Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 1989"

America, post-Utopia: Body, Landscape, and National Fantasy in Hawthorne's Native Land

Abstract: In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx develops an aesthetic of revolution that explains the political content of mass movements by their relation to symbolic forms. He does not simply read the content-logic of the forms themselves—so that the \"meaning\" of a metaphor like \"the nation is a woman\" does not reside primarily in the way \"woman\" expresses national qualities. Rather, Marx evaluates the techniques through which a movement formulates or articulates itself. \"Bourgeois revolutions,\" he writes, \"... storm quickly from success to success;

Kissing Becky: Masculine Fears and Misogynist Moments in Science Fiction Films

Abstract: ����� ers (1956), Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982)—are all marked by a common element: the presence of at least one moment of startling misogyny These moments are startling in part because they involve either a narrative digression or superfluity, a stylistic deviation, or a violation of their films' prior encodings of the female More importantly, each of them expresses an unanticipated level of male fear of or violence towaid women, in response to a threat to men's powers of representation and control What follows attempts to read in these moments of textual excess both the instability of male identity and the vulnerability of male hegemony This reading is part of the stream of response to Laura Mulvey's watershed essay on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," with its crucial analysis of "Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look" Since Mulvey, a good deal of writing on film and gender has focused on trying to undermine the seemingly monolithic structure of the classic pattiatchal Hollywood system, and paiticulatly on theorizing women's relation—and opposition—to a cinema that seems systematically to exclude them as subjects Hence critics have taken up such matters as the "return of the gaze" on the part of the female image/object, the problem of "women's cinema," and the positions of actual female spectatots, in vatious histotical moments, as they watch classic Hollywood

Twilight Sleep: Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics

Abstract: ENERATiONS of critics have claimed that Edith Wharton liked both her gardens and her society well-pruned. In her late fictions, however, Wharton addresses the politics of intimate experience in the context of social debates. To that end, her characters often echo social policy, transformed as it is by Wharton's own bias against legislation of private morality. Although her late fictions have been read conservatively, they are not written in isolation from larger political issues. Instead, they insist on the relation between private and public rather than on a divorce between the two. In challenging her class's (as well as her culture's) gender ideology, Wharton manipulates the conventions of the realist novel to reconcile popular fiction with cultural criticism. My aim is not to reduce the ambivalence with which Wharton writes about anti-Semitism, nor her hatred of black culture, especially as Carl van Vechten describes it in his 1926 Nigger Heaven. I do, however, want to show how writing literature and writing culture, for Wharton, draws on a cultural unconscious, one associated for her with fascism. In Nancy Armstrong's terms, \"individual works and kinds of writing gather force, not as they exemplify [an] individual imagination, genre, or tradition of ideas, but as they enter into an unwitting conspiracy that extends throughout the figurative operations of cultural production to shape the lives of real people\" (357). I do not so much want to place Wharton's Twilight Sleep in the \"context\" of history, thereby writing a new historicism, as

Who Gets Lost in the Funhouse

Abstract: There's no point in going farther; this isn't getting anybody anywhere; they haven't even come to the funhouse yet. Ambrose is off the track, in some new or old part of the place that's not supposed to be used; he strayed into it by some onein-a-million chance, like the time the roller-coaster car left the tracks in the nineteen-teens against all the laws of physics and sailed over the boardwalk in the dark. And they can't locate him because they don't know where to look. Even the designer and operator have forgotten this other part, that winds around on itself like a whelk shell. That winds around the right part like the snakes on Mercury's caduceus. . . .'

Getting Into History

Abstract: hile historians like Hayden White have busily been trying to get out of history, feminist literary critics have been just as energetically trying to get into it.1 Since women as historical subjects are rarely included in \"History\" to begin with, the strong feminist interest in forging a new historicity that moves across and against \"his story\" is not surprising. What is more surprising perhaps is the particular form these new feminist approaches to historicism are taking: feminism enacts its engagement with history through a fetishistic fascination with its own historical roots both as a theory and as a practice. But this may be precisely the problem: histories of feminist theory have come to stand in for more rigorous feminist theories of history. Feminism's vexed relation to historicism is not so much alleviated as exacerbated by these recent attempts to deal with the category of history by tracing feminism's own genealogical roots. The exercise is not a pointless one (far from it) ; it is simply insufficient to answer the still serious charges of \"ahistoricism\" that seem to plague feminist theorists at every turn, even and especially those self-professed materialist literary critics who have made the most impassioned and most persuasive pleas for a historicist feminism. Toril Moi's Sexuaí/Textuaí Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985) is arguably the first systematic investigation of feminist literary criticism's theoretical presuppositions, and it has already received the serious and sustained attention such innovative critical work deserves. 2 My interest

The Antimodernist Unconscious: Genre and Ideology in The House of Mirth

Abstract: NY reconsideration of Edith Wharton's place in the canon of American literature must come to terms with the following anomaly. With a handful of other novelists, it is her distinction to have successfully negotiated the realms of high and mass culture at a time when their separation had become institutionalized. Published in 1905, The House of Mirth propelled Wharton to the front rank of American authors and broke all sales records at Scribner's during its heyday as a national best seller (Lewis 151). The body of critical opinion that has characterized Wharton as a \"literary aristocrat\" or antimodernist,1 out of touch with the main currents of twentieth-century American culture, cannot explain her popular following of 1905. Furthermore, it has tended to diminish the historical significance of her oeuvre. This paper is a contribution toward a fuller appreciation of Wharton's enduring claims on the present. There are several important precedents for such an undertaking. In the company of Henry Adams, Samuel Clemens, and William James, Wharton figures among the \"dtamatis personae\" of Jackson Lears' revisionist study in American cultural history, No Place of Grace (32223). Far from being \"the death rattle of old-stock Northeastern elites unable to adjust to a raw new industrial civilization,\" the antimodetnism of these fin-de-siecle artists and intellectuals \"helped to revitalize familiar bourgeois values and eased the transition to new ones\" appro-

Dialogic Structure and Levels of Discourse In Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Abstract: UCH attention has been paid to the most basic level of narrative structure in The Grapes of Wrath, to the alternation of the story of the Joads with the story of the Dust Bowl exodus as a whole. Critics have discussed Steinbeck's rationale for such a structure and have closely examined devices the author uses to weld the two kinds of chapters into a unified novel.1 In spite of long interest in the immediate dialectic of the alternating chapters, however, almost no attention has been devoted to the still more complex dialogic structure and levels of discourse in The Grapes ofWrath. In attempting to write the story of a human tragedy on a national scale, Steinbeck was faced with a dilemma. The documentary, a form with which he was thoroughly familiar, tended to give the big picture, tended to focus on the suffering multitudes, with the effect of educating the viewer or reader but at the same time distancing him from the intimate suffering and pain of those caught up in disaster. \"It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know

The Discourse Within: Feminism and Intradisciplinary Study

Abstract: In this essay, I want to bring the history of feminist theory and scholarship to beat on a specific problem in literary studies, a problem symptomatic of a larger pattern in academic discourse. In particular, I will argue that there is a relation between the structuring of the academic discipline of American literary studies and the way American literary texts are understood and valued. Although feminism has become a part of academic discourse only in the last few decades, feminists have tried since theit initial entry into the academy to change its structure. From its inception, feminist study has been interdisciplinary. The 1976 inaugural issue of Signs, for example, states that its first purpose "is to publish the new scholarship about women from both the United States and other countries" (Stimpson, et al. ?). Having defined this comparativist task, the editors continue, "Signs has a second purpose as well: to be interdisciplinary" (v). Women's histories, literature, culture, and lives had fallen between the cracks of traditional academic disciplines; interdisciplinary study would allow scholars to recapture them. In addition, an interdisciplinary perspective would foster new attention to, and critical evaluation of, the methodologies employed by various disciplines. This critique of methodology proved especially important in the humanities where the very use of method was often unacknowledged. The results of the feminist call for a broad restructuring of traditional disciplines and approaches have been widespread. For example, the new literary history that has

Handedness and the Self: Poe's Chess Player

Abstract: close reader of Poe's detective stories soon discovers that the .real mystery in these tales turns not so much upon the startling identity of the killer in the Rue Morgue or the actual cause of Marie Roget's death or the manner in which the purloined letter is concealed by the Minister D_________ (all of which are soluble), as upon the analytic power itself, that mysterious mental ability to solve a mystety. Starting with the narrator's opening argument in the first Dupin story that "the mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in them- selves, but little susceptible of analysis,"1 Poe expands his analysis of the analytic power over the course of the three tales to include the mysteries of the mind-body relationship and the structure of the self. In making the nature of human self-consciousness the real object of investigation in the Dupin stories, Poe is simply continuing and refining a thematic concern that had been present from the beginning of his career as a prose writer. Indeed, some five years before publishing the first Dupin story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe made what is perhaps his most explicit examination of the criteria of mental activity in an 1836 essay entitled "Maelzel's Chess Player." In the essay Poe presents a lengthy analysis of the chess-playing au- tomaton invented by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1 769 and exhi- bited during the 1820s and '30s in the United States by Johann Maelzel, an inventor of musical automata and a one time friend and business partner of Beethoven. Poe's analysis—which critics frequently point to as a prefiguration of the analytic method of the three Dupin stories—is

Interlude: The Agony of Play in "The Open Boat"

Abstract: 'An overturned boat in the surf is not a plaything to a swimming man,\" the narratot remarks, near the close of Stephen Crane's \"The Open Boat\" (1897), that famous account of \"the experience of fout men from the sunk steamet 'Commodore,'\" the story of how those men, cramped togethet in a lifeboat, wage a battle, raging, against their doom.' To the correspondent, once struggling in the boat to gain the surf, now struggling in the surf to get to shore, the upturned tenfoot dinghy could become a life-preserving float, as it has for the captain, \"clinging with one hand to the keel\" (5:91). More likely, it could become a lethal obstacle—as, historically, it did for the oiler William Higgins.2 In either case, the boat is not a toy. The severity of the story's narrative situation would seem to obviate such a point: who, reading about four men laboring for their lives against an \"indifferent, flatly indifferent\" natural world (5:88), would entertain the idea, as this contest draws to its close, that the dinghy in the waves off-shore is simply an object to be played with? And yet the narrator feels compelled to

Narration and Reflection: The Search for Grounds in Poe's "The Power of Words" and "The Domain of Arnheim"

Abstract: Self-reflection as an attempt to establish certainty in the unmediated relationship of the self to itself is the foundation of \"modern metaphysics as a metaphysics of subjectivity.\"1 Poe's tales belong to this post-Cartesian metaphysics of subjectivity which searches for the foundations or grounds of moral and epistemological certainty in itself. In tales like \"The Domain of Arnheim\" and \"The Power ofWords\" Poe both participates in and subverts the grounding of thought in subjectivity. In these tales Poe explores the problem of reflection and finds the act of narration to be essential to it. In Poe, the necessity of narration reveals the incoherence and the indispensability of attempts to ground certainty in an unmediated relationship of self to self. In Poe, the foundation of moral philosophy in the analysis of subjectivity appears cracked. An imp of the perverse, a principle of conflict within the self, ungrounds speculation. Reflection in Poe's tales usually involves an irreducible alterity that constitutes the subject. Stories like \"William Wilson,\" \"The Fall of the House of Usher,\" and the tales of ratiocination, enact the conflicts of consciousness most obviously. But in the tales that focus on language and aesthetics, which the philosophy of reflection in Poe's era especially valued, the ineluctable link between self-reflection and self-antagonism—the flaw Poe finds in the foundation of moral philosophy—appears most clearly. In this connection,

Semiotics/Psychoanalysis/Christianity: Eliot's Logic of Alterity

Abstract: It has become increasingly fashionable and politically correct to dismiss Eliot as an irrelevant anachronism or, in a stronger rejection, as the embodiment of all of those pernicious mental habits—essentialism, formalistic aestheticism, and so forth—against which much contemporary theory calculates its difference. It has seemed an easy project to banalize Eliot and fix him in a formulated critical phrase, or to pin him to some philosophical wall as a fully known quantity left as sprawling witness to a now-discredited theoretical position. Often, it seems, we believe we have known all of Eliot already, and that there is no remainder or excess to this knowledge. Such is the case with Christopher Norris, for example, for whom Eliot is nothing more than a late example in a long line of \"conservative critic-philosophers,\" a phrase that for Norris gives a complete picture of Eliot's thought (12). Norris aggressively promotes this formulaic picture, placing Eliot securely in the camp of aestheticians who by collapsing, as he puts it, \"history itself into a timeless, idealized 'tradition, ' \" do all they can to protect themselves and their criticism from the reasoned critique of philosophy and the inevitability of \"mediating theory\" (14). For Norris, Eliot stands on the other side of a great divide: while those ideologically-mystified

Night Pollution and the Floods of Confession in Michael Wigglesworth's Diary

Abstract: The sabbath evening and the next day I was much distressed in conscience, seing a stable dore of Mr. Mitchels beat to and fro with the wind, whither, I should out of duty shut it or not; no temptations perplex me so sorely as such like, when I am not clear concerning my duty . . . this made me seriously and solemnly cry to heaven for light to my mind, and grace to obey with chearfulness all gods wil. And still I cry, Lord leave me not to er from thy ways subdue the enmity of my heart in tender mercy for thy name sake: pitty my poor fainting decaying body.'

Being Otherwise: Nature, History, and Tragedy in Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract: The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his kind: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone's and the Earth no one's. —Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality

Exposing the Verisimilar: Hawthorne's "Wakefield" and "Feathertop"

Abstract: akefield\" (1835) and \"Feathertop\" (1852) are improbable tales that nevertheless engage our belief in their own peculiar veracity. The narrators of these tales draw authority from conventions of moralized prose and romance that allow as probable what we do not expect within our everyday experience nor, by extension, in novelistic modes of fiction. We tentatively accept the narrator's claim in the earlier tale that a meaningful character will emerge from his announced imaginative activity because explicit fictionalizing is a familiar convention of romance and because explicit narrative judgment is a familiar convention of moralized prose. Likewise, we tentatively accept the narrator's claim in the last of Hawthorne's short fictions that inhaling a magical pipe brings a scarecrow to life, and that this show of life speaks to our own, because we grant to certain kinds of fiction latitude for such unnatural events. But these narrators also call into question the authority of their claims for the truths of moralized prose and romance as well as the authority of our own perceptions and

Orality, Aggression, and Epistemology in Walker Percy's The Second Coming

Abstract: The second coming (1980) has been read as a celebratory affirmation of the restorative powers of love in the modern world. Like all of Percy's protagonists, Will Barrett, hero of both The Last Gentleman (1966) and The Second Coming, is a perennial seeker. But unlike Binx Boiling, Dr. Thomas More, and Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, Will actually discovers the objects of his pursuit. When the novel opens, Will Barrett is experiencing spells of physical and psychic dislocation: he inexplicably falls down on golf courses and suffers extended fits of involuntary memory. Recently widowed, Will comes to recognize that he and his wife had been virtual strangers to each other and that he is equally estranged from his only daughter, Leslie, \"a dissatisfied nearsighted girl whose good looks were spoiled by a frown which had made a heavy inverted U in her brow.\"1 While Leslie quells her discontent through \"new-style\" Christianity, her belief in \"giving her life to the Lord through a personal encounter with Him\" (152), Will rejects the dogmatic forms of both old and new-style Christianity. Well into middle age, he finds himself detached from family, friends, and God and slowly losing hold of whatever tenuous connections to the world he had hitherto maintained. A second line of narration interwoven with Will's story centers on Allie, a young woman tired of conforming to the demands of her parents and of attempting to achieve socially determined goals. Having

Robert Coover's 'Writing Degree Zero': "The Magic Poker"

Abstract: OBERT coover's Pricksongs and Descants (1969) is not only a »superb short story collection but a work that attempts to destroy the myths of contemporary literature and to examine the very nature of the writing process. Despite lavish talents, Coover has been a neglected figure on the American literary scene because his prose consistently investigates the conflicts that beset modernist writing as well as the act of composing that produces them. Frequently regarded as a precocious metafictionist, a lesser Barth or Pynchon, whose prose puzzles recall experimental American writing of the late sixties at its most synthetic, Coover is actually a highly poetic, extremely sophisticated prose philosopher whose fictions have always questioned the self-reflexivity of the American metafictionist movement. He has much in common with the anti-mythological writer that Roland Barthes sought in his 1957 essay "Myth Today," the one who would produce what Barthes calls writing degree zero, language that assiduously attempts to extract all its false, mythic content.1 In paralleling Barthes' program, Coover's stories attain a sparsity, purity, and elegance that signifies far more than Coover's declaration of his own presence in the text. Rather, these stories reflect the presence of a tough-minded yet supple intelligence in their analyses of many myths, including what Barthes considers one of the most dubious myths of literature: the literary mythos itself, the belief that literature must exclusively concern itself with the dissemination of ideas or feeling,

A Small Boy and the Ease of Others: The Structure of Masculinity and the Autobiography of Henry James

Abstract: The idea for this essay comes from a public lecture by a famous intellectual, which I witnessed several years ago at Harvard. I was thinking about both masculinity and James at the time, and I found his on-stage persona a striking one. As a master-intellectual sutrounded by competitors and desiring students, he clearly seemed to be a part of the world of male power, yet the masculine nature of his posture seemed to be produced by more than his position as the center of scrutiny. It was the ease of his on-stage manner which produced a sense of his masculine control. Clearly, with every shrug or wave, it implied the presence of resources more than sufficient for dealing with the situation at hand.1 The whole question of \"ease\" seemed stunningly foregrounded as a sign of the masculine in interand intra-gender relations, and in aesthetics. And when I subsequently returned to the work of James, I found that the Mästet obsessively associates this term with male charactets throughout his novels. The discussion which follows tries to account for this persistence, initially by exploring the implications of \"ease\" as a metaphor, and then by focusing, with the help of Melanie Klein, on its use in A Small Boy and Others, the crucial first volume of James's Autobiography. 2 Fotms of ease weave themselves in and out of our conversation in a variety of ways: ease, easy, easily, easier, easiest, easing, uneasy, and disease. Ease in its most obvious sense is a synonym for pleasure, espe-

Heroism, Home, and the Telling of Shane

Abstract: The title character of Jack Schaefer's classic, Shane, may be said to embody virtually all of the qualities usually associated with the Western hero—or, indeed, more generally with the Ametican hero. He is handsome, youthful, even boyish. Joe Starrett, the proud homesteader who befriends Shane, remarks to the gunfighter: \"There's still a lot of kid in you.\" Young Bob Statrett, Joe's son and only child, goes on: \"The first teal smile I had seen yet flashed across Shane's face. 'Maybe. Maybe there is at that.'\"1 He is utterly independent and self-reliant— \"cool and competent,\" Bob observes, at a climactic moment, \"facing that room full of men in the simple solitude of his own invincible completeness\" (254). He is \"as self-sufficient as the mountains\" (161). And, when the chips are down, he reminds Bob's father, \"There's no man living can tell me what I can't do. Not even you, Joe\" (243). He is solitary, taciturn, socially remote. \"Shane was not anxious to meet people. He would share little in their talk\" (124). He has no respect for the other homesteadets, and he makes no effort to disguise his contempt (165). He is itinerant and homeless—\"I was fiddle-footed and left home at fifteen\" (77), he declares—and disinclined to talk at any length about his past. \"He had no news about himself,\" says Bob: \"His past was fenced as tightly as out pasture\" (71). As Bob insists at the novel's end, Shane's origins are mythical, intertwined with the destiny of the region and the nation, and somehow subsumed in the latitude of his autonomy and the depth of his self-completeness. \"He was the man

American Ethnopoetics: A New Critical Dimension

Abstract: Ethnopoetics is the study of preliterate societies' modes of discourse, the formal complexity ofwhich requires that they be understood as literature. In the twenty years of its existence ethnopoetics has demonstrated that material collected by linguists, folklorists, and anthropologists inattentive to aesthetic components or functions reveals—when carefully analyzed—patterns of superb literary artistry. Because the central focus of this discipline is work oral in its original form, ethnopoetic critics do not ignore the uniqueness of individual performances. But these critics assume that the artistry of any single performance is made possible by the existence of definable literary traditions. The art of a single work, as with Western European literature, simultaneously embodies and modifies an aesthetic system. Ethnopoetics thus radically opposes modern celebrants of \"primitive\" art, artists such as Picasso and critics such as Roger Fry, who have praised aboriginal creations as accordant with Modernist aesthetics while implicitly or explicitly denying the capability of \"primitives\" to create significant artistic traditions. As in linguistics, which operates on the assumption that no language can be identified as \"primitive,\" the fundamental presupposition of ethnopoetics is that there is no such thing as \"primitive art.\" The importance of ethnopoetic ambitions to recover artistic system is perhaps best illustrated by Western European civilization's supreme ethnopoetic texts, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The most famous work of classical scholarship in this century is Milman Parry's study of Homeric formulae, which first appeared more than half a century ago. Parry's

The Picture of History in "The May-Pole of Merry Mount"

Abstract: Perhaps the most curious texture in \"The May-Pole of Merry Mount\" is the interlude described by some critics as an \"historical essay.\"1 Within \"these authentic passages from history\" the narrator concludes, \"[the May-Pole] has made their true history a poet's tale\" (9: 60). 2 That visual and spiritual center of the colony conflates \"history\" and \"tale\" into a common, enduring truth. This conclusion also represents an authorial signature in the comer of his canvas: like its title symbol, the tale itself, however historical, makes history into story. \"The May-Pole\" 's rich effect derives in good part from the apparently competing claims of history and story, which I take to be the tale's dominant contrasts. History and story—under which umbrella I locate common features of allegory, Hawthorne's favorite term; romance, critics' favorite term; and dream—implicate one another so pervasively that each exists only in the context of the other, as a sort of shadowy double. This symbiosis, evident in an oscillating textual rhythm,3 results in an emblem that stresses eternal contraries rather than reconciliation, and that simultaneously records and stops change.4 The entire tale figures as an emblem whose quintessential gloss describes a permanence that displaces the transitory:

Projections of Measure: The Continued Synergies of Pound and Williams

Abstract: Poetry is intrinsically musical, and it calls for a kind of invention which may not be solved by reverting to the tune of some received meter, though that solution contented Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Wallace Stevens, among othets. Rimbaud, however, as a metrical American poet (Hart Crane) reminded himself, did say \"il faut être absolument moderne,\" pre-echoing the \"Make It New\" of Pound and Confucius' bathtub. The imperatives of inventing a live music in poetty can present themselves as problems, and one can too easily ignore those problems by reversion to received conventional, or even received \"unconventional\" solutions. To find and invent his music, the poet at all times is called upon to hear and adjudicate among the possibilities before him. These possibilities, in almost all but the most primitive societies, are multiple, and call for resolution, even if, like Lucretius and Propertius and Vergil and Ovid, the poet has made the choice of a single pattern measure, or, like Catullus and Horace, has chosen from among a group of given measures. The solution of all these Roman poets is to exploit special possibilities within their given metets. Unique solutions seem to have been sought, and found, so far as we can tell from the slender evidence before us, by the earliest Greek lyric poets; by Alemán and Sappho, as well as by Pindar. Chaucer evolved his Mozartian mettical fluency, the most finelytuned for centuties, out of a number of French and Italian possibilities