Speculative fiction is a paradox. Synonymous with science fiction and “genre literature,” it is also one of the most ancient modes of storytelling in literary history. One could easily identify Plato’s Atlantis…
View More Jordan Krall’s Speculative Fiction
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag examines the history and development of representing war in photographs. Returning to the earliest images of conflict, she writes: ‘Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what caused this havoc, this carnage – these would be the reactions of a moral monster’ (2003: 7). …
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A week after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, was quoted as saying that ‘the end of the age of irony’ had arrived, while Roger Rosenblatt, of Time, wrote: ‘One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony’. The affirmation that irony had died seemed to be confirmed in those first weeks, with many other commentators …
View More 9/11 Fiction and the Death of Irony
In his 1946 essay, ‘Silence,’ the English novelist Aldous Huxley described the twentieth century as ‘the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire – we hold history’s record for them all’ (149). Writers of the early twentieth century saw noise as a symptom and consequence of modernity and modernist writing, as Josh Epstein notes, was ‘infiltrated’ by ‘the sounds of air-raid sirens, trains, typewriters,
View More Loud Fictions: Noise in the Contemporary American Novel
When the images of torture and abuse by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public in 2004, what was it that shocked so many people? It surely came as little surprise to…
View More Snapshots of the Executioners
Many aspects of the comics form have entered popular consciousness but none is quite as ubiquitous as the bubble. In order to work as a narrative form, comics are required to make visible…
View More Framing Comics Words
As one of the most important American writers of the late-twentieth century – alongside Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon in particular – Don DeLillo is a notable target of…
View More DeLillo, Aesthetics, The Cold Iraq War
Comics are the new kids on the block in the world of literary academia. It is only in recent years that they have been accepted at a valid narrative form…
View More Panel Transitions in Trauma Comics
In his book, Empathy and Moral Development, the psychologist Martin Hoffman defines empathic response as ‘the involvement of…
View More Empathy After 9/11