“Siblings, Kinship and Allegory in Jesmyn Ward’s Fiction and Nonfiction”

This article examines the centrality of sibling relationships in Jesmyn Ward’s fiction and nonfiction, focusing specifically on her second novel Salvage the Bones (2011) and memoir Men We Reaped (2013) but referencing all of her long-form works. It analyzes Ward’s repeated depictions of siblings supporting each other in the absence of protective or nurturing parents, and argues that this can be read allegorically – as citizens supporting each other in the absence of the state. Using and developing Gary Johnson’s notion of “intradiegetic allegory,” it argues that Ward’s specific narrative strategies reveal intersections between the experience of traumatic violence and systemic or “slow violence.” Furthermore it examines Ward’s writing in the context of critical debates about the enduring uses of trauma as an interpretive framework. For instance, while Lauren Berlant’s influential argument for “moving away from the discourse of trauma … when describing what happens to persons and populations as an effect of catastrophic impacts,” suggests an emerging impasse between trauma and a new emphasis on the systemic, Ward’s writing urges us to consider the ways traumatic events are experienced in the context of systemic violence

The End of the 90s in Porochista Khakpour's The Last Illusion, Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation

This article argues that three contemporary novels – Porochista Khakpour's The Last Illusion (2014), Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room (2017), and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) – offer correctives to prevalent histories of the American 1990s that depict this period as a time of stability, tolerance, and optimism. These novels offer specific vectors of critique, attending to the advance of social and cultural forms of neoliberalism, popular notions of the “alternative” or liberal 90s, and address a sequence of ruptures and social turbulence preceding “9/11” – often seen as the abrupt conclusion of the “long 90s.” Additionally, the historical narratives of these novels each build in depictions of the September 11 attacks, which decenter them and question the exceptionalization of this event. I argue for the value in reading these novels together and demonstrate how they speak to and mirror each other in productive ways

The Implicated Neoliberal Subject in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

This article argues that in Bleeding Edge, Pynchon moves from an oppositional schema in which the world is divided into elect and preterite populations towards one that is concerned with implication and complicity. The article uses Michael Rothberg 's The Implicated Subject as the basis for analysis, and notably his argument that to be implicated in wrongdoing often involves a kind of structural blindness towards suffering elsewhere. In the case of Bleeding Edge, the protagonist, Maxine Tarnow, is implicated in the violence committed in order to secure the hegemony of neoliberalism. The article describes Maxine 's gradual recognition of her own blindness, and hence of her implication in the harms perpetrated in the name of neoliberalism. It begins by noting that her experience of neoliberalism is one of process and of immaterial exchange. The second part of the article argues that the introduction of Nicholas Windust shows how neoliberalism may be an experience of rupture or trauma for those outside the developed world. Finally, with the attacks on New York, the same violence rebounds against its source; the attacks therefore act as the final stage in Maxine's increasing awareness of her own implication

Joseph O'Neil's Netherland and 9/11 Fiction

This article argues that Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland (2008) self-consciously addresses some of the problematic aspects of the emerging canon of ‘9/11 fiction’. Netherland subverts one of the dominant thematic rubrics of the canon, marriage and relationships, by politicizing this area that has led Richard Gray to state that in many examples of 9/11 fiction, ‘the crisis is in every sense of the word, domesticated’. Secondly, it moves beyond the Manhattan or Wall Street milieus that dominate these texts, and grants significant space and voice to a hitherto marginalized New York. Thirdly, it overtly explores the problematic fault line between personal and public trauma, and lastly, it explicitly asks the question that is only obliquely engaged with in other 9/11 fictions: what is the lasting impact of the attacks? In working through some of the trends and tropes that have preoccupied the literary response to the attacks, O’Neil is able to illuminate certain aspects of a conflicted response to 9/11 and work towards points of reconciliation between the polarized ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ frames of interpretation of the attacks

The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity

No abstract available

Blake Schwarzenbach and the anxieties of American punk rock: 1991–present

This article argues that Blake Schwarzenbach was a pivotal figure in the evolution of American punk from the early 1990s. Schwarzenbach’s journey as a punk figure has exemplified some of the interconnected ‘anxieties’ of this period relating to punk aesthetics and philosophies, authenticity and ‘selling out’, and the roles of literary cultures. Schwarzenbach’s music, particularly with his first major band Jawbreaker, has also consistently artistically engaged with these anxieties. I argue that Schwarzenbach’s life and work has much to say generally about the radical potential and limitations of American punk, and that it ultimately, and perhaps conversely, embodies the enduring value and appeal of punk as an idea – despite its various iterations, countless sub-genres, and the ever-shifting landscapes of its scenes

The Ordinary Literary World of Lodge 49

This article argues that Jim Gavin's short-lived series Lodge 49 (2018-2019) presents a vision of Long Beach, CA, which is highly distinctive in the diffuse yet deeply embedded, affective, and material roles reading and writing play in its inhabitants' lives. This is a world of local libraries, books on tape, prolific and eccentric genre writers, online poetry workshops, beat reporters who care about story, and celebrity CEO biographies — as well as mystical and alchemical texts. There are allusions to Joyce, Keats and Thoreau, but these appear amidst everyday acts of reading, writing, researching and storytelling that structure and connect characters' lives. These acts offer a refuge from unfulfilling and exploitative labor, the neoliberal culture of competition, and the near-constant threats of redundancy, job loss, and precarity the show's characters face