Showing papers in "American Literature in 2017"
TL;DR: Bachman et al. as mentioned in this paper historicized Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home in the context of the presidency of George W. Bush and claimed the proliferation of digital photography as a watershed event in the history of graphic narratives.
Abstract: This essay historicizes Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home in the context of the presidency of George W. Bush. Bechdel created Fun Home from 1999 through 2005—dates that corresponded with Bush’s campaign, election, and presidency. As Bechdel frequently laments in her serialized comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the Bush presidency posited truth as unknowable, facts as infinitely flexible, and faith as constitutive of reality. Fun Home never mentions the president (nor any historical figure or event after the mid-1980s), but the memoir uses newly available digital technology to resist Bush-era “truthiness.” In Fun Home, Bechdel combines digital photography, her body in performance, and hand drawing to create a new form of graphic narrative. This essay draws out Fun Home’s political engagement with the Bush administration and simultaneously claims the proliferation of digital photography as a watershed event in the history of graphic narratives
20 citations
TL;DR: This paper recovered a once celebrated but now forgotten Filipino novel in English, Juan Cabreros Laya's His Native Soil (1941), which marked the emergence of realism during the Philippine Commonwealth's slow, decade-long transition to independence from the United States.
Abstract: This essay recovers a once celebrated but now forgotten Filipino novel in English, Juan Cabreros Laya’s His Native Soil (1941), which marked the emergence of realism during the Philippine Commonwealth’s slow, decade-long transition to independence from the United States. Whereas the novel was originally praised as a landmark text in Philippine literature in English, His Native Soil was later dismissed by postwar critics as an imitative, formally flawed, and stylistically inferior work. Taking up Roberto Schwarz’s challenge to advance a reading practice that takes into account the difference between literature and social structure in the colonial periphery, I argue that rather than viewing His Native Soil’s improbabilities of plot and tonal dissonances as artistic flaws, they are more meaningfully read as the author’s attempt to adapt the realist protocols of the bildungsroman to capture the double-edged nature of independence: the adoption of a trade policy that would economically bind together the Philippines and the United States and that would render political freedom impossible for Filipinos unless relations of colonial dependency were to be continued after independence.
18 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines fictions of nuclear waste commissioned by the US Department of Energy to show that a risk-based realism is used to maintain the status quo of settler colonialism, and then turns to a countermodeling of the futures of the nuclear waste by Leslie Marmon Silko in Almanac of the Dead (1991), where uranium's longue duree future, impossible to imagine from a human perspective, recasts the present as a space in which the unlikely, implausible, and unrealistic saturate the everyday.
Abstract: This essay intervenes in current ecocritical debates about the relationship between fiction and environmental risk by analyzing the limits of risk theory in the deep time of the Anthropocene. Although contemporary ecocriticism argues that we must move from apocalyptic depictions of risk to realistic ones, this essay examines fictions of nuclear waste commissioned by the Department of Energy to show that a risk-based realism is used to maintain the status quo of settler colonialism. It then turns to a countermodeling of the futures of nuclear waste by Leslie Marmon Silko in Almanac of the Dead (1991), where uranium’s longue duree future, impossible to imagine from a human perspective, recasts the present as a space in which the unlikely, implausible, and unrealistic saturate the everyday. For Silko, the apocalyptic futurelessness that nuclear waste seeds into our present is a vital formal resource for unsettling colonial realism in the contemporary United States.
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back through its official and unofficial editions as it has migrated from licensed paper to PDF format and shows that the digital edition that circulated on the social blogging platform Tumblr.com and other informal social networks constitutes a new and important form of versioning that reaches different audiences and opens up new pedagogical opportunities.
Abstract: This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back through its official and unofficial editions as it has migrated from licensed paper to PDF format. The digital edition that circulated on the social blogging platform Tumblr.com and other informal social networks constitutes a new and important form of versioning that reaches different audiences and opens up new pedagogical opportunities. Though separated by decades, Tumblr and This Bridge both represent vernacular pedagogy networks that value open access and have operated in opposition to hierarchically controlled content distribution and educational systems. Both analog and digital forms of open-access woman of color pedagogy promote the free circulation of knowledge and call attention to the literary and social labor of networked marginalized readers and writers who produce it, at once urging new considerations of academic labor and modeling alternatives to neoliberal university systems.
8 citations
TL;DR: Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) as discussed by the authors explores the power relations of watching and argues that metafiction is especially well suited to grapple with the significance of metadata and data surveillance, given its own preoccupation with watching itself watch.
Abstract: This essay analyzes increasingly ubiquitous data collection and posits that metafiction is especially well suited to grapple with the significance of metadata and data surveillance, given its own preoccupation with watching itself watch. Making a critical intervention in the historically male-centered canon of US metafiction, Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) conscientiously engages the power relations of watching. In the background of the novel and at its chronological center are the 9/11 attacks and also, incidentally, the launch of the iPod. In a sense, these two events structure the novel’s investments in data surveillance. Moreover, to the extent that the novel’s form mirrors a musical album it also forms a network of characters, speaking to the constellation of forces that not only convert analog recordings into digital data, but also translate relationships, habits, and subjectivity into metadata.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors track the interrelated histories of the cod and the whale from John Smith's colonial American vision of abundance to the near disappearance of the living resources he described as inexhaustible.
Abstract: This essay tracks the interrelated histories of the cod and the whale from John Smith’s colonial American vision of abundance to the near disappearance of the living resources he described as inexhaustible. Working at the intersections of animal studies, food studies, and the environmental humanities—and considering cultural artifacts from Smith’s tracts and Herman Melville’s fiction to Cheryl Savageau’s poetry and the underwater sculpture of Jason deCaires Taylor—the essay reads the commodification and consumption of these creatures as constitutive elements of an extinction-producing economy. Within this reading, the cod and the whale appear as exemplary figures not only for the important distinction between the edible and the exotic animal—wild food and wildlife—but also for the larger historical relation between “animal capital” and mass extinction.
8 citations
TL;DR: Turning back to the mid-nineteenth-century pandemics, the authors explores the contours of an emergent global health approach on both sides of the Atlantic and demonstrates why the gothic was the form through which this approach was narrated, how the form worked, and the effects of the genre on popular and medical knowledge.
Abstract: Global health traces its origins back to a single moment in 1854 when John Snow eradicated cholera with a map. It is a nice story, but it’s a myth, a fantasy of empiricism. The modern global health approach did begin with the nineteenth-century, worldwide cholera pandemics, but cartography was not the principal form associated with this paradigm; it was the gothic. Turning back to the mid-nineteenth-century pandemics, this essay explores the contours of an emergent global health approach on both sides of the Atlantic. It demonstrates why the gothic was the form through which this approach was narrated, how the form worked, and the effects of the genre on popular and medical knowledge. Contemporary global health has been reorganized around scientific empiricism, but elements of its gothic history remain. I conclude by suggesting the value of recuperating these gothic origins for global health today.
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the production of a dynamic "Old Negro" figure in African American discourse during the New Negro Renaissance and examines the consequences of accepting existing, white-authored literary representations of the Old Negro.
Abstract: This essay examines the production of a dynamic “Old Negro” figure in African American discourse during the New Negro Renaissance. Conflicting impulses to claim the Old Negro as an ancestor and to renounce him as an obstacle to racial progress mirrored a broader tension about representing slavery in black cultural production. While Alain Locke and other critics called for literature to portray the Negro of the new day and discard the old representations, James Weldon Johnson understood the Old Negro’s enduring importance to modern black self-conception. His 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, portrays the consequences of accepting existing, white-authored literary representations of the Old Negro. While Johnson’s ex–colored man fails to reclaim this figure, Johnson himself did exactly that in his 1917 adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), an operatic cantata that until now has never been examined. In this text, Johnson incorporates and evolves the Old Negro into a contemporary literary tradition that challenges the racial violence of Jim Crow and celebrates black survival
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the mutually influential relationship between literary modernism and tourism as those two interests converged around the US Southwest in the early twentieth century, focusing on a promotional brochure produced for the Harvey Company's sightseeing “Indian Detour” experience.
Abstract: This essay analyzes the mutually influential relationship between literary modernism and tourism as those two interests converged around the US Southwest in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers were drawn to the Southwest’s folk and Native American cultures, viewing them as potent sources of artistic inspiration. However, those same modernists had a significant hand in shaping the region’s burgeoning tourism industry. These surprising commercial collaborations offer the opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of modernism’s relationship to commercial work. The essay focuses on a promotional brochure produced for the Harvey Company’s sightseeing “Indian Detour” experience. The brochure, distributed to passengers on the Indian Detour, featured essays and poetry contributed by modernist writers including Witter Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Harriet Monroe. The essay also brings to light the connections between this promotional brochure and back issues of Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, further underscoring the close ties between commercial tourism and literary modernism.
4 citations
TL;DR: The authors traces the influence of the Spanish American revolutions (1808-26) on Washington Irving's early nineteenth-century writings and, in particular, on his popular 1828 biography of Christopher Columbus.
Abstract: My essay traces the influence of the Spanish American revolutions (1808–26) on Washington Irving’s early nineteenth-century writings and, in particular, on his popular 1828 biography of Christopher Columbus. Irving’s conception of America as a multinational hemisphere comprised of nation-states with entangled nationalist rhetorics and narratives—including Columbus’s “discovery”—underwrites the biography’s unprecedented critiques of nationalist historiography. Examining the politics motivating this work offers new insights for discussions of the textual morphologies of nineteenth-century nationalist thought.
3 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined Adrienne Rich's teaching materials, writings on education, and participation in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge educational opportunity program in order to argue that poetry and pedagogy were interrelated means through which Rich sought to redistribute institutional power and resources.
Abstract: This article examines Adrienne Rich’s teaching materials, writings on education, and participation in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge educational opportunity program in order to argue that poetry and pedagogy were interrelated means through which Rich sought to redistribute institutional power and resources. Although Rich’s poetry and essays have been widely praised for their contributions to feminism, little attention has been paid to the way she changed her life course, moving from Columbia to City College, to participate in one of the most visionary, controversial, and challenging educational experiments in the history of twentieth-century American higher education. Teaching students who were historically excluded from higher education catalyzed a major shift in Rich’s work: a move away from teaching traditional literary history toward the poetics of everyday life, and a related move away from hierarchical models of teaching and learning to a more collective, activist pedagogy, inspired by movements for women’s liberation, anti-imperialism, and black liberation and self-determination. The literary pedagogy that emerges from these classrooms explores how lives are shaped by metaphors, comparisons, erasures, elisions, and gaps, and how the elliptical, unsaid, implied, and occluded might be deployed, instead, to build a better present.
TL;DR: This paper contrast the reading pedagogy inspired by the talking book and the reading approach described by Frederick Douglass, arguing that Douglass viewed literacy and freedom as practices, learning to read not as a gift but as theft, and education orienting students to resist social structures that would oppress them.
Abstract: This article contrasts the reading pedagogy inspired by the “talking book” and the reading pedagogy described by Frederick Douglass The talking book offers literacy as a thing to be acquired that can be traded for freedom “Literacy as a gift” inculcates in students a view of education as a commodity in the marketplace This promise, education as a gift of freedom, fails—it fails to speak to students today, fails to remedy racial and gendered disparities, and fails by giving students tests to pass that fail to make them think Douglass, by contrast, sees literacy and freedom as practices, learning to read not as a gift but as theft, and education not inculcating social values but orienting students to resist social structures that would oppress them
TL;DR: The authors examines early nineteenth-century US literature that argued for increased compensation and copyright protection for authors, concluding that the difficulty even professional writers faced in mounting any kind of case for themselves as paid creative personnel arose not only from the systems of industrial publishing but also from the system of political value instituted by art in what Jacques Ranciere calls the aesthetic regime.
Abstract: This essay examines early nineteenth-century US literature that fought for increased compensation and copyright protection for authors. Instead of dismissing this literature as a form of complaint, as many scholars do, I take writers’ concerns seriously, but I also look at the difficulty even professional writers faced in mounting any kind of case for themselves as paid creative personnel. Even when writers made a rational argument to explain why they should be paid more, they tended to undermine themselves, invariably intimating that writers as a group were better off impoverished. These difficulties, I argue, arose not just from the systems of industrial publishing but also from the systems of political value instituted by art in what Jacques Ranciere calls the “aesthetic regime.” I pursue this hypothesis by examining contemporary texts that argue for authors’ rights alongside Rebecca Harding Davis’s tale of tragic artistic labor, “Life in the Iron Mills.”
TL;DR: This article used Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's experience in the transatlantic literary market to analyze how British publishers constructed antebellum American literature as a cultural commodity and an aesthetically valuable tradition through their material texts.
Abstract: This article uses Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s experience in the transatlantic literary market to analyze how British publishers constructed antebellum American literature as a cultural commodity and an aesthetically valuable tradition through their material texts. Longfellow’s correspondence with publishers John Walker, George Routledge, and David Bogue and Bogue’s illustrated editions of Evangeline and Hyperion reveal that British reprints manifested overlapping discourses of authorization and value. Publishers used the materiality of their texts to legitimize their reprinting but also to champion Longfellow’s poetry, American letters more broadly, and Longfellow’s vision of a cosmopolitan American literature. The essay then traces this dialogue between British books and the emergence of American literature in Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish, in which transatlantic circulation and British books are integral to the founding of the United States and American writing. Ultimately, this essay repositions British reprints as complex acts of reception that intervened in debates over the nature of American literature, and it argues for a recentering of US literary history around material transatlantic exchange.
TL;DR: This article explored the 1907-11 Child-Rescue Campaign run by the Delineator, a fashion magazine for women edited by Theodore Dreiser, and argued that the campaign mobilized social science to reconceptualize maternity as based in affective expertise rather than biological reproduction.
Abstract: This essay explores the 1907–11 Child-Rescue Campaign run by the Delineator, a fashion magazine for women edited by Theodore Dreiser. I argue that the campaign mobilized social science to reconceptualize maternity as based in affective expertise rather than biological reproduction. Readers were able to write in to the magazine to adopt “dependent” children whose images and stories were featured in each issue. The essay suggests that these serialized images and “tragic histories” constructed a form of realism in which the Delineator’s readers were invited to act as maternal experts, saving “future citizens” by rescuing them “out of a life of crime” and into white, middle-class domesticity, at the same time articulating the child’s biological mother as criminal and nonwhite.
TL;DR: In this article, an analysis of Little Mr. Thimblefinger and his Queer Country (1894) by Joel Chandler Harris and The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899) by Charles Chesnutt is presented.
Abstract: Through an analysis of Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) by Joel Chandler Harris and The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899) by Charles Chesnutt, this essay attempts to account for a late nineteenth-century genre termed the queer fantastic. In so doing, it suggests that in the late nineteenth century, the term queer, as a signifier of distorted time, became central to debates over race and the nature of folkloric belonging.
TL;DR: In this article, a theory of counter-private is proposed, inspired by Herman Melville's fiction, where privacy became a language of morality across the nineteenth century while at the same time imagining various counterprivate forms that resist entanglement with domesticity, property, and liberal individualism.
Abstract: This essay advances a theory of the “counterprivate” elucidated through Herman Melville’s fiction. Echoing the term counterpublic, which has done much to critique the notion of the unified public sphere, a new theory of the “counterprivate” can open out to alternative visions of privacy, a proliferation of competing and resistant modes that cannot be reducible to the domestic or the political. I situate Melville’s Typee and Pierre within an emergent nineteenth-century discourse of privacy, still prevalent today, in which one’s private life operates to develop and display one’s adherence to conventional public morality. Melville’s fiction shows us how privacy became a language of morality across the nineteenth century while at the same time imagining various counterprivate forms that resist entanglement with domesticity, property, and liberal individualism.
TL;DR: The authors argue that teachers of American literature should focus on a pedagogy of wakefulness that encourages connections between different writers and texts, between the past and the present, and especially between the classroom and the world beyond.
Abstract: This article argues that professors of American literature should focus on a pedagogy of “wakefulness” that encourages connections between different writers and texts, between the past and the present, and especially between the classroom and the world beyond. The goal of this pedagogy is to encourage active citizenry in engaging the material conditions of the current moment. This is especially valuable at nonelite institutions, such as mine, where students are not as aware of how knowledge is contingent and contested. Ultimately, this approach privileges metacognition and transferring learning from the course to action as a citizen. This pedagogy ultimately fosters a liberal education that explicitly links private study with public concerns and that encourages students to see themselves as potential agents of change in a neoliberal state that identifies them merely as consumers or tools of production.
TL;DR: The authors proposes ethical alienation as a critical pedagogical practice by analyzing the neoteric critical consolidation of Asian American literary and cultural studies, a consolidation marked by the recent (and near simultaneous) publication of four major compendiums.
Abstract: This article proposes ethical alienation as a critical pedagogical practice by analyzing the neoteric critical consolidation of Asian American literary and cultural studies, a consolidation marked by the recent (and near simultaneous) publication of four major compendiums—The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (Lee 2014), Keywords for Asian American Studies (Schlund-Vials, Vo, and Wong 2015), The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Parikh and Kim 2015), and The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (Srikanth and Song 2015) The publication of these four compendiums within the span of a year signals a pivotal moment in Asian American literary and cultural studies, one that both recognizes the institutional gains of the field and addresses the (in)compatibilities between the field’s theoretical developments and its pedagogical practices This article considers the centrality of ethics to a postidentity Asian American studies, suggesting how ethical alienation—signaled both by the figuration of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni and our own estrangement from it—can create productive classroom and metapedagogical practices in the study of Asian American literature By attending to the field’s consolidations around a set of pedagogical and scholarly imperatives and analyzing that critical solidification in relation to “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni both as a figuration of “complex personhood” (Gordon 1997, 4–5) and as an interdisciplinary “term of analysis and history rather than personhood” (Chuh 2003a, 9), this article argues that ethical alienation as pedagogical practice can lead us to a differently ordered set of disciplinary priorities
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that why we teach what we teach is just as important as why we study what we study but is seldom discussed as a field-defining issue, whereas our pedagogical practices raise new questions about the relevance and role of American literature as we confront the pressing educational and political exigencies of our time.
Abstract: Why we teach what we teach is just as important as why we study what we study but is seldom discussed as a fielddefining issue. In turning our attention to pedagogy, the editors of this special issue of American Literature would like to ask both how our scholarly engagement with our field has produced a distinct set of pedagogical practices and how our pedagogical practices raise new questions about the relevance and role of American literature, as we confront the pressing educational and political exigencies of our time. This volume presents an opportunity to integrate disciplineand fieldspecific knowledges more fully into a critical discussion of pedagogy. By leveraging the location of our teaching as developing out of specific scholarly concerns, this special issue illustrates the intersection of theory and pedagogical practice while highlighting the diverse disciplinary, institutional, and political contributions of American literature to higher education and community-based teaching and learning. It’s been almost fifty years since Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire urged educators to recognize the need for a paradigm shift with Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). By insisting that “liberating education consists of acts of cognition, not transferals of information,” Freire (1968, 79) rejected elitist educational models that imposed a static power hierarchy, placing the teacher above the student. Instead, Freire proposed putting students on the same plane as the teacher, inverting the dominant cultural script in which students were expected to be “docile listeners” rather than, as he wrote, “critical coinvestigators in dialogue with the teacher” (81). In elaborating this
TL;DR: The antebellum writings of author Herman Melville are hardly alone in demonstrating apathy's hermeneutic and aesthetic uses; they nevertheless suggest a concentrated encounter with apathy, given how the author thematically foregrounds unfeeling in his work.
Abstract: This essay makes a pair of interrelated claims about apathy. One of these is literary-historical, the other critical-literary. During the turbulent middle decades of the nineteenth century, a number of US writers resorted to the emotionless state of apathy even as the wider culture normalized the possession and display of feelings. The antebellum writings of author Herman Melville are hardly alone in demonstrating apathy’s hermeneutic and aesthetic uses; they nevertheless suggest a concentrated encounter with apathy, given how the author thematically foregrounds unfeeling in his work. In Melville’s writings, we discover an alternative affective register for the characteristic emotionalism of US literary culture in the decades surrounding the nation’s Civil War. Meanwhile, apathy continues to pose a challenge to the emotionally implicated modes of reading, reception, and response that have enjoyed critical favor in recent years as a broadly conceived affect studies. If apathy is not a foil for the study of affect, it does extend the emotional range of our criticism by modeling a way to formulate feelings—those associated with the literary subjects of our scholarship, as well as those that inform and motivate our work in the first place—in relative and relational terms. Apathy is more than a generational disposition of postmoderns or the cool, emotionless province of “critique” that Rita Felski identifies with what she (after the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur) names a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Rather, apathy is an interpretive stance in its own right, proactive in the critical postures it adopts as much as it is reactive to any culture that defines itself, at least in part, on the basis of its relation to feelings.
TL;DR: The authors examines a post-Civil War trend in novels that focus on the mechanics of governmental process, and argues that Mark Twain and Henry Adams deliberately turned to the novel to advance a nonpartisan perspective that existed in neither the press nor the politics of the period.
Abstract: This article examines a post–Civil War trend in novels that focus on the mechanics of governmental process. Remarkable for the smallness of their concerns, these novels replace the bitter conflicts of the war and Reconstruction with plots that hinge on matters of political procedure. Two political journalists and early practitioners of this genre, Mark Twain and Henry Adams, deliberately turned to the novel to advance a nonpartisan perspective that existed in neither the press nor the politics of the period. I argue that Twain’s The Gilded Age, which famously named the era, did more to shape future political conflicts than to describe those of its own time. By examining how Adams’s Democracy even further developed this formal nonpartisanship, I show what the political stakes were for this shift in the nineteenth century, how it related to the abandonment of Reconstruction, and why it is important today to consider the novel’s role in its development.
TL;DR: The authors identified major problems facing college English in Taiwan, including declining enrollment, reduced funding, and widespread contingent hiring, linking them to similar problems associated with the humanities crisis in the United States.
Abstract: The first part of this article identifies major problems facing college English in Taiwan, including declining enrollment, reduced funding, and widespread contingent hiring, linking them to similar problems associated with the humanities crisis in the United States. The second examines selected writing on these problems in the United States, including writing on pedagogy associated with the New Criticism, which until the 1990s was the main approach to literary studies in Taiwan. The third reflects on how commentary on English in the United States might apply in the Taiwanese context, with focus on the material value of an English degree and the potential expansion of the degree beyond the isolated major.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the classroom's contingency, temporariness, and interpersonal exposure yield a form of queer kinship that is contracted rather than intentionally developed, a social iteration of the unintentional, symbiotic collaborations that anthropologists have described as emergent ecologies.
Abstract: This article argues that pedagogy may help us respond to the precarity of higher education by reclaiming the forms of provisionality, accident, and exposure endemic to collaborative learning. Putting kinship theory into contact with studies of contagion, I suggest that the classroom’s contingency, temporariness, and interpersonal exposure yield a form of queer kinship that is contracted rather than intentionally developed. This kinship, a social iteration of the unintentional, symbiotic collaborations that anthropologists have described as “emergent ecologies,” burgeons in the wake of harm and helps us respond collectively to the precarity that constitutes our (experience of the) world. Ultimately, I argue that in a moment when the changing climate of higher education inspires (and perhaps even requires) paranoia, such a pedagogical practice constitutes a significant reparative gesture, enabling us to reckon with the ways in which higher education has abandoned us without requiring us, in turn, to abandon it.
TL;DR: In contrast to accounts that emphasize the speed of propaganda, political operatives in America loyal to the Crown deliberately sought to slow the flow of information, including the stream of satire, rumor, and diatribe that inevitably accompanied it.
Abstract: The wager of this essay is that consideration of an antiquarian media environment—the American colonies in the era of Revolutionary ferment—can help identify tactics for slowing the communications juggernaut that threatens to overwhelm public political discussion. In contrast to accounts that emphasize the speed of propaganda, political operatives in America loyal to the Crown deliberately sought to slow the flow of information, including the stream of satire, rumor, and diatribe that inevitably accompanied it. Broadsides, pamphlets, and poems written in reaction to what Loyalists called the “American rebellion” provide an occasion for assessing what can be done, specifically at the level of discourse, to offset flows of radical publicity.
TL;DR: Baraka posits three interrelated forms of black silence: the silence of oppression, resistance, and social optimism as mentioned in this paper, and he presents a vision of black vernacular culture that does not privilege orality and expression but instead deems silence to be essential in the construction of a black commonplace.
Abstract: The present essay grows out of an engagement with a single line from Amiri Baraka’s 1964 book, The Dead Lecturer. In the poem “Rhythm and Blues,” Baraka writes, “The people of my life / caressed with a silence that only they understand.” The line appears amid a long improvisation on the iconography of black vernacular life. In the middle of this cacophony of frantic chant and scream, Baraka posits silence, and not speech, as the condition of black cultural distinctiveness. In doing so, he presents a vision of black vernacular culture that does not privilege orality and expression but instead deems silence to be essential in the construction of a black commonplace. Baraka posits three interrelated forms of black silence: the silence of oppression, the silence of resistance, and the silence of social optimism. In the perceived absence of expression, the poems from The Dead Lecturer communicate a history of systematic violence, of fugitive withholding, and of communal goodwill. To borrow a phrase from poet and critic Fred Moten, they articulate “an intimacy given most emphatically, and erotically, in a moment of something that, for lack of a better word, we call ‘silence.’”
TL;DR: This article explored the recent popular press debates about the Common Core State Standards and their curricular mandates about the percentage of reading that can be fiction in middle school and high school curricula and suggested that early American arguments about fiction's educational value can help us better understand today's debates about fiction role in the classroom.
Abstract: This article explores the recent popular press debates about the Common Core State Standards and their curricular mandates about the percentage of reading that can be fiction in middle school and high school curricula I suggest that early American arguments about fiction’s educational value can help us better understand today’s debates about fiction’s role in the classroom, because they reveal just how much is taken for granted in our contemporary arguments about fiction The article argues that recent work on fictionality (and on historical poetics generally) allows us to come to a richer understanding of the terms on which early Americans valued fiction, bringing into view a series of historical contestations over fictionality’s cultural meaning and purpose These contestations, in turn, reveal just how delimited a sense of fiction’s value and possible uses underpins our current debates After a brief reading of Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), the article explores how attention to these historical contestations over fiction’s value might lead to a reconsideration of the grounds on which we defend fiction’s educational value today I close by considering the more general pedagogical implications of recent scholarship in historical poetics broadly construed
TL;DR: The authors restore the import of race to the skyscraper by reading formalist theories by the father of modern architecture, Louis Sullivan, alongside a work of African American modernist fiction, Nella Larsen's Passing (1929).
Abstract: Since its inception, the skyscraper has served as an icon of American innovation, modernity, and freedom. Upholding this image has erased the racial thinking and racist practices foundational to this born-and-bred American architectural form. This essay restores the import of race to the skyscraper by reading formalist theories by the father of modern architecture, Louis Sullivan, alongside a work of African American modernist fiction, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). Reading Sullivan alongside Larsen explains how skyscrapers and blackness together have defined what gets seen as modern. The unexpected pairing reveals the visual racial logics built into skyscraper aesthetics and adds an architectural thread to the well-established scholarship on Larsen’s novel.