Joseph Conte
Professor of English at the University at Buffalo since 1988, where I teach twentieth and twenty-first century literature with an emphasis on postmodernism, transnational politics in post-9/11 fiction, the global novel, multimodal literature, film adaptation of the novel, postmodern theory, literature and science, literature of migration, and modern poetry and poetics.
I am pleased to announce the publication of my book from Routledge in November 2019, Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, available in hardback (9780367236069) and eBook (9780429280733). Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel suggests that literature after September 11, 2001 reflects the shift from bilateral nation-state politics to the multilateralism of transnational politics. While much of the criticism regarding novels of 9/11 tends to approach these works through theories of personal and collective trauma, this book argues for the evolution of a post-9/11 novel that pursues a transversal approach to global conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. These novels embrace not only American writers such as Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Thomas Pynchon, and Amy Waldman but also the countervailing perspectives of global novelists such as J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Mohsin Hamid, and Laila Halaby. These are not novels about terror(ism), nor do they seek comfort in the respectful cloak of national mourning. Rather, they are instances of the novel in terror, which recognizes that everything having been changed after 9/11, only the formally inventive presentation will suffice to acknowledge the event’s unpresentability and its shock to the political order.
My book, Design & Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction, received the Agee Prize in American Literary Scholarship from the University of Alabama Press in 2002. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry was published by Cornell University Press in 1991 and reissued as an ebook in 2016. Book chapters and articles on a wide range of contemporary fiction and poetry have appeared in Trump Fiction: Essays on Donald Trump in Literature, Film, and Television; American Literature in Transition: 1990-2000; Modern Fiction Studies; Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction; The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo; The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism; Dictionary of Literary Biography; Sagetrieb; and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, among others.
I have been a SUNY Senior Fellow at the New York—St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture in St. Petersburg, Russia and Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China. I have been awarded a University at Buffalo Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship, a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellowship, and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities. I received my Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1988.
Phone: (716) 645-0696
Address: Department of English
306 Clemens Hall
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-4610
I am pleased to announce the publication of my book from Routledge in November 2019, Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, available in hardback (9780367236069) and eBook (9780429280733). Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel suggests that literature after September 11, 2001 reflects the shift from bilateral nation-state politics to the multilateralism of transnational politics. While much of the criticism regarding novels of 9/11 tends to approach these works through theories of personal and collective trauma, this book argues for the evolution of a post-9/11 novel that pursues a transversal approach to global conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. These novels embrace not only American writers such as Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Thomas Pynchon, and Amy Waldman but also the countervailing perspectives of global novelists such as J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Mohsin Hamid, and Laila Halaby. These are not novels about terror(ism), nor do they seek comfort in the respectful cloak of national mourning. Rather, they are instances of the novel in terror, which recognizes that everything having been changed after 9/11, only the formally inventive presentation will suffice to acknowledge the event’s unpresentability and its shock to the political order.
My book, Design & Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction, received the Agee Prize in American Literary Scholarship from the University of Alabama Press in 2002. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry was published by Cornell University Press in 1991 and reissued as an ebook in 2016. Book chapters and articles on a wide range of contemporary fiction and poetry have appeared in Trump Fiction: Essays on Donald Trump in Literature, Film, and Television; American Literature in Transition: 1990-2000; Modern Fiction Studies; Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction; The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo; The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism; Dictionary of Literary Biography; Sagetrieb; and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, among others.
I have been a SUNY Senior Fellow at the New York—St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture in St. Petersburg, Russia and Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China. I have been awarded a University at Buffalo Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship, a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellowship, and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities. I received my Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1988.
Phone: (716) 645-0696
Address: Department of English
306 Clemens Hall
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-4610
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Books by Joseph Conte
https://www.routledge.com/Transnational-Politics-in-the-Post-9-11-Novel-1st-Edition/Conte/p/book/9780367236069
Design and Debris discusses the relationship between order and disorder in the works of John Hawkes, Harry Mathews, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo. In analyzing their work, Joseph Conte brings to bear a unique approach adapted from scientific thought: chaos theory. His chief concern is illuminating those works whose narrative structures locate order hidden in disorder (whose authors Conte terms "proceduralists"), and those whose structures reflect the opposite, disorder emerging from states of order (whose authors Conte calls "disruptors").
Documenting the paradigm shift from modernism, in which artists attempted to impose order on a disordered world, to postmodernism, in which the artist portrays the process of "orderly disorder," Conte shows how the shift has led to postmodern artists' embrace of science in their treatment of complex ideas. Detailing how chaos theory interpenetrates disciplines as varied as economics, politics, biology, and cognitive science, he suggests a second paradigm shift: from modernist specialization to postmodern pluralism. In such a pluralistic world, the novel is freed from the purely literary and engages in a greater degree of interactivity between literature and science, and between author and reader. Thus, Conte concludes, contemporary literature is a literature of flux and flexibility.
Unending Design examines general issues of contemporary poetics--how to categorize versions of the postmodern "long" poem, or to address the multiple voices of the lyric, for example--as well as the smallest details of poetic structure. Conte reads closely the works of such canonical figures as Creeley, Ashbery, and Duncan, semi-canonical writers such as Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky, and Lorine Niedecker, and previously overlooked poets including Harry Mathews, Paul Blackburn, William Bronk, and Weldon Kees. He describes the serial form adopted by Creeley, George Oppen, and Jack Spicer, among others, as combinative and provisional, incorporating random events without succumbing to formlessness. Then he discusses the procedural form--developed by poets including Ashbery and Mathews, and the composer John Cage--in which arbitrary constraints generate the content, rather than merely contain it. Among the characteristics of proceduralism are the varation of recurrent lexical or semantic elements and the free play of poetic artifice. Conte employs the semiotic approaches of Barthes, Eco, and Riffaterre to define these new compositional methods and to interpret the meaning of form in contemporary poetry.
Unending Design provides both an overview of postmodern aesthetics and a penetrating analysis of the distinct forms of contemporary poetry. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in American poetry in particular and postmodernism more generally.
Reviews of Design and Debris by Joseph Conte
Reviews of Unending Design by Joseph Conte
Book Chapters by Joseph Conte
While the literary author was once engaged in shaping the principal medium of communication, now the writer may no longer be regarded as practising in the dominant medium of the postwar period. DeLillo accepts the challenge that televisual and digital media present to the writer, both recuperating and critiquing various forms of visual media in his novels. Whereas Jack Gladney in White Noise, Nick Shay in Underworld, Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, and Richard Elster in Point Omega appear to fall prey to visual projections of reality, DeLillo’s fiction establishes a hermeneutic space around these protagonists in which the politics of our visual culture may be ironized; it is the subject in which and against which he writes. Confronted by our cultural imaginary, DeLillo resists the absorption of the aesthetic experience of the sublime into televisual and digital media.
Keywords:
Age of terror; global capitalism; anarchism; political assassins; technological sublime; apocalypse
After the millennial apocalypse that went by the name Y2K fizzled, Americans felt secure in their leadership of the New World Order; but then the towers fell, ushering in the twenty-first century for real as an age of terror and retribution. Don DeLillo’s novel, Cosmopolis (2003), probes the source of this catastrophe in the transnational forces of global capitalism and resistant terrorism. The novel chronicles a single day in April 2000 when the financial market suddenly loses its momentum and wobbles towards collapse. As billionaire currency speculator Eric Packer embarks on a crosstown odyssey in Manhattan, he is confronted by black flag anarchists at the NASDAQ Center, the funeral cortege of a murdered rapper, the President’s motorcade, and finally a lone assassin who resembles an amalgam of Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley, Jr. DeLillo remarks that “the day on which this book takes place is the last day of an era.” The film adaptation of Cosmopolis (2012) by David Cronenberg evokes both the claustrophobic compression of a long day’s journey into night and a fatalistic inevitability as Packer and the country accelerate toward “the ruins of the future.” In a cotemporaneous short fiction by DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof” (2002), strangers view the installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York of Gerhard Richter’s cycle of fifteen canvases, October 18, 1977 (1988), that render in blurred grayscale images the suicides of German Red Army Faction terrorists, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader. Resistance to state corporatism and the origins of modern terror bring novelist, filmmaker, and artist to a vision of an apocalypse yet to come.
Keywords:
Columbian Exposition; alternative history; paramorphism; international anarchism; propaganda of the deed; anarcho-syndicalism
Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) begins with the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and ends with the immediate aftereffects of World War I in 1920. Yet the novel depicts not only the history and politics of the turn-of-the-last-century as we have received them but also “the other side of the tapestry,” a darker and alternative history. The Chums of Chance surveil “the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism,” only seven years after the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. In the historical paramorphism of the novel, what if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand met his demise while cavorting in the New World rather than by assassination in Sarajevo in 1914? A small perturbation in the course of history might have averted the cascade of events that brought the Triple Alliance to war with the Central Powers in the “General European War.” The novel is set during the heyday of international Anarchism that sought to dislodge plutocrats from power and turn the material assets of the industrial monopolies over to the workers. Attacks on European royalty and heads of state followed the principle of “propaganda of the deed,” but the repentant bomber Webb Traverse ultimately declares his loyalty to anarcho-syndicalism. The novel draws a double refraction between the Belle Époque of monopoly capitalism and the post-9/11 politics of globalization.
Keywords:
Multilinear narrative; hybrid fiction; transnational conflicts; censorship; terrorism; political philosophy
J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) is structured as a multilinear narrative. The “dominant” narrative that occupies the top of each page is an assortment of “Strong Opinions,” essays attributed to Señor C., an aging South African writer living in Australia. Separated from the essays by rulers are two “subordinate” narratives that put forward the story of a romantic and fiduciary intrigue. The novel is thus a hybrid fiction that combines nonfiction political essays on such transnational conflicts as Guantánamo Bay, al-Qaeda terrorism, anarchism, pedophilia, censorship, and the slaughter of animals, with a “realist” fiction of thwarted romance. Coetzee deploys the literary persona of Señor C. in a narrative gambit that Mikhail Bakhtin calls “nondirect speaking,” that of an author who says “‘I am me’ in someone else’s language, and in my own language, ‘I am other.’” Tolstoy is held as an exemplar of “authority in fiction,” but like Tolstoy, Señor C. is unmasked as nothing more than an “ordinary man with fallible opinions.” Alienated by the violence of political discourse, and yet ethically compelled to speak to the injustices visited in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Coetzee describes a political philosophy of “pessimistic anarchistic quietism.”
Keywords: Headscarf controversy; political Islam; Armenian genocide; political exile; hidden symmetry; the veiled and the unveiled
Orhan Pamuk sets Snow (2002) in the village of Kars in the eastern Anatolia province of Turkey, far away from the multicultural city of Istanbul that links Europe and Asia, in order to foreground the tensions and resistance between Islam and Turkey’s secular state as girls, forbidden to wear head scarves to school, commit suicide. The protagonist Ka, a poet posing as a journalist, is caught between the factions of political Islamists and militant nationalists. His dilemma forecasts Pamuk’s own arrest and trial in Istanbul in 2005 on charges of “insulting Turkishness” for suggesting that responsibility for the Armenian genocide in Anatolia in 1915 lies with the Turkish Republic. The novel’s diegetic narrator “Orhan Bey” finds the “hidden symmetry” of a snowflake design that organizes Ka’s book of poems, Snow, on three axes of Reason, Imagination, and Memory, though the poems themselves are lost. Orhan Bey’s novel is likewise organized according to a hexagonal design whose three axes are traversed by pairings of the Veiled/Unveiled, Politics/Beauty, and Belief/Incredulity. Pamuk’s Snow negotiates the local conflicts between conservative Islamists and secular republicans, but as a global novel that defends freedom of expression it fulfills his conviction that cosmopolitan citizens “do their deepest thinking about themselves” by reading literature.
https://www.routledge.com/Transnational-Politics-in-the-Post-9-11-Novel-1st-Edition/Conte/p/book/9780367236069
Design and Debris discusses the relationship between order and disorder in the works of John Hawkes, Harry Mathews, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo. In analyzing their work, Joseph Conte brings to bear a unique approach adapted from scientific thought: chaos theory. His chief concern is illuminating those works whose narrative structures locate order hidden in disorder (whose authors Conte terms "proceduralists"), and those whose structures reflect the opposite, disorder emerging from states of order (whose authors Conte calls "disruptors").
Documenting the paradigm shift from modernism, in which artists attempted to impose order on a disordered world, to postmodernism, in which the artist portrays the process of "orderly disorder," Conte shows how the shift has led to postmodern artists' embrace of science in their treatment of complex ideas. Detailing how chaos theory interpenetrates disciplines as varied as economics, politics, biology, and cognitive science, he suggests a second paradigm shift: from modernist specialization to postmodern pluralism. In such a pluralistic world, the novel is freed from the purely literary and engages in a greater degree of interactivity between literature and science, and between author and reader. Thus, Conte concludes, contemporary literature is a literature of flux and flexibility.
Unending Design examines general issues of contemporary poetics--how to categorize versions of the postmodern "long" poem, or to address the multiple voices of the lyric, for example--as well as the smallest details of poetic structure. Conte reads closely the works of such canonical figures as Creeley, Ashbery, and Duncan, semi-canonical writers such as Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky, and Lorine Niedecker, and previously overlooked poets including Harry Mathews, Paul Blackburn, William Bronk, and Weldon Kees. He describes the serial form adopted by Creeley, George Oppen, and Jack Spicer, among others, as combinative and provisional, incorporating random events without succumbing to formlessness. Then he discusses the procedural form--developed by poets including Ashbery and Mathews, and the composer John Cage--in which arbitrary constraints generate the content, rather than merely contain it. Among the characteristics of proceduralism are the varation of recurrent lexical or semantic elements and the free play of poetic artifice. Conte employs the semiotic approaches of Barthes, Eco, and Riffaterre to define these new compositional methods and to interpret the meaning of form in contemporary poetry.
Unending Design provides both an overview of postmodern aesthetics and a penetrating analysis of the distinct forms of contemporary poetry. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in American poetry in particular and postmodernism more generally.
While the literary author was once engaged in shaping the principal medium of communication, now the writer may no longer be regarded as practising in the dominant medium of the postwar period. DeLillo accepts the challenge that televisual and digital media present to the writer, both recuperating and critiquing various forms of visual media in his novels. Whereas Jack Gladney in White Noise, Nick Shay in Underworld, Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, and Richard Elster in Point Omega appear to fall prey to visual projections of reality, DeLillo’s fiction establishes a hermeneutic space around these protagonists in which the politics of our visual culture may be ironized; it is the subject in which and against which he writes. Confronted by our cultural imaginary, DeLillo resists the absorption of the aesthetic experience of the sublime into televisual and digital media.
Keywords:
Age of terror; global capitalism; anarchism; political assassins; technological sublime; apocalypse
After the millennial apocalypse that went by the name Y2K fizzled, Americans felt secure in their leadership of the New World Order; but then the towers fell, ushering in the twenty-first century for real as an age of terror and retribution. Don DeLillo’s novel, Cosmopolis (2003), probes the source of this catastrophe in the transnational forces of global capitalism and resistant terrorism. The novel chronicles a single day in April 2000 when the financial market suddenly loses its momentum and wobbles towards collapse. As billionaire currency speculator Eric Packer embarks on a crosstown odyssey in Manhattan, he is confronted by black flag anarchists at the NASDAQ Center, the funeral cortege of a murdered rapper, the President’s motorcade, and finally a lone assassin who resembles an amalgam of Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley, Jr. DeLillo remarks that “the day on which this book takes place is the last day of an era.” The film adaptation of Cosmopolis (2012) by David Cronenberg evokes both the claustrophobic compression of a long day’s journey into night and a fatalistic inevitability as Packer and the country accelerate toward “the ruins of the future.” In a cotemporaneous short fiction by DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof” (2002), strangers view the installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York of Gerhard Richter’s cycle of fifteen canvases, October 18, 1977 (1988), that render in blurred grayscale images the suicides of German Red Army Faction terrorists, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader. Resistance to state corporatism and the origins of modern terror bring novelist, filmmaker, and artist to a vision of an apocalypse yet to come.
Keywords:
Columbian Exposition; alternative history; paramorphism; international anarchism; propaganda of the deed; anarcho-syndicalism
Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) begins with the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and ends with the immediate aftereffects of World War I in 1920. Yet the novel depicts not only the history and politics of the turn-of-the-last-century as we have received them but also “the other side of the tapestry,” a darker and alternative history. The Chums of Chance surveil “the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism,” only seven years after the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. In the historical paramorphism of the novel, what if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand met his demise while cavorting in the New World rather than by assassination in Sarajevo in 1914? A small perturbation in the course of history might have averted the cascade of events that brought the Triple Alliance to war with the Central Powers in the “General European War.” The novel is set during the heyday of international Anarchism that sought to dislodge plutocrats from power and turn the material assets of the industrial monopolies over to the workers. Attacks on European royalty and heads of state followed the principle of “propaganda of the deed,” but the repentant bomber Webb Traverse ultimately declares his loyalty to anarcho-syndicalism. The novel draws a double refraction between the Belle Époque of monopoly capitalism and the post-9/11 politics of globalization.
Keywords:
Multilinear narrative; hybrid fiction; transnational conflicts; censorship; terrorism; political philosophy
J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) is structured as a multilinear narrative. The “dominant” narrative that occupies the top of each page is an assortment of “Strong Opinions,” essays attributed to Señor C., an aging South African writer living in Australia. Separated from the essays by rulers are two “subordinate” narratives that put forward the story of a romantic and fiduciary intrigue. The novel is thus a hybrid fiction that combines nonfiction political essays on such transnational conflicts as Guantánamo Bay, al-Qaeda terrorism, anarchism, pedophilia, censorship, and the slaughter of animals, with a “realist” fiction of thwarted romance. Coetzee deploys the literary persona of Señor C. in a narrative gambit that Mikhail Bakhtin calls “nondirect speaking,” that of an author who says “‘I am me’ in someone else’s language, and in my own language, ‘I am other.’” Tolstoy is held as an exemplar of “authority in fiction,” but like Tolstoy, Señor C. is unmasked as nothing more than an “ordinary man with fallible opinions.” Alienated by the violence of political discourse, and yet ethically compelled to speak to the injustices visited in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Coetzee describes a political philosophy of “pessimistic anarchistic quietism.”
Keywords: Headscarf controversy; political Islam; Armenian genocide; political exile; hidden symmetry; the veiled and the unveiled
Orhan Pamuk sets Snow (2002) in the village of Kars in the eastern Anatolia province of Turkey, far away from the multicultural city of Istanbul that links Europe and Asia, in order to foreground the tensions and resistance between Islam and Turkey’s secular state as girls, forbidden to wear head scarves to school, commit suicide. The protagonist Ka, a poet posing as a journalist, is caught between the factions of political Islamists and militant nationalists. His dilemma forecasts Pamuk’s own arrest and trial in Istanbul in 2005 on charges of “insulting Turkishness” for suggesting that responsibility for the Armenian genocide in Anatolia in 1915 lies with the Turkish Republic. The novel’s diegetic narrator “Orhan Bey” finds the “hidden symmetry” of a snowflake design that organizes Ka’s book of poems, Snow, on three axes of Reason, Imagination, and Memory, though the poems themselves are lost. Orhan Bey’s novel is likewise organized according to a hexagonal design whose three axes are traversed by pairings of the Veiled/Unveiled, Politics/Beauty, and Belief/Incredulity. Pamuk’s Snow negotiates the local conflicts between conservative Islamists and secular republicans, but as a global novel that defends freedom of expression it fulfills his conviction that cosmopolitan citizens “do their deepest thinking about themselves” by reading literature.
Keywords:
Transversality; cosmopolitanism; anti-globalization; eclecticism; différend; remigration
Transversal cosmopolitanism offers resistance to both the hegemony and homogeneity of late-capitalist globalization through the highlighting of incommensurable cultural difference, the fostering of creative appropriation, and an exposure to alternative systems of belief or idioms. Cosmopolitanism occupies the same pathways of (de)differentiation and (de)territorialization as globalization, but at every point its relation to the hegemonic flow is transversal rather than oppositional, diagonal rather than dialectical. Transversality in Deleuze and Guattari’s “lines of flight” accounts for hybridity, the combination of elements that correspond obliquely on what would otherwise be separate and non-communicating pathways. Transversals are “double captures” with the potential for change that affects both elements in a correspondence. I read the post-9/11 global novel as an expression of transversal politics, as narratives that expose the différend which resists translation into a single global idiom; and I identify those characters who are cosmopolites, global citizens, who instigate a shared deterritorialization, or who may be types of an ethnocentric nationalism advanced by the 2016 Presidential election that is in the process of transversal transformation. I examine four novels that traverse in bi-social fashion the fractious relationship between Islam and the west. Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) confront the profiling, racism, and backlash towards Muslims in America after 9/11. The protagonists of both novels are well-educated professionals and nonobservant Muslims who are forced by political circumstance to reconsider their citizenship, their practices, and their faith. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King (2012) reconsider the American abroad who is both naïf and ugly in his encounter with the other, innocent and guilty of the civilized savaging of a foreign land. All four protagonists leave the US to become global citizens.
Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality (1991) touted the “ten-year rule,” according to which computer enthusiasts by the millions—in 2001—would be interacting directly with virtual worlds through their desktop VR engines. But films of the 1990s, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), and novels such as Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), and Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (2000), uniformly present VR as the usher to a postmillennial apocalypse. Their dystopias are a means by which the legacy media of print fiction and the cinema “remediate” both the false promises and the disturbing threats of an artificial reality that would supplant them. Some say that with the technological improvements introduced by Oculus Rift or Google Glass, VR’s moment in media history has finally arrived in the 21st century; some say that for VR and its funny goggles, its future has already passed.
Virtual reality; dystopia; remediation; Avant-Pop; Pat Cadigan; Mark Lehner; Richard Powers; Howard Rheingold; Neal Stephenson
Complexly Unrealistic: Gilbert Sorrentino’s Pack of Lies
The Unclassifieds: Harry Mathews’s The Journalist, and
Navigating the Periplum: John Barth’s Last Voyage.
John Hawkes' short novel Travesty presents a monologue of a person driving an automobile who plans to deliberately crash the car into a farmhouse because his wife and daughter are lovers of his friend Henri. Henri and his daughter are with him. The collision is expected to occur within 100 minutes. However, the novel is not about suspense. The driver is very much interested by the chaotic behavior of a collision and the idea that personal decisions and chance both determine life.
Transversal cosmopolitanism offers resistance to both the hegemony and homogeneity of globalization through the highlighting of incommensurable cultural difference, the fostering of creative appropriation, and an exposure to alternative systems of belief or idioms.
Cosmopolitanism occupies the same pathways of (de)differentiation and (de)territorialization as globalization, but at every point its relation to the hegemonic flow is transversal rather than oppositional, diagonal rather than dialectical. Transversality in Deleuze and Guattari’s “lines of flight” accounts for hybridity, the combination of elements that correspond obliquely on what would otherwise be separate and non-communicating pathways. Transversals are “double captures” with the potential for change that affects both elements in a correspondence.
I read the post-9/11 global novel as an expression of transversal politics, as narratives that expose the différend which resists translation into a single global idiom; and I identify those characters who are cosmopolites, global citizens, who instigate a shared deterritorialization or double capture, or who may be types of an ethnocentric nationalism advanced in the 2016 Presidential election that is in the process of transversal transformation. I examine four novels that traverse in bi-social fashion the fractious relationship between Islam and the west. Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) confront the profiling, racism, and backlash towards Muslims in America after 9/11. The protagonists of both novels are well-educated professionals and nonobservant Muslims who are forced by political circumstance to reconsider their citizenship, their practices, and their faith. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King (2012) reconsider the American abroad who is both naïf and ugly in his encounter with the other, innocent and guilty of the civilized savaging of a foreign land. All four protagonists leave the US to become global citizens.
Cosmopolitanism occupies the same pathways of (de)differentiation and (de)territorialization as globalization, but at every point its relation to the hegemonic flow is transversal rather than oppositional, diagonal rather than dialectical. Transversality in Deleuze and Guattari’s “lines of flight” accounts for hybridity, the combination of elements that correspond obliquely on what would otherwise be separate and non-communicating pathways. Transversals are “double captures” with the potential for change that affects both elements in a correspondence.
I read the post-9/11 global novel as an expression of transversal politics, as narratives that expose the différend which resists translation into a single global idiom; and I identify those characters who are cosmopolites, global citizens, who instigate a shared deterritorialization or double capture, or who may be types of an ethnocentric nationalism advanced by the 2016 Presidential election that is in the process of transversal transformation. I examine four novels that traverse in bi-social fashion the fractious relationship between Islam and the west. Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) confront the profiling, racism, and backlash towards Muslims in America after 9/11. The protagonists of both novels are well-educated professionals and nonobservant Muslims who are forced by political circumstance to reconsider their citizenship, their practices, and their faith. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King (2012) reconsider the American abroad who is both naïf and ugly in his encounter with the other, innocent and guilty of the civilized savaging of a foreign land. All four protagonists leave the US to become global citizens.
The irony of such a massive migration into Italy and the European Union would not be lost on Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, whose story, “The Long Crossing,” concerns Sicilian villagers who are conned by that day’s version of human traffickers into believing they will be deposited (as illegal immigrants) on the shores of New Jersey. Between thirty-five and fifty percent of the mostly single males who ventured to L’America returned to Italy; the ritornati were indeed remigrants. In Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s film, Big Night (1996), chef Primo considers whether to return to work in his uncle’s restaurant in Rome, against his brother Secondo’s conviction that only America provides the opportunity for advancement. Migrants into both the United States and Italy have faced isolationist, xenophobic and anti-immigration political parties such as the Northern League and the Tea Party
The transnational politics of Against the Day should then be understood not only as an historical analysis of the rise and fall of an anti-authoritarian movement in the fin de siècle but also as a work of post-9/11 literature intended to provoke an oppositional response to the current political crisis of the War on Terror. Invoking Santayana’s famous maxim in The Life of Reason (1905), “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Pynchon’s historical bilocation suggests that those who most vigorously investigate the suppressed history of the last century are most well equipped to interrogate the political crises instigated by present-day plutocrats.
Pynchon’s sympathies with an international Anarchist movement that sought to dislodge plutocrats from power and turn the material assets of the industrial monopolies over to the workers are in evidence in the novel. There are references throughout its more than a thousand pages to the spate of attacks on European royalty and heads of state before and after the centenary. These attacks followed the international Anarchist principle of “propaganda of the deed” that promoted physical violence against political enemies as a way of inspiring the masses and catalyzing revolution. Pynchon draws our attention to the striking parallels between the terrorism and transnational politics of 1901 and 2001—but what we should infer from these references is for us to decide.
The featured character in Point Omega is Richard Elster, a retired scholar (exactly DeLillo’s age of 73) recruited to the E ring of the Pentagon, given a security clearance, and tasked with conceptualizing the war in Iraq, “to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counter-insurgency.” Elster theorizes a “haiku war … in three lines,” that is, “a set of ideas linked to transient things.” Clearly that’s not the war that we got. Elster is pursued in his disgrace, “Wolfowitz went to the World Bank. That was exile,” by a documentary filmmaker, Jim Finley, who wants to feature Elster in a film conceived as an extended monologue, “just a man and a wall.” There would be no archival footage, no cutaways, no off-camera interviewer posing provocative questions; only Elster in “one continuous take” speaking whatever comes to mind.
Elster confers with the “fantasists of the Pentagon” who, in devising their war plan for Iraq, “created reality.” In a not overly subtle reference to the missing weapons-of-mass-destruction and an al-Qaeda in Iraq that appears only after the invasion, Elster remarks, “There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create.” Some will recall the New York Times Magazine essay by Ron Suskind in 2004 in which Suskind was told by an anonymous senior advisor to George W. Bush that journalists of his sort were “in what we call the reality-based community,” who sought empirical evidence for their assertions. In contrast, the administration regarded itself as “an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Something like that inversion of fiction and reality occurs in “Point Omega,” whose title refers to the French paleontologist and Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the final evolution of human consciousness, the Omega Point, where matter and consciousness are one. In the conceptual universe of DeLillo’s novel, reality and fiction move asymptotically toward Teilhard’s Omega Point.
Diary of a Bad Year is thus a type of hybrid genre that combines non-fiction political essays on such transnational concerns as Guantánamo Bay, Al-Qaeda terrorism, and the slaughter of animals, with literary biography, and a “realist” fiction of thwarted romance. At one level we can read the book as a “political novel” that innovates with respect to narrative conventions. Where we expect to find factual references in the subordinate commentary, we instead find the narrative diegesis. Conversely, the writer’s personal foibles literally undermine and destabilize the political arguments that we might otherwise—if they were published separately—take to be earnest. To what extent do we ascribe the provocative opinions of Señor C. to Coetzee? Or does the thinly-veiled fictional spokesperson exonerate Coetzee from responsibility for the opinions? Tolstoy is held up as the exemplar of “authority in fiction,” unmasked by the poststructuralist criticism of Barthes, Foucault. Like Tolstoy, Señor C. is unmasked as nothing more than an “ordinary man with fallible opinions.”
Spring 2018
In this seminar on innovative fiction, we will examine the contraindicated persistence of multimodality in print novels; or, books you can’t read on a Kindle™. Alison Gibbons defines multimodality as “the coexistence of more than one semiotic mode within a given context.” We experience multimodality as the environment of our daily life, in various platforms that include the urban streetscape, art galleries, digital “desktops” and other electronic media. Multimodality is as new as the iPhone with its app icons and voice assistance, but as old as the New England Primer’s abecedarium. Multimodal literature may be regarded as both the resistance to and the appropriation of digital technology in the print medium. Most literary works are monomodal and language-centered; they call on the reader’s store of linguistic competency and comprehension of the symbolic mode, but they subordinate or exclude the iconic and indexical modes. But multimodal literature exhibits polysemiosis: the reader encounters two or more semiotic modes and recognizes that they are not autonomous meaning systems but semantically interrelated. The experience of reading a multimodal text requires that the reader—in the broadest sense of the word—negotiate between systems of meaning, not merely within the rule of one mode. The relation between the verbal text, visual icon and indexical design is one that is cognized rather than decoded. So the study and reception of multimodal literatures requires the development of a cognitive poetics.
Each of the multimodal books that we will peruse exhibits a “set” toward a dominant mode while retaining reference to all others: the book can trend toward a. transparency, or the set toward narrative, mimesis or character; b. opacity, or the set toward the form of the novel; c. code, or the set toward the visual appearance, the icon; or d. base, or the set toward the form of the book. We will want to examine the effects of multiple reading paths on narrative structure; the physical manipulation required to read one or more of these books; the relationship between the semiotic modes of the graphical and textual in all of these books; the “self-conscious” reading that is required by works that call attention to themselves as books; or the metafictive reflexivity of these works as fictions; etc.
Works for extended discussion will include: Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006); Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010); Alison Gibbons’s Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (2011); B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (2009); Emily McVarish’s The Square (2009); Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) (2008); Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic (2011); and Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2004). Other literary and critical readings will be available through UB Learns or on graduate course reserve.
Fall 2015
The paradigm shift from analogue to digital culture should be acknowledged as a defining aspect of postmodernism. A complex dynamics of incommensurability arises in periods of technological overlap. In the Kuhnian model the new paradigm supplants the practices and forms of the old and renders them obsolete. But a model of remediation suggests that all new media refashion and sublimate old media. The incommensurability of print and digital media incites creativity in—and thus disturbs, but does not eradicate—the older, established forms of literature. Modulations in the form of the novel—the concept of what a “novel” might consist of, how its structure as a bound codex might be manipulated—are provoked by the introduction of digital media. While photography did not supplant painting in the nineteenth century, its capacity for documentary detail compelled the artist to reexamine the conventions of mimesis, challenge the genteel rules of subject matter and foreground the painterly medium of color and light. In the twentieth century broadcast television arises as literary fiction’s dominant technological other. And yet TV’s one-to-many delivery of infotainment to a passive audience instigated an interactive, plural and multimodal print fiction. The disturbing presence of broadcast and digital media has not made the novel disappear; rather, new media has made the most compelling fictions those that generate associative logic instead of the causal sequence of plot, parallel processing instead of serial in discourse, and multimodal design instead of the block print page. The reader’s apprehension of the textual condition displaces the conduit metaphor of communication; reflexivity in the narrative dispels absorption in the text-world.
During the seminar, we’ll alternate between readings of postmodern novelists who provocatively engage with the terms and conditions of information culture and theorists who invoke the surfeit of information and the hyperconnectivity that characterizes broadcast and digital media. We’ll begin with writers who question the antagonistic relationship between literary fiction and television as the dominant mass media in the postwar period, including David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993) and “My Appearance” (1989); and Curtis White’s Memories of My Father Watching TV (1998). Next we’ll survey the advent of virtual reality (VR) in a selection of cyberpunk fiction including: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which features a Hiro Protagonist whose digital avatar pursues a virus capable of infecting the cerebral cortex; Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), in which the map of the mind becomes the territory of real space; and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), which delves into the post-Cold War world of multinational corporate communications. Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (2000) switches between narratives that correlate the sensory deprivation of a hostage in an empty room in Beirut and the efforts of a Seattle-based group to project a virtual reality on the blank walls of “the Cavern.” We’ll finish with the Avant-Pop movement that splices the corruscations and convergences of the avant-garde and popular media culture in work by Larry McCaffery, Mark Leyner, Kathy Acker and Samuel R. Delany.
Our fiction readings will be informed by excerpts from a variety of critical and theoretical texts on information culture, virtual reality and digital media, including: Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspective on Ergodic Literature; Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies; Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media; David Ciccoricco, Reading Network Fiction; Joseph Conte, Design & Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction; Jane Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books; Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris, ed. The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction; Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”; N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter; Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics; George Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology; Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace; William Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information; Mark Poster, What’s the Matter with the Internet?; Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions; and Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb.
University at Buffalo
Department of English
Summer 2015, Second Session, July 6-August 14
Online Course
This installment of Contemporary Literature will examine the revival of the social novel prompted by Jonathan Franzen and exemplified by his recent book, Freedom (2010), which depicts a middle-American dysfunctional family. His brand of social realism is characterized by the objective representation of recognizable types (ourselves, only slightly embellished), in a prose style that mimics the contemporary vernacular (our voices, barely, if at all, embellished), and encompassing conflicts (the discontents of family and married life; substance abuse and psychological debilities; loneliness in a time of social media) that are ordinary, if only slightly more desperate than our own.
In point of contrast, we’ll then read Zadie Smith’s prize-winning debut novel, White Teeth (2000), which stirs together a postmodern fabulist style with a multinational and multiethnic cast of characters in London, England. More self-conscious in its bearing and more attuned to global culture and its transnational conflicts, Smith’s novel will in both style and content allow us to evaluate two prominent strains in contemporary fiction beyond the often insular American market.
As both of these novels are substantial in length, we’ll spend approximately half of the brief summer session with each, supplementing our reading of the texts with required nonfiction essays on the social novel and multicultural literature. Because this course will be conducted online through UB Learns, students will be required to participate in weekly graded discussion boards on the novels. In addition to these short responses, there will be two essays that will be likewise submitted through UB Learns.
University at Buffalo
We will read a selection of “books” that question every aspect of what it means to be a print novel. These are multimodal works that integrate text, pictures and design elements; and yet they are books you can’t read on a Kindle™. We experience multimodality as the environment of our daily life, in various platforms that include the urban streetscape, art galleries, digital “desktops” and other electronic media. Multimodality is as new as the iPhone with its “app” icons and voice assistant, Siri, but as old as the New England Primer. Multimodal literature both resists and appropriates digital technology in the print medium. Most literary works are language-centered: they call on the reader’s store of linguistic competency and comprehension of the text, but they subordinate or exclude pictorial or graphic elements. The experience of reading a multimodal novel, however, requires that the reader negotiate between the verbal and the visual, always aware that the bound book is also an expert technology. We will examine the effects of multiple reading paths on narrative structure; the physical manipulation required to read these books; and the “self-conscious” reading that is required by works that call attention to themselves as books.
Works for extended discussion will include: Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006); Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010); B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (2009); Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) (2008); Tom Phillips’s A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (fifth edition, 2012); Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic (2011); and Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2004).
Transnational Politics and the Post-9/11 Novel
Spring 2015, University at Buffalo
Literature after September 11, 2001 reflects a shift from the provincial politics of nation-states to that of transnational politics—issues that require adjudication across national, geographic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and racial borders. In the epoch of globalization, these are conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without the cooperation and understanding of diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. If the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought to a close an overt dichotomy in international politics and deprived Western writers of a reliable foil, the events of 9/11 not only redirected our “intelligence community” from counter-espionage to counter-terrorism but also compelled writers to attend to a multilateral political terrain. This new political paradigm is both transnational and asymmetrical. The system of global capitalism, for which the secular ideals of representative democracy are a thinly disguised “advance man,” contends with the emergent threat of a transnational theocracy that is resistant to the agnostic, graphical, and consumerist Western ideology.
We will read some works of fiction that directly represents the events of 9/11 and others that reflect changes in the political and cultural milieu in its aftermath. Don DeLillo has called this the “Age of Terror,” and in Falling Man (2007), he eschews documentary realism in favor of representing 9/11 through the cognitive and psychological trauma of a World Trade Center survivor whose recuperation is the beginning of a “counternarrative” to terrorism. Orhan Pamuk sets Snow (2004) in the village of Kars in far eastern Turkey, away from the multicultural city of Istanbul that links Europe and Asia, in order to foreground the tensions and resistance between Islam and Turkey’s secular state as girls, forbidden to wear head scarves to school, commit suicide. J. M. Coetzee, in Diary of a Bad Year (2007), fashions a multi-tracked narrative in which the author-surrogate Señor C. ventures a series of “strong opinions” on anarchism, terrorism, the state, Al Qaida, democracy and so on that question the purpose of writing in an ethically confused and disputatious world.
These and other works of contemporary fiction—including Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008)—suggest that, rather than suffering from self-absorption and disaffection, innovative fictions have engaged global politics. As Pamuk contends, it is through novels that world citizens do their deepest thinking about themselves.
We’ll also screen films that present differing views of the role of state power in the transnational political drama, including Kathryn Bigelow, dir. Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Alain Brigand, prod. 11'09"01 September 11 (2002), and Errol Morris, dir. Standard Operating Procedure (2008).