Andrew C. WenausThe University of Western Ontario | UWO · Department of English and and Writing Studies
Andrew C. Wenaus
Doctor of Philosophy
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Publications (45)
This chapter considers how the cyberpunk trope of “jacking in” to cyberspace updates the mythical trope of descending into and ascending from the underworld. By revisiting the Greek myth of Orpheus and his lover Eurydice, Noon replaces Orpheus’s lyre with Scribble’s turntables. While Orpheus convinces the gods of the underworld to permit the return...
This chapter examines the tension between escapist melancholia, on the one hand, and how avant-pulp narrative, on the other, confronts the realities from which we seek release. Noon antagonizes this conundrum at the level of both content and form. Rather than composing Vurt according to the conventional narrative arc (exposition, rising action, cli...
This chapter considers the way Noon imagines alternatives when there appears to be no escape. Because repetition and reiteration are central to the novel, Noon employs Douglas R. Hofstadter’s concept of the “strange loop” to investigate this impasse. A “strange loop” is a structure that, no matter how once moves through it upwards or downwards, one...
This chapter considers the way Vurt complicates the question of genre. While often categorized as a work of cyberpunk fiction, Vurt does not engage with many of the genre’s central tropes: it is a novel without multinational mega-corporations, urban sprawls, or cybernetic implants. Rather than cyberpunk, Noon characterizes his work as avant-pulp: t...
This chapter examines the novel’s setting: Manchester (Hulme and Moss Side) and the “Madchester” techno and rave scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The city in Vurt is both a rigid geographical place and a plastic space of the psyche. While the Manchester of the novel can be a place of physical entrapment, Vurt emphasizes that all locales are...
In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists protested against art, nationalism, the individual subject, and technologized war. With their automatic anti-art and cultural disruptiveness, Dadaists sought to “signify no thing.” Today, data also operates autonomously. However, rather than dismantling tradition, data organizes, selects, combines, quant...
Introductory Chapter to Kenji Siratori's Transcendental Systems
This article examines how Jeff Noon grafts concepts from chaos theory to literature in order to develop a playful narrative form appropriate to representing multiple ontological levels. I argue this by looking closely at the roles of form, metaphor, and content in Noon’s stylish debut novel, Vurt (1993). The novel’s movement from order to disorder...