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"Rando, David"
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Modernist fiction and news : representing experience in the early twentieth century
\"Modernist Fiction and News characterizes modernism in terms of its intimate, creative, and experimental relationship with a newly reorganized and rapidly expanding news industry. Writers such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf engage with the discourse and narratives of the news in order to establish an experimental space in which to represent experience with the hope of greater immediacy and faithfulness to reality\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Nonhuman Animals and Hope: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
What can critical animal studies learn by temporarily directing attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature? Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? allow readers to experience the hopes of engineered or artificial nonhuman creatures. Without presuming to know the unknowable or to make the animal speak, these novels help to further animal liberation discourses by democratizing the ostensibly human concept of hope, opening new paths of empathy between nonhuman and human animals while making it harder to accept the instrumentalization of nonhuman animals under anthropocentric capitalism.
Journal Article
David Foster Wallace and Lovelessness
While there is much to encourage such views, including Wallace's own essays and interviews-indeed, hip irony and gooey sentiment are Wallace's own terms (\"E\" 63, Infinite 694)-insufficient attention has been paid to the lack of emotion structuring his fiction, especially given the ways Wallace's fiction is crucially invested in affectlessness, most memo- rably perhaps in the character of Infinite Jest's Hal Incandenza, whose \"anhedonia\" is described as \"a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content\" (693). Critics have not sufficiently challenged Wallace's categories, however, and have too often reproduced his own thought patterns.1 They do not quite make clear how it is that the masks become unstuck, how irony can be ironized so that unironic sentiment can find expression without in fact compounding irony so that it goes, as it were, all the way down.
Journal Article
Storytelling and Alienated Labor: Joyce, Benjamin, and the Narrative Wording Class
James Joyce's narrative experiments in Ulysses allow readers to recognize traditional novel narration as alienated labor. In the course of narrating Ulysses, Joyce's notorious Arranger becomes aware of his own alienation from the product of his labor, as the life he has given to the novel finally “confronts him as something hostile and alien,” in the words of Marx. The Arranger's alienation, consistent with the forces of capitalism to which Walter Benjamin attributes the death of storytelling, motivates his outrageous narrative behavior. This alienated behavior in turn allows Ulysses to articulate experience in ways that exceed the capabilities and capacities that Benjamin grants to traditional novels. Specifically, the Arranger's labor and death absorb the fragments of living and immediate experience represented in the novel into a scheme of epic memory that transforms modernity's jolts and shocks into something communicable and gives Ulysses its unparalleled sense of life “lived.”
Journal Article
George Saunders and the Postmodern Working Class
George Saunders peoples his stories with the losers of American history--the dispossessed, the oppressed, or merely those whom history's winners have walked all over on their paths to glory, fame or terrific wealth. Among other forms of marginalization, Saunders's subject is above all the American working class. Rando discusses Saunders's fiction that not only reflects the changed ways of conceiving class but also the challenges to reconsider basic questions of class representations.
Journal Article
Reading Gravity's Rainbow After September Eleventh: An Anecdotal Approach
This essay asks two primary questions: what and how can Gravity's Rainbow tell us about the world we live in after 9/11? Do anecdotes gain currency in times of war? Specifically, this essay seeks to read a sampling of the profuse post-9/11 anecdotes about children who break their piggy-banks and donate money to relief funds alongside Thomas Pynchon's graphic sexual depictions of children in the setting of World War II. How do each of these kinds of representation affect a state's ability to establish itself as innocent and to prosecute war? Centering on the figure of Zwölfkinder, a miniature of the state run by children in the novel, the essay explores how the state launders its institutions and its finances through its children. This state-in-miniature is akin to the diminutive form of the anecdote, which functions similarly as a site of innocence creation. Gravity's Rainbow's refusal to constitute children as either innocent or experienced blocks the kind of innocence production that post-9/11 \"piggy-bank\" anecdotes help to establish in the context of the state-written innocence/experience narrative. Children in such multiply mediated anecdotes become points of contact for the diverse desires of the public, the media, and other institutions, where the state takes its ultimate pleasure. In fact, rather than a recent phenomenon related directly to the 9/11 disaster, this specific form of piggy-bank anecdote has a history and is tied to specific ideological responses to war, as demonstrated in an early nineteenth-century anecdote that is structured almost identically to these newer ones. At the same time, however, the essay discusses the delicate historicity of this form and asks how history expresses itself in these and other anecdotes, questioning generally how these anecdotes are poised at an important nexus between event, narrative, and history.
Journal Article
Make it news! Representing experience in twentieth-century news and literature
This dissertation explores the ways in which Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and John Dos Passos systematically engage twentieth-century news innovations, arguing that modernist fiction is characterized by an intimate relationship with news discourse. Walter Benjamin poses the problem this way: \"Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation.\" Dissatisfied with the comprehensive report of reality and the massive instrumentalization of life that news appears to offer, modernist fiction attempts to carve out an experimental space in relation to news in which experience might be represented with greater immediacy than in the narrative forms, temporal orderings, and event-centered news accounts of the world. Modernist fiction seizes upon distinctive news accounts of war, scandal, and identity in order to fashion a representational mode that dialectically engages the reportorial implications of news discourse. Their relationship in the twentieth century assumes a distinctly complex and powerfully creative dialectical character, in which modernism ironically subscribes to the representational forms of mass media in order self-consciously to export them back into a space of unreported experience, a process that defines modernism itself. Each chapter defines a given work's unique attempt to write experience by engaging the news conventions of entertainment and reportage; these essays thus suggest a range of perspectives on the ways in which modernist writers and texts read and rewrite the news. In U.S.A. by John Dos Passos or in James Joyce's Ulysses, news discourse is directly thematized or adapted. Stein's autobiographical writings and Woolf's \"The Mark on the Wall\" do not address news explicitly, but rather are formed by an implicit engagement with news discourse. This study thus works to comprehend the dialectical response of entire literary texts to the news, in formal, historical, and ideological terms.
Dissertation
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (review)
[...] it tries to respond to Latham and Scholes's call for a truly crossdisciplinary research team necessary to study periodical culture. [...] its rhetoric of challenging or decentering modernist studies contrasts with the tantalizing points of contact with literary modernism to be found here, as when Laurel Brake reads W. T. Stead's annuals as modernist texts, or when Patrick Collier examines how contradictory attitudes toward authorship in John O'London's were exemplified by its associations with Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells.
Journal Article
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005
When Auden writes of Yeats in \"In Memory of W B. Yeats,\" he says, \"You were silly like us,\" but when Coetzee writes of Waltet Benjamin, he seems merely to say, you were silly. Because he, like Theodor Adorno, does not respond to Benjamin's method of dialectical images in The Arcades Project - largely, it appears, because he rejects Benjamin's thesis that the nineteenth century, and we ourselves suffer under a long and catastrophic dream of capitalist phantasmagoria - the only three verdicts he proposes for it are \"ruin,\" \"failure,\" or \"impossible project\" (63). Coetzee knows that to cut Benjamin's text is to undermine its potential to survive as dialectical images, to violate Benjamin's crucial structural principle of arresting history and shocking us awake, but he seems intent on digesting Benjamin's most consuming intellectual project to little more than \"a treasure hoard of curious information,\" \"thought-provoking quotations,\" and \"a multitude of succinct observations, polished to a high aphoristic sheen\" (60). Coetzee considers The Pht Against America as a dystopian novel, set unexpectedly in the past rather than the future. [...]Roth must \"provide rwo lines of suturing: the imaginary Lindbergh years have to be sutured at one end to the real history from which they diverge in mid- 1940, and at the other end to the real history that they rejoin in late 1942\" (241).
Book Review