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"Discontent Fiction."
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“He stopped to lower his window and say hello”: Jonathan Franzen, Neorealism and De-politicized Communitarianism
Referencing the term “Great American Novel,” the August 2010 cover of Time Magazine introduced Jonathan Franzen as “the Great American Novelist,” a change that draws attention to the persona of the author, as well as to his alleged ability to capture the American experience in the 21st century. Based on the analysis of Franzen’s novels, this article describes changes in mainstream American fiction under neoliberalism—the shift towards strong authorial presence, omniscient narrator, mimetism, middle-class family saga—that arguably constitute a post-postmodernist tendency, neorealism. In spite of Franzen’s extra-literary promise of political critique of neoliberalism and cultural critique of therapy discourse, his fiction in fact performs de-politization on narrative level. Happy endings exemplify a new model of success attained by characters who renounce their idealism—happiness based on small community, family, and abandonment of the hope for a structural change. This redefinition of success is presented as anti-establishment, and is combined with a style of writing that stresses verisimilitude and pretends neutrality, while applying strong narratorial authority. Those inconsistencies between the declarative and narrative levels can themselves be perceived as an intervention of neoliberalism in literature, as they cater to the demand for political discontent from Franzen’s liberal, intellectual readership, while affectively soothing it with de-politicized happy endings.
Journal Article
Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online
Sociologists of culture studying \"fan activism\" have noted an apparent increase in its volume, which they attribute to the growing use of the Internet to register fan claims. However, scholars have yet to measure the extent of contemporary fan activism, account for why fan discontent has been expressed through protest, or precisely specify the role of the Internet in this expansion. We argue that these questions can be addressed by drawing on a growing body of work by social movement scholars on \"movement societies,\" and more particularly on a nascent thread of this approach we develop that theorizes the appropriation of protest practices for causes outside the purview of traditional social movements. Theorizing that the Internet, as a new media, is positioned to accelerate the diffusion of protest practices, we develop and test hypotheses about the use of movement practices for fan activism and other nonpolitical claims online using data on claims made in quasi-random samples of online petitions, boycotts, and e-mailing or letter-writing campaigns. Results are supportive of our hypotheses, showing that diverse claims are being pursued online, including culturally-oriented and consumer-based claims that look very different from traditional social movement claims. Findings have implications for students of social movements, sociologists of culture, and Internet studies.
Journal Article
The Postwar African American Novel
Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. But the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding.In this book, Stephanie Brown recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. She also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators.Wright's Native Son (1940) is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African-American literature. And Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. But readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby's historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby's case, \"costume dramas.\" Their status as \"lesser lights\" is the product of retrospective bias, Brown demonstrates, and their novels established the period immediately following World War II as a pivotal moment in the history of the African American novel.
eBook
The Reparative Politics of Central America Solidarity Movement Culture
This essay examines the affective structures of the Central America solidarity movement in the 1980s. Through an analysis of movement photography, memoir, and Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Bean Trees , the essay shows how the 1980s Central America solidarity movement was characterized by a disillusionment with the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and a valorization of sentimental reparative modes that emphasized affective connections between US and Central American subjects. This reparative orientation often required depoliticizing racial performances from Central Americans, anticipating the demands of neoliberal multiculturalism.
Journal Article
The illusio of the foreign language standard in a Colombian University
The Ministry of education in Colombia set a policy for higher education in which graduates should achieve an intermediate proficiency level (B1) in another language; and by 2025 it expects that they leave college with an upper intermediate level (B2). This report deals with a private college that attempts to participate in the policy, yet the college has a requirement, not a foreign language policy. It offers their students 160 hours in which they hardly attain a high beginner level (A2). The Board of Directors of the college conducted a satisfaction survey that became the first cycle of the action research study reported here. The sample of 624 EFL learners expressed dissatisfaction with the program and frustration with the approach and with the results. The situation mirrored what Bourdieu (1995) defines as the illusio, the belief that the \"game\" we collectively agree to play is worth playing, that the fiction we collectively elect to accredit constitutes reality. The authors conducted a second cycle to establish the source of dissatisfaction, and to identify the needs and wants of the stakeholders. The results indicate that the administrators expect that English reinforce disciplinary knowledge, while learners expect to learn to speak it, and teachers expect to teach grammar. A third cycle has been planned to propose a curriculum proposal that reconciles the allotments of resources of time, space, staff, content learning and language learning with a standard that meets the needs and expectations of the program. In other words we expect to make a proposal that corrects the collective misperception of reality which constitutes a reality in itself.
Journal Article
The Controversy of Sciences: Humanities Revisited
The present paper is an attempt to explore the various views of the problematic relation between sciences and humanities. It is a relation marked by a great extent of discontent and misconception. It has six sections. The first section is a theoretical background. The second deals with Wells’s fiction. The third is devoted to Huxley’s. The fourth is about Snow’s writings in this field. The fifth section discusses Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The last section deals with the contribution of the post-modernistic writers to this controversy.
Journal Article
“Better than the real world”. On the Reality and Meaning of Online Computer Games
In the modern, 'disenchanted world', magic and mystery have by large been banned to the world of fiction: the realm of literature, film and, more recently, online computer games. From a modern perspective, fantasy fiction may instigate a 'willing suspension of disbelief but it can never threaten the modem distinction between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction on which a 'disenchanted world' is based. In this article it is questioned whether this analysis can be upheld by presenting a case study of online computer games. First, it is demonstrated that these 'games' are based on the fantasy genre of J.J.R. Tolkien and have evolved from 'interactive fiction' in the 1980s into the current, three-dimensional virtual worlds that defy the definition of fiction. The second section consists of a content analysis of four popular online games (Ultima Online, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft) to empirically explore the culture, social structure and economy of these online worlds and their potential meaning and appeal to the players. The analysis demonstrates that these virtual worlds break with modernity and its discontent as analyzed by sociologists such as Weber, Durkheim and Marx: they hark back to an 'enchanted world' suffused with magic and mystery, reconstruct a stateless society with clans, guilds and 'meaningful' communities and encourage players to regain control over the means of production. It is concluded that the emergence and popularity of online worlds are indicative for a problematic modern distinction between the real and fantasy, fact and fiction. Virtual worlds of fantasy may instigate 'real' enchantments. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article