Jonathan Lethem

"This paper explores the dialectics of authenticity and hybridity – two concepts that tend to be theoretically conceived in terms of mutual exclusion, while fictional texts have for quite some time started to enact them as analogous and compatible ideas. With respect to two recent novels, Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, I would like to show that hybridity these days can very well be employed to elicit an aura of authenticity, rather than conveying ironical distance, subversion or disruptive metafictional self-reflection.
Both novels stem from the realm of what has been called neo-realist fiction and both of them run counter to Jonathan Franzen's diagnosis of a contemporary literary market in which a naïve understanding of cultural identity rules supreme. After all, Powers and Lethem are white authors which capitalize on the subject of race. While both novels trace issues of identity and identification which have their origin in the structures of racial ascriptions and self-fashionings, they give a markedly new and critical slant to the mechanisms of testimonial identity politics which Franzen demarcated, without falling back on long-standing postmodern techniques of ironic distancing and de-authentication.
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Jonathan Lethem’s long-evident interest in comics, for example in his 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude, culminated in his 2008 reworking of Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’s 1976 comic book series from Marvel Comics, Omega: The Unknown. Demonstrating that Lethem’s self-conscious paraphrasing of the prior series is part of a sustained examination of repetitions and relations, this essay shows how the serial nature of comics enables Lethem to address themes of families, legacies, and communities, both in this comics work and in his earlier novel also. It will be argued that The Fortress of Solitude and Omega: The Unknown together read the repeating-but-differing images of the comic book in contrast with the repetitions of the franchised brand to present a sustained critique of capitalist cultures. In all of this, it will be seen, Lethem draws on the idioms and traits of comic books: colours, panels, word balloons, margins, gutters, lines.

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.

This paper aims at understanding the complex implications of Jonathan Lethem’s decision to write the story of a graphic novel, Omega the Unknown (2007), which resurrected a forgotten superhero from the Marvel universe, and re-told his origins. Lethem seems to have been attracted to the original Gerber & Skrenes series, published in the Mid-Seventies, because it contained some of his favourite themes in nuce: alienation, adolescence and its obsessions, street life in New York City, especially in a racially mixed neighbourhood, and a science-fictional context (Omega-Man comes from another planet and has to fight against androids). However, the Omega series also offered Lethem the opportunity to somewhat disassemble the figure of the superhero in its main components, that have been embodied in three characters of the graphic novel: the silent
Omega-Man, as the real Hero; Titus-Alexander Island, a gifted but odd adolescent, as the Would-Be Hero, and Rex Kansur, aka the Mink, as the Bogus Hero or Anti-Hero. This allows Lethem to articulate an original interpretation of superheroes as American icons, well rooted in the national tradition but also tied to such a classical text as Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

An analysis of how Lewis Hyde's "The Gift" influenced various contemporary fiction writes, with a special focus on Zadie Smith's second novel "The Autograph Man." Critiques the argument that treating art as a gift offers a means by which to avoid commodification.

The isolation and loneliness that are central conditions experienced by many people in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic are attributed by the author to a politics and law of movement, the ends of which are not simply political-economic or bio-political but also ethical-existential, to the extent that the very space of separation between is destroyed. Through a reading of Hannah Arendt on tyranny and totalitarian governance, the author asserts the importance of solitude as what needs to be reclaimed for there to be any ethical sense of the common and any political sense of solidarity.

L'isolement et la solitude qui sont des conditions centrales vécues par de nom-breuses personnes durant cette pandémie de COVID-19 sont attribués par l'auteur à des politiques et à des lois de mouvement, dont les résultats ne sont pas simple-ment politico-économiques ou biopolitiques, mais aussi éthico-existentiels, au point où l' espace même de séparation est détruit. Par la lecture de Hannah Arendt sur la tyrannie et la gouvernance totalitaire, l'auteur affirme l'importance de la solitude en tant que quelque chose qui doit être réapproprié pour qu'il y ait un sens éthique du commun et un sens politique de la solidarité.

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.

Sadek Kessous, a Ph.D. student in English Literature at Newcastle University, looks at Jonathan Lethem’s semi-autobiographical novel The Fortress of Solitude (2003). It follows the friendship of two teenage boys, one black and one white, through the turbulent cultural politics of 1970s New York to the 1990s. In 1970s Brooklyn racial tensions are never far from bubbling over. For Dylan and Mingus, however, this is everyday life. What matters more is Soul, Funk, graffiti, and comic books. But when the two discover a ring that grants them superpowers, we see the true extent of the escape offered by these escapisms. Meditating on pop-culture, gentrification and racial identities, Lethem’s novel reveals important truths that carry into Obama's supposedly post-racial America.