Dave Eggers

This paper historicizes the ambivalent discourse on data and communication transparency that is epidemic in digital cultures by confronting it with a reading of Kleist’s novella, The Duel (1811). In the medium of literature, conditions of possibility for the production of relevant and reliable knowledge on the basis of data are subject to analysis and critique. Basic operations of data processing have proven to be fallible and corrupted by media, which, instead of reducing complexity, deepen it. In contradistinction to the trust that reduces this complexity, The Duel performs an epistemology of mistrust, which insists on the polyvalence, dubiousness, agility, and ephemerality of the data from which truth is supposed to appear.

This volume, Environmental Crisis and Human Costs, is the second in the CLYMA series [Culture, Literature and Environment, initials in Spanish], a series within the Biblioteca Benjamin Franklin of the Instituto Franklin-UAH, Universidad de Alcalá. The first was Realidad y Simbología de la Montaña [Reality and Symbolism of Mountains], ed. by Juan Ignacio Oliva, with contributions in Spanish by members of the GIECO ecocritical research group. This research group, ascribed to the Instituto Franklin-UAH, was the pioneer in ecocritical studies in Spain. For our second volume, we have chosen an all English publication, with contributions of researchers from diverse countries and institutions. This book, co-edited by Ufuk Özdağ and François Gavillon, stems from a panel presented at the EAAS conference in Izmir, Turkey, in 2012. The essays in the volume analyze the costs of environmental crisis on human health as well as the intertwined effects of human and environmental degradation. We would like to acknowledge once more the unswerving support the Instituto Franklin-UAH has lent the GIECO research group and the development of ecocriticism in Spain.

This essay identifies a particular mode of testimonial writing, ‘hybrid testimony’, which is produced through creative collaborations between victims of historical violence and professional writers. Through analysis of two autobiographical responses to the civil wars in Sudan —  Slave: The True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and Her Fight for Survival (2004), by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis, and What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) by Dave Eggers — it considers whether hybrid testimony should be considered a distinct genre in its own right, reflecting on the cultural, historical and political forces that determine the ways that this literature is written and read.

From its inception in Plato's Republic and revival in Thomas More's Utopia, the concept of a perfect (or as More originally put it in a qualification often lost, " best ") form of a republic has been dogged by the spectres of hypocrisy, contradiction, and authoritarianism. However, the matter is more complicated than a simple declaration that utopias provide a vehicle for totalitarian fantasy, that totalitarian governments inevitably portray themselves as creating a utopia. While today's readers, at a comfortable distance from the early sixteenth century, may bridle at the lack of privacy, or at the ideological coerciveness in More's Utopia, that does not eradicate how, in Walter Kendrick's words, " what for us are problems are for them solutions. " it can be argued that the negative elements are a response to social ills. The same goes for Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Dave Eggers's The Circle. While the negatives in all three fictions undermine or put into question the positives, our realization that the authors also intended the negatives as genuine attempts at resolving genuine problems that cause untold misery invites us to complicate our judgments. The undermining is itself undermined. L'idée d'un gouvernement parfait (ou « meilleur » pour reprendre l' expression même de More), de son apparition dans la République de Platon jusqu' à son renouveau dans l'Utopie de Thomas More, a été traquée et mise à profit par les partisans de l'hypocrisie, de la contradiction et de l' autoritarisme. Toutefois, la question est plus complexe que la simple affirmation qui voudrait que les utopies favorisent les phantasmes totalitaires, ou que les gouvernements totalitaires se présentent inévitablement comme la réalisation d'une utopie. Ces éléments négatifs répondent en fait souvent à de véritables problèmes sociaux, et, bien que le lecteur d' aujourd'hui, dans la confortable distance qui le sépare du début du XVIe siècle, puisse s'indigner du manque de vie privée et de l'intransigeance idéologique de l'Utopie de More, cela ne change pas le fait que, pour emprunter la formule de Walter Kendrick, « ce qui pour nous sont des problèmes, sont pour eux des solutions ». Il en va de même pour le Brave New World de Aldous Huxley et The Circle de Daver Egger. Alors que les aspects négatifs dans ces trois fictions compromettent leurs aspects positifs, le fait de reconnaître que ces auteurs, par ces moyens discutables, ont sincèrement tenté de régler de vrais problèmes entraînant des misères infinies, amène le lecteur d' aujourd'hui à nuancer ses jugements. Et ainsi, les aspects compromettants de ces oeuvres sont eux-mêmes remis en question.

FONIOKOVÁ, Zuzana. Fikčnost ve faktuálním vyprávění : Případ fikčních metaautobiografií. Česká literatura, Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2018, roč. 66, č. 6, s. 841-869. ISSN 0009-0468.
Studie se zaměřuje na otázky spojené s texty, jež promlouvají o životě autora pomocí záměrného zapojení fikčnosti do autobiografické výpovědi: autofikce a fikční metaautobiografie. Fikční elementy v tomto typu psaní často slouží jako nástroje sebereflexe. Prostřednictvím specifických narativních metod se díla vyjadřují například k problematice autobiografické paměti, epistemologické (ne)dostupnosti minulosti nebo narativní konstrukce identity. Tato studie se pokouší o propojení úvah současných naratologů o fikčním a faktuálním vyprávění s analýzou autofikčních a metaautobiografických děl. První sekce stručně pojednává o problematice fikčnosti a představuje rétorickou teorii (H. S. Nielsen, J. Phelan a R. Walsh), která umožňuje vnímat fikčnost mimo fikci a jako součást faktuálního sdělení o aktuálním světě. Následující část se soustředí na metaautobiografický text Montauk švýcarského autora Maxe Frische: osvětluje metodu zapojení fikčnosti do autobiografického textu jako prostředek reflexe vzpomínání, možností zobrazení vlastního života a utváření vlastního Já psaním. Analýza je propojena s krátkým exkurzem do problematiky narativní konstrukce v autobiografickém vyprávění, především ve spojení s osobní identitou. Další část článku krátce shrnuje odlišnosti mezi klasickými autobiografiemi a současnými sebereflexivně laděnými autobiografiemi a autofikcemi, představuje kategorii fikčních metaautobiografií, kterou zařazuje do širšího rámce autofikčních textů, a přináší (neúplný) přehled mnohých definic a podob autofikce. Následuje rozbor druhého příkladu fikční metaautobiografie, Srdceryvného díla ohromujícího génia současného amerického autora Davea Eggerse, které ironicky dekonstruuje konvence autobiografického psaní. Závěr studie upozorňuje na rozdíly ve způsobu zapojení fikčnosti v představených dílech, které tvoří základ pro dělení fikčních metaautobiografií dle druhu návodu ke čtení, jenž poskytují čtenáři: Montauk reprezentuje díla, která čtenáři usnadňují přepínání mezi fikčním a autobiografickým způsobem interpretace tím, že naznačují, které části či aspekty jsou smyšlené a které se drží reálných událostí; na druhé straně texty jako Srdceryvné dílo ohromujícího génia poskytují poměrně málo indicií, jež by čtenáři pomohly rozlišit fikční prvky a identifikovat autenticky autobiografické momenty.

This bachelor thesis analyses the literary techniques used to convey a culture-critical message about our relation to online media in The Circle (Dave Eggers, 2013) and Ready Player One (Ernest Cline, 2011). Both novels are a pressing warning against our dependence on online media, and attempt to warn their readers against media. They do
so by creating a contrast between the dystopian character of the novel and the utopian society as their narrators see it. This contrast is further strengthened by the opposing of the real world and the online world in both novels. Secondly, the protagonists are used to
convey the warning. Both have to make a choice at the end of the novel; whether to choose for the real world or remain in the online world completely. Ready Player One features a heroic narrator, who makes the heroic choice in choosing for the real world. The protagonist of The Circle however remains a flat character throughout the novel, with whom a reader cannot sympathize, and who eventually chooses the online world over the real world. This thesis will show exactly how Cline and Eggersconvey the warning in their novels.

Published in Jo Gill, ed., Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. London & New York: Routledge, 2005. pp.100-114. Please reference if quoting. An examination of confessional writing in the age of late postmodernism, focusing on Egger's paratextual, metafictional memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This work is considered in the light of analyses of the ironic mode in contemporary televisual culture by Jean Baudrillard and David Foster Wallace.

This chapter offers an overview and theorization of the strand in contemporary American fiction I have dubbed the New Sincerity. Writers whose work is discussed in the chapter include Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead and David Foster Wallace.

What is 'postirony'? Foremost, it is a response to the ironic zeitgeist. Moreover, it is the key to understanding a specific form of literature. The contemporary reader is familiar with and – unfortunately – used to postmodernism's ironic, self-reflexive metafiction. Authors like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers chose a different path: Despite the reign of contemporary irony, they strive to reach the reader on a level beyond, cognitively as well as emotionally – they claim to be sincere and true. Focusing largely on nonfiction by said authors, Lukas Hoffmann explores the means the texts use to achieve something new – namely, a new form of sincerity.

Se entiende por derecho de vía a una parte del suelo, de propiedad privada que tiene un uso limitado por una reglamentación de carácter local o nacional. Se trata, pues de franjas de terreno por donde pasa infraestructura de propiedad estatal Es la faja de terreno destinada a la construcción, mantenimiento,

Although transhumanism counts with the support of a growing number of followers, some critics and writers of fiction have recently warned about the detrimental effects that some particular technologies may have on human beings. Dave Eggers‘ 2013 The Circle is a novel that overtly deals with the possible dangers of transhumanism. Set in the near future, the novel places particular emphasis on social media tools and surveillance devices. This paper aims to explore some textual strategies the novel uses to set the debate over human enhancement technologies. More specifically, it argues that, by using a series of narrative strategies which ultimately make readers realize the dehumanization that social media tools and surveillance devices bring about, Eggers stresses the need to adopt a critical stance towards these technologies, avoiding the temptation of being carried away by their appealing promises.

Sudden celebrity is a subject to which Dave Eggers devoted considerable space in his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In this tongue-in-cheek memoir, Eggers engages with the notion of constructed reality, and draws parallels between his own interesting firstperson story-telling and the rise of reality-inspired formats in mainstream media. Eggers notes that popular culture has profoundly altered the ways in which people imagine their own existence and, in his memoir, Eggers invites readers to 'watch' the author and observe how he watches himself.

As attested to by the anxious international media coverage of the recent U.S. debt ceiling crisis, the United States’ economic instability following the late 2000s financial crisis remains headline news. Anticipating the sense of ongoing crisis, Andrew Dix, Brian Jarvis, and Paul Jenner in The Contemporary American Novel in Context (2011) proposed that “we may…be seeing the emergence of the ‘credit crunch novel’ dedicated to measuring the effects of ‘toxic’ debt on the emotional, cultural and ideological health of the US.”  Subsequently, Andrew Lawson’s “Foreclosure Stories: Neoliberal Suffering in the Great Recession,” postulated “a crisis of representation” in narrative art depicting the crisis due to the inability of both the “financial system and the wider culture” to “recognize and comprehend deeply embedded structures of inequality.” 

Taking the aforementioned novels initial observations as a starting point, by analyzing the novels Union Atlantic, The Privileges, Wanted: Elevator Man, The Financial Lives of the Poets, and A Hologram for the King, this paper shall explore emerging trends within American “crash fiction” thus far. These trends include: a bias toward white middle and upper class experiences; a predisposition toward framing the crisis’ impact from male perspectives; individuals narratives of adaptation to diminished circumstances being allegories for America’s broader ‘humbling’; and the adoption of the languages and practices of finance capitalism into everyday discourse. By considering these novels and trends, this paper is intended to instigate a broader discussion and debate about responses to, and representations of, the current crisis, and its significance to 21st century American culture.

The question of length – what makes a short story short – has never been far from view in critical discussions of the form. As early as the nineteenth century, the matter of upper and lower limits was debated, and quickly became entwined with questions about the short story’s aesthetics and its particularities in relation to other literary genres. Edgar Allan Poe famously established brevity as the key generic marker of the short story by emphasising ‘unity of effect’, a quality that for Poe depended on the possibility that short stories could and should be read ‘at one sitting’, that...

Digital image processing techniques (DIP) have been widely used in various types of application recently. A variety of these techniques are now being used in many types of application area such as object classification, intelligent system, robotics, biometrics system, medical visualization, military, law enforcement, image enhancement and restoration, industrial inspection, artistic effect and human computer interfaces. This paper proposes the implementation of digital image processing techniques to classify three different categories of commercial eggs. The proposed system consists of the study on different types and sizes of commercial eggs, real size measurement of these eggs using Coordinate Measure Machine (CMM) and camera, classification algorithm and the development of vision based egg classification system. Image processing techniques such as image filtering and image enhancements have been applied in the system. Results have shown that the proposed system has been able to successfully classify three categories of commercial eggs with accuracy of more than 96%.

It has become a critical consensus that microfictions (or flash fictions) are particularly suited to the age of social media. In his attempt to theorise the genre, William Nelles (2012) allows for a wide range of narrative and thematic possibilities but maintains that, because of their radical brevity, flash fictions need to renounce characterisation, reader empathy and identification. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the generic limitations specified by Nelles can be transcended. By examining a selection of microfictions by David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, the article argues that flash fictions can evoke projective empathy and become a successful vehicle for a “two-way conversation” between the author and the reader – in line with Adam Kelly’s notion of the postironic new sincerity. Textual analysis of the stories is supplemented by the results of a reader-response survey conducted among the students and staff of the University of Wrocław.

Mainly concerned with a longing for sincerity, much twenty-first century literature problematizes an ontological distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Nevertheless, how to theoretically approach such genre-blending narratives and the strategies employed by contemporary authors to achieve truthful and earnest communication are still open questions. This essay offers, through the analysis of a paradigmatic case, Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity (2003, 2004), 1 some possible answers for contemporary narratives interested in a "dialectic of sincerity" (Kelly 2014) and puts them in relation to generic distinctions. As I will show, the fiction/nonfiction discourse underlying You Shall Know Our Velocity reveals a strategy of sharing the author's creative process of writing in order to achieve sincerity.

This issue begins with a reprint of the journal's founding manifesto, which argues key issues regarding authorship, authority and the politics of the journal. Foremost among the qualities the journal has kept is its openness: to people, to ideas, to possibilities, to conversations. The issue includes essays on David Eggers, Star Trek, superheroes, Bataille and ballet, and animation.

The events that mark the beginning and the end of postmodernism are symmetrical: it starts and ends with the destruction of iconic buildings. Modernism ended with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe urban housing project in 1972; 1 and the so-called postpostmodernism started with the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. 2 The same architect, Minoru Yamasaki, designed both buildings. Thus, postmodernism, the age of irony, was ironically framed: it started and ended with a bang. 3

Kollektivität als wesentliche Merkmale einer 'kleinen Literatur" ausmachten und im Blick auf das Schreiben Franz Kafkas verorteten (dt. 1976), nahmen sie auf das, was wenig später als 'postkoloniale Literaturen' mit ganz ähnlichen Kategorien belegt werden sollte, keinen Bezug. Die Analogien liegen aber auf der Hand. Deleuze/Guattaris Überlegungen zu einer neuen Literatur, die sich Sprache und Sprachen aneignet, bricht, politisierend umfunktioniert und für Zwecke der revolutionären Neuverortung appropriiert, wurden nicht von ungefähr immer wieder auf die postkoloniale literarische Expressivität übertragen und kritisch vor diesem Hintergrund reflektiert (Kaplan ). Die Herausstellung der zukunftsweisenden Funktion der kleinen Literatur bei Deleuze/Guattari verweist daneben aber auch auf Jean-François Lyotards fast zeitgleiche Ankündigung einer postmodernen Ära der 'kleinen Erzählungen', die die Metaerzählungen, die 'grand récits', der Moderne ablöse. In dieser Allianz wird das Kleine zum Charakteristikum einer neuen, zeitgemäßen Poetik und Epistemologie. Kleine Literaturen und kleine Erzählungen zeichnen sich durch Vorläufigkeit, Tentativität, Variabilität und Fragmenthaftigkeit aus und ziehen eben aus diesen Verfahren der Unbestimmtheit ihre kulturelle Wirkmacht. Lyotard (dt. 1994) selbst wies darauf hin, dass die Figurationen des Kleinen in vieler Hinsicht und paradoxerweise als Metaerzählung der Postmoderne begriffen werden können. Und tatsächlich lässt sich die Entwicklung einer globalen Kultur um die Wende zum 21. Jahrhundert als Erfolgsgeschichte des Kleinen schreiben. Das gilt zumindest für die Bereiche einer globalen Wirklichkeit, in denen transnationale Märkte und Zielpublika erschlossen oder adressiert werden. Auf der Ebene der Wissensvermittlung, der kulturellen Kommunikation und der Bedeutungsstiftung manifestiert sich der Hang zum Kleinen in einer Modularisierung und Feingliederung von Informationen, und gestaltet sich daher oft als Verkürzung: die 1 Teile dieses Textes folgen der Argumentation, die in Mayer 2014 in einem anderen Kontext entworfen wurde.

As an intellectual and literary icon for a new millenium, Dave Eggers has approached the question of success and status as an "outsider," maintaining an "anti-establishment" stance even as he himself has been swept up into fame, both as a writer and publisher. In the following essay, Sarah Brouillette analyzes Eggers' "economic disavowal" and shifts critical attention to other economies and hierarchies in which Eggers' works participate. Because Eggers' mission attempts to deal with some of the issues brought forward in our own "manifesto" (published in this issue), Brouillette's discussion is especially important for readers of Reconstruction. We invite readers to bring their thoughts and ideas about these economies to our message boards.

In this article, we analyse two testimonial narratives written or published by Dave Eggers, an American author, editor, and publisher whose oeuvre shows a marked interest in harnessing the power of narrative to engage in human rights activism. Both narratives focus on the case of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American who suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and at the hands of the state through its response to that natural disaster. Our analysis challenges many of the assumptions with regard to affect that dominate the field of human rights and literature, which often takes for granted the intricate and treacherous process that undergirds a reader’s engagement with testimonial narratives. Affective engagement with the reader is a key feature of Eggers’s works, yet we show how it operates in a way that actively shapes the affective tenets of human rights culture in order to allow the reader to engage with the disempowered on more equal terms.

Calling into context the polemics surrounding the notion of space, this paper deals with certain pertinent questions regarding digital spaces by critically engaging with the representation of hybrid realities and the subsequent delineation of identities therein through an analysis of Dave Eggers’ dystopian/ speculative fiction The Circle (2013).  Situating the text in the third space problematized within literary and popular culture, this paper looks into the representation of subjectivity(ies) of Mae, the protagonist, who in the process of going transparent comes to occupy a heterotopia as conceptualised by Michel Foucault in “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”.  Jon L. Berquist contends, for Foucault, heterotopias are not imagined places but real places that almost delete themselves from public consciousness. They are null sites in awareness, yet inevitable and vital to the construction of space. This paradoxical situation is probed in the paper by problematizing the representations of governmentality, citizenship, privacy and cartographic invisibility/visibility. In the narrative the protagonist seems to be working with apparent tensions among visibility, transparency, and invisibility and seems to be declaring an inherent paradox that total visibility or going transparent is the only way to move back to the stage of invisibility. In effect, this paper probes the boundaries of cultural imagination and contemporary spatial practices within the immediate context of digital culture and cultural globalisation.
Keywords: Heterotopia, Digital Space, Subjectivity, Hybrid Realities/Identities, Cartographic Visibility/Invisibility

In this essay, I make the case for teaching as a sincere act. By that, I do not mean the conventional notion of operating without “pretense, deceit, or hypocrisy” (OED), but instead a more radical uptake drawn from literature—fiction (e.g., Egan, 2010; Eggers, 2001; Wallace, 2001)—and literary theory (Kelly, 2016) that understands the concept as “always contaminated internally by the threat of manipulating the other…this sincerity depends not on purity but on trust and faith” (Kelly, 2016, p. 201). Such a sincerity offers educators ways of teaching hopefully, bringing forth themselves in conversation with students. It offers a way of rethinking teaching as primarily and problematically a manipulative and impositional act, a mode of imagining pedagogy beyond the dichotomy between oppressive transmission pedagogies and liberatory critical ones. I suggest that if we’re going to humanize (Paris & Winn, 2013) our work as educators and scholars of education, a renewed theorizing that affirms the role of the teacher as relationally important, as having something to offer through the communication of their selves, can enrich the work of teaching—as an extension of teachers’ lives, as creative and communal, compelling, complex, and deeply personal work—in ways that prove fruitful for both teachers and students.

That an empathic response to testimonies can lead to altruism is a key assumption of much cultural research on trauma and witnessing, which prides itself on its ethical commitment. Most trauma theorists also agree that empathy is to be distinguished from forms of affective involvement that do not recognize and respect the otherness of the other, and which are variously referred to as sympathy, projective identification, incorporation, or crude empathy. While this caveat against imperialism and appropriation is meant to prevent empathy from turning into a closed-loop process, canonical trauma theory itself has been plagued by Eurocentrism from its inception, as it tends not to adequately address the sufferings of members of non-Western or minority groups. In this essay, I will discuss the challenges that transcultural witnessing poses for empathic understanding and ethical thinking, using both theoretical and literary texts as examples, and focusing specifically on Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What. Published by McSweeney’s in 2006, What Is the What, subtitled The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, is a collaborative first-person testimony that tells the story of a refugee from the second Sudanese civil war. I argue that in this book Eggers manages both to stay true to the continuing cultural demand for empathy with distant others and to defuse or counter the prevailing scepticism about the morality of empathic identification that tends to find such efforts hopelessly wanting. What Is the What does not resolve all the moral ambiguities surrounding transcultural witnessing, but it is unafraid to confront them and refuses to be paralysed by them. The novel harnesses feeling in the face of suffering while continually reminding the reader that Deng’s experiences are not his or hers to inhabit. Rather than solidifying an already existing community, it calls a community of otherwise distant and disconnected people into being for the purposes of alleviating suffering.

By analysing Dave Eggers's autofictional work A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this article attempts to reveal the role of this author in the post-postmodern narrative of the turn of the millennium. Following in the wake of David Foster Wallace, Eggers's solution to overcome the problems created by postmodernism is a kind of writing based on honesty. Through a rebirth of the author, the objective of Eggers's New Sincerity is the democratization of narrative in order to create a sensibility network aimed at ending the solipsism brought about by postmodern linguistic relativism. However, this new sensibility is reminiscent of pre-postmodern fundamentalism. The use of meta-metafiction based on the use of neo-Romantic irony enables Eggers to create an escape valve that allows for the creation of a metamodern oscillation-as described by Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker.

This article argues that Dave Eggers’s You Shall Know Our Velocity invites the reader, via various textual markers, to enter into a “metafictional pact” with the author, through which the reader
agrees to view the text as a writerly act, rather than as an object or event; through this pact, a new moral significance is granted to the text and to the relationship formed between author and
reader.

Per una religione dell'equivoco: la menzogna ne Il bell'Antonio di Vitaliano Brancati Angela GATTI, Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II" Ariosto erede di Luciano. Menzogna, fantastico e narrazione nell'Orlando Furioso Maria DI MARO, Università degli Studi di Bari L'elogio paradossale della menzogna: la dissimulazione del reale nei Ragguagli di Parnaso di Traiano Boccalini La paretimologia come "menzogna". Sondaggi a partire dal lessico del teatro di Salvatore Di Giacomo La realtà testuale tra 'verità' storiografiche e 'menzogne' filologiche. Il caso esemplare dell'Istoria del concilio tridentino di Paolo Sarpi Giulio VACCARO, Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR (Firenze) L'Historia di Castallo Metallino delle famiglie del Rione dela Regola, testo romanesco del IX secolo Gloria ZITELLI, Università degli Studi di Macerata Tra verità e menzogna: le fonti dell'Historia destructionis Troiae di Guido delle Colonne False sperimentazioni: il caso del Microteatro in Spagna Irene POLIMANTE, Università degli Studi di Macerata The Mrs. Gets Her Ass Kicked (aka Heaven): quando la performance poetry denuncia un'altra realtà Giuseppe PREVITALI, Università degli Studi di Bergamo A Creative Treatment of Actuality. Costruzione del reale e menzogna nel cinema documentario

David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram" is an account of the prevalence of destructive irony at the end of the twentieth century. Trying to break free from the solipsism brought about by postmodern relativism, Wallace embraced sincerity as the cornerstone of the zeitgeist of the new millennium. This article offers an analysis of two salient sources of influence that could be considered as inspiration for Wallace's alternative to postmodern irony: American transcendentalism and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. It does so with the intention of furthering the understanding of the cultural significance of the work of the author for the generation of writers that followed in his wake, and to demonstrate how the recovery of Romantic ideals may be the key to map out the nature of the paradigm shift to post-postmodernism. Keywords: David Foster Wallace, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, New Sincerity.

This essay examines the manner in which Dave Eggers’s recent work of literary nonfiction, The Monk of Mokha (2018), sets out to amplify the voices of the marginalized by chronicling the adventures of a young Yemeni-American in search of the best coffee in the world. This takes the protagonist from the infamous neighborhood of his birth in San Francisco, “a valley of desperation in a city of towering wealth,” to his trials and tribulations in the war-torn homeland of Yemen. I will argue that the narrative, which
blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction and combines history, politics, biography and thriller, highlights the American entrepreneurial zeal and contagious exuberance which still feed the immigrant American Dream and proves that social mobility in the
United States is still attainable, sometimes as a result of chasing the world’s most dangerous cup of coffee. Moreover, I argue that the protagonist’s endeavor can be read within the larger context of contemporary political consumption as an example of social justice activism and ethics-driven buying.

‘À quoi sert la littérature?’, Deleuze opens his book on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch with a question that this paper will pose again, trying to propose an answer to it, and to put to test the methodological approach that can be obtained from that answer: what are the uses of literature and, more specifically, how could the philosopher use literature, what could be done with it?
To this end, this paper will focus on Deleuze’s symptomatological conception of literature.
The second part of the paper will be dedicated to the reading of two novels, 1984 by George Orwell and The Circle by Dave Eggers. The novels will be put in in a relation of resonation with two concepts sketched in Deleuze’s Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle: Foucauldian disciplinary societies and control societies. These novels will be considered as signaletic material, symptomatologies of two conditions of society, from which this paper proposes to extract two types of signs: Signs of Order and Signs of Suggestion. These signs will be made react with the concepts of Foucault and Deleuze, in order to see if they can produce the ground for a therapeutic. The paper will therefore combine literary symptomatologies and philosophical aetiology, in the attempt to make them react together, Foucault and Orwell, Eggers and Deleuze, to extract and describe signs from the literary material considered that may be brought to the fore only after the consideration of the causes of the most important symptoms of discipline and control.

"Transparency" in US usage over the last few decades has been a positive term: a political goal for public policy to be made in public, and police practices kept in the open. The term is better seen as ambiguous. "The gaze" may make one the admired "observed of all observers," as Ophelia says of Hamlet, or an object of awe, embodying power and majesty, as Queen Elizabeth I presented herself to her court; alternatively, even for men the gaze may be upon one exposed, humiliated, and tortured as an Englishman upon a scaffold being drawn and quartered, or a condemned slave upon a high cross. Even so, transparency can work to expose official actions to view by ordinary citizens, but also allow surveillance of subjects by the State or allow exposure of ordinary people denied privacy by anyone with a mobile phone with a camera.

Novelist Dave Eggers (1972- ) has an intriguing relationship with truth, power, and belief. In his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), Eggers insists that self-awareness of the artificiality of the text is a form of sincerity and truth, and that only he can act as “the perfect amalgam” for his Generation X readership. However, these claims are undermined by Eggers’ narcissistic conception of his audience being just like him, his perception of himself as a generational locus fatally flawed. Other complications regarding truth and belief emerge in What is the What (2006), Eggers’ fictionalized biography of Sudanese refugee Valentino Deng. By not only taking on and fictionalizing Deng’s story, but also writing it in the first-person in a voice purported to be Deng’s, Eggers opens himself up to scrutiny concerning his validity as Deng’s amanuensis and whether a broadly fictionalised ‘true’ account of Deng’s terrible experiences is appropriate. This paper shall explore both novels, ultimately considering whether ‘truth’ is a relativistic concept in Eggers’ post-postmodern literature.

Wie digitale Vernetzung unsere Gesellschaft verändert, gehört zu den drängendsten Fragen der Gegenwart. Wie jedoch dieser Prozess die zeitgenössische Literatur prägt, erfährt seit der enthusiastischen Erforschung von Hypertexten um die Jahrtausendwende wenig kulturwissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit. Dabei lohnt es sich, die Beobachtungsperspektive von der Literatur im Netz auf das Netz in der Literatur zu verschieben. Denn informations- und kommunikationstechnologische Netzwerke – und vor allem das Internet – schreiben sich zunehmend in die Romane der Gegenwart ein. Nicht selten avanciert das ›Netz der Netze‹ sogar zum inhaltlichen Kernelement von erzählten Welten und wird dort vielfältig wirksam: von der räumlichen und temporalen Inszenierung des Motivs über das Zusammenspiel von Figurenkonstellationen und Erzähltechnik bis hin zur formalästhetischen und symbolischen Ausgestaltung der Texte. Auf einer breiten theoretischen Basis erkundet die vorliegende Studie literarische Erzähltexte, die den medial bedingten Wandel der Lebenswelt reflektieren, indem sie dessen wohl wichtigstes Movens poetisch durchdringen.

This chapter explores the turn to formally conventional fiction among American writers in the 2000s. It positions this turn not as a capitulation to the norms of neoliberal capitalism, as other critics have argued, but as a formally oriented response to neoliberalism’s effects on US society since the 1970s. In the new politics of form, postmodern and avant-garde experimentalism are coded as unresponsive to an increasingly fragmented and atomistic culture, whereas the conservation of forms becomes understood as a politically progressive project. The chapter outlines this twenty-first-century politics of form using evidence from the fiction, non-fiction and interviews of several high-profile American novelists.