21st century terms

critical distance

The temporal and intellectual space needed to properly analyse cultural works. The challenge of 21st century lit studies: do we need time to process events before we can interpret them?

Contemporaneous

Things happening at the same time — a temporal designation. Distinguished from 'contemporary', which implies a relational, partly disconnected stance.

contemporary

Recent in time to us, but also: being a part of, yet also apart from, the present moment. A relative state — contemporary in relation to someone, something, or somewhere else.

9/11 & literary consequences

A rupture that made postmodern experimentation feel frivolous for many writers. Smith: the novel might die unless authors have the courage to keep it alive. Also: made the crisis-orientation of 21st century lit studies more urgent.

to be contemporary

For Agamben: not to perfectly coincide with your era or Zeitgeist, but to be slightly disconnected and anachronistic — which paradoxically enables you to perceive your time more clearly.

Genetic engineering

The modification and manipulation of an organism's genes using technology. A theme in White Teeth — how much of identity is 'written in DNA'? Links to nature vs nurture debates.

Nature vs nurture

Central tension in White Teeth: how much of identity is determined by biology/DNA vs cultural upbringing, religion, immigrant background. Smith refuses simple answers.

a busy/loud book

Smith's own description of White Teeth: breathless, jumping from image to image, variety of sentence styles, embedded literary references, multimedia elements. Loudness as a way of representing multicultural plurality.

Perpetual motion machine

James Wood's term for White Teeth and similar contemporary novels: stories and sub-stories sprouting on every page, unable to be still, addicted to busyness. Related to his critique of hysterical realism.

hysterical realism

James Wood's label for novels like White Teeth: the conventions of realism are not abolished but overworked and exhausted. Characters are more cartoonish than real. The style seems evasive of reality while borrowing from it.

multiculturalism

A demographic reality and set of governance policies recognising diverse populations. Key concept of the 1990s: rejects the 'melting pot' in favour of maintaining distinct cultural identities. Stuart Hall: how do societies envisage futures composed of peoples from very different backgrounds?

The Chalfens

A white, highly educated, upper-middle-class family in White Teeth. A caricature: Joyce Chalfen finds 'brown strangers really stimulating.' They represent a shallow multiculturalism that accepts immigrant presence without genuine equality.

Omniscient / intrusive collective narrator

The narrator of White Teeth: speaks as 'we', captures a whole society in England at end of century, situates characters in broader multicultural phenomenon. Intrusive because it comments, judges, addresses the reader directly.

Stuart Hall

Cultural theorist who defined multiculturalism as 'how we are to envisage the futures of those many different societies now composed of peoples from very different backgrounds… where difference refuses to disappear.'

Canon / culture wars

Debates in academia about whose texts are taught and whose voices are included.

In White Teeth: the Shakespeare sonnet 127 classroom scene where teacher insists 'dark woman' must be white — clash between canonical assumptions and multicultural reading.

Bhopal chemical disaster

1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India. Thousands died immediately; multigenerational health effects. Sinha's Animal's People fictionalises it as Khaufpur. Legal cases ran until 2023 with insufficient compensation.

ecological imperialism

Wealthier nations using poorer nations as sites for polluting industries because people there are devalued and labour is cheaper. Bellamy & Clark: 'the dumping of ecological wastes in ways that widen the chasm between centre and periphery.'

global south

Development term replacing Cold War 'Third World' — refers to nations in the economic and political periphery, often in the Southern hemisphere. Used to name the unequal distribution of ecological and industrial harms.

Namispond Jamispond

Animal's phonetic spelling of 'My name is Bond, James Bond' — a reference embedded in oral narration, reminding us the novel is composed of tapes Animal records himself. The misspelling enacts the orality of the text.

Sunil

The real boy whose stories partly inspired Animal. Sinha: 'Some of the stories Sunil told me found their way into the novel, however the character of Animal is entirely fictional.' Raises questions about ethics of representation and the mediation of real lives.

picaresque/picaro

A narrative genre originating in 16th-century Spain. Features an episodic structure, a roguish social outsider who survives by wit, scatological humour, and minor crimes. In Animal's People: the tapes are episodes; Animal commits small crimes while the Kampani commits enormous unpunished ones.

ethic of representation

The question of who has authority to tell a story, especially of trauma. Animal refuses to be a 'poison victim' performing suffering for outsiders. The novel critiques sentimentalism — emotional extravagance without action — and slum tourism.

slum tourism

The phenomenon of outsiders visiting sites of poverty or disaster as spectacle. In Animal's People: Animal shows Ellie his slum and dwells on how poverty is often treated as an attraction for foreigners. Critique of the power dynamic in humanitarian narratives.

aerial perspective

A narrative and visual device in Animal's People: characters go to high places or have dream sequences with a god-like view of Khaufpur. Promises full knowledge but ultimately reveals impotence — characters can see everything but cannot act on it.

Sentimentalism (critique of)

• excessive pathos and sympathy

• emotional extravagance without action

• a performance of emotion that validates the reader's moral superiority rather than demanding real response. Animal deliberately resists generating this response.

Human Element — Dow

Dow Chemical's 2006 award-winning ad campaign depicting humans as a chemical element that 'forms bonds' with other elements. Ironic given their ownership of Union Carbide and the Bhopal disaster. Sinha uses this to critique how corporations instrumentalise the idea of humanity.

Slow violence (Nixon)

Rob Nixon (2011): violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, dispersed across time and space. Not spectacular or instantaneous — attritional, incremental. The Bhopal disaster's multigenerational health effects are a paradigmatic example.

graphic fiction

A literary form combining images and text, expanding what readers look for in meaning: colour, texture, font, line shape, panel size, gutter. Orban: provides a 'perceptually rich reading experience' that combines sustained and scattered attention, suited to post-print culture.

queer / counter archives

Collections of ephemera and artifacts (postcards, diaries, photos, clothing) by and about marginalised communities who are excluded from official archives. Not only an alternative but a political act: speaking back to exclusion, reconstituting memory and identity.

ephemera

In queer archive theory: the transient, everyday objects — postcards, ticket stubs, pamphlets — that constitute the informal record of marginalised lives. Bechdel's Fun Home is full of these as she reconstructs her father and her own identity.

personal archive

Bechdel's Fun Home as an act of gathering, arranging, and rearranging memory: 'still looking for some kind of answer to who am I.' A personal archive is both individual and community-focused — capturing the Bechdel family as her own subculture.

ecocriticism

'The study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment' (Glotfelty). Literary criticism focused on the environment; expands across genres. Big questions: what are the cultural origins of environmental values? How does art depict human-nonhuman interrelations?

environmental writing

Dungy's expanded definition: not just writing about nature or climate, but all writing — because environment encompasses city, suburban life, and everything shaping human existence. Partitioning it into a separate genre gives us licence to ignore those issues.

partition (dungy)

The act of making 'environmental writing' a separate exclusive category — which allows us to exclude social issues, race, and urban life from discussions of 'nature.' Dungy argues this partition is itself a political act that silences marginalised voices.

Canine Violence

Dungy's example: the history of dogs being used to threaten and hunt Black people. Important because a dog is part of an environment — more so than a gun. Connects to her argument that environment and racist social history cannot be separated.

ecotone

A region of transition between two biological communities (e.g. where beach meets ocean, or forest meets meadow). Dungy uses it as a metaphor for the overlap of genres, environments, and cultural worlds — zones of conflict but also diverse possibility.

nature poetry (tradition)

Rooted in 18th–19th century Thoreau and Wordsworth; 20th century Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver. Characterised by observation, rich description, combining scientific facts with literary style, largely rural and wilderness-focused. Critiqued for excluding urban life, people of colour, and human impacts.

colonial nature poetry

Gwen Benaway (2019): 'Nature poetry is always colonial… To write a nature poem is to choose to write entire lands and peoples into the archive of the missing to justify your own dominion.' Pico's Nature Poem both agrees with and challenges this.

preterition/paralepsis

A rhetorical device: an implied omission where the speaker brings attention to something while claiming not to say it. 'I'm not going to say she was a bitch.' Pico's whole poem operates this way — claiming he can't write a nature poem while writing one.

persuasive piece

Dungy's 'Is all writing environmental writing?' is a persuasive essay — it tries to change your mind and take you to another understanding, starting with personal anecdote before building its argument.

non-compartimentalize

Dungy's key instruction: do not separate the effect and expression of nature from our broader social environments. Same applies to genre — partitioning genres shuts down the meaning they can hold when read together.

fugitive pose

Pico's strategy in Nature Poem: engaging and eluding dominant Euro-American culture simultaneously — to fight erasure and exoticization. Both denying the nature poem and participating in it at the same time. Engaging on his own terms.

storytelling media

Egan's interest: how can different (social) media forms offer new forms of expression and narrative voice? E.g. a PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad, Twitter for Black Box. The medium becomes part of the story's meaning.

twitterature

Using Twitter to deliver short stories, first appearing in 2009. Taps into serialised form on a small scale. Appeals to writers: interactive, direct feedback, no publishers, constraint as creative tool. Each post can stand alone and as part of a whole.

science fiction

A.k.a. speculative fiction. Features: defamiliarization (making the familiar strange), challenges to how the world/bodies/values work, takes reality as starting point and speculates via science, technology, strange bodies, or environmental conditions. After pomo: informed by critical theory.

defamiliarization

Making the familiar strange — a core feature of science fiction. By showing us bodies, worlds, or systems that deviate from the norm, the genre forces us to question what we take for granted. In Fifth Season: orogeny defamiliarises what 'normal' bodily capacity means.

anaphora

A rhetorical device where phrases begin or end the same way — used by Egan in Black Box, where some tweets end the same as they start. Contributes to the aphoristic, instruction-manual quality of the text.

Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway)

Donna Haraway (1984): cyborgs are hybrids of human, machine, and animal, outside essentialist categories. Identity including gender is fluid and unstable. Utopian potential: cyborgs can disrupt hierarchies. Risk: origins in state/military/corporate contexts. Applied to Lulu in Black Box.

New heroism

In Black Box: renouncing the American fixation with being seen and recognised; giving yourself over to a collective mission. Ironic because it demands women specifically erase themselves, absorb violation, and perform 'selflessness' — repackaging patriarchal demands as progressive virtue.

hyper-masculinist state

O'Riordan's term: after 9/11, the US rebuilt its identity through a hyper-masculinist narrative of autonomy, unassailability, and military might (e.g. PATRIOT Act). Black Box is an 'oblique 9/11 text' critiquing this shoring-up of masculine state power.

domestic fiction

A genre centred on family life, domestic spaces, and middle-class relationships. Weather operates partly as domestic fiction: centred on Lizzie's family, brother, husband, son — but the domestic is constantly interrupted by apocalyptic climate anxiety.

tone

Sianne Ngai: 'a literary or cultural artifact's feeling tone: its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation towards its audience and the world.' Not a single scene's emotion but the whole atmosphere the work emits.

tone of anxiety (Ngai)

Anxiety differs from fear: no definite object, all-pervasive, a cluster of threats rather than one thing to flee. Weather's climate anxiety is low-grade, not fight-or-flight — suspended tension, impossible to resolve, treated with dark humour and intellect.

parataxis

A writing style placing members within a sentence or a sequence of sentences side by side with no expression of their connection except 'and.' Hemingway is the classic case. Offill raises this to the level of whole paragraphs — section breaks function like the 'and.'

fragmentation

Offill's compositional method: printing out fragments and pasting them on poster boards; only keeping those that retain 'radiance.' Produces climate anxiety as form — the reader must supply connections between snippets, replicating the overloaded, non-linear experience of contemporary life.

orogeny

The ability to sense and manipulate geological forces (seismic energy, heat, pressure) in The Fifth Season. It is simultaneously a disability (framed as threatening, contained by the Fulcrum) and a superability (exploited by the state). What changes is not orogeny itself but how society defines and values it.

critical disability studies

Julie Minich: involves scrutinising not bodily/mental impairments themselves, but the social norms that define certain attributes as impairments, and the social conditions that concentrate stigmatised attributes in particular populations.

superability

A capacity that arises out of disability narratives — when a marginalised body is given exceptional power, often as narrative compensation. The two sides of the same coin: what makes orogenes powerful is also what makes them persecuted. Society decides whether it counts as asset or threat.

neo-slave narrative

Contemporary novels that reimagine (U.S.) antebellum life through the perspective of the enslaved — 'attempting to reclaim a true sense of time and identity of the Black diasporic subject' (Arlene Keizer). Jemisin uses orogeny to convey what it meant to live in enslaved conditions.

slave narrative

18th and 19th century first-person accounts of the experience of being enslaved — the genre that neo-slave narrative responds to and reimagines. E.g. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs.

Sami Schalk — bodymind

Schalk's term (Bodyminds Reimagined, 2018): disability studies investigates (dis)ability as a socially constructed phenomenon. 'Bodymind' resists the ableist separation of body and mind — especially relevant to The Fifth Season where orogeny is felt through the whole self.

Second person 'you' — 21st century

Growing use of 2nd person narration in 21st century fiction. Functions: creates intimacy and immediacy, evokes surveillance and being-watched, enables dissociation and self-splitting, sidesteps gender markers, addresses readers as 'outsiders' who then become the character.

hoah as narrator

The late reveal in The Fifth Season: Hoah (a stone eater) is the 'you' narrator addressing Essun. This demonstrates intimacy between humans, orogenes, and stone eaters, and reveals the 'you' as an intimacy mechanism — reframing Essun's life without judgement.

node maintainers

Orogenes with too much uncontrolled power, sent to node stations where their bodies unconsciously suppress seismic activity. Often children. Can be abused. Inspired by Octavia Butler's Kindred. Represents the lowest point of orogene treatment — the spectrum of exploitation.

Genre fiction / high vs low

A key 21st century inquiry: what is the relationship between 'high'/literary and 'low'/genre fiction? In 21st century lit, genre (sci-fi, graphic novel, twitterature, picaresque) penetrates literary fiction more than ever and genre boundaries are deliberately blurred.

Climate fiction (cli-fi)

Fiction set in the present or near-future that deals with climate change and its psychological, social, and ecological consequences. Weather is an example. Distinct from speculative future apocalypse: cli-fi is happening now. Fifth Season has also been read as climate parable.

Postmodern style (pomo no mo'?)

A key 21st century inquiry: has postmodernism been assimilated into mainstream culture? The answer in this course: pomo style lives on but is now deployed to political and ethical ends — around climate anxiety, environmental injustice, identity — rather than as pure self-referential play.

Julie Minich

CDS scholar: 'Involves scrutinising not bodily or mental impairments but the social norms that define particular attributes as impairments, as well as the social conditions that concentrate stigmatised attributes in particular populations.' Core quote for Fifth Season analysis.

Haraway — cyborg origins

'The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism… But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.' The potential for cyborg subversion.

Crystal Parikh — dissolution

'Narratives of fragmentation and dissolution by contemporary writers counter the stranglehold that those of progressive and linear development… have had in constructing the ideal subject of liberal humanism.' Fragmentation as political form, not just aesthetic choice.

stonelore

The fragmentary records of the past in The Fifth Season — not a linear story, unreliable, learned from to survive. The Season forces civilisation to constantly remake itself, securing ruptures at both the level of the individual and the planet.