820 Englische, altenglische Literaturen
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When the first volume of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, "Autumn", was published in 2016, Smith recounted in a series of interviews and articles how the idea for the tetralogy had arisen: as she had been so late in handing in the manuscript of her former novel, "How to be both" (2014), her publisher had hardly had any time to go through it. The book was printed within only six weeks of submission. Smith was surprised: "Six weeks! It set me thinking about the time it habitually takes between delivery and publication - usually at least nine months, often more like a year and a half." This gave Smith the idea for what she calls a timesensitive experiment, i. e., a set of novels written very close to their time of publication. She had had a book project about the seasons in mind for some time and decided to implement it as follows: "Now I asked [my publisher] if it'd be possible for us to do these books [the seasonal quartet] as a sort of time-sensitive experiment. Four books, written close to their own publication", that "would be about not just their own times, but the place where time and the novel meet." [...] In this article, I will refer to earlier forms of quick-response writing and publication, in particular to the serial literature of the Victorian age, in order to compare them with Smith's own brand of quick-response literature. I will then analyze the effects of this experiment on Smith's texts in terms of form and content, thereby underscoring the novelty of her literary project.
Breaching the New Weird : worldbuilding and atmospheres in China Miéville's "The City & The City"
(2023)
China Miéville's "The City & The City" (2009) is a New Weird novel that expands the limits of speculative fiction by establishing a rich storyworld where a logical impossibility serves as the foundation for the novel's worldbuilding. Making such a construction believable and immersive requires specific narrative strategies that necessitate readers accept the thought-experiment put forth by Miéville. The New Weird mode of writing is a recent noteworthy trend in speculative fiction that consciously draws on established tropes but also deliberately strives to move beyond the forms and styles that by now are familiar and recognizable in the context of speculative fiction. These forms draw on established genre tropes found in horror, science fiction, and fantasy literature but are propelled into new formations in the New Weird. This article explores the New Weird and "The City & The City" by analyzing how the novel's worldbuilding produces a distinct atmosphere that becomes a central aspect of the reading experience. "The City & The City" is uniquely positioned in relation to other books in Miéville’s oeuvre; Through an analysis of "The City & The City" that focuses on worldbuilding, this article will show how genre, expectations, and sensory engagement together emphasize the importance of a plausible storyworld even when weird and fantastical textual elements are part of the narrative. As we shall see, the atmospheres that are produced in the New Weird are a central aspect of this emerging mode of writing. I will employ concepts from possible worlds theory, contemporary worldbuilding theory, as well as argue for the effects of sensory stimulants and how exactly the narrative stimulates immersive experiences. This is done in part using Rita Felski's ideas on the purpose and value of literature from "Uses of Literature", with particular focus on her ideas on literary shock. I will expand on the shock-idea and analyze how speculative fiction makes use of affective responses to assist worldbuilding, and through worldbuilding ultimately assist and reinforce immersion. This is closely connected to postcriticism and its focus on emotions and the intangible aspects of reading. The New Weird is particularly interesting in the context of postcriticism since the unexplained weirdness and the strange storyworlds that are created cannot always be explained via conventional tools in the literary analysis arsenal. For example, there is rich potential for suspicious or political readings of New Weird texts, but I argue that the immersive potential of these storyworlds is more readily explored from a starting point that views these texts as deliberate attempts at pushing textual envelopes and crossing boundaries.
Der Aufsatz untersucht in einem kontrastiven Vergleich zwischen dem klassischen Detektiv Sherlock Holmes und heutigen Forschungsagenturen wie Forensic Architecture einen aktuellen Wandel des "Indizienparadigmas" (Ginzburg). Ausgehend von der Rolle, die das "Indizienparadigma" für eine kritische Literatur und Kulturwissenschaft spielt, wird der staatstragende Positivismus eines Sherlock Holmes von dem staatskritischen Konstruktivismus von Forensic Architecture unterschieden: Während Holmes die Spur als ein positives Datum auffasste, wird sie in den virtuellen Investigationen von Forensic Architecture aus Daten hergestellt. Diese Gegenüberstellung ist jedoch zu differenzieren, wenn man die "Ästhetik der Objektivität" (Charlesworth) der Animationsvideos kritisch untersucht, mit denen Forensic Architecture ihre Ergebnisse präsentieren. Der Aufsatz schließt mit der Frage, welche Konsequenzen sich aus den neuen Formen des Wissenserwerbs für die Methodik der Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften ziehen lassen.
Eine alte Dame sitzt in ihrem Sessel im heimischen Wohnzimmer in Schottland und schaut im Fernsehen ihre Lieblingsserie - eine Naturdokumentation der BBC. Bei der skizzierten Situation handelt es sich eigentlich um nichts Ungewöhnliches. Die betreffende Person heißt Veronica McCreedy und ist eine fiktionale Figur, genauer gesagt, die weibliche Hauptfigur aus Hazel Priors Erfolgsroman "Away with the Penguins" (2020) mit der Fortsetzungsgeschichte "Call of the Penguins" (2021). [...] Priors Romane über die Begegnung der Seniorin mit der Welt der Pinguine liefern nicht allein ein bemerkenswertes Beispiel für die literarische Darstellung der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung in der Gegenwart, die sie zu einem bevorzugten Gegenstand der Human Animal Studies prädestinieren. Sie geben zudem darüber Aufschluss, wie sich Romanschriftsteller/innen beim Verfassen ihrer Fiktionen an einem anderen Leitmedium orientieren können, in diesem Fall an der seriellen TV-Naturdokumentation. Entscheidend ist dabei der Umstand, dass die Serie nicht nur auf der inhaltlichen Ebene der Erzählfiktion thematisiert wird, sondern die filmische Produktion selbst, vor allem im zweiten Roman, auch den Aufbau und die Struktur der Erzählung sowie die Figurenkonfiguration maßgeblich prägt. In "Call of the Penguins" kommt es überdies zu einer interessanten, immer wieder ironisch gebrochenen Reflexion auf den filmischen Produktionsprozess, die jeweils beteiligten Sprecher, Kamera und Regie, wie es für Romane, die zur (anspruchsvollen) Populärliteratur gehören, auf den ersten Blick eher ungewöhnlich erscheinen mag. Anders formuliert: Die Pinguin-Erzählungen von Hazel Prior erlauben Einblicke in den Vorgang einer interessanten und komplexen Adaption. Sie zeigen beispielhaft, wie es gelingen kann, das beliebte Genre der TV-Naturdokumentation in Erzählfiktionen anzueignen und in den fiktionalen Texten ästhetisch produktiv umzusetzen.
Der Aufsatz untersucht in einem kontrastiven Vergleich zwischen dem klassischen Detektiv Sherlock Holmes und heutigen Forschungsagenturen wie Forensic Architecture einen aktuellen Wandel des "Indizienparadigmas" (Ginzburg). Ausgehend von der Rolle, die das "Indizienparadigma" für eine kritische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft spielt, wird der staatstragende Positivismus eines Sherlock Holmes von dem staatskritischen Konstruktivismus von Forensic Architecture unterschieden: Während Holmes die Spur als ein positives Datum auffasste, wird sie in den virtuellen Investigationen von Forensic Architecture zu einem aus Daten Hervorgebrachten. Diese Gegenüberstellung ist jedoch zu differenzieren, wenn man die 'Ästhetik der Objektivität' (Charlesworth) der Animationsvideos kritisch untersucht, mit denen Forensic Architecture ihre Ergebnisse präsentieren. Der Aufsatz schließt mit der Frage, welche Konsequenzen sich aus den neuen Formen des Wissenserwerbs für die Methodik der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften ziehen lassen.
In a radical shift from Hans Blumenberg's account of the classical trope, "Shipwreck with Spectator", the existence of the spectator is no longer grounded in their safe detachment from shipwreck, but from their fearless involvement in it. In this article, I will shift focus once again, from those involved, lifesaving spectators of shipwreck to the immediate actors, or rather: the actor-network of sea travel, which includes shipping companies, crews, passengers, and ships. This actor-network, with the sailing crew at its core, has been subsumed into a binding code of behavior in distress ever since the 1852 foundering of the Royal Navy steam frigate HMS Birkenhead at Danger Point, off the Western Cape of Africa. The code's two key imperatives - "women and children first" and "captain goes down with the ship," henceforth known as the Birkenhead drill - were safely embedded in Victorian morals by popular life guides. [...] Based on this shift of attention, I will look at two different articulations of this dilemma, the "Jeddah incident" of July 1880 (a shipwreck that never happened), and the sinking of the Titanic of April 1912 (a shipwreck that has been happening ever since), and unfold the translation of each case in a modern novel: Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" for the former, and Franz Kafka's "Der Verschollene" ("The Man who Disappeared") for the latter. I will pay particular attention to the role of professional ethics as drivers of the narrative in both cases, and I will highlight how the two authors, while using an almost identical plot structure, pursue different strategies of fictionalizing the Birkenhead dilemma.
Some of the most important and most contentious political questions of our time concern the anticipation and pre-emption of future harm. The fight against the corona pandemic, with its focus on precautionary measures and projections of case numbers is only one example in a long line of threats that include nuclear war, climate change, and transnational terrorism, all of which challenge us to act based scenarios and predictions of future harm.
The apprehension of such threats is to our experience of globality in the contemporary world. However, these hazards are very often removed from immediate perception, so that our knowledge of global risks is often second-hand knowledge, shaped as much by science as by transcultural flows of images, metaphors and narratives about technological hazards. The thesis explores how 20th and 21st century Anglophone fiction narrates the experience of living at risk from global technological and environmental hazards.
In six contrastive readings that bring British, American, and postcolonial anglophone writing into dialogue, the book examines how the politics of fictional texts are connected to its narrative strategies for writing global risk: Engaging global risks means focusing on events which have not taken place yet and which are often hard or impossible to localize in a single geographical setting. Moreover, understanding how texts engage the temporality and location of global hazards not only helps us comprehend the role of fiction in debates about global risk, it also helps us explore how scenarios of the future are imagined and narrated more broadly.
This article investigates two case studies of queer performers who counteract discomfort and terror with their acts of hope: Peter McMaster's A Sea of Troubles (2019) and Split Britches' Covidian performance Last Gasp (WFH) (2020). In the performers' work, the politics of queer be-longing is tied to the performance of acts of hope which can function as a means to defy a society/a space that is limiting, hostile, or causing anxiety. This article conceptualizes the performance of acts of hope as ways to create forms of be-longing that position the queer individual firmly in - and, sometimes, "slightly above" (Dolan 5) - the (uncomfortable) present. Be-longing in this context is hyphenated to put an emphasis on the gap between the queer body and the surrounding space and to argue that that body can never merely be. Hope, therefore, is both a bodily and mental positioning that either looks to what is to come and draws its shape from that or, in looking back, reparatively constructs its space via retrospection to an elsewhere. In the two performances analysed, this positioning to be-long in the present constitutes itself via an engagement with one's (male) theatrical ancestors (McMaster) and a retrotopian looking back on their career (Split Britches) to find words for the present.
Through a contrastive comparison between the classic detective Sherlock Holmes and contemporary research agencies such as Forensic Architecture, this paper examines a recent shift in the "evidential paradigm" (Ginzburg). Based on the role that the "evidential paradigm" plays in critical literary and cultural studies, the state-supporting positivism of Sherlock Holmes is distinguished from the state-critical constructivism of Forensic Architecture: While Holmes conceives the trace as a positive datum, it is created from data in Forensic Architecture's virtual investigations. However, this confrontation must be differentiated when critically examining the "aesthetics of objectivity" (Charlesworth) of the animated videos Forensic Architecture use to present their findings. The essay closes by asking what conclusions can be drawn from these new forms of knowledge generation for the methodology of literary and cultural studies.
