Revista de estudios norteamericanos - 2022 - Nº 26

URI permanente para esta colecciónhttps://hdl.handle.net/11441/149979

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Mostrando 1 - 17 de 17

Brady Harrison and Randi Lynn Tanglen, editors. Teaching Western American literature [Review]
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Sofía Martinicorena
‘Whatever doesn’t Kill You Simply Makes You Stranger’: Fear in the Character of T he Joker in The Dark Knight and Joker
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Arroyo Paniagua, Juan José
The Joker is one of the most frightening comic book characters ever created and has, as a result, been the subject of numerous adaptations to film and television. This article analyses the portrayals of the Joker by actors Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix inThe Dark Knight (2008) and Joker(2019),respectively, and the differences in their representations of the Joker in relation to fear. Italso explores how the two films serve as allegorical representations of public fears present at the time of the films’ creation, and how these fears are either embodied in or experienced by each films’ Joker. Fear elements utilized by eachfilm’sJokercharacterare also analysed, i.e., acts of terrorism, use of make-up, and laughter. Moreover, the article’s treatment ofthe Joker reveals a character who is a victim both of public fears and of his own traumatic past—fearful experiences which come to shapethe Joker’s violent persona. The article’s comparative analysis makes use of psychological and sociological explanations of fear and its characteristics.
William l. Andrews. Slavery and class in the American South: a generation of slave narrative testimony 1840-1865.[Review]
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Rice, Alan
Construing Acts of Voicing in Christina Dalcher's Vox Through Vulnerability Metaphors
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Anastasaki, Elena; Kitsiou, Roula
In the digital era, and especially in the context of the fourth industrial revolution, where everyone’s digitally mediated voice can, potentially, reach the entire world, Dalcher’s dystopian novel, Vox, expresses a very real fear of being silenced. In modern America,apurist movement voted into power has silenced all women and girls overnight. The novel investigates the intersection of physicality and the immateriality of spoken words. The narrator’s voice, sober but without restriction, contrasts sharply with the limitations imposed around her and uncovers the silent horror of a dystopian America where half the population has lost all rights of self-disposal, both physical and discursive. Employing the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson (2003), this study explores metaphors in Vox that shape discourse(s) on voicing vulnerability and on voice as visibility through an interdisciplinary discourse analysis that draws on the fields of literature and linguistics.
“The forces that came together to infl ict thatpain”: Class, Race, and Sexuality in Ellen Feldman’s Scottsboro
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) González Groba, Constante
In the infamous Scottsboro case (Alabama, 1931), nine black youths were falsely accused of raping two low-class white girls that happened to be sexually promiscuous with both white and black males. The Scottsboro Boys were innocent victims of the southern rape complex and the automatic legal lynching of any black male accused of raping a white woman. The main character of Ellen Feldman’s novel Scottsboro(2008) is based largely on two progressive northern reporters, Mary Heaton Vorse and Hollace Ransdall, both of whom looked into the case. She visits Alabama and learns about the complex racial, class, and genderrelations there, as well as her own bigotry and class-privilege. Like Ransdall and Vorse, she reports on an eventin which two poor victims of capitalist oppression are elevated from the level of “white trash” to be made representatives of “defiled” white womanhood, while eight of the nine black youths, stereotyped as hypersexualized and inherently criminal, are given death sentences because of the tyranny of valueswhich mean nothing in the life of the girls themselves.
Joy Harjo’s Ethical Modes of Behavior Toward the Land
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) García Navarro, Carmen
Joy Harjo’s poetry may be used to reflect on how various cultural traditions experience the concept of “We”with regards to other species and the environment, for which creative forms of responsibility should be articulated. Today, humans and non-humans a like face numerous and significant challenges and hreatsthatare becoming increasingly apparent in the specific context of climate change and environmental degradation. Harjo’s orkraises concerns aboutthe impact that current global crises arehavingon the environment and our relationship to places, and consequently,our sense of belonging. This article discusses the relevance of some of Harjo’s poetry for increasing consciousness about the earth’s vulnerability and the need for environmental justice, which may be found in small but fundamental acts of caring.
Muriel Rukeyser’sThe Book of The Dead and the Representational Challenges of Slow Violence
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Simal González, Begoña
The events narrated in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead(1938) constitute a good example of what Rob Nixoncalls “slow violence,” a type of “attritional,” non-spectacular violence that seems to resist effective literary representation. This essay focuses on the strategies Rukeyser deploys in order to overcome the representational limits posed byNixon’s“slow violence”: the patchwork of genres, the choice of a polyphonicpoem-sequencestructureand, last but not least, the visible process of “wastification” of the tunnel workers, who play such a central role in the poem. Read in the light of recent scholarship on waste, Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead emerges as one of the first poem sequences to explorethe conjunction of material toxic waste (silica dust) and human “wastification.”
Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxationin a World with No Rest nor Relaxation: Narrative Prosthesis and Hyperreality
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) González Moreno, Esperanza
The representation of a form of disability in literature can be used not only as a way of distinguishing the character and setting the narration in motion but as a metaphor of social and individual collapse.Following this idea, I will focus on Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a 2018 novel that narrates the experiences of a privileged woman in a context of growing aestheticism and its consequent loss of political meaning in the American society of the 90s.In it, I argue, the depression that she suffers from can be observed to work as the engine of the narration and the result of the emptiness derived from the current society of spectacle. I use David T. Mitchell’s and Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis to delve into the role that the depression the main character suffers from plays in the novel and how she follows the pattern traditionally found in disability narratives. I also use Jean Baudrillard’s analysis ofthe current state of simulacra to explain her disabled experience.
Brady Harrison and Randi Lynn Tanglen, editors. Teaching western American literature. University of Nebraska press, 2020 [Review]
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Martinicorena, Sofía
“Fragmented and Bewildering: ” The New Risk Society in Jenny Offill’s Weather
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Abarrio Peinado, Rubén
US author Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) shows her idiosyncratic take on the notion of risk society. In the noveland its accompanying website, Offill develops a type of anxious fragmentation as an answer to the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. A multiple text characterized by compulsive quotation and the formal influence of digital media, Weatheris held together by afirst-person confessional voice. Eventually, Offill manages to achieve a sense of interconnection through an aesthetics of the fragment thanks to a double movement: she favorsa critical posthumanist perspective that understands the interrelational subject as constituted by interaction with multiple others, and she explicitly callsfor collective action. Therefore, I conclude that Weather represents Offill’s both aestheticand political quest, as she distinctly aspiresto elicit an answer from readers in the form of social activism.
Special section on representations of human and environmental vulnerability in North American literature
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Chapman, Ana; Bennett, Lucía
Sarah E. Farro’s True Love(1891):Plagiarist Reconfigurations of Ellen Wood’s The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1863)
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Manuel Cuenca, Carme; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICIN). España
In 1891 Sarah E. Farro was hailed as “the first negro novelist” with the publication of her novel True Love, a story featuring white English characters set in England. Scholars have believed that Farro’s text was ignored because it features noblack characters and does not deal with racial issues. In contrast to these opinions, I contend that True Loveis an unacknowledged but meticulous reworking of The Shadow of Ashlydyat(1863), the celebrated Victorian sensation novel by Ellen Wood. Farro’s plagiarism together with her deployment of a raceless plot far from being an aberration is an act freighted with a titanic self-affirmation and literary ambition that may have ultimately condemned her to literary ostracism.
Narrating The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanismin Catherine Lacey’s The Answers
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Abizanda Cardona, María
Recent scientific break throughs under the wing of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, particularly in the realm of biotechnology, have prompted an integral redefinition of the human, looking tow ardthe posthuman state. Stances on this question range from the trans humanists’ advocacy of over coming biologic al limits, to the inde xing of technoscientific advancementto an antihumanist and postanthropocentric project championed by critical posthumanism.These debates have been translated into speculative fiction works such asCatherine Lacey’ The Answers (2017). This novelrevolves around the Girlfriend Exper iment, a state-of-the-art research project aimed at tak ing the next step inouremotional evolution by eliminating the need for romantic relationships, bankrolled by a film industrymogul. This paper analyses the representation of human enhancement in the novel, arguing that the depiction of the material consequences of the experimentupon its research subjects amounts to a rejectionof the unrestricteddevelopment of technology along trans humanist and neoliber al tenets. In this, The Answers offersa critical take on the Fourth Industrial Revolution aligned with the principles of critical posthumanism.
Poetry in Pandemic Times: Mourning Collective Vulnerability in Sue Goyette’s Solstice 2020. An Archive
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Martínez Serrano, Leonor María
Focusing on Canadian poet Sue Goyette’s collection Solstice 2020. An Archive(2021),this article examines how dealing with the effects of a global pandemic through the medium of poetry can act as a powerful catalyst in raising awareness about collective vulnerability and mourning. During the locked-down days of 2020, Goyette felt it was her responsibility as a poet to find words to convey the sense of shared vulnerability people experienced in the face of a momentous event that confined them to their homes for days on end. Drawing on vulnerability theory, ecophilosop her David Abram’s thinking on the more-than-human world, Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, as well as on recent theorizations on the COVID-19 pandemic, this article argues that Goyette’s Solstice 2020isa most interesting sociological document that represents collective vulnerability, testifies to the con undrums posed by the still ongoing pandemic,and makes visible the deep affinities between humankind and the more-than-human world.
Transhumanism and the Anthropocene in Becky Chambers’A Closed and Common Orbit
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Roldán Romero, Vanesa; Agencia Estatal de Investigación. España
Transhumanism has been rising in both popularity and influence on western societies and philosophical thought. Dreams of mind transfer, immortality, or cloning as well as the fear of sentient and intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) can be traced in some of Netflix’s most popular series such as Altered Carbon(2018), from the novel by Richard K. Morgan, or Orphan Black(2013), to mention just a few. Similarly, transhumanism may be spotted in Becky Chambers’ fiction. The novel analysed in this paper, AClosed and Common Orbit(2016), a sequel in the author’s Wayfarers series, explores the possibility of cloning human bodies, the production of sentient AI, and the subsequent ethical implications of both science fiction tropes. Far from showing transhumanism as a miracle solution to limitations in human bodies and capacity to avoid climate change, the text presents the suspicions and fears transhumanism may raise in the USA. This article provides evidence of how the Anthropocene and transhumanism operate in Becky Chambers’ novel, theethical effects concerning intrinsic and extrinsic values andtheirpossible subversion through a posthumanist alliance under the Anthropocene.
Decolonial Hope against the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of The Sea Light (2013)
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Fernández Jiménez, Mónica
Este artículo explora la última novela de Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light(2013),como una respuesta a las ideologías modernas/coloniales que siguen emanando de las predicciones de una Cuarta Revolución Industrial. Tras un análisis del trabajo de Danticat como literatura del hemisferio americano en vez de literatura meramente caribeña o haitiana, este artículo argumenta que el retrato de la naturaleza, el medio ambiente y el pasado que el texto realiza se ajusta a visiones de esperanza de colonial más que al progreso linear dela Cuarta Revolución Industrial. A través de las historias de una pequeña comunidad en Haití, Claire of the Sea Light también plasma la degradación medioambiental que asola al país y lo hace en relación a las fuerzas externas que lo afectan, presentando una colonialidad del clima asociada adinámicas raciales del hemisferio americano. La amalgamación de narrativas humanas y medioambientales en la novela sin embargo ofrece posibilidades de resistencia y una visión esperanzadora del país basada en ecologías de coloniales y epistemología caribeña. Darles igual importancia a las historias de los actores no-humanos en la novela la posiciona fuera de la tradición moderna/colonial y abraza una poética de colonial que ofrece esperanza en un mundo que ha demostrado reproducir su propia colonialidad a medida que desarrolla nueva tecnología.
Discursive Constructions of Waste and Slow Violence In Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2022) Villamarín Freire, Sara; Agencia Estatal de Investigación. España
This paper addresses the representation of environmental destruction in the Appalachian coalfields in the novel Strange as this Weather Has Been (Ann Pancake, 2007). Pancake’s book follows the disbandment of a family of six in southern West Virginia and presents us with the dilemmas they must confront, most notably whether they should leave or stay and organize against the coal company. I seek to analyze the ways in which the novel conveys each character’s embodied, material experience when facing environmental destruction; moreover, I examinethe way in which slow violenceis represented in the text. Focusing on Appalachia’s extractivist past (and present), I argue that Strange as this Weather Has Been ultimately helps to counter the existing prejudice against poor whites in the region by fostering reader empathy through the textual recreation of the bleak environmental condition in the novel’s storyworld.

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