Lynne Tillman and the Great American Novel
Kasia BoddyMost recent "Great American Novels" are not great, but merely big. Lynne Tillman's American Genius, A Comedy, by contrast, is designed with scale, not size, in mind. So argues Kasia Boddy, who reads the novel as a critical engagement with book reviewers' favorite cliché for ambitious social fiction. Instead of resisting cultural obsolescence through sheer assertion, Tillman's book examines how the cracks and contradictions of American ideology have imprinted themselves on the individual body, bearer of the national disease: sensitivity.
Skin Deep: Lynne Tillman’s American Genius, A Comedy
Peter Nicholls"Like skin, the comma both connects and divides." Peter Nicholls traces Tillman's endlessly subordinating, endlessly equivocating sentences, showing how their quest for historical and social clarity passes through an interminable sequence of deferral and denial.
Post-Prognostics
Justin RobyHow does one write science fiction when the atom bomb (and later 9/11) makes the future seem impossible to predict? Justin Roby reviews Paul Youngquist's Cyberfiction: After the Future, which explores how postwar "cy-fi" critiqued life in the age of cybernetic control systems.
Going Up, Falling Down
Tom LeClairCan the rising cost of cosmopolitan real estate have brought the New York City novel to a low point? Tom LeClair measures recent fictions from and about New York City - including three "9/11 novels" - against the Systems Novel of the mid-1970s.
Lydia Davis Interviews Lynne Tillman: The ebr Interview
Rone Shavers, Eric Dean Rasmussen, Lydia DavisTwo innovative contemporary writers discuss the relationship between encyclopedic narrative and notions of gender and writing, the body as the physical embodiment of memory, and the unique syntax of Tillman's American Genius, A Comedy. The novel's prose depicts the way "thought, when you're not thinking, happens."
Lost and Long-Term Television Narrative
David LaveryDavid Lavery ponders the "neo-baroque" tap-dancing of TV's most playful and commercially successful serial drama.
“Essential Reading”: A Review of Daniel Punday’s Five Strands of Fictionality
Anthony Warde
Anthony Warde traces Daniel Punday's analysis of the intertwining strands of contemporary "fictionality," the different modes - from "myth" to "assemblage" - by which invented stories are legitimated. Punday's work implies that the active construction of 'life-fictions' is becoming more significant in contemporary technoculture, a view that runs counter to the more pessimistic view of agency in Baudrillard's Simulacrum America and other accounts of a wholly 'virtual' reality.
Unworldly Reflections
Stephen DoughertyIn this review of Robert Chodat's Worldly Acts and Sentient Things, Stephen Dougherty argues that Chodat's inquiry could have profited from a deeper engagement with posthumanist thought.