... is concerned—rightly and presciently so—with the inherent multiplicity of individual action, that which lies at the very foundation of liberal thought. He shows that neither the individual nor the action is ever singular, or—more precisely—that this singularity is always already (or paradoxically, depending...
...Maria Christou Abstract At center stage in Kazuo Ishiguro's work is the figure of the nonactor: a character type that confronts us time and again with scenarios in which action is devalued. This essay shows that, despite finding themselves in situations that mandate action, Ishiguro's characters...
... would encourage her to act in accordance with her knowledge of his past actions and her own experience of heartbreak. Concurrently, Tom's society (in recognizing him as Allworthy's heir) erases his youthful, transgressive experiences, seeing the actions of gentlemen as purgative and temporary. Character...
... with other world systems become the sites of dramatic action and ethical transformation. In essence, Murakami presents us not with single verisimilar realities but with what I call fractal realism, recursively constituted fields of representation wherein characters and readers alike must continually adapt...
..., and contingency that many readers of Hopkins's text have noted in fact constitute a response to James's theories—a statement recognizing the unfinished quality of diasporic black political action. © 2013 by Novel, Inc. 2013 Duke University Press Transnational Healing in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One...
... of a realist aesthetics stages a critique of key assumptions of the narratives of emergency, which place the victims in an overly determined condition where meaningful action is impossible. The works of Mda, Farah, and Akpan restore historical agency to characters who experience extreme insecurity and provoke...
... reproduction, Nostromo calls on tropes of nineteenth-century realism only to insist upon their inadequacy. The novel's attention to institutions as material structures (and as actors in their own right) joined to sets of values, practices, and incentives (and thus as contexts for individual action) resonates...
... or supernatural agency over Crane's fictional terrain. Accounting for these in terms of fairly conventional modes of realism and naturalism, critics often presume that Crane's plotting works to literalize clichés of common speech and thus to reveal, in a manner of action, social significance latent in a manner...
... by photography. I argue that many novelists need the idea of photography as freezing a moment in time to meet their own narrative ends, to signify an instant of stopped action: that way, too, they retain authorial control of the (imaginary) photograph's signification. Their version of photography is underwritten...
... first by discussing what it calls “commodity origin” scenes in Émile Zola, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Powers, a genre that like the epic simile interrupts the action to provide background knowledge. Second, it reflects on the famous first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years...
... action is embodied and interrogated in what I call the microeconomic mode , a ubiquitous twenty-first-century cultural formation defined by a combination of abstraction and extremity. From Cormac McCarthy's The Road to the Hunger Games franchise, this mode represents individuals making life-and-death...