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.
Understanding post-autonomous fiction is crucial in understanding the connection between fiction and reality(more…)
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(more…)
Quite a nice little series I seem to be creating… This is the second “why I became disillusioned” kind of post after that on making Android apps. I’ve spent 12 years at the university – as a student, researcher, and teacher. But it’s time to admit it: I’ve lost faith in the academia; perhaps irreparably.
We won’t change the world simply by reading literature a different way, even against the grain. It’s a matter of whether we want to be a part of communities outside the university, where issues of equality are the daily reality.
I also note there that “I have no interest in an academia that does not act this way, and every academic work I have produced has been a small but honest effort in that direction.”
Well, let’s reverse that somewhat.
Every academic work I have produced has been a small but honest effort in that direction, but I have no interest in an academia that does not act this way.
This has been a major reason why I lost faith in the academia.
The reasons I lost faith in the academia mostly revolve around freedom of thought and, mostly, around possessing the capacity for freedom of thought(more…)
