The of Hunger: Post-war Beckett and the Genealogies of Starvation

Moody, A. David

doi:10.1163/18757405-024001018

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…His Beckettian characters that inhabit late‐twentieth‐century United States present a specific political allegory. Whereas Beckett's own bums might be associated with an history of crisis such as the Irish famine or the World War II food rationings that the Irish writer himself had to go through in his life (Moody, 2012, p. 266), Auster's bums expose the systemic presence of poverty amid wealth in America, a tragic reality that is exacerbated in the era of neoliberal inequality. His bums convey the injustice of a wealthy civilization that is entrenched in the myth of the underserving poor.…”

Section: The Downtrodden a 1960s Idealist In The Age Of Greedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…His bums convey the injustice of a wealthy civilization that is entrenched in the myth of the underserving poor. Therefore, if Beckett's attention to starvation “stinks of history but has no clear place within it” (Moody, 2012, p. 272), Auster's destitution has a clear geographical and historical location: The United States of the post‐1960s neoliberal revolution.…”

Section: The Downtrodden a 1960s Idealist In The Age Of Greedmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

“Far more poetry than justice.” The economics of austerity in the America of Paul Auster

Tedde

2020

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Moving beyond the modernist and postmodern metaphors of hunger that the writing of Paul Auster (b. 1947) suggests, this article explores Auster as a writer who responds to the so-called public economic austerity that has dominated the political economic agenda in the United States during the past four decades. This reading suggests that there is a realist quality in Auster's work, notwithstanding its postmodern play. In presenting this argument, I believe that the writer's body of work discloses the history of post-1960s American economy in a plethora of poverty-stricken people that form the social background of his stories (downtrodden), in the insecurity that thwarts the main characters' existence (the newly dispossessed) and in the personal choices of the author himself to live his life as a starving artist (the penniless hero). Such an history of US economy is accompanied by a criticism of neoliberal ethos that restores the dignity of marginalized poor Americans.

show abstract

Section: The Downtrodden a 1960s Idealist In The Age Of Greedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Downtrodden a 1960s Idealist In The Age Of Greedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Far more poetry than justice.” The economics of austerity in the America of Paul Auster

Tedde

2020

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The Aesthetics of Hunger: Knut Hamsun, Modernism, and Starvation's Global Frame

Wientzen¹

2015

Novel

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Exhibiting formal characteristics of works published decades later, Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890) has long occupied a central position in genealogies of modernism. Its status in the modernist canon, however, has often come at the cost of disregarding the cultural and economic conditions of Hamsun's Norway, which was one of Europe's least developed nations in the nineteenth century. Where critics have tended to treat the hunger that drives Hamsun's novel in terms of the desires and affects of metropolitan modernity, this article instead reads starvation as a transnational historical phenomenon, one that informed wide swaths of the global periphery in the late nineteenth century. In Hunger, Hamsun invoked a history of economic development that endowed the starving body with transnational political significance. Restaging the naturalist novel's own approach to hunger, Hunger reflects the transnational reconfiguration of economic forms, which depended centrally on the leveraging of bodily needs of entire populations for productive ends. In Hamsun's novel, the body stands as a primary site upon which the transformation of macroeconomic structures are made legible as well as an object of political struggle. In making this argument, this article restores the historically specific quality of starvation to readings of modernism and places Hamsun within a history of hunger that informed the formal projects of successive generations of novelists.

show abstract

The of Hunger: Post-war Beckett and the Genealogies of Starvation

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

“Far more poetry than justice.” The economics of austerity in the America of Paul Auster

“Far more poetry than justice.” The economics of austerity in the America of Paul Auster

The Aesthetics of Hunger: Knut Hamsun, Modernism, and Starvation's Global Frame

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About