Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 1995"

Gomorrahs of the Deep or, Melville, Foucault, and the Question of Heterotopia

Abstract: ISHALL SPEAK OF THAT DOUBLE-EDGED DESIRE which in Michel Foucault takes the name of \"heterotopia\" and in Herman Melville takes the name of \"Neversink.\" It is from such a desire that I start in order to produce a Melvillean reading of Foucault. Foucault 's remarks on heterotopias become here a heuristic starting point fot an investigation of spatial discourses in Melville—an investigation which hopes, in turn, to transform Foucault's conceptual apparatus and, as it were, to highjack it to quite different trajectories and destinations. In a sense, Melville and Foucault are here placed side by side as two theorists of space who, all the specificities notwithstanding, share in the common history of certain Western epistemologies of space—epistemologies which, ultimately, are also revealed to have emerged in crucial interaction with modern paradigms and representations of same-sex desire, practices and identities.1 In the 1967 lecture \"Of Other Spaces,\" Foucault sketches the theorization of a concept he had first introduced in The Order of Things: \"heterotopia.\"2 While utopias are condemned to remain forever \"sites with no real place,\"3 heterotopias are instead characterized as follows:

From Man-Eaters to Spam-Eaters: Literary Tourism and the Discourse of Cannibalism from Herman Melville to Paul Theroux

Abstract: The Oceania found in this literature is . . . more revealing of papalagi fantasies and hang-ups, dreams and nightmares, prejudices . . . than of our actual islands. I am not saying that . . . the papalagi should not write about us, or vice versa. But the imagination must explore with love, honesty, wisdom and compassion . . . writers must [respect] the people they are writing about. Albert Wendt, \"Towards a New Oceania\

Wicked Instruments: William Bartram and the Dispossession of the Southern Indians

Abstract: ? june i, 1773, william Bartram witnessed the Treaty of Augusta, in which Cteek and Cherokee Indians, constrained by trade debts, ceded two million acres of land to the Crown.1 While accompanying govetnment agents and tribal chiefs on the surveying mission, Barttam noted a \"remarkable instance of Indian sagacity\" which \"nearly disconcerted all our plans, and put an end to the business\" (58). Batttam wtites:

To Make the Past Useful: Frederick Douglass' Politics of Solidarity

Abstract: ? 7 November 1 84 1, enslaved rebels on boatd the slave brig Creole, heading from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to New Orleans, rose upon the crew, took over the ship and directed it to Nassau in the British Bahamas where British authorities boarded the schooner. On 1 1 November all were allowed to leave except the nineteen who had been identified by the white crew and passengers as perpetrators of the rebellion. They disembarked among reportedly thousands of cheering dwellers of Nassau. The nineteen were jailed until they were released five months later for lack of evidence. At this point, all those who had rebelled or otherwise fled on the Creole disappear from the historical record in the US. The rebellion, however, received widespread coverage in the newspaper press in both southern and northeastern United States, and was the subject of legal, legislative, and diplomatic debate until 1855, when an international arbitration panel forced British authorities to pay reparations for the economic value of the lost \"cargo.\" In 1853, Frederick Douglass took up the subject of the Creole rebellion in his only piece of fiction, The Heroic Shve. Douglass' claiming and rewriting of the historical coverage of the Creole rebellion challenged US Americans to imagine the action of the Creole rebels, especially Madison Washington, as being like those of the founding fathers. Upon the deck of the brig Creole, at the end of the novella, Washington proclaims,

Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Burke, and the Form of Democracy

Abstract: Whatever else the Civil War was for, It wasn't just to keep the States together, Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both. She wouldn't have believed those ends enough To have given outright for them all she gave. Her giving somehow touched the principle That all men are created free and equal. And to hear her quaint phrases—so removed From the world's view of all those things. That's a hard mystery of Jefferson's. What did he mean? Robert Frost, "The Black Cottage" 57

The Public Life: The Discourse of Privacy in the Age of Celebrity

Abstract: 'hen Helen dale, the famous lady novelist of Edith Wharton's \"Copy,\" meets her ex-lover—the well-known poet Paul Ventnor—after years of separation, she greets him with the news of her own death. \"1 died years ago,\"1 says Dale, attempting to explain her sense that the public image she has acquired has taken on a life of its own, a life that seems to have become more real to her than her own flesh and blood existence. \"What you see before you is a figment of the reporter's brain—a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs with ink in its veins\" ( 1 1 1 ). The rising popularity of her public persona only reinforces the fact that \"[t]he last shred of [her] identity is gone\" (112). As the dialogue makes clear, however, Dale's public identity is \"monstrous\" not just because it is patently false, a \"figment\" of someone else's \"brain,\" but rather because it can be sold repeatedly, like any other commodity. Her identity, in other words, has become \"public property\" ( 1 1 1 ). And, if Dale has clearly profited from her ability to sell her identity—\"most people,\" according to Ventnor, \"would be glad to part with theirs on such terms\" (112)—she has also lost the ability to see herself as anything but alienable property: \"A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion\" (112). In \"Copy,\" it appears, the market that can provide the individual with an identity that is larger than life can also rob the individual of a kind of personhood, making the most intimate experiences virtually indistinguishable from the mechanisms of contract and exchange. If Dale has indeed \"died,\

Anastasia of Oregon

Abstract: For many years we have imagined and relived the western frontier experience through stories that white men have told. Lewis and Clark, Parkman and Dana, Cooper and Catlin, Wister and Remington, Turner and Roosevelt—and other explorers and conquerors, travelers and settlers, and artists and scholars—have represented what for some people has always seemed to be the \"true\" western frontier. Recently, however, we have come to realize that the \"western frontier\" is a geographically vague, seemingly indefinable term, and that—wherever and whatever it is—the western frontier is a place about which many stories, not just one, have been told. The history, literature, folklore, and artifacts of underrepresented groups are more frequently studied now, with the intention (and sometimes with the unintended effect) of questioning, complicating, and even confusing our understanding of what the West really means, and to whom. Of all these groups, children are perhaps least represented in western history and literature and, as a consequence, most neglected by today's western scholarship. The lack of attention to children can be attributed to a problem that is partly conceptual. Scholars rightly tend not to perceive children as cohering into one well-defined group since they are dispersed throughout all other groups in society. Children are members of both sexes, all classes, each racial and ethnic group, and every culture and community that has ever existed out West. It would therefore be wrong to assume that they share a monolithic identity. But the difficulty in examining the lives and works of children is partly concrete as well. Children neither write nor publish extensively. They seldom produce documented histories or artistic materials that scholars might examine for clues.

Melville's Spell in Typee

Abstract: Let me begin with a well-known story. Published as an autobiographical travel narrative in 1846, Typee, Melville's first book, provoked a controversy among readers and reviewers. English publisher John Murray's Colonial and Home Library, the series in which Typee was published, specialized in the real-life experiences of travelers in exotic places and promised factual accuracy. But the taint of fiction that was taboo in Murray's series clung to Melville's manuscript. Readers doubted that \"Herman Melville\" was a real person, and that his account of his experience in the Marquesas Islands was true. British readers in particular were incredulous that any common sailor could write so well. Murray, who worried from the start about the authenticity of both the author and the tale, repeatedly begged Melville to substantiate the truth of the narrative somehow, even after \"Toby,\" one of the book's main characters, fortuitously appeared, \"happy to testify to the entire accuracy of the work, so long as I was with Melville.\"1 Although today we know that \"Herman Melville\" was a real person who had shipped as a common sailor to Polynesia and jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, we also know that the authenticity debate over the book was well founded. Herman's brother Gansevoort, acting as his agent in London, assured Murray that the author of Typee had \"never before written either book or pamphlet, and to the best of my belief has not even contributed to a magazine or newspaper.\"2 But Melville had already published at least several letters and one piece of fiction in the local press. Furthermore, as Charles R. Anderson demonstrates in his groundbreaking Meíviííe in the South Seas (1939), Typee was a substantially embellished version of the \"facts,\" converting Melville's \"relatively slight contact with primitive life\" during a four-week sojourn in

Milly's Bargain: The Homosocial Economy in The Wings of the Dove

Abstract: Exchange, gift, and theft (the only known forms of economy) each in its way implies heterogeneous objects and a dislocated time: my desire against something else—and this always requires the time for drawing up the agreement. Simultaneous proffering establishes a movement whose model is socially unknown, unthinkable: neither exchange, nor gift, nor theft, our proffering, welling up in crossed fires, designates an expenditure which relapses nowhere and whose very community abolishes any thought of reservation: we enter each by means of the other into absolute materialism.~ , . , , „.. . Barthes, A Lovers Discourse (151 )

The Utopian States of America: The People, The Republic, and Rock and Roll in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

Abstract: Although the concept of Utopia involves a vision of society safely removed from the ravages of history, the history of the New World has paradoxically been triggered by the oscillating sequence of the founding of utopias, followed by the betrayal of those utopias bringing about a return to history. Utopia has been a perennial conception of the New World in European thought, possibly before Europeans had even learned of its existence but imagined Atlantis, a wonderful island to the West. Amerigo Vespucci, the continent's namesake, described the natives of the New World as participants in the golden age of Greek mythology and philosophy. Sir Thomas More, inventor of the almost five-hundred-year-old neologism Utopia, related a fictitious side trip, a parallel journey, by one of Vespucci's crew, and quantified that idyllic society with mathematical precision, all the while admitting that such a land existed no place. While the conquistadors' rhetorical strategy was to discount the first term in the natives' noble savagery, Vasco de Quiroga, the Bishop of Utopia, was soon busy petitioning the crown for, and eventually founding, slave-free zones in New Spain based explicitly on Thomas More's book as though it were a blueprint for constructing a just society. These Utopian communities, or Hospices, would last for centuries, attracting Indians from far and wide, though conquistadors, while trying to enslave the rest of the territory,

"My Chosen World": Jean Toomer's Articles in The New York Call

Abstract: G?a? toomer published two books during his lifetime, Carre (1923), the work for which he is primarily known, and Essentials 193 1 ), a privately-printed collection of aphorisms. In the past fifteen years three further books of his writings have appeared, much of it previously unpublished material: The Wayward and the Seeking (1980), The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988), and The Jean Toomer Reader (1993).1 The earliest dated material in these collections is from 1922, though some of the poems may have been written in 1921, and the accepted date of Toomer's first publication is April 1922, when \"Song of the Son\" appeared in the Crisis. This poem would become the centerpiece of Cane's first section. Despite the sudden flurry of creative activity in 1922, Toomer had been an aspiring writer since at least 191 7 and the five years between his initial efforts and his first publication were an extended apprenticeship. When he first submitted his work to the Crisis in February 1922, its literary editor Jessie Fauset inquired of him, \"Where did you get a chance to work out your technique? I know that didn't come in a moment. You must have studied and practiced to achieve it.\"2 We know that Toomer by this time had been reading Waldo Frank, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and perhaps even Ezra Pound, but it has long been assumed that if there were any pre-Cane writings, they were lost. Thus Nellie McKay in her critical

Harold Bloom and the School of Resentment; or, Canon to the Right of Them

Abstract: MONG the TALKED-ABOUT authors and deal-cutters of the .season (O.J., Newt, the Pope), Harold Bloom stands out by crying wolf to the academic world: literary studies, he maintains, are about to pass into the hands of those who read politically and ideologically, those who reject aesthetic value as a mystification used to cover up the hegemonic nature of academic literary discourse. For writing The Westem Canon as a warning against this \"School of Resentment,\" Bloom was given an advance of $600,000 by the publishers, according to reports. I can't begrudge Bloom the money, since it is bruited that he doesn't spend it on himself; but I do revel in schadenfreude at the prospect of Harcourt Brace losing a great deal of that money, for the book has no potential readership that I can imagine. The publishers obviously counted on a lot of sales to the same people who made Allan Bloom's Ciosing of the American Mind a best-seller (and thus a national disgrace). Need we wonder if they quietly hoped that most of these lumpen-conservative buyers would confuse the two

The Ironic Romance of New Historicism: The Scarlet Letter and Beloved Standing in Side by Side

Abstract: The resemblances between Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Toni Morrison's Beloved are extensive and suggestive enough that we might imagine something like a correspondence between them, and from there venture to speculate further upon the nature and consequence of this peculiar and rather problematic connection. I describe it as peculiar and problematic knowing full well that placing these two texts side by side upon the literary scaffold may be viewed from a number of critical and theoretical positions as somewhere between unimaginable and reprehensible. Not only have I suggested the trope of literary lineage between a canonical nineteenthcentury white male author and a twentieth-century black female author, but I've also joined the hands of a contemporary novel that vividly portrays the conditions and effects of slavery with another novel that, as a number of recent interpretations would have us read it, is \"about\" slavery too, if only by virtue of the absence of the topic from the book. Or, to be more precise, the way in which authorial intention, textual trace, and the claims of historical production and reception commingle to constitute an ideological presence very different from the one which we would (wish to?) find in Beloved. This article involves the irony of romance in unexpected places. That is to say, while I will indeed inventory a significant number of similarities between these two novels and furthermore claim that such

Authority and Witchery: Cotton Mather's Ornaments and Mary English's Acrostic

Abstract: MONG the many revisions that have occurred in studies of . colonial America, three in particular influence this investigation. There was, we now recognize, much more trouble with the establishment of authority in the New World settlements than we once thought. Relatedly, we appreciate better today that Puritan culture was far more diverse and hétérodoxie—far less formed—than we previously believed. And we now understand that, within both of these dynamic contexts, women's voices were more evident and distinctive than we had once noticed. These voices, wittingly or unwittingly, spoke over the franchise of authority and thereby often revealed other stories within the main story of emergent orthodoxy, including the Puritan version. One story they tell concerns the discomfort some women experienced when expressing a sense of identity and voice, a discomfort that registered beneath the surface of their writings and sometimes destabilized their efforts as writers. This problem can be gauged not only by effects in their own work; clues to their difficulties also surface as "another story" in writings by male authors who, in one way or another, touch upon the subject of female authority. My essay tries to piece together a version of this "other story" by assembling clues from a book on women in general by Cotton Mather and a poem on one woman in particular by Mary English. The lives of both Mather and English intersected during the Salem witch trials, but of primary interest here is how his book and her poem are both deformed by the unstable Assuring con-

Provisional Institutions: Alternative Presses and Poetic Innovation

Abstract: magine that all the nationally circulated magazines and all the trade presses and all the university presses in the United States stopped publishing or reviewing poetry. New poetry in the United States would hardly feel the blow. But not because contemporary poetry is marginal to the culture. Quite the contrary, it is these publishing institutions that have made themselves marginal to our cultural life in poetry. As it is, the poetry publishing and reviewing practices of these major media institutions do a disservice to new poetry by their sins of commission as much as omission—that is, pretending to cover what they actually cover up, as if you could bury poetry alive. In consistently acknowledging only the blandest of contemporary verse practices, these institutions provide the perfect alibi for their evasion of poetry; for if what is published and reviewed by these institutions is the best poetry has to offer, then, indeed, there would be little reason to attend to poetry, except for those looking fot a last remnant of a genteel society verse, where, for example, the editor of The New York Times Book Review can swoon over watered-down Dante on her way to late-night

"A Glorious Solution": Gender, Families, Relationships, and the Civil War Story

Abstract: The causes of the civil war are second only to the reasons for its outcome as a permanent problem for historians of the period. Even the recognition that a complex set of issues including slavery, economics, cultural differences, and political philosophies brought about the war fails to account for the war's peculiar intensity and divisiveness. For the individual human beings who fought the war or demanded that others fight it uncompromisingly, emotions rather than principles, self-interest, or other impersonal forces were what provoked the war's violence. Charles Royster has argued for the importance of these emotional motivations in The Destructive War (1991).' Royster, in a move rare among military historians, treats personal insecurities and emotional pain as forces stronger than nationalistic or materialistic motives. Kathleen Diffley (Where My Heart is Turning Ever, 1992) has recently argued that the cultural impact of Civil War fiction ranges far beyond representations of battle to include social and domestic institutions that are apparently only indirectly affected by the war.4 The present article is an attempt to read some of the representations of the emotional pain which led to military violence in five short stories

Textual Hermeneutics and Belated Male Heroism: Edith Wharton's Revisions of The House of Mirth and the Resistance to American Literary Naturalism

Abstract: The call over the last decade for a literary histoty informed by an attention to textual issues has been successful chiefly in ethical revaluations of English Romanticism. With a few exceptions, howevet, such scholatship—emphasizing editions, variants, and revisions as well as their relation to a histotical mattix (what Jetóme McGann has characterized as a "matetialist textual hetmeneutics" imbued with a serious engagement with "facticity and positive knowledge")—has yet to find a firm place in studies of Ametican literature.1 While the field of American litetaty studies is one of the most advanced, theoretically speaking, of all areas of literary inquiry, it still awaits the kind of historically-informed revival of close textual inquiry which has enlivened the study of Btitish nineteenth-centuty poetry by problematizing the idea of a stable text as well as the notion of single authorship.2 The essays collected in Romantic Revisions (1992), for example, display a scholarship informed by current inquiries in textual studies.' There has been, of course, a thoroughgoing series of editing projects in Ametican studies.4 Yet, while New Criticism has bequeathed a strong

The Sun Almost Rises: Hemingway and the Hollywood Marketplace of Depression America

Abstract: DARRYL F. ZANUCK courted controversy. As head of Twentieth Century-Fox he produced Forever Amber (1947), Pinky (1949), Island in the Sun (1957), and, finally, in late 1957, the \"sexy story\" of The Sun Also Rises. Reviewers generally hailed the performances and production values of The Sun Also Rises, then turned captious. Lady Ashley and \"her Tom-cat following\" were too \"silly\" and the other characters too \"frivolous\" for general audience appeal, Hazel Flynn wrote in the Beverly Hills Citizen, her opinion borne out by her history of the property. The 1926 Hemingway novel had never before been produced, she noted, \"because movie audiences were considered not yet ready for its heroine, Lady Brett Ashley, who had so many love affairs she was practically a nymphomaniac. Nor did studios and code administrators feel we would accept a hero who had lost his virility as a result of war wounds or the subsequent 'spiritual' mating of these two.\"1 The fears of studios or censors had caused Hollywood to abandon or weaken hundreds of novels, screenplays, and pictures, so what happened to The Sun Also Rises was not unique. It was nonetheless instructive. In the dawn of sound pictures, movie producers were attracted by the colorful setting and characters of the book but daunted by its scant action and somber final chapters. An original work from an original writer, The Sun Also Rises needed an independent producer—or director or performer acting as independent producer—as its advocate and metteur en scène. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the evolu-