Publications

Forthcoming
Patrick Whitmarsh. Forthcoming. “"'It will take years for the picture to emerge': Interdisciplinary Strategies for Teaching Slow Violence".” In Teaching the Literature of Climate Change, edited by Debra J. Rosenthal. Modern Language Association.
2021
Patrick Whitmarsh. 2021. “"'Science fiction and prehistory': Don DeLillo's Underworld and the Novel of the Anthropocene".” Modern Fiction Studies, 67, 4, Pp. 613-636. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Often associated with literary retrospectives on the Cold War, DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld is rarely viewed as an expression of the period that some humanists and scientists identify as the Anthropocene epoch—the proposed period of planetary time in which humanity’s existence can be “read” in the earth’s layers.  Underworld’s narrative integrates its complex temporal structure with an experimental spatial perspective that shifts from horizontal to vertical, effectively destabilizing humanity’s position within history.  DeLillo adopts this perspectival approach from the aesthetics of land art, specifically the work of Robert Smithson, as embodied in the novel’s own visual artist, Klara Sax.

Patrick Whitmarsh. 2021. “Speculative Geologies: Project Mohole and the Anthropocene Narratives of Reza Negarestani and Karen Tei Yamashita.” Contemporary Literature, 62, 3, Pp. 397-429. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Project Mohole was a landmark scientific expedition that sought to revolutionize humanity’s understanding of the earth’s geology. Although rarely discussed by literary scholars, references to the project have found their way into works by postwar writers, and it was covered by John Steinbeck in a piece for Life magazine. I argue that this episode of scientific history serves as a salient figure for emerging cultural anxieties toward the underground—its value as a reservoir of natural resources, but also its unseen machinations taking place below our feet. Two works of contemporary fiction—Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008)—extrapolate the anxieties implicit in the project, and situate them in a history of geological time and industrial ruination of the planet. Both novels reveal Project Mohole’s continued cultural import and significance for modern geological knowledge—its understated effects on the literary imagination, but also its role in the development of the fossil fuel economy and the epoch known as the Anthropocene. Underscoring humankind’s exploitation of planetary resources, Negarestani and Yamashita introduce the concept of extinction as a constitutive element of industrial modernity and Anthropocene narrative.

2019
Patrick Whitmarsh. 2019. “"'So it is I who speak': Communicating Bodies in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days and The Unnamable".” The Journal of Modern Literature, 42, 4, Pp. 111-128.Abstract
Despite their generic and formal differences, Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel The
Unnamable
and 1961 play Happy Days register complementary concerns toward the
relationship between embodiment and communication. Both texts exhibit aspects of
what media theorists and literary critics call the materiality of communication, going so
far as to imagine communication itself as re-embodiment: a process in which Beckett’s
compromised and sometimes indecipherable bodies discover new forms. Considering
themselves as observed objects (physical and discursive), Happy Days’s Winnie and The
Unnamable
’s narrator reflect upon the material systems that constitute and shape them.
This reflexive strategy, both aesthetic and formal, illuminates both characters’ estranging
physicalities at the same time that it produces them, aligning communication itself with
a sense of embodiment.
2017
Patrick Whitmarsh. 9/2017. “"Specters of Communication: Supernatural Media in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow".” Modern Fiction Studies, 63, 3, Pp. 524-546.Abstract
This paper addresses the relationship between spiritual communion and technological communications in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I argue that Pynchon deploys spiritualist imagery as an analogue for the complexities of modern communication, which displaces the human subject from its self-designated role as creator and/or controller of information. While many scholarly ventures into Pynchon's work tend to downplay the importance of his supernatural imagery, I contend that the supernatural plays an important role in his fiction even at the formal level, from which the novel appears to its readers as a kind of spirit board.
2016
Patrick Whitmarsh. 7/2016. “"'Imagine you're a machine': Narrative Systems in Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia".” Science Fiction Studies, 43, 2, Pp. 237-259.Abstract
Peter Watts is a relatively new figure in the field of science fiction, and his recent work has presented the literary community with a refreshingly innovative take on the ontological question of the human. Watts's critique of anthropocentrism, however, exceeds the compelling and sometimes disturbing thought experiments he depicts in his fiction; beyond the novelty of their content, Watts's recent novels Blindsight (2006) and Echopraxia (2014) attack the values of humanism at the level of narrative form. This essay argues that the relationship between these two texts is far more complex than prequel and sequel, and that their combined structure calls into question the rationale of narrative theory (as it has been practiced in literary studies), and even the production of meaning itself, by reconfiguring narrative as a super-intelligent evolutionary system. Ultimately, Watts's science-fictional project forces literary criticism and theory to reconsider the following relations: a) that between perspectival stability and narrative meaning, and b) that between narrative structure and the discursive demands of science fiction