Showing papers in "American Literature in 2010"
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a method to detect the presence of brain cancer in a person's brain using a brain tumor, which is known as brain tumor regression (BP) detection.
Abstract: © 2010 by Duke University Press. The original publication is available through Duke University Press at DOI: 10.1215/00029831-2010-045
50 citations
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TL;DR: Melville's turn to poetry originates not in a politico-aesthetic reversal or withdrawal, as some critics have argued, but rather in a revised understanding of historical change as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Marrs's essay considers how Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) provides an immanent account, or inside narrative, of the author's transition from novelist to poet. Focusing on the relation between his figurations of time and the structures of his verse, Marrs argues that Melville's turn to poetry originates not in a politico-aesthetic reversal or withdrawal�as some critics have argued�but rather in a revised understanding of historical change. In his experience of the Civil War, Melville comes to perceive history as an agent of destructive repetition. This altered historical sensibility, Marrs demonstrates, not only leads him to conjoin the South's rebellion to an extended series of upheavals, from the bloody coups of ancient Rome to the peasant rebellions of medieval France, but also stimulates the very form of his poetry, in which damaged rhymes, broken meters, and twisted syntax attempt to carry the weight of the war and its chronopolitical meanings. In Battle-Pieces, the war's historical significance becomes a matter of intense formal interest, as Melville connects the mechanics of his verse to an idea of aesthetic time according to which poetry's aleatory and self-determined temporality exceeds or escapes the force of historical necessity. What Melville creates in Battle-Pieces through this fusion of politics and aesthetics is nothing less than a novel lyric form, one whose strange capaciousness has everything to do with its refractions and rearrangements of historical time.
26 citations
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TL;DR: This paper argued that there was no trial and that Wheatley instead made her career by cultivating an intricate network of relationships to white women, and explored the racialized and gendered dynamics of sentimentality in eighteenth-century American literature as well as their continuation in late twentieth-and twenty-first-century feminism.
Abstract: This essay challenges the image, popularized by Henry Louis Gates Jr., of eighteenth-century African American poet Phillis Wheatley "on trial" before a jury of eighteen white male judges. Brooks argues that there was no trial and that Wheatley instead made her career by cultivating an intricate network of relationships to white women. Because Wheatley crafted elegiac and occasional poems for her white female auditors in exchange for their support, these women exerted a disproportionate influence over the shape of her published Poems (1773). Their participation in this transactional, sentimental culture of mourning enabled white women to indulge feelings of self-consciousness, self-regard, and willful passivity imbricated with their increasingly privileged merchant-class status. It also allowed white women to evade taking responsibility for their economic privilege-a privilege capitalized on the unfreedom of enslaved men and women like Wheatley-and ultimately to evade their responsibility to the poet herself. This essay, then, explores the racialized and gendered dynamics of sentimentality in eighteenth-century American literature as well as their continuation in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminism.
24 citations
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TL;DR: This paper showed that the current American Funding Model causes the decline of U.S. educational attainment, and that underachievement is directly tied to underfunding, which is not the solution to this educational crisis but its source.
Abstract: The United States has long been seen as the world's leader in higher education, but in fact its academic outcomes have been stagnating or falling for years. Newfield shows that the current funding model for higher education is not the solution to this educational crisis but its source. Using datasets recently compiled by scholars with unusual access to student records, he demonstrates that underachievement is directly tied to underfunding. The antiegalitarian effects of the current American Funding Model cause the decline of U.S. educational attainment. But why do educational leaders face little resistance from faculty in perpetuating the current funding system? In part this is because faculty mistakenly believe that their own interests are served by the current system. In fact, Newfield shows, the current funding model also creates inequities in research funding that have done particular damage to the humanities. Both overall national educational attainment and advanced academic research will be improved by building funding structures with egalitarian procedures and goals-which require greatly expanded public funding-and faculty will need to adopt egalitarian values in order to improve national education and to fix their own institutions.
14 citations
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13 citations
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11 citations
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TL;DR: Finseth as discussed by the authors argues for the foundational role of nature in the development of racial ideology and demonstrates how understandings of nature animated and delineated discussions of racial identity and, by extension, slavery.
Abstract: The two books under review offer new avenues into the understanding of racial formation in the United States. Shades of Green focuses on nature’s role in defining race during the early national and antebellum periods, and Laughing Fit to Kill examines black humor’s critique of racial stereotypes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Both books are excellent additions to the critical field of U.S. literary race studies. Ian Finseth’s Shades of Green investigates the complex entanglements of race, nature, and culture. Revealing how eighteenthand nineteenth-century understandings of race spring from natural science and philosophy and are embedded in depictions of the natural world, Finseth argues for the foundational role of nature in the development of racial ideology. Through a wideranging analysis of cultural discourses (natural science, natural philosophy, geography, phenomenology, aesthetics, religion, politics, and economics), he convincingly demonstrates how understandings of nature animated and delineated discussions of racial identity and, by extension, slavery. Although Finseth shows how extensively this issue permeated U.S. literature and culture, he focuses most specifically on how representations of nature influenced antislavery thought. In deploying images of the natural world to mobilize public opinion for sociopolitical change, antislavery writers often conveyed a contradictory message that naturalized racial difference even as it accused slavery of violating natural liberty. Finseth’s focus on antislavery discourse underscores the difficulty of translating cultural ideas into political action. This study is as remarkable for its depth as for its breadth. The book is Book Reviews
11 citations
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TL;DR: Allison Hedge Coke's remarkable sequence of two narrative and sixty-four persona poems, Blood Run, gives voice to the traditions of Indigenous North American mound-building cultures and, most strikingly, to Indigenous earthworks themselves as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Allison Hedge Coke's remarkable sequence of two narrative and sixty-four persona poems, Blood Run, gives voice to the traditions of Indigenous North American mound-building cultures and, most strikingly, to Indigenous earthworks themselves. Central to this project is the poet's literary resurrection of a destroyed snake effigy mound once central to the Blood Run earthworks site, located on what is now the Iowa-South Dakota border, which she performs by citing the terrestrial form and celestial alignments of the majestic Serpent Mound extant in southern Ohio. Analysis of the thematic and structural complex Hedge Coke builds for her "Snake Mound" and "Stone Snake Effigy" persona poems reveals the multiple ways she simulates earthworks technologies, based in methods of Indigenous science, both in the strategic placement of individual poems within the sequence and in the complex geometry that underlies their free-verse forms. This subtle mathematical patterning, based on the natural numbers four, three, and seven and on the sequence of the first twenty-four primes, provides the foundation for a contemporary earthworks poetics. Hedge Coke explicates an older form of Indigenous writing, produced not simply on the land but through the medium of the land itself, while recording an activist witnessing of historical and ongoing attempts at its erasure.
10 citations
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TL;DR: Duane argues that reading two disparate texts together-the largely unknown school records chronicling the work of antebellum black children and a text by the most prominent African American author in the canon-allows a powerful model to emerge for reading the mediated voices of children, slaves, and other marginalized people as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In this essay, Duane argues that reading two disparate texts together-the largely unknown school records chronicling the work of antebellum black children and a text by the most prominent African American author in the canon-allows a powerful model to emerge for reading the mediated voices of children, slaves, and other marginalized people. Duane recovers and analyzes the records of the New York African Free School in the 1810s and 1820s, an archive that features the work of the first generation of black children to inherit freedom in New York City. She argues that the scripted performances of the NYAFS students offer insight into a set of overlapping cultural metaphors that structured black-white relations throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. The interaction between black students and white teachers anticipates the treatment that many early black abolitionists received from white abolitionists-of which the famous clash between Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison is the most prominent example. By untangling the assumptions that underlie these performances, Duane suggests that we can better understand and analyze other interactions scripted by the overarching and intertwined beliefs that African Americans were children, and that children's subjectivities could be shaped according to the will of their educators.
9 citations
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TL;DR: Farrell places Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in the context of the nineteenth-century movement for education reform and explores the novel's representation of pedagogy and adoption and how these techniques worked simultaneously to incorporate racial outsiders and mark them as separate from the religious educators who taught and cared for them as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Farrell places Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in the context of the nineteenth-century movement for education reform. Her essay explores the novel's representation of pedagogy and adoption and how these techniques worked simultaneously to incorporate racial outsiders and mark them as separate from the religious educators who taught and cared for them. Stowe drew these strategies from James Janeway's seventeenth-century Token for Children storybooks, which evangelicals actively reprinted and adapted for use in Sunday schools in Stowe's time. These token stories revolve around dying child "saints," of whom Stowe's character Eva is one iteration. Upon death, these ideal children leave a powerful emotional memory that can transform incorrigible children into eager students. As the example of Mary Martha Sherwood's The History of Little Henry and His Bearer shows, the pedagogic formula from Janeway's original Token books was re-imagined in the nineteenth century to involve colonial missionaries working in imperial outposts such as India. Thus the character Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin becomes both the object of a colonizing, missionary effort within the nation and an example with which Stowe can imagine ex-slaves becoming part of American society without changing its character. The intimacy created by adoption and loving education becomes a tool for garnering submission from racial outsiders.
8 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, an Emersonian political model of violent action carried out by a small, loosely confederated, religiously motivated group of individuals-an Emerson of the terror cell-is presented.
Abstract: Under the influence of Calvinist and radical abolitionist John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson reconsidered the value of political activism rooted in absolutist and sectarian religious beliefs. Retreating from the earlier declarations of secular and democratic individualism for which he is best known, Emerson came to embrace even the most extreme forms of militancy-up to and including terroristic violence-as legitimate means to engage in the modern secular political process. Representing Brown's abolitionism as an approved form of zealotry, Emerson began to praise historical religious warriors, most notably the Muslim martyrs ready to die for their faith. Viewing such militancy as not just appropriate but necessary within a constitutional arrangement whose founding violence is suppressed, he anticipated a key strain of contemporary postsecular scholarship (led by Talal Asad) that sees American fascination with the figure of the Muslim terrorist as a symptom of the modern West's own contradictory and incomplete process of secularization. At the same time, also under the influence of John Brown and his volunteer army, Emerson articulated a model for practical action that depended neither on the lone individual nor on the sanctioning power of the state but rather on the temporary and partial congruence of multiple individuals. What emerges from this conjunction of political theology and rescaling is an Emersonian political model of violent action carried out by a small, loosely confederated, religiously motivated group of individuals-an Emerson of the terror cell.
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TL;DR: The authors argued that much of this inattention and misreading has been a result of failing to see how Lin's engagement with the discourse on technology (and especially his decades-long attempt to invent an electric Chinese typewriter) was central to both his literary work and its transnational circulation.
Abstract: Despite his enormous popularity as a native interpreter of Chinese culture for Western readers, Lin Yutang's literary career has been largely ignored in American studies and only selectively attended to in Asian and Asian American studies. This essay argues that much of this inattention and misreading has been a result of failing to see how Lin's engagement with the discourse on technology (and especially his decades-long attempt to invent an electric Chinese typewriter) was central to both his literary work and its transnational circulation. Whereas some scholars have argued that Lin simply internalized the basic tenets of Euro-American orientalism, Williams contends that Lin's typewriter demonstrates an aggressive attempt to modify and subvert those discursive practices for Asia's benefit. Recasting Lin's career in the context of a discourse he calls "Asia-as-techne" not only provides a more accurate picture of Lin's transnational literary development; it also opens a space for a reading of Lin's novel Chinatown Family that dramatically alters the typical Asian American understanding of his work and offers an important contribution to the larger critical discourse on the place of technology in American studies.
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TL;DR: Chaney analyzes cartoons representing slaves and slavery from the British satirical periodical Punch, or the London Charivari to argue that African American readers such as Frederick Douglass engaged in an evolving role as readers, interpreters, and users of Punch's iconographic discourse as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Chaney analyzes cartoons representing slaves and slavery from the British satirical periodical Punch, or the London Charivari to argue that African American readers such as Frederick Douglass engaged in an evolving role as readers, interpreters, and users of Punch's iconographic discourse-even when, after the outbreak of the Civil War, the political sensibilities of the British periodical were no longer sympathetic to the cause of abolition. Reading the ekphrastic relation between Punch cartoons of Shakespearean mock-ups of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis and Douglass's citation of these images in various mid-nineteenth-century speeches, Chaney argues that this intertextual and transatlantic dialogue with Punch enabled Douglass to renegotiate inscriptions of racialization, authority, and iconic celebrity. Beyond the cartoons, key pieces of evidence utilized in the essay include humorous asides from Samuel Ringgold Ward during an 1853 address of the Congregational Union in England, Douglass's speech "The Proclamation and a Negro Army" (1863), and several of Douglass's statements about the racial and political value of his hair from various sources.
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TL;DR: Black Empire, narrated in the first person by one Carl Slater, ex-reporter for the Harlem Blade, presents a rendition of race war that both participates in and parodies the production of the mediagenic fantasy it reflects in the aftermath of the Italo-Ethiopian War.
Abstract: First in the chronological table of world affairs relevant to any argument concerning the black internationalism of the 1930s is the Italo-Ethiopian War. George Samuel Schuyler, then the most prominent black journalist in the United States, stood in for international-minded black Americans at the vanguard of the pro-Ethiopian campaigns.
For all its obvious concerns with issues of black internationalism raised by the Italo-Ethiopian War-and though it gripped the black popular imagination of its time-Schuyler's Black Empire, originally serialized from 1936 to 1938 in the Pittsburgh Courier, has not attracted much attention from modern critics, largely due to the uncomfortably violent racial scenarios it depicts. Yet, as Taketani's essay suggests, to address such seemingly objectionable scenarios is to confront the origins of black internationalism in the race war fantasy that gained global currency in the media surround of the mid-1930s, triggered by the rumored alliance of two colored empire-nations, Ethiopia and Japan.
Black Empire, narrated in the first person by one Carl Slater, ex-reporter for the Harlem Blade, presents a rendition of race war that both participates in and parodies the production of the mediagenic fantasy it reflects in the aftermath of the Italo-Ethiopian War. By allowing the signifying "colored empire" full play in the black imagination, Black Empire affords a deeper understanding of the objectives of mid-1930s black internationalism.
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TL;DR: Lopenzina et al. as discussed by the authors make the attempt to regard Apess's narrative from "native space," weighing the loose materials of his life as he recorded them against a deeper understanding of indigenous tradition and practice, and begin to see Apess as an active participant in a network of Native community and belief.
Abstract: Nineteenth-century Pequot minister William Apess has appeared to many readers over the years as a Native American figure who fully assimilated into the expectations of the dominant culture, his role as Christian minister placing an insuperable distance between him and the traditions of his people. More recently, critics have come to find in Apess a radical voice latching on to the power of the pulpit and the rhetoric of the abolitionist movement to argue for Native rights. In either case, Apess seems to have risen up from a kind of intellectual vacuum with no way of accounting for his inspired activism. Lopenzina seeks to relocate Apess within the intellectual traditions of the Native northeast. If Apess appears as an isolated figure, having achieved a measure of success in spite of his inauspicious origins, this may have something to do with the oral methodologies of Native peoples in the nineteenth century and the archival absences imposed by a settler culture determined to make Natives "vanish" from the colonial scene. When we make the attempt to regard Apess's narrative from "Native space," weighing the loose materials of his life as he recorded them against a deeper understanding of indigenous tradition and practice, we begin to see Apess as an active participant in a network of Native community and belief. Eulogy on King Philip shows Apess connecting with Native methodologies in heretofore unnoticed ways, drawing on traditional Native diplomacy and the "tragic wisdom" of his people to carve out a message of interracial peace.
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TL;DR: The work of Anzia Yezierska presents a challenge to early-twentieth-century models of personhood, citizenship, and reading based on common assumptions regarding the nature of sympathy as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The work of Anzia Yezierska presents a challenge to early-twentieth-century models of personhood, citizenship, and reading based on common assumptions regarding the nature of sympathy. Yezierska's deployment of what Mikkelsen terms "aesthetic empathy" draws on an emergent discourse about empathy that defined this concept quite differently from current usages. Rather than designating an interpersonal dynamic, this discourse considered empathy as a relation among bodies, objects, and desire within capitalism. Yezierska's fashion-conscious characters reveal a United States constituted by economically, socially, and culturally mobile, not to mention aesthetically pleasing, bodies. Both Jewish and American, these bodies serve as touchpoints for their own desiring gazes, positing a model of assimilative empathy for "native" and immigrant alike in which "looks" refer to both an act and its object, the agent blurred with the process of her continual self-invention as a hybrid of multiple cultures.
Meditating on relations between subject and object, viewer and vision, consumer and commodity, Yezierska makes plain the role of citizen as consumer. Her work crystallizes the dominance of technologies that infused the public sphere with art and beautiful images of human forms, leading the modern spectator to see others as potential reflections of herself. Mikkelsen's examination begins with a reading of the short story "Wings"; continues with a discussion of Jewish American involvement with the garment industry and high fashion as imagined in Salome of the Tenements (1922); and concludes with early theorizations of aesthetic empathy's role in motion pictures such as Hungry Hearts (1922), the film made of Yezierska's short stories.
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TL;DR: The contraband song, a genre of poetry and music popular during the American Civil War, has been studied by Cohen as mentioned in this paper, who argues that the contraband songs offer a particularly rich opportunity to map the contested terrain of wartime culture.
Abstract: Cohen excavates the social history of the contraband song, a genre of poetry and music popular during the American Civil War. Written in the voices of "contrabands," former slaves living under the protection of the Union army, contraband songs emerged in the intersections of diverse discourses and institutions of the 1860s: unionist nationalism, blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism, emancipation, antiwar satire, and the study of slave culture that began under the Port Royal experiment. The mobility and mutability of the contraband song allowed it to serve competing political agendas, and therefore Cohen argues that the contraband song offers a particularly rich opportunity to map the contested terrain of wartime culture. Ultimately, the article suggests that wartime poetry and music were crucial to the mediation of the war and must be taken more seriously in the historiography of wartime culture. Cohen analyzes a series of contraband works: abolitionist poems by John Greenleaf Whittier; African American spirituals like "O Let My People Go"; minstrel songs like "Kingdom Coming"; and an assortment of anonymous poems published as broadsides and in periodicals such as the Liberator. In addition, the article examines the use of these works in performances, quotations, recitations, and individual acts of reading. By combining close reading with an archival history of these poems and songs, Cohen proposes that "circulation" and "genre" offer valuable categories of analysis for the study of nineteenth-century poetry.
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TL;DR: Toomer's Cane as mentioned in this paper, a novel about African American folk culture, preservationism, and the mediation of song, was considered from a musicological perspective and discussed the novel's musical poetics with an ear toward 1920s discussions of African African folk culture.
Abstract: Graham considers Jean Toomer's Cane from a musicological perspective and discusses the novel's musical poetics with an ear toward 1920s discussions of African American folk culture, preservationism, and the mediation of song. At the time of Cane's publication, Toomer's poems-modeled on African American spirituals-could be appreciated and sung by readers of various ethnic backgrounds. This essay argues that their musicality and performability were ultimately intended to promote interracial empathy and to elide racial difference.
Other topics of the essay include turn-of-the-century American theater, Tin Pan Alley and the music industry, anthropology and ethnography in the southern United States, and Toomer's debts or relations to other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, among them James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes.
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TL;DR: The authors investigates the impact of the present in early historical fictions and how that present is manifested in the elaborate allegorical structures of the first popular novels to emerge after the War of 1812.
Abstract: Letter investigates the impact of the present in early historical fictions and how that present is manifested in the elaborate allegorical structures of the first popular novels to emerge after the War of 1812. Specifically, the figure of the suffering Revolutionary soldier, central to both James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy and John Neal's Seventy-Six, serves as a contemporary allegorical expression of historical change, a figure best explained by Walter Benjamin's definition of the allegorical ruin. The suffering soldier complicates national origins and resists narrative closure. As a literary figuration, this soldier represents a disruptive discourse in the early nation, one that contradicts master narratives of progress and national destiny. Thus, the suffering soldier complicates criticisms of early popular novels by suggesting a highly complex cultural function for the genre. Presentism as an early national orientation suggests an alternative to historical progressivism and antiquarianism, both of which depend on linear approaches to the study of early U.S. culture and literary history. Cooper, when read alongside his contemporary Neal, reveals a deeply conflicted temporal sensibility, one as much concerned with past losses as it is hopeful of future gain. Historical allegories, because they articulate between past and present, offer an important discursive frame for studying the emerging significance of novels in early national culture.
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TL;DR: The authors traces the emergence of a new ecological discourse that began to shape thinking about urban life across disciplines in the mid-twentieth century, and examines the legacies left by those who opposed it.
Abstract: Rowan's essay traces the emergence of a new ecological discourse that began to shape thinking about urban life across disciplines in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s, urban institutions such as the New Yorker embraced what historians Michael Barbour, Robert McIntosh, and Gregg Mitman describe as "community" ecology. Later, postwar urbanists such as Jane Jacobs would draw on the authority of community ecology to reckon with the physical and social transformations then being carried out within New York City's urban renewal programs. Offering scientific evidence of cooperation as a fundamental biological principle and defining diversity as a critical element of communal stability, community ecology helped city observers challenge the logic of urban renewal by infusing public relationships that had previously been dismissed as emotionally bankrupt with new affective value. Attending more carefully to how these urban ecologists redeveloped the ways in which their communities should be understood, Rowan argues, allows us to reexamine the legacies left by those who opposed it-a heritage that many now fear turned a blind eye to issues of social justice.
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TL;DR: Hanlon's essay depicts South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks's 1856 assault on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner as a flashpoint for 1850s controversies over the laying of transatlantic telegraphic cable between the United States and England as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Hanlon's essay depicts South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks's 1856 assault on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner as a flashpoint for 1850s controversies over the laying of transatlantic telegraphic cable between the United States and England. Widely treated by both Northern and Southern commentators as a form of political discourse, Brooks's caning of Sumner also reverberated with a broad set of concerns over telegraphic communication. Many noted that the cane with which Brooks assaulted Sumner was constructed of gutta-percha, the substance that was used to insulate the transatlantic cable and that served, over the course of the decade, as a metonym for advanced telecommunications technology. In Congress, Brooks's assault was depicted by Senator Andrew Butler as a rejoinder to Sumner's speech as an improper-because prepublished and internationally distributed-abolitionist diatribe. The Brooks-Sumner affair, in which a Southern legislator smote his abolitionist colleague using a fragment of the era's most salient symbol for global peace and goodwill, called forth a set of anxieties concerning the telegraphic disembodiment of the voice, the unchecked proliferation of speculation and rumor, and the globalization of the American cotton trade.
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TL;DR: Hager as mentioned in this paper explores the political implications of Redburn's spatial tropes, paying special attention to the architectural history of the New York customhouse and the way Melville expanded the novel itself.
Abstract: In a standard narrative of Herman Melville's career, the author's initial tendency toward cultural nationalism-most famously displayed in his 1850 essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses"-gave way during the early 1850s to political misgivings and increasingly dark novels. The Democratic Party and the "Young America" movement seemed to take a sinister turn with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and Melville grew disillusioned with Young America's literary side following the poor reception of Moby-Dick (1851). Melville's fourth novel, Redburn (1849), though regarded as one of his secondary works, merits greater attention as a counternationalist meditation on the origins of U.S. culture. Because it was written before the political events of the early 1850s and Melville's falling-out with the New York literary establishment, Redburn focuses our attention on a different context for the deepening and darkening of Melville's work: the apparent realization of U.S. "Manifest Destiny" in 1848, with a massive territorial conquest from Mexico. Hager explores the political implications of Redburn's spatial tropes, paying special attention to the architectural history of the New York customhouse and the way Melville expanded the novel itself. As this essay argues, Redburn suggests that excesses of space-architectural, textual, and territorial-obscure the origins and founding principles of the nation.
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TL;DR: Hochman's essay as discussed by the authors uses the work of George Washington Cable to examine a far-reaching set of debates about media technology, auditory perception, and cultural difference that emerged during the 1880s and 1890s.
Abstract: Hochman's essay uses the work of George Washington Cable to examine a far-reaching set of debates about media technology, auditory perception, and cultural difference that emerged during the 1880s and 1890s. The first half focuses on Cable's classic dialect novel The Grandissimes (1880)-a text that constantly signals its own inability to reproduce the speech and music of New Orleans's Afro-Creole community-in order to illustrate the growing sense among late-nineteenth-century U.S. writers that the written word was fundamentally inadequate as a sound archive. The second half turns to the work of three prominent U.S. ethnographers (Franz Boas, Jesse Walter Fewkes, and Benjamin Ives Gilman) who posited the newly invented phonograph as a more ideal form of cultural listening and writing.
"Hearing Lost, Hearing Found" combines literary and media history to advance two overlapping arguments. On the one hand, Hochman makes a case for the centrality of anthropological theories of sound (especially the emergence of sound technology) to Cable's work and thought. On the other, he demonstrates more broadly that the phonograph's documentary authority evolved out of late-nineteenth-century print culture's engagement with the "sound" of race. It was only after U.S. intellectuals began to recognize the extent to which the acts of listening and writing are mediated (and potentially distorted) by racial and cultural differences that the new technology of mechanical sound reproduction could make the old medium of the written word seem insufficient.
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TL;DR: This paper examined the narrative construction of Harriet Jacobs in 1865, when her former editor Lydia Maria Child included a revised selection from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in The Freedmen's Book, a reader Child was developing to help newly freed slaves learn to read and make a life for themselves.
Abstract: Stewart examines the narrative construction of Harriet Jacobs in 1865, when her former editor Lydia Maria Child included a revised selection from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in The Freedmen's Book, a reader Child was developing to help newly freed slaves learn to read and make a life for themselves. Stewart reads the revised selection from Jacobs's narrative as a case study of core tensions in Child's Reconstruction rhetoric and, more broadly, the anxious rhetoric surrounding the postemancipation status of African Americans in 1865. In The Freedmen's Book, Child celebrates a revolutionary tradition with its attendant social disruption at the same time she champions conventional gender roles as a way of patterning much-needed stability in the post-Emancipation United States. Given her involvement in the 1861 publication of Incidents, Child's role in the 1865 narrative raises questions about the slipperiness of textual authority, and Stewart posits that the scholarly debate over Jacobs's authorial legitimacy has perhaps obscured our awareness of her as a textual construction and (Re)construction-a figure whose narrative was ever adapting to a changing political context and the needs of a community in transition.
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TL;DR: Gonzalez et al. as discussed by the authors explored the relationship between race and class and between politics and literary form in major works of Chicano literature over the last hundred years, focusing on the fiction of five writers whose work spans a century: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Danny Santiago, and Cecile Pineda.
Abstract: The field of Mexican American fiction has exploded since the 1990s, yet there has been relatively little critical assessment of this burgeoning area in American literature. \"Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form\" is a provocative and timely study of literary form that focuses on the fiction of five writers whose work spans a century: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Danny Santiago, and Cecile Pineda.Drawing on the Marxist concept of reification to examine the connections between social history and narrative, Marcial Gonzalez highlights the relationship between race and class in these works and situates them as historical responses to Mexican American racial, political, and social movements since the late nineteenth century.The book sheds light on the relationship between politics and form in the novel, an issue that has long intrigued literary scholars. This timely and original study will appeal to scholars and students of American literature, ethnic studies, Latino studies, critical race theory, and Marxist literary theory.This book explores the relationship between race and class and between politics and literary form in major works of Chicano literature over the last hundred years.