Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought
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"I wanna die just like JFK / I wanna die in the USA": Libra and DeLillo’s Curation of the Kennedy Archive
Get PDFDon DeLillo reimagines and revisions the Kennedy assassination in Libra. Nicholas Branch, a retired senior analyst for the CIA, has been hired on contract to write a definitive account of the events at Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963. In the process, Branch subsumes the role of the museum curator; he meticulously combs through the received records in order to challenge accepted versions of “history”. As the novel’s character-as-curator, Branch examines, positions, interprets, and displays the artifacts at hand to outline the numerous plots swirling around the assassination. This paper will demonstrate how DeLillo, through Branch, reimagines the space of the novel, transforming it into a museum display that challenges the Warren Commission’s “Single-Bullet Theory” and its “Lone-Gunman Theory”, to instead suggest the possible presence of multiple shooters. As the novel’s character-as-curator, Branch meticulously places the objects on display and leaves it to the reader to decide which view to adopt or accept
Afro-Science Fiction: A Study of Nnedi Okorafor’s What Sunny Saw in the Flames and Lagoon
Get PDFThis paper examines the blending of Nigerian magical elements with science fiction in the writings of Nnedi Okorafor. Looking at her novels What Sunny Saw in the Flames (2011) and Lagoon (2014), we examine the juxtaposition of traditional magical elements with science fictional materials, which leads to the convergence of pseudo-realistic visions in her narratives. This paper analyses Okorafor’s novels in the context of the novelty of science fiction in Nigerian literature. Particular attention is paid to the distinctive qualities of her artistry that locates her writing within a Nigerian framework as well as within a broader global science fiction culture
Beyond the Entwurf: (A Preliminary) Project for a Scientific Death Drive
No full textThis paper explores the conceptual thresholds of psychoanalysis as they have been laid out over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, specifically focusing on the tensions between Sigmund Freud and two of his many heirs, viz., Jean Laplanche and Jacques Lacan. First, I extricate Freud's visionary text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), from Laplanche's condemnation of the text as either whimsically metaphyical or simply a return to Freudian seduction theory. I argue that neither categorization has the capacity to contain the argumentative force of Beyond. Second, by attending to Lacan's theorizations of the philosophy of science apropos of psychoanalysis, I speculate on the possibility of a psychoanalytic future, one that incorporates scientific rigour into its theories practices. By accounting for the materiality of the death drive (through Timothy Morton's object-oriented interpretation of molecular processes), I show how the death drive was never necessarily metaphorical and thereby acts as an discourse-altering facet of psychoanalysis in a way that neither Laplanche nor Lacan could have anticipated
Primates in Print: Popularizing Interspecies Kinship in Huxley's 'Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature'
Get PDFThis paper examines the bibliographic features of Thomas H. Huxley’s 1863 work Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature in order to focalize Huxley’s public engagement with non-professional audiences and consumerist market forces. Huxley’s shaping of Victorian scientific practices and his cultural contributions to natural history have been thoroughly documented, yet the hermeneutic potential of the popular work’s bibliographic and visual elements has not been adequately addressed. When amalgamated through a re-conceived process of reading, the textual and visual features of Evidence materialize the evidence of evolutionary processes to which humans themselves are subject to. After confronting humans and primates in print, Huxley’s audience understood that the socio-cultural barriers to the dismantling of animal/human dichotomies imposed by humanist ideology were made available to rational critique. Because of its wide-ranging success as a catalyst of public—not just professional—acknowledgment of evolution, I contend that Evidence’s physical and visual features should not be overlooked as major contributing factors in the dissemination and acceptance of natural explanation. This research engages with pressing questions concerning the interclass popularization of Victorian science: how did tactile decisions about the object fashion its own reception? Can evolution be presented via visual rather than purely conceptual means? How immersed was Huxley’s product in burgeoning capitalistic forces? Ultimately, understanding Evidence’s status as a marketable visual product sheds light on how Victorians (professional and colloquial subjects alike) propagated, absorbed, and contemplated the ramifications of evolution.
Postmodern Chic and Postcolonial Cheek: A Map of Linguistic Resistance, Hybridity, and Pedagogy in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Get PDFThis essay examines how Salman Rushdie appropriates the colonial linguistic medium (English) in Midnight’s Children and embeds resistance within its commonplace and seemingly innocent lexical interstices through the insertion of Hindi/Urdu terms in his wordplay. This lexical hybridity may be examined as a creative example of Homi Bhabha's exegetical “third space” that is postmodern in its disruption of semiotic stasis and postcolonial in its disruption of the primacy of English. This paper contextualizes Rushdie’s code-mixing of English and Hindi/Urdu lexical registers to produce multiple meanings and puns, maps select examples through L.G. Heller’s mode of linguistic diagramming, and provides an overview of the resultant ideological considerations
Imaginary scenarios: Literature and Democracy in Europe
Get PDFThe main focus in this paper is on the European public intellectual: literary writers presenting their critical ideas and imaginaries on society, and critiquing the (dis)function and (dis)agreement in politics. The concept ‘imaginary scenario’ will be implemented to investigate imaginative scripts and settings constructed by authors to visualize democratic structures, as such commenting on political and social events and ideas. Two European writers from different nation-states, the French M. Houellebecq (Submission) and the Portugese Gonçalo M. Tavares (Learning to pray in the age of technique) build their novels around a Vorstellung of how (future) individuals and people in power could act and speak. Similarities and differences in these author’s strategies and visionaries will be examined. The ‘imaginary scenario’ is based on Charles Taylor (2004) and Elena Esposito (2007), and as surreal-perspective evidently tells something about the experience of the present. Our claim is that these European writers have to be considered in a critical context beyond the save haven of autonomy: in their novels they address the reader as citizen and invite him to reflect on democratic practices. Thus, these European scenarists prompt us to reconsider what it means to live in the EU and to reflect on its political realities and perspectives.
“I cannot act!”: Fanny’s “Inaction” in the Economic Ideology Driving Mansfield Park
No full textIn early 19th century British culture, an ideology founded on economics permeates one of society’s most private affairs marriage between two individuals. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the characters become a type of currency to be exchanged through marriage in order for others to gain power and wealth. Fanny Price, subjected to this objectification, comes to realize the inherent value that she possesses as a woman. Once she is given agency in the novel, she is able to live beyond the ideology of the novel. Her marriage allows her to recognize herself as being equal to her husband, Edmund Bertram, and join him in ownership of their property. Fanny and Edmund represent a new ideology that is founded on love and equality, rather than profit value.
Revisionary Historical Metatext or 'Good Mills and Boon'?: Gender, Genre, and Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl
No full textIn recent decades, literary critics have become increasingly interested in the ways that contemporary historical novels are used to write “history from below.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1978), Adrienne Rich describes a process she calls “re-visioning,” a process that is defined as “looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (35). Many female authors of contemporary historical novels engage in exactly this process, looking back in time and reinserting the histories of women into the dominant narrative of history in which they are often excluded or marginalized. Novelists like Philippa Gregory, Diana Gabaldon, and Tracy Chevalier have made feminist politics clearly visible in their bestselling historical novels. And yet, for all their potential and visible disruptions of patriarchal ideology, many of these popular novels also make use of literary archetypes, tropes, and narrative patterns that reinstate hegemonic ideologies about individual identity and social structure. Using Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) as a case study, this paper argues that popular women’s historical novels often exist in tension between the pulls of revisionary feminist historiography and the popular romance narrative.