The wider political formation of centrism within the last two decades can be more thoroughly articulated by examining its cultural expressions. This article argues that no accounting of the political centre’s literary and cultural mediations would be complete without Ian McEwan, who has shown remarkable permanence as the pinnacle of a specifically English, middlebrow literary culture.
View More Class, Authenticity and Centrism
At the centre of our collective inability to apprehend the climate crisis is our failure to imagine ourselves as anything other than the centre of everything. This article examines Jenny Offill’s novel “Weather” arguing that it stages the contemporary Western subject’s centring on its own trivialities as necessary to survival on an individual scale, yet also as threat to the survival of the planet.
View More The Centrality of the Trivial
To read a Tom McCarthy novel is to find oneself weirdly and wildly awash in grids within grids, maps within maps, of infrastructural objects and systems. Protagonists and minor characters alike obsess over these objects and systems of infrastructure—over their grandeur, their minutiae, their flows and flaws, slows and jams, their symbolic ideological concretizations, their masterful and/or absurd designs, their volumes of strata.
View More Infrastructure and the Anthropocene in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island