Showing papers in "American Literature in 2015"
TL;DR: The authors consider the literary afterlife of the Korean War through readings of Ha Jin's War Trash and Toni Morrison's Home and discuss the understanding of Korean War as “forgotten,” an idea first introduced in 1951 but more recently taken up by memory studies scholars.
Abstract: Within the United States, the Korean War has never attracted the memory culture that other twentieth-century wars do. Korea is remembered only for not being remembered, as the “forgotten war.” And yet, as commentators continue to characterize the war on terror as an unparalleled era marked by permanent war, literary authors are returning to Korea to tell a different story. Many of these authors trace the rhetorical and material origin of the war on terror back to 1945, when the United States established a military government in Korea, and 1950, when the war began in earnest. It was Korea, they remind us, that provided the rationale for building a permanent standing military and a global network of more than seven hundred military installations around the world. Those mining this history include some of the most acclaimed American novelists writing today: Ha Jin in War Trash (2004), Philip Roth in Indignation (2008), Chang-rae Lee in The Surrendered (2010), and Toni Morrison in Home (2012). In considering the literary afterlife of the Korean War, I begin with an analysis of the biopolitical logic of defense that arose after World War II during a time of American global ascendancy and heightened anticommunism. Second, I discuss the understanding of the Korean War as “forgotten,” an idea first introduced in 1951 but more recently taken up by memory studies scholars, before advancing an alternative narrative theory of the Korean War. And finally, I consider the twenty-first-century literary return of the Korean War through readings of Jin’s War Trash and Morrison’s Home. These novels advance counternarratives of the Korean War. Refusing the bracketed, three-year history of the war, they instead reveal the basis of an enduring warfare state in Korea and locate the war on terror in this legacy.
24 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism and explores realism as an aesthetic approach that distinguishes itself from these two distrusted alternatives by expressly depoliticizing pain while foregrounding its intrinsic sensitizing value.
Abstract: This essay examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century shared with influential religious ideologies including the New Thought an assumption that a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering represented the height of civilization. Theories connecting the civilizing process to an intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify the revulsion from physical pain increasingly characteristic of the era. Similarly invested in the eradication of physical suffering as a civilized ideal, sentimentalism deploys suffering instrumentally in the hopes of encouraging empathy as well as personal and political agency. Mediating between these anesthetizing and sentimentalist sensibilities, realists including Edith Wharton, Henry James, and William Dean Howells espouse an aesthetic sensibility premised on a sensitive yet restrained engagement with pain. They thereby challenge the prevalent association of superiority with a sensitive revulsion from pain while simultaneously evincing a deep skepticism about whether exposure to physical suffering could inspire social change. This essay first surveys the medical advances, religious ideologies, and consumerist tendencies that contributed to the burgeoning perception of painlessness as a desirable and increasingly feasible goal before examining the implications of sentimentalist intensifications of pain for identificatory and reformist purposes. It then explores realism as an aesthetic approach that distinguishes itself from these two distrusted alternatives by expressly depoliticizing pain while foregrounding its intrinsic sensitizing value. Analysis of writings by Wharton, James, and especially Howells reveals realism's investment in representing physical suffering as a catalyst for a ruminative, sensitive, and reticent responsiveness that the realists associated with refinement.
17 citations
TL;DR: The authors argues that literary redescriptions of international American Express offices by queer writers like Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and James Baldwin allowed the 1960s literary counterculture to establish a relationship to American corporate culture grounded in irony: the knowledge that the vocabulary used to describe the social world is not fixed, but contingent and fluid.
Abstract: This essay argues that literary redescriptions of international American Express offices by queer writers like Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and James Baldwin allowed the 1960s literary counterculture to establish a relationship to American corporate culture grounded in irony: the knowledge that the vocabulary used to describe the social world is not fixed, but contingent and fluid. By ironizing the American Express—that is, by describing it only to destabilize one’s own description—novels like Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Corso’s The American Express (1960) consciously resignified the institutional brand and circulated this literary resignification in tandem with the company’s promotional materials. I show how ironic style underwrote the counterculture’s surprising attraction to corporate life and the corporation’s equally surprising embrace of queer intimacies
13 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the author of Dred, Harriet Beecher Stowe charts an emergent trauma theory developing among slaves that deliberately focused on perpetrators rather than victims of New World slavery, and the title Dred deliberately puns on that fear, working to undo its preemptive logic.
Abstract: When mesmerism first came to this hemisphere by way of St. Domingue, a complex association between radical abolition and the new science was born. Harriet Beecher Stowe takes up that association in her second abolitionist novel Dred. In so doing she charts an emergent trauma theory developing among slaves that deliberately focused on perpetrators rather than victims of New World slavery. Such a reading widens our understanding of early trauma theory by making visible the tension between Stowe’s sentimental strategy famously inscribed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her adaptation of theories by thinkers like Frederick Douglass. If the first strategy depends on familiar but discrete bonds of sympathy between her reader and slaves like Uncle Tom, the second involves recognition of uncontained levels of fear compulsively linking emancipation with slave insurrection. The title Dred deliberately puns on that fear, working to undo what Brian Massumi has called its “preemptive logic.”
11 citations
TL;DR: The authors proposes that there are two broad phases of Korean War literature: the first phase is work written in the 1950s and early 1960s generally by white, male Americans who fought in the war, reported on the war or had some other ties to the US military.
Abstract: From a Cold War literary and cultural studies perspective, the Korean War (1950–1953) is a distinctive moment in US cultural history. This essay proposes that there are two broad phases of Korean War literature: the first phase is work written in the 1950s and early 1960s generally by white, male Americans who fought in the war, reported on the war, or had some other ties to the US military. Work of this phase renders the Korean War in terms of the bipolar global imaginary dictated by the Cold War: even as this imaginary is ultimately unsuitable for capturing the complexities of the war, writers of the first phase understand Korea’s meaning only in terms of US political imperatives. The second phase, marked by Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred (1964) but not gaining traction until the 1980s and 1990s, is work generally written by first- or second-generation Korean Americans who either experienced the war directly or explored the cultural memory of a war that, some scholars have argued, is a precondition of the very idea of Korean Americanness. Work of this phase begins with the premise that the US framing of the Korean War is damaging, and as such is marked by meta-engagements with the Cold War rhetorical frame that shift the meaning of the war away from US claims about it. The category of “Korean War literature” changes how we understand “Cold War literature” and therefore post-1945 American literature and culture.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this article, an interpretation of original and popular verses that appear in nineteenth-century friendship albums is presented, arguing that the verses engage a long-standing conversation about the nature of friendship in the Western tradition.
Abstract: Based on archival research done at the Library Company of Philadelphia, this essay offers an interpretation of original and popular verses that appear in nineteenth-century friendship albums. It argues that the verses engage a long-standing conversation about the nature of friendship in the Western tradition: where the feeling of friendship comes from, the nature of the feeling itself, and how we ought to practice it. Situating the verses in relation to literary and philosophical writings on friendship including those of Socrates, Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Holderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Blanchot, and Simone de Beauvoir achieves two main objectives. First, it aims to give the verses, which have largely been ignored by scholarship, their due as literary texts; and second, reveals that this popular practice, though not itself explicitly philosophical, makes a serious contribution to the Western philosophical tradition's consideration of the concept of friendship
6 citations
TL;DR: In the late 1940s and early 1950s, large-scale population shifts, urban-development projects, and new media transformed New York City in ways that were heard as much as seen as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the late 1940s and early 1950s, large-scale population shifts, urban-development projects, and new media transformed New York City in ways that were heard as much as seen. In this context, Langston Hughes and sound documentarian Tony Schwartz each experimented with techniques of montage to splice the sounds of their local New York neighborhoods. Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred and Schwartz’s “New York 19” tape-recording projects locate a crisis in listening in New York’s postwar urban geography of race and economics. Although their projects differ in significant ways, both employ montage to expose listening as a mediated and socially constructed act often intertwined with the structural violence of racial and economic discrimination. In response, both develop alternative models of collective listening, which together offer contrasting perceptual strategies for remapping social, spatial, and sonic relations in the diverse and unequal urban geographies of the United States.
6 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that the institutionalization of childhood studies in American literary criticism unwittingly privileges youth over all other ages and reifies the stages of life themselves as essential categories rather than as cultural constructs.
Abstract: This essay draws attention to how the institutionalization of childhood studies in American literary criticism unwittingly privileges youth over all other ages and reifies the stages of life themselves as essential categories rather than as cultural constructs. Given that age emerged as a primary identity category between 1820 and 1900, this essay argues that age offers an especially pertinent lens for nineteenth-century literary scholars. Louisa May Alcott's 1873 novel Work makes the political and social significance of age its central subject. Work acknowledges age as a newly meaningful coordinate of identity in the mid-nineteenth century, but it denaturalizes the seeming inevitability of gendered age norms and the developmental teleology that under-writes them. Ultimately, Work envisions alternative versions of female maturity that depart from linear models of aging as decline
6 citations
TL;DR: The authors argues that historical fantasy offers a particular mode of engagement with the past, one that steers a middle course between nationalist chauvinism and revisionist debunking, and argues that a strong literary tradition can help us understand this mode of historical fantasy.
Abstract: The proliferation of historical commemoration in the United States has led to the willful, overt manipulation of historical facts through imaginative fantasy. This essay argues that a strong literary tradition can help us understand this mode of historical fantasy. The essay surveys contemporary fictions of alternate history, particularly Philip Roth’s The Plot against America (2004). The essay contends that historical fantasy offers a particular mode of engagement with the past—one that steers a middle course between nationalist chauvinism and revisionist debunking.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a six-year literary transformation of Paris noir from 1957 to 1963 overlaps with the Algerian war for independence from France (1954-1962).
Abstract: This essay maps out a six-year literary transformation of Paris noir from 1957 to 1963 that overlaps with the Algerian war for independence from France (1954–1962). In this journey that transits from Parisian utopianism to postcolonial criticism, from Richard Wright and James Baldwin's love songs to racially liberal Paris to William Gardner Smith's shrewd attack on French colonialism, the trope of interracial romance undergirds both the construction and the questioning of a colorblind Paris. I argue that as African American expatriate writers included North African characters and decolonization issues in their fiction, they struggled to reconcile the coexistence of a colorblind and a colonial Paris. The two-faced city is located in the periphery of expatriate fiction, in Wright's lesser-known novel The Long Dream (1958) and its 1959 sequel, “Island of Hallucination,” an unpublished roman a clef and his only long work of fiction set in Paris, in James Baldwin's short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” (1960) rather than his celebrated Paris novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), and in the understudied author William Gardner Smith's last novel The Stone Face (1963). The essay highlights telling differences in how each author grappled with French colonialism, and how they echoed and reversed each other's writings to position themselves vis-a-vis the so-called City of Light. Together, their narratives demonstrate how Algerian Paris surreptitiously came to displace France and Europe as a model of liberation for African American writers.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an archive of humor magazines from the 1850s and 60s is used to study recurring forms, conventions, and themes that constitute a distinctively American style of comic strip.
Abstract: It is widely assumed that the American comic strip “begins” in the 1890s with the multipanel sequences appearing in Sunday newspapers This essay challenges this periodization by looking to an archive of humor magazines from the 1850s and 60s As early as 1852, artists including Frank Bellew, John McLenan, and Augustus Hoppin experimented with the multipanel sequences they encountered in the Francophone “picture story” However, rather than replicating the Francophone genre, these artists sought to adapt it in ways that conveyed the rhythms and cadences of everyday American life What emerges from this study is a newly coherent picture of recurring forms, conventions, and themes that constitute a distinctively American style of comic strip From one perspective, this is a record of visual conventions that would dominate twentieth- and twenty-first-century comics But it is also a history of visual languages that failed to take hold—lost literacies and potential trajectories in American comics
TL;DR: The authors examines the role of the inanimate in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy as a means for tracing connections and highlighting divergences between these two intellectual movements engaged in drawing humanity's attention to the surreptitiously active nature of things.
Abstract: A suspicion toward inherited notions of agency has long been recognized (and frequently decried) as a defining feature of literary naturalism. But while the deterministic worldview of writers like Theodore Dreiser generated much lively debate in the early twentieth century, literary scholarship’s investment in the unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) questions of inanimate agency raised by such works was gradually eclipsed by other concerns. Recently, however, a vigorous interest in such metaphysical questions has resurfaced in the discourse of new materialism, an interdisciplinary and politically committed field of scholarship dedicated to revising humanity’s conventional associations of materiality with passivity and predictability. While this is ostensibly a “new” movement, placing new materialism in the context of American literary history underscores how old—or rather timeless—the concerns addressed by the new materialism really are. Given these similarities, Trumpeter proposes that new materialist discourse stands to profit from a more nuanced understanding of literary naturalism and the discourse of new materialism can likewise help American literary scholars return to naturalist works with a more refined and reenergized perspective on the genre’s perennial concerns. This essay examines the role of the inanimate in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy as a means for tracing connections and highlighting divergences between these two intellectual movements engaged in drawing humanity’s attention to the surreptitiously active nature of things.
TL;DR: Highsmith's novels provide a nodal point for this political and intellectual history as she recasts representations of violence, murder, alienation, class envy, and social mobility in ways that both represent and define the legitimation crisis of the regulatory state as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This essay charts the development of two entwined intellectual threads during the 1950s: the translation of European existentialism into an American idiom and what Nathan Hale describes as the “golden age of popularization” for psychoanalysis in the United States. I argue that, in concert, these two movements contributed to the erosion of the New Deal regulatory state by elevating psychological—rather than structural or socioeconomic—explanatory templates for social phenomena. In contrast to the literature of the long Progressive Era, in 1950s works the ego and its vicissitudes become the dominant template for understanding society and the self. Patricia Highsmith's novels provide a nodal point for this political and intellectual history as she recasts representations of violence, murder, alienation, class envy, and social mobility in ways that both represent and helped define the legitimation crisis of the regulatory state. Highsmith repudiates a narrative world governed by structural or environmental conditions and—in contrast to literary naturalists like Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck—presents the darker corners of human experience as phenomena of the largely autonomous, internal arena of an existential psyche. These shifts in literary tastes, the essay argues, augmented the weakening intellectual purchase of an interventionist New Deal reform agenda during the 1950s.
Abstract: This essay, by paying attention to botanical language, reveals how Stowe's environmental sensibility affects her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. The theories of plant growth and vitality she draws on as her career develops refute the strict classification and cultivation practices associated with slavery, disrupting the logic used to segregate humans from each other and from the environment. Stowe's characterization of plants reframes our understanding of the relationship between antebellum science and sentimental culture, and upends the essentialist approach to nature by which many ethnologists classified race. Stowe comes to emphasize nature's mutability and interconnectedness, and invites her readers to consider human nature as part of this dynamic natural order.
TL;DR: The authors argued that the vernacular sonnet played a crucial role in the resurgence of Afro-modernism in the 1940s, arguing that it allowed poets to combine black everyday speech and high-modernist elements without subordinating one to the other.
Abstract: The essay offers a new perspective on the resurgence of Afro-modernism in the 1940s, arguing that the vernacular sonnet—specifically Langston Hughes’s “Seven Moments of Love: An Un-Sonnet Sequence in Blues” and the sonnets of Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden—played a crucial role in this development. As a consciously synthetic form of writing, the vernacular sonnet allowed poets to combine black everyday speech and high-modernist elements without subordinating one to the other. The essay examines the transformations these idioms underwent in response to each other and traces the emergence of techniques such as slant rhyme from the collision of the conventional boundaries of the sonnet with the unconventional sounds of the vernacular. It positions the vernacular sonnet as a pioneering form that anticipates both the achievements and the challenges of the Afro-modernist project.
TL;DR: In their denunciation of marriage and their investment in alternative forms of kinship, intimacy, and sociality, these novels suggest an important and overlooked historical connection between nineteenth-century reform culture and the contemporary queer critique of the progressive “marriage equality” movement as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This essay aims to restore the vital intellectual and political movement of free love to the study of American literature and culture, offering a brief overview of its major currents and analyzing three examples from a neglected archive of free-love novels, Mary Gove Nichols's Mary Lyndon (1855), Marie Howland's Papa's Own Girl (1874), and Lizzie Holmes's Hagar Lyndon (1893; published under the pen name May Huntley). In their denunciation of marriage and their investment in alternative forms of kinship, intimacy, and sociality, these novels suggest an important and overlooked historical connection between nineteenth-century reform culture and the contemporary queer critique of the progressive “marriage equality” movement. But in their ultimate turn back to marriage, they shed new light on the puzzling persistence of this institution, even for those who see its faults most clearly.
TL;DR: The authors examines textual and film representations of the first and second Gulf Wars, highlighting the increasing presence of anatopisms, items jarringly dislocated from their proper “expected” spaces.
Abstract: This essay argues that forces of globalization have changed how American combatants define their identities within and against a foreign environment. Building on notions that soldiers construct identity by rendering foreign landscapes as Other, this piece considers how familiarity within the combat zone traumatically destabilizes the attempts to delineate self and enemy. This essay examines textual and film representations of the first and second Gulf Wars, highlighting the increasing presence of anatopisms—items jarringly dislocated from their proper “expected” spaces. Focusing particularly on Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, this piece investigates the consequences of American soldiers’ encounters with the global familiar—goods and spaces within the war zone that unsettle distinctions due to the homogenizing forces of the global market. Encounters with the global familiar, the essay argues, may lead to new acts of solidarity between combatants, but they also hold the potential to compound the traumas of combat and produce new acts of violence.
TL;DR: The authors argues that Haley's and Thompson's nonfiction prose styles articulate a view of the social world that can now, retrospectively, be described as neoliberalism, allowing subjects under neoliberalism to inhabit a position that limits politics to the confines of individual entrepreneurialism and consumerism, thus broadcasting politics as not a collective enterprise but instead a set of individual postures and consumer choices.
Abstract: This essay charts how two important journalists, Alex Haley and Hunter S. Thompson, represent elements of the American counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in their influential writings about the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, the Chicana/o movement, and drug culture. By analyzing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and Haley's and Thompson's other magazine writings for Playboy, Rolling Stone, and the Saturday Evening Post, the essay argues that Haley's and Thompson's nonfiction prose styles articulate a view of the social world that can now, retrospectively, be described as neoliberalism. The neoliberal style this essay explicates allows for subjects under neoliberalism to inhabit a position that limits politics to the confines of individual entrepreneurialism and consumerism, thus broadcasting politics as not a collective enterprise but instead a set of individual postures and consumer choices.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the vocabulary lists reveal forms of linguistic sovereignty whereby the indigenous speakers interviewed for the project refused to have their languages condemned to the atavistic detritus of American antiquity.
Abstract: From 1790 to 1810, Thomas Jefferson inaugurated a massive effort to collect and preserve native languages. Compiling as many languages as he could, Jefferson worked to solve the question of Indian origins. More interesting for its failures than for what it achieved, the Indian Vocabulary archive displays telling instances of cross-cultural mistranslation as indigenous words spill beyond Jefferson's rules of orthography and beyond the word list itself in formal defiance of Jefferson's goal of recording the ancient and pure sounds of “primitive” America. This essay argues that the vocabulary lists reveal forms of linguistic sovereignty whereby the indigenous speakers interviewed for the project refused to have their languages condemned to the atavistic detritus of American antiquity.
TL;DR: The Black Vampyre as discussed by the authors is a gothic novel about the Haitian Revolution and the Haitian slave system, which is also related to the idea of vampirism.
Abstract: “‘A Climate . . . More Prolific . . . in Sorcery’: The Black Vampyre and the Hemispheric Gothic” proposes that Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s pseudonymous The Black Vampyre (1819) exemplifies the hemispheric gothic through its exposure of the connected, but disavowed histories of the Haitian Revolution and the United States. This sensational gothic novel invokes the Haitian Revolution even as its paratexts self-consciously worry about its place in the New York literary scene. The novel comments on the rise of a transatlantic literary market in which unfamiliar and aspiring figures such as D’Arcy and John Polidori sought to eclipse familiar, canonical authors such as Lord Byron. Then, it connects this literary market, with its concerns about originality, copying, and plagiarism, to the transatlantic slave system through the metaphor of vampirism, which, as theorized here, involves the theft of labor. While The Black Vampyre appears to contain the gothic horrors of a version of the Haitian Revolution with the end of a slave revolt and the end of the main characters’ vampirism, the text titillates readers with the possibility that a vampiric descendant of its eponymous hero has moved on from Haiti to haunt New Jersey. Thus, The Black Vampyre challenges both the easy relegation of the Haitian Revolution to the category of history and simple national narratives that ignore the intertwining histories of Haiti and the United States.
TL;DR: The authors traces the fixation on the purity of the ballot box from its moorings in the post-Reconstruction South to its reemergence in the disputed 2000 presidential election and its consequence for the doomed Voting Rights Act.
Abstract: The defense of electoral “purity” against intrusion, corruption, and fraud has historically bound US voting to a pernicious set of gendered and racial narratives, chief among them the routine depiction of the ballot as a white woman whose iconic, vulnerable body inscribes the limits of national belonging. By paying particular attention to the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Thomas Dixon Jr., and William Faulkner, the essay traces the fixation on “the purity of the ballot box” from its moorings in the post-Reconstruction South to its reemergence in the disputed 2000 presidential election and its consequence for the doomed Voting Rights Act.
TL;DR: This paper argued that debates over the methods of African American higher education shaped the function of literature within black modernity, and explored how Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington transformed literature and books into instruments of a practical approach to learning through a pedagogical method he named dovetailing.
Abstract: Racial uplift emerged in the aftermath of Reconstruction as a powerful philosophy of social advancement for African Americans subject to the absolute subordination and disfranchisement of Jim Crow, and it found its greatest institutional expression in the African American college. This essay posits that debates over the methods of African American higher education shaped the function of literature within black modernity. It explores how Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington transformed literature and books into instruments of a practical approach to learning through a pedagogical method he named dovetailing. The dovetailing method sought to correlate acts of reading and writing with industrial and agricultural training, instantiating an instrumental relation to literary expression that this essay terms vocational realism. Examining vocational realism as an important touchstone in African American literary history writ large repositions the canonical Washington as a figure with a more complex relation to the literary than scholars have previously discerned. Turning to curricular and institutional materials and to the writing and public addresses of Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, this essay argues that the fractious debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding the social utility of literature in the lives of black citizens established the critical, artistic, and reformist fault lines of the Harlem Renaissance.
TL;DR: The authors used two poetic works from the 1950s (Langston Hughes's 1951 sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred and the poetry and poetics of Black Mountain pioneer Charles Olson) to articulate a theory of racially engaged, non-mimetic poetic musicality deriving from the engagement both poets make with the bebop jazz of Charlie Parker and his colleagues.
Abstract: This essay uses two poetic works from the 1950s—Langston Hughes’s 1951 sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred and the poetry and poetics of Black Mountain pioneer Charles Olson—to articulate a theory of racially engaged, nonmimetic poetic musicality deriving from the engagement both poets make with the bebop jazz of Charlie Parker and his colleagues. By taking “jazz” less as a specific body of sounds than as a conceptual provocation to rethink the very idea (and ideal) of poetry as a musical phenomenon, Hughes and Olson—both individually and together—help us make new sense of three phenomena: the way poetry relates to musical sounds external to it, the way poetry understands itself as a form of music, and the prospects for racial representation this reevaluation makes possible.
TL;DR: The chronocanon as mentioned in this paper is a collection of poems published in the months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939", Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Palestine" and Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America".
Abstract: This essay engages the mass publication of poetry—ranging from W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” to Lorna Dee Cervantes’s “Palestine” and Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America”—in the months after September 11, 2001. I label this set of texts linked together by near-simultaneous (re)publication a chronocanon. The chronocanon, I argue, can serve as a means by which an oppositional group articulates its position to a broadly construed public and, in so doing, deploys literature in an attempt to produce a new hegemonic formation. In particular, I focus on the way this chronocanon put forth antiracist and anti-imperialist arguments in an era when racist violence and imperialist tendencies were widely deployed, both by the US government and by many of its citizens. More broadly, I argue that for critics interested in the politics of literature, more attention to mass republication can help ground such claims in praxis.
TL;DR: This paper examined some of the science-fiction stories published in Playboy magazine from 1953 to 1973, and found that futuristic narratives were integral to the magazine's editorial sensibility, which suggested that intimate life should be governed by the cool rationality of scientific management and excluded women and other supposedly vulnerable readers from its audience, appearing instead as instruments for masculine self-contemplation.
Abstract: Through an examination of some of the science-fiction stories published in Playboy magazine from 1953 to 1973, this essay shows that futuristic narratives were integral to the magazine’s editorial sensibility, which suggested that intimate life should be governed by the cool rationality of scientific management. In addition to offering close readings of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and “The Fly” by George Langelaan, this essay demonstrates that Playboy editor and publisher Hugh Hefner himself was a science-fictional figure, representing the fantasy of a human merging with a media network. During this period, Hefner purported to be the living embodiment of the Playboy enterprise, as well as its target audience. This claim allowed the magazine to manage public and legal perceptions of its readership, a move that helped Playboy skirt censorship while courting advertisers. Women and other supposedly vulnerable readers were excluded from its audience, appearing instead as instruments for masculine self-contemplation. Thus, the magazine describes female characters such as Clarisse, the “girl next door” in Fahrenheit 451, and Janet Pilgrim, the first girl-next-door Playmate, as media technologies operated by men. Drawing on Michel Foucault and the history of the book, this article uses the example of Hefner to theorize the editorial subject. Like Foucault’s author function, the editor function represents a position of legal, moral, and authorial responsibility that binds together disparate elements into a single, legible identity. Threats to this identity reemerge through science-fiction narratives, which allow readers to obtain a cool and estranged perspective on otherwise disturbing ideas and emotions. Nevertheless, Playboy rejected even speculative short stories that failed to conform to its editorial point of view.