Showing papers in "American Literature in 2000"

"Rabid Imperialist": Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction

Abstract: Late in April 1898, near the end of his illustrious career at Harvard, the eruption of war against Spain impelled Charles Eliot Norton to performwhat one biographer has called ‘‘one of his last acts of moral courage as a citizen and idealist.’’ 1 Norton urged his students not to serve in what he described to a friend as ‘‘this wretched, needless and, consequently, iniquitous war,’’ which he then lamented in a widely reviled address as ‘‘a bitter disappointment to the lover of his country’’ and ‘‘a turning-back from the path of civilization to that of barbarism.’’ 2 Vehemently attacked by politicians and an inflammatory press, and inundated by ‘‘a vast amount of, mainly anonymous, abuse and denunciation’’ in the mail, Norton went on to assail ‘‘this bastard ‘imperialism’ ’’ and ‘‘our detestable policy and proceedings in the Philippines,’’ as even more remote interventions by the United States led him to ‘‘mourn her desertion of ideals . . . of universal worth and validity.’’ 3 Such remarks placed Norton in the vanguard of a small but vociferous group of anti-imperialist Americans that had formed in opposition to the war with Spain and that remained influential until 1905, after Theodore Roosevelt’s reelection consolidated the nation’s appetite for empire. A personification of genteel conservatism, nearly seventy years of age and on the verge of retirement, Norton did not hesitate nonetheless to risk his reputation in courting public opprobrium on what he considered an urgent matter of principle. It was during this turbulent period that Edith Wharton became one of the last of Norton’s protégés, later remembering his friendship and the loyalty with which ‘‘[h]e never ceased to interest himself in my work, or to encourage me to go forward.’’ 5 On a visit to Washington,

Exporting Christian Transcendentalism, Importing Hawaiian Sugar: The Trans-Americanization of Hawai'i

Abstract: Californiamaterialized into a coastal center of capitalist accumulation and U.S. Pacific Rim presence with the discovery of gold in 1848 and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Capitalist centralization continued in London, Paris, and New York City, but geography was being restructured along oceanic pathways of economic flux and cultural liquidity that were linking the space—and racial frontier—of Asia and the Pacific to international and global designs centered in Europe and the mainland United States. It was during this booming era of uneven development and Manifest Destiny that the coastal area of Alta California, according to materialist geographer Edward Soja, began a ‘‘tilt to the global space economy of capitalism that would continue for the next century and a half.’’ 1 Crucial to California’s entry into the dynamic world system being reshaped from Japan and China to the Isthmus of Panama and the neocolonial ports of the Pacific Rim was communication with and representation of Hawai‘i, which served as a mediating space transmitting the cheap labor and abundant resources of the Asian Pacific region to

From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's "Bartleby"

Abstract: In recent years critics have been calling for a regrounding of mid-nineteenth-century American literature—of the romance in particular—in politics and history. John McWilliams applauds the contemporary ‘‘challenge to the boundaryless and abstract qualities of the older idea of the Romance’s neutral territory.’’ George Dekker notes that recent attempts to ‘‘rehistoricize the American romance’’ have entailed an ‘‘insist[ence] that our major romancers have always been profoundly concerned with whatmight be called themental or ideological ‘manners’ of American society, and that their seemingly anti-mimetic fictions both represent and criticize those manners.’’ 1 But Herman Melville’s ‘‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’’ (1853) has to this point been exempted from a thoroughgoing historical recontextualization; its subtitle remains to be fully explained. Not all readings of the tale, to be sure, have been ‘‘boundaryless and abstract.’’ Critics interested in the tale’s autobiographical dimension have interpreted it as an allegory of the writer’s fate in a market society, noting specific links with Melville’s own difficult authorial career. Scholars concerned with the story’s New York setting have discovered some important references to contemporaneous events. Marxist critics have argued that ‘‘Bartleby’’ offers a portrait of the increasing alienation of labor in the rationalized capitalist economy that took shape in themid-nineteenth-centuryUnited States. But such critical enterprises have remained largely separate, with the result that biography, historical contextualization, and ideological analysis have been pursued in different registers. Moreover, criticism of ‘‘Bar-

The Birth of the Critic: The Literary Friendship of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright

Abstract: Three years following the 1960 death of Richard Wright, an increasingly isolated Ralph Ellison saw civil unrest and belligerence on the rise. The renowned author, who as a youth in the 1930s had picketed side-by-side with Communists, continued to put more distance between himself and his radical past. Ellison was not eager for a frontline role in the Civil Rights Movement; he pursued neither public notoriety nor civil leadership. At fifty, he felt little need for the radicalism of the thirty-nine-year-old expatriate JamesBaldwin, who was attempting to surpass the public image of Richard Wright. In fact, Ellison made a point of clarifying his own debt toWright in a 1963 telephone interview with Myron Kolatch of the New Leader, an antiCommunist journal of politics. In this interview, which later became ‘‘The World and the Jug’’ (1964), Ellison offered a harsh estimate of Wright’s literary range: ‘‘How awful that Wright found the facile answers of Marxism before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering the forms of American Negro humanity.’’ 1 Indeed, when one compares their most recent novels at this point, Ellison’s heralded Invisible Man (1952) and Wright’s misunderstood The Long Dream (1958), the two men do not seem linked. Wright may not have shown Ellison the ‘‘forms of American Negro humanity,’’ but he did introduce the younger man to the serious literary life. Beginning in June of 1937, at Ellison’s urging, Richard Wright served as the younger writer’s intellectual and literary mentor for many years. Langston Hughes had introduced Ellison to Wright’s penetrating poetry, including ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ which

National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (review)

Abstract: Dana Nelson’s National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men makes an important contribution to helping us understand how the United States was consolidated as a nation through the ideology of race-gender identities and differences after the Revolutionary War. Nelson’s admirably lucid and scrupulously researched argument proposes national manhood as the ideology that unifies white men across the line of class conflict by constructing a particularly impassable barrier of racial and gender difference. The book might well be titled Fictions of Fraternity: The Ideology of Nationhood in the United States from the Revolution to the Millenium because from its exemplary inaugural reading ofMelville’s ‘‘Benito Cereno’’ to its culmination in impressive readings of Poe’s ‘‘SomeWords with a Mummy’’ and the films Air Force One and Contact, it sustains a rigorous argument about the race, gender, class, and sexual dynamics of these fictions, which seek to sustain on the plane of ideology a fraternal unity that the plane of actuality betrays. Nelson’s argument connects two spheres of male endeavor: the political and the professional. The former is exemplified by her readings of The Federalist in chapter 1 and of the presidency in her afterward; the latter, by her readings of the growth of the profession of ethnography in chapter 3 and that of gynecology in chapter 4. Chapters 2 and 5, then, deal with transitional moments between the realms of the political and the professional: the Lewis and Clark expedition of chapter 2 links issues of Manifest Destiny and ethnographic representation; chapter 5 returns to ‘‘Benito Cereno’’ to link issues of fraternal organization (formal and informal) with issues of governance. The precise structure of the whole, then, in which the parts are skillfully interwoven, drives the argument. If there is any weakness, it comes from the book’s strength—the tautness of the argument, which can produce the effects of seamlessness. Nelson’s notion of the institution of the presidency, for example, as the institution in U.S. government that co-opts democratic energies, while making perfect sense within the terms of her argument as well as provocative sense overall, needs to take into account other forces: the naturalization of the market and the notion of the ‘‘public good’’ in U.S. constitutional theory, both of which, as theorized in Federalist 10, privilege a hierarchical class structure that is fundamentally antidemocratic. The crucial factor of class also drops out of Nelson’s conception of professionalism in favor of what she reads as the consolidating forces of race and gender. But it is precisely the tautness of the argument that helps us to articulate these complementary forces. Nelson’s theorizing of white male identification with Indians as a way of consolidating national manhood by forging a national genealogy that, in this racial fusion, erases white violence against Indians is the best explanation I have seen of this dynamic.

Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women (review)

Abstract: In this study of American modernism and modern love, Nina Miller concentrates on three locations in New York: Greenwich Village, midtown, and Harlem. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Genevieve Taggard exemplify Greenwich Village’s bohemian ideal; Dorothy Parker represents the Algonquin’s middlebrow politics; and Gwendolyn Bennett and Helene Johnson speak for Harlem’s Renaissance. Miller begins her study of each location with general cultural observations about women, gender, and love in the literary scenes that these locations defined, then uses these observations to guide a series of close readings of individual poets and poems.Miller’s argument is that writing love poetry is ‘‘public cultural work’’ (10), and her interest is in how women use love poetry in a public arena. In her chapter on Millay, for example, she examines both fictional representations of Millay (or women that resemble her) in Floyd Dell’s Love in Greenwich Village as well as Millay’s wrestling with sexuality in her own work. Miller looks at Taggard’s poetry in the context of heterosexism and sexology, and she describes how Parker uses her poetry to obtain ‘‘female citizenship as a horizon of possibility—rather than as a contradiction in terms’’ (141). The move between general cultural observation and specific close reading of a poem or two works best in the last third of the book, which is devoted to the Harlem Renaissance. After a basic and fairly general chapter on gender in this scene, Miller turns to the writing by women. She argues that narrative for these writers ‘‘emerges as almost claustrophobic in the ideological burden it imposes’’ (182). Miller concludes with a chapter on Bennett and Johnson; through their work, she argues that love—not the private but the public kind, as in love of culture—is what finally frees a poet like Johnson from claustrophobia and sexism. This last chapter, defined by Johnson’s utopian belief in public love, is the most interesting in the book because it explains what use lyric poetry might have for how we read culture. Miller’s writing shines when she writes on culture. Less convincing are the close readings of the poems. There is little attempt to put these poems in the larger context of these writers’ oeuvres and little attention to how these poems’ idiosyncrasies might complicate head-on cultural analysis. Although she never admits it, at moments it is as if Miller herself can only hear tin in the poetry, despite her respectful and detailed close readings. Thus, the value of this book is what it contributes to readings of modernist culture in New York.

Igorots and Indians: Racial Hierarchies and Conceptions of the Savage in Carlos Bulosan's Fiction of the Philippines

Abstract: In 1930 Carlos Bulosan immigrated to the United States, where he experienced racial discrimination and struggled to reconcile the economic and political injustice he encountered ‘‘with the wide-eyed version of American life’’ he had formed in the Philippines. One might thus expect Bulosan’s ‘‘voyage in’’—his ‘‘conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West,’’ to ‘‘make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories’’— to be a voyage into U.S. society. Indeed, one of his major works, the fictionalized autobiography America Is in the Heart, A Personal History (1946), is a classic immigrant narrative of conflicted assimilation. For the most part, however, Bulosan voyages not ‘‘in’’ but back: most of his fiction engages U.S. culture and its colonial relationship to the Philippines in ‘‘folktale’’ narratives set in his native country. Although Bulosan never became a citizen, he spent his adult life in the United States, where virtually all of his stories, poems, and essays were published. Writing in English to a U.S. audience, Bulosan labored to articulate a Filipino identity. In the essay ‘‘How My Stories Were Written,’’ he attempts to establish an authentic native voice by creating an origin myth in which he, as a young boy in the Philippines, acquires the material for his stories from a mysterious old man of the mountains. This mixing of fact and myth to produce authenticity recurs throughout his work and, according to P. C. Morantte, Bulosan often exaggerated his family’s poverty and lack of education as part of this effort to construct a Filipino peasant identity. Despite the nostalgia of his nativist focus, Bulosan engages Western discourse and colonial policy by putting into play two diametrically opposed West-

Langston Hughes and the "Nonsense" of Bebop

Abstract: In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it has progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of themusic of a community in transition.—LangstonHughes, Introduction toMontage of a Dream Deferred

Dr. Gonzo's Carnival: The Testimonial Satires of Oscar Zeta Acosta

Abstract: Chicano lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta (1935–1974?), a prominent figure in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and early 1970s, published two book-length narratives about the Movement that, along with his disappearance under mysterious circumstances, have contributed as much to his fame as his confrontational approach to defending activists in high-profile political trials. In the years since his disappearance, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People have attracted considerable critical attention. In discussing these books,many critics have emphasized essentialist notions of authenticity, interpreting Acosta’s writing as ethnic autobiographical self-revelation; others have stressed his works’ ethical and moral indeterminacy and their apparently arbitrary nature. Both sets of critics have limited interpretive possibilities by reading these works as novels, autobiographies, or some hybrid of the two, misunderstanding the nature of Acosta’s critical project. I hope in this essay to take discussion of Acosta’s narratives in a new direction by placing them in the context of the author’s legal work and considering them in relation to the genres of grotesque satire and testimonio. The new vision I offer of what Acosta sought to accomplish in his treatment of identity and the law permits a ‘‘postpositivist realist’’ interpretation of his work and demonstrates that Acosta did not see the arbitrary nature of law as something he could use to his advantage. He advocated neither essentialist nationalism nor unstable and indeterminate identities. Rather, he supported a realist approach to justice and identity that rejected inadequate conceptions of both while articulat-

James Weldon Johnson and the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Musician

Abstract: In all the critical attention paid to James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, surprisingly little has been directed toward the crucial role of music in the narrator’s experience and identity. While music scholars have cited the novel’s passages on the origins and significance of ragtime, literary critics seem relatively uninterested in the narrator’s principal means of supporting himself, which is also, arguably, his principal means of crossing racial boundaries.1 Comfortable and capable in both European and African American music, the narrator’s musical performances function, more than once, as agents in his ‘‘passing’’ as either ‘‘white’’ or ‘‘black’’; indeed, his convincing performance of Frédéric Chopin ultimately convinces a ‘‘lily white’’ woman to marry him, while his masterful performances of ragtime make audible a blackness invisible to the eye.2 But the narrator challenges the ‘‘color line’’ even more dramatically in his repeated efforts to produce music that revises both ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘white’’ musical traditions by sounding an intimate relationship between the two—by performing European music in a style learned from his mother, by ‘‘ragging the classics,’’ and finally by composing (or preparing to compose) African American symphonies. Because it occupies the invisible medium of sound, this ‘‘hybrid’’ musicality promises to distract both the narrator and his audiences from the visual markers of the ‘‘color line’’ and to invite them into an aural experience of racial mixture and ambiguity, of ‘‘colors’’ that are not so clearly mapped onto stable racial identities. Typically overlooked by recent critics who read this novel as a powerful exposure of the social constructedness of ‘‘race,’’ the nar-

Libertinism and Authorship in America's Early Republic

Abstract: Late in the first book of Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), the novel’s heroine, Dorcasina Sheldon, ‘‘calling herself the most wretched of women’’ because her unreasonable father has prohibited her marriage to Patrick O’Connor, rejects the novels ‘‘in which she had formerly taken such delight’’ and turns for comfort to the letters O’Connor had written her during their clandestine courtship. Dorcasina ‘‘had got them arranged in perfect order, tied with a silken string, and wrapped in a cover, upon which was written these words, Letters from my dearest O’Connor before marriage.’’ 1 One of the great novel-reading heroines of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American antinovel tradition, Dorcasina has already arranged her paramour’s letters into the form of her favorite genre and has even given them a title. Female Quixotism then presents what must have been for late-eighteenth-century readers a hilariously caricatured scene of female novel reading: ‘‘Taking the first [letter] in order she kissed the seal, and the superscription; then, after opening it, and pressing the inside upon her heart, she read it three times over. This done, she folded it up again and laid it on her bosom, with that she had received in the morning’’ (FQ, 93). Full of ‘‘all the ardour of counterfeited passion’’ (FQ, 44–45), the letters have permanently unmoored Dorcasina from the world of rational understanding in precisely the manner pernicious novels were believed to set the innocent female mind afloat in a sea of chaotic sensibility. Tenney’s satire images female novel reading as a kind of parodic sexual expenditure in which the artless feminine mind and body exhaust themselves in the libertine’s artful designs.

Charity Begins at Home: Stowe's Antislavery Novels and the Forms of Benevolent Citizenship

Abstract: Scholarly work on Harriet Beecher Stowe, at least since the recuperation of sentimentalism, has tended to foreground her cultural and racial politics. Much of her critical rehabilitation, in fact, has rested on assertions of her fiction’s progressivism. Most notably, Jane Tompkins, in her landmark study Sensational Designs (1985), finds in Uncle Tom’s Cabin a revolutionary agenda that calls for both the emancipation of slaves and the cultural empowerment of women. But the late 1980s and 1990s saw a backlash, not against Stowe’s sentimentalism per se but against certain of the ideological and racial projects in which she (and other sentimental authors) participated. In particular, the colonizationist ending ofUncle Tom’s Cabin has fueled the charge that Stowe’s representations aremore damaging than liberating. Karen Sánchez-Eppler articulates many critics’ dismay at the novel’s segregationist resolutionwhen she decries ‘‘Stowe’s failure to imagine an America in which blacks could be recognized as persons.’’ 2 By invoking this disagreement, I do not wish to suggest that a simple binary pits Stowe’s advocates against her critics, in stark contrast and ongoing conflict; indeed, much of the scholarship highlighting Stowe’s politics has attended closely to the ambivalence her antislavery fiction engenders. My point, rather, is that it continues to matter how ‘‘good’’ Stowe’s politics were, and not only because her most famous novel is so explicitly and passionately activist. Stowe has come to represent—perhaps most pointedly for Euro-American women in the academy—earnest, middle-class, white activism. In the process, she has proven to be a vexing icon—both an honored foremother and a specter of good intentions gone awry.

The Dutchman in the Attic: Claiming an Inheritance in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon

Abstract: Mr. Washington Irvine’s [sic] acquaintance with English literature begins almost where Mr. Lamb’s ends,—with the Spectator, Tom Brown’s works and the wits of Queen Anne. He is not bottomed in our elder writers, nor do we think that he has tasked his own faculties much, at least on English ground. . . . Mr. Irvine’s writings are literary anachronisms. . . . Instead of tracing the changes that have taken place in society since Addison or Fielding wrote, he transcribes their account in a different hand-writing, and thus keeps us stationary, at least in our most attractive and praise-worthy qualities of simplicity, honesty,modesty, hospitality, and good-nature. This is a very flattering mode of turning fiction into history, or history into fiction; and we should scarcely know ourselves again in the softened and altered likeness, but that it bears the date of 1820, and issues from the press in Albemarle-street.—William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits

Merchants, Money, and the Economics of "Plain Style" in William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation

Abstract: As soon as they make the decision to separate from the Church of England ‘‘whatsoever it should cost them,’’ the small Scrooby congregation initiates the history that is the subject of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. But the almost brash heroism of this vow gives way to embittered sadness when Bradford announces: ‘‘And that it cost them something this ensuing history will declare.’’ 1 A number of Bradford critics have maintained that an analogous pattern of declension characterizes the entire history, which slides from the optimistic promise of book 1 to the increasingly mournful sense of failure in book 2. These readings assume that Bradford hopes from the beginning to narrate an important and exceptional story about Plymouth’s place within the broader religious and political framework supplied by the Protestant Reformation and by English overseas expansion but that this story, over the years, gradually became impossible for him to tell. Even if he had precisely such ambitions in mind when he began Of Plymouth Plantation, any reader of Bradford’s text knows that his most overt and anxious concern is not Plymouth’s place within the grand sweep of history but the far more mundane problem of finances. In fact, more than Bradford’s descriptions of separatism and the Reformation, his use of the verb ‘‘cost’’ in the opening sentences anticipates the remainder of his book. More than anything else, Of Plymouth Plantation tells a detailed and complicated story of economic mismanagement and loss. So consumed is this narrative by matters of money that it might best be described as a history of the plantation’s financial accounts. Although economic matters dominate Bradford’s text, the sections

Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment (review)

Abstract: ole, Tigua Pueblo, Turkish, Chinese, Spanglish, and American Sign Language. The collection constitutes an imaginative and critically important revision of ‘‘American literature.’’ Sollors, to his credit, does not segregate the languages into rigid geographic or racial categories. Instead, he allows the different cultures to interact freely, producing a complex, multifaceted dialogue about the meaning(s) of American literature written in languages other than English. There are many fine moments here: Doris Sommers’s study of the ‘‘unscored counterpoint’’ between democratic difference and universal sameness that is resolved in the Spanglish term AmeRíca; Manahem Blondheim’s archeology of the Orthodox Jewish sermon as an unexplored yet meaningful dimension of the American literary tradition; Te-hsing Shan’s insightful analysis of the collision of Sinocentrism andU.S. centrism in Americanwritings in Chinese; Douglas C. Baynton’s fascinating history of American Sign Language and the long tradition of nativism that seeks to impose ‘‘normalcy’’ through standardized language use. At its best, Sollors’s thematic groupings produce a finely wrought dialogic tension revealing the contradictions and intriguing nuances of studying literature in a multicultural context. Any collection that makes so bold a claim is, of course, always open to the ‘‘sin of omission’’ critique. That said, it must be acknowledged that the ‘‘literary geography’’ of the collection remains largely centered in Europe. There are eighteen essays on European languages, none concerning Africa. There are seven essays that explore the complexities of Jewish culture and none on Arabic language or culture. One of the dangers, it seems to me, of focusing too closely on language is the risk of losing sight of issues of race, sexuality, gender, and class. This project would be richer if it addressed questions of how class, gender, or sexuality inflect language and included essays that consider African American vernacular English, the vast diversity of Native American languages, and a more historically complicated awareness of the many languages within ‘‘Asian American literature.’’ Nevertheless, Multilingual America is one of those rare books that can utterly change one’s understanding of even the most familiar academic territory. Nathan Glazer may believe that ‘‘we are all multiculturalists now’’; in reality, a great deal more work needs to be done to define multicultural studies. Multilingual America is an important step in the right direction.

The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s (review)

Abstract: however, accept the Jeffersonian view that the value of poems is intrinsic and not dependent for price on a market managed by dispensers of credit. For both men, then, the production of poetry is not just a matter of aesthetics; it is good economics. Marsh’s ability to explain the Jeremiad quality of both poets and to connect this prophetic stance to their verse is another, though lesser, virtue of this book. I did find some of Marsh’s readings pro forma and thesis-driven—particularly his reading of Williams’s early poem ‘‘The Wanderer.’’ His detailed explanations, however, of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian economics will allow other critics to go back to The Cantos and Paterson, the two poems most involved with economic issues. This return may help to recuperate both poets, perhaps especially Pound, who are increasingly being read only by small coteries.

Jean Toomer's Cane: Self as Montage and the Drive toward Integration

Abstract: In the past decade several important preliminary studies have begun to focus on the relation between themodernist aesthetic and the thematic and formal elements of Jean Toomer’s Cane. But while scholars have donemuch to elucidate the fragmented, avantgarde nature of the text’s form and to pose possible unifying themes, their efforts have been hampered by critical assumptions usually applied to poetry and fiction. Critical criteria such as unity and closure, as they have been traditionally used in judging a novel’s or poem’s ‘‘success,’’ are not relevant toCane. InCane, Toomer attempts to enact a disruption of social boundaries through literary form by exploding the genre borders of fiction, lyric poetry, and drama. By forcibly bringing together the disparate elements of the text, Toomer exposes false dichotomies and separations that are both literary and social. The form of the text thus becomes its central metaphor. Applying Peter Bürger’s conception of the montage to Toomer himself, to Cane’s thematic organization, and to Toomer’s aesthetic methods (particularly in the lyric-narrative sections of the work), I will make clear the way in which this unsettling and unsettled narrative exhibits both disjunctive and nondisjunctive tendencies, tendencies that drive the text’s disparate elements toward unification and tendencies that frustrate its movement toward integration. A study of the way in which Toomer’s radical formal transgressions reflect his radical political position should ultimately prove valuable for understanding not only Toomer’s work but also the narrative dialectic in general and the extent to which narrative mode functions as an effective tool in avant-garde expression.

Becoming Longfellow: Work, Manhood, and Poetry

Abstract: Longfellow’s invention of himself as a poet was one with his assumption of a leading place in the social order, an accession that must have seemed very natural to him. The decisive years for this self-invention are roughly those of the midto late 1830s, when Longfellow left a professorship at Bowdoin College in the village of Brunswick,Maine, to go to Cambridge, where he followed the eminent George Ticknor as the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. Since his youth in maritime Portland, Longfellow had been ambitious to make a name for himself in letters; his biographer Lawrance Thompson shows how assiduously the young Longfellow worked as a Bowdoin professor to master his discipline and, through an impressive variety of academic projects, to escape what he called in a letter ‘‘this land of Barbarians—this miserable Down East.’’ 1 In exchanging Brunswick for Cambridge, Longfellow was finally moving out and up. His father, a Harvard graduate and Bowdoin trustee who in Yankee fashion was both suspicious and cautiously supportive of Henry’s literary career, continued to set goals for his thirty-year-old son even as he expressed his congratulations:

Engineering Power: Hoover, Rand, Pound, and the Heroic Architect

Abstract: History generally credits the United States with ideological distance from the authoritarian thought that swept Europe after World War I. Not fascism but Taylorism and Fordism serve as catchwords for the American zeitgeist of the twenties and thirties. In our collective mythology, it was Europe that dreamed of force, autocracy, and genocide, while in the United States we worked, endorsing an almost collectivist ethic of efficient production and scientific management through affordable technology; as Germans and Italians worshiped the charismatic leader, we pushed to the top of the world’s economic order through the technological application of visionary science. Cecelia Tichi’s Shifting Gears has established the ways that engineering and architecture came to articulate this dynamic vision of the United States. The first quarter of the century, she argues, saw a remarkable growth in the romanticized figure of the ‘‘hero-engineer,’’ the American exemplar of specifically modern forms of technological power and industrial management. The hero-engineer ratified the Fordist model of large-scale, assembly-line production and lent emotional force to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s vision of a scientifically maximized, assembly-line factory. As Tichi confirms, the response to Taylorist experimentation was not always enthusiasm; labor unions, in particular, campaigned against what many of their members considered the dehumanization and subjugation of workers. The figure of the hero-engineer, however, charged through popular fiction and advertisements with a panache that led the eye away from the grimness of scientifically managed industrial servitude. The popularity of this image of the man in charge—the man who could organize and design,

"I—Pay—in Satin Cash—": Commerce, Gender, and Display in Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Abstract: The court case pitting Lavinia Dickinson against the family of Mabel Loomis Todd, which came to trial on 1 March 1898, was ostensibly a dispute over the rightful ownership of a strip of meadow. Vinnie Dickinson was trying to reclaim land that had been given over to the Todds at the instigation of her brother Austin, who had been Mrs. Todd’s lover. But as a spectacle, the trial offered the people of Amherst a great deal more. It dramatized, in particularly stark form, tensions that had pervaded this community and others for some time. Accounts both of the litigants’ styles of dress and of the lawyers’ arguments make it clear that the trial became a struggle between different types of womanhood. Vinnie presented herself in court in strikingly poor clothes: an old blue flannel dress, yellow shoes, and a long black veil. She was accompanied by her long-time servant, Maggie Maher, and a friend, Miss Buffum. Her female adversary was the much younger Mabel Loomis Todd. Mrs. Todd had always displayed a subtle sense of style, exceptional in the relatively provincial milieu of Amherst. She was later pleased to remember that on this occasion she had worn a black hat with white wings. It may be that Vinnie did not have other, smarter clothes. But her ignorance of the imperatives of fashion also conveyed meanings having to do with the entitlements of class. Whether calculatedly or not, Vinnie presented herself as a gentlewoman of the old school, unconcerned about making a showy appearance. One contemporary observed that Vinnie was dressed in such a way as to suggest her ‘‘unworldliness.’’ 1 Her lawyer exploited this notion of her as a woman out of time, portraying her as a relic of a more venerable social order

Agnostic Tensions in Hawthorne's Short Stories

Abstract: Herman Melville, in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, remarks its ‘‘blackness, ten times black,’’ as well as Hawthorne’s tendency to tell the truth ‘‘covertly, and by snatches.’’ 1 For modern readers, this early appreciation has resonated. Throughout his fiction Hawthorne, we know, was preoccupied with the unconfessed sin in the minister’s breast, the selfishness underlying the philanthropist’s schemes, the haunted house encompassing the sweet shop. His generally pessimistic take on the world— never much offset by the breezier passages and sketches with which he leavened his oeuvre—is doubtless part of what Melville had in mind. In a much cited passage he holds that Hawthorne’s blackness ‘‘derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, fromwhose visitations . . . no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free’’ (‘‘MM,’’ 243). The insight points up Hawthorne’s divergence from the more optative (Emerson) and sentimental (Longfellow) writers he lived among and neatly plumbs such tales as ‘‘Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent’’ and ‘‘Earth’s Holocaust,’’ the second of which explicitly suggests that the heart is the source of evil. But Melville’s elaboration doesn’t completely satisfy. For one thing, Hawthorne’s Calvinistic strain isn’t especially ‘‘covert.’’ He often tempers it with a wry humor (as in ‘‘Earth’s Holocaust’’), but he doesn’t disguise it. Moreover, although Calvinism was a gloomy religion, it was not downright black. A just God, it presumed, was in his Heaven and had taken the trouble to redeem his chosen, even if one’smembership in that select companywasmoot. No, as the remainder of his review suggests, Melville was fascinated by something less