Browsing by Author "Harper, M. P."
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Item Open Access Breaking up, down and out: Anomie in Georgi Gospodinov's Natural Novel(Modern Humanities Research Association, 2015) Harper, M. P.This article argues that Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov's Estestven Roman (Natural Novel, 1999) exposes the simultaneous precariousness of anomie, a condition associated with post-Communism, and the vital significance of its productive activity. Fluid memory fragments augment the interpenetrating hi/stories of narrators, both conflate chronological sequentiality enabling the text to resist and subvert orthodox classifications, be they dialectical, moral, deductive or causal. Through its deployment of dispullulations — multiplicitous, paradoxical complexities of peculiar (inter- and intra-) textual events — Natural Novel, I propose, forges a critical ontology with implications for the individual, Bulgarian culture, and even the contemporary moment globally.Item Open Access Chaos as a mode of living in Samuel Beckett's the unnamable(Indiana University Press, 2012) Harper, M. P.In this article, I examine the deployment of chaos as a textual practice in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. My contention is that, in its endeavor to wrest chaos from the appropriative gestures of order and make room for newness, the text breaks with grammatical frames and conceptual systems that organize subjectivity. The Unnamable “squirms” involuntarily and willfully at the same time, in-between paradoxical turns, multiplying “I”-s, and stream-of-consciousness eruptions. Its squirming undermines stability, identity, and order, inviting into them the unborn, the unthought, chaos. Every proposition that the speaking voice utters subverts the premises upon which subjectivity is constructed and, thus, endeavors to turn the self into a site of chaos. Through its syntactic and semantic movements, The Unnamable inhabits the impossibility of “pure silence” as pure chaos and locates in it an impetus for self-transformation.Item Open Access Fabric frontiers: thread, cloth, body, self in Latina literature in film(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Harper, M. P.This article examines the relationship between self-formation and clothing as a contact zone in Sandra Cisneros's "Eleven," Achy Obejas's "We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" and Alicia Partnoy's "The Denim Jacket" as well as in the film El Norte and the documentary Señorita extraviada. Exploring the cultural conflicts that unfold on the surface of clothing, I contend that these literary and cinematic texts offer richly nuanced moments in which a character interacts with a garment to illuminate the complex relations between biological bodies and social contexts. In these texts, cloth operates both as a limen and as the creased and occasionally threadbare map of a life; whether to take a garment off, put it on, throw it away, or hold on to it becomes a matter of ethical significance, of practicing a particular kind of relationship to oneself.Item Open Access Introduction to the special Issue: new directions in fantasy sports studies(Reconstruction, 2017) Ploeg, A. J.; Harper, M. P.Item Open Access Turning to Debris: ethics of violence in Wilkomirski's fragments and Beigbeder's windows on the world(University of Nebraska Press, 2012) Harper, M. P.