‘Legally Recognised Undead’: Essence, Difference, and Assimilation in Daniel Waters’s Generation Dead

Vampire literature since Le Fanu at least has been conspicuously about ‘Otherness’, that crucial term of identity politics, and has thus rendered itself most obligingly to interpretation in terms of those politics—at least, since the rise of that paradigm in cultural analysis, it has been available to be read that way. Appearing deceptively human, animated, yet without a soul, vampires have conveniently represented alterity, whether foreignness or deviant sexuality, or both. Lately, zombies have been spotted lurching alongside their fellow undead in greater numbers, embodying otherness in a different, perhaps less exotic manner. But it was in Joss Wheedon’s Buffyverse (at a time, the 1990s, when identity politics in the US and Western world generally became mainstream) that we first saw a world where different undead cultures interact, are tolerated if not granted legal status, or are persecuted for their difference, particularly in Angel, with the Caritas nightclub, or in the various demon joints in Buffy. On the basis of these possibilities, later texts imagine the consequences of the claims to citizenship of the undead—and two kinds of responses that reveal very common stances on contemporary identity politics: a liberal one and a conservative one. The undead may be legally recognised, or they maybe neglected or even persecuted by the State. I shall examine these polarities in books from two series: the Southern Vampire novels by Charlene Harris (rather than the HBO True Blood adaptation for TV, which handles these themes rather differently), and the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series by Laurell K. Hamilton. I then consider one of the most dialectically subtle of recent presentations of undead would-be citizens: Daniel Waters’s Generation Dead novel for young adults avoids making obvious points or mechanically allegorising, and reveal the potential illiberal menace of the State, yet also dares to mock certain platitudes of liberal tolerance of difference

‘But by blood no wolf am I’: Language and Agency, Instinct and Essence – Transcending Antinomies in Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver trilogy

Young Adult dark romance is often more questioning than its adult counterpart; different, less constraining commercial imperatives are perhaps at work, or readers’ expectations less fixed. This chapter will show how, woven into a sensitive coming-of-age narrative of first love and familial problems, Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver trilogy performs a far more sophisticated interrogation of the boundaries of animality and humanity than other such fictions, highlighting the centrality of language and its relationship to agency. The hero, Sam’s, struggle with his lupine nature becomes an existentialist refusal to be defined by nature; other characters are tempted instead to yield to a fatalistic surrender of will. The books are tantalisingly ambivalent about the appeal of the instinctual and the borderline between an embodied humanity and the animal, particularly as manifested in the love affair of the teenage protagonists. For Marcuse, the surplus-repression of the proximity senses (smell, taste) enforces the isolation of individuals in civilisation. Stiefvater continually emphasises the sense of smell both as a trigger to sexual attraction and as an aspect of the pack sociality and sense of belonging of the wolves. Through such devices, she concretely renders the nearness of Grace and Sam (her young lovers) to wolfhood. This is contrasted with her exploration of human subjectivity through language, particularly in the perceptive depiction of silences and miscommunications and her hero’s absorption in books and poetry

Current, April 01, 1967

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‘The Commerce of Light’: The Eighteenth-Century Dialogue, Communicative Reason, and the Formation of the English Novel

This thesis analyses printed eighteenth-century dialogues in English. It considers them amidst the dialogic nature of cultural life in eighteenth-century Britain more widely. It argues that many printed dialogues successfully imagine, or fruitfully engage with imagined, ideal speech situations. In addition it argues that these texts had a sophistication that stemmed from a dialogicity enabled by the growth of the public sphere. It is alert to novelistic features of dialogues: characterisation, verisimilitude, narrative inter-est. That is important for this thesis, as the richness of eighteenth-century dialogues plays an important part in the formation of the early English novel. Chapter 1 explores eighteenth-century theories of language, many of which posit an originary dialogue. I consider Mandeville’s theories in The Fable of the Bees, James Harris’s Hermes, Monboddo’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language, and, briefly, Horne Tooke. Chapter 2 considers the consensual aspects of these dialogues by looking at Aphra Behn’s translation of Fontenelle, A Discovery of New Worlds; Shaftesbury’s The Moralists; Mandeville’s Fable again; and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Chapter 3 explores the polemical nature of dialogues, looking at Berkeley’s Alciphron, and some neglected dialogues of the 1790s, both radical and conservative, by Thomas Day, Sir William Jones, Thomas Spence, and in response, writers such as Hannah More. Chapter 4 depicts the absorption of the genre into the novel, arguing that the dialogue is an overlooked component of a multigeneric form. Novelists embedded formal debates into their works, and the critical openness that characterises dialogues of this period in-formed the spirit of the novel. In many novelists, the concern with love and the gestures at inclusiveness towards women led to an unprecedented fusion of mutual intellection and wooing. I examine the absorption of the structures of formal dialogue into novels by way of Richardson’s Pamela, Sarah Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa and The Cry, and novels of the 1790s, such as Robert Bage’s Hermsprong. The ‘Commerce of Light’ between the sexes is dwelt on, revealing a new facet of the ‘Rise of the Novel’ debate

Pushing the Margins: A Dynamic Model of Idiosyncrasy Credit in Top Management Team Behavior

Top management teams (TMT) behave both conventionally and unconventionally to implement strategic change in organizations. These behaviors are information used by organizational stakeholders to evaluate the TMT. However, because of limited cognitive resources, the cost of cognitive changes and the inherent variability of environments and relationships, stakeholders operate using the “latitude of norms,” which provides thresholds to measure the need for reappraisal and change. We explore this process of discontinuous reappraisals by reviewing past idiosyncratic credit literature and integrate it with expectancy violations theory to propose a theory of dynamic idiosyncratic credit. Both research and managerial implications are discussed