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Criticism

Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”: an Example of Post-Autonomous Fiction

July 12, 2020

guest post, Igor Livramento, Kristen Roupenian, literature, narrative, post-autonomous, writing

Today’s post offers an example of post-autonomous fiction, focusing on Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”. The article is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English.

Having explained what on earth is post-autonomous fiction, this time we’ll see an example of it, focusing on some of its literary specifics. Our example will be a most fascinating story. It appeared on The New Yorker, on December 4th, 2017.

I’m referring to Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”.

What’s so interesting is that the story got more views on a single week than any other one published on the magazine that year. That alone is impressive, but the reaction it got is also worthy of mention.

This reaction was due to a narration technique we’ll explore, and such a technique as applied there increased its post-autonomous status.

Roupenian's "Cat Person" — Whether Roupenian’s “Cat Person” is good in a literary sense is irrelevant. Rather, its importance lies in that it’s indistinguishable from reality.

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Post-Autonomous Fiction: Connecting Realities and Fictions

June 23, 2020

Criticism

academia, criticism, fiction, guest post, Igor Livramento, post-autonomous

Today’s article on post-autonomous fiction is a guest post by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English.

Fiction isn’t the way it used to be, claims Argentinian literary critic Josefina Ludmer on Post-autonomous fiction. But what does this doctor honoris causa mean? What is this autonomy we’ve arrived after?

Understanding autonomy is, unsurprisingly, crucial in understanding post-autonomy and post-autonomous fiction. Which, as we will see, is revealing in terms of understanding the connection between reality and fiction.

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The Modernity of Dracula: Dialectics of Past and Future

June 12, 2020

Criticism

academia, criticism, Dracula, Gothic, modernity, time

Note: the following article on the modernity of Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 66-67, 145-147) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.

Perhaps one of the most interesting utterances in Dracula is Jonathan Harker’s “old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (D 43). However, what Jonathan fails to realize is that the joke is on him:

Dracula awes because he is old, but within the vampire tradition, his very antiquity makes him new, detaching him from the progressive characters who track him… Jonathan Harker looks in his shaving mirror and sees no one beside him. In Jonathan’s mirror, the vampire has no more face than does Dickens’s Spirit of Christmas Future. In his blankness, his impersonality, his emphasis on sweeping new orders rather than insinuating intimacy, Dracula is the twentieth century he still haunts … [He is] less of a specter of an undead past than a harbinger of a world to come, a world that is our own. (Auerbach 1995, 63; emphasis in the original)

And so, several scholars connect Count Dracula with modernity, through the concept of the eternal now. Dracula, like other Gothic texts, presents a temporal model in which “[c]hronological time is … exploded, with time past, present and future losing their historical sequence and tending towards a suspension, an eternal present” (Jackson 1981, 47).

The modernity of Dracula often passes unnoticed, *precisely* because of his very antiquity

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