Author: Jamie Gaston Flat / Round In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster defines “the hidden life” as those components of character that the reader cannot know from “external signs or history.”[1] Information concerning another person’s innermost thoughts and feelings, which would remain inaccessible to us in the course of standard social interaction will be disclosed to the readers of a (modern) novel. On this basis, Forster divides fictional… Read More »Hidden Life
In fall of 2016, eleven Duke faculty … In fall of 2016, eleven Duke faculty—all of whom were working on their own within their respective language departments—discovered that they shared a common object of knowledge and stood to benefit immensely from working as a group. The group included Nancy Armstrong (English), Miriam Cooke (Arabic), Roberto Dainotto (Italian), Anne Garréta (French), Shai Ginsburg (Hebrew), Aimee Kwon (Korean, Japanese), Cate Reilly (Russian),… Read More »The Project
Author: Rachel Tay Rhythm and Whole In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster defines “rhythm in fiction” as “repetition plus variation.” It is not the melody itself, he proposes, but that which is suspended within and goes on to be sustained beyond. Forster also designates rhythm as the “whole” of the “symphony,” since it is the centre of gravity around which notes compose themselves and melodies are harmonized in synchrony… Read More »Networks
Author: Mike Kleynman In “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” Fredric Jameson characterizes the late-capitalist or postmodern moment “by the displacement of time by space as a systemic dominant” (128) and a corresponding “reduction to the present or reduction to the body” (106). Contemporary aesthetic space becomes, then, a space of events, entities that exist and are consumed only in a present, since they occupy a space without occupying time. By their… Read More »Singularity
Author: Luoshu Zhang In Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure, Dennis Broe traces the development of two competing philosophical concepts of seriality in critical history. The first is the Nietzschean concept of seriality as the “ever-repeating eternal return” where time does not advance but stays in a perpetual state of repetition and circulation (Broe 137). This persistent circulation defies any notions of beginning and end,… Read More »Seriality
Author: Chad Heller The contemporary global novel, as I will show, grapples with the collapse of subjective and objective worlds through the technique of prosthesis as a supplement to the self. This concept of prosthesis interrogates the novel as a prosthetic device for the human, a technology that dramatizes the changing relationship between subject and object. Similar to how Fredric Jameson in “The Aesthetics of Singularity” defines the concept of… Read More »Prosthesis
Author: Yue Yu “Intervals,” as Jonathan Crary proposes in his book Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, is an “instant of disorientation” and “site of crisis” in the global present which can disrupt the order of the 24/7 control society (11, 89). As the trait of global capitalism, “the 24/7 control society” investigated by Gilles Deleuze or “the global integrated spectacle” of Guy Debord generates multiple symptoms with the… Read More »Intervals
Author: Effie Gianitsos How does the contemporary global novel remake the subject of the novel for the present hypermediated world that its readership presumably inhabits? To sketch an answer for this question, I want to think alongside Fredric Jameson, who has famously claimed the death of the subject in his influential study Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989). The death of the subject is intimately bound up… Read More »Internet Subject
Author: Victor Jeong When Robinson Crusoe asserts the island to be “a whole country” that exists in a relationship of “mere property” to his sovereign self, he establishes a logic of the novel that is concerned with the formation of the individual as a category of being in relation to personal and material property (Defoe 247). As the novel’s protagonist protects their own property against the antagonistic forces that constantly… Read More »Immunity
Author: Carson Welsh In his essay “Genesis of the Media Concept,” John Guillory marks a problem that has haunted theories of mediation since well before the twenieth century: a “philosophical confusion … between mediation as an abstract, even logical process and medium as material technology” (338). Recent and disparate work in media theory makes one wonder whether anything is not a medium in at least one of these two senses,… Read More »Immediacy
Author: Anvita Budhraja Global space in the contemporary novel is a deliberately crafted and carefully constructed setting for human action that reveals a concerted, programmatic effort to give meaning to the space the novel inhabits. The term “curation” springs to mind as it’s a term for a very particular guardianship or supervision of preserved and exhibited objects (OED). In other words, the creation of space through curation involves the selection… Read More »Curation
Author: Matthew Thomas In claiming the predominance of space over time in the era of late capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes that the conclusion we must take from this is “plain … in our time all politics is about real estate … from the loftiest statecraft to the most petty maneuvering around local advantage” (130). Building from Jameson here, one could say that the contemporary global novel too seems fixated on… Read More »Brand
