Showing papers in "American Literature in 2011"

Organic Shrapnel: Affect and Aesthetics in September 11 Fiction

Abstract: Smith's essay examines history, politics, and literary form in September 11 fiction. It begins with the contention that the traditionally conceived relationship between trauma and form poses a problem for the analysis of September 11 fiction. It is often posited that traumatic events produce formal changes in narrative strategies that reflect transformations in historical and political thinking, but many 9/11 novels, like Don DeLillo's Falling Man, do not demonstrate significant formal departures from pre-9/11 works. Others, like Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, offer gestures toward formal innovation but ultimately support sentiments that are tied to a regressive view of history. Yet in turning to a less commonly considered work of September 11 fiction, Laird Hunt's experimental noir The Exquisite, the essay offers another way of thinking about the role of form in relation to political change. Hunt's work shows that formal innovations-in this case, a particularly strange use of ecological metaphor-need not merely reflect historical ruptures, but can also be understood to produce bodily affects that are themselves constitutive of altered attitudes toward the present.

Dave Eggers's What Is the What: Fictionalizing Trauma in the Era of Misery Lit

Abstract: Twitchell's essay examines Dave Eggers's What Is the What (2006) in the context of recent international interest in the morality of uncertainty, a stance which looks to self-erasure, not-knowing, and imaginative empathy as providing both the most humane response to trauma and a generative platform for cross-cultural understanding. Twitchell posits that this turn can be productively situated in relation to two seemingly unconnected "problem" genres of U.S. literature: representations of Africa and memoirs of suffering. By positioning What Is the What-the fictionalized autobiography of a real-life Sudanese Lost Boy written by a white American author-as the limit case for the imaginative representation of distant trauma, two distinct questions arise and converge: how did the fictionalizing of suffering become a means of rendering it usable, and what confluence of events has made it ethically possible for an American writer to offer a first-person account of African trauma? By sketching the recent critical histories of depictions of Africa and memoirs of trauma-each of which have been haunted by the specters of narcissism and fraudulence-Twitchell argues that two seemingly antagonistic cultural imperatives coincided at the moment of the novel's publication: the moral obligation to empathize with distant and dissimilar persons, and a skepticism about the morality of empathic identification itself. She suggests that Eggers's novel proposes a way out of this stalemate by offering a model for empathic response grounded in the ethical value of uncertainty and error, in which representations of Africa and memoirs of suffering function as privileged sites of cultural conversation not despite their inevitable inaccuracies but because of them.

“Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!” Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America

Abstract: Dismissed for decades as juvenile entertainment, comic books had by the early 1970s come of age as America's "native art": taught on Ivy League campuses, studied by European scholars and filmmakers, and taken up as a new generation's cultural critique of American society. The cultural regeneration of the comic book was made possible by the revamping of a key American fantasy figure, the superhero, from a transparent champion of the national interest to a genetic and species outcast mapping the limits of the human. This refashioning was most visible in the invention of the "mutant superhero"-a figure popularized in Marvel Comics's acclaimed X-Men series-whose genetic difference from humanity positioned the superhero as a cultural outsider akin to racial, gender, and sexual minorities struggling for political recognition in the post-Civil Rights period. In this essay, Fawaz theorizes the concept of "popular fantasy" to describe how tropes of literary enchantment are deployed to make sense of emergent real-world social and political relations. Through a close reading of the X-Men in the mid-to-late 1970s, Fawaz shows how the comic book visually absorbed the cultural politics of the women's movement and the gay liberation movement to figure "mutation" as an expansive form of cultural difference that wedded fantasy to the ideals of radical politics. By linking the fictional category of mutation to lived categories of difference, the X-Men series produced a mainstream popular fantasy that legitimized and helped shape readers' inchoate affective investments in antiracist and antisexist ideals in the 1970s.

A World of Difference: Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and the Protocols of Racial Reading

Abstract: Science fiction poses particular dilemmas for referential reading practices privileged in ethnic literary studies and African American literature. Because science fiction often requires the reader to discern the governing norms and values of its constructed, alternative world, it questions the traditional contexts and visual cues by which racial difference appears as racial difference at all. In this essay, Jerng first analyzes how race has been read in science fiction. Cataloging the practices of reading race in science fiction tells us a great deal about how we notice race and the underlying rules whereby racial markers are seen as significant or insignificant. Jerng then turns to the work of Samuel R. Delany, in particular his best-selling novel Dhalgren, to suggest how its narrative strategies lie in rewriting the readability of racial difference. By focusing on reading practices, Jerng turns the attention of critical race theory and SF studies toward the problem of how we notice and evaluate race within the social field. Drawing on frameworks from philosophies of imagination and perception, as well as theories of virtuality, the essay highlights the cognitive and perceptual strategies used to structure the appearance of race. In relocating the role of perception in the task of reading race, the observation of a conventional racial marker no longer serves as a starting point, as something already found in literary texts, but as the effect of a problem of world construction that reconfigures subjects and objects.

“This Alarming Generosity”: White Elephants and the Logic of the Gift

Abstract: In this essay, Bullen examines the literary and cultural history of the term white elephant-a phrase that refers to a burdensome object that is impossible to sell or give away-by tracing its origin in the American lexicon to the United States' diplomatic relations with Siam in the 1850s. Although a certain kind of albino elephant (chang pheuak) was regarded as auspicious in Siam, these animals were not white, nor were they given as gifts by the king of Siam in order to ruin his rivals. Bullen traces the emergence of the white elephant as a figure for value in European and American travel writing. By the 1850s this animal's association with wasteful expenditure had begun to surface even in prominent American literature, including Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). He argues that the white whale operates in a manner that calls to mind the white elephant, and that this novel as a whole functions as an allegorical critique of precisely the oriental despotism decried as the corrupt source of stagnant expenditure of which the white elephant serves as a prominent symbol. Finally, he examines the relationship between Siam and America in George Bacon's Siam, the Land of the White Elephant, as It Was and Is (1873), a text that subtly yet unmistakably aligns the white elephant with the figure of the Siamese twin, suggesting that despite their apparent differences, America and Siam might share a fundamental-and, for Bacon, repulsive-intimacy.

On the Literary Use of Superheroes; or, Batman and Superman Fistfight in Heaven

Abstract: Cates's essay considers the benefits and constraints of genre within superhero comics and recent alternative comics that make use of the figure of the superhero. Individual superheroes (Batman, Superman, Spider-Man) emerge as nearly allegorical figures for particular ideas or ideologies; the figure of the superhero more generally is also figured in these works as a symbol of arrested maturity, both within the fictions and within a larger metafiction about the genre. Works discussed in detail include Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1986-87), Mark Waid and Alex Ross's Kingdom Come (1997), Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan (2000), and Daniel Clowes's David Boring (2002) and "The Death Ray" (2004).

Domesticity beyond Sentiment: Edith Wharton, Decoration, and Divorce

Abstract: Fraiman's essay challenges the usual conflation-generally unquestioned in discussions of nineteenth-century US culture-of domestic preoccupations with sentimental views of family and femininity It does so by turning to Edith Wharton, whose devotion to houses and interior design was evident both in her first publication, The Decoration of Houses (1897), and in her home the Mount, built in keeping with Decoration's vision Yet Wharton's house-love, far from celebrating sentimental attachments, may be seen as the opposite: an expression of unhappiness in her marriage, anticipating her eventual divorce in 1913 The Mount was carefully designed to provide Wharton with her own quarters, segregated from her husband's as well as from the public rooms below Withdrawing there to write, she developed as a professional novelist not by fleeing the domestic but rather by claiming a second order of privacy within the private sphere The Decoration of Houses offers another example of domestic space reimagined to resist rather than embrace familial ties Fraiman links the book's fifty-six photographs of immaculate, museum-like rooms to a fantasy of home purged of literal and emotional mess-purged, indeed, of people altogether The book's seeming hostility to family life is all the more striking in contrast to a rival design manual, Clarence Cook's The House Beautiful (1877), whose sentimental sketches of husbands, wives, babies, and tea kettles insist that marriage and domesticity are happily inseparable Examining Wharton's revisionary, extramarital domesticity, Fraiman invites scholars on the Left to own this much maligned category as one available for various ideological ends

“Simply by Reacting?”: The Sociology of Race and Invisible Man's Automata

Abstract: This essay considers Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison's other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with Ellison's and others' resistance to a midcentury ideology of scientism. This scientism, which characterizes both the sociological construction of the so-called "Negro problem" and Ellison's representation of a scientifically oriented Communist Party, takes on its literary expression through Ellison's satirical use of the automaton. The novel repeatedly stages the ethical and ontological dilemma in which viewers are momentarily uncertain whether they are looking at a person or an automaton, which the essay links with Ellison's numerous discussions of African American political views as "reactions" rather than actions in their own right. For Ellison, Myrdal and the novel's Communist Brotherhood share a perspective limited by a "scientific" distance from, and instrumental treatment of, African Americans. This link, the essay argues, recasts the novel's anti-Communism as primarily a resistance to scientism at the same time that it foregrounds a new set of historical contexts through which to see one of the novel's main series of motifs.

Tarzan's White Flights: Terrorism and Fantasy before and after the Airplane

Abstract: By placing the Tarzan novels and films in the historical context of the development of aviation and aerial bombardment, Bady traces how changing fantasies of flight mediate the Tarzan franchise's changing relationship to white supremacist violence. Edgar Rice Burroughs's original novels were published contemporaneously with the popular "airmindedness" that accompanied the invention of the airplane, and Tarzan's ability to "fly" expresses the types of fantasy by which this advance was popularly understood. For Burroughs, Tarzan's flight signified the white race's "natural" superiority over nature. By the time the novels were adapted into films, however, aerial bombardment had come to seem monstrously unnatural, a technology serving racialized colonial governance. The Tarzan films made in the 1930s, this essay argues, use flight to describe a very different fantasy, the desire to forget and transcend the very histories of racial violence that the Tarzan character was once unthinkable without.

The Limbs of Empire: Ahab, Santa Anna, and Moby-Dick

Abstract: Taylor reads Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) through the history of the captured prosthetic limb of Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. U.S. travel narratives, soldiers' accounts, and P. T. Barnum's 1847 display of the captured prosthesis in his American Museum figured the leg as a symbol of the regenerative and reembodying benefits that territorial imperialism offered to Jacksonian working classes. Melville's journalism on Barnum's exhibit evinces a deep anxiety about the enthusiasm of Barnum's working-class audience for the prosthesis of empire, scrutinizing the figurative and rhetorical modalities by which the limb gained its symbolic value and affective force. Moby-Dick, Taylor argues, turns the figurative operations that Melville isolated in his reading of Barnum into a hermeneutic for interpreting the symbolic economies governing the interclass relations that produced populist imperialism. Moby-Dick narrates how hegemonic redeployments of the working-class rhetoric of loss transformed the hands of industry, seeking autonomy through territorial imperialism, into the prostheses of an Ahabian empire.

Repugnant Aboriginality: LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker and Indigenous Representation in the Age of Multiculturalism

Abstract: Surprisingly for a novel evidently invested in representations of contemporary Choctaw traditionalism as a viable alternative to settler society, LeAnne Howe's 2001 Shell Shaker gives unrelenting play to the gruesomeness, horror even, of the traditional rituals it depicts at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes of Indian savagery. Yet these depictions of the repugnant, that is, of ancient practices now prohibited by law or found reprehensible by a public sense of ethics, allow Howe to escape the integrative thrust of contemporary multiculturalism by preempting identification through difference-an interpretive logic according to which we are all the same because we are all different-at the center of contemporary multicultural reading practices. As the readers of Howe's novel recoil at the repugnant, they experience a limit to their understanding of the indigenous Other, a goal ethnic writing is presumed to facilitate. Howe's novel is a plea for alternative ways of apprehending difference in contemporary North America, whether we attempt it through reading literature or through other private or public activities. By redefining the interpretive ground of contemporary reading practices, Shell Shaker clears space for the potential welcoming of the (indigenous) Other despite freshly experienced limits of understanding, a welcoming that is not predicated on exacting transparency in exchange for acknowledgment. Further, the novel prompts an acknowledgment of contemporary indigenous nations, and the contemporary versions of indigenous traditionalism in particular, as viable forms of governance and sociality, forms that already successfully constitute political reality in North America.

The Predisposed Agency of Genomic Fiction

Abstract: Hamner's essay analyzes Richard Powers's novel Generosity: An Enhancement as an example of genomic fiction, a genre-bending science fiction subgenre focused on relationships between biology and identity. Prefacing this study with brief readings of novels by Michael Crichton and evangelical author Angela Hunt, the essay reflects extensively on the metaphors and mythologies involved in contemporary genomics. Here Powers has the distinct advantage of being one of only eight individuals, as of 2008, to have had his entire genome sequenced. Hamner interweaves essays about such experiences from Powers and others with questions about the extent to which genomics can be expected to yield new self-understanding. The essay's broadest argument is that by juxtaposing fictional creativity and genomic modification, Generosity effectively illustrates the need for bridge-building across science-religion, religion-humanities, and humanities-science divides. Specifically, Powers reveals the extent to which genes are gaining sacrosanct status in U.S. culture, and in response offers a postsecular, metanarratival science fiction that contextualizes some of the more inflated rhetoric. Defending scientific research but denouncing its metamorphosis into techno-transcendent spectacle, Powers's work aligns fiction and evolution as processes of painfully slow, bottom-up "compositing," wherein complexity emerges from simplicity, purpose appears in apparent randomness, and agency persists in tension with both inherited and environmental determinants. Ultimately, Hamner's essay shows that beneath questions about genomic identity lie even more profound ones about the nature and purposes of narrative.

Clean: Death and Desire in Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Abstract: In a reading of Samuel R. Delany's underexamined 1984 science fiction novel, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Reid-Pharr uses the work of theorists such as Leo Bersani, Mary Douglas, Orlando Patterson, and Hortense Spillers to question the necessity of gay men's relinquishing a presumably dirty and immature gay past in favor of a newfound respectability. Claiming that this process of cleansing works to create a "deadened subjectivity," he links the contemporary struggles of gay men and lesbians with that of enslaved Africans by arguing that the ideological structures surrounding the HIV/AIDS pandemic are similar to those surrounding the history of African enslavement. In particular, Reid-Pharr criticizes the all-too-common assumption that the disasters of both slavery and AIDS have been a necessary precursor to the modernization-and maturation-of both blacks and "queers." Framing this phenomenon as a process of figurative cleansing, he argues that what Delany bemoans in his fine novel is the assumption that the "dirty," "pre-AIDS" history of gay men must be repressed, deadened, or cleansed away before gay men can become fully established modern subjects. Instead Reid-Pharr utilizes Delany's work to call for gay men to hedge their bets, as it were, to continually challenge the ongoing oppression of sexual minorities while remaining suspicious of the offer of a clean (read "dead") status within modern society.

Toward a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction

Abstract: Higgins argues that the depth of science fiction's engagement with imperial themes allows the genre to function as a critical literature of empire. As a literary mode engaged with imperial dream-work, science fiction addresses the operations of imperialism more fully than any other mode of cultural production, and it is from this deep understanding of empire (in both its colonial and neocolonial forms) that the genre produces rich cosmopolitan alternatives to imperial discourse and practice. One example of science fiction's successful interrogation of cosmopolitan concerns can be found in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels. Unlike the work of many other SF authors from the 1960s and 1970s, Le Guin's extrapolations develop throughout her Hainish cycle beyond a straightforward negative critique of imperialism toward a positive and creative conceptualization of cosmopolitan conviviality. The Hainish novels move from a preliminary critique of imperialism and an exploration of cosmopolitan ethics in the early Worlds of Exile and Illusion novellas (1966-67) to a more fully developed imperial critique and a radical imagining of the possible political shapes of instantiated cosmopolitan conviviality in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). The essay concludes by suggesting that science fiction's celebrations and condemnations of imperial discourse and practice enable the genre as a whole to transcend its own oft-complicit engagements with empire and to generate an imaginative space for the exploration of rich and open-ended cosmopolitan possibilities.

Theorizing a Reading Public: Sentimentality and Advice about Novel Reading in the Antebellum United States

Abstract: By reconsidering the complex, dialectical relationship that existed between novels and their detractors in the antebellum United States, Brady's essay argues that antinovel commentators aimed not simply to limit the activity of novel reading but to redefine what it is and, more importantly, what it does. In conduct books, public lectures, and other printed materials, commentators argued that novel reading did not empower individual readers but made them all alike, rendering them passive by invoking passionate and often overwhelming emotions. In short, they posited novel reading as a collectivizing rather than individualizing agent. We can therefore use this viewpoint to discern how commentators performed a task that seems on its surface to be contradictory: they used their antinovel advice to define and construct a reading public in the antebellum United States-a public that did read novels over critics' heated objections. That imagination of a coherent, cohesive reading public crucially required a turn to sentiment. Indeed, as antinovel commentators labored to think the private and the public together, they used the irresistible passions of novel reading to position the individual reading, feeling subject amid a coherent public. In doing so, antebellum arguments against novel reading articulated complicated ideas about how sentiment moved through the private and public arenas-ideas that allowed them to impart a political valence to the very experience of novel reading.

State Killing, the Stage of Innocence, and The Exonerated

Abstract: Ryan's essay analyzes the coordination of the innocence argument and sentimentality in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's The Exonerated (2003), a documentary play based on interviews with people sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. The play's composition, performance, and reception reveal the challenges of creating art that is aimed at social reform and confirm the difficulty in assessing the political function or, in Fredric Jameson's sense, the political unconscious of American literature. As a celebrated example of political theater, The Exonerated also provides a forum for thinking through the contemporary terms and framework of conversations about state killing. Ryan argues that the play stimulates reform and elicits sympathy by substituting a false rhetoric of universal vulnerability for a more accurate assessment of imprisonment and judicial murder. The attempt to make the play accessible, emotional, and persuasive also sets real limits on how audience members are asked think about personal and social responsibility. Some of these efforts include a focus on the wrongly convicted instead of the guilty, a balance of white and black interviewees in the face of a racially unbalanced justice system, a rendering of pain as uplifting for audiences, and an encouragement of personal and financial solutions rather than structural and political ones.

Frank Reade, Jr., in Cuba: Dime-Novel Technology, U.S. Imperialism, and the "American Jules Verne"

Abstract: Williams's essay examines the complex portrayal of imperialist themes in the long-running series of nineteenth-century dime novels featuring boy inventor Frank Reade Jr. Authored primarily by Cuban-American writer Luis Senarens under the pseudonym "Noname," these works provide a case study into dime-novel authorship and the cultural work of American proto-science fiction. The prevailing understanding of these novels asserts that their repeated retellings of a technocratic expansionist narrative shaped U.S. audiences' understanding and acceptance of subsequent American global imperial endeavors. Approaching the novels utilizing Franco Moretti's "distant reading" approach demonstrates precisely how the works' expansionist themes developed as newer, more powerful martial and transportation technologies were imagined by Senarens between 1880 and 1895. The recurring narrative of the Reade novels, however, also contains motifs that resist direct analogues to imperialism. Senarens's earliest stories frequently feature elements that undermine the conceptualizations of race and nationalism that enabled U.S. global territorial expansion. This approach reaches its fullest expression in Frank Reade, Jr., in Cuba (1895), a novel that presents Reade Jr. aiding the Cuban revolution against Spain and interacting with fictionalized portrayals of Cuban patriots Maximo Gomez and Antonio Maceo. By applying the Reade novels' narrative formula to create an overtly political text valorizing Cuban sovereignty in the era just prior to U.S. imperial involvement in Cuba after the Spanish-American war, Frank Reade, Jr., in Cuba demonstrates how central elements of the boy inventor novel simultaneously imagine technocratic expansion while subverting foundational concepts of empire.

Forcibly Impressed: Reform Games and the Avatar Figure in Milton Bradley and Walt Whitman

Abstract: Guerra's essay examines the overlapping discourses of avatar found in Milton Bradley's The Checkered Game of Life and Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Because an avatar is defined by action, the essay begins by tracing the operational dynamics of the figure in Bradley's game, contrasting it with the other board games of the period as a way of understanding the competing perspectives on selfhood that existed in this moment. Using Bradley's innovations in Life to codify these differences, Guerra then explores Whitman's use of the figure in "Song of Myself." Whereas Bradley's game foregrounds the mechanics of avatar agency, Whitman's lyric imagines what such an agency would entail given something approaching the full range of nineteenth-century American experience. By tracking the emergence and use of these ludic avatars, Guerra sheds light on the affordances, both liberating and limited, of a figure that continues to have special resonance in the digital age.

The Production of Nativity in Early Syrian Immigrant Literature

Abstract: Rana's essay reads two pioneering works by Syrian immigrant writers, Ameen Rihani's The Book of Khalid (1911) and Abraham Rihbany's A Far Journey (1914), that inaugurate Arab American fiction and autobiography, respectively She shows how both texts proliferate myths of origin, attributions of kinship, and figurations of birth and rebirth, constructing a literary discourse of immigrant nativity-what Rana understands as the production of belonging by immigrants Although Rihani and Rihbany cannot claim to have been born in the United States, they nonetheless imagine ways of "going native," conceiving an American nativity that is subject to the modifications of their immigrant status She positions these marginalized texts in relation to the canonical mainstream of American literature, showing how they adapt American transcendentalism and Anglo-American Protestantism in the course of their production of nativity In these works, a remarkable literary structure of Orientalism emerges, characterized not so much by the binary teleology of "East" and "West" as by the typological circularity of these constructs Ultimately, this essay reveals how early Syrian immigrants have contributed to the vexed proximity of the Middle East and the United States, proposing that we explore the broader archive of immigrant Americanism that subtends, but also redefines, the terms of American hegemony