Gerald David Naughton | University of Sharjah (original) (raw)

Papers by Gerald David Naughton

Critique: Studies In Contemporary Fiction, Apr 6, 2022

In his 1996 novel The Story of the Night, Irish writer Colm Tóibín addressed the issue of homosex... more In his 1996 novel The Story of the Night, Irish writer Colm Tóibín addressed the issue of homosexuality for the first time in his fiction. The novel weaves a manifold tale of nationality, identity and sexuality and displaces that tale, as Tóibín himself acknowledged, onto another country, ...

African American Review, 2013

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980–2020, Mar 25, 2022

Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 2013

This article discusses the contemporary British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips and the twentieth... more This article discusses the contemporary British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips and the twentieth-century African-American writer James Baldwin within a comparative framework that speaks to the expanding issue of international (and transnational) American literary influence. Baldwin has frequently been cited by Phillips as a major literary source, but the nature of this influence can be difficult to frame. The article is interdisciplinary in nature and takes its theoretical framework not from narrative theory but from music theory. Issues of creative repetition in black music and rhythmic counterpoint in jazz are suggested as models that can be applied to a relationship of literary influence. The article applies these issues to close readings of Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" (1957) and Phillips' In the Falling Snow (2009), focusing on the musical structures, themes, and motifs that permeate both texts.

English Academy Review, Jan 2, 2015

This article examines the framing of travel in Alex Garland's novel The Beach ([1996] 1997. L... more This article examines the framing of travel in Alex Garland's novel The Beach ([1996] 1997. London: Penguin), and explores Bill Brown's Thing Theory as a means of conceptualizing Garland's engagement with fragile futures. The argument is that the novel's embeddedness in the so-called X Generation colours its futile presentation of futures, which is witnessed in the protagonist's unfulfilled desire for utopian travel. The striving for travel beyond touristic signification, which the article equates to Thing Theory's description of ‘thingness’ beyond the normal circuits of production, is the novel's defining element.The ultimate hopelessness of this striving, it is argued, presents a characteristically ‘Generation X’ attitude towards the fragility of utopian futures.

Critique: Studies In Contemporary Fiction, Dec 15, 2017

This article examines James McBride's National Book Award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird (2013)... more This article examines James McBride's National Book Award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird (2013) as an example of both posthistorical fiction and postracial passing. These twin ambiguities, the article argues, structure McBride's neo-slave narrative, pointing toward the inherent ironies of racial, gender, and historical construction, both in the era of the novel's historical setting (the 1850s) and in the age of the novel's critical reception (the twenty-first century). Ultimately, the essay suggests, McBride's novel plays within these ironies, rather than attempting to unravel them. Identity and history in the text exist only as models of performativity, and constructs of essence or authenticity are eschewed.

Intersections, 2017

This article describes Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action"... more This article describes Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action" (known as the Moynihan Report, 1965) as an example of a Reconstructivist impulse in American cultural history. Sandwiched, as it was, between the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Watts Riot (or Rebellion) of 1965, the Moynihan Report and its ensuing controversy are frequently associated with the increased militarism and entrenchment of racial discourse of the late civil rights era. Though the Moynihan controversy has frequently and resonantly been discussed in scholarship, much of this analysis has focused on Moynihan's construction of black family pathology. The current paper shifts focus in the debate slightly by examining how the trope of cultural reconstruction undergirds both Moynihan's thesis and its subsequent reception. Moynihan's Report attempts to tie together America's first and second Reconstructions with the trope of family-a rhetorical move that had a rich and varied history in American and African American literatures. By reading Moynihan's efforts to draw a thread between the Reconstruction era history of black family life and the Civil-Rights era urban black family, the article traces a profusion of tropes and signs and arguments about black family life that are repeatedly established and reinforced in moments of American reconstruction.

$Research paper thumbnail of The Suffering Joker and the Cruel Joke: Nabokov\u27s and Bellow\u27s Dark Laughter$

This article interrogates the interrelationship between cruelty, suffering, and laughter in novel... more This article interrogates the interrelationship between cruelty, suffering, and laughter in novels by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, positing an affective reading of how bodies that suffer come to produce laughter as a confounding, unexpected, and at times inappropriate readerly affect. Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark and Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King both explore suffering as a form of excessive somatic cruelty inflicted on protagonists who, in experiencing such punishment, engender a strange, troubling, and potentially transformative form of laughter. In order to bring together a discussion of the body, suffering, cruelty, and laughter in Nabokov and Bellow, the essay uses Henri Bergson\u27s idea of the elasticity of laughter in connection to cruelty and suffering, and various “affective” formulations of the body. In both writers, such Bergsonian elasticity of laughter is what allows for laughing at suffering, but there are crucial differences in their depictions of somatic s...

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2022

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2018

This article examines James McBride’s National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird (2013)... more This article examines James McBride’s National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird (2013) as an example of both posthistorical fiction and postracial passing. These twin ambiguities, the article argues, structure McBride’s neo-slave narrative, pointing toward the inherent ironies of racial, gender, and historical construction, both in the era of the novel’s historical setting (the 1850s) and in the age of the novel’s critical reception (the twenty-first century). Ultimately, the essay suggests, McBride’s novel plays within these ironies, rather than attempting to unravel them. Identity and history in the text exist only as models of performativity, and constructs of essence or authenticity are eschewed.

English Academy Review, 2015

Shipwreck and Island Motifs in Literature and the Arts, 2015

Why the chora?The island is often conceived of as a place that kindles the subject's imaginat... more Why the chora?The island is often conceived of as a place that kindles the subject's imagination and desire. As an imaginary space full of promise, the island functions as that which is directly opposed to the real: "the romantic dream is still the individualized form of Utopia, ... [and because] the dissociation from the real world is maximized, the island of Utopia stands opposed to the continent of the real".1 In this sense, the island also enables the subject to fulfil alternative desires and explore other selves that are not "permitted" in the "real world". In psychoanalytic terms, this "disassociation from the real world" prompts the subject's return to the Real, within the Lacanian/Zizekian model, or to the chora,2 within the Kristevian/Derridean model. Zizek defines the Real as that "which threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance"; Kristeva similarly describes the chora as a "movement towards jouissance" and... a multiplicity of expulsions ensuring its infinite renewal. Expulsion rejects the discordance between the signifier and signified to the extent of the dissolution of the subject as signifying subject. But it also rejects the partitions in which the subject must shelter in order to constitute itself.The island provides precisely this jouissance and "multiplicity of expulsions", ensuring the subject's "infinite renewal". In every island narrative or image explored in this paper, the island disrupts the "subject as signifying subject" and positions it as an "insular" self. In the absence of physical and symbolic shelter or partition, the subject becomes exposed to its own multiple possibilities. In this sense, the island becomes a temporary shelter without partitions, a "mobile-receptacle site of the process"3 - a chora, in geographical, symbolic, and psychic terms.In Michel Tournier's Friday, for example, the narrator describes the "shedding of context" that takes place on his desert island, Speranza, where "there is only one viewpoint, [his] own, deprived of all context".4 Though initially "charted by a network of interpellations and extrapolations", the island - and hence, the subject - "expels" its partitions and becomes simply what is sensually perceived. "My vision of the island", he concludes, "is reduced to that of my own eyes, and what I do not see of it is to me a total unknown. Everywhere I am not, total darkness reigns."5 Thus, a correlation is established between the subject's sensual experience, the body, and the island. The subject and the island produce each other through choric (ex)pulsion.It is on these terms that this comparative study will explore the island in selected texts from different mediums: Jose Saramago's O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida (1997; The Tale of the Unknown Island), Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967; Friday, or, The Other Island), Marguerite Duras' India Song (1975), Frida Kahlo's Lo Que el Agua Me Dio (1938; What the Water Gave Me), and Alexandre Dumas' Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844; The Count of Monte Cristo). By combining insights from psychoanalytical and postmodern theories with close readings of proposed texts, this essay will explore the paradigm of the self-island as a chora of "multiplicity" and "infinite renewal".Toward the island as choraKristeva takes her concept of the chora from Plato, who in Timaeus, proposed it as a "receptacle" - a space of becoming. Timaeus, we may recall, is the dialogue that takes place on the day directly following that of Plato's Republic. It is a text that is intimately concerned with the task of moving from the abstract perfectionism of the Republic to something more active and material. Thus, Plato's chora is an "inbetween" space, or, as he himself termed it, a "third kind": neither matter nor form. Thomas Rickert has attempted to express this sense of chora in another way:Put differently, we could say that the choric city [as opposed to the Republic] is where invention comes to life. …

CEA Critic, 2013

"“My steps then were not directed towards classic shores, but to lands of newer and more... more "“My steps then were not directed towards classic shores, but to lands of newer and more vigorous life. Westward went I in search of romance”, wrote Thomas Mayne Reid in _The Quadroon_ (1856). While the trope of ‘renewal’ through westward adventure is well established in American Romanticism, the strange afterlife of Reid’s fiction presents a unique perspective on the enduring transnational romanticism of the American West. Reid’s most faithful and grateful reader was Russia. The enormous popularity of his escapist adventure novels in Russia – and Eastern Europe via Russian translations – eclipsed their fleeting success in America. Today, Mayne Reid is largely forgotten by both readers and scholars of American literature. As Czesław Miłosz noted, "Mayne Reid is the rather rare case of an author whose fame, short-lived where he could be read in the original, has survived thanks to translations". Indeed, Reid’s tales of the American West were perhaps ideally translatable into other cultures. Such tales relied on what Richard White (1999) described as the “master narrative of the West”, which “erased part of the larger, and more confusing and tangled, cultural story in order to deliver up a clean, dramatic, and compelling narrative”. These “clean”, ‘untangled’ narratives were readily exported, making the American West, from its very inception, a transnational phenomenon. The cultural translation and reception of Mayne Reid’s Western adventures outside of American borders provide an interesting paradigm for exploring the transnational West. As Neil Campbell (2008) suggests, the “application of … radical, outside perspectives drawn from beyond western studies”. In Stuart Hall’s words (1995), the West should be seen “as a meeting place, the location of ... connections and interrelations, of influences and movements”. The key questions that this paper wishes to address here are: in what ways did Reid’s West become such a ‘meeting place’ for transnational ‘influences’, and how was the West repositioned and reconceptualized by America’s ‘Other’, (Soviet) Russia and Eastern Europe? "

Exploring Transculturalism, 2010

ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2013

At the start of the 1850s, as African American writing begins to blur the boundaries between fict... more At the start of the 1850s, as African American writing begins to blur the boundaries between fiction and non− fiction, two texts appeared which attempted to novelize the African American narrative voice. William Wells Brown's novel Clotel and Frederick Douglass's novella “The Heroic Slave” were both published in the same year (1853) and both addressed issues of narrative voice—but in different ways. Brown's labyrinthine textual strategies leant heavily on a number of mid− nineteenth century discourses—most notably ...