Stanford University Press Blog

“I Slip Into Your Skin”: Identity and Novelistic Representation

A look at the ethical aesthetic of Girl, Woman, Other

DOROTHY J. HALE

Oct. 10th, 2008— Bernardine Evaristo at a reading in the Long Room, Lancaster Maritime Museum. CC BY 2.0. Photo by Lancaster Litfest via Flickr. 

 

A happy problem for those of us who write on contemporary fiction is the continuous expansion of the field. After I completed the manuscript for The Novel and the New Ethics, I read Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize–winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, and wished I could have included in my book a chapter on her work.

Girl, Woman, Other: Evaristo’s title trumpets the centrality of identity to its representational project while also making explicit the specific categories of identity which are its guiding concern. But while the title implicitly links the value of literature in the contemporary moment with its capacity to depict—to turn Georg Lukács’s phrase—a new social order and new type of woman, it also raises the question of what literary fiction brings to identity as a personal and societal project.¹ To make social space for new identities, why not pen one’s autobiography or profile the lives of real women?

The Novel and the New Ethics » argues that crucial to the contemporary understanding of fiction’s social value is a belief in fiction’s power to offer a meaningful encounter with otherness. The contemporary writers I discuss—Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Richard Russo, and Marilynne Robinson—all share Evaristo’s belief that “slipping into the skin of characters who are clearly not myself” (as Evaristo puts it) is the defining ethical task of the fiction writer.² Importantly, all these contemporary writers each pursue that ethical task with a full awareness of the political and ideological limitations that make the goal of “becoming other” (to use Morrison’s phrase) an aspirational goal that inspires an ongoing ethical endeavor.³

American Academy of Religion Conference 2020

 

To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the AAR exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of religion publishing at SUP.

 

Events

New Books and New SUP Authors

2021 Religion Catalog

From the SUP Blog Archives

New in Stanford Digital Projects

This Year’s Award Winners

AAR Resources

 

---

Events

 

All times are listed in Eastern Standard Time

 

Stanford University Press

Meet David J. Halperin, author of Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO (Stanford University Press)

Tuesday, December 1, 1:00 PM–1:30 PM

UFOs are a religious phenomenon—a UFO encounter is a bona fide religious experience, UFO lore a religious myth. As a collective cultural dream, UFOs transport us to the outer limits of that most alien yet intimate frontier, our own inner space. In his new book David Halperin, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lifelong specialist in Judaica, explores what UFOs and UFO belief mean for us as individuals, as a culture, as a species.

 

Stanford University Press Publishing with Stanford University Press

Tuesday, December 1, 2:00 PM– 2:30 PM

Interested in pitching your book to Stanford University Press? This brief presentation, led by SUP’s Executive Editor for the Humanities Erica Wetter, will cover the proposal and submissions process, including: What are the key components of a strong proposal? What makes a project stand out? What should you expect during peer review? What happens after a book is contracted? And, how can you make the most of your publishing experience? A Q&A period will conclude the event.

 

Movements of Rage

Understanding stochastic violence

GLENN E. ROBINSON

November 2020— Memorial in Desider-Friedmann-Platz, Vienna By Bwag - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

On November 2 at 8:00 pm, Kujtim Fejzullai opened fire on civilians in Vienna, Austria, killing four and wounding two dozen more before being killed himself. Born in Austria and of Albanian heritage, Fejzullai became known to Austrian counterterrorism officials when he attempted to cross the Turkish border to join ISIS in Syria, a crime for which he served eight months in prison. As far as we know, Fejzullai never actually made contact with ISIS officials; he seems to have planned and carried out his terror attack completely on his own. He declared his allegiance to ISIS on social media before launching his attack. ISIS acknowledged that it was surprised by the attack, calling Fejzullai a “soldier of the caliphate” – a phrase normally reserved for previously unknown sympathizers who carry out a violent act. Thus, it appears that very little could have been done to prevent this radicalized individual, acting alone but inspired by ISIS, from carrying out his deadly rampage.

Welcome to the fourth wave of global jihad.

As my new book Global Jihad » details, there have been four distinct waves of global jihad. The most recent fourth wave is part of the broader phenomenon of stochastic violence: i.e. violence that is inspired and social media driven. Following the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, Abu Musab al-Suri feared for the future of armed jihad itself. A committed jihadi, Suri had fought in the first round of the Syrian civil war in the early 1980s, advised the GIA in Algeria’s bloody civil war in the 1990s, and likely had a hand in some of Europe’s most notorious acts of terror. Suri wanted to create a jihadi system that could withstand the constant crush of security and military forces, built on emerging internet technologies, and held together by an always evolving wiki-narrative that made sense of all the disparate acts of jihadi violence. Nizam, la tanzim he declared: “a system, not an organization.” Jihadi organizations were too easily defeated, but a networked system that linked together individuals and small groups from around the world was a durable form of jihadi action. It required, at its center, acts of jihad fardi, or personal jihad: attacks by ‘lone wolves’ or small groups.

The idea of stochastic terror was first launched by American neo-Nazis, and only made possible by the advent of the internet and social media.