Literature

Locked Up: Siri Hustvedt’s ‘The Blazing World’

Siri Hustvedt’s latest work The Blazing World (2014) is a complex and multi-layered novel that deals with the notion of authorship in the art world. The novel shows an intricate play with the concept of authorship and highlights in particular a form of authorship that is rather restrictive. The fictional author/creator constructs an aesthetic experience …

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The Oscillating Zombie

The pop-culture zombie creates a compelling analytical framework for viewing the shifts and usurpations within competing cultural theories and artistic movements. The zombie process of life–death–rebirth suggests that even what dies will eventually come back to haunt us, and its rebirth inscribes a new way of understanding the previous life-death dynamic. For instance, in the …

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Oscillating Towards the Sublime

Postmodernism is dead, but its successor has not yet been crowned. Attributes of that successor have, however, begun to be elucidated. Among them is the idea that, after the scepticism of postmodernism, interest is re-emerging in the inexplicable, the unspeakable, in the things that cannot be encompassed rationally. Florian Niedlich calls this development a ‘religious …

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“Take that you intellectuals!” and “kaPOW!”

NoM editor Alison Gibbons has published an article in Studia Neophilologica on the British novelist Adam Thirlwell and metamodernist style (2014, 1-15). This is the abstract: In 1990, John Frow was asking the question, already in past tense, “What was Postmodernism?”, while Linda Hutcheon, in the epilogue to the second edition of her seminal book The Politics of …

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Miranda July: Interrupting the Conventions of the Personal

The paradoxical and perplexing work of writer and filmmaker Miranda July honours the struggle to communicate and to belong while also making it strange again. Adamant that “the whole point is to be able to feel more, to connect more” (Kushner 65), her work acknowledges the contingency of being human in a way that is …

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