Joshua Ferris

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.

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.

Mental disorders have become the topic of numerous contemporary American novels. Attesting to the ongoing fascination with the workings and the sciences of the human mind, many of these texts turn to neuroscientific questions. This paper offers a close reading of one of these ‘neuronarratives’ – Joshua Ferris’s acclaimed 2010 novel The Unnamed, a story in which the protagonist is afflicted with an utterly mysterious condition that disrupts his sense of self as his mind appears to be separated from his body. In this paper, I aim to show how such a dualist conception problematizes not only the concepts of self and agency as the unnamed disease is linked to contemporary lifestyles in corporate America, but also helps to craft a counternarrative that challenges recent materialist conceptions and neuroscientific theories.

“We were the only two left. Just the two of us, you and me.” –Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris, 2007.

In his three novels to date ––Then We Came to the End (2007), The Unnamed (2010), and the recently Booker Prize long-listed To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (2014)––Joshua Ferris has explored the potential for post-postmodern connections between Self and Other. Considering Self and Other in a 21st century America characterized by communications technology that isolates as often as it connects, post-millennial paranoia, and vague yet urgent spiritual yearnings in a late capitalist landscape, Ferris ultimately reaffirms the humanity of the fractured 21st century Self and the benefits of engaging with atomized Others.

Notions of Self and Other in Ferris’s novels are considered as part of an ongoing post-postmodern process, reflecting upon the difficulties and rewards of individuals overcoming their ingrained skepticism and introspection in order to relate to Others, rejecting isolation for community. By exploring the redemptive potential of collective storytelling, consciously engaging with existential anxiety, and cautiously addressing our digital lives and identities, Ferris continues the work of his post-postmodernist peers in challenging new contexts.

In this paper, through close readings of key passages in each of Ferris’s three novels and the application of post-postmodern critical theory, this paper argues that Ferris’s work is profoundly hopeful in its outlook, seeking to invoke in readers a renewed optimism and desire for human connection.

"Following on from Adam Kelly’s essay “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” on the work of the late David Foster Wallace, this conference paper intends to explore how the concept of ‘New Sincerity’ can be developed in the work of one of the most acclaimed and successful younger novelists to follow in Foster Wallace’s wake: Joshua Ferris.
In particular, I shall be considering Ferris’ novels Then We Came to The End and The Unnamed, and seek to reassess these works outside of the standard constraints of their default postmodern classification. My central debate, is considering how and to what degree of success Ferris takes up what Adam Kelly identified as the ‘New Sincerity’s’ interest in restoring and instigating community and disclosure as a form of post-religious secular therapy while also addressing the deliberate ambiguity central to the post-postmodernists.
I shall argue that in ...End, Ferris, more overtly than Foster Wallace, in fact takes a more measured and balanced  consideration of the benefits and pitfalls of community and disclosure than his predecessor, while writing from a position of ambiguity engaging with the reader off the page. By contrast with The Unnamed, Ferris changes his approach dramatically and employs a more hybridised “postmodern-realist” style, remaining ambiguous about his postmodern predecessors but altering his world view substantially.
Befitting the generational differences between Foster Wallace and Ferris, I shall relate these issues to an assessment to Ferris’ narrative voices; the construction of textual loops  and leitmotifs within the texts; the conflicting ‘tones’ of the writing; and his ethical position on the use – or abuse – of community and disclosure for finding solace and meaning.
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