Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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Roped Solidarity: The Aesthetics of Human-Animal Bonding in Melville’s Moby-Dick and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
Full text linkThis paper investigates the literary aesthetics of ropes and argues that ropes represent a poetics of connection and disconnection between humans and other (non)humans in the spirit of new materialism. Drawing on Michel Serres’s philosophical contract theory, ropes can be regarded as the cords of an accord, which become taut and visible in seagoing narratives; in this paper, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1957) are discussed, as both novels devote much attention to the ship’s rigging or rope-work, as well as to the lines of attachment between humans and whales or marlins respectively. Both novels show that upon being roped, an aesthetics of spectrality is introduced, marked by a radical dissolution of binaries such as active/passive or subject/object. This paves the way for a poetics of solidarity, especially in those moments in which the ropes are taut and solid so that the pulls of either agent are felt
Dis/Connection: Relations, Interactions, Disruptions
Full text linkThe twenty-five years since the turn of the new millennium have been characterized by pervasive experiences of alienation manifesting across social and political spheres. Thus, with this issue, we intend to contribute to the scholarly exploration of discourses surrounding attempts at dis/connection, focusing on how literature can communicate both feelings of disconnection, for example, through exploring the experience of death, as well as affective stories of connection, from familial ties to companionship with animals.
Autofiction as a Site of Resistance: Reclaiming Agency in Contemporary Women\u27s Writings
Full text linkThis article examines how contemporary autofiction, particularly by women writers, functions as a site of resistance against gendered literary and cultural norms by disrupting the binary between the personal and the public. Focusing on Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014), I argue that these novels employ autofictional techniques such as blending fact and fiction, fragmented narrative structures, formal experimentation, author-character overlap, and heightened emotional expression. I explore how these strategies enable women writers to politicize personal experiences while maintaining protective ambiguity. Ultimately, I contend that these works demonstrate how autofiction allows women to write themselves into the literary field by challenging conventions of authorship, genre, and gender roles. Autofiction’s genre-defying innovations thus operate not only as stylistic and meaning-making practices but also as feminist strategies for reclaiming agency and reshaping dominant cultural narratives
Deviant and Ashamed: Queer Indigenous Subject Formation in the Age of Grindr
Full text linkIn my contribution, I analyze shame, specifically ‘queer shame’ as an affect in Billy Ray-Belcourt’s (Driftpile Cree) essay “Loneliness in the Age of Grindr” which is from his A History of My Brief Body (2020). I examine how the queer Indigenous subject is formed through shame by participating in contemporary queer digital hookup culture and then later interacting with the Canadian public health system due to the possibility of HIV infection. In the essay, shame functions as an identity-forming affect, which is internalized, sometimes embraced, and also shaped by outside influences
Affective Boundaries: Death, Mediation, and Virtual Space in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011)
Full text linkIn the following article, I examine contemporary conceptions of authenticity in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). I focus on how virtual and material encounters with death affect the protagonist, Adam Gordon and discuss what these encounters communicate regarding the relationship between experience and mediation. Turning to the writings of Andreas Reckwitz, Fredric Jameson, and Manuel Castells, I investigate death’s virtual expressions and pervasiveness in contemporary postindustrial societies versus its more rare and affective presence in material space. Through this context, I argue that Atocha Station privileges literature that foregrounds its own form as a medium, over eliciting affect in readers. Nevertheless, I conclude that the novel does leave space for affect by narrating an encounter with death through the aesthetic of a chat log.
Politics of Anger and Trauma Disclosure in Michelle Bowdler’s Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation and a Manifesto (2020)
Full text linkThis article focuses on the memoir manifesto as an intersection of forms and analyzes Michelle Bowdler’s Is Rape a Crime? (2020) as being representative of this subgenre in the current ‘manifesto moment.’ Bowdler as author narrates through the lens of trauma, with an emphasis on the affects the political reflection of trauma evokes. Through the personal narrative, her anger about the injustices of rape culture is explored and affective truths are disclosed without adhering to the hegemonic narrative of overcoming trauma. Instead, the book narrates an emotional arc from lonely suffering to communal activism, engaging the reader in a mode of angry witnessing
Animacy, Agency and Animatedness: The Human-Animal Transformation in Sorry to Bother You
Full text linkThis paper investigates the racialized affect of ‘animatedness’ (Ngai) as presented in the film Sorry to Bother You (2018). In this dark comedy, workers’ subjectivities are constituted by their labor: Their subjectivity is presented as plastic, by formal techniques such as the use of Claymation or animatronics, but especially by the corporate plan to transform workers into human-horse hybrids dubbed Equisapiens, to improve workplace productivity. This paper outlines the connections between this visual plasticization and the continued dehumanization of Black people, to justify the exploitation of their labor. However, this paper argues that rather than using the Equisapiens as figures symbolizing the loss of the workers’ agency, Sorry to Bother You presents both the workers and Equisapiens as excessively animated, ultimately allowing them to form a coalition based on this shared affect.
Listening Closely: Narrative Sensitivity and Thematic Apperception in Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School
Full text linkThis article offers Ben Lerner’s 2019 novel The Topeka School “as a case study to argue that even literary texts that are steeped in Theory or feature “diagnostic” narrators (Dames) do not interpret themselves but require active readers to do so. By modeling the novel’s narrative structure on the psychological Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), the narrator obliges the reader to listen to his stories as if she were a psychologist interpreting a patient’s test results. I suggest that, for The Topeka School“, adopting the same attitude of “narrative sensitivity” that psychologists bring to the evaluation of the TAT proves a productive reading strategy (Cramer 28). Especially the idea of listening closely to the text yields profound insights into its form and politics due to its central interest in the nexus of voice and masculinity. Careful attention to narrative perspective, voice, and style reveals that the novel makes powerful political claims through its form alone. It figures male violence as a structural, not an individual problem and links it to the existence of a form of collective voice of white male US-America that can speak through a liberal-minded writer just as well as through a Trump-voter or even Donald Trump himself
Chronicling the Capitalocene — History, Colonialism, and Capital in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins
Full text linkAfter first situating Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016) within the context of the Capitalocene, this essay turns to the novel’s historical narrative as decentering the individual human in a broadening account of history on the one hand, while on the other hand putting a renewed focus on the human through the central role of inequality and exploitation within the context of environmental destruction. In a second step, the essay turns to the novel’s representation of capitalism–colonialism as a destructive cycle founded upon the twin logics of elimination and (false) infinity. Barkskins, I make the case, enacts a critique of the underlying principles of the Capitalocene while remaining dedicated to the past—no particular vision of the future is offered up, even as history broadens in scope