Bennett, Alice (2022) “People with Equal but Opposite Afflictions, Propping Each Other Up”: Sleep Solidarity and Fictions of Mass Sleeplessness. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 68 (3). ISSN 0026-7724
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Abstract
Fictions of mass sleeplessness form a microgenre that imagines wakefulness as an epidemic, and in so doing turns the solitary experience of insomnia into a collective catastrophe. The texts this essay considers—Charlie Huston’s Sleepless, Adrian Barnes’s Nod, Kenneth Calhoun’s Black Moon, and Karen Russell’s Sleep Donation—all depict an outbreak of fatal mass insomnia in North America and were published between 2010 and 2014. These narratives use the architecture of the zombie apocalypse (transmuted into an insomnia apocalypse) to represent scenarios of collective, public sleeplessness and, I argue, use the zombie genre’s imaginary of the crowd, pack, or horde to construct emergent forms of sleep solidarity beyond the solitude of insomnia. All four texts counterpoint the public space of the street, where collective insomnia is made manifest, with the private space of the bedroom. Understanding the bedroom as a primary site of social reproduction—because of its associations with the heteronormative family and the renewal of labor power—this essay identifies the relationships between the bedroom and the street, the private and the public, and the individual and the collective, as crucial dynamics in these four texts’ interest in mass insomnia. These fictions show moments of sleep solidarity ultimately emerging from apocalyptic scenarios of mass sleeplessness, and these texts break open the strictures of private sleeping to imagine alternative structures of mutual support among all those whose sleep is under threat.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information and Comments: | This is the author's accepted manuscript of an article that was published in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. Copyright © 2022 The Purdue Research Foundation by Johns Hopkins University Press. The published version is available from: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/866155 |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities |
| Depositing User: | Alice Bennett |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Nov 2022 14:21 |
| Last Modified: | 05 Dec 2024 16:25 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3656 |
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