Graham Swift

– This article examines the dialectics between distance and proximity in Graham Swift's Out of this World. It specifically addresses the relationship between Harry Beech, one of the main characters, and his relatives, namely his daughter and his father, Sophie and Robert, respectively. As a photojournalist, Harry travels around the world; he seldom stays at home. The close proximity he enjoys with the victims of war he photographs, in defiance to his father who is an arm manufacturer, ironically entails a distancing whose effects are often perverse. This results in a paradigmatic pattern in which distance generates transient proximity and proximity reflects distance.

FONIOKOVÁ, Zuzana. "History, Storytelling, and Narrative Construction of Reality in Graham Swift’s Waterland." Revue Belge de Philologie et de Histoire / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis 95. 3 (2017),  561-574. ISSN 0035-0818.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/rbph_0035-0818_2017_num_95_3_9061
After a short introduction dedicated to historiographic metafiction, this paper discusses the ways in which Waterland, like other works in this category, thematizes the problem of historiography as narrative construction of the past guided by certain rules and conventions. Waterland demonstrates how thin the boundary between history and stories can possibly become, while resisting the postmodern temptation of equating historiography with fiction and insisting on the importance of history for our existence. The final part of the paper concentrates on the significance of storytelling in human lives and shows how the novel works with the idea that people tell stories to make sense of their lives and the world around them. Comparisons to two other works of historiographic metafiction, Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, will be made where appropriate to illustrate how the level of present dominates over the actual story of the past in historiographic metafiction and to support the paper’s claim that by questioning the objectivity of history such novels do not aim to erase the boundary between factual and fictional narration.

The present paper aims to discuss the current state of the authority
held by the academia over society at large as seen in contemporary
British novels such as Waterland (1983) by Graham Swift, Nice
Work (1988) by David Lodge, and Possession (1990) by A. S.
Byatt. Far from typecasting academics as ivory tower dwellers out
of touch with reality, these novels offer a nuanced portrayal of the
intricate relationships between the observers of contingency and
those dealing with meta-texts. This tension is all the more
interesting since the objects of our gaze also deal with the
humanities, and the change of cultural framing leaves them without
their Grand Narrative of Enlightenment. The age-old conflict
between the Gown and the Town is complicated further in
postmodernity when the periphery is given its own carnivalesque voice
and culture itself can now wander the streets, as well. Therefore, is
the question of power outdated or simply re-framed?

Graham Swift's Last Orders (1996) covers the story of a one-day trip of four men from London to Margate to scatter the ashes of a deceased friend to the sea. The narrative is presented in monologue chapters in which multiple narrators, in a confessional tone, introduce their histories, recollections and memories sparked by this death. Almost all of the narrators are fathers and the stories they relate are either about their children or their fathers. Within these narrations, fathers become the symbols of tradition, history, authority and stability. The following generation, on the other hand, symbolizes change, future, individualism and mobility. While these discrepancies introduce a certain level of tension, the crisis that masculinity faced, as in the changing role of fatherhood, in the last decade of the twentieth century becomes another source of the conflict in the novel. This conflict is heightened by the narrator fathers who, by looking back at their fathers in the past, try to continue the old forms of masculinities. The aim of this study is, then, to analyse this conflict and crisis in the novel caused by the ever-changing forms of masculinities and to locate it within a certain socioeconomic and cultural frame. A thorough analysis of the male characters of the novel may contribute to the overall understanding of masculinities. Novels are important objects of research as they provide instances to explore the construction of mas-culinities. The mechanisms at work in the process of this construction may be more visible in literary texts as literature serves to foreground knowledge that has become invisible because of familiarity.

This article employs the concepts of spectres and haunting to analyse Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday: A Romance (2016) as a commentary on (literary) history and its economy of spectres. Referring to Jacques Derrida’s notions of haunting, inheritance, and time, I focus on the spectres of literary modernism and the First World War to explore the ways in which Swift’s novella questions the canonical representation of modernism and revises the conventional means of writing about the past, memory, and history. The analysis of Mothering Sunday approaches the spectre as a figure of repressed otherness and a reminder of what has been excluded or silenced, so as to trace some of the ghosts that appear in the book and to underline its melancholic, spectral character. Situating Swift’s novella within the context of contemporary cultural criticism, I propose to see it as a sign of a larger cultural and critical turn, where spectres have been assimilated into the structure of the everyday and where the experience of haunting has become a major expression of the present condition.

In Swift’s writings, Greek culture is not perceived as something different from his characters’ culture. The Greek seaside is seen as similar to the seaside in Cornwall in Learning to Swim and Greece is not a cultural barrier in Out of This World.  Harry, in Out of This World, while flying in his plane, notices that from up there one cannot see boundaries between nations. The paper will explore reasons for this perception of Greek culture. One of the reasons has to do with the fact that the influences of ancient Greek culture are still visible today on literature, culture, architecture, etc. and that today’s world would not be the same without its influences. Virginia Woolf, in her essay On Not Knowing Greek, believed that we return to ancient Greek culture in order to avoid the confusion of the present day epoch. We can extend this analysis to the way the ancient Greeks tried to impose order on the world by scientific discoveries and to the way Swift’s characters try to do the same by introspection. Swift’s characters use in their introspection moments of revelation to impose order on their experiences.

Keywords: Postmodernism, seaside, moments of revelation.

Graham Swift is one of the most successful and respected novelists writing in contemporary Britain. Since 1980 he has published eight novels, a collection of short stories, and a nonfiction book. His work has garnered critical acclaim and literary prizes, and it has won a large and appreciative audience throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. His most celebrated books are Waterland, from 1983, which is widely considered a modern classic, and Last Orders, which was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize in 1996.

After the success of Waterland in 1983, Graham Swift surprised many by denying that he had grown up as child of East Anglia's Fens, and his more recent work has highlighted the intimacy of his connection to the South London of his childhood. To move a short distance from the Bermondsey backdrop of Last Orders (1996) is to discover Swift's own birthplace on the fringe between Sydenham and Catford. This essay traces stylistic connections between memoir and fiction to reveal the way Swift uses everyday suburban space as the dramatic setting for evolving a rhetoric of peripatetic recollection in The Light of Day (2003).

Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address.

Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene.

Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics.


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Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity.

— Grant Farred, Cornell University


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Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quo—these immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political.

— Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic

Around the turn of the twenty-first century a re-emerging interest in the human consciousness is evident in science, the arts, and in society in general. Writers of narrative fiction increasingly engage with the topic of human inner life, thoughts and feelings. Today the narrative genre of stream of consciousness fiction is enjoying new popularity, for example in the novels of Eva Figes, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift. Contemporary stream of consciousness fiction, on the one hand, addresses crucial questions of the philosophy of mind, such as the mind-body problem. On the other hand, it also intertextually engages with its own literary tradition and its aesthetic origins in modernism. Despite placing their narrative fiction in this literary tradition, contemporary authors transcend the modernist and postmodernist era. Their fiction achieves a new ethical function; it addresses moral issues – for example those arising from current biomedical research into the human brain and into its genetic prerequisites. Thereby stream of consciousness fiction succeeds in addressing some of the most important controversies and ethical questions of the early twenty-first century.

The thesis at hand examines contemporary stream of consciousness fiction with regard to its engagement with the mind-body problem, its heritage from modernist stream of consciousness literature as well as its recent ethical turn. After overviews on the theoretical classifications of intertextuality and intermediality, the development of modern narratology as well as the question of consciousness and narrative modes of presenting consciousness, the thesis provides in-depth analyses of selected contemporary novels. By means of narratological analyses of works by Eva Figes, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift the study exemplifies trends in stream of consciousness fiction from the 1980s to the 2000s.

The present study offers a poetics of science in the contemporary historical, and more specifically, neo-Victorian novel. Its starting point is both the profound (dis)similarity between science and history, and Ansgar Nünning’s pathbreaking systematisation of the historical novel. The poetics itself is based on a rigorous development and application of four hypotheses. These hypotheses are a direct result of the interdisciplinary nature of a study with at least three, if not four, epistemological concerns, for this is a study of «science» in a «literary» context which deals with «history,» specifically history of the «Victorian» period. Each of the four terms forms the basis for one of the hypotheses. The poetics is tested on two novels which have proved to be land-marks in neo-Victorian fiction: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990).

This collection of essays on Graham Swift's fiction brings together the perspectives of renowned Swift scholars from around the world. Authors look at the swift's oeuvre from different interpretative angles, combining a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. This book covers all of Swift's fiction, including his novels and short stories; special emphasis, however, is on his most recent books. By approaching Swift's work from a number of perspectives, the volume offers a synthetic overview of his literary output. In particular, it searches for thematic and formal continuities between his early and more recent fiction, and attempts to emphasize its new developments and interests.

Abstract What costs humanity very dearly is doubtless to believe that one can have done in history with a general essence of Man, on the pretext that it represents only a Hauptgespenst, arch-ghost, but also, what comes down to the same thing—at bottom—to still believe, no doubt, in this capital ghost. To believe in it as do the credulous or the dogmatic.

Regardless of how we read them, the popularity of neo-Victorian novels serves as an indication of a need to look back to the past. To quote John McGowan, "we express our identities through what we produce and consume”. The proliferation of novels dealing with the Victorian period as well as texts studying the phenomenon shows that neo-Victorian fiction is taking part in the construction of our understanding of society. At times, especially during the last decade, the authors of novels referring back to Victorian times seem to have acknowledged the didactic function fulfilled by their texts.

Losing his job as a history teacher causes the narrator and protagonist of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) to reflect on the past and chronicle the death of a local boy during his teenage years. In doing so, Tom Crick also offers what seems to be a redeeming account of his paternal family’s role in the Fens, the land dominated over the centuries by his maternal ancestors, the Atkinsons. In telling their story, however, he exercises the same exclusion that once relegated the Cricks to the historical periphery. Self-appointed family chronicler, Crick imposes narrative representation as the only way to exert one’s historical agency. Yet his half-brother Dick’s suicide, which emerges as an impenetrable silence, brings the account to an abrupt end, revealing the representational inadequacy of Crick’s project of historical restoration while, ironically, inaugurating a new horizon of possibility for the narrator’s life.

This book offers a critical reading of the novels of Graham Swift in light of recent developments in literary theory and criticism. It shows how the novels elaborate an ethics of alterity by means of a detailed study of one of Swift’s most persistent and fascinating – yet all too often ignored – concerns: the traumatic experience of reality.

Swift’s texts evoke the cultural pathologies of a nation (post-war Britain) and an era (modernity) through the narratives of individual characters who are struggling to come to terms with a traumatic personal and collective past. This study charts the entire trajectory of Swift’s engagement with the perils, pitfalls and possibilities of navigating a post-traumatic condition, proceeding from an emphasis on denial in his early work, through an intense preoccupation with the demands of trauma in the “middle-period” novels (including Waterland), to a seemingly liberating insistence on regeneration and renewal in Last Orders and The Light of Day.

By providing a wide-ranging and in-depth analysis of Swift’s novels against the background of the “ethical turn” in literary studies and the emergence of trauma theory, this book extends and enriches our understanding of what is arguably one of the most significant literary oeuvres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Hayden White afirma în cunoscutul său studiu, Metahistory, că acele aspecte pe care istoricul modern le consideră evenimente ale trecutului, îi apar, unui istoric postmodern, drept elemente ale unui mare text al prezentului, câtă vreme postmodernismul a impus, treptat, imaginea unui istoric privit, în primul rând, ca scriitor, capabil să plaseze orice eveniment al trecutului în contextul mai larg al unei cronici, înţeleasă, însă, mai cu seamă ca o naraţiune având o ipoteză, o concluzie, precum şi o linie de desfăşurare a acţiunilor bine definită. Nuanţându-şi punctul de vedere, acelaşi Hayden White va susţine, ulterior, că istoria însăşi trebuie privită din perspectiva momentelor (evenimentelor) care o compun şi care ar avea o accentuată structură simbolică, putând configura, astfel, metafore extinse, de aceeaşi factură cu acelea pe care le întâlnim în literatură, luând naştere, în acest fel, "dominanta metaistorică" ce poate fi identificată, practic, în orice discurs istoric.

The narration of maritime voyages and their role in scientific explorations represents a key intersection between nineteenth-century travel writing and science. The legacy of ‘the “great age” of scientific travel’ (Pratt, Imperial Eyes 38) finds fruitful terrain in its neo-Victorian renditions, where the connection between travel culture and the making of science is complicated further by the chronological distance between nineteenth-century past and its twentieth- and twenty-first-century recuperation.
This paper analyses how, in Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (2000) and Amy Sackville’s The Still Point (2010), the retracing of Victorian scientific expeditions creates a literary and intertextual legacy between contemporary readers and their Victorian ancestors. In particular, the protagonists of these novels are either literary scholars (Byatt), or direct descendants of Victorian scientists and travel writers (Swift and Sackville) who embark on literary-biographical quests in the footsteps of three Victorian explorers and polymaths. Driven by a desire to establish a taxonomic classification of their nineteenth-century subjects’ writings, naturalistic specimen and memorabilia, the neo-Victorian heroes build an ‘imaginative history’ (Beer, Darwin’s Plots 6), where storytelling becomes a form of literary travel across seas of textualities and material culture connecting the present to the past.
These neo-Victorian storytellers eventually abandon their search for truth and authenticity by writing themselves into the narratives they seek to recuperate. The recuperation of the past in the archive therefore enables epiphanic discoveries of one’s own sense of self in the present and allows to break free from the heavy, inherited past. By crossing the boundless seas of texts and by rewriting Victorian narratives of travel and scientific discovery, neo-Victorian heroes pave the way for a new future, related to – but equally at a distance from – one’s past.
Bibliography:
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 1983. Print.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

The present article tries to find answers for a lack of narrative tension in Graham Swift’s The Light of Day. Taking its cue from recent theological approaches to Swift’s work, the article starts by analysing the way the novel expresses parental figures as representations of the Biblical God. The analysis yields a separation of feeling and truth/justice in both the representations and the novel as a whole. The article argues that this separation entails the naturalisation of guilt and evil, which has a deflating effect on the narrative tension of the novel. Through a comparison with Waterland, the article shows that The Light of Day lacks a problematic but seemingly necessary dimension of nature: its teleological dimension. The article concludes by showing how the absence of any teleological dimension in the novel leads to what I call poietic suicide.