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Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 1994"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The United States, of course, neither maintains an official ideology of nationalism and anti-Semitism, nor overtly silences political opposition through as mentioned in this paper, nor does it tolerate political opposition.
Abstract: Don delillo's White Noise comically treats both academic and domestic life. Yet both of these subjects serve primarily as vehicles for DeLillo's satiric examination of the ways in which contemporary America is implicated in proto-fascist urges.1 In making this claim, I do not mean to erase the enormous differences between contemporary America and Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly Germany and Hitler's National Socialists, which DeLillo's novel invokes. The United States, of course, neither maintains an official ideology of nationalism and anti-Semitism, nor overtly silences political opposition through

32 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In contemporary Western medical practice increasingly sophisticated imaging apparati fetishize the technologized reproduction of a body's inner landscape (which, in turn, remains eminently unreadable by the ''body'' being imaged), and have profound effects on what actions are taken on people's lives as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: t least since Foucault, the scene of institutionalized medi„cine has served as an obvious locale for studying looking relations and the reproduction, management, and censorship of bodies. In contemporary Western medical practice increasingly sophisticated imaging apparati fetishize the technologized reproduction of a body's inner landscape (which, in turn, remains eminently un-readable by the \"body\" being imaged), and have profound effects on what actions are taken on people's lives.1 The precedent for the primacy of the specular, the confluence of photography with diagnostic discourse and the amphitheatrical space of medical pedagogy, is already apparent in the United States in the nineteenth century. The Civil War as both the real and fantasmatic catalyst for the professionalization of medicine created the need for nurses and hospitals, and fed the fascination for photographic record of the body mutilated beyond repair. Louisa May Alcott, better known today for her wildly successful sentimental narratives and more recently discovered Gothic thrillers, began her writing career with a series of sketches loosely based on her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War. Hospital Sketches is a ready site for examining gender and race in the realm of censored viewing.2

10 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors re-frame what criticism might say about Hamlin Garland by using Garland's career to frame the critical endeavor, and the following remarks are occasioned by three distinct and well-known developments of the 1980s: the renewed historical and political interest in American Populism, the theoretical exploration of what might be called the ''populist potential of popular culture, and a re-invigorated literary-critical return to American realist and naturalist fiction.
Abstract: rORKiNG t? re-frame what criticism might say about Hamlin Garland by using Garland's career to frame the critical endeavor, the following remarks are occasioned by three distinct and well-known developments of the 1980s: the renewed historical and political interest in American Populism, the theoretical exploration of what might be called the \"populist potential\" of popular culture, and the re-invigorated literary-critical return to American realist and naturalist fiction. Garland surfaces nowhere in these conversations, although he once served the literary-historical function of marking the advent of determinist realism in American fiction, although his later romantic fiction helps mark the advent of the popular Western, and although he has long been America's most famous Populist writer, who lectured and campaigned for the Farmers' Alliance and the Peoples' Party, part of the \"movement culture's\" task of educating farmers. The failure to surface may well be conditioned by the pressure of the fact that Garland was and remains known chiefly for his first volume of

10 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the fall of 1 856, the anti-slavery periodical, the Boston Liberator, reported that a wealthy white slaveowner by the name of G. W. Vandell had uncovered a plot among his African-American slaves to murder the white populace of Fayette County, Tennessee and then to proceed to Memphis, where they would be met by co-conspirators with additional weapons as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the fall of 1 856, the anti-slavery periodical, the Boston Liberator, reported that a wealthy white slaveowner by the name of G. W. Vandell had purportedly uncovered a plot among his African-American slaves to murder the white populace of Fayette County, Tennessee and then to proceed to Memphis, where they would be met by co-conspirators with additional weapons. The most frightening discovery for the vigilance committee investigating Vandell's report was the \"fact\" that the incipient rebellion \"was not confined to this particular neighborhood, but that they [the slaves] expected to act in concert with various others in the surrounding counties and States.\"1 Indeed, as the Boston Liberator and other periodicals of the day would make clear on a repeated basis, reports alleging the existence of plans for slave revolts dominated the popular consciousness throughout 1856 (Wish 206). 2 Labelled by the historian Harvey Wish as the \"slave insurrection panic of 1856,\" pro and anti-slavery papers took turns blaming the other side for the violence which all believed to be imminent. The New York Tribune would, for example, declare: \"Let the South with her growing insurrections look to it. . . . These last suppressed insurrections grew out of the discussions on Kansas. . . . The manacles of the slave must be stricken off.\" And although this was by no means an unjustifiable position to assume toward the institution of slavery, the important thing to recognize about the Tribune's rhetoric, with its evocation of widespread slave rebellions, is that it took shape only as a direct response to a New York

9 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: One of the most striking aspects of Epcot Center is its ''Woild Showcase'' as mentioned in this paper, an anay of pavilions from various nations, which, arranged in a circle around a manmade lake, allow one to take a simulated tour of the world without actually traveling at all.
Abstract: The Disneyland theme park, as Jean Baudrillard has noted, is in many ways the ultimate postmodern phenomenon, the ultimate example of the kind of simulated environment with which we deal in less obvious ways every day. Its younger but bigger brother, Disneyworld, is even more perfectly postmodern, especially with addition of the technological and cultural marvels of Epcot Center. One of the most striking aspects of Epcot Center is its \"Woild Showcase,\" an anay of pavilions from various nations, which—arranged in a circle around a manmade lake—allow one to take a simulated tour of the world without actually traveling at all. At first glance this compressed world community might appear to be the epitome of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, but it is also worth wondering whether Epcot Center— which Andrew Ross has called \"the most fully administered of corporate futurist environments\" (138)—does not in fact represent a denial of heteroglossia. Among other things, the prepackaged world tour offered to visitors of Epcot might be seen as a sott of Baedeker phenomenon updated and perhaps iun amok, indicating the artificiality and superficiality of the contact that touiists make with the countries they visit even in \"real\" tiavel. This tout also says something about the paradoxical way we view space in a postmodern wotld where high-speed transportation has made international tiavel easier than ever before,

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: DeLillo's "Libra" as mentioned in this paper plays Borges to the report's "Joycean Book of America", a work that has as much a propositional relation to itself as fiction as it does to reality.
Abstract: I R assassinations, particularly when the site of the event is the Texas School Book Depository. As Don DeLillo's Libra makes abundantly clear, the assassination is a text, which is to say it is anything but clear. I do not refer to the all too familiar questions of conspiracies that were raised immediately following the assassination, left unsettled by the Warren Commission Report, and since renewed by Oliver Stone's JFK. Rather, history is a text, and not simply by virtue of the documentary evidence compiled by the Warren Commission with an inclusiveness that establishes the twenty-six volumes as a Menippean satire. Libra plays Borges to the Report's \"Joycean Book of America\";1 that is, Libra is a commentary, a work that has as much a propositional relation to itself as fiction as it does to reality. If the novel is a proposition about fiction and the assassination is a text, then Libra holds in its scales the undecidable balance between history and language. Although Libra does not, in the manner of certain Borges stories, present itself as a synopsis of a possible work, at 456pages, however, it is still short enough to be a commentary on the Warren Report and the numerous texts produced by those scholars of the assassination, assassinolo-

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the first convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society, members called for the mobilization of free blacks and ex-slaves as professional ''agents'' who would bear oral witness to the wrongs of captivity.
Abstract: t the first convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society .in 1833, members called for the mobilization of free blacks and ex-slaves as professional \"agents\" who would bear oral witness to the wrongs of captivity. Writing to Theodore Weld in 1838, the abolitionist Angelina Grimké champions these roving lecturers by exalting the dynamic between the ear and the voice igniting it: the slave's \"narratives\" must \"come burning from his own lips. . . . Many and many a tale of romantic horror can the slaves tell\" (Weid-Grimke' Letters 2: January 21, 1838, 523-24). ' In her controversial Pennsylvania Hall speech, Grimké endorses hearing as an almost mystical transportation into the space of political reform—the \"here\" of the Pennsylvania Hall itself: \"Here it—hear it. . . . Every man and woman present may do something ... by opening our mouths for the dumb and pleading the cause\" (Pennsylvania Hall 123-25.) The rhetorical outrage of abolitionists like Grimké consistently, of course, took the form of meticulous ratiocination. But she and other cohorts understood that speech might not only convert the intellect and soul, but ravish the senses as well.

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Melville's "Tartarus of maids" as discussed by the authors is a deeply Foucauldian allegory where the factory both emblematizes and participates in some new social technology of gender wherein "through consumptive powers of this blank, raggy life go these white girls to death".
Abstract: ����� In melville's "The Tartarus of Maids," the narrator goes on one of the factory tours that were fashionable in the mid-nineteenth century to see a paper mill, where he observes "rows of blank girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding paper."1 In this deeply Foucauldian allegory, the factory both emblematizes and participates in some new social technology ofgender wherein "through consumptive powers of this blank, raggy life go these white girls to death."2 "Consumptive" registers the pathology ofboth the factory system and the consumerism that feeds it, and Melville's antipathy to both. The reproductive and heterosexual symbolism in "Tartarus" has also been amply documented by its critics: to pick only a few examples from the text, during a complicated nine-minute process one machine "germinates" rag particles, finally giving birth to paper pulp attended by an operative who was once a nurse, and the visiting narrator tells us that he is a "seedsman" who distributes nationally. Central to "Tartarus," ofcourse, is the way the "maids" have been sexually and technologically "made," the way that female sexuality is conscripted for

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The story of the conversion of Rutherford from a self-proclaimed "petty thief" and "social parasite" into the chief accuser of the illegal slavetraders of New Orleans (2,200-03) is described in this paper.
Abstract: UTHERFORD calhoun, the narrator of Charles Johnson's third »novel Middle Passage, has three careers, each of which is part of a determined effort on his part to create the person he \"could rightly call Rutherford Calhoun,\" or to discover, as he puts it, the \"T that I was\" (162). After he is manumitted by his master in Southern Illinois, he first becomes a thief— a career, he informs us, that he had learned as a slave, and a career which is part of his striving to generate a philosophy of experience. In one way, Middle Passage is a story about the conversion of Rutherford from a self-proclaimed \"petty thief\" and \"social parasite\" into the chief accuser of the illegal slavetraders of New Orleans (2,200-03). He is transformed from someone who lives outside one set of laws into someone who comes to live within another set of laws. We cannot say that Rutherford undergoes a radical transformation from thief to law-abiding citizen for two reasons. First, he was never as \"petty\" a thief as he professes to be because his career as a thief coincides with, and is supported by, an interesting philosophy of revolution and class warfare. Second, he does not simply begin obeying the law after his middle passage. Having discovered the economic and social conditions underwriting large-scale crime—namely, slavery and the slave trade— Rutherford partially reforms his philosophy about stealing property, but he also discovers that blackmail is an effective strategy towards ending the slave trade. In his second career, Rutherford becomes a lover. In many ways, none of them conventional, Middle Passage is a love story.

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The issue of the visibility of the Native American within Puritan texts, and especially in more recent histories of the Puritans' settlement of New England, has been central to the work of Americanist revisions for the last twenty years as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The issue of the visibility of the Native American within Puritan texts, and especially in more recent histories of the Puritans' settlement of New England, has been central to the work ofAmericanist revisions for the last twenty years.1 I want to contribute to both the primary and secondary aspect of that ongoing discussion by taking the case of Roger Williams' A Key into the Language ofAmerica (1645). One of the first English translations to inaugurate not only a concern for Indian visibility but to hold out the possibility of dialogue between cultures,2 this text was misconceived and underestimated in Perry Miller's seminal interpretations of Williams' notion of theocracy. I would suggest that an examination of how A Key figures Indians, and how Miller historicizedWilliams without really accounting for either Indians or A Key, can lead us back to the cultural poetics that Miller missed. That poetics is manifested in the Indian himself—a textual embodiment of the nexus between metaphor and civil discourse; 1 would argue that Williams conceived the link as essential to political and religious survival in the culturally contested New England of the early seven-

4 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Morgan Manuscript of Pudd'nhead Wihon as discussed by the authors contains three major plots: a farcical story about Siamese twins from Italy, a fingerprinting detective story featuring an eccentric lawyer, and a changeling-miscegenation plot instigated by the slave Roxana.
Abstract: , N January 2 , 1 893 , as a typist transcribed the holograph document that has come to be known as the Morgan Manuscript of Pudd'nhead Wihon, Mark Twain wrote to Laurence Hutton from Italy: \"I've finished that book and revised it. The book didn't cost me any fatigue, but revising it nearly killed me. Revising books is a mistake.\"1 The self-professed \"jackleg\" author who compares himself to Dante in a prefatory note had in fact done a good deal of patching and filling but very little ofwhat most writers call revision on the Morgan Manuscript, an early version of Pudd'nhead Wihon that includes the dizzying coincidence of three major plots: a farcical story about Siamese twins from Italy, a fingerprinting detective story featuring an eccentric lawyer, and a changeling-miscegenation plot instigated by the slave Roxana. With his new manuscript in hand, Twain traveled to New York that spring, where his publisher, James Hall, persuaded him that the story's unsettling sequence of miscegenation, murder, and situation comedy required at least one more set of revisions. On May 13 the author departed for Europe, still convinced that \"revising books is a mistake,\" but resigned to Hall's opinion that on this occasion further revision constituted a necessary hardship. Leslie Fiedler lamented that Twain \"lost his nerve\" when he failed to override Hall's fiscal concerns in order to publish \"the really great and

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The philosophical correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson descends to us as a public text, one which readers have widely admired for its intellectual depth, epistolary style, and remarkable perspective on friendship as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The philosophical correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson descends to us as a public text, one which readers have widely admired for its intellectual depth, epistolary style, and remarkable perspective on friendship. Indeed few readers would object to Ezra Pound's declaration that the letters stand as \"a Shrine and a Monument\" to the cosmopolitan intellect of the revolutionary age (148). Frequently lost, however, in the compelling image of the two presidents conversing on the summit of a republican Mt. Parnassus is the fact that the letters emerged in a culture which routinely used the correspondents as symbols of partisan conflict and rancor. When Adams wrote Jefferson on January ?, 1812, breaking their eleven-year silence, neither of them could be certain that the friendship would this time survive their political disagreements. The statesmen's public identity and their lingering personal resentments combined to make their reconciliation fragile and tenuous, and their letters repeatedly guard



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The WORDSWORTHIAN preoccupation with identity, targeted by writers as diverse as Robert Pinsky, Jacques Derrida, Kathy Acker, and Charles Bernstein, takes another kind of hit in the poetry of Ray A. Young Bear.
Abstract: The WORDSWORTHiAN preoccupation with identity, targeted by writers as diverse as Robert Pinsky, Jacques Derrida, Kathy Acker, and Charles Bernstein, takes another kind of hit in the poetry of Ray A. Young Bear, deep-image surrealist, Mesquakie, cultural isolato, and—at the same time—communal cultural nationalist. Young Bear's first two books, Winter of the Salamander: The Keeper of Importance and The Invisible Musician, have a contemplative intensity that often risks the indecipherable. His third and latest book, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint ¡Narratives, explains itself more patiently, integrating cultural exposition with poetic narrative, at times almost like a novel. The blend might recall the way some of Leslie Marmon Silko's poems displace anthropological annotation by having an elder explain things to a child (Mattina 146-47), except that Young Bear's irreverence keeps the sensibility more ironic and slippery. In all three books Young Bear pursues something like a Euro-American surrealism while also writing more thoroughly from within a native culture than any other Native American writer I know of. Readers often feel lost amid the esoteric reference points; and the abrupt, often dream-inspired zigs and zags do little to accommodate our bewilderment. (A typical title, for example, is \"in dream: the privacy of

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Taxidermy's politics of reproduction as discussed by the authors is a central feature of taxidermy, since the taxidermist after all labors to birth a constructed or artificial being which will appear, in the end, to look just like the animal in a live or natural state.
Abstract: . ne of the ways humans save animals, as in preserve them, is through the practice of taxidermy. Consider Trigger, Roy Rogers' gallant palomino companion, who died at the noble horse age of 28 and who, after being stuffed and mounted by a taxidermist, can now be gazed at by visitors to the Roy Rogers Museum near Victorville, California. Existing now as a commodity for visual consumption, Trigger on display illustrates what Donna Haraway has called taxidermy's \"politics of reproduction\" (30). \"Reproduction\" is of course a central feature of taxidermy, since the taxidermist after all labors to birth a constructed or \"artificial\" being which will appear, in the end, to look just like the animal in a live or \"natural\" state. The success of any museum's project to save Trigger or any other animal from time and decay depends on the taxidermist's ability to obscure the traces of production so that the horse will appear before our eyes as a \"pure\" object, a magi-

Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: The evolution of the modern novel can be traced back to the development of James Joyce as discussed by the authors, who oversaw the modern literature through its evolution of various narrative modes, from realistic fiction (the kind of slice-of-life portraits that we have in Dubliners) to the literature of selfconsciousness and the indeterminate that we find in Finnegans Wake.
Abstract: James Joyce oversaw the modern novel through its evolution of various narrative modes. Such movement takes us from realistic fiction (the kind of slice-of-life portraits that we have in Dubliners) to the literature of self-consciousness and the indeterminate that we find in Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s development as a novelist thus recapitulates — indeed replicates — the evolution of the modern novel. Joyce’s work is a microcosm of the macrocosm — proof that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny — and Joyce is the paradigmatic modern.1

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The New York Times ran an article discussing the structure of the building and the possibilities of its being brought down by a larger and more thoughtfully placed explosion, and the timing and placement of the Times article is interesting in itself: it was a rapid response anodyne to the spiral of geopolitical-urban trauma, and, at the same time, undet the covet of a discussion of engineeting, it invited its readers to participate in transgressive calculations of how the Trade Center towers might actually be btought down as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: ?t many days after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the New York Times ran an article discussing the structure of the building and the possibilities of its being brought down by a larger and more thoughtfully placed explosion. It turns out not to be easy: apparently, each tower is built to withstand the impact of a fully loaded jet liner taking off. In addition to the strength of the structure, attackers would have to confront its complexity: there are twenty-one loadbearing pillars and they could not be reached simultaneously by the force of an explosion. In being destroyed, a particular section would in fact shield other areas by absorbing the impact. The timing and placement of the Times article is interesting in itself: it was a rapid-response anodyne to the spiral of geopolitical-urban trauma, and, at the same time, undet the covet of a discussion of engineeting, it invited its readers to participate in transgressive calculations of how the Trade Center towers might actually be btought down. Translations of violence to papei ate hard to make convincing. Literary revolutions may be hard to pull off on the page, but it is much harder to translate any of their energy from the page to the outside world. I am invoking the bombing here, however, in beginning to consider the structure of the problem that Bruce Andrews has been confronting in his woik over the last two decades and particularly in a recent book, I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) . For those who are not familiar with his work, Andrews has been one of

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the middle of November two years ago I was driving back to Buffalo from the Catskills as mentioned in this paper, and the first thirty miles or so of the return trip west is a long grade up through the mountains.
Abstract: Tin the middle of November two years ago I was driving back to Buffalo from the Catskills.1 The first thirty miles or so of the return trip west is a long grade up through the mountains. Half-way to the top I saw a huge semi laboring slowly on ahead of me in the far right lane, weighted right down on the springs. When I eased out behind it into the passing lane I noticed that it was heavily loaded with Christmas trees. Then as I accelerated and pulled even with that westering truck I looked across the wide median and saw a huge east-bound semi speeding down-hill toward me in the opposite lane. As it passed me and the west-bound truck I could see what it was carrying. It was heavily loaded with Christmas trees. It felt a deeply American moment, one that suggested the symbolic grid we live by: the need of the west was being supplied by the east while the need of the east was being supplied by the west. But I found myself puzzled. Was anything reciprocal really happening? Surely no principle of exchange was involved. I struggled to understand the event in terms of the law of supply and demand, or surplus and scarcity. No wonder I

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The first edition of the almost one-thousand-page The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, written in French, was published in Paris in 1887.
Abstract: t the turn of the twentieth century, American read.ers were outraged and enthralled by the diaries of the Russian artist Marie Bashkirtseff, and her homegrown American successor Mary MacLane. These two writers captivated the nation in making a claim for themselves that women simply were not supposed to make: they wete geniuses, endowed with greatness and destined for fame. Both Bashkirtseff and MacLane were extremely successful commercially, and were heavily reviewed in newspapers and magazines; their fame approached culthood. The occasional article is still written about Bashkirtseff, usually in French. However, with the exception of an inclusion in Margo Culley's anthology ofwomen diarists,1 MacLane seems to have been all but forgotten since her death in 1929. I intend to give a brief overview of Bashkirtseff 's journal and examine its influence on the American literary scene, make an extensive textual analysis of The Story ofMary MacLane, and discuss MacLane's American reviews. However, my central intent is simply to demonstrate that Mary MacLane deserves to have readers again. The first edition of the almost one-thousand-page The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, written in French, was published in Paris in 1887. It consists of entties selected from the diary Bashkirtseff kept from the age of fourteen to her death from tuberculosis at twenty-six, and it not only records the myriad of events and people that filled the writer's life, but reveals as well her endlessly unsatisfied desire for fame, love, and artistic success—as she calls it, her struggle \"to get all that I have been crying for since the world began.\"2 Bashkirtseff also expresses her frustration with the restricted life of the bourgeois nineteenth-century European woman; Simone de Beauvoir considered her self-love and

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Mo Tzu was in the strict sense a radical: that is, he was adopting the posture appropriate to a rebel in a traditional society, which is that of a reactionary as discussed by the authors, but it was nevertheless so far from possible in that society to forgo deriving authority from antiquity that he must suggest an alternative version of antiquity which would authorise his alternative arrangements.
Abstract: But Mo Tzu was in the strict sense a radical: that is, he was adopting the posture appropriate to a rebel in a traditional society, which is that of a reactionary. He did not believe it any longer possible to govern society by the inherited means of ritual, and had an alternative set of arrangements to suggest; but it was nevertheless so far from possible in that society to forgo deriving authority from antiquity that he must suggest an alternative version of antiquity which would authorise his alternative arrangements. The appropriate location for his image of antiquity was the remotest accessible past.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that the superimposition of images implicit in the poem's visionary-pictorial structure (and particularly in its images of the object of desire [the mother]) represents a formal embodiment of these fantasies on the level of poetic technique.
Abstract: , UR analysis of the five sections of \"Powhatan's Daughter\" illustrated the way the poetic equivalent of lateral foreshadowing in painting superimposes an afterimage, in effect casts a shadow outline, from one of the poem's sections upon an image from an adjacent section in order to build up a composite figure such as the triple archetype of virgin-mother-whore. Given the importance in The Bridge of both the womb fantasy and the fantasy of the primal scene as respectively the individual psychological versions of the return to origin and the proleptic vision of that return, I would argue that the superimposition of images implicit in the poem's visionary-pictorial structure (and particularly in its images of the object of desire [the mother]) represents a formal embodiment of these fantasies on the level of poetic technique.