Robert Eaglestone

Contemporary fiction in the academy: towards a manifesto

Researching contemporary fiction in the academy raises uncomfortable and worrying questions about what we academics do. It also reveals that we have yet to come to a view – not even a dissensus range of views – about what it means to research contemporary fiction. In order to begin to develop such a dissensus, this manifesto outlines nine questions or problems for the study of contemporary fiction.

Avoiding Evil in Perpetrator Fiction

The recent boom in perpetrator fiction seems to play to the very reasonable desire to ‘understand’ the mind of a perpetrator, which means, at base, understanding the evil involved in perpetration. However, as I try to suggest, this is far from straightforward. Looking at two recent examples (Maureen Myant’s The Search and Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies), I suggest that imprecise prose (indeed, bad writing) and preordained ideas prevent this happening. I turn then to the very major recent work in this area, Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones. Here, too, I identify a ‘swerve’ away from addressing the evil of ‘ordinary’ genocidal perpetrators. However, by following through an idea of Hannah Arendt’s, I suggest that this novel does, in fact, get the reader closer, if obliquely, to understanding something of the genocide.

Transition into the Profession: Accuracy, Sincerity and ‘Disciplinary Consciousness’

One of the central challenges for academics beginning their careers, making the transition from PhD researcher to member of the faculty, is balancing the demands of research and teaching. This chapter does not explain how to achieve this balance, but it does recast the debates—and certainly the damaging rhetoric—over ‘research versus teaching’ in a more useful form. It explains why research and teaching, which are so frequently presented as opposed forces, simply are not. It does not suggest that academics with newly minted PhDs are somehow—as if by magic—excellent teachers: you have to learn how to teach just as you have to learn how to research. Instead, it suggests that the virtues that make one a good researcher are, at their deep roots, those that make one a good teacher and that seeing things this way perhaps might ease that transition, achieve a better balance, and make ‘thinking about teaching’ more attractive.

Transition, ‘Hard’ Theory and disciplinary consciousness

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the question of why students in transition find theory so hard. It argues that there is a significant gap between English in secondary education and English in higher education and this is most clearly marked by ‘theory’. One result of this gap is that students find theory ‘hard’. The article goes on to explore three reasons for this ‘hardness’: the unexpectedness of theory, its intrinsic difficulty and lack of boundaries, and the inherent difficulties for teaching it. The article looks at the consequence of this ‘hardness’ for students and then explores three pedagogic approaches which engage with this ‘hardness’ and which display a distinct sense of a disciplinary consciousness.

Madness or modernity?: The Holocaust in two Anglo-American comics

This article looks at the ways in which the two Anglo-American comics, Desert Peach and Miracleman, explain the Holocaust. I highlight their differences from Maus, the starting point for nearly all discussions in English about comics and the Holocaust. Donna Barr’s Desert Peach is about the fictional younger brother of Erwin Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’. The stories are rather like a World War II German version of M*A*S*H. However, her account of the Holocaust offers the widely accepted and widely criticized ‘good German’ story: that, although the SS and Nazi High Command were perpetrators in the genocide, the ‘Honourable’ German army were bystanders who did not commit atrocities. Her basically liberal paradigm means that ‘Nazi madness’ is the only explanation. In contrast, Alan Moore’s superhero allegory, Miracleman suggests that there is an inextricable alliance between modernity and the death camps. By highlighting the similarities between this and Adorno’s discussion of the ‘myth of the Enlightenment’, I suggest that this story, in which blond Aryan superheroes take over the world is a conscious allegory for the Holocaust and is both a warning about the power of Enlightenment thought and an analysis of it.

Derrida and the Holocaust: A Commentary on the Philosophy of Cinders

(2002). Derrida and the Holocaust: A Commentary on the Philosophy of Cinders. Angelaki: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 27-38.

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

Flaws: James, Nussbaum, Miller, Levinas

How are we to read ‘ethically’? How, if at all, do literary texts ‘show’ or ‘testify’ to ethics, to the ‘whole conduct of life’? In the fragmentary text of The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot describes three different ways of reading: There is an active, productive way of reading which produces text and reader and thus transports us. There is a passive kind of reading which betrays the text while appearing to submit to it, by giving the illusion that the text exists objectively, fully, sovereignly: as one whole. Finally, there is the reading that is no longer passive, but is passivity’s reading. It is without pleasure, without joy; it escapes both comprehension and desire. It is like the nocturnal vigil, that ‘inspiring’ insomnia when, all having been said, ‘Saying’ is heard, and the testimony of the last witness is pronounced.2