Book of abstracts

Material Realisms in Contemporary British Literature

 

Book of abstracts

 

 

‘Traumatic Realism’ and the Synaesthetic Phenomenology of War:

Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone

Isabelle Brasme, Université de Bourgogne

 

I propose to revisit the divide that is typically agreed upon when considering the history of realism in the 20^th and early 21^st century. When we look in closer detail at the evolution of representation in the prose of the early 20^th century and divest ourselves of the consensual narrative of modernist writing as rejecting mimesis and realism, we realise that many instances of what is commonly regarded as ‘modernist’ writing in fact never relinquished the mimetic impulse.

In contrast to the traditional academic discourse which claims that the First World War played a major role in the breakdown of realism, I argue that the reverse was often true. Writers who had a direct frontline experience certainly felt compelled to renew the techniques they were developing before 1914, but this renewal did not lead to a renunciation of realism: the war experience fostered a reinvention of the relationship between literature and reality. Although concerned with the Holocaust, Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘traumatic realism’ (2000) fully applies to WWI writing: these authors felt compelled to strive for a revivified and deepened mimetic mode precisely as they were interrogating the limits of representation in the context of the war. They were largely doing so for ethical reasons: not only to bear witness, but to engage with issues of vulnerability and grievability. In the case of the war nurse, the choice of rendering the gruesome reality of the evacuation hospital also operates as a form of resistance to the totalising ‘ethos’ of state propaganda in which the materiality of the soldier’s wounded body or corpse is conveniently erased.

My talk will first take a fresh look at Aristotle’s definition of the mimesis-muthos pair so as to disprove the conventional consideration of ‘modernist’ writing as anti-mimetic. Secondly, I will demonstrate that in literary testimonies of the First World War, the materiality of the experience is crucial in allowing the authors to develop a synaesthetic phenomenology of the war that relies on sensory experience. In this regard, these texts anticipate new materialism and current material-realist fiction. This bears particularly rich consequences when we look at women’s writing, as will be evidenced through Mary Borden’s engagement with the ‘entangled’ materiality of the ravaged environment and of the mutilated or dying body in The Forbidden Zone. The very concept of subject is interrogated in Borden’s fragments: this ontological questioning also has repercussions of an ideological and ethical nature. What I ultimately hope to demonstrate is how relevant our current considerations on ‘vibrant matter’ and ‘transcorporeality’ are to texts engaged with representing the crisis that largely contributed to the emergence of our contemporary world.

 

Bibliography

Primary sources

Borden, Mary. The Forbidden Zone. London: Heinemann, 1929.

Secondary sources

Adorno, Theodor. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke UP,  2007.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005.

—. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. 2004. London

and New York: Verso, 2006.

—. Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009.

Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London: U. of Minnesota P., 2008.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985.

—. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991.

—. Alterity & Transcendence. Translated by Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.

Walezak, Émilie. Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing. Realism, Feminism, Materialism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

 

 

 

“Real Materialisms: from Marx’s Primitive Accumulation to Trans-corporeality in Smith’s NW, Lanchester’s Capital and Coe’s Number 11.”

Sara Thornton, Université Paris Cité

 

This paper will firstly return to Marx’s Capital (1867) to look at some of the founding concepts of political economy and materialist thought, be it through primitive accumulation, commodity fetichism or congealed labour, or the way in which like Engels, he detects a mineralization of labouring bodies. We will consider how these concepts, critiqued by David Harvey and reimagined by post-marxist thinkers, have informed our understanding of ourselves and our interface with the urban capitalist scene.  We will also seek to understand how historical materialism has acted as a grid in our reading of what Lukacs called the bourgeois realist novel and which has, in turn, coloured our reception of the contemporary novel. Smith, Lanchester and Coe work masterfully with the ghosts of political economy Past and reinvest them with new power as they look at the effects of the city space on body and mind.

 

 

 

Ambiguous Care in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun.

Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès, Université du Mans

 

This presentation will delve into Ishiguro’s ambiguous representation of care understood as a quality of attention paid to others but also as a potential form of recuperation of empathetic feelings by contemporary forms of material capitalism. As Ishiguro’s dystopian novels Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun pose the question of the ethical limitations of contemporary societies’ scientific advancements by unveiling the complicities of science (including cloning and AI) with materialistically based social and political logics, they pinpoint the constant conversation of literature and the arts with our material world. The development of plot and characters in his recent novels, combined with the use of a deliberately ambiguous and limited narrative voice, serve to complexify notions of care and insert them in the material reality of our posthuman, post-anthropocentric world. Thus, Ishiguro’s novels explore the possibility of non-human care and human lack of care in the age of the anthropocene, inducing the reader to ponder his or her relation to the materiality of the world through that of the text, and to appraise the political role of literature and the arts in our tech-savvy societies.

 

Bibliography

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.

Baker, Djoymi. “‘Being the Spiders’: The Human-Animal in Kazuo Ishiguro’s and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go.” Journal of Animal Ethics, vol. 11, no. 2, 2021, pp. 97–105. 

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.

Bernard, Catherine. “Dismembering / Remembering Mimesis: Martin Amis, Graham Swift.” Postmodern Studies, n°7, “British Postmodern Fiction.” Theo D'haen and Hans Bertens, eds. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994: 121-144.

———. Matière à réflexion. Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains. Paris: PUPS, 2018.

Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity, 2019.

Ganteau, Jean-Michel. The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative. London: Routledge, 2023.

Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.

McDonald, Keith. “Days of past futures: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as ‘speculative memoir’.” Biography, Vol. 30, No. 1, Winter 2007, pp. 74-83.

Schwetman, John David. “‘Shadowy Objects in Test Tubes’: The Ethics of Grievance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, 2017, pp. 421–40. 

Walezak, Emilie. Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing. Realism, Feminism, Materialism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Whitehead, Anne. “Writing with Care: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go". Contemporary Literature, Vol. 52, No. 1 (SPRING 2011), pp. 54-83

 

 

 

The Material Realism of Pastoral: The Case of Sarah Hall’s Haweswater (2002)

Constance Pompié, Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry

 

“After the war he began painting with startling realism, almost photographic accuracy” (Hall 2002) declares the narrator of Haweswater about a painter who depicts scenes from the valley of Mardale in the Lake District. This comment mirrors Hall’s own aesthetics, as the novel showcases two of the most quintessential elements of the realist novel: an omniscient narrator and recurring descriptions and inventories stemming from minute attention to detail (Hamon 19).

Haweswater recounts the dispossession of a farming community as the valley of Mardale has to be flooded to provide water to the cities of the North of England. As such, it is premised on a pastoral ethos whereby it represents the everyday life of famers following what Paul Alpers calls the “pastoral anecdote” (Alpers 22). The farmers’ lives and labour are memorialised through extremely detailed descriptions, so that the ordinary is what prevails in the face of the extraordinary event. Using the archetypal narrative device of the flood, Hall presents a material realist tale in which pastoralism meets realism.

One cannot help but wonder how the pastoral can coexist with a realist aesthetics since the pastoral has been largely criticised for the idealisation of its representations (Williams, Barrell and Bull, Sales). Hall repurposes the pastoral ethos and delves into what Terry Gifford calls the post-pastoral (Gifford 479) thereby bridging the gap between the pastoral and realism. One step further, I argue that Hall’s realism partakes in the neo-materialist turn represented by Stacy Alaimo, Jane Benett, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, as the novel discloses a reassessment of what it means to be an embodied human subject living within ecosystems. In Haweswater, to be human means being entangled (Barad 393) and trans-corporeal (Alaimo 2) by sharing a body with minerals, animals, plants and water.

What I aim to demonstrate is that Sarah Hall’s Haweswater brings to the fore a contemporary version of realism: one that inventories species, people, and matter, one that showcases the role of embeddings and entanglements, one that highlights the ethics of paying attention (Ganteau 166) to the detail of reality on several scales. By blending post-pastoral and material realism, Hall’s novel sheds light on another form of empiricism (Bernard 17) underlining the vulnerability of human subjects and the necessity to represent the contact zones and entanglements they harbour with other species.

 

Bibliography

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2010.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. 

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.

Bernard, Catherine. Matière à réflexion. Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains. Paris: PUPS, 2018.

Boxall, Peter. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.

Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity, 2019. 

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. 

Ganteau, Jean-Michel. The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative. London: Routledge, 2023.

Hall, Sarah. Haweswater. Faber & Faber, 2002.

Hamon, Philippe. Du Descriptif. 4e édition. ed. Paris: Hachette Supérieur, 1994. Print.

Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Walezak, Emilie. Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing. Realism, Feminism, Materialism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 

 

 

“Here’s where it all ends: a long, straight road between fields.” (Harrison 2015): Melissa Harrison’s novels and the materiality of nature

Cécile Beaufils, Sorbonne Université

 

Contemporary British nature writing has recently been highly concerned with the experience of precariousness in both the human experience and the natural world while experimenting with the materiality of books. It is also increasingly dominated by life-writing (as evidenced by recent winners of the two most prevalent literary prizes in the genre, the Nan Shepherd Prize and the Wainwright Prize), while general literary fiction is permeated with a growing concern for the environment (Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, for instance). Melissa Harrison’s novels, when she writes for adults, bear the trace of a desire to reflect on the interaction between the human and nonhuman worlds, and this is particularly prominent in At Hawthorn Time (2015), and more recently the historical novel All Among the Barley (2018). The two novels reveal a clear attention to caring about nature and caring about human communities, showing the author’s drive to creating and using a new idiom to engage with the materiality of these concerns.

This paper aims to examine Melissa Harrison’s fiction as it engages with the natural world and teases out new ways of weaving material concerns about nature in her narratives. As she specifically reworks and challenges pastoral tropes, she creates realist fiction which engages with the nonhuman world with clear political concerns regarding vulnerability. Precarious characters (Jack in At Hawthorn Time) in violent situations (in All Among the Barley’s depiction of the rise of fascism, for instance) interact with the nonhuman world in a way that, as we will contend, reinvests realism with care, and connection in a profoundly political manner.

 

Bibliography

Primary sources

Harrison, Melissa. All Among the Barley. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

---. At Hawthorn Time. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Secondary Sources

Barker, Meghanne. “You Have Been Misconnected”. Critical Inquiry, vol. 50, n^o 2, January 2024, p. 201‑24. DOI, https://doi.org/10.1086/727641.

Bernard, Catherine. Matière à réflexion. Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains. Paris: PUPS, 2018.

Boxall, Peter. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.

Barnett, Joshua Trey. Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2022.

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012.

Moslund, Sten Pultz, et al., eds. How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2020.

Walezak, Emilie. Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing. Realism, Feminism, Materialism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

 

 

Embodied Memory and Textures of Textuality: Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under

Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University

 

If material realism seeks to revisit the importance of matter in defining reality and the entanglements of matter and memory, Daisy Johnson’s debut novel Everything Under, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, appears as an intricate case-study to explore these enmeshments. Balancing between psychological tensions, childhood nightmares, and the everyday ordinary, constituting the uncanny opacity and murkiness of reality, it recounts the story of mother and daughter(s) and the past surfacing through the memory of their life on a canal boat on a river in modern-day Oxfordshire. Main character Gretel is a lexicographer, making an escape into the world of the city and words; yet “[t]he places we are born come back to us” (Johnson, 2018, 263), as agential, vibrant matter.  Memory and irrevocable reality gain agency through textures, smells, sounds, bodily sensations, turning Gretel’s narrative into a “material memoir” (Alaimo 2010) in which the characters are transcorporeally connected with their material environment, most prominently the river. Their identities are both embodied and fluid (incl transgender and gender fluid); characters inhabiting the watery world of the river often sense their animality and enmeshment with the body of water (Neimannis 2018) and their common vulnerability (Oppermann 2023). Interaction with water blurs the boundary of life and death, and the boundaries of the body, water being the element that constitutes us. The novel evokes intertextual connections with Oedipus Rex, but also Dickens’s Great Expectations and Graham Swift’s Waterland, thus myth/Greek tragedy, a work of classical English realism and late 20^th-century metafiction, to negotiate both the legacy of these genres and their transformations in new, 21^st century material realism, allowing to explore its potential for re-thinking but also re-feeling reality and its textures and textualities.

 

Bibliography

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self.

            Bloomington:  Indiana UP.

Johnson, Daisy. 2018. Everything Under. London: Vintage.

Neimannis, Astrida. 2018. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London:

            Bloomsbury.

Oppermann, S. 2023. Blue Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

 

 

Of Gross Reality and Personal Myths: Agential Realism in Jeanette Winterson’s Weight

Andrea Raso, Roma Tre University

 

Known for her many retellings of canonical works, in Weight (2005) Jeanette Winterson re-elaborates on what is possibly the most traditional of literary forms: myth. Reimagining the story of Atlas and Heracles, the author offers a new perspective on how fact and fiction merge into unexpected aesthetic representations of the real. Indeed, Winterson leans on reality’s complexity, introjecting its entanglements and refusing the illusion of universal truth, to raise the fundamental epistemological and ontological question of what it means to be human today. This paper will attempt to interpret Winterson’s Weight as an exploration of the ideological nature of myths as prompted by their historical and contextual proximity to reality (Barthes 1972). In fact, Winterson’s narrative search “focuses on the possibility of rethinking what has historically been imposed as a univocal and orderly truth, in contradictory and polysemic ways” (Antosa 2014, 56). Put differently, by oscillating between mythological atemporality and reality’s situatedness, Winterson takes on a myth where corpo-reality is exalted by the unique physicality of its protagonists as well as by material and ethical considerations on the fate of Planet Earth. She thus overcomes the limits of real/fictional dichotomies, showing a material-semiotic impulse towards the imagination of new creative (discursive) practices to be performed (materially) in our daily lives, athwart a kind of literature that promotes the disincarnate status of pure reasoning and neglects a reality whose ‘silence’ could in fact be voiced through the transfiguration of tangible elements (Camus 1984, 269). In a book whose language motif is “I want to tell the story again” (2005, xvi), Winterson unveils the speculative potential of realism by forsaking the canon and its “perpetuation of a phallocentric value system” (Walezak 2022, 14). Instead, she ultimately resorts to a form of agential realism, with its challenge of the totalizing objectivity of individualist metaphysics (Barad 2007), while also embracing a trans-corporeal worldview, namely a non-essentialist symbiotic relationship “where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’” (Alaimo 2008, 238).

 

Bibliography

Alaimo, “Trans-corporeal Feminism and the Ethical Space of Nature”. In Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 2008: 237-64.

Antosa, Silvia, “‘My Monstrous Burden’: Queering the Myth, Rewriting the Self in Jeanette Winterson’s Weight”, Textus 3, il Mulino, Bologna, 2014: 55-74.

Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke UP, Durham-London, 2007.

Barthes, Roland, “Myth Today”. In Mythologies, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1972: 109-56.

Camus, Albert, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, Vintage, London, 1984.

Winterson, Jeanette, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, Canongate, Edinburgh, New York-Melbourne, 2005.

 

“An exercise in magical thinking”: The Troubling Matter of Will Self’s “Dirty Magical Realism”

Diane Gagneret, ENS de Lyon

 

However provocative a coinage to begin with, Will Self’s own description of his work as “dirty magical realism” has not only endured, but also proven to be an operative prism through which to approach his confluent rather than conflicting fictional praxes from the 1990s to the present day. Simultaneously proclaiming himself “a transcendental idealist” and “a deeply realist writer”, the singularly versatile author fosters coexistence over contradiction in his sustained exploration (and interrogation) of the modes and meanings of the mimetic impulse. Through the fusion of seemingly antagonistic traditions (one disenchanting, and the other re-enchanting the real), his highly idiosyncratic brand of magical realism – which, in and of itself, can be seen as a disturbance of more conventional realist writing (Lodge) – demonstrates realism as a whole to be the “capacious form” (Gąsiorek) it has come to be (re)conceptualised as.

One of the most consistently exploited materials from Self’s debut short story collection to the Umbrella trilogy, is the representation of individual and social psychosis as “embodied and embedded” (Braidotti); while his core fictional method, as evidenced by its characteristic “enmeshing of matter and thought” (Bernard), rests on liminality and an “antipathy toward oppositional ways of thinking” (Coole and Frost) which ground his brand of realism not merely in materialism, but the new materialisms that have emerged in post-human times as well. This paper will explore some of the ways in which Self’s ethos/aesthetics of embodiment (and entanglement) contribute to re-presenting realism not as imitation, but interrogation; not as reproducing, but redefining, reality – and its interactions with fiction. The focus will be, in turn, on the means and ends of materializing the mind in these “dirty magical” fictions; on the body as “contact zone” (Haraway) and the continuum between human, animal and the “technological sensorium” (Campos); and, finally, on the “contact zone” that is the body of Self’s work as a whole, and the main tenets of its reversible relationship to the real.

 

 

Bibliography

Alexander, Marguerite. Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction. London: Edward Arnold, 1990.

Bernard, Catherine. Matière à réflexion: Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains. Paris: PUPS, 2018.

Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity, 2019.

Campos, Liliane. “Innervation and the Technological Sensorium in Will Self’s Umbrella”, British Society for Literature and Science annual conference, April 2017.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. L’Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Minuit, 1972.

--- . Mille Plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980.

Gąsiorek, Andrezj. Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After. London: Edward Arnold, 1995.

Hall, Alice, ed. Contemporary Literature and the Body: A Critical Introduction. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.

Hayes, M. Hunter. Understanding Will Self.

Hillman, David and Ulrika Maude, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.

Leclair, Bertrand, ed. Un véritable naturalisme littéraire est-il possible ou même souhaitable ? Jonathan Coe / Will Self. 2003.

Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. London: Secker & Warburh, 1992.

Martin-Payre, Camille. “Réinvestir Dorian Gray : Le travail de l’intermédialité dans The Picture of Dorian Gray d’Oscar Wilde et trois reprises romanesque, filmique et télévisuelle”. Thèse de doctorat sous la direction de Catherine Bernard, Université de Paris, soutenue le 9 janvier 2021.

Roth, Zoë. Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2022.

Self, Will. The Quantity Theory of Insanity. London: Bloomsbury, 2006 [1991].

---. Cock  and Bull. London: Bloomsbury, 2011 [1992].

---. Great Apes. London: Bloomsbury, 2011 [1997]

---. Dorian, an Imitation. London: Viking, 2002.

---. Umbrella. London : Bloomsbury, 2013 [2012].

Testard, Jacques. “Interview with Will Self”, The White Review (July 2013). Online, <https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-will-self/>.

 

 

“Truly, anything can happen today:” Material Realism and Quichotte’s Impossible Quest

Cécile Girardin, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord

 

“Things”, “wares”, “grigris”, “objects”, “devices”, “possessions”: perhaps even more so than in his previous writing, Rushdie’s Quichotte (2019) is a novel teeming with “stuff”, from pills to jeans, cars and burgers, described at length and wanted desperately by characters to fulfill both vital and futile needs. This materiality is enhanced by its redundancy in other worlds, not only through omnipresent television, but also “clones”, “video games”, “GIFs”, “bitmojis”, and so on.

True to the author’s well-known style, this novel, which is a loose, modern-day rewriting of Cervantes, features characters who evolve in a magical universe (with talking guns, paths to the third dimension, fairies, fantasies turned real) but who persistently encounter history in the making (contemporary America, rural and urban, plagued by an opioid crisis, systemic racism and crazy entrepreneurship).

The 17^th-century masterpiece, which choice shall be discussed at length, gives shape to a novel about concurring truths, lies and fake news, phony characters, and its overall structure and philosophy resonate with what Rushdie’s readers have been used to. The hybrid narrative composed of realism, metafiction, fantasy, is nonetheless taking a singular turn with Quichotte: I contend that the quest undertaken by a deranged man (created by an author who is himself a prominent character in the book), living in a fantasy world and driven by pure love, enables the narrator to set candid, yet disillusioned eyes on contemporary society: a series of potent images emerge here and there in the flexible gap between reality and fantasy, and open up a space for a renewed representation of reality. In particular, I would like to show how matter and material act as the novel’s driving force: the overweight plot revolves around an obsession with finding material evidence of the characters’ existence (or of the author, for that matter?), as the very last resort in a world that is more and more opaque and impossible to grasp. Quichotte and, even more so, Sancho, are continually at risk of “disintegrating”, or unable to “regain full definition”: their deeds, their thoughts and their words, come as tests upon reality. Lunacy prevents reality from unfolding unsentenced, when reality tests Quichotte’s folly and determination to keep going.

I will attempt to define realism as a means to channel contention and doubt: in doing so, I would like to outline the subtle, yet definite, change in the way the individual is portrayed in Quichotte, compared with the rest of his oeuvre, from Midnight’s Children on.

 

 

From Material Realism to hHyperrealism: Metafiction, Self-reflexivity and the Posthuman in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and The Fraud (2023)

Mª Jesús Perea Villena,Camilo José Cela University, Madrid

 

Nowadays a continuous questioning of identity and reality is foregrounded in multiple contexts and scenarios and once again, literature places us in front of the mirror and offers us the opportunity to investigate and innovate with techniques that draw or construct a “reality” that wants to be narrated. and represented. Authors as relevant as David Lodge or Javier Marías, just to mention some examples, decided to innovate technically in this line, aware of a dilemma that becomes explicit in the new textuality proposed by the concept of postmodernity and the posthuman era. These authors, in their attempt to represent the world, realize the complexity and impossibility of this enterprise and choose to develop a self-awareness and reflexivity that is also materialized in an approach to extraverbal referentiality in a new kind of experimentation around "realistic aesthetics", now revisited.

Through self-reflection, parody, irony and a prominent use of exaggeration (hyperbole), metafiction is placed in the literary axis of the work of fiction, where the limits of representation of nineteenth-century realism are openly exceeded, and with which paradoxically, we approach a fictional universe in which, in numerous occasions, the barriers or differentiations between it and the real world are erased.

The objective of the present study is to identify and review the elements of experimentation on reality that exist in the work of Zadie Smith, more specifically, White teeth (2000) and The Fraud (2023). Accordingly, to do this, we will introduce the concept of hyperrealism to appreciate if the author uses hyperreal techniques and autoreferential elements to reconstruct a reality, which, once again, is capable of presenting answers to a society with a tendency to blur identities, in all its areas. To this end, the methodology used responds to a detailed analysis of the aforementioned works from the point of view of hyperrealism and metafiction, discussing key aspects such as subversion, humor, parody, use of hyperbole and autobiography as integrating elements of a reality under construction and constant review.

Zadie Smith, with the use of hyperreal techniques and approaches, opts for an augmented reality, which seeks to mask authorial control, and aims to openly demonstrate her own mastery over her narrative. This new hyperrealist approach in Zadie Smith's study reopens the debate on referentiality and realistic representation in contemporary literature and examines the variety of experimental techniques available to achieve that desired objective.

 

Bibliography

Alexander, Margaret. Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction. London: Edward Arnold,1990.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.

Boxall, Peter. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.

Connor, Steven. Postmodernist culture: an introduction to theories of the contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Culler, Jonathan. Breve introducción a la teoría literaria. Barcelona : Critica, 2000.

---. Sobre la deconstrucción. Teoría y crítica después del estructuralismo. Madrid : Cátedra, 1998.

Ganteau, Jean-Michel. The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative. London: Routledge, 2023.

Gomel, Elana. Postmodern science fiction and temporal imagination. London: Continuum, 2010.

Hawking, Stephen. A brief history of time. The updated and expanded tenth anniversary edition. New York: Bantam Books, 1998.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.

Reed, John R. Dickens’s Hyperrealism. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2010.

Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf, 2010.

Tew, Philip and Alex Murray. The modernism handbook. London: Continuum, 2009.

Viñas Piquer, David. Historia de la crítica literaria. Barcelona: Ariel, 2008.

Waldenfels, Bernhard. De Husserl a Derrida. Introducción a la fenomenología. Barcelona: Paidós Studio, 1997.

Winterson, Jeanette. 12 Bytes. How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Way We Live and Love. London: Vintage, 2022.

 

 

An Eto-ecological Reading of Scale Effects in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos

Emma Kihl,Södertörn University

 

Kim Stanley Robinson insists that science fiction is ‘the realism of our time.’ With this statement, and the question of a new type of “Patchy Anthropocene”-realism, I aim to do two things in this paper: 1) give focus to the scale effects of colonization in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives written between 1979–1983 and 2) introduce a new literary method for thinking with “realism”.

Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos is a sequence of five novels that shifts in events, genres voices and paces. Throughout the five books Lessing is using different techniques, such as repetition, to question the shape of reality. The two first novels are set at different times or in different regions on Shikasta, the Canopean name for Earth. While the others could be identified as taking place in an expansion of terran cosmology. In this paper I will use the guidelines suggested by Anna Tsing et al. to think structurally about material or more-than-human social relations in landscapes, such as those presented in Canopus in Argos, that are formed by “modular simplifications” and their “feral proliferations” (i.e. scaling effects).

In my reading of the scaling effects in Lessing’s pantology I will use the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers “ecologies of practices” as a literary reading method. The method Stengers calls for is amorphous, adapted to each encounter in each new situation. There is thus never a question of a given set of rules to apply, other than to think with what the specific, always local situation (or material), allows. Paying due attention to “realism” thus means letting oneself be affected by everything that communicates with experience while taking the risks that all encounters entail.

 

 

The Poisoned Bog: Jan Carson’s Embodied Poetics and Politics of Ecosickness

Héloïse Lecomte, ENS de Lyon

 

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing ecological crisis, a flurry of fictional works focused on the embeddedness of the (ailing) human body within its environments. In her 2022 novel The Raptures Jan Carson recounts the rapid spread of a mysterious epidemic in the fictional northern Irish town of Ballylack. As some of the town’s children are revealed to have been poisoned by unknown chemicals, the main plotline combines medical and criminal investigations, borrowing from the narrative codes of the whodunnit to trace the source of the lethal ecosickness (Houser).

While the novel at times veers away from realism by staging a young girl’s conversations with the dead children’s ghosts, Carson puts materiality at the heart of the story by graphically depicting the physical and (micro)biological symptoms of the disease. As the children’s bodies are repeatedly compared to those of animals or to more than human entities and the source of contamination is identified in a nearby bog where “everything living is now dead” (Carson 194), the novel also acknowledges the effect of toxic exposure on the biosphere as a whole. The community’s grief over the children’s deaths could thus be extended to the contaminated ecosystem, illustrating Thom Van Dooren’s assertion that “genuine mourning should open us into an awareness of our dependence on and relationships with those countless others being driven over the edge of extinction” (in Haraway 42).

It is my contention that Carson’s material realism – the minute description of the diseased bodies along with the organic and ecological consequences of chemical poisoning –  opens up a space of reflection on the impact of the Capitalocene on human and non-human lives alike. Combined with Carson’s occasional ghostly incursions into the realm of magical realism, which stage the irruption of the past into the present, the novel thus explores the toxicity of northern Ireland’s political and environmental ecosystems by foregrounding the vulnerable bodies of children.

 

Bibliography

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures. Indiana University Press, 2010.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2009.

Carson, Jan. The Raptures. Doubleday, 2022.

Cunsolo, Ashlee and Karen Landman, eds. Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017.

Ganteau, Jean-Michel. The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative. Routledge, 2023.

Haraway, Donna. “Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”. In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore. PM Press, 2016, p. 34-76.

Houser, Heather. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect. Columbia University Press, 2014.

Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Opperman, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Indiana University Press, 2014.

Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature. Cornell University Press, 1977. 

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care : Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Walezak, Emilie. Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing. Realism, Feminism, Materialism.  Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 

 

 

‘a kind of fine-grained incantation, made in flesh and time’ (Greengrass, The High House, 2021). When Fictions of Mothering and Childcare Refashion Material Realism in the Face of Ecological Disaster.

Diane Leblond, Université de Lorraine

 

In Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017) and Jessie Greengrass’s The High House (2021), the end of a world by flooding signals an effort on the part of fiction to acknowledge the consequences of a human history of exploitation and anthropogenic damage to the planet. In both cases the devastating event that is the flood coincides with the birth of a child, bringing into relief the responsibility of adults to the generation they will leave behind. As the very possibility of a future is brought into question, this responsibility towards more vulnerable beings connects to that which humans bear to fellow critters and compost companions (Haraway) in the context of climate breakdown.

The status of these novels as ‘flood narratives’ (Bracke) inscribes them within a tradition seldom associated with realism – from myths and Biblical stories to recent classics of science fiction, horror and dystopia. But for texts that focus on the pragmatic experience of (child)care, in a time and place of publication where flooding has become a palpable fact of life, the attempt at representing the catastrophe gravitates towards new modalities of material realism. These flood narratives do not look for heroic or anti-heroic destinies shaped by the end of the world – in fact they question the notion of apocalypse as too absolute and abstract. Neither do they propose a nostalgic turn towards patriarchal founding stories (Watkins), and the promise of a covenant with transcendence that would ensure humankind’s survival as the elect species. Instead, they emphasize the feeling of disproportion that comes from living within two bodies, between the ‘reality’ of life lived and the ‘truth’ of ongoing worldwide disaster (Hildyard). They insist on the materiality of time dedicated to a more vulnerable other, the minutiae of everyday gestures of care. They foreground the entanglement of bodies, the porousness of the physical envelopes we experience as home. In doing so, they disrupt the patriarchal and anthropocentric logic of genealogy and procreation critiqued by theorists of more-than-human worlds, and reclaim mothering and (child)care as the basis for practices of reading, dwelling and considering that look for what matters.

 

 

Bibliography

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-

World. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of

Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.

Bernard, Catherine. Matière à réflexion. Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels

britanniques contemporains. Paris: PUPS, 2018.

Bracke, Astrid. Climate Crisis and the 21^st-Century British Novel. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

--- ‘Flooded Futures: The Representation of the Anthropocene in Twenty-First Century British Flood Fictions.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 60:3, 2019, 278-288, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2019.1570911.

--- and Katie Ritson (eds). Waters rising. Green Letters, 24:1, 2020.

Cusk, Rachel. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. London: Picador, 2001.

DiQuinzio, Patrice. The Impossibility of Motherhood. London: Routledge, 1999.

Ganteau, Jean-Michel. The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative.

       London: Routledge, 2023.

Greengrass, Jessie. The High House. London: Swift Press, 2021.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke

UP, 2016.

Hildyard, Daisy. The Second Body. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.

Hollway, Wendy. The Capacity to Care. London: Routledge, 2006.

Hunter, Megan. The End We Start From. London: Grove Atlantic, 2017.

Ingold, Tim. ‘Towards a Politics of Dwelling.’ Conservation and Society, 3:2, 2005, 501-508.

Mosse, Kate. An Extra Pair of Hands: A story of caring and everyday acts of love. London:

Profile Books, 2021.

O’Reilly, Andrea (ed.). From Motherhood to Mothering. Albany, State University NYP, 2004.

--- Maternal Theory. Essential Readings. Bradford: Demeter Press, 2007.

Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds,

Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 2017.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. London: Virago,

1977.

Richard, Claire. Des mains heureuses. Une archéologie du toucher. Paris: Seuil, 2023.

Tate, Andrew. Apocalyptic Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Wahlström Henriksson, Helena et al. (eds). Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in

 Fiction and Life Writing. London: Palgrave, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-

17211-3_1

Walezak, Emilie. Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing. Realism, Feminism,

Materialism. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.

Watkins, Susan. Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2020.

Winterson, Jeanette. 12 Bytes. How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Way We Live and

Love. London: Vintage, 2022.

 

 

Pandemic Realism: Exploring the Materialities of Covid-19 through Metonymy in Sarah Moss’s The Fell

Katia Marcellin, Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry

 

In her pandemic fiction, The Fell (2021), Sarah Moss deftly highlights the paradoxes of Covid-19-related lock-downs or so-called periods of “self-isolation” which produced, on a social and mental scale, the very asphyxiation that they were meant to prevent on the biological level. Attempts to shield oneself or others from breathing deficiencies and lung failure were therefore conversely responsible for social asphyxiation and claustrophobia. Thus, Moss’s narrative precisely explores the logics of contamination brought about by the pandemic in terms of its ability to affect all aspects of both human and non-human life, touching upon issues of economy, environment, mental health, social life etc.

As the character of Kate, forced to isolate with her teenage son Matt, decides that she can’t take it anymore and needs to go for a walk over the Fell, she triggers a series of events that, just like a chain of contamination, will circulate from one character to the next, leading to unforeseen and dramatic consequences.

Taking up David Lodge’s definition of realism in The Modes of Modern Writing, as relying on a metonymic style of writing, I wish to analyse Sarah Moss’s ability to address the micrologies of the Covid pandemic the better to displace them. Although it is steeped in its contemporaneity, and takes as a starting point a highly relatable experience, The Fell eschews generalisation to explore meticulously the fabric of ordinary experience and the power of relationality. Thus, it appears that the metonymic dimension of the plot does not lie so much in an attempt to present itself as a “representative bit of reality” (Lodge 109) but in its exploration of relations of contiguity and their ability to establish forms of care and resistance to dehumanising “patho-politics”.

 

Bibliography:

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Bernard, Catherine. Matière à réflexion: du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2018.

---. ‘Vibrant Allegories: Questioning Immunity with Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016–2020)’. Études anglaises 75.1 (2022): 13–29.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.

Esposito, Roberto. Communauté, immunité, biopolitique : repenser les termes de la politique. Trans. Bernard Chamayou. [2008] Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2010.

Fuller, David, Corinne Saunders, and Jane Macnaughton, eds. The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Jakobson, Roman. ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’. Fundamentals of Language. Ed. Morris Halle and Roman Jakobson. [1956] Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. 67–96.

Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Laugier, Sandra. ‘The Ordinary, Romanticism, and Democracy’. Modern Language Notes 130.5 (2015): 1040–1054.

Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Edward Arnold, 1977.

Moss, Sarah. The Fell. London: Picador, 2021.

Vasset, Sophie. ‘Epidemic Notions: Immunity – Care – Lockdown – Toxicity – Vulnerability – Contagion’. Études anglaises 75.1 (2022): 3–12.