... 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...

...Timothy Lem-Smith Abstract This article makes the case for a rejuvenated and multifaceted mode of paranoid reading. Eve Sedgwick famously used the term paranoid reading to signal critique's overblown, cynical, and alarmist tendencies and to provisionally create the space for a reparative...

...Jack Dudley Abstract Ecological catastrophe has challenged the contemporary novel to find forms that convey the scale and affective conditions of life amid looming planetary devastation. While sincere tragedy has been the dominant mode and tone of the novel's approach, recent scholarship has...

... yields truths inaccessible to wider gazes. The essay focuses on Gilbert White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) and Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village (1824-32). It argues that we can detect the trace of a practice of close observation and a set of descriptive modes premised upon...

...). In these texts, the cross-genre “nesting” of the visual within the written becomes less precise of boundary, progressing from a clearly demarcated cinematic ekphrasis to a mode of writing that becomes stylistically cinematic. The role of visuality in these works as a vehicle for the representation of self...

...Sanjay Krishnan In this essay I ask whether there is a mode of writing that we can call “underdeveloped.” I examine two writers from the periphery, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir and V. S. Naipaul, in order to consider how realist modes take effect in social formations where institutions of the modern...

... because they understood fictional representation itself as an assault, a means of revenge, a vitriolic mode of writing. For both writers this had everything to do with their conception of realism—and with their own participation in the quintessential late Victorian debate about realism in fiction...

... dramatizes a citizen-science response to marine debris and theorizes marine science as a mode of witnessing and a mode of reading. Furthermore, by bringing her depictions of marine science into conversation with the Zen Buddhist practice of not-knowing, Ozeki meditates upon the idea that attempts to know...

... represents not a political statement on the Spanish Civil War but an attempt to synthesize and recover the moments of interpenetration between English and Spanish since the 1600s. Hemingway's mode of dialogue in the novel is thus a “structural Spanglish” rather than the common code-switching form...

... apart from the privatizing drive that seeks to corporatize all civil society. This ambition to differentiate the novel from the primary ideology of this period has been marked by the emergence of a particular mode of critical rejoinder to the pervasive corporatist mind-set, a mode called limit thinking...

...—Burney posits an ethics of the novel that treats matters of chance and modes of depleted agency as central aspects of the human condition rather than as markers of moral or aesthetic failure. Setting Burney's texts within ascendant modes of economy and finance in the eighteenth century, the article...

... the arguments of both the imperial prosecution and the defense, which thereby misrecognize and register the novel's mode of insinuating scandal without representing it. In the process, the trial's own discourse becomes entangled in that paraliptical mode, with the result that the novel and the trial form...

... 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...

... written in the first place, this article tracks how this same anticlimactic and nonrepresentational narrative mode is repeated throughout the novel. It suggests that these conspicuous absences serve as formal literary interventions that point toward the impossibility of thinking, sensing, and thereby...

... attending to the novel's own reception of those histories. Focusing on the significance of the novel's intertextual and paratextual evidence in an interpretation of the novel's unconventional narrative strategies, the essay examines hybrid modes of reading the novel, as well as reading in the novel as a way...

.... In both cases, the tic or repeated, jarring detail reorganizes the realist space momentarily in the mode of perversity, reopening its narrative frame to discordant echoes from the literary past (satire) and future (modernism). The symptom is thus mobilized in its specificity to refuse the etiological...

... of step with the temporal imperatives of the twentieth century. Turning to the temporality of jazz form, the essay then shows how the novel reshapes its mode of prolepsis to accommodate itself to the changing temporal landscape of the twentieth century. The figure I use for the interaction between jazz...

...Lisa O'Connell My paper re-historicizes the eighteenth-century marriage plot by shifting attention away from both the history of literary genres and the modes of social history that have generally informed accounts of the rise of the novel. Drawing instead on recent historiography of the period's...