Showing papers in "American Literature in 2007"

Revising the Human: Silence, Being, and the Question of the Animal in Nightwood

Abstract: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, like many modernist texts, sustains a commentary on the status of the human subject in the early twentieth century as it straddles the legacies of Enlightenment rationalism and Darwinian revelations. But unlike much modernist writing, Barnes’s novel refuses the displacement of animality onto marginalized others in the service of imperialist and masculinist projections. While the discourses of gender, race, and sexuality in Nightwood have been under examination for some time, Barnes’s species discourse, and its relationship to language, circumscribe a posthuman identity premised on a critique of the phallus. Robin Vote figures nonidentity as a form of subjectivity, where the nonlinguistic, the undecidable, and the animal serve to revise what counts as human. Barnes’s novel formulates a scathing critique of language as that which forces the unknowable into the realm of the known. Reading this ornate and historically marginalized text engages us in deeply philosophical narratives that trouble humanist subjectivities by privileging a kind of animal consciousness. Bonnie Kime Scott tells us that the original title of Barnes’s novel reveals more clearly its engagement with the discourse of species: “Djuna Barnes wrote to her writer/ agent/friend Emily Holmes Coleman that, before settling upon NightRevising the Human: Silence, Being, and the Question of the Animal in Nightwood

The Barbarous Voice of Democracy: American Captivity in Barbary and the Multicultural Specter

Abstract: On 25 July 1785, a Boston schooner named the Maria, bound for the Mediterranean on a trading voyage, was commandeered by a fourteen-gun Algerian xebec plying the waters off the coast of Portugal. The “Mahometans” who boarded the six-man vessel demanded to see its flag and papers. “[O]f the first they had no knowledge,” writes James Cathcart in his account of eleven years in Barbary captivity, “and the papers they could not read and Mediterranean pass we had none.”1 With this terse assessment of national nonrecognition and the international legal jeopardy it occasioned, the American nation’s political relationship with the Islamic world opened its first violent chapter. The ongoing history of this relationship is proving to be a complex narrative. Of late, scholars and historians have compared the United States’ engagement in the Barbary Wars (1801–05; 1815) with the nation’s current “war on terrorism,” which once again pits the United States against stateless Muslim actors and the Islamic states that give them harbor.2 Indeed, the two eras have striking parallels. The just-marked two-hundredth anniversary of the United States’ first foreign military engagement, the Tripolitan War (1801–1805), presents an appropriate time to survey the arc of American political, military, and rhetorical relations with the Islamic world. Americans first came to know this world through American narratives of Barbary captivity and the wider public discussions to which this white slavery gave impetus. According to Paul Baepler, although “the Barbary captivity narrative in English existed for more than three centuries, it caught the attention of American readers primarily during the first half of the nineteenth century. Between John Foss’ 1798 narrative and The Barbarous Voice of Democracy: American Captivity in Barbary and the Multicultural Specter

Negotiating Peace, Negotiating Literacies: A French-Iroquois Encounter and the Making of Early American Literature

Abstract: A large canoe with three Iroquois men and a French captive approaches the small settlement of Trois Rivières, on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. It is 5 July 1645. Suddenly, those gathered along the shore recognize the Frenchman. Guillaume Cousture, a young man taken captive by the Iroquois and presumed dead, has been brought back alive. As French settlers rush to welcome Cousture, a tall and stately man stands up in the front of the boat and addresses them. He is Kiotseaeton, a well-known Iroquois orator, diplomat, and ambassador of great prestige. He has come to negotiate for peace. His body is covered with beaded strings and belts, known as wampum.1 Exchanged during peace-treaty negotiations, wampum serves, according to a Jesuit missionary in the area, “the same function as writing and contracts among us” ( JR, 40:164).2 The wampum that Kiotseaeton brings to this encounter represents the thoughts and indeed the words authorized by the tribal body on whose behalf he speaks and negotiates. This wampum is part of a narrative and documentary tradition that the Iroquois have used in diplomacy for generations.3 To this treaty encounter, the French bring their own mystic media for materializing words: pen, ink, and paper. Just as wampum is more than a cultural artifact, alphabetic script is not simply a record of facts. Both are documentary media and forms of literacy—one printed, one beaded and strung.4 Each emerges out of distinct cultural and textual contexts, but at the moment of this peace negotiation in North America, wampum and alphabetic script intersect in a space where neither is hegemonic. Indeed, this 1645 treaty council represents a mutual attempt by French and Iroquois delegates Negotiating Peace, Negotiating Literacies: A French-Iroquois Encounter and the Making of Early American Literature

“A” for Atlantic: The Colonizing Force of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Abstract: In The Scarlet Letter, colonization just happens or, more accurately, has just happened. We might recall, by contrast, how Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s novel Hope Leslie elaborately narrates the sociopolitical process of making an Indian village into a native English spot. Hawthorne eclipses this drama of settlement. Although Hawthorne, like Sedgwick, sets his plot of sexual crisis in the early colonial period of Stuart political crisis and English Civil War, he places these events in the distant backdrop, as remote from his seventeenthcentury characters as his nineteenth-century readers. Meanwhile, he recasts Sedgwick’s whimsical heroine, Hope Leslie, as a sober, already arrived, and already fallen woman. In beginning from this already fallen moment, Hawthorne keeps offstage both the “fall” of colonization and its sexual accompaniment. He thereby obscures his relationship to a long Atlantic literary and political history. But if we attend to the colonizing processes submerged in The Scarlet Letter, we discover the novel’s place in transatlantic history—a history catalyzed by the English Civil War and imbued with that conflict’s rhetoric of native liberty. We see that Hawthorne’s text partakes of an implictly racialized, Atlantic ur-narrative, in which a people’s quest for freedom entails an ocean crossing and a crisis of bodily ruin. That is, The Scarlet Letter fits a formation reaching from Oroonoko, Moll Flanders, Charlotte Temple, and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative to The Monk and Wieland and continuing through such divergent yet fundamentally Atlantic texts as Billy Budd, Of One Blood, The Voyage Out, and Quicksand.1 Critics have long noted the offstage locale of Hester Prynne and “A” for Atlantic: The Colonizing Force of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter