Alex Houen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3087869 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Houen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Houen |
| SIGNATURE | HOUEN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Osteoporosis Society |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Sacrifice and Modern War Writing
This book surveys how Anglophone war writing explores sacrifice in relation to major conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the First World War; the Irish ‘Easter Rising’ and Anglo-Irish War; the Spanish Civil War; the Second World War; the Vietnam War; the Cold War; and the War on Terror. Various conceptions of sacrifice are examined, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and secular, and the discussion ranges across literary por…
On inner voice, free indirect style, and lyric
In this essay, I examine how both Claudia Rankine in Citizen and Ben Lerner in The Topeka School present innovative modes of voicing and listening by using free indirect style to relate inner voice and social discourse. Discussing these literary works is only part of my focus, though, for the following reason: theorists of free indirect style haven't tended to consider that style in terms of how a person relates to their own inner voice, nor have…
Affect and Literature
Sacrifice and Modern War Literature
Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for critics to argue that after the First World War many of the cultural and religious values associated with sacrifice have been increasingly rejected by writers and others. As the contributors to this volume show, though, literature has continued to add…
Afterword
In trying to understand why ‘nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time’, Benedict Anderson stresses the importance of the role played by the human imagination—both individual and collective.1 As literacy rose across the course of the long nineteenth century, acts of reading—of newspapers, novels, and poetry—took place contemporaneously within its borders, creating among citizens a shared idea of a poli…
Reckoning Sacrifice in ‘War on Terror’ Literature
This chapter examines how novelists and poets explore the sacrificial reckonings of the ‘war on terror’ in terms of relations between faith (social and religious), sympathy, and bearing witness. It discusses Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and two books of poetry: Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs (2005). Both poems balance matters of aesthetics and ethics by comparing mo…
Sacrifice and the Inner Organs of the Cold-War Citizen
The cold war as a historical continuum within the citizen imagination existed as a set of internalized mechanisms for the imperilling and domination of the subject. This transpires in some of the more extreme fictions that attempted to stage this anxiety as a fear for internal organs, as a sacrificial logic threatening innocent citizen ‘insides’. This chapter discusses examples of those stagings: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy; Elizabeth Bowen’s The Li…
Martyrdom and Terrorism
Many of those committing recent terrorist attacks have been intent, and have often succeeded, in killing themselves in the process. This volume explores and compares religious and secular traditions of martyrdom and terrorism. Martyrdom is, in a certain sense, central to the Christian tradition, insofar as this is an appropriate description for Christ’s Passion. Islamic notions also link shahadat (martyrdom) to “bearing witness” to faith and God.…
Introduction
“Back! Back! Back! CENTRAL Mind-Machine Pentagon …”
This article explores ways in which the poems Allen Ginsberg wrote against the Vietnam War entailed resisting what he viewed to be effects of “coldwar subjectivity” – in particular, the automation of thinking and feeling. Many of these poems are what Ginsberg called “auto poems”: lyrical flights of autobiography dictated while traveling in automated transport. I argue that in an auto poem like “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Ginsberg develops a poetic “p…
Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature
Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker Alex Houen (bio) I In Foucault’s introduction to Society Must be Defended (1997), the course of lectures he delivered at the College de France between 1975–76, he announces a major shift in his ongoing analysis of power: “Until now, or for roughly the last five years, it has been disciplines; for the next five years, it will be war, struggle, the army.”1 The stat…
Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature
Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker Alex Houen (bio) I In Foucault’s introduction to Society Must be Defended (1997), the course of lectures he delivered at the College de France between 1975–76, he announces a major shift in his ongoing analysis of power: “Until now, or for roughly the last five years, it has been disciplines; for the next five years, it will be war, struggle, the army.”1 The stat…
“Back! Back! Back! CENTRAL Mind-Machine Pentagon …”
This article explores ways in which the poems Allen Ginsberg wrote against the Vietnam War entailed resisting what he viewed to be effects of “coldwar subjectivity” – in particular, the automation of thinking and feeling. Many of these poems are what Ginsberg called “auto poems”: lyrical flights of autobiography dictated while traveling in automated transport. I argue that in an auto poem like “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Ginsberg develops a poetic “p…
Introduction
Martyrdom and Terrorism
Many of those committing recent terrorist attacks have been intent, and have often succeeded, in killing themselves in the process. This volume explores and compares religious and secular traditions of martyrdom and terrorism. Martyrdom is, in a certain sense, central to the Christian tradition, insofar as this is an appropriate description for Christ’s Passion. Islamic notions also link shahadat (martyrdom) to “bearing witness” to faith and God.…
Sacrifice and Modern War Literature
Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for critics to argue that after the First World War many of the cultural and religious values associated with sacrifice have been increasingly rejected by writers and others. As the contributors to this volume show, though, literature has continued to add…
Afterword
In trying to understand why ‘nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time’, Benedict Anderson stresses the importance of the role played by the human imagination—both individual and collective.1 As literacy rose across the course of the long nineteenth century, acts of reading—of newspapers, novels, and poetry—took place contemporaneously within its borders, creating among citizens a shared idea of a poli…
Reckoning Sacrifice in ‘War on Terror’ Literature
This chapter examines how novelists and poets explore the sacrificial reckonings of the ‘war on terror’ in terms of relations between faith (social and religious), sympathy, and bearing witness. It discusses Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and two books of poetry: Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs (2005). Both poems balance matters of aesthetics and ethics by comparing mo…
Sacrifice and the Inner Organs of the Cold-War Citizen
The cold war as a historical continuum within the citizen imagination existed as a set of internalized mechanisms for the imperilling and domination of the subject. This transpires in some of the more extreme fictions that attempted to stage this anxiety as a fear for internal organs, as a sacrificial logic threatening innocent citizen ‘insides’. This chapter discusses examples of those stagings: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy; Elizabeth Bowen’s The Li…
Affect and Literature
On inner voice, free indirect style, and lyric
In this essay, I examine how both Claudia Rankine in Citizen and Ben Lerner in The Topeka School present innovative modes of voicing and listening by using free indirect style to relate inner voice and social discourse. Discussing these literary works is only part of my focus, though, for the following reason: theorists of free indirect style haven't tended to consider that style in terms of how a person relates to their own inner voice, nor have…
Sacrifice and Modern War Writing
This book surveys how Anglophone war writing explores sacrifice in relation to major conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the First World War; the Irish ‘Easter Rising’ and Anglo-Irish War; the Spanish Civil War; the Second World War; the Vietnam War; the Cold War; and the War on Terror. Various conceptions of sacrifice are examined, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and secular, and the discussion ranges across literary por…
Philosophy (7 works) · Art (6 works) · History (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Poetry (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Sacrifice (3 works)