On Victor Li’s \u3cem\u3eThe Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity\u3c/em\u3e

The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity (Victor Li

The Victorian Newsletter (Spring 1987)

The Victorian Newsletter is sponsored for the Victorian Group of Modern Language Association by the Western Kentucky University and is published twice annually.Arnold among the Contentions of Criticism / Holly Laird -- Closure and the Victorian Novel, 1986 / Marianna Torgovnick -- Victorian Weaving: The Alienation of Work into Text in "The Lady of Shalott" / Gerhard Joseph -- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Anne Brontë's Jane Eyre / Margaret Mary Berg -- The Poor Fictionist' s Conscience: Point of View in the Palliser Novels / Patricia A. Vernon -- A New Perspective: Naturalism in George Moore's A Mummer's Wife / Judith Mitchell -- Browning's Testament of His Devisings in The Ring and the Book / Joseph A. Dupras -- Books Receive

Hosts and hostages: Mass immigration and the power of hospitality in post-war British and Caribbean literature

This article examines the challenge to colonialist centre-periphery relations in post-war novels by white British and Caribbean writers. Concentrating on the relationship between political debates surrounding mass immigration and the marginalization of non-white migrants within British communities, I analyse texts that depict the threshold of the home as the politicized site of racial tension, namely Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and Anthony Burgess’s The Right to an Answer (1960). In varying ways, these texts depict the durability of centre-periphery relations at local levels through the informal segregation of the colonizer and the colonized. In doing so they point to what Jacques Derrida has outlined, in Of Hospitality (2000), as the power relationship inherent in policies of immigration, whereby the host-nation remains in control of the conditions upon which hospitality rests

Bomb and Climate Change in Fact and Fiction

This essay counterpoints two existential threats in our lifetimes—nuclear apocalypse and climate catastrophe—comparing how they have been recorded in historical documents and how they have registered in the American imagination. It surveys non-fiction and fiction, including a few films, to uncover persistent patterns of American denial that may lead—in fact, scientists increasingly believe will lead—to climate apocalypse. Strong historical and thematic similarities exist until, surprisingly and even shockingly, they diverge at their imagined endpoints. My essay turns to examples from the United States’ history as a nuclear power. These include governmental suppression of information after the bombing of Hiroshima, willful distortions of how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, and controversial museum exhibitions since 2000. I also analyze American perceptions of climate change, as directly informed by numerous, but flaccid, reports, conferences, and summits on “global warming” that activist youth groups now parody in postings and memes. The essay examines the kind of doom-laden fantasies that I myself once had about the threat of nuclear annihilation. It looks to the worlds of fiction and film for iterations of the same kind of dread and doom. Imaginative projections in fiction include motifs such as “empty cities” with no sense of human responsibility for the absence of people, strong themes of racial disparity, and the exploration of human depravity versus the possibility of cooperation and community. Primary fictional examples of nuclear plots include Cormac McCarthy and Octavia Butler, and the suppressed 1959 racial drama The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, starring Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens. For cli-fi fiction, the essay touches on similar preoccupations in novels by Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a host of 21st-century others. My topic has renewed urgency in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reintroduced the nuclear threat and forestalled action to slow climate change. But—and this emerges as an important payoff in the essay—nuclear and climate change narratives differ strongly in how we conceive of their endpoints. Despite sporadic fears about terrorists after 9/11, about North Korea, and now about Ukraine, Americans still by and large expect that, absent a true madman (Putin being a chief suspect), nuclear restraint will hold. In contrast, with regard to climate catastrophe, an increasing number of examples in both fact and fiction now expect climate catastrophes that will end humanity but (unlike nuclear winter), not end life on Earth which will remain, and increasingly become, both inventive and fecund. The essay ends with a meditation on the possible, even likely, consequences of expecting, and even accepting, the inevitability of climate apocalypse on a human scale. Archive: Selected 20th and 21st-century American novels, grouped by theme and outcome and cited briefly; a few 20th and 21st-century films; best-selling non-fiction books: Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. Weisman’s The World Without Us, the History Channel’s Life After People, Scranton’s We’re Doomed, Now What? Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, Rich’s Losing Earth and others. Academic books by Nixon, Scranton, Ghosh, Purdy, McClintock, and others.

Back to the Future: "The New Nature Writing," Ecological Boredom, and the Recall of the Wild

The “new nature writing” has been seen as a response, especially in the United Kingdom, to the growing sense that earlier paradigms of nature and nature writing are no longer applicable to current geographical and environmental conditions. At the same time, some writers who have been associated with the “new nature writing” dislike the term, criticizing it for its residual parochialism, its continuing class and gender biases, and its paradoxical adherence to the very categories – particularly wildness – it wishes to confront. This article does not set out to dismiss the “new nature writing” or to assess which writers might be the best fit with it; instead, it looks at its indebtedness to the earlier literary and cultural traditions it claims to interrogate and deconstruct. This debt is often expressed in terms of belatedness, whether acknowledged or not, in relation to earlier notions of wilderness and wildness – inherently slippery categories that multiply and ramify in the “new nature writing,” which has neither managed to dissociate itself from wildness nor to redefine it for our ecologically troubled times