Band 141, Heft 4 - Research Cluster: Abstract Reflection in Contemporary Fiction

The three papers joined in this research-cluster issue investigate contemporary works of fiction by focusing on a common formal feature: the inclusion of abstract reflection. While making general statements about contemporary fiction is notoriously difficult, there is nonetheless a clear tendency in a wide range of texts to incorporate short theoretical or essayistic deviations from the narrative sequence. After a brief definition of ‘abstraction’ and a discussion of its relationship to fictional narration, this introduction outlines the three main axes that shape the overarching research agenda: (1) a concern with the interplay between narrative form, abstract reflection, and cultures of knowledge; (2) a typology of abstract reflections; (3) literary assessments of abstract reasoning. In their respective articles, Ralf Haekel analyses the role of engineering, mathematics, and architecture in three novels by the Irish author Adrian Duncan, Stella Butter investigates mathematical and empathic cultures of knowledge as well as climate change and the Anthropocene in texts by Ted Chiang and Richard Powers, and Jarmila Mildorf examines reflections on music in texts by Julian Barnes, Roger Scruton, and Rose Tremain.

Adrian Duncan’s second novel A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) marks a departure from ‘typical’ Irish topics such as national identity and religion. This he shares with a range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel’s focus on architecture and engineering, which also looms large in Duncan’s other novels Love Notes from a German Building Site and The Geometer Lobachevsky , is unique, as it leads to unusual reflections on the nature of material culture. This original approach to the novel form should be considered as part of the current international trend to integrate theoretical reflections on a wide range of topics, thus negotiating contemporary cultures of knowledge. The novel’s international outlook moves away from ‘typical’ Irish topics of national identity and religion shared by a wider range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel is thus also a reflection on the collapse of old systems, be they political, social, or epistemological, and the existential uncertainty created by their demise. I argue in my paper that Duncan’s novel addresses questions of knowledge formation that bear a striking resemblance to the Romantic novel as an open and generically hybrid form. I read it in a wider context as part of an ongoing experience of crisis: my overall thesis aims at describing the contemporary tendency to include abstract reflections that interrupt the narrative sequence as an expression of a fundamental crisis of knowledge. Today’s mediascape represents the contemporary world in a state of severe emergency, whose symptoms, be they climate change, the rise of nationalism and the far right, ultimately lead to a fundamental experience of contingency. Novels like Duncan’s can thus be seen as an expression of the crisis of the contemporary media ecology of knowledge.

Narrative fiction that combines mathematical or scientific discourses with a pronounced interest in the topic of reasoning, particularly the mercurial effects of abstraction, unfolds an especially multi-faceted engagement with hegemonic cultures of knowledge. The contrastive analysis of two contemporary works of American fiction illustrates the role that the affordances of aesthetic form thereby play: Ted Chiang’s “Division by Zero”, a short story concerned with mathematical and empathic cultures of knowledge, and Richard Powers’s maximalist novel The Overstory , a climate change novel that challenges plant disparity awareness in Western culture. Powers’s novel can be seen as a critical response to the anthropocentric cultures of knowledge encapsulated in Chiang’s short story.

Music and literature are sister arts whose affinities and intertwinement over time have been explored from musicological and literary studies perspectives. Music holds great fascination with both scholars and lay persons because it manages to move us deeply even if we do not know much about it in a technical or theoretical sense. Aesthetic theories of music have time and again assigned this art form a special, sometimes even a divine, status. This article explores some ways in which contemporary novels reflect on music as an art form and cultural practice, its personal as well as political significance. It investigates how such reflection about music is embedded in the narrative texts, either as narratorial comments which momentarily suspend the action or as thoughts and opinions expressed by characters. In each case, readers are invited to follow the often deeply philosophical lines of reasoning presented in the text and to form their own ideas. Musical ekphrasis is used to convey at least a fleeting impression of the ephemeral ‘texture’ of the respective music and its lasting effects on the novels’ characters.

This article presents an in-depth analysis of “Against a Wen”, a poetic charm from twelfth-century England that personifies, banishes, and annihilates a skin blemish. The study begins with a brief overview of the text’s linguistic features and then proceeds to discuss the charm in distinct sections. Each of these concentrates on the contextualisation of a specific passage. The article assembles analogues from previous research and also offers several novel parallels from a diverse range of incantations, Scandinavian sources, medieval medical texts, and the Old and New Testament. Combining these parallels not only helps clarify obscure passages in “Against a Wen” but also sheds additional light on the composition’s background. Specifically, unveiling the charm’s intertextual connections allows pointing out that “Against a Wen” incorporates riddling and bilingual wordplay, as well as biblical allusions. These findings challenge the long-held perception of the composition as vernacular and provide insight into the literary devices and healing strategies found in early medieval verse charms.

Although casual readers of Northanger Abbey often still interpret the novel as a straightforward parody of the Gothic, a range of critics have pinpointed the realistically Gothic horrors that do reside in Austen’s narrative. This essay applies a similar lens to crime novelist Val McDermid’s understudied and underappreciated retelling of Northanger Abbey , arguing that the new version of Austen’s text employs the form of Gothic writing in which the most horrifying types of violence are gendered everyday injuries: experiences of gaslighting and denials of physical and verbal agency. Responding to reviewer criticism that has painted the new Northanger Abbey as pointlessly derivative, I also argue that McDermid innovates on Austen’s original narrative by refiguring the novel’s conclusion, giving her version of Catherine Morland an assertive voice with which to resist Gothic psychological violence. In this reimagined ending, the figure of General Tilney becomes defined by his anti-queer bigotry, highlighting the gothicism of pathological heteronormativity and the importance of intersectional approaches to feminist resistance. Grasping how McDermid’s Gothic approach both echoes and innovates on the rich complexities of Austen’s novel is key to recuperating this contemporary text.

We are at a point in literary studies where the meridian has begun to insistently make its presence felt. But at the same time, we are approaching the field through a miscegenated lens. This essay is about mixtures and the blurring of chronologies these effect in the realm of literary studies. Both modernism and new modernist studies draw on the stimulus provided by intermixtures. One glance at our recent compendium of terms: creolity, métissage, planetarity, is a marked indicator of the direction in which modernist studies is currently headed, as much beholden to intermixtures as modernism was. I am going to approach these questions by taking as my pivot Jean Rhys’s short story – and the title itself is deviously indicative of an intervention into all the theorizations referred to – “Mixing Cocktails”. The question I intend to ask via foregrounding the liquid principle that Rhys’s story deploys is whether in the quest to meridiniaze, if one could call it that, literary studies today, especially modernist literary studies, we are in fact letting the headiness of discovery blur meridians, even as we aim to bring them into focus. Dwelling on the admixtures, montages, blurring frames and colorisms in Rhys’s fiction, I will argue that the intermixed futures that were being shaped by the global crossings of the empire are encountered in all the bleakness of an incomplete, forever deferred birthing in the writer’s fiction. Drawing on the trope of the cocktail as both suggestive of a voluptuous dispersion and yet a shaping of all the elements into a finished product in the final analysis, this essay will dwell on how intermixtures are not always a palatable draught in Rhys.

“Rondine al Nido” is part of the Nevada-based first short story collection by Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn (2012). The third-person narrator focuses on a woman in her thirties who recounts her lover the experience of being sexually abused when she ran away at sixteen years old with a former friend to Las Vegas. Set in the backdrop of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the story dwells on the moment when the two girls could have escaped from the hotel room of their abusers but decided not to. The embedded story exemplifies Rosalind Gill’s idea of the late 1990 s and early 2000 s postfeminism (2008), and compliance with male standards of a pornified sexual experience (Nikunen 2007). I argue that the use of temporality in the story allows for a revision of gender demands and stereotypes reinforced through nationalistic discourses surrounding 9/11, and foregrounds a “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant 2011: 10) with regards to sexual violence. Further, understanding the act of the telling as an ethical encounter with the Other allows the narrator to come to terms with her younger self and the friend whom she did not protect from sexual violence in the past. 1