Showing papers in "American Literature in 2016"

Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice

Abstract: This essay considers naturalist and neonaturalist deployments of smell as a means of mapping uneven and potentially toxic atmospheres in the contexts of Progressive Era urbanization and twentieth-century environmental “slow violence.” After showing how the description of noxious “smellscapes” structures Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914), I move on to consider the use of smell in key scenes in the writings of Ann Petry and Helena Viramontes. While environmental justice novels extend Norris’s interest in connections between smell, health, and stratified air, they also explore how these issues intersect with racially uneven geographies in the twentieth century.

Forms of Duration: Preparedness, the Mars Trilogy, and the Management of Climate Change

Abstract: This essay examines two kinds of speculative fiction focused on the management of climate change: preparedness documents on climate change as a threat to national security, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (1993–96), a science fiction trilogy about the terraformation and colonization of Mars. Focusing on narrative scenarios and exercises that train officials to respond to natural disasters, this essay positions these preparedness documents as part of a system of affective management. They teach participants to cultivate a feeling of neutral detachment—to stay calm and cool so that they can react automatically and repeatedly when disaster strikes. This emphasis on detachment and repetition reveals the political stakes of preparedness as a national security paradigm: to maintain the status quo by extending the always-catastrophic present into the future. The essay's second half turns to the Mars trilogy to argue that by emphasizing duration, or the heterogeneous lasting of time, the trilogy invites its readers to experience climate change as the intersection of various scales and compositions of time, both human and nonhuman. Demonstrating that the management of climate change is inseparable from an experience of it, the Mars books challenge preparedness by emphasizing ongoing change rather than the containment of a never-ending series of disasters.

“My Childhood Is Ruined!” : Harper Lee and Racial Innocence

Abstract: This essay uses insights from Southern and childhood studies—particularly Robin Bernstein’s performative theories of racial innocence—to analyze Lee’s newly complicated contributions to understanding US racial histories. I argue that where To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), following American literary tradition, offers child-embodied racial innocence as a solution to injustice, Go Set a Watchman (2015) excoriates it as the problem. Deliberately and forcefully violating childlike trust in Atticus Finch’s racial paternalism, Lee in Watchman invites readers into what for many of her contemporaries, and ours, is uncharted territory: confronting racial injustice not as a black body in pain, or in a despised white Other, but as a system of white power embodied in the self. The extent to which childhood racial innocence is allowed to be ruined in each novel, and the manner of the rage this ruination occasions, offer an important lens into the desires, and the perceived needs, of contemporary readers in both 1960 and 2015.

Making Emends: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Anne Bradstreet

Abstract: This essay examines two versions of an essay by Adrienne Rich on Anne Bradstreet to argue that Rich's intervening relationship with Audre Lorde facilitated her development of a rhetorical technique I call additive emendation. This method allowed her to supplement the original essay so as to both comment on its errors and let them remain evident to the reader. Lorde's emphasis on knowledge as an ongoing phenomenon rather than a finite commodity, and her understanding of prose as a means to inscribe that process, informed this technique and became evident to Rich in a series of contentious print exchanges between them. As such, the three pairings in this essay—Rich and Bradstreet, Lorde and Rich, and Rich's later and earlier authorial personae—reflect the feminist phenomenon of the open letter, whereby anger, rather than critical dispassion, founds argumentative cogency.

One More Time with Feeling: Repetition, Reparation, and the Sentimental Subject in William Wells Brown’s Rewritings of Clotel

Abstract: The publication history of Clotel, which was rewritten and rereleased three times in twenty-five years, puts considerable strain on conventional readings of sentimental activism’s focus on the exceptional individual and private resolution. In the patterns of repetition and transformation that emerge from Brown’s self-duplication, I therefore argue that Clotel and its successors provide a new historiography of systemic trauma that is highly relevant to current debates on redress and reparations in the United States. Read together, this interlinked series reshapes what narrative can be, producing scenes that refuse to be marshalled into the discrete chronology of simple plot and a host of characters whose lives overlap and blur in their shared circumstances and joint wounds.

“what is your mother’s name?”: Maternal Disavowal and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in Black Nationalist Literature

Abstract: Building on black women’s critical negotiations of black nationalist discourse, this essay names the matrix of black maternal sounds, songs, and approximated womb-spaces as the site of production for black nationalist ideologies and black male identity. Listening to audible traces of black maternity in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), the essay unearths the sonic frameworks through which black male subjectivity and ideologies of black nationalism are formulated. Masculinist black nationalist texts use black women’s sounds to enact the subjective rebirths of men, who then abandon black women, thereby erasing their labors in the constitution of black nationalist ideology. However, embedded within these texts are the resonant echoes of black women’s pain, which both haunt and structure their respective nationalist discourses. The article reveals the extended history of maternal disavowal in black male-authored nationalistic texts, and counterpoises black women authors’ critical responses to these texts in order to reveal that maternal sacrifice proves endemic to masculinist forms of black nationalism.

Tapping the Wire: A Telegraphic Discourse

Abstract: Focusing on mid- to late nineteenth century texts about the telegraph, this essay traces a US literary discourse around this groundbreaking technological innovation that sees writers move from a sense of euphoria over seemingly having overcome the confines of time, space, and embodiedness to the gothic gloom of war and surveillance, finding its end in a subgenre of regressive telegraphic romances. Discussing short journal pieces from periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s as well as more canonical texts (from Walt Whitman to Emily Dickinson), “Tapping the Wire” analyses this cultural evolution in light of poststructuralist media-theoretical paradigms to come to a closer understanding of the epistemological issues these fictions brought to bear on telegraphy as the first truly digital means of communication—and arguably the founding technology of our current technosocial landscape(s).

Uncle Tom across the Sea (and Back): Pierre Faubert and the Haitian Response to Harriet Beecher Stowe

Abstract: The transnational material network of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) has enjoyed substantial critical analysis: however, most scholarship tends to focus on the novel’s influence in Europe. Haiti plays a much greater role in the novel than any European country, yet in contrast to Britain, France, or Hungary, the first black republic is seldom considered a serious actor within Uncle Tom’s reception history. This essay considers how Stowe’s cautionary specter of the “San Domingo hour” was translated to Haiti and, in turn, the diverse ways in which Haitians responded to l’Oncle Tom. Ultimately, this essay argues that Haiti, far from being an isolated figure, was aware of, responded to, and cannily attempted to retranslate its own image both at home and abroad. This essay contributes to a long-neglected archive of Haitian cultural production while more broadly asking how Haitian writers revised Stowe’s conceptualization of nationhood.

“The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference”: The Campus Novel from Stover at Yale through The Art of Fielding

Abstract: This essay argues that in its opposition to the business of college sports, the American campus novel has undergone very few changes over the past century. Debates about college sports replicate, either literally or metonymically, the assumed economic and social functions of college education as such. Campus novels like Owen Johnson's Stover at Yale (1912) are committed to the belief that the corruption of sports by business interests emblemizes the corruption of the university as a whole, while the ideal of sports uncorrupted by business represents the ideal of the university itself. Similarly, when commercialized sports are condemned today, the narrative critique imagines an alternative academic world—as we see in Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (2012)—in which economic corruption is abolished and true academic merit is valued. However, despite the ten-fold increase in college enrollment over the past century, America's most influential educational institutions largely serve the same social classes as they did in the past, and largely for the same reasons. The essential difference is that while the benefits of higher education were once understood as form of inherited privilege, today they are understood as justly earned reward, and, I argue, it is both this similarity of the student population and this difference in that population's understanding of itself that makes the campus novel such a necessary form in contemporary American society.

Echocriticism: Repetition and the Order of Texts

Abstract: In this essay I examine the disruption to the textual order caused by reprinted texts, arguing that the American tradition of textual editing can help us identify some of the invisible forms of repetition that structure the literary field. Pioneering figures such as W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers developed sophisticated technologies for understanding and managing reprinted texts, and yet the scholarly tradition they founded, and that of their most vocal critic, Jerome McGann, have both ignored the ideality of the literary text—how the claim to textual identity across variation is a signal property of literary works. Taking up Michel Foucault's challenge to study the “mode of existence” of literary discourse, I argue that in order to write literary histories that are attentive to the history of literariness, scholars need to question both their commitment to preserving the integrity of the text and their attachment to organizing and reading literary works in the order of their composition.

Chronicling Contemporary Latinidad

Abstract: Some of the most compelling and widely consumed US Latin@ literature being produced at the turn of the twenty-first century is literary journalism in the form of the chronicle, a transnational and transhistorical genre that draws on US and Latin American literary traditions. This essay elucidates the genre’s contemporary contours in the work of US Latin@ writers, including Hector Tobar, Sonia Nazario, Daniel Alarcon, and Daniel Hernandez, whose lives and writings traverse multiple American borders as they cover issues like undocumented migration, narcopolitics, and cultural assimilation. The essay argues that an examination of how this genre portrays the present and imagines the future allows for an investigation into the current shape, possibilities, and limits of Latinidad as imagined by US Latin@ writers. Studying the chronicle’s genealogies, areas of thematic focus, modes of community imagination, and reception and distribution, the essay explores the ways in which US Latin@ writers are engaging the transnational literary imagination to intervene in historical portrayals, political debates, and the shaping of a Latin@ identity that is still under construction in the United States. It pays particular attention to the intersections of nationality, citizenship, and class that complicate concepts of Latin@ hemispheric unity.

“Why Should You Be So Furious?”: Fantasies of Violence in Seventeenth-Century Writings

Abstract: This essay analyzes the American appropriation of an incident in the 1620s on the spice island of Ambonya in which several English traders were tortured (waterboarded) and executed by their Dutch rivals. The essay argues that New England authors imagine themselves the subject of anti-English violence half a world away in order to lay claim to a global English identity. The essay compares the visual representation of that East Indian violence with a well-known image of violence in New England, John Underhill’s figure of the Mystic Fort massacre of the Pequot War, arguing that the two images are linked intertextually. The two images anchor a particular history of torture that suggests how representations of violence are key elements of colonial fantasies that made (and make) real atrocities possible.

On the Make: Truman Capote, Seriality, and the Performance of Celebrity

Abstract: This essay examines the serialized accrual of narrative in the transmedia celebrity construct of Truman Capote. Through historical and literary analysis of texts ranging from the travelogue The Muses are Heard (1956), the profile of Marlon Brando in “The Duke in His Domain” (1957) and the nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1965), I argue that Capote’s most enduring text is his celebrity—an embodied serial that may be read as the performance of his unfinished masterpiece Answered Prayers. Capote as the celebrity-author models a site where narrative identities are rendered legible by the confluence of textual work and public performance.

Love and Theft: Plagiarism, Blackface, and Nella Larsen’s “Sanctuary”

Abstract: When Nella Larsen’s story “Sanctuary” appeared in the Forum in 1930, readers noted its similarity to “Mrs. Adis,” a tale by the popular British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith. Scholars concur that “Sanctuary” turns a story about British class-consciousness into a story of African American race loyalty. This essay suggests that the intertextuality of Larsen’s “Sanctuary” extends beyond “Mrs. Adis” to a neglected 1903 novella by Edith Wharton, also titled Sanctuary, and that in writing her last story Larsen “blackens up”—imitating, mocking, and distortedly mirroring both sources. Larsen’s “Sanctuary” bitterly critiques the triumph of culture, education, and moral agency in Wharton’s tale, while reworking “Mrs. Adis” to expose group solidarity as a poor substitute for autonomy, segregation in another guise. Larsen’s “Sanctuary” reveals the false promises held out to African Americans by a series of values that were much recommended to them: literacy, filial devotion, Christian charity, and group allegiance.

“Ha-Ha and Again Ha-Ha”: Laughter, Affect, and Emotion in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust

Abstract: The eruptive burst of laughter—messy, convulsive, and involuntary—appears repeatedly in French poststructuralism as a metaphor for the productive cracking up of subjectivity. This essay posits that the philosophical potential of laughter is taken up in the American context not in critical theory, but in literature. Focusing in particular on the spasmodic howls and jarring barks of laughter that populate Nathanael West’s final novel, The Day of the Locust (1939), I examine laughter not as an emotional response to humor, but as a form of affect capable of convulsing being. To do so reveals the poststructuralist impulses of West’s novel, which explicitly stages the distinction between being and becoming through two different strains of laughter. The first is a self-reflexive laughter, an emotionally legible “ha-ha” that fixes the laughing person as a general type and in so doing camouflages him or her among the crowds of caricatures that inhabit West’s Hollywood. The second is what I term grotesque laughter—an affective overspill that dismantles subjectivity into a series of ontologically unstable performances.

The Novelist as Organic Intellectual: William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Reconsidered

Abstract: Scholars of material and print culture have recently challenged the theory of an early American public sphere, arguing that the literary landscape of eighteenth-century America was composed instead of fragmented publics, local networks frequently partisan in nature. This essay theorizes how the novel genre functions within these publics by reconsidering the literary career of William Hill Brown, best known as the author of The Power of Sympathy (1789). Reading his lesser-known writings, I argue that Brown was an intellectual for a prominent network—often referred to as the natural aristocracy—and saw the novel genre as a means to disperse his network’s ideology to a growing novel-reading audience. I conclude by reevaluating The Power of Sympathy in light of Brown’s commitment to the natural aristocracy, which provides a model for considering the novel genre within the framework of local publics rather than as part of a universal public sphere.

Charles Brockden Brown and the Conundrum of Complicity

Abstract: Charles Brockden Brown’s four major novels, all written between 1798 and 1800, are devoted to the conundrum of moral complicity—the impossibility of pinpointing moral accountability for harms in a world where intersubjective life makes it impossible to separate one person’s action from the actions of others. This essay argues that for Brown, this conundrum constituted the narrative precondition of fictional storytelling and served as the source of his fiction’s formal innovation, theoretical self-consciousness, and gothic weirdness. This essay suggests, too, that the conundrum of complicity served as the prompt for a synoptic mode of reading that Brown introduced to American fiction.

“The General Practice of the Nation”: Walt Whitman, Language, and Computerized Search in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

Abstract: Word-search technologies have played a significant role in literary scholarship for decades, yet they have received little attention from literary theorists. This paper considers how we might more thoughtfully approach the use of search in navigating cultural material from the nineteenth century. Taking the writings of Walt Whitman as both an example and a theoretical foil, I argue that the use of these tools can amplify historical differences in word use that are relatively unimportant to close reading, influencing what sorts of texts we read in ways that are not immediately apparent. I suggest that if we as literary scholars are to use word search in our research, we should approach it from a philological point of view, actively exploring the limits of our knowledge about the linguistic practices of the past and considering the effects of technological mediation on our encounters with historical texts.

Experience Beyond Bearing: Steinbeck in the War Psychiatry Archive

Abstract: This article begins with the discovery in a Wellcome Library war psychiatry archive of a carbon copy of one of John Steinbeck’s 1943 dispatches to the New York Tribune from the Italian front. The article examines Steinbeck’s dispatch in relation to documents in the military psychiatry archive, to Steinbeck’s other war dispatches published in 1958 as the collection Once There Was a War, and to the reception of his propagandistic novel The Moon Is Down in order to show that Steinbeck’s archived piece (infused as it is with the conflicted discourses of war psychiatry) constructs soldiers’ responses to war violence as beset by paradox—as normal as childbirth yet “beyond bearing.” I use this strange juxtaposition of documents (postmodern dispatch and official reports and memoranda) to reflect on the archive as an accidental anthology that allows us the opportunity to read disparate texts in relation to one another and to see sociocultural phenomena in a new light, in this case both the trajectory of Steinbeck’s writing career and contemporary representations of war trauma.

Hawthorne’s Distillery: Time and Temperance in “The Birth-Mark” and Other Tales

Abstract: Drawing on a wide range of temperance reform literature, this essay examines the temporal dimensions of America’s antebellum crusade against alcohol and their remarkably complex treatment in the tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The inebriates in Hawthorne’s tales are not necessarily drinkers (the writer’s fondness for drink is well known), but rather those reformers and idealists who, in their zeal for perfection, seek to obliterate the past. In his richest portrait of this temporal intemperance, “The Birth-Mark” (1843), Hawthorne portrays the perilous nature and effects of the cultural amnesia that flows from America’s intoxicating confidence in the transformative power of industrial technology. To counter the temporal imbalance of an industrializing nation drunk with the spirit of innovation, Hawthorne’s “temperance” tales ultimately offer a distillation of time that transports the reader into a fluid realm of temporal ambiguity where past, present, and future converge. Reaching far beyond its reformist connotations, “temperance” ultimately proves to be a seminal metaphor for the imaginative state of temporal equilibrium that Hawthorne would achieve as a writer of historical romances.

Jim Crow Pragmatism: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the Legal Logic of Race

Abstract: In The Common Law (1881), Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote famously, “the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” This essay turns to this seminal work of American legal pragmatism to reconsider the stakes of pragmatism for contemporary studies of race. After a framing discussion of Holmes’s debt to William James, it examines The Common Law as well as Holmes’s subsequent reading of the Fourteenth Amendment and the ways in which this reading replicates the Supreme Court’s reconstruction of racial citizenship from the end of Reconstruction to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The root of this shared logic is a pragmatist theory of personhood that, first elucidated in The Common Law, is itself a remnant of racial citizenship in the United States. Pragmatism’s failure to address practically the racial discord of its era, I argue, is inseparable from its conceptual failure to recognize the social histories of racialized bodies.

Touching a Button

Abstract: This essay tracks the gesture of touching a button across a series of early twentieth-century photographic and literary texts, mapping the uneven shock and pleasure of electrified contact as it emerges under the body politic of Jim Crow. Examining William Vander Weyde's images of the electric chair at Sing Sing prison alongside James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the essay argues that these texts invite us to recast early twentieth-century black resistance in electrical terms, terms that expose racial violence as a function of technological progress while, at the same time, reclaiming electricity as a form of material and rhetorical contestation.

Ugly Data in the Age of Weather Satellites

Abstract: Three days before Hurricane Sandy’s East Coast landfall, NASA released its first aerial, time-lapse video of the storm. Roughly 22,000 miles above Earth, NOAA’s GOES-14 satellite scanned the hurricane’s movement across the southern United States. NASA’s video, produced through rapid-scanning technology, captured the enormity of the storm, its dynamic cloud structure, and the sharpening of the storm’s eye as the continent dimmed under the setting sun. But despite the complicated process of data gathering and transmission that is involved in meteorological satellite sensing and imaging, satellite media often pass as uninterpreted weather reality for popular audiences, offering visual and textual narratives of weather crises that abstract the human from environmental disaster. This essay considers the twentieth-century turn toward uninterpreted and visually centered weather media by analyzing the meteorological satellite movement of the 1960s, contemporary GOES-14 experimental satellite technology, and the narratological and ontological ramifications of the visual satellite data and media that constitute a weather “movie” during storm crises.