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1

Reality in the Margins, Pseudo-Reality in the Main Frame: The Posthuman in Steven Hall’s "The Raw Shark Texts"

100%

Guenther S.

Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

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2018

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vol. 5

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issue 1

1-10

EN

I contend that, at its core, Stephen Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts is an allegory of reading that illustrates how composite realities exist in the increasingly electronically-dominated world of posthumanism. Hall succinctly identifies how words act upon readers intellectually and psychologically. Readers take the written words from the page and turn them into actual people, places, things, and events within their minds, bringing their own past narratives to create their versions of the text’s pseudoreality. However, the text’s main character, Eric, is disabled by his repeated episodes of complete amnesia – his reality is constantly being erased and rewritten, just like computer memory, leaving Eric with no past narrative to inform his present and future. Hall, very much aware of the conflict between reality and pseudoreality, conflates the worlds of written and digital text, and of human and computer memory in ways that both celebrate their coexistence and warn of one’s potential to eliminate the other. Thus, the allegory of reading exemplifies the potential destruction of reading and the end of electronic posthumanism. As digital text and the mainframe threaten to destroy the act of reading in the twenty-first century, the death of the reader looms large.

2

An interregnum: masculinity and British fiction at the turn of the century

88%

Więckowska K.

Avant

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2015

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vol. 6

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issue 1

EN

The article offers a reading of the representation of the masculinity crisis at the end of the 20th century in selected British novels. The works by Irvine Welsh, Graham Swift, Niall Griffiths, and Ian McEwan are situated against the development of pro-feminist men’s writing and masculinity studies, as well as the mythopoetic men’s movement and Robert Bly’s bestselling Iron John: A Book About Men (1990). The article foregrounds the sense of an impasse that permeates the novels and that echoes the general feeling of in-betweenness characteristic for the turn of the century.

3

An interregnum: masculinity and British fiction at the turn of the century

88%

Więckowska K.

Avant

|

2015

|

vol. 6

|

issue 1

EN

The article offers a reading of the representation of the masculinity crisis at the end of the 20th century in selected British novels. The works by Irvine Welsh, Graham Swift, Niall Griffiths, and Ian McEwan are situated against the development of pro-feminist men’s writing and masculinity studies, as well as the mythopoetic men’s movement and Robert Bly’s bestselling Iron John: A Book About Men (1990). The article foregrounds the sense of an impasse that permeates the novels and that echoes the general feeling of in-betweenness characteristic for the turn of the century.

4

Hercule Poirot and the Tricky Performers of Stereotypes in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express

75%

Eckert K.

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

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2021

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issue 11

186-203

EN

Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934) remains well-read, and its hero Hercule Poirot continues to enjoy popular currency. Yet the text has not aged well due to some of its now clichéd plot developments and dialogue, as well as Christie’s depiction of class, ethnic and national prejudices in it and her other novels. This study hopes to re-energize discussion on Murder by finding defensible reasons for its apparent flaws. Not only do the stereotypical behaviors of the passengers narratively distract Poirot and the reader from a solution, but their flaws serve as foils against which Poirot’s heroic gravitas and cultural values are positively contrasted. Further, criticism often misses the point that the passengers are performing their behaviors, and if so, the deployment of stereotypes as only acted performances destabilizes them as permanent aspects of national or ethnic identity. Can Murder then be read as an anti-racist text?

Refine search results

2 Avant

1 Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

1 Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

2 Więckowska K.

1 Eckert K.

1 Guenther S.

1 2021

1 2018

2 2015

Reality in the Margins, Pseudo-Reality in the Main Frame: The Posthuman in Steven Hall’s "The Raw Shark Texts"

An interregnum: masculinity and British fiction at the turn of the century

An interregnum: masculinity and British fiction at the turn of the century

Hercule Poirot and the Tricky Performers of Stereotypes in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express