Modern Fiction Studies

Modern Fiction Studies: It’s a scholarly journal focusing on the countless elements of contemporary and modern literature. The table of contents can be scrolled through via its URL: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/mfs/ (MFS). However, its actual contents cannot be accessed by the public. It can be available in print (to TTU students anyway) in the Volpe Library stacks.

MFS publishes a myriad of professional articles as well as book and essay reviews under the umbrella of theoretical perspectives on canonical and emergent texts. The journal goes back to 1955, where it was made possible by the Modern Fiction Club held at Purdue University, located in Lafayette, Indiana, currently published under the John Hopkins University Press (MFS). Annually, it publishes four issues (two general ones accompanied by two special editions), and contains a considerable amount of content that has fluctuated in the past ten years, but has nonetheless remained consistent. Typically the number of reviews outnumbers the articles, the articles themselves being weighed in higher esteem. The current editorial staff at the moment includes John N. Duvall (an editor at Purdue and author of two works on Faulkner and Morrison), Robert P. Marzec, Jason Dodge, Rebekah Mitsein, and Leah Pennywark (MFS). MFS also holds two editorial boards: One is composed of faculty (the Purdue Advisory Board) and the other is made up of distinguished scholars and critics from universities and colleges across the United States as well as abroad (the Editorial Advisory Board), thus making the journal an international constituency (MFS).

The reviewed issues of the journal reflect all that it is supposed to embody. The latest issue—Volume 59, Number 3, Fall 2013—has a focus on modernist life narratives: the bildungsroman, the biography and the autobiography, featuring articles such as: “Posthumous Playback: Oscar Wilde and the Phonographic Logic of Modern Biography” (Crowell). Ellen Crowell, in this article, keeps to the theme of the issue and addresses the importance of the selected genre by exemplifying Wilde (Crowell). An article from a decade ago appears to demonstrate similar zest and relevance for its subject; Volume 49, Number 4, Winter 2003, although its focus isn’t addressed in bold print, offers a vast selection of reviews and articles that hold an emphasis on ethnicity in literature. “Under the Lids of Jerusalem”: The Guised Role of Jewishness in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl by Liesl M. Olson overviews role that religion and kin play in the aforementioned work (Olson). Next to other articles such as The Business of Patriarchy: Black Paternity and Illegitimate Economies in Richard Wright’s The Long Dream by Elizabeth Yukins, that discusses how masculinity ties in with race in Wright’s work, the refrain of the issue is not only addressed by elaborated on to a thorough degree (Yukins). The gap between 2013 and 2003 also seems to be occupied with issues that cumulate in equal success. Volume 55, Number 1, Spring 2009 deals with regional modernism. David McWhirter produces an article titled: Eudora Welty Goes to the Movies: Modernism, Regionalism, and Global Media, which challenges the modernist view in today’s society and specific environments (McWhirter).

On a general note, in its book reviews, MFS has covered a variety of authors that apply to the modern denomination. The scope of the journal’s taste in authors spans from those of classic proportions to the recent, nondiscriminatory towards nationality. The journal has a focus that ranges from Jose Saramago’s Blindness to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Don DiLillo’s Great Jones Street to Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry to Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden. A distinctive feature of MFS is that it also takes illustration submissions. The resolution qualifications have to be met, and the submitter also has to be an author.

Overall, MFS has been a consistent source of information pertaining to modern literature that has kept up with the standards dating back to 1955. It has retained an even pace and hosts a variety of subjects that have full potential to be applicable to a myriad of research topics, acting as a characterized medium for modern literature and those who are interested in it.

Transgressive Fiction: The New Satiric Tradition

Transgressive Fiction is a rather new work, published May 7 of this year by Palgrave Macmillan, marketing through eBook under Barns & Noble. The author, Robin Mookerjee, is Co-Chair of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, the New School for the Liberal Arts in New York. He has been a professor there since 2000, teaching a variety of classes. Mookerjee earned a BA at Bard College, and his MA and PhD at New York University, also winning an Award of Distinction for his dissertation.

Transgressive Fiction: The New Satiric Tradition is a study on a number of authors, such as Kathy Acker, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, and Irvine Welsh, who are of the contemporary era and are characterized with depicting sex, drugs, and violence in their works, frequently being dismissed by academic critics as “crass opportunists.” According to Mookerjee, this species of writer is simply a resurrected style of the Menippean classic who “opposes everything and proposes nothing.” It is a style that is “contrived, lacks moral awareness, and mocks the moralities through which negative behavior can ordinarily be witnessed.” In other words, Mookerjee embraces these themes for his belief that the world is undergoing a period that is bereft a “ruling social mythology.” Mookerjee approaches this absence as a justification of this genre’s controversial themes; he says—and elaborates through his book—that these authors are new satirists bemoaning this development, presenting primitives subjects that often compete against modern discourses. While the nature of the literature Mookerjee tackles is guilty of exploitation, he validates their contents as portraits that intend to rebel against, or simply mourn, how nebulous (or nonexistent) that ethics and consequential magnitudes have become.

Mookerjee goes into a six-chapter, 227 page validation of this analysis over what he has coined as “transgressive” fiction, narrowing the topic when necessary via exemplifying authors and archetypes. Throughout his text, Mookerjee convers a myriad of motifs found in this breed of literature, including but not limited to criminal characters, antisocial characters, antiheros, plays off of the traditional epic, satire, sexual deviancy, and so on. Mookerjee provides after a collection of notes, tallying 178 references he carefully utilizes throughout the study. To one interested in contemporary literature with a tendency for controversy, Transgressive Fiction displays certain potential for beneficial research.

Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction

 

            Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction is a study on literary violence by Michael Kowalewski: Ph.D. degree professor and former president of the Western Literature Association. Published in 1993 in Princeton, New Jersey at the Princeton University Press, this work focuses on the subjects of American Fiction—History and Criticism, Violence in Literature, and Literary Form.

Deadly Musings is a source available online in abridged form online, non-abridged if ordered via e-book. It is a piece thoroughly laden with sources, varying in perspectives on a demographic basis, but all universally praising and positively critiquing the theme of violence in literature, focusing on the modern epoch. Kowalewski states his premise in the introduction of his book, making the declaration: “Violent scenes in American fiction are not only brutal, bleak, and gratuitous. They are also, by turns, comic, witty, poignant, and sometimes, stragely enough, even terrifyingly beautiful.” Following this cordial thesis, the body of his book includes over 300 pages of analysis, dissected into chapters that coincide with the author of focus for that section. The first chapter (of eight), is an explanation of violence and how to interpret and make sense of it through justifying it as symbolic. Kowalewski defends the diversity of violence by explaining that what it exactly symbolizes depends on who precisely penned it as well as the nature of the era, hence the importance of his chapters being dedicated to authors. He covers (in this order) James Fenimore Cooper, Poe, Stephen Crane, Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Pynchon, and lastly a discourse of miscellaneous other works by various authors in the postscript. Kowalewski makes the point to display the evolution that violence has undergone as his analysis progresses, equally stressing the constant aspects as well, relating Cooper’s Native American-based brutality to warfare in Hemingway’s novels, Faulkner’s Southern Gothic violence towards women to Poe’s traditionally Gothic violence towards women, et cetera. Possessing a myriad of layered information on such a narrow subject, easily does this source prove relevant to the development of violence as a theme in modern literature.

Deviancy, Sensationalism and Brutality Captured in 80’s American Literature

“I Was Born in the U.S.A.”:

Deviancy, Sensationalism and Brutality Captured in 80’s American Literature

A selective annotated bibliography.

            Think the 80’s landscape of America. Think Ronald Reagan. Think Jelly Shoes and Hammer pants and mullets and iconic cartoons. Florescent neon clothing. Michael Jackson prior to his bleach and his infamously fragile snout. To the now-middle aged American population, these memories are probably fond and humbly embarrassing, but more than that, they are layered: layered in the sense that they are also accompanied by not-so-fond memories, hanging somewhat malignantly off the tail of things that rest easier on the brain. The peculiar death of Bob Marley in ’81. The drug culture that flourished in cities—namely the big and bright ones: L.A., San Fran, et cetera. The crime that supplemented this wave of lifestyle of substance. The 50’s-with-a-vengance materialism that swept the nation. It has a blasphemous ring to it, but it’s a sin in itself to not admit the sensationalism that was sex, drugs, and bloody rock & roll that made the era such a bewildering and captivating time to live in.

Like monuments erected to preserve the feats and ideas of the past, literature has sealed the essence of this decade as well as any stone replica. The written word once again delivers an experience that contains the sublime nature of 80’s America, and this selective bibliography intends to provide a variety of perspectives on it. Perhaps the worth of the compilation is weighed in interest, or rather in research fodder for whatever subject or micro-subject that this assembling of information should contain. Of its contents, it offers a myriad of sources that highlight the literary poster-children of the given period and/or supply depth to their controversial nature—namely on the topic of violence. Next to the cited critical essays, there are other more recent sources of scholarly proportions that propose commentaries and explanations for these novels’ controversial themes, or simply elaborate on their general canonical importance in the history of American literature.

This is when you start thinking Cormac McCarthy. Bret Ellis. Jay McInerney. Katherine Dunn. Thomas Harris. It is because of these writers among others that we can once again be reminded of the fond memories and callous ones, and at their expense there are creative testaments that embody them, providing a reflective purpose on an important epoch in the 20^th century. If this brief compendium lives up to its intended purpose, then perhaps more information and more creativity can embellish the present day based off of the effort and observation of those who have acknowledged this era and celebrated its elements.

Berkenkamp, Lauri. “Reading, Writing and Interpreting: Stephen King’s Misery.” The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. 203-11. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.

Lauri Berkenkamp’s critical essay over Stephen King’s ’87 horror novel, Misery, is essential to the bibliography because it sheds light on the fact that King’s novel can be interpreted as a story elaborating on communication gone wrong between reader and writer. Through the novel’s two primary characters, Berkenkamp illustrates how a sequence of violence and torture unraveled between them due to the nature of such reactions unto products of the writer’s creation. In so many words, this essay explains not just the commentary aspect that literature has on the time and place, but how literature can be motivating for more violence to occur. While Misery takes this concept to the extremes, it’s crucial to recognize this possibility, especially when one considers the domino effect instigated by Ellis’s American Psycho.

Hislop, Andrew. “The Wild Bunch.” Times Literary Supplement 4490 (21 Apr. 1989): 436. Rpt.   in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 204. Detroit: Gale,  2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 Oct. 2013.

Andrew Hislop’s critical essay addresses the nature of Cormac McCarthy’s theme of violence. He argues that McCarthy examines the unnecessary brutalities during the era of westward expansion in America to accentuate the overall meaninglessness of violence in general. By this he visually demonstrates the extents of greed to subliminally pull readers into a scenic view of American history that isn’t so pretty once you get down to its core—“hollow as a used artillery shell.” This argument is crucial in the sense that it sheds light and spreads scholarly grounds on the impetus of meaning in literature, or, importantly, lack thereof.

Jefferson, Faye. “Cultural/Familial Estrangement: Self-Exile and Self-Destruction in Jay McInerney’s Novels.” The Literature of Emigration and Exile. N.p.: Texas Tech UP, 1992. 115-30. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter and Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 112. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.

Faye Jefferson, in her brief critical essay over Jay McInerney’s works, addresses the author’s most renowned second-person perspective novel, Bright Lights, Big City. She addresses the character’s cocaine and club-hopping habits that are ultimately just a form of self-harm. She references several points in the novel where the protagonist reflects upon his literary and career ambitions that are drowning in his own lifestyle. She acknowledges that while the ending is hopeful, the theme of the novel suggests a cycle that renders the main character a lost cause. This source’s importance lays in the indirect form of violence that Jefferson proves as eminent: subtle violence towards the self.

Kowalewski, Michael. Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993. Print.

Michael Kowalewski, in his scholarly book, Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction, gives a professional definition to literary violence and similar themes. He describes the relevance that acts of violence have in literature, describing in his introduction the variety of implications that it can suggest: dominance, man vs. man conflict, futile resolution, et cetera. To elaborate on the potential violence has, he goes into depth with a number of authors after the turn of the 20^th century. This source serves to back up the prospective merit that the theme of violence has in the literary world.

Levey, Nick. “Crisis and Control in Don DeLillo’s White Noise.” The Explicator. 71.1 (2013): 11-13. Academic OneFile. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.

Nick Levey’s article that appeared in The Explicator delves into Don DeLillo’s breakthrough novel, White Noise. It illustrates the relevance the ’85 novel has to its time period, harboring the themes of extensive consumerism, saturation of media, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and reintegration of the American family, disasters caused by the human race, and the potentially regenerative nature of human violence. Levey then concludes that it was the presence of these themes that finally equivocated in success for DeLillo, because of the obvious appeal it had to people who felt identical in the day and age.

Mookerjee, Robin. Transgressive Fiction: The New Satiric Tradition. 2013. Print.

Robin Mookerjee’s Transgressive Fiction: The New Satiric Tradition is his scholarly endeavor to bring a number of contemporary authors to justice, authors that have been previously put down by critics as “just crass opportunists.” Mookerjee covers authors that are not only pertinent to the sex, drugs, and violence pattern (which in itself is crucial to Mookerjee’s study), but he namely covers authors a few authors that are important to the decade as well as this compendium: Bret Easton Ellis and Kathy Acker. By comparing these authors with ones from previous or later decades, and simply by possessing a professional view on literary violence and mischief, his presence in the study of this topic is central.

Nolan, Amy. “‘A New Myth To Live By’”: The Graphic Vision Of Kathy Acker.” Critique 53.3  (2012): 201-213. Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 24 Oct. 2013.

Amy Nolan’s critical essay over Kathy Acker serves in this bib for her attempt at literarily justifying the excess of controversy leaden in Acker’s most recognized work, Blood and Guts in High School. Nolan outlines Acker’s novel and its controversial points: pornographic incest, descriptive violence and conceptual violence [e.g. abortion scenes, rape, etc], and drug use, justifying the novel as a “feminist statement” that has leaped over from the seventies into the eighties (its time of publication). Nolan describes that the revulsion the novel has received isn’t at all deserved once scrutinized, where it offers a professional take on the “Oedipal-frame narrative,” and a treks into the “‘no-man’s land of the subconscious.’”

Price, David W. “Bakhtinian Prosaics, Grotesque Realism, and The Question Of The Carnivalesque in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.” Southern Humanities Review 32.4 (1998): 321-346. Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 17 Oct. 2013.

While American Psycho was published in ’91, the setting and themes of the novel supply enough relevance for its presence in this compilation. David W. Price covers this relevance thoroughly in his article featured in Southern Humanities Review. Price compares Ellis’s disreputable novel to Mikhail Bakhtin, and uses this analogy to explain American Psycho’s importance as a “blistering critique of the 1980’s.” Price then describes through the length of his article, using three focal points, that further analysis of this work can provide sufficient political and cultural prophecies concerning the development of inner city violence merged with excessive consumerism.

Runyon, Randolph P. “Cathedral.” Reading Raymond Carver, Syracuse University Press. 1992: 137-85. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.

Randolph P. Runyon critiques Raymond Carver’s ’83 short story collection, Cathedral, by initially recognizing the trend of alcoholism throughout. Scrutinizing “Chef’s House,” “Vitamins,” and “Where I’m Coming From,” among a few others, Runyon makes the conclusive statement that the anthology in itself celebrates (or anti-celebrates) a form of violence in which itself, making note of the many destructive features present in the stories, from the image of the Vietnamese ear in “Vitamins” to the obliteration of the marriage in “Where I’m Coming From.”

Schmid, David. “The Kindest Cut of All: Adapting Thomas Harris’s Hannibal.” Literature-Film Quarterly 35.1 (2007): 389. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.

This article by David Schmid tackles the serial killer novelist turned modern drama sensation: Thomas Harris, responsible for the character icon, Hannibal. Schmid evaluates Harris’s 1981 Red Dragon, 1988 Silence of the Lambs, as well as 1991 Hannibal, and makes critical remarks towards what the success of Hannibal the character says about the culture of 80’s America onward. He evaluates the character’s infamous sense of class and etiquette combined with the mercilessness and brutality of his appetite appeals to the “distinguished taste of the American culture,” and has an identical effect on American sensations “…as Manson did to the rebels of excessive consumerism and materialistic peace.”

Sahlin, Nicki. “‘But This Road Doesn’t Go Anywhere’: The Existential Dilemma in Less Than Zero.” Critique 33.1 (Fall 1991): 23-42. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter and Timothy J. White. Vol. 117. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 Oct. 2013.

In Nicki Sahlin’s critical essay, she scrutinizes Bret Easton Ellis’s work, Less Than Zero. The scholar attends to the many spontaneous acts of crudeness and violence that occur within the novel and evaluates the muffled responses to these acts by the characters. She commentates on their behavior, and makes claims that they hardly give an appropriate reaction considering that they are, “so numbed with the existential culture that they aren’t even rightly disturbed.” This professional observation proves vital to the subject of violence in 80’s literature, particularly given that included is a modest amount of focus on the iconic drug culture prevalent in the decade, and the author applies this to assumptions made about the morals of the era.

Toutonghi, Pauls Harijs. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” American Writers Classics. Ed. Jay Parini. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003. 19-33. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.

Pauls Harijs Touronghi writes of the widely renowned and scrutinized Toni Morrison novel, Beloved in his critical essay regarding spiritual violence ever-so-present in the text. Touronghi centers on the vengeance of the ghost of Seethe’s child, making a series of points where the hack-saw related death comes back to shake her in spells of supernatural disturbances. He makes relevance of this in the sense that “violence resonates,” and it has a particular habit of carrying across time, as Toni Morrison’s novel does, ferrying the pain of a harsh and discriminate era into 1980’s America. The reception of the novel speaks for itself: this idea is still tragically appropriate and more than effective.

Worthington, Marjorie. “The Texts of Tech: Technology and Authorial Control in Geek Love and Galatea 2.2.” Journal of Narrative Theory 39.1 (Winter 2009): 109-133. Rpt.           in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 292. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 Oct. 2013.

This critical essay by Marjorie Worthington goes over the controversial and generally bizarre elements of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Worthington addresses a number of the novel’s motifs, ranging from misconfiguration for amusement to cultist sensationalism that branches out from a glutton for a completion. She says that the root for these themes lies in Dunn’s observation that the American population was experiencing a flood of symbolic wealth. “Materialistic notions were on the high and this instilled a longing in people for a more genuine existence.” This idea anchors Worthington into making sense of the strange characters with stranger characteristics that maintain a worth in the literary time frame.