Cloneliness

On the Reproduction of Loneliness

Michael O'Sullivan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501344848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Recent posthuman philosophies, human-computer interface studies, and technology-inspired biopolitical discourses and practices are reinventing and reimagining loneliness in different communities. Cloneliness: The Reproduction of Loneliness takes a cross-cultural approach to loneliness by examining 20th-century artistic expressions and examinations of loneliness in the context of more recent global expressions grounded in social networks, virtual reality, the biopolitical commons, academic credentialization and such practices as Hikikomori. Newer forms of loneliness, pushed by the algorithms of biopolitical capitalism, result in what this books calls "cloneliness." Michael O'Sullivan plots the transformation in loneliness in literature and philosophy in readings that take us from Henry James and such classic works as Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice and Richard Yates's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness to more recent expressions in such writers as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, and Sayaka Murata. Michael O'Sullivan argues that cloneliness as an institutional practice of reproduction in society nurtures, normalizes, and reproduces loneliness in order to create subjects who are more willing to accept ideologies of competition, "extreme individualism, " and the stresses of being "interconnected loners."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Radical Embodied Cognitive Loneliness
• 2 Loneliness as Method: Henry James and the “Essential Loneliness” of Artistic Practice
• 3 The “Lonely Voice” and “Submerged Population” in O’Connor, Joyce, and Mansfield: How Can We Live “Alone Together”?
• 4 Loneliness Is Part of the Job: “Sentimental Loneliness” in Carson McCullers and Richard Yates
• 5 Beating University Loneliness and Workplace Boredom: David Foster Wallace on “How to Keep Yourself Open to A Moment of the Most Supernal Beauty”
• 6 Loneliness in a Selection of Japanese Philosophy and Fiction: Takeo Doi, Natsume Sōseki, Kitarō Nishida, Haruki Murakami, and Sayaka Murata
• 7 Filial Piety and Loneliness in a Selection of Chinese Novels: Cao Xueqin, Mo Yan, Dai Sijie, Ha Jin, and Yiyun Li
• 8 “I Am Trash”: How Student Stress and Student Self-Stratification Is Creating a Generation of “Interconnected Loners” [with Flora Ka Yu Mak]
• 9 An Erotics of Loneliness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index