Re-conceptualising ‘contemporaneity’ by Thinking through the ‘criminality’ of the World using Chloe Hooper’s The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

  • Soumya Mishra

Abstract

Inspired by Theodore Martin’s Contemporary Drift and “Contemporary, Inc.,” this essay explores the ‘emptiness’ of the contemporary category by thinking through the criminality of the world. It also explores how genre allows authors to come up with innovative and complex ways to fill the ‘emptiness’ of contemporaneity by providing new knowledge about the world we live in.

Keywords: Contemporaneity, criminality, contemporary uncertainty, genre and contemporary writing.

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Author Biography

Soumya Mishra

Soumya Mishra completed her postgraduate in English Studies from The University of Sydney and is now planning to do Ph D. Her areas of interest include postcolonial theory, genre theory, contemporaneity and gender and sexuality studies.

References

1. Berlant, Lauren. “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, pp. 445–451. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421150.
2. Frow, John. Genre, Routledge, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=1791265. Accessed 12 Oct. 2019.
3. Hooper, Chloe. The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire. Penguin Random House Australia, 2018. Kindle Book.
4. Martin, Theodore. Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, Columbia University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=5276001. Accessed 15 Oct. 2019.
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6. McCarthy, Tom. Satin Island: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Kindle Book.
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9. Smith, Rosalind. “Dark Places: True Crime Writing in Australia.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 8, 2008, pp. 17-30, https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9731. Accessed 13 Sept. 2019.
Published
2020-08-10
How to Cite
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Section
Research Papers