Kyle Woodend - research

Current Research

Literature Toward What? The Global Novel and Imagining Deep Change

My research examines the (in)capacity of the contemporary postcolonial and world novel to imagine and articulate structural social, political and economic change. Recent widespread calls on the political and literary Left for deep change continue to be plagued by the difficulties of thinking beyond a capitalist world-system that “seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (Fisher, 9). This project synthesizes the activist prioritization of objective through the question 'toward what' with approaches to the historical, ideological, and material grounds of literary form to critique belated literary strategies that restrict articulations of significant change to semblances, compromises, and failures rather than developing narratives of momentum, organization and collectivization. Predicated on the necessity of deep change in our current era, the question 'literature toward what' prioritizes the global novel’s (in)capacity to imagine beyond capitalism to locate new ways to conceive literary contributions to the most crucial contemporary issues.

Revelation and Negating Change in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer: This paper explores the revelatory literary configuration as a strategy of containment that negates and conceals the possibility of articulating structural change in favor of climax, catharsis, and closure.

The Political Event in Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins: This project investigates Hamilton’s novelization of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution as an attempt to render the fundamental exteriority and collectivity of the event tangible through a big bang temporal structure.

Prefiguration in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: This chapter explicates Arundhati Roy’s literary strategy of prefiguration in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to decipher the narrative’s capacity to imagine structural change through the narrativization of the alternative community embodied by the non-capitalist, pseudo-institutional Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services collective.

Past Research

On the Familiar and the Unfamiliar in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah
South Central Review (2021)

This paper examines the interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah. It investigates the concept of a comfort read in the context of a narrative that deals with the transformative experiences of Ifemelu and Obinze, questioning whether reading for comfort merely entails retreating into the comfort of the familiar, or if it involves engaging with an identifiable approach to addressing complex problems. Through the lens of Ifemelu and Obinze's evolving relationship, the paper suggests that the familiar is not a static refuge, but an ongoing dynamic that involves both the familiar and the unfamiliar. Therefore, the story demonstrates how the familiar can serve as a means of engaging with the world rather than escaping from it. The paper contends that re-reading Americanah involves re-entering the characters' world in a way that is characterized by a continuous negotiation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, much like their relationship.

Irony, Narcissism, and Affect in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2019)

This article contends with the paradigm in critical works on David Foster Wallace that posit affectless irony as a central predicament in his work. Insofar as critics have become caught explicating affective resolutions to an ironic problem, an “x over irony” approach has reached a stalemate in Wallace studies. Instead, this article argues that Wallace’s critique of irony is more a criticism of its narcissistic use, which problematizes the notion that irony is non-affective. In Infinite Jest, irony constitutes only part of a highly affective narcissistic dilemma that not only results in isolation, but also buffers subjects from an engulfment threat that pervades the novel. Accordingly, Wallace’s characters reside in a double-bind of distance and closeness with regard to the other—a balancing act that underlies the author’s model of subjectivity. Consequently, any “resolutions” to affectless irony are better approached as mitigations of this double-bind.