figure among its major narrative subjects.
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