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"People with Equal but Opposite Afflictions, Propping Each Other Up": Sleep Solidarity and Fictions of Mass Sleeplessness
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 68, Number 3, Fall 2022
- pp. 525-543
- 10.1353/mfs.2022.0028
- Article
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Abstract
Abstract:
The texts considered in this essay—Sleepless by Charlie Huston (2010), Nod by Adrian Barnes (2012), Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun (2014), and Sleep Donation by Karen Russell (2014)—imagine an epidemic of fatal mass insomnia. They form a micro-genre I call mass-sleeplessness fiction, which emerged at the same time as the anxious discourse of the contemporary sleep crisis. This essay argues that the texts adapt genre elements from the zombie apocalypse to conceptualize the deeply uneven effects of sleep crisis and to identify forms of sleep solidarity as an alternative to conventions of privatized and individualized sleep.
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