Papers by Jack Dudley
Modernism/modernity Print+, 2023
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction , 2021
Ecological catastrophe has challenged the contemporary novel to find forms that convey the scale ... more 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 explored the possibilities of the comic, which presents its own limitations and ethical problems. This article argues that Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake moves past these limitations of genre and tone through engagements with the more complicated tragicomic sensibility of Samuel Beckett. The tragicomic first offers Atwood a mode that better conveys the complexity of mixed possible fortunes and futures amid ecological catastrophe while it also better evokes the strange, often contradictory affects of life in the Anthropocene. Yet Atwood sees greater promise in Beckett's tragicomedy beyond his mere endurance of unchangeable existential conditions. She instead repurposes the tragicomic for the ecological and political needs of the contemporary to produce “survival laughter,” an attitude that recognizes the tragic conditions of catastrophe but simultaneously uses comedy to protect the psyche from despair in the face of devastation. Unlike Beckett's laughter that merely endures entropic decline, Atwood's survival laughter opens the possibility for dynamic, creative action oriented to the hope of transformation and flourishing, even amid seemingly total loss. Through tragicomic survival laughter, Atwood moves the ecological novel beyond its dominant mode of sincere tragic disaster while also avoiding the pitfalls of pure comedy to instead imagine more integrated and realistic forms of ecological resilience that powerfully combine mitigation and adaptation.
English Language Notes, 2021
While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas an... more While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas and tropes of “contamination” in its first novel, Annihilation, the trilogy’s radical ecological thought emerges more clearly through cosmic and transformative trauma in the final novel, Acceptance. Rather than some contaminated space, Area X is restoring Earth’s ecosystems to a “pristine” state, but in a process of guided succession that traumatizes human life as lived under ecologically destructive neoliberal economies of extraction. Reading the twinned falls of Saul and Control, this article shows how Acceptance reimagines uncanny trauma for a new form that is painful but also familiar, human but also posthuman, and utterly necessary for planetary survival.
This proposed panel for the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 conference in Columbus, Ohio, No... more This proposed panel for the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 conference in Columbus, Ohio, November 8-11, seeks to expand on recent work in modernism and religion—from Pericles Lewis, Justin Neuman, and Matthew Mutter, among others—by exploring how modernist writers responded to, incorporated, or shaped religious visual culture, defined broadly. If modernist literary production was much more concerned with questions of religion than past scholarship has allowed, what role did religious visual culture play in shaping that engagement? Did modernist writers adapt or incorporate the religious visual culture of the early twentieth century? Did they shape it or produce new examples of it themselves? How do these encounters change our understanding of modernism and religion as well as our understanding of the religious itself?
Please send a brief abstract of 250-300 words and a short bio to Jack Dudley at dudley@msmary.edu by April 1, 2018.
What critical possibilities and problems emerge when affect theory and postsecularism are brought... more What critical possibilities and problems emerge when affect theory and postsecularism are brought together? This article explores this question and its implications for literary theory. Can affect at once open a space beyond rationality while at the same time remaining emphatically materialist and foreclosing feelings of religious transcendence or automatically subsuming them within materialism? What might be the critical and cultural authority of postsecular affects, of feeling religiously? I suggest that if past modes of rational, public arbitration for such questions are declining, literature, specifically the contemporary novel, can serve as the site for imagining these new ways of being and feeling in the contemporary world.
Book Reviews by Jack Dudley
A review of a collection of essays about the HBO show True Detective, entitled True Detection, ed... more A review of a collection of essays about the HBO show True Detective, entitled True Detection, edited by Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis, and Nicola Masciandaro. Lexington, KY: Schism Press.
Conference Presentations by Jack Dudley
This roundtable invites reflections on the tensions and limits of teaching and studying literatur... more This roundtable invites reflections on the tensions and limits of teaching and studying literature at religious colleges and universities. Do institutional commitments, positions, and documents (conduct oaths, pledges, church constitutions, and doctrinal statements) as well as campus cultures, constituencies, and attitudes implicitly and explicitly limit what can be taught and published? How have scholars navigated, resisted, and adapted to these limits?
Per Just-In-Time Session guidelines, accepted panelists must be MLA members by Sept. 22.
Please note that MLA 2021 will be a virtual convention that takes place online (https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2021).
Please send a 200-word abstract and CV by Friday, 18 September, 2020 to Jack Dudley (dudley@msmary.edu) and Dave Wehner (wehner@msmary.edu)
Accepted Roundtable for NeMLA 50, March 21 -24, 2019, Washington, DC.
As Sophia Siddique and Rap... more Accepted Roundtable for NeMLA 50, March 21 -24, 2019, Washington, DC.
As Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael write in Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (2016), “From its origins, what would eventually come to be called ‘the horror genre’ has been deeply transnational both in contexts of production and reception.” In “The American Horror Film? Globalization and Transnational U.S.-Asian Genres” (2013), Christina Klein observes that this transnational quality has particularly been evident most recently, as cinema as a whole continues to become increasingly transnational. For Klein, genre films such as horror lend themselves to the transnational because of their indebtedness to convention or tropes, which can be culturally portable or which, in her words, “can be combined by local filmmakers in fresh ways to carry locally specific meanings.” This accepted roundtable invites participants to interrogate the relationship between contemporary horror—understood as roughly post-1960—and the critical categories of the nation, the global, and the transnational. How do the particular conventions, tropes, and forms most associated with horror facilitate and/or complicate its relationship to the nation? Are the conventions, tropes, and forms of particular national traditions truly exportable and what are the limits of their cultural adaptability? Have recent examples of contemporary horror resisted the transnational and instead laid claim to specifically national visions of horror? By exploring these questions, this roundtable seeks not only to examine how the category of the nation and the transnational have shaped contemporary horror, but how what is still often denigrated as a marginal genre, horror itself, can help us continue to theorize the nation and the transnational as well. Participants are welcome to focus on any medium.
Please submit abstracts through the NeMLA portal, which can be accessed here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login
Abstracts are due to the NeMLA portal by Sept. 30, 2018.
Please email dudley@msmary.edu with any questions.
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Papers by Jack Dudley
Please send a brief abstract of 250-300 words and a short bio to Jack Dudley at dudley@msmary.edu by April 1, 2018.
Book Reviews by Jack Dudley
Conference Presentations by Jack Dudley
Per Just-In-Time Session guidelines, accepted panelists must be MLA members by Sept. 22.
Please note that MLA 2021 will be a virtual convention that takes place online (https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2021).
Please send a 200-word abstract and CV by Friday, 18 September, 2020 to Jack Dudley (dudley@msmary.edu) and Dave Wehner (wehner@msmary.edu)
As Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael write in Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (2016), “From its origins, what would eventually come to be called ‘the horror genre’ has been deeply transnational both in contexts of production and reception.” In “The American Horror Film? Globalization and Transnational U.S.-Asian Genres” (2013), Christina Klein observes that this transnational quality has particularly been evident most recently, as cinema as a whole continues to become increasingly transnational. For Klein, genre films such as horror lend themselves to the transnational because of their indebtedness to convention or tropes, which can be culturally portable or which, in her words, “can be combined by local filmmakers in fresh ways to carry locally specific meanings.” This accepted roundtable invites participants to interrogate the relationship between contemporary horror—understood as roughly post-1960—and the critical categories of the nation, the global, and the transnational. How do the particular conventions, tropes, and forms most associated with horror facilitate and/or complicate its relationship to the nation? Are the conventions, tropes, and forms of particular national traditions truly exportable and what are the limits of their cultural adaptability? Have recent examples of contemporary horror resisted the transnational and instead laid claim to specifically national visions of horror? By exploring these questions, this roundtable seeks not only to examine how the category of the nation and the transnational have shaped contemporary horror, but how what is still often denigrated as a marginal genre, horror itself, can help us continue to theorize the nation and the transnational as well. Participants are welcome to focus on any medium.
Please submit abstracts through the NeMLA portal, which can be accessed here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login
Abstracts are due to the NeMLA portal by Sept. 30, 2018.
Please email dudley@msmary.edu with any questions.
Please send a brief abstract of 250-300 words and a short bio to Jack Dudley at dudley@msmary.edu by April 1, 2018.
Per Just-In-Time Session guidelines, accepted panelists must be MLA members by Sept. 22.
Please note that MLA 2021 will be a virtual convention that takes place online (https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2021).
Please send a 200-word abstract and CV by Friday, 18 September, 2020 to Jack Dudley (dudley@msmary.edu) and Dave Wehner (wehner@msmary.edu)
As Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael write in Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (2016), “From its origins, what would eventually come to be called ‘the horror genre’ has been deeply transnational both in contexts of production and reception.” In “The American Horror Film? Globalization and Transnational U.S.-Asian Genres” (2013), Christina Klein observes that this transnational quality has particularly been evident most recently, as cinema as a whole continues to become increasingly transnational. For Klein, genre films such as horror lend themselves to the transnational because of their indebtedness to convention or tropes, which can be culturally portable or which, in her words, “can be combined by local filmmakers in fresh ways to carry locally specific meanings.” This accepted roundtable invites participants to interrogate the relationship between contemporary horror—understood as roughly post-1960—and the critical categories of the nation, the global, and the transnational. How do the particular conventions, tropes, and forms most associated with horror facilitate and/or complicate its relationship to the nation? Are the conventions, tropes, and forms of particular national traditions truly exportable and what are the limits of their cultural adaptability? Have recent examples of contemporary horror resisted the transnational and instead laid claim to specifically national visions of horror? By exploring these questions, this roundtable seeks not only to examine how the category of the nation and the transnational have shaped contemporary horror, but how what is still often denigrated as a marginal genre, horror itself, can help us continue to theorize the nation and the transnational as well. Participants are welcome to focus on any medium.
Please submit abstracts through the NeMLA portal, which can be accessed here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login
Abstracts are due to the NeMLA portal by Sept. 30, 2018.
Please email dudley@msmary.edu with any questions.