English, Drama & Film Research Collection
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- PublicationIntroduction: On the Meanings of 'American Reality'(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022-08-24)This chapter begins by considering the dominant affective state that came into being after the election of Trump in 2016, namely shock and disbelief, and contextualizes it through two opposed yet complementary impulses. First, it illustrates how political and cultural derealization was actively promoted by Trump himself and his administration, to then consider the liberal biases that were already implicit in the widespread perception that reality was collapsing. In the context of the emergence of two and seemingly irreconcilable American realities, ever more polarized along partisan lines, the literary world felt compelled to respond and did so publicly. This chapter considers various initiatives but focuses in particular on the insights provided by writers Aleksandar Hemon, Jan Clausen, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, who denounced the exceptionalist rhetoric that was often employed and called for a more engaged and less self-deluded American literature. It then proceeds to map the emerging corpus of ‘Trump fiction’ and existing scholarly studies, and argues that the analyses offered in American Literature in the Era of Trumpism contribute not only to the continued understanding of the landscape of American literature after 2016, but also to the long-standing scholarly tradition of decentering the notion of ‘America.’
15 - PublicationCompeting Fantasies and Alternative Realities: Salman Rushdie's the Golden House(Cambridge University Press, 2021-12-13)This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new "American reality."Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has "left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe,"a turn to fantasy that precedes the final irruption of a wealthy vulgarian who calls himself the Joker, and who subverts any previous sense of identity and of what is "real."Drawing from the notion of national fantasy as argued by Lauren Berlant (1991), Jacqueline Rose (1996), and Donald Pease (2009), the article suggests that Rushdie's novel performs and invites a rare self-examination in the context of early literary responses to the rise of Trumpism.
24 - PublicationPapeles del crimen. Mujeres y violencia en la ficción criminal(Universitat de Barcelona Edicions, 2019)El actual boom de la literatura y la cinematografía criminal incluye a un relevante número de autoras que, desde posiciones estéticas e ideológicas muy diversas, han reformulado de manera semejante las estructuras, las situaciones y, sobre todo, los personajes de este género de ficción. Han creado personajes de mujeres detectives, policías o juezas que mantienen una relación con la sociedad muy diferente de los modelos clásicos, a la vez que suscitan reflexiones sobre la vulnerabilidad social fruto en parte de la última crisis económica, y exploran nuevas formas de representar las violencias contra las mujeres y de las mujeres. Aún son pocos los estudios que indagan en estas violencias ficcionalizadas desde la perspectiva de género. Las contribuciones del presente volumen analizan la representación de la violencia en relación con las mujeres, víctimas o agresoras, en la narrativa literaria y fílmica, al tiempo que ofrecen respuestas al fenómeno más llamativo de la literatura popular del siglo XXI.
81 - PublicationThe monstrosity of the long poem(Poetry Wales, 2009-09-01)Writing ‘long’ poems in an age that has a capacious appetite for the image, a diminished attention span and a desire for the quick sound bite might seem counterintuitive, if not spectacularly naive. Turn to the guidelines of any poetry competition and you will find (more often than not) the restrictor ‘judges will accept entries of poems of up to 40 lines’. Short poems valiantly secure a space for poetry in public spaces; Poems on the Underground, Metro, BART and DART offer a welcome imaginative respite to any traveller. But the poetry world is not full of master haiku writers, Zen brevity can quickly become anticipated Zen epiphany as the commuter minds the gap. Thankfully an alternate vein of poetry displays a need to challenge the perceived aesthetics of what is marketable or desirable. This is not to argue that this poetry operates somehow outside of culture. But the way poetry can respond to, incorporate or assimilate the world often aims to challenge market expectations and revive expectations. Writing ‘long’ poems in an age that has a capacious appetite for the image, a diminished attention span and a desire for the quick sound bite might seem counterintuitive, if not spectacularly naive. Turn to the guidelines of any poetry competition and you will find (more often than not) the restrictor ‘judges will accept entries of poems of up to 40 lines’. Short poems valiantly secure a space for poetry in public spaces; Poems on the Underground, Metro, BART and DART offer a welcome imaginative respite to any traveller. But the poetry world is not full of master haiku writers, Zen brevity can quickly become anticipated Zen epiphany as the commuter minds the gap. Thankfully an alternate vein of poetry displays a need to challenge the perceived aesthetics of what is marketable or desirable. This is not to argue that this poetry operates somehow outside of culture. But the way poetry can respond to, incorporate or assimilate the world often aims to challenge market expectations and revive expectations.
17 - PublicationLyric from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E into the 21st Century(Peter Lang, 2007-12)In the last two decades there has been an alert and inherently sceptical examination of Language Writing’s legacy to a younger generation of poets. Emerging from current scholarship is a strong sense that Language Writing must be viewed as the last of the American avant-gardes. If the appropriation of the avant-garde into mainstream culture denotes the invariable commodification of a radical aesthetics, it could be argued that Language Writing has already been disseminated into a texture of writing. Yet in adhering to a chronological pattern of emerging schools, there is the risk of fetishising poetic style as an adherence to what Alan Golding refers to as ‘New Newer and Newest Poetries.’ Within this chronological framing there is also the temptation to view how a ‘post’ Language poetics may be shaped.
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