Showing papers in "American Literature in 2014"

The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse

Abstract: The Book of Mormon is perhaps best known in Americanist circles as a version of the Indians-as-Israelites theory. It features the racialized division of the progeny of the text's founding diasporic Jewish figure, Lehi, into wicked "Lamanites," who are cursed with "a skin of blackness" and were understood by the earliest readers to be the ancestors of Amerindian peoples, and the righteous "Nephites," the fair-skinned narrators of The Book of Mormon. This essay shows how The Book of Mormon's foundational raci(al)ist orthodoxy autodeconstructs, and in so doing not only offers a vision of racial apocalypse diametrically opposed to what would come to be known as Manifest Destiny-one resonant with contemporaneous Amerindian prophetic movements-but also challenges the literalist hermeneutics that found warrant for Euro-Christian colonization in the transcendental authority of "the Bible alone."

Introduction: After the Postsecular

Abstract: The secularization thesis is dead. There is no doubt whatever about that. Over years that have begun to stretch into decades, through the work of a diverse array of scholars—from Talal Asad, José Casanova, Saba Mahmood, and Charles Taylor, down to Americanists like Tracy Fessenden, Toni Wall Jaudon, Kathryn Lofton, John Modern, and Michael Warner—the notion that something called “secularization” provides an adequate conceptual framework for the post-Enlightenment movement of bodies and belief, of thought and authority, has come under sustained and multidimensional assault. We have become, as the term goes, postsecular, to the degree we understand those assaults to have been, finally, cumulatively, fatal. It’s a fairly noncontroversial position at this point, as stated by Asad way back in 2003: “If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable” (2003, 1). Disenchantment, a swing from superstition to rationality, credulity to skepticism, eschatological fanaticism to liberal tolerance: ours is a scholarly moment no longer persuaded by the clarities of these stories of modernity, nor by the neat dichotomies nested within them. So the secularization thesis is dead. This must be distinctly understood. To be clear, this sense of the postsecular does not carry with it a particular historical claim, as opposed to the desecularization narrative recently offered by the chastened secularization theorist Peter Berger Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman

"Peculiar and Characteristic": New Orleans's Exceptionalism from Olmsted to the Deluge

Abstract: Two hundred years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out to limn the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase, demonstrating its seamlessness with the national body in direct travel to the West Coast, a different kind of travel narrative-one that demonstrated New Orleans's profound discontinuity from the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina-dominated the national conversation about the city's suffering and recovery. This paper seeks to examine what Barbara Eckstein calls "claims for New Orleans's exceptionalism," considering theorizations of the city's uniqueness as products of terror at the abandonment of national amity and the evacuation of the category of citizenship. It adumbrates a history of New Orleans's exceptionalism through Frederick Law Olmsted's A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), considering the ways that African American women's bodies become signifiers of disorder and potential in the city, as well as aberrations from economic norms of enslavement in the Upper South.

Sacred theories of Earth: Matters of spirit in The Soul of Things

Abstract: Geology, so we’ve been told, wrested the earth away from God. It wasn’t an easy task. The Comte de Buffon’s departure from biblical history, in his 1749 Histoire Naturelle, was declared “reprehensible”; for suggesting that Earth was formed out of space debris, rather than emerging from the hand of God, he nearly lost his appointment at the Sorbonne (Roger 1997, 187–88). Similar attacks were launched a few decades later against the work of James Hutton, the Scottish scientist whose articulation of what would come to be known as “deep time” was denounced by fellow scientists as a “wild and unnatural notion . . . [leading] first to skepticism, and at last to outright infidelity and atheism” (Williams 1789, lix). Hutton countered by arguing that theories of the earth should be precisely that: “the philosophy or physical knowledge of this world” (Hutton 1795, 270, emphasis added). The accounts developed by thinkers like his biblically guided seventeenthcentury predecessor, Thomas Burnet, author of Telluris Theoria Sacra (The Sacred Theory of the Earth), did not count as knowledge but merely “dream[s], formed upon . . . poetic fiction[s]” (271). For many latter-day historians of the science, Hutton’s intervention marked geology’s awakening from Burnet’s sacred dream, its ascension to the status of a modern, and therefore a secular, field of knowledge. The modernization of geology involved two secularizing shifts: one temporal, from Creationist to deep-time frames, and one methodological, from “sacred theory” to empirical observation, the latter nicely summed up in the contrast between Hutton’s 1795 title—Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations—and Burnet’s. The new geological empiricism demanded an engagement with the material world instead Dana Luciano

"Ain't One Limb Enough?" Historicizing Disability in the American Novel

Abstract: This essay traces disability's entry into the American novel. It argues that disability was largely absent from the first US novels and that it emerged into US fiction only after the War of 1812 (1812-1815). The cultural logic of disability in later periods was largely incompatible with the historical circumstances and the generic conventions of the early national novel. Furthermore, when impaired figures entered American fiction in the late 1810s and 1820s, their bodies were not stigmatized, but rather crippled bodies most often signified a legible and laudable history of patriotism. I conclude by returning to Moby-Dick to demonstrate how this genealogy of disability representation opens up new ways of reading canonical disability-studies texts and of illuminating the cultural shift from impairment to identity. More broadly, this essay urges scholars to carefully historicize discussions of disability in American literary and cultural studies.

Edwin Forrest’s July 4th Oration and the Specters of Provocative Eloquence

Abstract: This is the author's accepted manuscript, available from the publisher at http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/content/86/1.toc.

Ruins amidst Ruins: Black Classicism and the Empire of Slavery

Abstract: While scholars have taken an increasing interest in the ways writers of the African diaspora have appropriated, revised, and otherwise intervened in the Western classical tradition, this scholarship has yet to fully articulate a cohesive theory of the political implications of black classicism as a literary and historiographical practice. This essay works toward such a theory by delineating a continuous tradition of black classicism as political engagement and historical critique across two centuries, from the early antebellum period through our contemporary moment, and situating key literary figures-most prominently Charles Chesnutt-within this tradition. Chesnutt and others (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Toni Morrison among them) adapt and revise multiple mythic traditions-ancient and modern, "African" and "American," "black" and "white"-to counter an exceptionalist view of American history. These writers oppose exceptionalism by linking the United States to a broader and deeper history defined by slavery, empire, and ruin, while at the same time offering a prophetic vision of a future beyond the "empire of slavery."

Seriality and Settlement: Southworth, Lippard, and The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley

Abstract: This essay reads George Lippard's 'Bel of Prairie Eden (1848), E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859), and a moving panorama, The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley (ca. 1850), to show how the serial structures and temporalities of these particular works and the narrative forms of recursion and repetition that result produce an aesthetic engagement with the past that emphasizes simultaneity and overlap. Highlighting the presence of multiple temporalities as they are represented in landscapes and topographies within popular works frequently read in relation to issues of empire surrounding the US-Mexico war, the essay refocuses attention on broader discourses of settler colonialism. Attending to the recurrence embedded in the ostensibly linear forms of these works, and to images in which they confront US settlement of lands that contain other histories of imperial violence and settlement, helps us recognize articulations of settler colonialism not merely as "forgetting" (forgetting previous claims on space, for example) to be combatted with the "hauntings" or "remembering" of postcolonial approaches, but as various, ongoing processes of "in-betweenness." Reading popular fiction like Lippard's and Southworth's and visual material like The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley for how it depicts the recurrence and copresence of temporalities alerts us to the narrative forms of settlement and reminds us of earlier efforts to narrate the multiple histories of settler space.

Printing Native History in David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations

Abstract: As channels of print distribution and production widened in the early nineteenth century, Native Americans employed print as a means of expressing their pasts and thus their historical claims to territories coveted by the United States. In this essay, Radus shows how the nature of print in this period was at times incommensurate with the values and practices of Native historiography. Through an analysis of Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827), Radus argues that Cusick, a Tuscarora historian, used various rhetorical and narrative techniques to alter the conventions of print so that the medium better conformed to the ideals of Haudenosaunee history telling. Sketches at once archives a history of Haudenosaunee territorial possession and subverts the presumption that printed texts afford access to any authoritative sense of the Haudenosaunee past. Cusick thereby assents to print modernity even as he refashions its premises in accord with his timely support for his nation's territorial sovereignty.

Tract Tales, Literary Aesthetics, and American Fiction

Abstract: Howard's essay argues for the significance of antebellum evangelical tract tales both as precedents for later best-selling works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and as provocations to consider our critical understandings of literariness. Tract tales belonged to a moment in which discourses of literary aesthetics were bound to a set of questions about whether meaning derived from God, language, or man. The literary was not a mark of the secular, understood as the absence of spiritual concerns, but part of a process of thinking about the relationship of individual will to moral law, biblical precepts, and history. Howard follows the development of ideas about literariness in the antebellum evangelical context by first tracing their roots in a Puritan tradition of representing divine things in language and a Scottish aesthetic tradition that deemed such representations useful. Both of these traditions allowed for a gap between the practical use of language and theories about its significance. It was in this gap that the tract tales emerged-within a cultural context still suspicious of fiction-as representations of what divine truths looked like when lived in the modern world. The essay demonstrates how tales used the developing forms of plot and dialogue to argue for biblical precepts by reading several shorter works as well as Helen Cross Knight's 1846 tract tale Robert Dawson; or, The Brave Spirit. In closing, Howard considers the formal analogies between this work and the century's best-selling novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Drowning (in) Kittens: The Reproduction of Girlhood in Victorian America

Abstract: Following Donna Haraway's concept of the "killable" animal in When Species Meet, this essay looks at the social conditions and literary conventions that render ostensibly "priceless" objects, like pets and children, disposable in the Victorian period. Through the Victorian trope of the drowned kitten, Barnes shows how sentimental culture's alternative "economy of feeling" colludes with, rather than opposes, a market economy chiefly concerned with reducing populations. The essay's primary example is the female bildungsroman, where anxieties over female biological reproduction are obscured by the reproduction of an idea of the generic, iterable, and ultimately "killable" girl.

Transcending Boundaries: The Network Concept in Nineteenth-Century American Philosophy and Literature

Abstract: The network is a figure of thought that began to emerge as a concrete physical formation and as a conceptual model long before the digital revolution. Following recent scholarship on historical network epistemology, this essay traces such network thinking in nineteenth-century US philosophical and literary discourses with an emphasis on Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist philosophy and Walt Whitman's poetry. Features associated with networks, such as relationality, reciprocal interaction, decentralized self-organization, and emergent properties significantly shaped US thought and played a crucial part in national, cultural, and political processes of self-reflection and -identification in the early days of the American Republic. Demonstrating how network epistemology has informed and in turn been generated by US literature and philosophy of the nineteenth century, Schober examines the network not only as a universal model, but also as a historically contingent conceptual model. The specifically Romantic concept of the network that comes to the fore in the texts under scrutiny responds to an increased impact of concrete technological network structures, while reflecting and affecting particular notions of (spiritual) interconnectivity, community, and national unity. In Emerson's and Whitman's writing in particular, conceptions of the network serve to integrate the Romantic quest for unity within an optimistic vision of an original US identity, establishing the network as a key figure for future self-reflection and -definition at a time particularly shaped by cultural renewal and social reform. The network, as combining both concrete, material reality and epistemological, theoretical discourses, thus represents a central image in the project of (re)defining personal and national identity in the early Republic.

Strange Beauty: The Politics of Ungenre in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills

Abstract: When the question of aesthetics and politics is addressed, it is usually in the context of the Marxist and Frankfurt school debates. Nonetheless, what we think of as the well-rehearsed, and to some thinkers, transhistorical, polarity between art and activism is actually a fairly recent and exceptional account. At least since the eighteenth century rise in aesthetic philosophy (and arguments could be made farther back than this), the relationship between the aesthetic and the political sphere, however each of these was defined, was a fairly conventional and even assumed one. Rebecca Harding Davis's 1861 novella Life in the Iron Mills presents an apposite case study for the constitutive relation of art and politics in the nineteenth-century American context. The text's efforts culminate in its central figure: the korl woman statue carved by Hugh Wolf out of the waste material of the manufacturing process. The sculpture represents Wolf's thirst "to know beauty," a knowledge that would allow him to become "something other than he is." The explicitly feminized art object is what seems to quench this thirst insofar as it transforms his experience of deprivation into form, turning hope into "a real thing." But the sculpture-described as "rough" and "ungainly"-in its atypical expression of the feminine simultaneously disables any easy aesthetic distance that would result in the attribution of beauty normatively defined. Instead, its particular non-normative form of femininity formalizes an aesthetic of refusal that brings into view an alternative literary historical trajectory of the politics of ungenre.

William Dean Howells's Deserted Wife: E. D. E. N. Southworth, A Modern Instance, and Sentimental Divorce Narration

Abstract: This essay challenges received readings of William Dean Howells's A Modern Instance and well-established critical assumptions that associate his realist project with public male legal discourse and define it strongly against presumptively feminine rhetorical strategies like sentimentality. In A Modern Instance, Howells shows the professional effectiveness of strategically deployed affective narration in the courtroom, making it a necessary subject for realist representation. I argue that the novel is Howells's realist response to and rewriting of E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Deserted Wife; that Gaylord's courtroom narration is a reductive, parodic version of Southworth; and that Howells's ending punishes Gaylord and Marcia, who have functioned as sentimental author and heroine. Critics have long accepted Howells's 1908 claim that Euripides's Medea inspired the novel, but I contend that it was more likely conceived as an appropriation and revision of Southworth, whose pivotal chapter is titled "The New Medea." Anxiously competing for the role of moral and cultural advisor to female readers, Howells writes his own deserted wife novel, in which he vanquishes Southworth in a variety of ways.

Amoral Abolitionism: Frederick Douglass and the Environmental Case against Slavery

Abstract: Ellis's essay reconstructs the history of environmental crisis-the crisis of Southern soil exhaustion-at the heart of the antebellum slavery debates. Through readings of landscape in My Bondage and My Freedom, the essay argues that in the 1850s, Douglass displaces the moral and sentimental antislavery rhetorics for which he is known in favor of a newly pragmatic antislavery logic focused on slavery's unsustainability-its tendency to exhaust the soil. This argument has two main aims: to explore Douglass's engagement with ecological and economic antislavery rhetorics, and, more broadly, to consider the relevance of his pragmatic turn to modern ecocriticism as it reexamines the role of ethical sentiment in its project going forward.

“Just Like Home”: Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the New Deal

Abstract: This essay reads Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) against Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the New Deal, and the intervening history of white women's sentimental activism. It argues that Native Son is a work of domestic fiction that self-consciously engages the history of sentimental and domestic discourse in the United States and the pivotal role that discourse played in the formation of a two-track US welfare state. Attentive to the racist effects of the New Deal's long-term provisions for African Americans, Wright's novel gives us the story of a marginal man absorbed into a new, federally configured social order that promises but ultimately fails to deliver security. When Bigger kills Mary Dalton in her bed and then uses her dead body to heat her parents' home, he makes a mockery of the very idea of domestic security. Through his recourse to physical violence, Bigger also opposes and illuminates an otherwise invisible order of violence instituted by the welfare state. Wright associates this second order of violence with a disembodiment of white racial power, which he traces to the historical figure of the good white sentimental woman whose activism mediates between nineteenth-century domestic ideologies and twentieth-century social welfare policy. When his crimes draw the entire city into the search for a suspect, Bigger embarks on his own mission of detection, gathering and assembling clues about the nature of the invisible adversary he faces. Before he dies, he offers the reader a comprehensive understanding of a new structure of racial domination in the United States that he is the first to perceive-the one governing both the fact and the terms of his original domestic entrapment.

The Painting of Modern Light: Local Color before Regionalism

Abstract: Schroeder's essay works to draw critical attention to the aesthetic history of local color, and, more broadly, to the underrecognized relation between local color and realism. In returning local color to its long aesthetic history within painting, Schroeder argues that its primary purpose within realism was not the delineation of regions, but rather the production of an affective and aesthetic engagement with the cosmopolitan project of self-cultivation. The local-color detail was generally not used as a representative detail of a place, but rather, by the late-nineteenth century, as an indexical trace of the invisible truths of an object, and particularly the invisible processes that made human populations distinctive. By bringing this attention to local color's color, Schroeder aims to move critical debates away from considerations of place-based content of local-color stories and toward a recognition of how local color constituted an aesthetic that could be configured in radically antithetical ways by an archrealist like Mary Murfree and an impressionist like Hamlin Garland. Ultimately, local color helps us see realism not as an indiscriminate, antiliterary, transparent representation of the world, but rather as a highly discriminating, distinctive style that was consistently engaged with the twin principles of human self-cultivation and the neoclassical economy of representation. The example of Garland's Crumbling Idols has proven so illuminating for this essay precisely because of how it reacts against this formation, as well as how it suggests an alternative, unconscious receptivity to the detail that foreshadows American modernism and regionalism.

“Times When Greater Disciplines Are Born”: The Zora Neale Hurston Revival and the Neoliberal Transformation of the Caribbean

Abstract: This essay reframes the recovery and canonization of Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in the late 1970s and early 1980s in relation to the US economic restructuring and military invasion of the Caribbean in that same period. Focusing on Paule Marshall's novel Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Audre Lorde's biomythography Zami (1982), the essay demonstrates how US black feminist literature used Hurston's work as a stimulant and script for representing the Caribbean as a free zone of individual autonomy and desire outside of hegemonic and cultural nationalist gender and sexual binds. By juxtaposing the spatiotemporalities and affects of these fantasies alongside those of Ronald Reagan's speeches and CIA literature produced in the wake of the Grenada invasion, the essay shows how these Hurstonian fantasies of the Caribbean worked to both mask and enable the US government's destruction of Caribbean revolutionary and anticolonial societies in the name of the freedoms and intimacy neoliberal capitalism purported to offer.

The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism: Robert Herrick’s The Web of Life and the Political Economy of Health Care at the Turn of the Century

Abstract: Robert Herrick's novel The Web of Life (1900), a self-proclaimed work of literary realism, opens a critical window onto an urban "web" of intersecting practices, institutions, and professional formations at a moment when key dimensions of the US health-care system as we know it today were first taking shape. At this fluid historical moment, Herrick stages a competition between two contrasting possibilities for what that system would, or should, look like in the new century. One possibility consists of a democratic profusion of health-care providers and options, all of which jostle against one another in a marketplace largely unregulated by any external authority. Herrick implicitly associates this energizing, though unsettling, model of US health care with both the labor movement (the novel is set in the same year as Chicago's Pullman strike) and certain aspects of the New Woman movement. The second possibility the novel showcases, which is closer to the model that would historically prevail, envisions a health-care system that is centralized, rationalized, and directed from the top down by the so-called orthodox profession. Herrick aligns this model with powerful banks, trusts, and corporations. The book presents the competition between these alternative paradigms by following the shifting career choices and internal conflicts of its protagonist, Dr. Howard Sommers, as he strives to satisfy his own vision-at times itself contradictory-of medical professionalism. By the end of the novel, both Sommers and The Web of Life have been forced to acknowledge if not the desirability, then the practical necessity, of the orthodox profession's monopoly on health care. This reluctant endorsement on Herrick's part also offers an important perspective on why large-scale systemic reform in US health care has proven so difficult to achieve in the more than a century that has passed since the novel was written.