Scottish Literature: Representing the Nation in the Age of the Post-National

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Guided by new materialist approaches to the memory of loss, this reading of Jackie Kay’s 1998 novel <italic>Trumpet</italic> surveys the affective permutations registered by different objects of remembrance in the Scottish-Nigerian writer’s fictional account of mourning. Exploring several material figurations of Black Scottishness in Kay’s writings, the essay derives its main theoretical framework from studies on blended subject-object ontologies, including Bill Brown’s critique of <italic>thingness</italic>, Maurizia Boscagli’s notion of the disruptive agency of <italic>stuff</italic>, and Mel Y Chen’s view of matter’s <italic>animacy</italic>, and discusses how the novel latches onto the role of things in anchoring memory and in helping humans work through bereavement.
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“Daft naff Scottish things”: Stuff, Waste and Memory Objects in Jackie Kay’s <italic>Trumpet</italic>

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The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how Ali Smith’s novel <italic>There But For The</italic> (2011) foregrounds a temporality in which the scenario of hospitality is encoded into the characters’ perception of the future, while the welcoming scenarios in which they engage are themselves marked by the awareness of futurity. To this end, I rework Levinas’s equation of the future as the Other, as well as Derrida’s notions of conditional and unconditional hospitality, of the future as the expected/unexpected event, and of “<italic>choratic</italic> space.” The subsequent analysis of the novel proves how these notions are thematized both through the characters’ inner and intersubjective discourse, and via the authorial construction of imagery and the deictics of the spaces they inhabit. As such, the characters’ conversations bear the marks of an uncertain causality springing from the welcoming scenario; attitudes towards futurity are faced with the disquieting awareness of the conflict between the expected and the unexpected event; while the <italic>choratic</italic> space acts as the possibility of an ethical reaction to the strangers’ singularity, through a linguistic reorientation which employs the contingency of the linguistic sign as a site for hospitality.
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The Future as a Scenario of Hospitality in Ali Smith’s <italic>There But For The</italic>

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Starting from a brief examination of Muriel Spark’s position as a Scottish novelist within the framework of her anti-essentialist, anti-authoritative aesthetics, my essay will take a seemingly abrupt, but in fact consequential turn to investigate the complex antinomies involved in her fictional representation of the lives of others. Although at home and abroad she is hailed as Scotland’s most celebrated author of the twentieth century, Spark’s writerly practice consists of regularly dismantling grand narratives or fixed, stable identities, often clashing with more localized or prescriptive views on the social and national functions of narrative. My argument, however, is that it is the very unease of her “Scottishness” that acts as one of the foundations of her literary ethics, embodied in her acute awareness of the antinomies involved in textualizing the lives of others. Spark’s shrewdly metafictional <italic>Loitering with Intent</italic> (1981) openly thematizes both the obligation, and the risks of telling one’s own and other people’s stories, performing a radical ethics of narrative alterity through its staging of the enmeshments of writing, (auto)biography and experience.
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“In came the self-evident and luminous little mess”: Ethical Life Writing in Muriel Spark’s <italic>Loitering with Intent</italic>i

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Scottish author Irvine Welsh has crafted an internally cohesive cosmology, grounded in mapping a somewhat loosely defined “chemical generation” that helped spearhead a personal brand of anti-Thatcherite counterculture (with an especially heavy focus on the marginalized, disgruntled and boisterous youths of Edinburgh). Examining some of the writer’s most recent and lesser-known works, my essay will argue that a series of archaic mythical patterns, symbols and cosmological coordinates can be shown to guide a large number of the axioms that Welsh employs to refine his own vision of a modern, emergent mythos.
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Violence, Innocence and Redemption in Irvine Welsh’s Chemical Mythos

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The present essay seeks to analyze Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod’s <italic>The Corporation Wars</italic> trilogy (2016-2017) as an amalgam of politico-philosophical ideas set against the background of posthumanism. MacLeod’s far-future posthuman world-building relies on the conventional tropes of science fiction (man-machine hybrids, brain uploading, digital resurrection, and the agency of sentient machines) to engage with pressing ideologies (the master-slave dialectics, the historical perpetuation of age-old conflict between progressive and reactionary forces, the ethics of machinic consciousness). MacLeod’s novels project a postbinarist worldview where outmoded binary oppositions between life and death, the real and the virtual, the human and the machinic are constantly abolished, but which still preserves persistent ideological divisions.
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The Battle Within and the Battle Without: The Posthuman Worldview of Ken MacLeod’s <italic>The Corporation Wars</italic> Trilogy

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The interview offers a comprehensive, paradigmatic overview of the experience of literary modes within the broad frameworks of modernity and postmodernity. It invites reflection and rethinking of epistemic change from a major literary historian and theorist whose work in the Anglo-American context has become synonymous with the examination of temporality, historicity, and poeticality in twentieth century experimentation with form. Revisiting central concepts and aesthetic categories in literary criticism and theory, Randall Stevenson contributes a highly contemporary, ground-breaking vision of the literary act against the backdrop of the new structures of knowledge pertaining to the digital age and the post-humanist crisis.
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Modernism, Postmodernism and the Nature of the Times: A Conversation with Randall Stevenson

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According to Giorgio Agamben, the Greek term for ‘habitual dwelling place,’ or ‘habit,’ is <italic>ethos</italic>. The rise to prominence in the twentieth century of the modern idea of the suburb, or ‘suburbia,’ held open the door to the potential realization of the American (and Canadian) dream <italic>ethos</italic> of universal home ownership. The tantalizing appeal of a the ideal of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ have become key terms in the Post World War Two pursuit of a mode of ‘dwelling’ linked to consumer capitalism. Yet for Frankfurt School critics such as Theodor W. Adorno, the pursuit of this suburban ideal induced a deep sense of <italic>ennui</italic> such that to feel ‘at home’ in such a suburban environment challenged the very foundations of the dwelling place of Western civilization. “It is part of morality,” Adorno concluded in his book, <italic>Minima Moralia</italic>, “not to be at home in one’s home.” This text is an exercise in examining this question of ‘dwelling’ and ‘home’ through an allegorical poetical focus (drawn from Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire) focusing on a newly completed suburb in the Canadian city of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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Homes for Canadians (II)

Scotland and Scottishness: From Tradition to Modernity

The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation

Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges

Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language

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American, British and Canadian Studies

 Publishing House and Owner: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania  Founded in 1999 as the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, American, British and Canadian Studies is currently published biannually by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, under the aegis of the Research Centre for Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies at LBUS and the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. It is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone Studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

American, British and Canadian Studies

Volume 37 (2021): Issue 1 (December 2021)

Editor’s Note

Scottish Literature: Representing the Nation in the Age of the Post-National

Artikel

“Daft naff Scottish things”: Stuff, Waste and Memory Objects in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

The Future as a Scenario of Hospitality in Ali Smith’s There But For The

“In came the self-evident and luminous little mess”: Ethical Life Writing in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intentⁱ

Violence, Innocence and Redemption in Irvine Welsh’s Chemical Mythos

The Battle Within and the Battle Without: The Posthuman Worldview of Ken MacLeod’s The Corporation Wars Trilogy

Modernism, Postmodernism and the Nature of the Times: A Conversation with Randall Stevenson

Postcards

Homes for Canadians (II)

Reviews

Scotland and Scottishness: From Tradition to Modernity

The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation

Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges

Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language

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