🔍 Deep Dive: Liam Connell | University of Brighton - Academia.edu

Liam Connell

University of Brighton, English literature, Faculty Member

University of Brighton, English literature, Faculty Member |

As a researcher I am interested in the material contexts for the formation of ideas, and I try to show how literary texts express these ideas in ways that resonate with their wider social articulation. My work in the area of postcolonial studies has sought to link specific texts to the material structures of power that govern their production and to think about how far these texts work within and against the dominant narratives of public discourse.

I completed my DPhil at the University of Sussex in 2000. This work was on the cultural context for the Scottish Renaissance Movement of the inter-war years and it sought to ask why a nationalist reading of Scotland gained especial purchase during the years between 1918 and 1939. This work developed my interest in nations and nationalism, especially with modernist and postcolonial ideas of the nation, and in the material origins of cultural texts.

My current research is with the question of globalization and, in particular, how a globalised economy is represented in creative texts. I am currently completing a book-length study which explores how contemporary labour patterns are represented in novels from India, the UK and North America. With a particular focus on fictional accounts of office work, this book suggest that ideas of workers' precariousness and of generational shifts from a Keynesian to a neoliberal economy, are repetitively reproduced in order contemporary fiction.
Phone: 01273 641405
Address: College of Arts and Humanities
University of Brighton
E352, Checkland Building
Falmer Campus
BN1 9PH

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Books

Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel

Chapter abstracts. http://bit.ly/2wuj12B

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Cargo Excavating the Contemporary Legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Plymouth and Devon

by Tony Eccles, Len Pole, Zoe Shearman, Liam Connell, Judith Robinson, and Wessie Ling

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The Literature and Globalization Reader

Papers

Introduction: Troubling Globalisation

Parallax, 2021

In a context in which the idea of globalisation is now routinely condemned in the name of a natio... more In a context in which the idea of globalisation is now routinely condemned in the name of a nationhood that should once again assert its sovereign preeminence, to question the purpose or place of this idea is both politically and intellectually risky. If the era of globalisation is coming to an end, it is often posited, then it is because the idea of the nation – as a territory and a population with a defined social and cultural character – is again in the ascendant. Any critical or intellectual challenge to globalisation today risks being perceived either as enabling neo-nationalist anti-globalism or as seeking to preserve neoliberalism’s crumbling narrative of open movement and free exchange. If we are to avoid these risks then one option is to look to Peter Sloterdijk’s observation that a structural shift is under way not because of the nation-state’s resurgence but because ‘we are today living through a dramatic crisis of reformatting’. In this drama, the disavowal of the foreig...

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Anxious reading

Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel

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Offshore cosmopolitanism: reading the nation in Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, Lawrence Chua’s Gold by the Inch and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Open Arts Journal, 2013

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E‐terror: Computer viruses, class and transnationalism in Transmission and One Night @ the Call Center

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2010

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Scottish nationalism and the colonial vision of Scotland

Interventions, 2004

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Modes of Marginality: Scottish Literature and the Uses of Postcolonial Theory

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2003

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The Scottishness of the Scottish press: 1918–39

A recent attempt to characterize the Scottish press identified its major features as comprising p... more A recent attempt to characterize the Scottish press identified its major features as comprising primarily local papers which, by comparison with the London ‘nationals’, command small budgets and, consequently, contain a high concentration of Scottish news at the expense of UK coverage, foreign news and features. Strikingly, despite an initial enthusiasm for the fledgling Scottish Parliament, public indifference had led to a general neglect of Edinburgh politics in imitation of the ‘London broadsheets and blue tops – particularly the Daily Mail ’ (Luckhurst, 2000). The implication of this neglect of Scottish-wide political institutions, combined with the concentration on Scottish news, is that the content of the Scottish press is principally composed of local rather than national events (either Scottish or British), and what news coverage they provide is dominated by human interest or breaking news. Importantly, while newspaper readers in Scotland still prefer locally produced titles...

Kailyard money: nation, empire and speculation in Walter Scott's letters from Malachi Malagrowther

This essay re-reads Scott's three letters from Malachi Malagrowther in the context of the 182... more This essay re-reads Scott's three letters from Malachi Malagrowther in the context of the 1825 banking crisis. It suggests that these letters have a complex relationship to British imperialism as it was consituted at that time. First, it shows how far Scottish capital was connected to finanical speculation in the Americas as part of British expansionist ambitions in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Second, it indicates how Scott's letters contains a curious series of images of Amerindians that positions Scots as a colonised nation. It tries to read this imagery back into Scott's novels to consider how far this allows his letters to disguise class interests beneath a veneer of nationalism.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism

The formal characteristics of a literature described as Magic Realist are hard to distinguish fro... more The formal characteristics of a literature described as Magic Realist are hard to distinguish from the formal characteristics of early-twentieth-century Modernism; to that end, attempts to keep these movements distinct through the categorization of one sort of literature as modern and another as magical, as well the various attempts to define the genre through a series of extra-literary criteria, merely serve to codify a set of prejudices about Western European and non-Western societies and their respective modes of thinking. That is to say that non-Western societies are persistently characterized through a series of indicators which are categorized as primitive—one of which is a residual belief in myth, magic, and the use of ritual. Western nations by contrast are characterized as progressive, developing, modern. They then are allowed literary forms called Modernism, where their non-Western counterparts can only write Magic Realism.

Melanie Jackson’s The Undesirables: Visualizing Labour in the era of Globalisation

in Contemporary Visualizations of Migration

Reading Coupland Backwards: Time, Generationality and Work in Generation X, Microserfs and JPod

This chapter reads Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), Microserfs (2004) and JPod (2006) and ... more This chapter reads Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), Microserfs (2004) and JPod (2006) and examines how Coupland’s generational narrative of declining worker compensation from the Baby-Boomer generation to the present day comes under pressure when his three novels are read together as a novel-cycle. Although, individually, each novel is organised by nostalgia for the presumed security of earlier conditions of work, across the three novels Coupland depicts continuities between generations that undermine this narrative structure. Using theories of debt from Maurizio Lazzarato, accumulation from David Harvey, socialized work from Antonio Negri and fractalization from Franco Beradi, it suggests that Coupland’s novels offer a picture of presentism in which workers of successive generations are trapped in repeated iterations of the precarious present.

Post-colonialism and Globalization: the literal and figurative economies of difference

Discarding Magic Realism: Modernism, Anthropology, and Critical Practice

Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 1998

... Discarding Magic Realism: Modernism, Anthropology, and Critical Practice. Liam Connell. Full ... more

More than a library: the ethnographic potential of Stevenson's South Sea writing

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;This paper considers Robert Louis Steve... more &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;This paper considers Robert Louis Stevenson’s South-Seas writing in an attempt to understand why his fiction has so frequently been read as ethnographic source-material. I begin by relating Stevenson’s writing to late nineteenth-century anthropological models and suggest that, while he was writing within a tradition of the informed amateur-observer, he also deviated from this tradition in ways that anticipate the methodologies of participant-observation. I argue that Stevenson’s relationship to these traditions combined with his own belief in the revelatory potential of fiction in order to produce an authoritative idiom in his writing that has led it to be read as a truthful account of Pacific cultures. I then consider the serial publication of The Beach of Falesa in the Illustrated London News (1892) and suggest that this supported Stevenson’s emphasis upon his physical presence in the Pacific as testament to the authority to his accounts. I argue that material published in the ILN often relied upon a discourse of witnessing: a discourse that emphasised the presence of its writers in colonial locations and enlisted the reader as protectors of the empire through their reading of first-hand accounts. Not only did Stevenson’s biography help align his text to the dominant ideology of the ILN but the house-style also saw Stevenson’s story literally blend into the surrounding material that frequently comprised imperial testimony. I conclude by reviewing representations of ‘The Bottle Imp’ in biographies of Stevenson and illustrate how frequently his biographers have read this story as evidence of a Samoan belief in magic. I trace these interpretations back to Stevenson’s own representation of the story in a letter to Conan Doyle in 1893 and suggest that these readings perpetuate nineteenth-century cultural assumptions by reproducing Stevenson’s transformation of his South-Seas fiction into ethnography.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;

Dying to Work: American Nationalism and the End of Productive Labour

This chapter reads Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air ([2001] 2010), Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the ... more This chapter reads Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air ([2001] 2010), Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End (2007) and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2012) within the context of the persistent myths of American nationalism. It argues that the dominant ideas about America struggle to survive the form of contemporary office work. Using the idea of productive labour as it emerges from David Graeber’s writing on bullshit jobs, it explores the contrast between the feelings of being productive with the feelings of deathliness that arises from these novels account of contemporary work. It then explores how these novels project the idea of work as death into their depiction of Romantic notions of individualism, showing how these notions struggle to coexist with new, neoliberal, forms of self-sufficiency.

Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel

Chapter abstracts. http://bit.ly/2wuj12B

Download

Cargo Excavating the Contemporary Legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Plymouth and Devon

by Tony Eccles, Len Pole, Zoe Shearman, Liam Connell, Judith Robinson, and Wessie Ling

Download

The Literature and Globalization Reader

Introduction: Troubling Globalisation

Parallax, 2021

Download

Anxious reading

Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel

Download

Offshore cosmopolitanism: reading the nation in Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, Lawrence Chua’s Gold by the Inch and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Open Arts Journal, 2013

Download

E‐terror: Computer viruses, class and transnationalism in Transmission and One Night @ the Call Center

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2010

Download

Scottish nationalism and the colonial vision of Scotland

Interventions, 2004

Download

Modes of Marginality: Scottish Literature and the Uses of Postcolonial Theory

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2003

Download

The Scottishness of the Scottish press: 1918–39

Kailyard money: nation, empire and speculation in Walter Scott's letters from Malachi Malagrowther

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism

Melanie Jackson’s The Undesirables: Visualizing Labour in the era of Globalisation

in Contemporary Visualizations of Migration

Reading Coupland Backwards: Time, Generationality and Work in Generation X, Microserfs and JPod

Post-colonialism and Globalization: the literal and figurative economies of difference

Discarding Magic Realism: Modernism, Anthropology, and Critical Practice

Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 1998

... Discarding Magic Realism: Modernism, Anthropology, and Critical Practice. Liam Connell. Full ... more

More than a library: the ethnographic potential of Stevenson's South Sea writing

Dying to Work: American Nationalism and the End of Productive Labour

Working Women and the Welfare State: Jenny Turner’s The Brainstorm

Reading Jenny Turner’s The Brainstorm (2007) as a rewriting of women’s popular fiction, this chap... more Reading Jenny Turner’s The Brainstorm (2007) as a rewriting of women’s popular fiction, this chapter shows how Turner’s novel interrogates New Labour’s accommodation of neoliberal rationalisation within its commitment to the British Welfare State. It argues that Turner’s novel stages a philosophical engagement with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, with autonomist Marxism’s notion of social reproduction and the refusal of work, and the Utopian collectivism of post-war Brtiain to challenge the idea of neoliberal competition in the contemporary workplace. With a particular concentration on gender and class inequality, Turner sketches out the opportunities for political solidarity with those marginalised communities that sit at the edges of the New Economy.

Crossings, Bodies, Behaviours

Through a reading of two recent films, Marc Foster’s zombie apocalypse movie, World War Z (2013) ... more Through a reading of two recent films, Marc Foster’s zombie apocalypse movie, World War Z (2013) and Phillipe Loiret’s socially-realist romance, Welcome (2009) this essay attempts to think about the nature of somatic depiction in the cultural representation of refugees. This reading takes its lead from Judith Butler’s notion of appearance, both as a visible facade and the act of emergence as a form of politics, to qualify Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of politics as a kind of biopolitics that exploits the refugee as a figure of exception. In line with Butler’s intervention, this essay argues for an interpretive practice that reads the textual presentation of the body as carrying political content. That is to say that the representation of the body’s physicality orientates the body’s capacity to enter the realms of the civic. The visual appearance of the body is not a neutral manifestation of the body but rather a performative response to the state’s attempt to circumscribe the forms...

Literature and globalization: a reader

Globalization has had a huge impact on thinking across the humanities, redefining the understandi... more Globalization has had a huge impact on thinking across the humanities, redefining the understanding of fields such as communication, culture, politics, and literature. This groundbreaking reader is the first to chart significant moments in the emergence of contemporary thinking about globalization and explore their significance for and impact on literary studies. The book’s three sections look in turn at: - an overview of globalisation theory and influential works in the field - the impact of globalisation on literature and our understanding of the ‘literary’ - how issues in globalisation can be used to read specific literary texts. Containing essays by leading critics including Arjun Appadurai, Jacques Derrida, Simon Gikandi, Ursula K. Heise, Graham Huggan, Franco Moretti, Bruce Robbins and Anna Tsing, this volume outlines the relationship between globalization and literature, offering a key sourcebook for and introduction to an exciting, emerging field.

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