Joseph Plumb Martin's 1830 memoir is one of the earliest American narratives to position the narrator's body and suffering at its center and to deploy this bodily suffering as a means of resistance I contend that by exploring the dynamics between the discourses of civic virtue and the body in Martin's memoir, one may arrive at a better understanding of the history and the political uses of the “physical” body and its representations in the early Republic Martin uses his tale of the body to present a counter-narrative of the ways in which the revolutionary veteran's suffering has been appropriated by the state Through his narrative of the deteriorating and suffering citizen-soldier's body betrayed by an ungrateful nation, Martin lashes out in a political critique of the Revolutionary generation's failure to adhere to the social ideals of the Revolution, thus undermining the emerging conservative memory of the Revolution

A Dead Body Never Begs a Grave

The Question of Time

"End of the End of the Line": The Broken Temporality of David Foster Wallace’s "Infinite Jest"

This book brings together leading critics in American literature to address the representation of time throughout a wide range of genres, methodologies, and chronological periods. American literature, from its beginnings to the present, provides a particularly rich set of texts to examine in this regard, with its interest in history, modernity and progress. Each essay considers how time embeds itself in a variety of textual representations, including Native American rituals, Shaker dances, novels, poetry, and magazines in order to provide readers with a capacious view of time's constitutive role in American literature. The essays are organized into four sections - Materializing Time, Performing Time, Timing Time, and Theorizing Time. Each section reflects a particular approach to the question of time, but taken as a whole the volume makes visible unexpected temporal patterns that cut across time period and genre.

A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction

Letter investigates the impact of the present in early historical fictions and how that present is manifested in the elaborate allegorical structures of the first popular novels to emerge after the War of 1812. Specifically, the figure of the suffering Revolutionary soldier, central to both James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy and John Neal's Seventy-Six, serves as a contemporary allegorical expression of historical change, a figure best explained by Walter Benjamin's definition of the allegorical ruin. The suffering soldier complicates national origins and resists narrative closure. As a literary figuration, this soldier represents a disruptive discourse in the early nation, one that contradicts master narratives of progress and national destiny. Thus, the suffering soldier complicates criticisms of early popular novels by suggesting a highly complex cultural function for the genre. Presentism as an early national orientation suggests an alternative to historical progressivism and antiquarianism, both of which depend on linear approaches to the study of early U.S. culture and literary history. Cooper, when read alongside his contemporary Neal, reveals a deeply conflicted temporal sensibility, one as much concerned with past losses as it is hopeful of future gain. Historical allegories, because they articulate between past and present, offer an important discursive frame for studying the emerging significance of novels in early national culture.

Joseph J. Letter

Papers

Past Presentisms: Suffering Soldiers, Benjaminian Ruins, and the Discursive Foundations of Early U.S. Historical Novels