Showing papers in "American Literature in 2002"

No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader

Abstract: No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about American literature and culture within the narrow rubric of “male public” and “female private” spheres from the founders to the present. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered unexamined in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies new ways of analyzing gender, breaks through old paradigms, and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century. Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Catharine Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang Rae-Lee, and Samuel Delany. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations. Feisty and provocative, it provides a forceful analysis of the limititations of any theory of gender that applies only to women, and urges suspicion of any argument that posits “woman” as a universal or uniform category. By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literatur e of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, providing a key supplementary text in the American literature classroom. Contributors. Jose F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Cathy N. Davidson, Judith Fetterley, Jessamyn Hatcher, Amy Kaplan, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Renker, Ryan Schneider, Melissa Solomon, Siobhan Somerville, Gayle Wald , Maurice Wallace

Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves

Abstract: Is it possible to save the subject now that it has been imploded by Jean Baudrillard, deconstructed by Jacques Derrida, and pronounced dead by Fredric Jameson, only to be revived as a schizophrenic? (Not to mention its re-creation as an infinitely malleable information pattern by biomedical practices like the Visible Human Project.) For writers who hope to make a living from their work, the problem with such high-tech and high-theory exercises is that the majority of mainstream, nonacademic readers continue to believe they possess coherent subjectivities; moreover, they like to read about characters represented as people like themselves, which the recent success of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections demonstrates. In House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski has found a way to subvert and have his subject at the same time. Camouflaged as a haunted-house tale, House of Leaves is a metaphysical inquiry worlds away from the likes of The Amityville Horror. It instantiates the crisis characteristic of postmodernism, in which representation is short-circuited by the realization that there is no reality independent of mediation. Rather than trying to penetrate cultural constructions to reach an original object of inquiry, House of Leaves uses the very multilayered inscriptions that create it as a physical artifact to imagine the subject as a palimpsest, emerging not behind but through the inscriptions that bring the book into being. Its putative subject is the film The Navidson Record, produced by the world-famous photographer Will Navidson after he, his partner Karen Green, and their two children, Chad and Daisy, occupy the House of Ashtree Lane in a move intended to strengthen their strained relationships and knit

Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson

Abstract: rocketry, ghosts, and perversity through which Morrison and Pynchon illustrate the failures of individualism (in chapter 3) and community (in chapter 4). These two chapters provide persuasive readings of The Crying of Lot 49 and Sula, as well as extended citations of failures of individualism and repressive communalism in Pynchon’s and Morrison’s other novels. Patell’s final brief chapter concludes by recommending an amalgam of respectful protection of human rights (negative liberty) and sensitive and cosmopolitan multicultural community: ‘‘What I believe that the novels of Morrison and Pynchon suggest to us is that we need to find a way to break through two different impasses: between individualism and communitarianism in the field of political theory and between New Criticism and multiculturalism in the field of literary criticism.’’ The process of reaching this conclusion seems more persuasive than the conclusion itself.

Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel

Abstract: Much work in the field of ecocriticism, established in American literary studies during the 1990s, assumes that the natural world is endangered, and that some of the human activities that threaten nature also put human health and life at risk. But while this assumption explicitly shapes a good deal of environmentalist politics and implicitly underlies most, if not all, ecocritical research, the concept of risk has so far rarely been subjected to theoretical discussion in ecocriticism. This omission is all the more remarkable considering that risk theory and risk analysis constitute a well-developed field of study in the social sciences, encompassing more than three decades of research. Perhaps because this field is not committed to the same environmentalist concerns that interest ecocritics, it has so far attracted little attention in ecological criticism. One exception is the work of Lawrence Buell, which engages some studies of risk in the analysis of what Buell calls ‘‘toxic discourse,’’ textual and visual representations of exposure to hazardous chemicals. But even in his work, the notion of risk and the social scientific theories that have evolved around it play only a relatively minor role. My essay will discuss connections among ecocriticism, risk theory, and narrative to suggest, on one hand, that a focus on the notion of risk as a literary theme can substantially sharpen and shift standard interpretations of some contemporary texts and, on the other hand, that a consideration of risk and the kind of narrative articulation it requires has potentially important implications for the analysis of narrative form. My argument focuses on a particular type of risk—exposure to chemical substances—but similar analyses could be carried out, with

Bodies in Labor: Sole Proprietorship and the Labor of Conduct in The Coquette

Abstract: The human body came under increased scrutiny during the Enlightenment as natural scientists attempted to apply a ‘‘mathematical vision’’ to the complexities of human difference. Implicit in this rationalizing vision was a faith in the veracity and authority of the discerning eye: the disembodied observer could, with sufficient examination of bodily surfaces, discern a systematic ‘‘order of differences existing between natural entities’’—a ‘‘structure’’ that ‘‘reduces the whole area of the visible to a system’’ of ‘‘perfectly clear and always finite description.’’ At the same time, however, as Londa Schiebinger and others have persuasively argued, the scientific community’s intensified scrutiny of bodies during the eighteenth century must be read in relation to emerging republican theories of natural rights, which asserted that all ‘‘men’’ are by ‘‘nature’’ equal. Schiebinger points to the striking ways in which race, gender, and economic inequalities emerging within the framework of Enlightenment thought soon came to be justified medically through the mechanisms of science. While such rhetoric did not limit natural rights explicitly to white, middle-to-upper-class European (and European American) men, these limitations were tacitly understood. In other words, modern materialist theories of sexual and racial difference provided justification for the argument that, in practice, all bodies are not equal: bodies differ in ‘‘nature’’ according to sex, race, and age. Accordingly, the bodies of white women and of black men and women (as well as an array of other non-European bodies) became the contested ground for investigating the limits of natural rights doctrine. With this focus on the body, it is not surprising that Hannah Webster Foster’s heroine in

Intimate Publics: Race, Property, and Personhood

Abstract: On 24 April 1998, Donna Fasano, a white woman, and Deborah Perry-Rogers, a black woman, underwent in vitro fertilization at a fertility clinic in midtown Manhattan. Six weeks later they both learned of the mistake made that day: while each woman received her own fertilized eggs, Donna was given Deborah’s eggs as well. Only Donna became pregnant, and in December 1998, she gave birth to two boys, one of whom, DNA tests showed, was not genetically hers. As the media declared, Donna Fasano had delivered ‘‘twins,’’ ‘‘one white, one black,’’ but the status of her motherhood was challenged as Deborah and her husband Robert filed for custody of their genetic child. In March 1999, the couples reached an agreement: The Fasanos would give ‘‘Joseph’’ to the Rogerses if the twins would be raised as brothers. ‘‘We’re giving him up because we love him,’’ Donna Fasano explained to reporters. In May 1999, one day after Mother’s Day, as the Washington Post duly noted, the Fasanos relinquished the child to the Rogerses, who renamed him Akiel. The pact between the couples was short-lived, however, and in June 1999 they went to court. The Fasanos claimed that the Rogerses had broken the custody agreement by refusing to allow Akiel to spend a weekend at their home; the Rogerses cited a failure of trust between the couples, based in part on an incident that occurred during a scheduled visit. According to Deborah Perry-Rogers, Donna Fasano had referred to herself as Akiel’s mother, encouraging him to ‘‘Come to Mommy’’ and comforting him that his ‘‘mommy is here.’’ David Cohen, the Fasano attorney, explained the white couple’s perspective: ‘‘The Fasanos don’t see [Joseph] as someone else’s black baby; they

The Wandering Bachelor: Irving, Masculinity, and Authorship

Abstract: In October of 1817, Washington Irving wrote a letter to his lifelong friend, Henry Brevoort, congratulating him on his engagement. Although genuinely pleased that his friend had found someone to marry, the occasion was bittersweet for Irving, who remarked in the letter that ‘‘marriage is the grave of Bachelors intimacy.’’1 Affectionate alienation from the social dispensations of marriage and family intimacy characterized both Irving’s life and literary writing. During his first European tour in 1804 at the age of 31, Irving concluded a letter to his brother, William Irving Jr., by asking him to ‘‘Remember me most affectionately to all the family. My heart warms toward you all the farther I am off.’’2 Such intimate estrangement would eventually characterize Irving’s relation to the American reading public, as he indicates in another letter to Brevoort in 1821, written just two years after the international success of The Sketch Book (1819). In response to suggestions that he was somehow un-American because of his protracted expatriatism and The Sketch Book’s dearth of what Richard Henry Dana Sr. vaguely labeled American ‘‘home qualities,’’ Irving writes:

Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and Authorship in Melville's Pierre

Abstract: In November 1851 Melville received a letter from Hawthorne praising his most recent literary endeavor, Moby-Dick. Shortly thereafter, Melville composed his famous response to his friend: ‘‘A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book,’’ he confesses. ‘‘Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.’’ For Melville, Hawthorne’s understanding of Moby-Dick (or more accurately, Melville’s projection of this understanding) inspired an intense corporeal bond, a connection so profound it resulted in a vision of merged subjectivity. In this fantasy, Hawthorne and he are not discrete individuals but ‘‘pieces’’ of a common being. In recent years scholars have read Melville’s intense response to Hawthorne in a (homo)erotic register. While not wishing to displace this reading, I would like to suggest that we can arrive at a more complete understanding of this letter’s libidinal force by considering its sentimental posture. Eighteenthand nineteenth-century sentimental ideology posited that fellow-feeling between individuals could result in the experience of bodily merging. When we use the imagination to ‘‘place ourselves in [another’s] situation,’’ writes Adam Smith in 1759, ‘‘we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.’’ Like Smith, Melville imagines a mental convergence with Hawthorne that leads to a fantasy of physical unity. The erotic overtones of shared lips, I would argue, are one component of

Non-Newtonian Time: Robert Lowell, Roman History, Vietnam War

Abstract: What is non-Newtonian time? No ready answer comes to mind. Its opposite—Newtonian time—hardly fares better. Neither term is idiomatic or even vaguely recognizable because time is rarely qualified by these adjectives, or qualified at all. In more than just a grammatical sense, time seems to come all in one piece, in one flavor. It is an ontological given, a cosmic metric that dictates a fixed sequence of events against a fixed sequence of intervals. It is present everywhere, the same everywhere, independent of anything we do. It carries no descriptive label and has no need to advertise or to repudiate that label. When seen as this uniform background, time is quantifiable. Its measurable segments are exactly the same length, one segment coming after another in a single direction. This unidirectionality means that there is only one way to line up two events, one way to measure the distance between them. Apparently, we need to imagine time in this concrete form—as a sort of measuring rod—to convince ourselves of its absolute existence. One year, one month, one minute— these unit lengths have to be ‘‘real’’ unit lengths, objectively measurable. And as proof of that objective measurement, they have to come already stamped with a serial number. And so we speak of one particular minute as, say, 10:10, followed by the next minute, 10:11, just as we speak of one year as, say, 1965, followed by the next year, 1966. This serial designation puts time completely under the jurisdiction of number. Most of us take this step quite innocently. Without much thought, we refer to a particular year as 1965, because a numerical bias is so

American Literary Realism and Nervous "Reflexion"

Abstract: American literary realism flourished in the late nineteenth century along with rapid developments in the sciences of the brain and nervous system. The literature that was so devoted to accurate representation, in other words, grew in tandem with the science devoted to explaining how humans perceive and apprehend the world. While we have long assumed the importance of science to realist movements, the primary connection has been drawn rather narrowly, between scientifically objective observation and realist aspirations to truthfulness in representation. Scholarship has not attended to realist writers’ interest in sciences of the brain and nervous system or explored the effect of rapid developments in neurology and brain biology on these writers’ conceptions of mimesis. But there was an effect. As ‘‘mental physiology’’ intruded upon realist aesthetics, some of the writers we most associate with realism loosened their allegiance to the model of the detached observer and opened their conception of literary production to a biological model of image transmission. New ideas about the apprehension of reality—such as the indexical reception of reality-impressions in neural tissue or the furrowing of memory pathways in brain circuits—dislodged the image of the cool, untouched, representing consciousness. And ultimately the model of unconscious brain and nervous system processes as the manufacturers of literature challenged that of the conscious reporter. My history here of the intersection between literature and neuroscience in the late nineteenth century is offered partly as a rethinking of American literary realism, in order to put back into the cultural configuration that includes literary realism the physiological psychol-

Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (review)

Abstract: Edwards (1710–58). Struggling for maternity through two miscarriages and one infant death, Turell uses maternal language ‘‘not only to articulate her own spiritual identity but also to articulate her ideal of the religious community’’ (90). In Reliquiae Turellae, her father, Benjamin Coleman, and her husband, Ebenezer Turell, published excerpts from her writings interwoven with texts of their own. From this, Henigman reconstructs Jane Colman Turell’s struggles as she sought her father’s advice on how to loosen her close bond with him and accept her husband’s counsel and congregation. Focusing on Turell’s maternal imagery, Henigman leads us through her spiritual travails and a fine reading of her poems. Sarah Edwards’s famous vision of 1742, an account of which her husband Jonathan used in Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival of Religion to defend spiritual awakenings against charges of disorderliness, constitutes Henigman’s third case. Contrasting Jonathan’s dualistic vision of spirituality with Sarah’s (‘‘a difference not in theology but in affect’’ [162]), Henigman reads her narrative as ‘‘a most intense vision of congregational unity’’ (168), presented in an idiom that her husband eventually adopts. Through all three sections of her book, Henigman wants us to ‘‘develop the habit of reading . . . minister-authored texts as pastoral documents, that is, as documents inflected, even if silently, by lay people’’ (178). She makes her case well.

Filibustering Cuba: Cecilia Valdés and a Memory of Nation in the Americas

Abstract: In 1883 the New York-based, Spanish-language newspaper El Espejo printed an advertisement promoting Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés o La loma del ángel (Cecilia Valdés or the Angel’s Hill), a ‘‘novel of Cuban customs’’ (1882).1 El Espejo was an unlikely place to advertise a work that William Luis has called ‘‘the most important novel written in nineteenth-century Cuba and perhaps one of the most significant works published in Latin America during the same period.’’2 The primary focus of El Espejo was not literature but commerce. Circulated in Latin America, El Espejo was a commercial sheet filled with advertisements for U.S.–made export products, such as locomotives, wheelbarrows, and pianos. Appearing alongside ads for washing machines and plastic sacks, the advertisement for Cecilia Valdés describes the book as an ‘‘attractive’’ product—a six-hundredpage octavo volume printed on ‘‘good paper,’’ in a new typeface for easy reading, and adorned with several engravings. Classifying it as a ‘‘historical’’ novel that records ‘‘true’’ events and portraits of ‘‘public figures’’ who lived in Cuba between 1812 and 1831, the ad goes on to note that the work is dedicated to ‘‘las Cubanas,’’ thus positing a gendered national subject. Buyers are told that they may purchase the book at the offices of El Espejo in New York as well as from booksellers in Madrid, Paris, Key West, and Havana. This advertisement not only reveals the commodification of Cecilia Valdés as a U.S. export, but it also raises questions about the location of this most national of Cuban novels. El Espejo was one in a long line of newspapers produced by Cubans who lived in the United States in the nineteenth century. Owned and edited by Narciso Villaverde,

The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception,1905-1920

Abstract: resentation of working-class characters, as in Lummox (1923) and Imitation of Life (1933), where working women function to expose middle-class limitations more than to improve the conditions of their own lives. Across all three ethnicities, women’s journalism has received less critical attention than men’s, yet as Batker’s study makes clear, these women’s journalism is integral to an adequate interpretation of their fiction. Although the text could have benefited from additional editorial revision, the endnotes and bibliography attest to careful and complete preparation. Carol Batker successfully reforms our notions of Progressive women’s writing as she argues for the confluence of their reform activism, articles, and fiction.

Jurassic Park Technology in the Bioinformatics Economy: How Cloning Narratives Negotiate the Telos of DNA

Abstract: In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles argues that ‘‘a defining characteristic of the present cultural moment is the belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates,’’ which she alternately describes as the ‘‘condition of virtuality’’ and the ‘‘computational universe.’’ 1 The material substrates Hayles considers range from research in artificial life to science fiction novels. Her examples have in common the contemporary concern with bringing explanations of organic processes into alignment with theories about complex systems or, to be more specific, with treating living things as information-processing systems. The historical precedent for this view of living things can be traced to twentieth-century physicists’ perplexity over how to account for self-organization in life given the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. Some historians of science have pinpointed the precise arrival of this new issue in biology to Erwin Schrödinger’s question, which became the title of his 1943 lecture series, ‘‘What is Life?’’ On the one hand, Schrödinger was simply asking a physicist’s question: Why don’t living systems succumb to dissipation, as do nonliving systems? On the other hand, Schrödinger’s question cued scientists in

Convergence of the Two Cultures: A Geek's Guide to Contemporary Literature

Abstract: In Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho (2000), Jon Katz introduces what some might consider a rare creature: a teenage computer hacker who reads literature. Katz’s nonfiction bestseller follows two working-class kids who achieve success because of their technological savvy. They are members of an evergrowing group, whose mastery of computers has suddenly made them, in Katz’s words, ‘‘culturally trendy.’’ They are ‘‘the new cultural elite, a pop-culture-loving, techno-centered Community of Social Discontents’’ (G, xi). Jesse struggles to explain himself to the author through months of conversations and e-mail exchanges. The breakthrough occurs when Jesse thinks to ask Katz if he has ever read David Copperfield. ‘‘That’s how I feel about myself,’’ Jesse says. ‘‘I can’t say it any better’’ (G, 81). The author of ten books of investigative journalism, political commentary, memoirs, and detective fiction, Jon Katz is an occasional college professor and a columnist for numerous magazines—a writer whose journalistic passion about obscure social outcasts has its own Dickensian quality. But it is the techie kid who invokes Dickens. Katz is not surprised in the least: ‘‘A computer geek who explains himself through Dickens is less remarkable a phenomenon than one might think. Geeks’ passions often crisscross back and forth between technology and more traditional forms of culture, with unusual depths of interest in both’’ (G, 83). Such crisscrossing is the hallmark of important sectors of American society at the turn of the millennium. From the young loners Katz chronicles to their successful counterparts in Silicon Valley, from role-playing gamers to the computer-special-effects wizards at movie

The Verdict from the Porch: Zora Neale Hurston and Reparative Justice

Abstract: Well over a century after the emancipation of American slaves and the collapse of Reconstruction, the question of slavery reparations has again become the focus of a national discussion. Beginning with the passage of the Civil Liberties Act (1988), which granted reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II, a series of events around the world, all bearing on the necessity of publicly and appropriately responding to mass atrocity, has revived the African American claim and given it a new national urgency.1 United States representative John Conyers Jr. has brought the issue directly into the political arena, introducing a bill to establish a commission on reparations. While the Conyers bill has never gotten a hearing, the success of class-action lawsuits in Germany and Korea, and the global proliferation of truth commissions and restitution agreements, has opened up precedents and possibilities for pursuing the African American claim. In law schools, college campuses, city councils, and editorial pages, Americans are debating the question that Harper’s magazine poses in the Forum section of its November 2000 issue: ‘‘Does America owe a debt to the descendants of its slaves?’’2 The explicit aim of a reparations lawsuit would obviously be material compensation—either money or some equivalent resource, such as scholarships. But as the Harper’s Forum discussion makes clear, the significance of the lawsuit is well in excess of the actual award. ‘‘What’s more important,’’ asks lawyer Alexander Pires Jr., ‘‘to tell the real story of American slavery or to win specific damages from 1940 onward’’? Dennis Sweet III points out that ‘‘a small part of [the law-

"A Foul Lump Started Making Promises in My Voice": Race, Affect, and the Animated Subject

Abstract: A foul lump started making promises in my voice,’’ notes the speaker in John Yau’s poetic series ‘‘Genghis Chan: Private Eye’’ (1989), giving new ‘‘life,’’ ‘‘spirit,’’ or ‘‘zest’’ to a clichéd expression for the inability to speak due to excessive emotion: a lump in the throat.1 In fact, the cliché seems reinvigorated here to the extent that the ‘‘lump,’’ the inhuman entity obstructing speech, comes to assume a life of its own, perversely ventriloquizing the Asian American speaker. We thus move from a racially marked subject who is ‘‘all choked up’’ to a situation in which the inhuman object restricting his speech becomes a subject dangerously capable of speaking for him, purportedly on his behalf. Insofar as we often regard the cliché as a ‘‘dead image’’—what Robert Stonum calls a ‘‘fossilized’’ metaphor whose ‘‘expired figurative life’’ is rarely capable of being ‘‘restored or reinvented’’—Yau’s announcement dramatizes ‘‘giving life’’ in more ways than one, reanimating by rhetorically doubling the dis-

Family Embraces: The Unholy Kiss and Authorial Relations in The Wide, Wide World

Abstract: In the originally unpublished final chapter of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, Ellen and her new husband, John Humphreys, stand together before a painting of the Madonna and child and consider its meaning. This ideal woman’s beauty, John declares, exists as a mere transparency through which the viewer may perceive the light of transcendent truth, the Word of the divine Father. After briefly challenging this reading, Ellen evidently capitulates—but at the same time she tells another story about the painting directly to the reader, unheard by the ravishingly masterful husband:

"Then Began He to Rant and Threaten": Indian Malice and Individual Liberty in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative

Abstract: The most notorious battle of King Philip’s War is the Great Swamp Fight (or Massacre) of December 1675, in which the New England colonial army ambushed and set ablaze a fortress of the Narragansett Indians. At the time of the attack, the Narragansetts were neutral observers of the war between a coalition of other Algonquian tribes and the English colonists, but the destruction of their fortress precipitated their involvement. In January 1676, hoping to wipe out the new enemy before the survivors could regroup and join the war, the English sent a detachment to pursue and kill those Narragansetts who had fled the Great Swamp. The detachment failed to complete its mission, and the surviving Narragansetts did indeed join with other Algonquians to attack Lancaster in February 1676, the battle in which Mary Rowlandson was taken captive. The Great Swamp Fight is alluded to but not discussed by the pseudonymous writer (probably Increase Mather) of the preface to Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 narrative of her captivity during this war. To explain the February attack upon Lancaster, the writer looks to ‘‘the causeless enmity of these barbarians, against the English, and the malicious and revengeful spirit of these heathen’’ (318). The mention of Indian malice as the reason for the attack upon Lancaster, combined with a vague account of the preceding English violence, may seem a simple, familiar tactic to justify English actions by obscuring the Algonquians’ reasons for fighting. However, there is more to this rhetorical maneuver. The idea of Indian malice not only rationalizes English violence; as a trope for individual liberty, it is ingeniously faithful to a Calvin-

Restaging the Racial Contract: James Weldon Johnson's Signatory Strategies

Abstract: In his autobiography Along This Way (1933), James Weldon Johnson describes his confrontation with a white man in a bicycle shop in Jacksonville, Florida, at the end of the nineteenth century, soon after Johnson had been appointed as a high school principal in the city. The shop ‘‘rivaled the barber shop as a place for the exchange of masculine talk and gossip,’’ and on this occasion, Johnson joined a conversation with a relatively unfamiliar group of white men.1 After steering the topic toward racial injustice, he received ‘‘a mild warning’’: ‘‘I was expressing some of my opinions when I was interrupted by a nondescript fellow, who remarked with a superb sneer: ‘What wouldn’t you give to be a white man?’ ’’ Less threatened than irate, Johnson collected himself to reply: ‘‘ ‘I am sure that I wouldn’t give anything to be the kind of white man you are. No, I am sure I wouldn’t; I’d lose too much by the change.’ ’’ While the white man assumes that he is in the superior position, not only with respect to this verbal exchange but within an economy of raced identity, Johnson, by rejecting the terms of the latter, wins the upper hand in the former: ‘‘The young fellow himself seemed to realize that to beat me up would not improve his position in the eyes of the witnesses to the incident. He was spiritually licked. I rode away satisfied’’ (ATW, 135–36). But Johnson’s satisfaction is tempered, not only by the frequency with which the man’s question—‘‘What wouldn’t you give to be a white man?’’—is posed or implied throughout his life but also by his need to ‘‘go over this question frankly with myself . . . and give myself the absolutely true answer.’’ His method of self-investigation resembles that of a psychoanalyst: ‘‘I watched myself closely and tried to analyze

Home on the Train: Race and Mobility in The Life and Adventures of Nat Love

Abstract: Returning to the United States for the first time in twenty years, Henry James embarked in 1904 upon a year-long tour to reacquaint himself with his homeland. Riding across the country by train, James finds ‘‘almost all the facts of American life’’ displayed upon ‘‘the great moving proscenium of the Pullman,’’ but he is not entirely pleased by what he sees. In The American Scene (1907), he deplores the ‘‘thinness’’ and crass commercialism of American life and character. Even more disturbing is the ‘‘transparency’’: ‘‘[I]t is as if every one and everything said to you straight: ‘Yes, this is how we are; this is what it is to enjoy our advantages; this moreover is all there is of us; we give it all out’ ’’ (AS, 407). What optimism James can rally rests finally on the notion that the ‘‘universal type’’ of American he observes is, like the Pullman itself, ‘‘perpetually provisional’’ (AS, 407, 408). While provisionality seems to hold out the promise of future fulfillment, James’s narrative strongly implies that such a happy conclusion will be endlessly deferred; the ‘‘perpetually provisional’’ offers only an ever shifting and uncertain present. Without grounding in stable inner qualities or cultural values, provisional identity is just another ‘‘production’’ inextricably linked to the forces of the (mass) market, ‘‘a type

Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary (review)

Abstract: to propose forms of environmental politics and writing that—to rearrange the title of chapter 7—rejects the misery of both beasts and humans. In the final chapter, Buell circles back to a theme he raises at the start. But whereas he began with the dystopic binding powers of chemicals—we all drink from the same poisoned well—he concludes with a consideration of rivers, those aquatic connectors of cities and regions. ‘‘Not by coincidence,’’ Buell writes, have recent ‘‘metropolitan restoration projects based themselves upon the prior configuration’’ of city rivers (264). Like the other acts of environmental imagination discussed in this wide-ranging book, when we restore a downtown riverbank—not as a site for touristic consumption but as a place where nature and culture cohere in ecologically and socially healthy ways— we reveal our faith in the collective capacity to imagine a greener and more just future. Beautifully written and exquisitely researched, Buell’s book will no doubt help scholars, activists, and the general public alike see themselves as vested in the outcome of such imaginative acts.

"Dark Spot" in the Picturesque: The Aesthetics of Polygenism and Henry James's "A Landscape-Painter"

Abstract: While Henry James was writing ‘‘A Landscape Painter’’ (1866), his elder brother, William James, was exploring Brazil with ‘‘that great naturalist,’’ Louis Agassiz, and a small entourage.1 In 1865, Agassiz had organized the Thayer Expedition from his post at Harvard University, and William, a student at Harvard, had volunteered to join. In the shadow of Civil War, William spent a year traveling through South America to find, sketch, and classify unknown species of fish, keeping a diary and frequently sending letters to Henry and the rest of the James family in Boston—letters that Henry would later recall as a crucial influence in his decision to become a writer of fiction.2 Although critical commentary has tended to dismiss ‘‘A LandscapePainter,’’ more is at stake in the protagonist’s attempt to paint Miriam

Preface: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges

Abstract: In his Rede Lecture of 1959, the English scientist and novelist C. P. Snow coined the phrase ‘‘two cultures’’ to describe a disjunction between the sciences and the humanities that, he believed, both signaled and produced grave social problems. Four years later he explained that his primary objective in the lecture was to sharpen ‘‘the concern of rich and privileged societies for those less lucky.’’ But what amazed, angered, or amused his ever broadening audience, and subsequently became the chief legacy of the piece, was his claim that ‘‘the intellectual life of the whole western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.’’ Humanists and scientists, he argued, have nothing in common: from their assembled data to their research methods, from the way they think to the way they talk, ‘‘a gulf of mutual incomprehension’’ divides them. They inhabit, in an anthropological sense, two cultures. The accuracy of Snow’s comments is not our concern in this special issue. We are interested more in what Jay Clayton, in his essay in this volume, calls a ‘‘convergence.’’ On the one hand, scientific specializations have moved at such a pace that the untrained are virtually illiterate. On the other hand, the practical impact of this specialized knowledge—from reproductive technologies to electronic archives, from bioterrorism to gene therapy—makes science illiteracy no longer an option. Scholars in the humanities simply have to come to terms with these forces of change. Unpersuaded by the language of crisis with which some cultural observers have responded to the current situation, we see an opportunity for creative and productive responses to the emergence of new forms of knowledge, of cross-disciplinary

"Indelicate Exposure": Sentiment and Law in Fall River: An Authentic Narrative

Abstract: While such funeral ballads were not uncommon at the time, the use of a patriotic anthem as a melody suggests that some of the concerns raised by the case had to do with national public values. As with many sensational crime stories of the earlyto mid-nineteenth century, details about the case swept the region through the popular press and gripped the public imagination. The new penny press thrived on crimes involving sexual scandal, and this event was full of sordid details: the victim, Sarah Maria Cornell, was thought at first to have committed suicide, but when it was discovered that she was pregnant at the time of her death, clues led to a local Methodist preacher as the prime murder suspect. These circumstances took on additional meaning in light of the industrial and religious institutions with which the victim and the suspect were associated. The victim’s pregnancy out of wedlock as well as her death confirmed suspicions that industrial labor degraded moral character, and the evidence pointing to the Reverend Ephraim K. Avery as a murder suspect fueled concerns about the social dangers of religious revivalism. In the protracted social con-

More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Context

Abstract: Professor’s House; and Cather’s ‘‘strange sister,’’ the photographer Laura Gilpin. When he turns his attention more explicitly to Cather’s fiction, Goldberg cites the double lives of Cather’s characters as evidence that she queers her texts. His splendid reading of Godfrey St. Peter’s ‘‘double-life’’ in The Professor’s House, where the professor’s ‘‘back garden’’ nurtures Tom Outland’s narrative of the homosocial red mesa, is evidence of the ‘‘strong homo and hetero cleavages’’ (137) that divide Cather’s novel. In his meditations on ‘‘the stunning resonances’’ in her ‘‘laconic’’ fiction (1), Goldberg plumbs Cather’s texts, sexing them by opening up their double lives. Given that both writers are participating in the project of queering Willa Cather, Goldberg is surprisingly ungenerous to Lindemann, accusing her of not being queer enough in his discussion of Cather’s first novel Alexander’s Bridge. Granted, he is harder on Acocella and her ‘‘populist antiintellectualism,’’ accusing her of ‘‘reduc[ing] Cather’s texts to banalities, themes of the kind she no doubt was taught that Cather represented when she read her in high school’’ (182). Nevertheless, Goldberg and Lindemann’s texts harmonize much more than they diverge, particularly in both authors’ lyrical and consuming discussions of Cather’s Pulitzer Prize–winning, underpraised and overcriticized masterpiece of World War I, One of Ours. That Willa Cather will continue to resonate for some as a Nebraska lady novelist and for others as queer theory’s diva darling, and that she will do so simultaneously, is perhaps the best testament to Cather’s abiding ‘‘queerness.’’

Ezra Pound's Whistler

Abstract: On 20 February 1905, Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, addressed the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers who had gathered for a banquet held at the Café Royal in London. They were celebrating the imminent opening of a memorial exhibition of the works of James McNeill Whistler, the Society’s first president, who had died a year and a half before. The Society was a respected group: its current president was Auguste Rodin, and the Honorary Committee included a prince, ten peers of the realm, two foreign ambassadors, and the directors of ten major international art galleries. But in his speech, Raleigh chose to emphasize Whistler’s antagonistic relationship with the art establishment and the societies to which he had belonged: