Showing papers in "American Literature in 1996"

American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender.

Abstract: In this brilliantly combative study, Robyn Wiegman challenges contemporary cliches about race and gender, a formulation that is itself a cliche in need of questioning. As part of what she calls her \"feminist disloyalty,\" she turns a critical, even skeptical, eye on current debates about multiculturalism and \"difference\" while simultaneously exposing the many ways in which white racial supremacy has been reconfigured since the institutional demise of segregation. Most of all, she examines the hypocrisy and contradictoriness of over a century of narratives that posit Anglo-Americans as heroic agents of racism’s decline. Whether assessing Uncle Tom’s Cabin , lynching, Leslie Fiedler’s racialist mapping of the American novel, the Black Power movement of the 60s, 80s buddy films, or the novels of Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, Wiegman unflinchingly confronts the paradoxes of both racism and antiracist agendas, including those advanced from a feminist perspective. American Anatomies takes the long view: What epistemological frameworks allowed the West, from the Renaissance forward, to schematize racial and gender differences and to create social hierarchies based on these differences? How have those epistemological regimes changed—and not changed—over time? Where are we now? With painstaking care, political passion, and intellectual daring, Wiegman analyzes the biological and cultural bases of racial and gender bias in order to reinvigorate the discussion of identity politics. She concludes that, for very different reasons, identity proves to be dangerous to minority and majority alike.

Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism.

Abstract: Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. “We have a great desire to be supremely American,” Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America’s cultural and collective identity—ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity—linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos—something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels’s sustained rereading of the texts of the period—the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar—exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.

The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926

Abstract: Upon its publication in 1871, Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex sent shock waves through the scientific community and the public at large. In an original and persuasive study, Bert Bender demonstrates that it is this treatise on sexual selection, rather than any of Darwin's earlier works on evolution, that provoked the most immediate and vigorous response from American fiction writers. These authors embraced and incorporated Darwin's theories, insights, and language, creating an increasingly dark and violent view of sexual love in American realist literature. In The Descent of Love, Bender carefully rereads the works of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Harold Frederic, Charles W. Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway, teasing from them a startling but utterly convincing preoccupation with questions of sexual selection. Competing for readership as novelists who best grasped the "real" nature of human love, these writers also participated in a heated social debate over racial and sexual differences and the nature of sex itself. Influenced more by The Descent of Man than by the Origin of Species, Bender's novelists built upon Darwin's anthropological and zoological materials to anatomize their character's courtship behavior, returning consistently to concerns with physical beauty, natural dominance, and the power to select a mate. Bringing the resources of the history of science and intellectual history to this, the first full-length study of the impact of Darwin's theories in American literature, Bender revises accepted views of social Darwinism, American literary realism, and modernism in American literature, forever changing our perceptions of courtship and sexual interaction in American fiction from 1871 to 1926 and beyond.

The Civil War World of Herman Melville.

Abstract: The culmination of more than a decade of research, Stanton Garner's magisterial study reveals the previously little-known world of one of America's greatest writers during its most devastating era - that of the Civil War. Contrary to popular belief, Garner contends, Melville was not intellectually and emotionally detached from the war. In actuality, Melville brooded over the war's enormous brutality and destructive power. At the same time, his passion for writing, which had suffered greatly in the wake of his grand failures of the 1850s, revived. With renewed purpose, Melville saw an opportunity to establish himself as the prophet-poet of rededicated America rising phoenix-like the ashes of destruction. The vehicle for this ambitious enterprise was \"Battle-Pieces\", an epically conceived book of poems that chronicles the war from John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry through Lincoln's assassination. Despite its innovative style and powerful imagery, Melville's epic statement about the war was little noticed by a weary and unreceptive readership trying to move beyond the war's painful memories. Drawing upon previously unknown or neglected archival sources, Garner places Melville's experience within the larger contexts of his extended family, social circles, political beliefs, travels and reading. He establishes Melville's position in the rift among major Northern writers in which Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier were on one side and Melville, Hawthorne, and - to some extent - Whitman were on the other. By delving into the complexities and apparent contradictions of Melville's personal life, Garner reveals why a man who was diametrically opposed to slavery, refused to side with the abolitionists and maintained the anti-administration attitude predominant in his Democratic family, while supporting the Union war effort.

Art Spiegelman's "Maus": Graphic art and the Holocaust

Abstract: I n presenting a \"Special Award\" to Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1992, the Pulitzer Prize committee decided to finesse the issue of genre. The members were apparently befuddled by a project whose merit hey could not deny but whose medium they could not quite categorize. The obvious rubric (Biography) seemed ill-suited for a comic book in an age when ever-larger tomes and ever-denser scholarship define that enterprise. Editorial cartooning didn't quite fit either, for Maus illustrated not the news of the day but events of the past. The classification problem had earlier bedeviled the New York Times Book Review, where the work had criss-crossed the Fiction and Non-Fiction Best Seller Lists. Originally, Maus was placed on the Fiction List, a decision Spiegelman protested in a wry letter to the editor: \"If your list were divided into literature and non-literature, I could gracefully accept the compliment as intended, but to the extent hat 'fiction' indicates awork isn't factual, I feel a bit queasy. As an author, I believe Imight have lopped several years off the thirteen I devoted to my two-volume project if I could have taken a novelist's license while searching for a novelist's tructure.\"1 Ina tiny but telling blip on the cultural radar, the Times obligingly moved the volume from the Fiction to Non-Fiction Best Seller List. The veracity of the image-even the comic book image-had attained parity with the word. From its first appearance in 1980 in the comic magazine Raw (\"High Culture for Lowbrows\") to the complete two-volume edition issued in 1991, Maus presented an unsettling aesthetic and scholarly challenge, not least to print-oriented purists who scoffed at the notion of comic book artistry and bewailed the incursion of pop culture into the under-

Whispers in the dark : the fiction of Louisa May Alcott

Abstract: In this study, Elizabeth Keyser examines representative works from the various genres in which Alcott wrote, uncovering self-portraits or metafictions that convey what it meant to be a Victorian woman writer. Alcott's wealth of allusion to other writers, such as Charlotte Bronte, Margaret Fuller, and, especially, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of recurring motifs, such as textiles, texts, and theatricals, reveals her consistent subversion of conventional values for women. Keyser shows that beneath the mildly progressive feminism of her domestic and children's fiction lurks the more radical feminism of the Gothic thrillers. In some works Alcott symbolically conveys her vision of a feminist future in which men and women fulfill their androgynous potential and live in a harmonious state of equality. But in her most sustained critique of gender relations, the Little Women trilogy, Alcott betrays grave misgivings about the possibility of such a future.

Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur.

Abstract: Better Red is an interdisciplinary study addressing the complicated intersection of American feminism and the political left as refracted in Tillie Olsen's and Meridel Le Sueur's lives and literary texts. The first book-length study to explore these feminist writers' ties to the American Communist Party, it contributes to a re-envisioning of 1930s U.S. Communism as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis. At once loyal members of the male-dominated Communist Party and emerging feminists, Olsen and Le Sueur move both toward and away from Party tenets and attitudes - subverting through their writing formalist as well as orthodox Marxist literary categories. Olsen and Le Sueur challenge the bourgeois assumptions - often masked as classless and universal - of much canonical literature; and by creating working-class women's writing, they problematize the patriarchal nature of the Left and the masculinist assumptions of much proletarian literature, anticipating the concerns of \"second wave\" feminists a generation later.

The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition.

Abstract: For centuries, women who aspired to write had to enter a largely male literary tradition that offered few, if any, literary forms in which to express their perspectives on lived experience. Since the nineteenth century, however, women writers and readers have been producing \"disobedient\" counter-narratives that, while clearly making reference to the original texts, overturn their basic assumptions. This book looks at both canonical and non-canonical works, over a variety of fiction and nonfiction genres, that offer counter-readings of familiar Western narratives. Nancy Walker begins by probing women's revisions of two narrative traditions pervasive in Western culture: the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and the traditional fairy tales that have served as paradigms of women's behavior and expectations. She goes on to examine the works of a wide range of writers, from contemporaries Marilynne Robinson, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Sexton, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood to precursors Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, Mary De Morgan, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Edith Nesbit, and Evelyn Sharp.

Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market.

Abstract: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau have traditionally been portrayed as alienated outsiders, isolated voices of opposition to a society that failed to heed their words. More recently, they have been seen as unwitting advocates of capitalist culture, their texts and careers driven by its hidden logic even as they indicted its excesses. In 'Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom' Richard F. Teichgraeber III rejects both of these views to offer a revisionist account of the relation of Emerson and Thoreau to the emerging market culture of antebellum America. Emerson and Thoreau, Teichgraeber argues, were engaged with their contemporary readers in a common conversation about the institutions, conduct, and values of a Northern society experiencing extensive and radical social changes, and encountering in Southern slavery a dramatic challenge to its new political and economic way of life. Teichgraeber contends that Emerson and Thoreau knew their own purposes as social critics and set about achieving them in their published writings. In turn, the new commercial mediators of antebellum culture--publishers, editors, reviewers, and booksellers--introduced the two Concord writers to ordinary readers, discussed their works with surprising discernment, and constructed the images by which Emerson and Thoreau would eventually be canonized in American literature. \"Teichgraeber's study has extremely important implications for the much-gnawed question of the relationship of Emerson and Thoreau to American culture. The general opinion right now is that they have somehow been canonized by a cultural elite and therefore, at best, can claim only to be `representative men.' Teichgraeber demonstrates that much more can be claimed for them--that during their own lives and careers they touched a popular nerve, so that their canonization was not an act of a cultural elite but an expression of democracy.\"--James Hoopes, Babson College.

The Great Gatsby and modern times

Abstract: "A stunning piece of work. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby, it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an ideal companion piece to the novel--as brilliantly illuminating about America as it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style." -- Roger Rosenblatt "An impressive study that brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overall context of modernism." -- Milton R. Stern, author of The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald "Citing films, dates, places, schedules, Broadway newsstands, and the spoils of manufacture, the author, never lapsing into critical jargon, locates the characters in 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novels to emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements, photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identity for characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludes that Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself." -- A. Hirsh, Choice

The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child.

Abstract: For half a century Lydia Maria Child was a household name in the United States. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs's \"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,\" she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters--the historical novel, the short story, children's literature, the domestic advice book, women's history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history.

The Stowe debate : rhetorical strategies in Uncle Tom's cabin

Abstract: This collection of essays addresses the continuing controversy surrounding Uncle Tom's Cabin. On publication in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel sparked a national debate about the nature of slavery and the character of those who embraced it. Since then, critics have used the book to illuminate a host of issues dealing with race, gender, politics, and religion in antebellum America. They have also argued about Stowe's rhetorical strategies and the literary conventions she appropriated to give her book such unique force. The thirteen contributors to this volume enter these debates from a variety of critical perspectives. They address questions of language and ideology, the tradition of the sentimental novel, biblical influences, and the rhetoric of antislavery discourse. As much as they disagree on various points, they share a keen interest in the cultural work that texts can do and an appreciation of the enduring power of Uncle Tom's Cabin.