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Across the four novels Daniel Davis Wood has published to date, it is possible to delineate an evolving ethics of literary voice. His initial step in Blood and Bone is to subvert the third-person omniscient voice by drastically expanding the imaginative abilities of the first-person narrator, thus showing how the narrator must always speak through a subjective position. The second step involves examining the extent to which the narrator's desire is not their own: the narrator of Unspeakable is portrayed as the victim of toxic narcissism and media manipulation, for instance, while the protagonist of At the Edge of the Solid World is so alienated from his own emotions that he relives the calamities of others to process his own tragedy. Despite possessing the quasi-omniscient powers of Blood and Bone, these two narrators, far from being godlike, are shown to be puppets of desires that are not their own. The outcome is the dissolution of the subjective "I" in In Ruins, in which the narrator comes to understand the Otherness that permeates human subjectivity. Moral failures are dissolved by the inability to say "I", making the new ethical task bearing witness to the desire of the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Teddy Wayne’s The Great Man Theory (2022) is most obviously a response to the Trump presidency, this essay explores how the novel also engages larger questions about political critique and a meaningful response to power. We analyze, in particular, the protagonist’s closing attack on a right-wing pundit in the context of the novel’s exploration of magical thinking, drawing special attention to Wayne’s references to the idealism of Hegel. This essay thus reveals Wayne’s core idea in this novel, that the persistence of the “great man theory” in American culture represents a perverse ideology of disempowerment that must be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sadie Jones's The Snakes (2019) examines the overlap between secular capitalism and religious thought. Jones contemplates how Christianity and capitalism have shaped the moral economy, blending wealth and virtue to create a modern system of values. The essay first examines the responses of Jones's characters to this system: the protagonist, Bea, renounces her family's fortune to live the life of a saint, whereas her brother Alex sees himself as a sinner, attracted to the annihilation of self in Keats, Rumi, and Weil. The essay's second half focuses on how Jones disrupts this economy by strategically incorporating elements from ancient Greek culture. The Greek gods reject the transactional logic that underpins capitalism, so that not even Bea's virtue can prevent her brutal murder. No amount of credit, moral or financial, can move the amoral sovereignty of the world, as implacable as the rocks and trees Bea contemplates in her final moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the work of Jacques Lacan there exists an extended metaphor of clothing, whereby the 'naked' truth is always "clothed' in deception. For Lacan, clothing functions at the intersection of the symbolic and the imaginary, with outward appearance shaping what we imagine to be underneath in order to determine the landscape of symbolic desire. Joan Copjec considers the political implications of this metaphor, arguing that utilitarianism, in particular, divides desire into a false dichotomy of rational, naked desire, and the ornamental clothing of irrationality, a mindset woven into both capitalism and French colonialism. The article then examines two examples from Lacan's commentary on ethics: the story of Saint Martin and the beggar, and the myth of Actaeon and Diana, further demonstrating how clothing metaphors are entwined with notions of truth and deception. The article concludes by considering whether Lacan's words are similarly clothed in deception, and ponders whether he should be telling us the naked truth. Lacan weighs both options and concludes that the most effective form of communication constitutes a double bluff in which he strategically pretends to lie, not for the sake of deception, but in order to 'clothe' (and thus protect) the naked truth concealed underneath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevailing tendency among critics is to read the fiction of Hari Kunzru through a postcolonial lens, emphasizing either his themes of fluidity and hybridity, or his cosmopolitan resistance to national boundaries. This essay takes a different approach by examining how Kunzru engages notions of political theology. Kunzru uses computer programming, for instance, as a metaphor for divine creation, so that in works like Transmission and Gods Without Men his protagonists, both programmers, confront the notion of hacking the divine "code." In Gods Without Men, this process is achieved through a computer program named Walter that is able to predict first the stock market, and then the course of historical events. Walter is named after Walter Benjamin, who argued that a concealed political theology underlies the logic of modern society. Following similar clues in Kunzru's fiction, this essay explores his diagnosis, on the one hand, of political theology's responsibility for the creation of a modern society of control, and the revolutionary potential of being able to subvert and manipulate that divine code, on the other. In a world where the hegemony of modern capitalism feels increasingly stifling, Kunzru offers a means of escape and resistance by turning society's code against itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers de la Nouvelle: Journal of the Short Story in English is the property of Presses Universitaires de Rennes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay sets out to examine the connection between capitalism and ideas about time, focusing on Iain Pears's novel Stone's Fall (2009). Capitalism, with its endless promises of future returns, tends to deploy a model of time oriented around progress toward the future. Pears's narrative, by contrast, subverts this by reversing the timeline, each section of the novel a step backwards in time. The first section of the paper examines how other critics, from Walter Benjamin to Mary Poovey, have used similar reversals to undertake critical genealogies of capitalism's emergence. The second section shows how fiction and finance intersect in the credit economy, blending ethics and economies to train subjects who are, in Nietzsche's words, capable of making promises about the future. The essay closes by looking at the notion of prophetic time, which disrupts the capitalist paradigm through the unexpected return of ancient tragedy in the modern novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambivalence at the heart of Rachel Kadish's third novel, The Weight of Ink (2017), comes from the tension between Kadish's exploration of Jewish identity, on the one hand, and her position as a feminist on the other. Kadish thus uses the form of the historical novel to critique patriarchal traditions in Jewish culture that exclude women from the domain of scholarship and philosophical thought. The Weight of Ink weaves a complex narrative contrasting the life of a twenty-first-century historian, Helen Watt, to the fierce intellect of Ester Velazquez, a female scribe from the seventeenth century, who is forced to develop her philosophy secretly under a series of male pseudonyms. This essay starts out by examining the delicate balance required for this kind of cultural critique, for while Kadish excoriates the past ill-treatment of women and homosexuals, she nonetheless is also clearly proud of her identity as a Jewish woman. The second section of this paper looks at the extent to which Kadish launches a successful feminist analysis of Jewish culture and traditions. Her strongest points come when she turns the logic of this tradition back on itself: the very existence of Ester's intellect or Alvaro's homosexuality, she argues, are proof that such things are ordained by divine will rather than its contradiction. The conclusion of the paper explores the limitations of Kadish's approach, focusing in particular on the way she creates a biological tie between Ester and Shakespeare. This narrative twist appropriates Ester to the realm of the patriarchal law, encapsulating the irresolvable tension between Kadish's Jewishness and her feminist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the idea of an embodied art in A. S. Byatt's short story 'Body Art'. In order to contextualize this concept, the essay begins with a survey of Byatt's earlier explorations of the link between mind and body, as well as an analysis of the small amount of secondary material relating to 'Body Art', a text that has received little critical attention. The article then explores the story's ties to Dutch vanitas painting, a tradition that is intimately linked to the study of anatomy. The vanitas tradition shows how medicine and art were once a unified field, and explores the consequences of their modern division. This leads to a consideration of the influence of theological debates about mind and body and their effect, in particular, on Renaissance humanist art. The next section examines the shifting meaning of the archival collection, particularly in its significance for modern formations of subjectivity. This idea is particularly important in the context of the story's allusions to Joseph Beuys, who views the artist's body as a locus of creativity. Like Beuys, Byatt is interested in art that draws on the imaginative power of religious storytelling and imagery while rejecting its supernatural elements. Byatt draws together all of these elements in her story in order to articulate her vision of an embodied art, one that draws together the conceptual and the physical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ethical concept of the neighbour, an idea central to the fiction of Tim Winton. The first part focuses on how the ghosts in Cloudstreet symbolize an Australian culture haunted by the injustices of colonization, especially the dispossession of the Indigenous people. The second part looks at the paradox of being commanded to love one's neighbour, comparing an early story, "Neighbours", to Winton's recent novel Eyrie. The third part looks at Winton's ethics of neighbourliness in light of recent critical reworkings of this concept by Slavoj Žižek and Kenneth Reinhard. Central to this section is the importance of time and place to the ethics of the neighbour, in particular the repeated insistence by both Winton and his critics that, rather than focusing on the past, we should acknowledge the neighbour who stands before us in the here and now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]