Death of the Novelist
Regular readers will know that Scarlett Thomas is not afraid of ideas: PopCo chaffed codes and mathematics against Big Business; The End of Mr Y, a mystery, a fantasy and a critique of 19th-century philosophy was a perfect novel, a compelling free-association on Derrida, phenomenology, the interrelation of science, faith and language. In her eight novel, the author tackles the mechanics of storytelling, Aristotle’s rules of drama, the seven basic plotlines and Zen koans. It’s good to be back in Scarlett Thomas’ universe.
Susan Tomaselli on Our Tragic Universe.
Breaking the Ice
Dominic Fox’s Cold World seems initially to sit a little oddly with a work as candidly political as Capitalist Realism. Its title is borrowed from Coleridge, a move which seems to announce its primary concerns as aesthetic, and one is asked to do a substantial amount of reading between the lines in order to establish exactly what a ‘Politics of Militant Dejection’ might be. This is no bad thing. Tracing the history of dysphoria — the state in which one is incapable of taking pleasure in the world — from Romanticism through to the unfettered negativity of Xasthur and Darkthrone’s Black Metal via Gerard Manley Hopkins, Philip Larkin, Iris Murdoch, and Ulrike Meinhof (as unlikely a m énage as ever there was), Fox makes an implicit case for refusing to grasp liberalism’s cornucopia of so-called possibilities.
Joe Kennedy on Dominic Fox’s‘s Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria.