Brian Jansen is a lecturer in the Departments of English and Communication and Journalism and Humanities Specialist for the Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, where his Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded dissertation interrogated questions of ethics and authorial agency in contemporary American literary fiction and popular series fiction. A past participant in the Dartmouth College Futures of American Studies Institute and Bowling Green State University's Popular Culture Association Summer Research Institute, Brian's work on American literatures and cultures--including on David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, young adult fiction, Vladimir Nabokov, and professional wrestling--has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative American Studies, the Canadian Review of American Studies, ESC: English Studies in Canada, the Journal of Popular Culture, the European Journal of American Studies, and other venues.
This paper reads Joshua Ferris's best-selling 2007 novel Then We Came to the End as an unconventi... more This paper reads Joshua Ferris's best-selling 2007 novel Then We Came to the End as an unconventional entry into the canon of 9/11 fiction. The novel, best-known for its extended use of the first-person plural "we" narrator, deploys a number of plot echoes and strategic elisions to draw attention to events that are-nevertheless-left unstated. Drawing on narratology and Freud's sense of the uncanny (particularly critic Mark Fisher's supplemental ideas of the "weird" and "eerie"), this paper connects the use of "we" and narrative absences to larger cultural anxieties around the events of 9/11, ultimately arguing that the novel's attempt to avoid "re-enacting the 'terrorism of spectacle'" (Däwes 3) by foregrounding representational challenges runs into an alternate problem: turning readers away from the genuine historical complexities of those events. The paper closes with a discussion of how other 9/11 novels have navigated this same double-bind.
Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professiona... more Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.
Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, 2019
Drawing on critic Mark Fisher’s typology of the weird and the eerie (particularly his focus on th... more Drawing on critic Mark Fisher’s typology of the weird and the eerie (particularly his focus on the eerie as the sensation of nothing where there should be something), as well as Nancy Fraser and Rahael Jaeggi’s critiques of capitalism as an institutionalised social order, this paper uses Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel The Virgin Suicide to take up the significance of place and placelessness in contemporary American culture and literature. Set in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe in the early 1970s, The Virgin Suicides simultaneously disguises and reveals its sense of place, a curious and unstable tension that in turn calls readers’ attention to an entire set of unstable binaries inherent to capitalism as a social order – the separation of economic production from social reproduction, economy from polity, the natural from the human, and exploitation from expropriation. In its eerie interruptions and evocations of suburban decay, The Virgin Suicides offers a way to think about the destabilising effect of attempts to separate production from social reproduction, exploitation from expropriation, and human society from non-human nature, a toolkit that might then be used to think about (for instance) the Flint Water Crisis or the contradictions of an international border-crossing like the Ambassador Bridge.
Drawing on what American short story writer and novelist George Saunders has described as the urg... more Drawing on what American short story writer and novelist George Saunders has described as the urge toward kindness in his work, as well as its myriad allusions to Christian symbology and religiosity, this paper explores the intersection of languages of labour or “work” and religious tensions in Saunders’ oeuvre. Reading the stories of Saunders’s first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, through the lens of postsecular literary theory and Saunders’s own comments on Catholicism, we suggest that Christianity, for Saunders, is a double-edged sword: crucial to his social critique of the power structures of post-industrial, postmodern life, and yet ultimately prone, in its institutionalized forms, to cooptation by those very same power structures. Saunders’s “Center for Wayward Nuns” is a potent metaphor in the sense that it suggests that doubt and lack of agency endemic to a fragmented postmodern world do not absolve us of our ethical responsibility, and thus the Christian overtones of Saunders’ work are engaged in a compelling kind of double-critique: both of the “un-Christian” social realities of the world in which Saunders’ working poor toil, but also of the kind of extremist, fundamentalist—even corporatized—Christianity that may emerge out of those social realities.
In contrast to claims made by Susan K. Harris, Sabine Haenni, and others that American literary r... more In contrast to claims made by Susan K. Harris, Sabine Haenni, and others that American literary realism was a genre inadequately suited to representing the subjectivities of immigrant lives in the turn-of-the-twentieth century United States (whether because its use of dialect proved unable to access characters' interiorities or because or because it always oriented itself around middle-class norms that left immigrant subjects on the outside), this paper attempts to offer an alternate reading of immigrant fiction through Abraham Cahan's story of Yiddish New York, Yekl. This paper argues that that Yekl is a text whose realist impulse and urge to interpret Yiddish-American immigrant culture for a wider audience is complemented—and complicated—by a knowledge of and engagement with verbal, self-deprecating, anecdotal Jewish humour and non-realist, Yiddish literary traditions like the folk tale and folk figures such as the schlemiel. Yekl’s narrative technique, and particularly its use of dialect and its sense of humour, thus, do far more than simply recreate stereotypes. Yekl ridicules its characters, but it does so as part of a larger project that actually celebrates Yiddish identity and heritage.
Beginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical critic... more Beginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical criticism from multiple sides of the ideological spectrum and drawing on Roberta Seelinger Trites’s argument that this body of work is a postmodern phenomenon, this article interrogates whether young adult literature is a morally compromised genre from the start or whether there is not a morally constructive framework through which young adult novels might be viewed productively. Using the first novel of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy as a case study, this paper proposes a heuristic that borrows from the postmodern (or “liquid modern”) ethics of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman, who interprets Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics of ethics” as a descriptive, phenomenological, existential exercise, rejects absolutes in favour of process and an emphasis on the urge to “be-for” the Other. Through the lens of Bauman’s ethics, this paper analyzes Katniss Everdeen’s journey as a processual one, toward the end of an active moral urge.
". . . Eero Laine’s deceptively simple argument in Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stag... more ". . . Eero Laine’s deceptively simple argument in Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage is that theatre studies ought to take wrestling seriously, if not on its own merits then at least as an exemplar of commercial, what he terms “productive,” theatre (21). In this, he suggests, the study of professional wrestling might be likened to the rise of musical theatre studies, perhaps lagging only a decade behind (5). But Laine, even as he identifies himself as a fan, is not interested in centering wrestling per se; instead, he is interested in its value as an “outsider example,” an “omission that reinforces the form” (4). In other words, Laine contends that what professional wrestling openly displays—the labor of performers, the link between characters and actors, the relationship between audience and performance, the profit motive—might direct us to what commercial theatre, conventionally imagined, obfuscates. . . ."
From episode description: "(@37:15), Brian Jansen is a lecturer in the Department of English at t... more From episode description: "(@37:15), Brian Jansen is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Maine who writes on professional wrestling and labour. Wrestlers are workers, and as workers, face challenges shared by other workers — and some unique to their profession. And their fans, it turns out, are more progressive than you might think."
This paper reads Joshua Ferris's best-selling 2007 novel Then We Came to the End as an unconventi... more This paper reads Joshua Ferris's best-selling 2007 novel Then We Came to the End as an unconventional entry into the canon of 9/11 fiction. The novel, best-known for its extended use of the first-person plural "we" narrator, deploys a number of plot echoes and strategic elisions to draw attention to events that are-nevertheless-left unstated. Drawing on narratology and Freud's sense of the uncanny (particularly critic Mark Fisher's supplemental ideas of the "weird" and "eerie"), this paper connects the use of "we" and narrative absences to larger cultural anxieties around the events of 9/11, ultimately arguing that the novel's attempt to avoid "re-enacting the 'terrorism of spectacle'" (Däwes 3) by foregrounding representational challenges runs into an alternate problem: turning readers away from the genuine historical complexities of those events. The paper closes with a discussion of how other 9/11 novels have navigated this same double-bind.
Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professiona... more Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.
Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, 2019
Drawing on critic Mark Fisher’s typology of the weird and the eerie (particularly his focus on th... more Drawing on critic Mark Fisher’s typology of the weird and the eerie (particularly his focus on the eerie as the sensation of nothing where there should be something), as well as Nancy Fraser and Rahael Jaeggi’s critiques of capitalism as an institutionalised social order, this paper uses Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel The Virgin Suicide to take up the significance of place and placelessness in contemporary American culture and literature. Set in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe in the early 1970s, The Virgin Suicides simultaneously disguises and reveals its sense of place, a curious and unstable tension that in turn calls readers’ attention to an entire set of unstable binaries inherent to capitalism as a social order – the separation of economic production from social reproduction, economy from polity, the natural from the human, and exploitation from expropriation. In its eerie interruptions and evocations of suburban decay, The Virgin Suicides offers a way to think about the destabilising effect of attempts to separate production from social reproduction, exploitation from expropriation, and human society from non-human nature, a toolkit that might then be used to think about (for instance) the Flint Water Crisis or the contradictions of an international border-crossing like the Ambassador Bridge.
Drawing on what American short story writer and novelist George Saunders has described as the urg... more Drawing on what American short story writer and novelist George Saunders has described as the urge toward kindness in his work, as well as its myriad allusions to Christian symbology and religiosity, this paper explores the intersection of languages of labour or “work” and religious tensions in Saunders’ oeuvre. Reading the stories of Saunders’s first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, through the lens of postsecular literary theory and Saunders’s own comments on Catholicism, we suggest that Christianity, for Saunders, is a double-edged sword: crucial to his social critique of the power structures of post-industrial, postmodern life, and yet ultimately prone, in its institutionalized forms, to cooptation by those very same power structures. Saunders’s “Center for Wayward Nuns” is a potent metaphor in the sense that it suggests that doubt and lack of agency endemic to a fragmented postmodern world do not absolve us of our ethical responsibility, and thus the Christian overtones of Saunders’ work are engaged in a compelling kind of double-critique: both of the “un-Christian” social realities of the world in which Saunders’ working poor toil, but also of the kind of extremist, fundamentalist—even corporatized—Christianity that may emerge out of those social realities.
In contrast to claims made by Susan K. Harris, Sabine Haenni, and others that American literary r... more In contrast to claims made by Susan K. Harris, Sabine Haenni, and others that American literary realism was a genre inadequately suited to representing the subjectivities of immigrant lives in the turn-of-the-twentieth century United States (whether because its use of dialect proved unable to access characters' interiorities or because or because it always oriented itself around middle-class norms that left immigrant subjects on the outside), this paper attempts to offer an alternate reading of immigrant fiction through Abraham Cahan's story of Yiddish New York, Yekl. This paper argues that that Yekl is a text whose realist impulse and urge to interpret Yiddish-American immigrant culture for a wider audience is complemented—and complicated—by a knowledge of and engagement with verbal, self-deprecating, anecdotal Jewish humour and non-realist, Yiddish literary traditions like the folk tale and folk figures such as the schlemiel. Yekl’s narrative technique, and particularly its use of dialect and its sense of humour, thus, do far more than simply recreate stereotypes. Yekl ridicules its characters, but it does so as part of a larger project that actually celebrates Yiddish identity and heritage.
Beginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical critic... more Beginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical criticism from multiple sides of the ideological spectrum and drawing on Roberta Seelinger Trites’s argument that this body of work is a postmodern phenomenon, this article interrogates whether young adult literature is a morally compromised genre from the start or whether there is not a morally constructive framework through which young adult novels might be viewed productively. Using the first novel of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy as a case study, this paper proposes a heuristic that borrows from the postmodern (or “liquid modern”) ethics of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman, who interprets Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics of ethics” as a descriptive, phenomenological, existential exercise, rejects absolutes in favour of process and an emphasis on the urge to “be-for” the Other. Through the lens of Bauman’s ethics, this paper analyzes Katniss Everdeen’s journey as a processual one, toward the end of an active moral urge.
". . . Eero Laine’s deceptively simple argument in Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stag... more ". . . Eero Laine’s deceptively simple argument in Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage is that theatre studies ought to take wrestling seriously, if not on its own merits then at least as an exemplar of commercial, what he terms “productive,” theatre (21). In this, he suggests, the study of professional wrestling might be likened to the rise of musical theatre studies, perhaps lagging only a decade behind (5). But Laine, even as he identifies himself as a fan, is not interested in centering wrestling per se; instead, he is interested in its value as an “outsider example,” an “omission that reinforces the form” (4). In other words, Laine contends that what professional wrestling openly displays—the labor of performers, the link between characters and actors, the relationship between audience and performance, the profit motive—might direct us to what commercial theatre, conventionally imagined, obfuscates. . . ."
From episode description: "(@37:15), Brian Jansen is a lecturer in the Department of English at t... more From episode description: "(@37:15), Brian Jansen is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Maine who writes on professional wrestling and labour. Wrestlers are workers, and as workers, face challenges shared by other workers — and some unique to their profession. And their fans, it turns out, are more progressive than you might think."
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