Showing papers in "American Literature in 1990"

The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940.

Abstract: In this classic study of the relationship between technology and culture, Miles Orvell demonstrates that the roots of contemporary popular culture reach back to the Victorian era, when mechanical replications of familiar objects reigned supreme and realism dominated artistic representation. Reacting against this genteel culture of imitation, a number of artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century were inspired by the machine to create more authentic works of art that were themselves \"real things.\" The resulting tension between a culture of imitation and a culture of authenticity, argues Orvell, has become a defining category in our culture. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author, looking back on the late twentieth century and assessing tensions between imitation and authenticity in the context of our digital age. Considering material culture, photography, and literature, the book touches on influential figures such as writers Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Dos Passos, and James Agee; photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White; and architect-designers Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic.

Abstract: When Houston A. Baker Jr. one of America s foremost literary critics, first published \"Afro-American Poetics\" in 1988, it was hailed as a major revisionist history of both African American culture and criticism. Now available in paperback, this ambitious and enlightening book juxtaposes two of the most fertile periods of African American culture, the 1920s and the 1960s; it includes essays on Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Hoyt Fuller. This is also Baker s most personal book, an intellectual autobiography tracing his own beginnings as a scholar of Victorian literature, his second birth as he began teaching African American literature, and his visions and revisions of a black aesthetic. From reviews of the hardcover edition: A stunning critical achievement. . . . Baker explores in fine and splendid detail the dialectic between self and other, rhetoric and representation, high theory and the Black vernacular, to chart the evolution of Afro-American literary criticism since 1970. Henry Louis Gates Jr, Harvard University Baker s is a fascinating portrait of the literary critic as blues artist, reconstructing the products of two amazingly fruitful decades of engagement with Afro-American expressive culture in illuminating autobiographical examinations of his own and indeed, Afro-American criticism s momentous changes over that period of time. Michael Awkward, University of Michigan Readers who do not know much about black American literature would learn a great deal from \"Afro-American Poetics\"; those who do would be further enlightened. Peter Nazareth, \"World Literature Today\" For this student of black literature, the final impact of \"Afro-American Poetics\" is overwhelming. We now have the beginnings of a superstructure upon which to gauge individual pieces of black literature. Eugene Kraft, \"Callaloo\"\

Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich

Abstract: LOUISE Erdrich is a contemporary writer of German-American and Chippewa heritage. Like many literary works by Native Americans, her novels, Love Medicine (I984), The Beet Queen (I986), and Tracks (I988), reflect the ambivalence and tension marking the lives of people, much like herself, from dual cultural backgrounds. Erdrich's novels feature Native Americans, mixed-bloods, and other culturally and socially displaced characters whose marginal status is simultaneously an advantage and a disadvantage, a source of both power and powerlessness.! In Love Medicine, for example, Lipsha Morrissey, born with the shaman's healing touch, grows up with both Native American and Roman Catholic religious beliefs. His knowledge of both religions is sometimes an advantage, but at other times he is merely paralyzed between contradictory systems of belief. In The Beet Queen, Wallace Pfef, marginal as a homosexual in a small Midwestern town, plays an ambivalent role as Karl Adair's lover and as husband-and-father substitute to Karl's wife and daughter. His liminal status is a source of both happiness and grief. In Tracks, Erdrich's two narrators likewise struggle with liminality in their efforts to leave behind early lives in favor of others they have chosen. Nanapush grows up Christian in a Jesuit school, but later chooses life in the woods and Chippewa tradition; the other narrator, Pauline, is a mixed-blood raised in the Native American tradition, but she wishes to be white and

Thomas Pynchon at Twenty-Two: A Recovered Autobiographical Sketch

Abstract: N graduating from Cornell University at age twenty-two Thomas Pynchon applied for a Ford Foundation fellowship. It was a tough competition. As Ian Hamilton explains, that year the Foundation proposed to take "established writers" with no experience writing plays or opera librettos, attach them to repertory companies, and see if they could produce good drama. Applicants included poets Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, William Meredith, and Robert Lowell. Lowell and Meredith, for example, were accredited to the Metropolitan Opera of New York, a collaboration that resulted in a I960 libretto from Melville's "Benito Cereno."'1 As a part of his own (unsuccessful) application Pynchon wrote-probably in June or July of 1959-a combination autobiographical sketch/proposal of I,805 words. This document was listed in American Literary Manuscripts (I977), but was inexplicably lost for twelve years. In I989, through the efforts of Ford Foundation archivist Robert B. Colasacco, it was recovered and made available to several scholars. Pynchon probably learned of the document's reemergence when he was approached (through his literary agent) for permission to quote from it. Permission was denied, and subsequently Pynchon requested that the Ford Foundation close his file for the next fifty years. The Foundation complied, just before Pynchon's novel Vineland was released in late I989; but evidently they did so with reluctance and only after some debate.2 There things stand. The few xerographic copies of this docu-

Reinventing Lydia Sigourney

Abstract: IFLydia Howard Huntley Sigourney had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her. In fact, she was invented. As American women writers began to publish in numbers before the Civil War, one of their number would inevitably be construed as an epitome of the phenomenon of female authorship in its range of allowed achievements and required inadequacies. Now, here was a poor, virtuous, essentially self-educated woman whose writing was sponsored by one of the leading families in Hartford, Connecticut, with additional patronage from many other New England aristocrats.1 She published pious poetry on domestic subjects in the major magazines and wrote for the Sunday School League. Having made a good marriage (from the social point of view), she faithfully performed her duties as wife, mother, and hostess; and she began to write for money only after financial reverses put the family under economic duress. Here, in short, was a woman whose example could instruct all would-be literary women as to what they could do, what they should do, and also what they had better not do. Here also was a life in which a modern success story of upward mobility through hard work and self-sacrifice led to an affirmation of traditional class structure. The social construction of Lydia Sigourney began, then, in her own lifetime. And, with Sigourney's canny participation, it continued throughout her lifetime as well. For example, the prefatory "advertisement" to the I815 Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse, which was written by Daniel Wads-

Community and Utopia in Crevecoeur's Sketches

Abstract: ID Y the end of the eighteenth century, Leo Marx tells us, the U idea that "the American continent may be the site of a new golden age could be taken seriously in politics."' Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer is perhaps the best articulation of this utopian impulse, embodying in its third letter an agrarian version of the American dream. There he presents a vision of a society of social and economic equals, made independent through their economic dependence on the land alone yet bound together in a supportive and compassionate community. The agrarian values that James embodies in the book's opening -familial rootedness, reverence for nature, diligent work, economic egalitarianism, and an openness to those in need-are utopian in essence. They project an ideal society, the image of which becomes a stance for social criticism.2 Although Crevecoeur's presentation of the dream has only a peripheral relation to historical truth, something of the utopian impulse of the work has survived history, continuing to present a powerful image of what America might have become before it veered into the Industrial Age. The power of Crevecoeur's book is its utopian thrust, and as historical developments have rendered it more assuredly utopian, they have augmented the very source of its power. But what call can Crevecoeur's agrarian utopia legitimately have upon us? This essentially political question has been the unacknowledged subtext of much conflicting literary interpreta-

The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James.@@@Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.

Abstract: This book focuses on the intense intimacy between author and first-person narrator in the fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James: the narrator is both the central actor and the retrospective teller of his tale, at once hero and historian. Auerbach defends the beleaguered 'I' in these works against the depersonalizing tendencies of post-structuralism. In reaffirming the importance of the human subject for the study of narrative, Auerbach shows how the first-person form, in particular, underscores fundamental problems of literary representation: how fictions come to be made, and the relation between these plots and the people who make them.

Semiotic Subversion in « Desirée's Baby »

Abstract: T first "Desiree's Baby," published in I893 by Kate Chopin, seems no more than a poignant little story with a clever twist at the end.' Yet that does not fully explain why the tale is widely anthologized, why it haunts readers with the feeling that, the more it is observed, the more facets it will show. In "Desiree's Baby" Chopin, best known as the author of The Awakening, has created a small gem, whose complexity has not yet been fully appreciated. As I explore that complexity, my broader goal is a theoretical one: I plan to show not only that a semiotic and a political approach can be combined, but also that they must be combined in order to do justice to this story and to others like it, stories that lie at the nexus of concerns of sex, race, and class. A semiotic approach to the work reveals that, despite its brevity, it offers a rich account of the disruption of meaning, and that the character largely responsible for the disruption is Desiree Aubigny, who might on a first reading seem unprepossessing.2 She is a catalyst, however, for the subversion of meaning. When the semiotic approach is supplemented by a political approach, it can be seen that, in particular, Desiree casts doubt on the meaning of race, sex, and class.3 In this drama of misinterpretations, she undermines smugness about the ability to

Stealing the fire : the art and protest of James Baldwin

Abstract: This analysis of Baldwin's pre-1963 works examines the pressures that transform a successful Black from a private person into a racial activist

Hawthorne and the Scribbling Women Reconsidered

Abstract: IN the fall of I854 Nathaniel Hawthorne-already well established as the "famous American author" of The Scarlet Letter and serving as the American consul at Liverpool-wrote to his publisher and friend, William D. Ticknor, with an unusual request. The Englishman Richard Monckton Milnes had been introduced to Hawthorne as "a very kind patron of literary men" and as someone who did "a great deal of good among young and neglected people of that class."' It was perhaps in his capacity as promoter of the young and neglected that Milnes asked Hawthorne to send him "half a dozen good American books, which he has never read or heard of before." Hawthorne's letter to Ticknor, then, was part meditation and part business, as he cast about for an appropriate list:

Breaking the Silent Partnership: Businesswomen in Popular Fiction

Abstract: ROM the i 86os through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, American women of the middle class moved in ever increasing numbers from the domestic sphere into the marketplace. The federal census, among other sources, tells us that a good many pursued careers in business-not only as saleswomen and "typewriters" but also as entrepreneurs, merchants, industrialists, and financiers. The signs of this change begin to emerge as well in fiction. Yet the new character types of the independent careerwoman only appear to reflect their originals in the workplace. A closer look reveals that portraiture of businesswomen is shaped by a characteristic ambivalence on the part of the middle-class writer, as I shall argue in a discussion of two popular novels, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (I 871) and Margaret Deland's The Iron Woman (i9i i). My discussion of the structure and assumptions of these novels depends on their social context, on evidence of predominant ideologies of women's work and woman's sphere. I should like further to suggest how characters in the novels appear when set against biographical portraits of women whose careers both inspired and disturbed Phelps and Deland. The Silent Partner and The Iron Woman encourage us to reconsider women's work in the marketplace through the growth period of American industrialism. They invite us to ask how the doctrine of the separate spheres has not so much described as distorted the lives of female breadwinners, both in and beyond fiction. When Deland sketched the central character of The Iron Woman, she created an anomaly, if not a monster. The masterful owner-operator of the Maitland Works is female. The proof: she has borne a child. But is Sarah Maitland, with her "broken

Faulkner and Joyce in Morrison's Song of Solomon

Abstract: RITICAL response to "black" literature tends to overemphasize the adjective and to neglect the claims of the noun it modifies. In doing so, critics can seem unintentionally patronizing, as if black prowess with pen or typewriter somehow confounded expectation. The ethnic like the regional writer often requires rescue from labels that imply diminished importance, for just as the critic effectively qualifies all praise of a writer labeled "Southern," so does the qualifier "black" or "Afro-American" tend subtly to disparage. William Faulkner, for example, had once to free himself from the regionalist tag; Toni Morrison, whose work resembles Faulkner's in interesting ways, deserves emancipation from her own literary ghetto. To be sure, Morrison's 1977 novel Song of Solomon concerns the black experience in America over four generations, and in what follows I mean to consider this novel's exploration of black themes. But I wish to introduce and provide a context for these subjects with a consideration of Morrison's accomplishment within a larger tradition. One can argue-without qualifying one's admiration for Morrison's talent and originality-that her themes of history, identity, and freedom deserve consideration as something more than the self-absorbed, even solipsistic expression of black desire. They deserve consideration as part of a dialogue or intertextual engagement with certain literary precursors, among the most important of whom are Faulkner and Joyce. My task is not source-hunting, and only marginally does it concern influence. I seek a pair of presences in the work of a novelist whose Afro-American sensibility strikes me as overdetermined. Morrison imagines freedom, for example, in images of flight, images "grounded," she asserts, in the myth of the

Arturo Islas' The Rain God: An Alternative Tradition

Abstract: C HICANo author Arturo Islas' The Rain God, A Desert Tale' belongs to a contemporary tradition of autobiographical fiction by Latino men and women that has emerged from workingclass Hispanophone communities, for example, Chicano and Puerto Rican. In their search to define different "American" identities, Chicano and Chicana authors recall an earlier tradition of American immigrant authors who, at the turn of the century, found themselves on the other side of the dominant ethnic identity, namely, the Western European, AngloSaxon, or Nordic English-speaking American. This generation of "others" whose families immigrated from southern and eastern, not northern or western, Europe formulated a literary tradition in the 1930S different from the modernism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. ' However, important differences must be noted when viewing Chicano and U.S. Puerto Rican authors against the background of this alternative tradition of the 1930s. Chicano and "nuyorican"3 writers belong to a recent literary tradition of immigrant and migrant peoples from countries of non-European origin.

Absalom, Absalom!: The Movie

Abstract: TrHE view that Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkner's greatest novel, his most complex and rewarding literary work, makes it easy to forget that the novel was written for the most part in Hollywood while Faulkner was a paid scriptwriter. He would work on the novel early in the morning before going to the studio to write screenplays, participate in story conferences, and work on location at various film projects. The novel contains a number of indelible images, including a central one in which Quentin and Shreve sit across "a strange lamplit table" to collaborate on the Sutpen story. The two students, together in a foreign environment, sit in the "strange room" and contemplate one another's perspectives and insights "across this strange" juxtaposition of intellectual energies.1 The collaboration, the "strange" meeting of talents, produces a compelling historical narrative. Whether their story is "true enough" is a matter of some debate, but what is unquestionable is the amazing productivity of their joint effort. In one night they outline an American epic. Quentin and Shreve, as collaborators, must have originated not in Faulkner's experience as "sole owner and proprietor" of the apocryphal county but in his successful record as an employee in the Hollywood studio system. Only there did he sit regularly at strange lamplit tables across from interlocutors in order to get a story told. Absalom, Absalom! is about history and mythmaking and narrative and storytelling and all the rest, so aptly and thoroughly explicated over the past decades, but it is about one more thing as well. Absalom, Absalom! is about movie-making, and the production of images and moving pictures under the strange, forced, and often brutal conditions of an environment foreign to everyone, Hollywood.

The Resentments of Robert Frost

Abstract: BY I9I9 Louis Untermeyer-Robert Frost's most assiduously ID cultivated (if unwitting) literary operative-could declare in the opening sentence to the first edition of his soon-to-be influential anthology, Modern American Poetry, that "'America's poetic renascence was more than just a bandied and selfcongratulatory phrase of advanced literary culture: "it is a fact." 1 And on the basis of that fact or wish (it hardly matters which) Untermeyer and Harcourt Brace made what turned out to be a lucrative wager on the poetry market through seven editions of the anthology, the latter of which entered the university curriculum and stayed there through the 1940S and 5os, bearing to more than one generation of faculty and students the news of the poetry of modernism and at the same time establishing well into the 6os a list of modernist musts: Frost foremost, together with strong representations of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Hart Crane, and a long list of more briefly represented-and now mostly forgotten-poets. What Untermeyer had succeeded in presenting in his later editions, against his own literary and social values, was a stylistic texture of modern American poetry so mixed as to defy the force of canonical directive. If the poetry of modernism could include Frost, Stevens, Pound, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes, then maybe the phenomenon of modernism embraced a diversity of intentions too heterogeneous to satisfy the tidy needs of historical definition. But the first edition of Untermeyer's book offered no such collage-like portrait of the emerging scene of modern American poetry: No Eliot, Stevens, or Williams, only a token of Pound and the avant-gardists. Untermeyer's anthology of I9I9 was in fact heavily studded with names that had appeared a few years

Reading Rape: Sanctuary and The Women of Brewster Place

Abstract: UTHILE the relationship between the violence of a culture and its representational counterpart in art is probed in many literary and artistic works, few deal with the issue with the immediacy of Marcel Duchamp's room-size art work, "Etant Donnes: I la chute d'eau, 2 le gaz d'eclairage." "Etant Donnes" occupies one small room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the viewer's entrance into the room is marked by the absence of light, and the looming presence of an actual wooden door that appears to have been taken out of a garden wall and set down in the museum intact. While the door will not open, closer examination reveals that it contains two small holes through which it is possible to peer past the door itself, through the gap in a brick wall set about three feet behind the door, and into the world beyond. The backdrop of the scene that meets the viewer is artificially natural, a glitzy combination of fake trees, glittering lights, and mechanical waterfall that seems a poor imitation of an actual landscape. The glance of the viewer, however, is directed not toward that artificial backdrop but onto a life-size model of a woman's naked body, a body splayed out relentlessly before the viewer's eyes, a body that announces as its most prominent feature a hairless vagina that is cut into the woman like a wound. The woman lies as if abandoned after an act of violation, her legs spread painfully wide in a tangle of dark brush and autumn leaves. The peepholes in Duchamp's wooden door succeed in aligning the viewer's eyes with the glaring wound of the woman's sex; subtle techniques of focus that may be contradicted in a painting are replaced here by a physical alignment, a concrete limitation of sight, that is as effective as a strong pair of hands that jerk the viewer's head into position

The Twelve Traps in John Garandr's « Grendel »

Abstract: W~THEN John Gardner's Grendel appeared in 1971 it was greeted by a chorus of praise from reviewers, critics, and readers. Since then diverse interpretations of this fascinating work have been proposed. What indeed are we meant to make of Grendel, Gardner's reworking of the monster who, in Beowulf, harries King Hrothgar and his thanes for twelve years until overcome by the Geat hero, Beowulf? In various interviews and in his own writings Gardner gave many indications of what he set out to do when writing Grendel. On one level Grendel, "creature of two minds," represents conflicting parts of Gardner himself: "I was conscious that what I was about to do (or dramatize, or seek to get clear) was an annoying sometimes painful disharmony in my own mental experience, a conflict between a wish for certainty, a sort of timid and legalistic rationality, on the one hand, and, on the other, an inclination toward childish optimism, what I might now describe as an occasional flickering affirmation of all that was best in my early experience of Christianity."2 Here we recognize the basis for Grendel's predicament: his stubborn clinging to skepticism and cold, hard reason, while constantly tempted by belief. In an interview with Joyce Renwick and Howard Smith, Gardner makes the same point while hinting at his structuring of the conflict: "The novel Grendel, it seems to me, is about reason and faith. Grendel is again and again given the opportunity of believing in something which western civilization has held up as a value."3 On several occasions Gardner enlarged on his structuring of this conflict: "What Grendel does is take, one by one, the great

Herman Melville's The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology

Abstract: HERMAN Melville's The Isle of the Cross does not appear in any iLl bibliography of his writings, but I will show here that it was the title of a work he completed (almost surely as a book, not a short story) and that its subject (almost surely) was what we have long known as "the story of Agatha." Had Melville not been "prevented" from publishing it we would have read the writings of his mid-career in this sequence: Moby-Dict, Pierre, The Isle of the Cross, Israel Potter. In Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife Julian Hawthorne printed a letter Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne from Boston following a visit to Concord a few days before; in it Melville announced his decision to follow Hawthorne's advice and write "the story of Agatha" himself.1 (Julian Hawthorne gave no date for the letter, but Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman in I960 dated it "after 25 November I852," and the forthcoming Northwestern-Newberry Letters will place it after December 3 and before December I4.)2 For Julian the value of the letter was merely as an aid in narrowing the possibilities for the subject of a story his father had mentioned to Horatio Bridge: "The following letter from Herman Melville indicates that he had suggested a story to Hawthorne; but Mr. Melville recently informed the present writer that it was a tragic story, and that Hawthorne had not seemed to take to it. It could not, therefore, have been the 'more genial' tale which he spoke of to Bridge."3 Nothing was added to Julian Hawthorne's account until Raymond Weaver