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"Paranoia Fiction."
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Seeing Things: Gothic and the Madness of Interpretation
This chapter contains sections titled:
Reading Madness
A Mad Trist: “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Consuming Madness: Dracula
The Pursuit of Knowledge: M. R. James, “A Warning to the Curious”
References
Book Chapter
In black and white : a novel
\"Black and White is a full translation of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's 1928 novel, Kokubyaku, with an introduction that identifies the special conditions that might have made it a 'lost' novel. This novel offers a window into Tanizaki's life and work at a critical transition point in his career. The introduction focuses on the moment Tanizaki astounded the literary world in 1928 by writing three novels in the same year, after several years of relative silence following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Two of the three (Some Prefer Nettles and Quicksand) immediately became famous; this third disappeared from view. The novel tells the story of a writer who in essence kills another writer with his writing. In it, an obsessive paranoid fantasy turns out to invade 'real life,' and it ends with a man confessing to a murder he did not commit. Over the course of the story, he (the character? the author?) invents a character he calls the 'Shadow Man,' who is out to entrap the writer (the protagonist? the author?) and destroy him. The tone of the story is comic rather than tragic, sardonic rather than dramatic. There is a peculiar ambiguity between author and character that distinguishes the story from the usual 'I-novel' genre of the day; the novel is autobiographical in an unusual way, although Tanizaki was never considered an autobiographical writer. The central questions the introduction addresses are: What is autobiographical in the novel; who was killed and why; and how did that elimination help make Tanizaki a great writer?\"-- Provided by publisher
BOOK
John Fowles, Oscar Wilde, and the Conspiracy of Fiction
John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus , in which a mysterious and far-reaching \"godgame\" subjects the novel's protagonist to a series of deceptions that toy with his desires and punish his vanity, is a prime example of what one could call the \"conspiratorial style\" in fiction. Buried within the unfolding plot of Fowles's novel seem to be telling references to another text about the dangerous appeal of elaborate but unsubstantiated theories, Oscar Wilde's \"The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,\" a story about one man's fatal obsession over discovering the true identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets. The Magus parallels Wilde's cautionary tale not only in its focus on the evocative power of the artistic muse but also in how it explores the distorting effects of desire and the lure of solving what may well be unsolvable.
Journal Article
A Myth Besieged: How Indian Political Violence Transformed a Popular Genre of British Fiction
A popular genre in late-Victorian British print culture, Mutiny fiction upheld the cultural myth of the Indian Mutiny, as a New Imperial interpretation of the historical events of the Indian Rebellion. The myth rested on the relative passivity of the Indian population since 1857. Increasing levels of violence in Indian nationalism challenged the myth, especially after Madan Lal Dhingra's assassination of Sir William Curzon Wyllie on the steps of the Imperial Institute in London in 1909. In this essay I discuss how the sociopolitical discourse around British India changed after Dhingra's act of political violence and how that shift is reflected in Mutiny fiction. I focus on Charles E. Pearce's Love Besieged , published in 1909 and written in response to the uptick in Indian nationalist violence in the subcontinent in the two years prior.
Journal Article
Mistress
\"Ben isn't like most people. Unable to control his racing thoughts, he's a man consumed by his obsessions: movies, motorcycles, presidential trivia-and Diana Hotchkiss, a beautiful woman Ben knows he can never have. When Diana is found dead outside her apartment, Ben's infatuation drives him on a hunt to find out what happened to the love of his life. Ben soon discovers that the woman he pined for was hiding a shocking double life. And now someone is out to stop Ben from uncovering the truth about Diana's illicit affairs\"--from publiser's web site.
Book
The Exchanges of The Good Story
This contribution to the Special Issue on epistolary form in the work of J. M. Coetzee examines the form of the “exchanges” in The Good Story (2015). These exchanges extend Coetzee’s longstanding interest in the methods and limitations of psychoanalysis. They stand as an iteration of self-reflexive meditation on his writing’s imbrication in these methods and limitations. At the same time, the exchanges strive to enact methods—the sympathetic, the erotic, the intimated—that Coetzee’s writing associates with the literary and would bring into productive dialogue with psychoanalytic practices.
Journal Article
Sealed
\"Heavily pregnant Alice and her partner Pete are done with the city is haunted by rumors of a skin-sealing epidemic starting to infect the urban population. She hopes their new remote mountain house will offer safety, a place to forget the nightmares and start their family. But the mountains and their people hold a different kind of danger. With their relationship under intolerable pressure, violence erupts and Alice is faced with the unthinkable as she fights to protect her unborn child\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Hearing Things: Gloria Naylor’s 1996, Havana Syndrome, and the Acousmatic Fantasy
In 1996, Gloria Naylor (2005) recounts a traumatic encounter with the surveillance state, one that begins with sonic harassment but ends with psychological instability. Uncertain what voices fill her mind, Naylor composes what she calls a fictionalized memoir, in which she projects the paranoia of surveillance onto the unstable medium of narrative voice. The indignity of “hearing things,” which features prominently in Naylor’s story, evokes a critical tradition that ranges from Eve Sedgwick’s (1997) theorization of paranoia to Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen’s (2024) more recent reimagination of “conspiracy/theory.” Although this interdisciplinary body of scholarship has established the indelibly literary demeanor of the surveilled life, it has yet to address hearing things as a fundamental problem of the digital world. As this essay argues, 1996 contests state surveillance not by reciprocating the data-collection process, but through fantasies of mystery voices and unverifiable—that is, acousmatic—sounds. The second section of this essay contends that increasingly ubiquitous and imperceptible surveillance technologies have made Naylor’s narrative strategy even more essential today. In 2016, American diplomats began to report hearing inexplicable noises as well as an array of neurological symptoms that news media have come to name Havana Syndrome. The diplomats’ government agencies largely dismissed their symptoms, and the experience of hearing things fell outside the procedures of clinical medicine, leading many to rehabilitate their minds through aesthetic means. This essay links the provocative narrative form of 1996 with the art therapies at Walter Reed Medical Center, before forecasting Naylor’s influence on the emerging counter-surveillant practices of the digital age.
Journal Article