Volume 139, Issue 3

Tennessee Williams famously called The Glass Menagerie a ‘memory play’. This remark has been consistently overlooked or misinterpreted by critics, unleashing a tradition of approaching the play in a rather confusing fashion concerning who the characters are and how the playwright uses them. This paper engages with the character of Amanda. First of all, I will trace major transformations in the conception of characters throughout twentieth-century drama, providing background for Williams’s attempt to redefine major aspects of a playwright’s craft such as what a ‘character’ is. Secondly, I will survey a critical tradition surrounding Tom Wingfield’s mother and consider major views concerning the character. Recurrent in them, as my analysis indicates, is the failure to acknowledge her as a tool for the ‘memory work’ Tom carries out. The character is subsequently posited as a fluid entity that helps Tom (and Williams) make sense of the past and explore how their families shaped who they were. As opposed to a realistic play, where so much is given at the start, a ‘memory play’, as Williams seems to have conceived it, remains a cry for the reader to join the playwright in a common search for meaning, one that utilizes, rather than just displays, characters in order to reach standpoints that are far from fixed and immutable.

Old people have always figured in literature, but the unprecedented and worldwide growth of longevity in the twentieth century has triggered new fictional approaches to the topic of aging. Thus, since the late 1980 s, an ever growing number of established British writers, reaching their own advanced years, have written on age from an insider’s perspective, creating old main characters and focusing on their mental and physical experiences. I have examined six of such novels, published between 1986 and 2019, trying to find out how the authors construct their heroes’ and heroines’ aging selves by imagining their attitudes to certain central issues like time, death, physical decay and human relationships. Of the classical formative categories (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.) gender has proved to be the most essential, especially when it comes to the perspectives on time. While the view of heroes created by male writers remains fixed on the past, often with nostalgia, sometimes with regret, the women authors’ heroines focus on their present situation with a view to the future, represented by children and grandchildren. Class turned out to be a second important category: the (uncontemplated) safe middle-class position of all protagonists appears as an indispensable precondition for the free choice of attitude to the challenges of aging.

Before the publication of Infinite Jest in 1996, no less than a dozen excerpts from Wallace’s novel had already been published in various journals and magazines. The essay presents the first complete overview of these previously neglected excerpts and analyzes how they frame Infinite Jest . Drawing on theories by Bryant, McGann and Bhaskar, the analysis shows that the excerpts function as ‘paracontent’ that occupies a gray area between self-contained content and marketing. The essay then considers the sum of excerpts, which exhibits a surprising bias in favor of certain parts of Wallace’s novel, and discusses the implications of this imbalance.

Renowned for his thoroughly researched ‘discursive narratives’ that trace in near-encyclopedic mode the complex interconnectivity of life in our (post-)postmodern period, Richard Powers’ Gain ambivalently raises the stakes of politics in the novel of late capitalism by asserting the imaginative agency of fiction itself. But how does one employ fiction to redress the simulacral hollowing out of everyday life in a corporate culture that fabricates reality by molding consumer desire to its own ends, specifically the end of financial profit? Can the ethical acknowledgement of complicity do away with its inevitability and even willingness within the unmappable totality which is our late capitalist moment? Gain confronts this problematic in ways that both resist and embrace it. The novel’s seemingly intentional ambivalence that mimics, yet strives to invert, the unashamed cynicism of late capitalist ideology finds a point of obdurate insistence in the ‘corpo-reality’ of the human body itself. At the same time, it imagines a vehicle of transcendence in the re-incorporation of that body or, more specifically, that body’s agential possibilities in a sphere beyond mere economic interest. Yet the asymmetry patent between the body’s death and the deathless corporation, despite the narrative parallelisms that the novel damningly establishes, returns us to the ambivalence of fictional ambivalence itself and the ethical dilemma of imagining ourselves beyond the currently unimaginable real. 1

This essay will examine two of Ian McEwan’s recent novellas as political rewritings of William Shakespeare and Franz Kafka. McEwan’s Nutshell (2016) repositions the avenger figure in Hamlet as an unborn child whose melancholic awareness of the condition of modern existence allows him a mode of ironic commentary about the possibilities of moral and political choices in a world soon to be destroyed by climate change and nuclear apocalypse. The Cockroach (2019) turns Kafkaesque absurdity into political satire as the protagonist-turned-insect first encountered in The Metamorphosis (1915) is arrogated a position of absolute power in a fictional dystopia eerily resonant of Britain on the verge of Brexit. I argue that McEwan’s re-scripting of these two works of canonical literature imbues his narratives with political resonance, as the formulations and distortions of the physical body in his two novellas map onto the articulations of political belief. In effect, McEwan posits the Foucaultian notion that the body is determined by symbolic systems of power. However, he succeeds in turning the gaze back onto the political by instantiating the radical dimension of a subject whose coming into being is already a political act and event. In other words, McEwan’s artistic intervention in rewriting the narratives of Hamlet and Gregor Samsa explodes the hermeticism of the family drama in the originals by relocating the theatre of subjectivity within the sphere of the political.