Showing papers in "American Literature in 2004"

Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, and: Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (review)

Abstract: and, according to Handley, ‘‘only betokens trouble’’ (18). Handley reads ‘‘the troubled particulars of romance and marriage in relation to American nationalism’’ (24), concluding that the conflicted marriages ‘‘in the literary West so often separate, even as they participate in, the double helix between love and nation, becoming allegories of a failed national metaphor of unity in a region, where many Americans hoped to locate common identity’’ (34). In Marriage, Violence, and the Nation, Handley challenges the myth of the ‘‘cowboy’’ West, but rather than offering an alternative paradigm, he explicitly and implicitly explores the complex act of creating literary meaning and its relationship to historical reality. In Handley’s view, and I agree, popular westerns, even formula westerns, are ‘‘ideologically complicated’’ and richly reward imaginative analysis rather than reductive dismissals (225). ‘‘What literature has to offer anyone who reads it closely,’’ Handley asserts, ‘‘is the demanding, unavoidable ambiguity and estranging effect of literary expression itself’’ (230), and he demonstrates this point in detailed and inventive readings of important and still widely read texts. Most valuable is the way he brings these readings to bear on a larger question of the relationship between literature and history, ‘‘this dilemma between the claims of representation and the claims of ‘reality’ ’’ (230). In a polemical afterword exploring ‘‘the impasses between [western] historians and literary critics,’’ (227), Handley advocates a ‘‘return to literary complexity’’ (233). These two fine books convincingly prove Handley’s point that ‘‘reality is narratively malleable’’ and support his argument ‘‘for understanding how and why narrative continues to matter’’ (232).

The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia: "Sad Fancyings" in Herman Melville's "Bartleby"

Abstract: On 26 February 1998, Roosevelt Dawson, a twentyone-year-old, African American college student in Southfield, Michigan, chose to die with the help of Jack Kevorkian. Dawson was the first African American and the youngest person among Kevorkian’s then ninety-seven assisted suicides. The prognosis for his disability and the prospects for his life were uncertain. Dawson had been quadriplegic for thirteen months due to a viral infection. Although he had been living in hospitals for over a year, his disability was stable, and he was not terminally ill. His mother, single with three younger sons, was not able to provide financial assistance. Even though it was publicly acknowledged that Dawson was depressed and lacked social services and strong personal support, a local court ruled that he was competent to decide to leave the hospital. The hospital, church officials, friends, and family knew he had contacted Kevorkian and intended to die. Underpinning local responses in the media to Dawson’s death lurked the sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit assumption that his life was no longer worth living. Indeed, Dawson’s preference to die validated such a belief. A letter to the editor of the Oakland Press concluded that because he used a ventilator, had ‘‘tubes stuck in him,’’ and—worst of all—supposedly needed ‘‘diapers,’’ his life was unlivable. In a speech at Dawson’s memorial service, Kevorkian’s lawyer offered consolation by imagining the dead man nondisabled in some other life: ‘‘Wherever Roosevelt is today, he can breathe, he can run, and he can reach down and hug every person here, and not as a slave to a machine.’’ No one in Oakland, Michigan, who commented publicly on Dawson’s death—or even Dawson himself before he died—

Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics

Abstract: Perhaps the central problem for contemporary critics who address aesthetics is defining exactly what we mean by the term. In addition to the abundance of historically specific ideas about aesthetics, various topics can be crowded under its aegis: aesthetic objects, aesthetic judgments (or values), aesthetic theories, aesthetic experience, aesthetic attitude (or function), aesthetic practice. In the past two decades, American literary criticism has tended to dismiss aesthetics in toto by identifying it almost exclusively with New Criticism’s formal judgments about specific aesthetic objects. This dismissal has consisted of debunking New Criticism’s idea of a transhistoric aesthetic object by revealing the sociopolitical interestedness of aesthetic judgments supposedly based on objective formal properties. Yet as Winfried Fluck has argued, ‘‘[T]he new revisionism has systematically misunderstood and misrepresented the issue of aesthetics, because it has conflated theNewCritical version of aesthetic value with the issue of aesthetics in general. . . . [in part] . . . to justify their own project of an historical and political criticism.’’ Such a conflation of aesthetics with a formal focus on ‘‘an inherent quality, structure, or gestalt,’’ Fluck contends, ‘‘is by no means plausible’’ and, in fact, is ‘‘ahistorical.’’ Instead of continuing to dismiss aesthetics or retreating into the defense of a transcendent canon, American literary criticism needs to explore how historically specific ideas about aesthetics and the aesthetic practices they engendered gave rise to something we might call aesthetic experience. The earliest uses of the term aesthetic in nineteenth-century American criticism reveal the anachronism of identifying aesthetics with

Aesthetics at the Limits of the Nation: Kant, Pound, and the Saturday Review

Abstract: How powerful is the nation as a taxonomic (rather than jurisdictional) unit? Who gets to classify, who gets to name the phenomena of the world? Do human beings naturally congregate as sovereign states, or can we imagine a different ordering of humanity, something like Bruce Ackerman’s ‘‘world constitutionalism’’ or Jürgen Habermas’s ‘‘postnational constellation’’? Habermas thinks that this new associative form will replace the conventional nation-state:

Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity

Abstract: The sphere of Herman Melville’s work has, not unreasonably, been understood as masculine. I use sphere advisedly here, for it alludes to the doctrine of separate spheres that so permeated nineteenth-century American thought about gender while insisting on the physical spaces through which this conception of gender was devised, implemented, and maintained. Critics have not yet recognized the degree to which Melville understood gender as produced by lived spaces. Throughout Melville’s writings, gender appears as a performance mounted in consultation with the built environments experienced by characters. In fact, Melville’s oeuvre reveals a consistent fascination with the gender identifications enabled and thwarted by physical spaces. Becoming alert to the dynamic interactions of gender and interior space not only allows a more nuanced understanding of Melville’s approach to questions of identity but also suggests a new basis for asserting continuities between the earlier seafaring work and the later ‘‘lee-shore’’ fiction. In each of these settings, Melville’s male characters need access to domestic space in order to form viable identities. In his attention to the influence of space on identity, Melville was a man of his time. Early-nineteenth-century discussions of domesticity increasingly attributed to houses the ability to shape their inhabitants’ identities. In Rural Architecture (1852), one of a host of popular and influential mid-nineteenth-century Americanwritings on home design, Lewis Allen asserts: ‘‘As the man himself—no matter what his occupation—be lodged and fed, so influenced, in a degree, will be his practice in the daily duties of his life.’’ In the antebellum United

The Specter of Wall Street: "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and the Language of Commodities

Abstract: Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me,’’ writes the lawyer in Herman Melville’s ‘‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’’ (1853), ‘‘it is fit I make somemention of myself, my employés, my business, my chambers, and general surroundings.’’ Intriguingly, the lawyer does not say he met Bartleby; instead, Bartleby ‘‘appeared’’ to him. Wemight read the word appeared as the diction of a man who has practiced law for many years, a profession in which the presence of individuals is often referred to as an ‘‘appearance.’’ Yet in legal phraseology the verb to appear is typically followed by the preposition before: one always appears before the bench, the judge, or the jury. Bartleby, however, does not appear before the lawyer but, in a crucial change of prepositions, to him. Bartleby’s appearance, of course, creates a subtle, dramatic tension, setting up the eventual climax in which he is shown to be quite different from the person he first appears to be. Yet the word appeared suggests a stranger possibility: perhaps Bartleby quite literally appeared, as would an apparition. But what would it mean to take Melville at his word and read Bartleby as an apparition? We would be reminded of what current critics of the story seem to have forgotten: Bartleby is strange. Contemporaneous reviewers certainly saw the story’s occult possibilities. One wrote of Bartleby’s ‘‘ghost-like taciturnity’’; another called the story a ‘‘weird tale,’’ reminiscent of the eeriness of Poe. Yet for the most part, this sense of the story’s weirdness has been lost. Nearly all current work on ‘‘Bartleby’’ follows from another critical genealogy—not the occult but the quotidian, with one early reviewer going so far as to call the story ‘‘a portrait from life.’’ Marxist criticism of ‘‘Bartleby,’’ in par-

Fictional Feeling: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the American Gothic

Abstract: An interest in the deep structure of aesthetic pleasure and in the emotions that shake us when reading has in recent years come increasingly to the fore in literary and cultural studies. This coalescing interest has gathered strength with the waning of reader-response criticism in the nineties, which had long been criticized for its tendency to privilege meaning over feeling and interpreting over imagining in its account of the reading experience, and with the concurrent and important rise of sensibility studies in Americanist research, which legitimized readerly emotion as a category of analysis but tended to do so primarily insofar as it could illuminate urgent political or cultural anxieties and needs. In this essay I want to contribute to the discipline’s renewed interest in the feelings of reading, its anticipated return to the ‘‘tears and prickles’’ of literature dismissed so long ago by Wimsatt and Beardsley. I will do so by using Charles Brockden Brown as a case study in the experience of fright. Fear is an especially suitable emotion for study, as I will argue, because of its illuminating extremity, and Brown is an especially suitable author. His works, as I hope to reveal, are among the most brilliant examinations available in the American literary tradition of what happens when readers read. One of the most frightened (mis)readers in all of Brown’s fiction is Baxter in ‘‘The Man at Home.’’ A character developed from Brown’s observations of the yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia in 1793 and 1797, Baxter falls ill and dies because he believes, falsely, that he has just witnessed the midnight burial of a fever-infected corpse and has therefore been exposed to the disease. This death scene, which Brown

"A Plea for Color": Nella Larsen's Iconography of the Mulatta

Abstract: The Negro poet portrays our group in poems, the Negro musician portrays our group in jazz, the Negro actor portrays our group generally with a touch of hilarity. . . . So why should the Negro painter, the Negro sculptor mimic that which the white man is doing, when he has such an enormous colossal field practically all his own; portraying his people, historically, dramatically, hilariously, but honestly.—Archibald J. Motley Jr., ‘‘The Negro in Art’’

Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism

Abstract: Recent innovative North American poetry is a good place for thinking about the status of a new aesthetics, since it’s been busy writing one. I’m thinking of American and Canadian poets, most in their thirties and forties now, who are writing in light of the poetic and critical projects of Language poetry, though they are by no means simply following them out. These poets, referred to as ‘‘postLanguage’’ writers in the small-press world in which they’ve emerged, raise interesting questions about new habits of literary criticism, since their poems read both as theory and poetry. Although these poets have not yet produced a body of writing like the criticism and theory of the Language poets, their poetry reads like the yield, if not the foregrounding, of significant theoretical effort. More specifically, many of the post-Language writers seem to have taken a kind of Frankfurt school turn in their poems, by which I mean not so much that they are crankily denouncing a culture industry— though they may—or critically miming ‘‘authoritarian’’ types of language—though they do—but that they have become invested in a historical story about what Theodor Adorno called ‘‘damaged life,’’ or what Susan Stewart might call the ‘‘fate’’ of the material world, its pasts and possible futures. Unlike Adorno or Walter Benjamin, though, many of the post-Language poets have struck a kind of camp posture toward the ‘‘damage’’ of late capitalism, in a way that borrows from but reinterprets both the messianism of Adorno and Benjamin and the subcultural (especially queer) trajectory of camp. The best sketch I can offer of the Frankfurtian part of this historical story about a ‘‘damaged’’ material life is to say that it’s not

"The Public Heart": Urban Life and the Politics of Sympathy in Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York

Abstract: In 1841, the renowned novelist and social reformer Lydia Maria Child elected to move to New York City, away from her husband David Child, to serve as editor of the embattled National Anti-Slavery Standard. After the relative privacy of domestic life, Child found herself at the helm of a controversial abolitionist newspaper fraught with internal dissension in a city divided by nativist riots and class upheaval. As ‘‘a safety valve’’ for managing these pressures, Child began to publish a series of first-person meditations on her new city. Part reportorial and part editorial, her widely acclaimed series ‘‘Letters from New York’’ helped pioneer the genre of the weekly newspaper column in the United States. When the letters were later published in two collected volumes (1843 and 1845), they became Child’s most popular works. The city scenes in Child’s candid, reflective, often stream-ofconsciousness New York letters range from hogs feeding on rubbish heaps in the city gutters to flaming sunsets over the ocean vistas of the Battery. In each letter, such tangible moments of urban encounter become occasions for Child’s revelation of more abstract spiritual truths. Just as nature offered her fellow New England transcendentalists myriad analogies to the soul of the individual, Child worked to decipher what she terms ‘‘the hieroglyphics of angels’’ within the text of the city itself (L, 112). In the contrasts and contradictions of urban life, Child finds potent allegories of the spiritual struggle between the soul of the individual and the trials and temptations of life in the metropolis. She implicitly draws upon Christian allegorists from St. Augustine to John Bunyan in her efforts to trace the lines of a spiritual

"Let Her White Progeny Offset Her Dark One": The Child and the Racial Politics of Nation Making

Abstract: In his famous critique of slavery, Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754), John Woolman emphasizes the colonies’ arbitrary but entrenched association of slavery with ‘‘colour’’ by asking readers to consider the plight of a child. The child to whom Woolman draws his readers’ attention is a white child who, abandoned on the death of its parents, comes under the power ‘‘of a person, who endeavours to keep him a slave.’’ According to Woolman, the image of an enslaved white child provokes outrage in those otherwise untroubled by the ‘‘many black [people who] are enslaved’’ because slavery is generally ‘‘connected with the black colour, and liberty with the white’’ (CKN, 59). Woolman uses a child to argue that the ‘‘false’’ belief in essential racial difference that ‘‘through the force of long custom’’ has been used to justify slavery undermines the colonies’ abiding commitment to ‘‘liberty’’ (CKN, 58–59). Over a hundred years later, as the nation went to war to determine the fate of slavery within its borders, the popular carte de visite ‘‘Rosa, Charley, and Rebecca: Slave Children from New Orleans’’ (1864) used the child to raise the same question: How can a nation that is, as Lincoln asserts in the Gettysburg Address, ‘‘conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,’’ condone slavery? (see fig. 1). Not so much protecting the three seemingly white children it cloaks as indicating their vulnerability to the institution of slavery the nation continues to countenance, the American flag here symbolizes the contingency, rather than unprecedented ascendancy, of freedom in the new nation, and the disjunction between the children’s racial identity and the color of their skin makes palpable the final inadequacy of race to justify slavery in a nation founded upon freedom.

Mourning the Promised Land: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Automortography and the National Civil Rights Museum

Abstract: When Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final speech on the night of 3 April 1968 in Memphis, the weather was nearly biblical in its foreboding: the shutters of the Mason Temple flapped open in the winds, the city was blanketed in the darkness of power outages, and civil defense sirens wailed their warning. ‘‘[A]t some points’’ during the speech, notes Jesse Epps, ‘‘where there would have been applause, there was a real severe flash of lightening and a real loud clap of thunder that sort of hushed the crowd.’’ Through its proximity to King’s death, ‘‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’’ haunts representations of the man. Eerie, unnerving, and prophetic all at once, the speech, in which King contemplates his own death, elicits a melancholic response. In its uncanny afterlife, or what I call automortography, King’s last speech can be instrumental in reading the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, especially as it is represented in the National Civil Rights Museum built on the site of the Lorraine Motel where King died. Together, the speech and the museum’s space provide a lens through which to view the relation between the melancholic, the aesthetic, and politics. My essay will first consider how King’s automortography can lead us to becomemelancholically oriented—mobilized—to see his project as unfinished, to see ‘‘history [as] open for continual re-negotiation.’’ 2 Shifting next to a description of my visits to the National Civil Rights Museum during the summer of 2001, I will consider how the temporal and spatial aesthetics of the museum are similarly animated by a melancholic aesthetic. Both the speech and the space, through their aesthetics and their relation to King’s death, are objects of continual

Protest and Affirmation: Composite Texts in the Crisis

Abstract: The Crisis has long been recognized for its instrumentality in the early civil rights struggle and for its promotion of African American literature and the arts, particularly in the 1920s. But I want to suggest that its large cultural presence in the early twentieth century was due, in part, to its multimedia format and its layout, which have drawn scant scholarly attention. From its first issues, the Crisis—founded in 1910 as the monthly publication of the NAACP, with W. E. B. DuBois as editor—featured dynamic conjunctions of written and visual texts. Individual pages are composite texts that mix copy and headlines with photographs, drawings, maps, and graphs, a format that enhanced the coverage of its two most prominent topics: protest against racial injustice and affirmation of the achievements of African Americans. Furthermore, protest and affirmation are often juxtaposed. Regular columns like ‘‘Men of the Month’’ that demonstrate the accomplishments of individuals are often positioned beside articles that record and decry American racism. The resulting pages have an incongruence characteristic of the montage or collage. Art and film theories suggest that the discord among the elements of these forms heightens their effect. In the Crisis, these striking combinations of diverse texts and images are particularly pronounced in the magazine’s first decade. The disjunctions in the Crisis of those years make its critique of American racism and its affirmation of African Americans especially compelling. When DuBois was hired by the newly formed NAACP as its director of publicity and research in the summer of 1910, one of his pri-

Margaret Fuller's American Translation

Abstract: When Margaret Fuller drowned in a shipwreck off the American coast in 1850, her spirit, though finally disembodied, still haunted the imagination of her male peers. She was returning to conservative New England as a figure of both political radicalism and sexual transgression. Fuller had reported first-hand on the revolution in Rome, and there was scandalized speculation that she had conceived her son out of wedlock. Haunted by these excesses, Nathaniel Hawthorne resurrected her as the defiant, flagrantly sexual Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance (1852) and reenacted her drowning in a paradoxical attempt to ‘‘disempower . . . by fully sexualizing her.’’ If Hawthorne’s motive was to influence perceptions of Fuller as a woman, his intervention was complemented by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s attempt to control her as a writer. After the shipwreck, Emerson sent Henry David Thoreau to comb the beach in search of ‘‘any fragments of manuscript or other property.’’ Like Fuller’s body, the manuscripts on board the ship were never recovered. But the literary loss extends to her publications and surviving manuscripts, which were disemboweled by a group of her friends. Their primary aim seems to have been to repatriate Fuller by erasing the central feature of her theory of a multilingual American literature: translation. Fuller had been known in her lifetime as a translator, but her literary executor, her brother Arthur Fuller, purged her books of the translations they contained, and her book-length translations passed out of print. At a time when increasing numbers of immigrants were coming to the United States in the wake of the European revolutions and U.S. imperial expansion was taking aggressive militaristic form, Fuller’s silencing coincided with a xenophobic backlash against the foreign,

Federalist Criticism and the Fate of Genius

Abstract: A t the end of the eighteenth century, Fisher Ames retired from a distinguished career as an orator and statesman to shore up the failing Federalist cause by publishing essays of political criticism concerning the democratic excess he saw threatening America. Although subject to fainting spells and frail from the lingering tuberculosis that would finally kill him in 1808, he wrote tirelessly to warn of the unruly passions of the demos and to promote a republican vision of liberty and equality that was wholly distinct from a democratic one. But when Ames considered the matter of ‘‘literary genius’’ in American culture in an essay entitled ‘‘American Literature,’’ he struck a rather odd pose for such a thoroughgoing advocate of conservative Federalism. In the essay, Ames departs from more conventional critics who bemoan America’s lack of aesthetic achievement, arguing instead that genius is an omnipresent and timeless force, and that the circumstances of American society have only rendered it inactive and invisible: ‘‘[Genius] is a spark of elemental fire that is unquenchable. . . . It is to the intellectual world what the electric fluid is to nature, diffused everywhere, yet almost everywhere hidden, capable by its own mysterious laws of action and by the very breath of applause . . . of producing effects that appear to transcend all power, except that of some supernatural agent riding in the whirlwind’’ (‘‘AL,’’ 26–27). In locating genius both in the immediacy of intelligible experience and beyond the knowable world, Ames’s vision betrays the influence of early romantic writers, such as William Hazlitt, who called genius a ‘‘pervading and elastic energy.’’ But the passage is most remarkable for its lack of restraint or qualification, an enthusiasm that far

Gertrude Stein's Brain Work

Abstract: In the eighteenth century that age of manners and formal morals it was believed that the temper of a woman was determined by the turn of her features . . . [L]ater in the nineteenth century when the science of heredity had decided . . . something different, it was discovered that generalizations must be as complicated as the facts and the problem of interrelation was not to be so simply solved. —Gertrude Stein, notebooks for The Making of Americans In 1902, less than a year after she left her scientific training at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Gertrude Stein began preliminary work on The Making of Americans, subtitled ‘‘Being a History of a Family’s Progress.’’ 1 In her notebooks Stein identifies the ‘‘science of heredity’’ as integral to the novel’s narrative strategies, citing ‘‘the problem of interrelation’’ as her ostensible focus. But although family history is her purported model, ‘‘interrelation’’ is not a primary feature of the narrative; its characters, as one critic has written, are ‘‘a collection of separate units with almost no relation to each other.’’ Thus, while the novel narrates certain events in the Hersland family history—births, marriages, deaths—it departs almost immediately from hereditary progression, instead aiming rather grandiosely toward a ‘‘history of everyone,’’ as Stein expostulates: ‘‘[I]f I could only go on long enough I could finally describe really describe every kind of human being that ever was or would be living.’’ 3 Though purportedly a family saga, the novel is essentially unconcerned with filiation and succession, centering on ‘‘types’’ of individuals in isola-

Coming Out through History's Hidden Love Letters in Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract: At a Faulkner conference not long ago, a scholar posed the question, ‘‘WhyAbsalom, Absalom!?Why do we keep returning to it, stuck in it?’’ It haunts us, I suggest, partly because we’re still trying to avoid the question at the heart of its narrative, which is figured in the symbolic threat of interracial gay romance. This novel’s reception history as well as its own thematized reading practices confirm that our official histories secretly harbor the very homoerotic desires condemned by their oppressive traditions. Adumbrating a growing body of recent queer scholarship, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) implicitly forwards an ethical rather than ontological understanding of gay identity. Foregrounding this understanding allows me to extend to homoeroticism an approach like Toni Morrison’s ‘‘effort’’ in Playing in the Dark ‘‘to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject’’—to ‘‘the preserve of white male views’’ that still perceives itself as ‘‘removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States.’’ As Morrison attests, there is no ‘‘romance free of what Herman Melville called ‘the power of blackness.’ ’’ And there is none free of homoerotic desire. Absalom opens with the insistent evocation of a question: Why does Miss Rosa choose Quentin to hear the history she tells? She claims that her purpose is financial: she imagines Quentin selling her story to a magazine some day, perhaps when he is newly married and in need of extra money. In what becomes a recurring theme of hermeneutic doubt and indeterminacy, however, contrary evidence leads Quentin to suspect that Miss Rosa has undisclosed motivations. The ‘‘queer archaic sheet of ancient good notepaper’’ she sends him as a ‘‘sum-

Banking on Emotion: Financial Panic and the Logic of Male Submission in the Jacksonian Gothic

Abstract: He had become of late very importunate for his pay. . . . At first I kept interposing, trying to pacify him. . . . But I could not stop him, and soon my own temper was up. . . . I was excited to the highest degree of passion.—JohnWhiteWebster, The Extraordinary Confession of Dr. JohnWhite Webster, of the Murder of Dr. George Parkman What are we to make of the panic-stricken professional male so often circulating in antebellum sensationalism? Eyes bulging, hair standing on end, often in flight from the persecutions of a malevolent (inevitably male) enemy, this figure predominates in the fiction of sensationalist writers such as George Lippard and Edgar Allan Poe, but he is also a mainstay of the seemingly limitless production during this period of pamphletand pulp-newspaper narratives about murder, sexual intrigue, and financial betrayal. Though easily dismissed as the debased and silly product of an incipient mass culture, this figure’s ubiquitous presence and the narratives of submission and terror to which it is linked should be understood as signaling a response to the period’s perilously unstable economy. Indeed, while sensationalist narratives of financial failure became increasingly common in the years following the devastating Panic of 1837, perhaps none registered so fully the social trauma brought about by the boom-andbust economy than those depicting masculine crises of debt and finan-

“Howl” and Other Poems: Is There Old Left in These New Beats?

Abstract: The job would be beyond my means, for the present, however there is always hope for the Future. . . . I am the Trotsky with no dogma in your party.—Allen Ginsberg, Journals Mid-Fifties, 1954–1958 It is difficult to resist the pull of the future. It is difficult, to turn immediately to the case I will discuss in this essay, not to place Allen Ginsberg’s poems of the 1950s within forwardmoving, future-oriented cultural narratives. According to such narratives, Ginsberg’s first published poems remain notable above all because of what they announced for the future, or to put it another way, because of the influence they had on what we now call the past. Literary historians often refer to Howl as the most important poem since The Waste Land, arguing that it helped free American poetry from New Critical hegemony by proclaiming loudly and abruptly that free verse, the personal, and the political belonged again in the poetic vernacular. Similarly, social histories of the 1960s often citeHowl (and the Beat movement more generally) as the most famous embodiment of a structure of feeling—youthful, dissatisfied, rebellious—that would soon coalesce into the explicitly political cultures and practices of the New Left. In such accounts, Ginsberg’s poems earn their place of

Recovering the New: Transatlantic Roots of Modernism, and: Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity, and: The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (review)

Abstract: it does seem necessary to confront the critics (Kreyling and Yaeger but also Anne Goodwyn Jones, Susan V. Donaldson, Scott Romine, Thadious Davis, and Suzanne Jones) within the fold of Southern literary criticismwho are challenging the stature and influence of the writers Beck so admires. Beck’s study is certainly not hagiography, but she goes a bit too easy on the old guard, especially the more unreconstructed figures, such as Tate and Davidson. She also largely elides the ways the Fugitives confronted or ignored the role of race in the South. Although Beck professes dismay that the Fugitives have been squeezed out of the canon, she doesn’t consider why, or by whom, nor does she sufficiently attend to the difference gendermade formembers of this school, especially Welty and O’Connor. Beck’s chapters on Taylor’s and Lytle’s inheritance from the Fugitives work much better. One could also argue that although Robert Lowell and John Berryman may be greater writers, Jesse Stuart and Elizabeth Spencer (who receive only cursory attention here) are more properly the heirs of the Fugitives, especially if you want to argue, and Beck does, that a considerable part of the Fugitives’ legacy lies in their poetry’s effects on fiction. Beck’s work prods us to reexamine Fugitive and post-Fugitive poetry and fiction with a renewed awareness of these writers’ achievements and influence after their company at Vanderbilt disbanded. Beck’s study emerges as the most traditional and conservative of these three books but also (with the exceptions I noted) the most successful. But all three scholars add significantly to the continuing conversation about the making of Southern literature and offer persuasive evidence that much remains to be said about the old canon before we can truly integrate it—as we must—with the new currents in Southern, national, and transnational literary and cultural studies.

On to the Centennial

Abstract: A stock comic figure of novels set in humanistic academe disapproves of all changes over the past score of semesters and insists (as a miles gloriosus, ret.) that his cohort won the crucial victories, now being frittered away. He teaches me to try taking the evolving present on its own terms or, specifically, to avoid wanting American Literature in 2004 to clone the issues that I first read and admired as a graduate student in 1947. But age counseling would also warn me against trying to show fervent ‘‘cool’’ or however the trend-setters brand their up-to-dateness now. The oldsters blinding Florida with their shirts and skirts or dimming Las Vegas in their shorts encourage me to let the future race ahead without my cheerleading. So my approach here will aim at the historical and documentary. After all, how many people still around can claim fewer degrees of separation from AL than I can? How many knew personally all of its editors since its founding? I remind myself of Jay B. Hubbell mentioning that he once talked with someone who had heard Edgar Allan Poe deliver ‘‘The Raven.’’ However, the life-arc of AL, still rising, makes for a much happier narrative. Like an old-style historian, I will first set downmy impressions ofAL gathered while digging (not brainstorming) through graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. After joining the faculty at Duke University in 1952, I started to gather personal experience with the editors, primarily as colleagues in the Department of English. Unsurprisingly, those on the lower rungs seined for gossip about the full professors, who ran the department tightly. So I had a distant sense, anyway, of how AL was functioning. Next, restrained by the belief

Misreading The House of Mirth

Abstract: With her first best-selling novel, The House of Mirth (1905), Edith Wharton came face-to-face with a reading public determined to have a happy ending for its upwardly mobile heroines. TheDetroit Post recounted the story of one indignant reader who chastised Wharton as she was walking in her adopted hometown of Lenox, Massachusetts: ‘‘[I]t was bad enough that you had the heart to kill Lily. But here you are, shamelessly parading the streets in a red hat!’’ 1 For this stranger, Wharton’s insufficient grief over the death of her heroine is confirmed by her public appearance and underscored by her preference for red over black. In the ostentatious hat, Wharton may even have appeared complicit in the social and economic structures that created Lily’s painful final days in the milliner’s shop. Wharton’s Lenox neighbor was not alone in her dismay. The death of Lily Bart seems to have fundamentally affronted Wharton’s 1905 readership, and there were many readers to affront. The book sold 30,000 copies during the first three weeks, a number that doubled to 60,000 within a month. The numbers then increased exponentially: after ten more days, sales had reached 80,000, and after another ten days, 100,000. The book was soon one of the three most requested adult fiction titles at the New York Public Library. Such figures would be more than respectable for a literary author today; for Wharton’s time, they were astonishing. Astonishment at The House of Mirth’s popularity has become commonplace inWharton criticism, and every critic seems to have a favorite explanation for the novel’s appeal. Why indeed would a vast reading public, attracted primarily to escapist romances and rough-riding

“No! In Thunder”

Abstract: The first time I met Ed Cady he taught me a word I didn’t know. It was in September of 1988, when I came to Duke to give my job talk and to meet everyone associated with American Literature. I was beginning to think about what it might mean to become the first female editor of the journal. I was regarded as a ‘‘theorist’’ and a ‘‘feminist’’ who was doing ‘‘cultural studies,’’ as someone who did ‘‘interdisciplinary work’’ and who had made a mark ‘‘expanding the canon.’’ I have put scare quotes around those words because it was the very height of the culture wars and, for some people, those terms were scary. I knew that taking this job, becoming a member of the infamous Duke English Department, would put me at the center of the fray. Ed Cady had been editor of American Literature from 1974 to 1986. He was a former football player who had spent a good bit of time in the Midwest. Since I had taught at Michigan State University, we began our meeting by exchanging stories about the Big Ten before moving cautiously on to literature. We discussed three novelists I was teaching that semester at Princeton:WilliamDeanHowells, EdithWharton, and Charles Chesnutt. Going carefully, we talked with varying levels of enthusiasm about each of the three. We were each pleased, I think, to find enthusiasms we could share. 1988 was a year when you were either a dinosaur (a relic from a long-dead past) or Godzilla (destroyer of all Western culture). There wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver in between. Ed and I were friendly with one another and polite. He offered me something alcoholic to drink and I realized immediately that I had

Engineering Womanhood: The Politics of Rejuvenation in Gertrude Atherton's Black Oxen

Abstract: In her autobiography, Gertrude Atherton pronounces her novel Black Oxen (1923) a ‘‘miracle [that] gushed out like a geyser that had been ‘capped’ down in the cellars of my mind, battling for release.’’ According to Atherton, she finished this novel in record time, typing at a speed she ‘‘had never commanded before.’’ The geyser propelling the completion of what would become one of Atherton’s most successful and controversial books was nothing less than a ‘‘modern scientific fountain of youth’’—the result, she claims, of a course of anti-aging treatment that gave her ‘‘renewedmental vitality and neural energy’’ (A, 556, 562). In Atherton’s case, this therapy consisted of eight sessions of X-rays directed at the ovaries. Known as rejuvenation (or reactivation, the term Atherton preferred), the treatment was promoted in the 1920s by scientists, physicians—and Atherton—as a means for restoring sexual and mental potency. Rejuvenation therapy was big news in the 1920s when Viennese physiologist and biologist Eugen Steinach published the results of his early vasoligature operations. First performed on rats in 1910 and later on humans in 1918, the procedure tied off the sperm ducts, which purportedly had the effect of reversing the internal and external signs of aging. Steinach claimed that attacking the aging process ‘‘at its

"Prismatic and Profitable": Commerce and the Corporate Person in James's "The Jolly Corner"

Abstract: R. you know, is reputed the richest man in the world, and he certainly is the most powerfully suggestive personality I have ever seen. A man 10 stories deep, and to me quite unfathomable. Physionomie de Pierrot (not a spear of hair on head or face), flexible, cunning, quakerish, superficially suggestive of naught but goodness and conscientiousness, yet accused of being the greatest villain in business whom our country has produced.

“The Housetop Sea”: Cityscape Verse and the Rise of Modern American Poetry

Abstract: In her 1914 review of The Little Book of Modern Verse, Harriet Monroe objected to Jessie Rittenhouse’s selections: ‘‘If this anthology were complete evidence, our living American poets would deserve the common reproach of having little or nothing to say in immediate relation to modern life and thought.’’ 1 This polemic was part of Monroe’s ongoing insistence that American verse could—and must—address industrial-age modernity. Born in 1860 when poetry was themain genre of American literary culture, Monroe had watched as, over her lifetime, poetry came to be treated as the province of perfumed dilettantes, its powers circumscribed by a rigid idealism that appeared oblivious to the forces shaping turn-of-the-century American life: big business, the industrialized metropolis, mass immigration, a bewildering array of life-altering technologies, and emerging genres of mass culture that measured their audiences in the millions. Clucking with self-satisfied disdain for the unpoetic times, poetry’s institutional custodians seemed to prefer that it become nothing more than ‘‘an esoteric cult,’’ as one exasperated commentator remarked in 1899, if the alternative meant implicating it in the nation’s headlong modernization. For two decades before 1910, the impasse between the immovable gatekeepers of gentility and modernity’s irresistible force had mired American poetry in a crisis of value that many suspected would prove fatal. At their most doctrinaire, poetry’s genteel defenders repudiated contemporary subjects, insisting that the genre was a species of ‘‘divine make-believe’’ necessarily about ‘‘remote times and places.’’ 4 These inhibiting strictures were internalized even by young poets who desired greater relevance. Josephine Preston Peabody, for ex-