Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 1997"

Scar Texts: Tracing the Marks of Jamesian Masculinity

Abstract: The jamesian wound has been much probed by critics.1 What caused it? What was it? Physical or psychic? Inherited? Selfinflicted? Castrating? Enabling? Rather than attempt to answer questions about the origins and nature of the wounds Henry James suffered (himself) and inflicted (on his characters), I want to focus on their traces, the scars that mark—and cover over—the space of the wound, that represent both injury and healing, loss as well as recovery. What opportunities did the figure of the wounded man, to which James returned again and again, offer him as a narrative artist? The image of a torn, marked, scarred body is traceable throughout James's letters, fictions, autobiographical and biographical writings. Describing any sort of hurt (mental, emotional, physical), James regularly uses \"lacerated\" and \"mutilated,\" words that image a body whose integrity has been broken, whose interior has been penetrated. In employing such language, James draws on the long Judeo-Christian tradition of representing intense spiritual and emotional experience as a physical piercing, as in the trope of circumcision or, conversely, the uncircum-

Corporate Thinking: Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree

Abstract: ETWEEN 1905 and 1 9 1 1 , Edith Wharton published a sequence ' of three novels, all ofwhich circulated in fascinated horror around the prone body of an immobilized woman. The House ofMirth (1905), Wharton's first best-seller, concluded its tale of a New York socialite's decline only when, in the novel's final chapter, Lawrence Seiden discovers \"on a bed, with motionless hands and calm, unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily Bart\" (325). Four years later, the image would recur in the bleak, New England narrative of Ethan Frome (19 11). The novella draws to a close when a shocked narrator finds Ethan's sallow wife Zenobia preparing dinner for a withered, \"much smaller and slighter\" Mattie Silver:

Iron Henry, or James Goes to War

Abstract: In its extravagance, my title aims to disrupt some common associations with the figure of Henry James: the portly aesthete of the writing-desk and social club who divorced himself from history to disport himself in art; the fellow whom the knowing eye ofTheodore Roosevelt sized up as \"wholly lacking in robustness of fiber,\" as too \"delicate [and] effeminate\" to \"play a man's part among men\"; the supersubtle chronicler of manners in parlors and on promenades whose characters \"never make lusty love, never go to angry war,\" as H. G. Wells complained.1 This conventional wisdom needs qualifying, for military history, men in arms, and especially the immediate scene of war—as a privileged surplus of experience and a site of masculine trial—occupied a prominent place in James's long life and even longer imagination. After all, his adult years were bounded by the Civil War and the First World War; he followed closely the imperial adventures of England and the United States, notably the Boer War and the Spanish-American War; and from his first tales to his last essays, he probed—and in a measure exemplified—William James's contention that \"soldiering . . . lies always latent in human nature.\"2 Particularly striking is not just the depth but the durability of James's interest in things military, which I will here trace through his later involvements with two very different soldiers, Viscount Garnet Wolseley, England's commander-in-chief at the turn of the century, and Rupert Brooke, the poetic celebrant and beautiful fated boy of the Great War. By means of these two friendships (scanted in James biography) and the texts they yielded as windows on war—Wolseley's The Story of a Soldier's

Literature, Gender Studies, and the New Western History

Abstract: It is no coincidence that one of the earliest and most visible critics of the New Western History, Larry McMurtry, is a writer.1 Or that one of McMurtry's principal targets, Patricia Limerick, is a white woman. At issue in the McMurtry/Limerick debate is the embattled status of \"the imaginative\" in revisionist history. Also at issue is the absence of prior revisionists in recent accounts of the western past. But something more is going on. That \"something\" has to do with the status of the white literary man in western history, the man who has critiqued western Anglo masculinity in ways that anticipate the New Western History by as much as a half-century. What kind of revisionism is this, McMurtry wonders, that bites off the hand that feeds it? A good question. And a strategically important one for anyone invested in promoting feminist politics within Western Studies. Now if the McMurtry/Limerick controversy is no long au courant in New Western History discussions, it nonetheless raises questions about the realm of \"the imaginative\" which seem of continuing importance to New Western historians. One often hears in informal scholarly conversation a lot of open struggle and confusion about \"stories,\" and the role that storytelling plays or should play in revisionist history. Historians speak, moreover, of their desires to tell \"new stories\" which also must be \"multiple stories\" of the western past. These questions, issues, and desires would seem to return us to the status of \"the imaginative.\" They would seem to be illuminated by an inquiry into the structures or tropes which govern narrative organization, or by sophisticated consideration

Tripmaster Monkey, Frank Chin, and the Chinese Heroic Tradition

Abstract: The reason he had the radio on was that whenever he stopped typing, he heard someone else nearby tapping, tapping at a typewriter, typing through the night. Yes, it was there, steady but not mechanical. . . . An intelligence was coming up with words. Someone else, not a poet with a pencil or fountain pen but a workhouse big-novel writer, was staying up, probably done composing already and typing out fair copy. It should be a companionable noise, a jazz challenge to which he could blow out the window his answering jazz. But, no, it's an expensive electric machinegun typewriter aiming at him, gunning for him, to knock him off in competition. Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Money: His Fake Book

The Problem of the "Popular" in the New Western History

Abstract: To see this commercialized vision of the Old Frontier in concrete, threedimensional form, the best place to go is Disneyland in Anaheim, California. When they enter Frontierland, visitors might ask Disneyland employees for directions, but they do not have to ask for a definition of the frontier. The frontier, every tourist knows, was the edge of Anglo-American settlement, the place where white Americans struggled to master the continent. This frontier, as everything in Frontierland confirms, was populated by a colorful and romantic cast of characters—mountain men, cowboys, prospectors, pioneer wives, saloon girls, sheriffs, and outlaws. . . . These images are very well understood. Tourists do not need any assistance in defining Frontierland. Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century" (1994)

Text, Lines, and Videotape: The Ideology of Genre and the Transcription of Traditional Native American Oral Narrative as Poetry

Abstract: remarkable thing has happened over the last few decades -in the tortured history of ttanscribing and ttanslating traditional Native American oral narrative into written English literature. Two brilliant scholar-translators, Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock, have made curiously similar and extravagant claims for how traditional Native American oral narrative should be put into writing, and their methods have become canonical. Hymes argues that Native American oral story should be written as \"verse,\" and Tedlock argues that it should be written as \"poetry.\" As a particular practice, there is nothing wrong with transcribing oral story as poetry or verse, and in the hands of Hymes and Tedlock it has led to exceptionally good translations. But as a canonical practice or an interpretation of narrative orality, it causes serious problems.1 The ttanslation of Native oral forms into written poetic forms has a long history. Although the line divisions of poetry are visual and written, certain forms, especially song and ritual, seem to fit what readers often assume they \"hear\" when they read poems. For an early example in English, scholars point to Henry Timberlake's 1 765 Cherokee \"WarSong\" in heroic couplets: \"Like men we go, to meet our country's foes,/

The Jamesian Thing: The Wings of the Dove and the Ethics of Mourning

Abstract: In his 1958 introduction to The Wings of the Dove, R. R Blackmur describes his \"first elated reading\" of James' novel in language that fuses literary epiphany and sexual awakening. Blackmur recalls a \"hot and muggy\" day culminating in a \"stifling midnight\": \"Long before the end I knew a master had laid hands on me. The beauty of the book bore me up; I was both cool and waking; excited and effortless; nothing was any longer worthwhile and everything had become necessary\" (Studies 161). For Blackmur, a lifetime of reading James begins in this youthful experience of \"appreciation never heightened\" afterwards, not yet dulled by either the \"over-interpretation\" or the \"stupefying idolatry\" of the critical reader. Blackmur's rapture at being held in the grasp of a \"master\" is one of finding something ineffable yet hard and teal in the book, of \"embracing] the shadow of imagination as if it were a solid thing\" (162). The strange \"thingliness\" of James' imagination that Blackmur both possesses and is possessed by in this youthful memory, however, shelters within it a wish that reaches toward an earlier encounter with a \"Jamesian thing\"—not only in James' fiction, but in relation to his person:

A Finer Grain: Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation

Abstract: 'hen richard Rodriguez personifies the United States in Days of Obligation: An Argument with M31 Mexican Father, he imagines a truck-stop waitress, \"a blond or a redhead—not the same color as at her last job. . . . Morning and the bloom of youth are painted on her cheeks.\" The bringer of new beginnings, with \"one complete gesture [she] pockets the tip, stacks dishes along one strong forearm, produces a damp rag soaked in lethe water, which she then passes over the formica\" (55). The trope of open road is a staple of American cultural criticism, from frontier legend to Jean Baudrillard's postmetaphysical musings, but this anti-maternal mother of us all, this pure product of American placelessness, is in the grain of another of Rodriguez's predecessors, William Carlos Williams.

The New Western History: An Essay from the Woods (and Rangelands)

Abstract: SKED t? discuss the \"New Western History\" (nwh) from the .resource management perspective, our immediate thought was that one of the virtues of the New Western History is that historians and literary types feel the need to include folks like us, specialists in natural resource management. Academic barriers being what they are, we seldom get such invitations. We infrequently employ terms like \"mimetic\" and \"trope,\" and we are confident that we do not have much to contribute to a discussion of either literary criticism or historical method. Although we are clearly a bit off-site, we came to this discussion to reflect upon what the New Western History says about the role of nature and the environment in human history. If not the principle distinguishing feature ofNewWestern historians, their explicit engagement in telling a story about the western United States that includes^ the biophysical world, environmental science, management, and nature is certainly what we call in dendrology a \"key spotter.\" Although resource managers are increasingly inclined to view their tasks as biological or technical rather than social, we are not strangers to telling stories about nature. \"Resource management\" as a profession and research area is comprised traditionally of fields like forestry, rangeland management, and wildlife management. Born out of progressive era goals of implementing scientific management on the forests and rangelands ofNorth America, professional resource managers are charged with designing and implementing programs to conserve natural resources

Clio Bereft of Calliope: Literature and the New Western History

Abstract: I suppose . . . that the root ofmy uneasiness with the Western revisionism generally is that the revisionists would like us to believe that they were more or less the first to notice, or at least to emphasize, how violent, how terrible, and how hard winning the West actually was. My own reading, as well as my boyhood among the old-timers, leads me to exactly the opposite conclusion: everyone noticed how hard it was. Larry McMurtry2

Washington Square, or Downtown with Henry James

Abstract: rASHiNGTON square\" is what Washington Square is about. James might have named the novel by another name (The Heiress, perhaps), but he did not. Poor Catherine Sloper does not much solicit his sympathies, nor is James greatly incensed as he confronts the scoundrel Morris Townsend. Much of the very style of the novel argues the same: lightsome, witty, epigrammatically nasty now and then, and, by that much, dismissive. Or if that is not the entirely continuous tone of it, much of the time it is so. The very prettiness of the novel, and the adroitness of the composition argue as well that James was not much challenged by his characters—although it is to be seen that here in this seemingly most forthcoming and certainly most charming ofJames's fictions, there is hint, and more, of encounters and ambivalences and crossed desires to come. Washington Square is the single most evidently personal of James's novels. It is the one novel into which he enters explicitly, in his own person, in order to indulge autobiographical reminiscences, or perhaps to establish an authority of the same, and although he enters only briefly, it is remarkable that he does so at all. The intrusion occurs within the first few pages of the novel, where James describes the Square itself, with, as he says, its solid and honorable dwellings and its air of \"a kind of established repose,\" as contrasted with other quarters of \"the long, shrill city.\" Here he interposes what he calls a \"topographical parenthesis\": \"I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable.\" The place, he says, has \"the look of having had something

Strangely Re-Abolitionized: William Dean Howells and Racial Repersuasion

Abstract: In A letter to his anti-slavery Republican father on the eve of the Civil War (November 6, 1859), William Dean Howells assigned himself a dual paternity: \"If I were not your son, I would desire to be Old John Brown's—God Bless him!\" (Life in Letters 26). Certainly this self-authotized fictive genealogy, later to be reprised in another arrogated adoption as a descendant of Brahmin Boston, poured forth Howells' youthful enthusiasm for the Harper's Ferry hero. But, in his second novel, A Chance Acquaintance, 1872, he enacted an analogous ideological parenting for his North-border Daisy Miller, Kitty Ellison. Although by most accounts Kitty Ellison and Miles Arbuton in A Chance Acquaintance are abstractable types in the novel's dialectic of polarized values on the American scene—East and West, civilized restraint and upstart instinct (Bassett 322)—this melodramatic two-sided conflict is really a complicated triangular struggle between Arbuton and the allied sentiments of Kitty and her own surrogate pater familias, the abolitionist Uncle Jack. In his letter of \"comprehensive character,\" Kitty's paternalistic guardian Uncle Jack (Dr. Ellison) extols to Kitty the superior cultural and moral virtues of Boston during the antebellum slavery crisis and views even present-day Boston, Howells tells us, as if it \"was strangely re-abolitionized\" (7). On one hand, Howells' eccentric neologism is clear: since Uncle Jack idolizes Boston's antislavery leaders as \"grand historical figures\" and presumes the inspired humanitarian period of abolition the \"holier\" scene of American liberty's \"resurrec-

The American's Double-Cross

Abstract: I RiTics have recurrently perceived The American as ex'hibiting an uneasy alliance of, or division between, realism and romance. This persistent sense of the novel's generic split or discontinuity has celebrated precedent in James's preface, which acknowledges its ultimate \"revolution\" or \"deflexion\" from realism and speculates that its author \"had been plotting arch-romance without knowing it\" (Art 31, 30, 25). The classic modern articulation of this view is to be found in Peter Brooks' justly influential reading in \"The Turn of The American,\" which both extends and critiques the long-standing critical intuition of the text's heterogeneous or incompatible novelistic modes. Of the notorious shift in its final third from realistic social comedy to a melodramatic or gothic register, Brooks observes that The American \"changes radically in tone and mode at the moment of Christopher Newman's betrayal by the Bellegardes. . . . What has up to this point been largely a social comedy, broad, amused, generally good-natured, suddenly calls forth the emotional conditions and the vocabulary of melodrama, unleashing a new and heightened drama for which the reader had scarcely been prepared, one that alters the very stakes of the text\" (43).1 Brooks' account of the novel's generic turn aligns realism and romance with a range of thematic categories—freedom versus determination, novelty versus convention, openness versus closure, liberation versus claustration—that are borrowed from The American itself. Brooks observes that James's presentation of the Bellegardes, who occupy the novel's romantic or melodramatic register, \"insists upon their unfreedom, their representative fixity, their determination by assigned, inherited identities.\" The novel is thus organized by a thematic \"struggle be-

Where the Summit Bears: Narrative Logic in Thoreau's "Ktaadn"

Abstract: 'hat is nature writing, anyway? A reading public seems content with the term, publishers have dignified it with suitcasesized anthologies, and yet the perimeters of the genre, if genre it be, remain diffuse. Does any work dealing with nature qualify as \"nature writing,\" whether framed as nonfiction, fiction, or poetry? Is the term synonymous with \"natural history,\" or is it an offshoot thereof, or a more broadly encompassing category? Should such an entity as \"nature writing\" be recognized at all, or do the term itself and works so designated tend rather to reinforce a nature-culture split that writers and critics should seek to dissolve? Such questions exist less to be settled, I think, than to be used. As Adena Rosmarin holds, genre is the critic's equivalent of what \"schemata\" or \"premises\" or \"models\" are to the literary or graphic artist (21): something the practitioner must always \"choose or define\" and actively shape to his or her purposes (8). The critic's material is not some realm of ideal forms but the actions and expectations of actual writers and readers; since genre is a primary tool by which these are explained, \"there are precisely as many genres as we need, genres whose conceptual shape is precisely determined by that need\" (25). Proliferating versions of nature writing's generic makeup provide an index of needs the explanations arise to address.

Intersubjective Epistemologies: Private Theater and Henry James

Abstract: Everything in a picture, it must be added, depends on the composition; if it be the subject that makes the interest, it is the composition that makes, or at any rate expresses, the subject. By that law, accordingly, our boxful of ghosts "compose," hang together, consent to mutual relation, confess, in fact, to a mutual dependence. If it is a question of living again, they can live but by being each other's help, so that they close in, join hands, press together for warmth and contact. Henry James, William Wetmore Story

The Photographic Print, the Literary Negative: Alfred Stieglitz and Jean Toomer

Abstract: s a modernist, Jean Toomer in Cane (1923) used spatial form -and imagism to help structure his collage of poems, sketches, and stories, and he was also fond of photographic moments—from the description of Karintha as \"a black bird that flashes in light\" to the \"soft circle\" of light that envelops Father John and Carrie K at the end of \"Kabnis.\"1 It is curious then that his relationship with the revolutionary photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, has never been explored, especially as Stieglitz was an important member of the intellectual milieu to which Toomer belonged. The significance of that relationship becomes clear if we look at two striking visual images of two famous buildings: Stieglitz's celebrated photograph of New York's Flatiron Building (1903) and Toomer's verbal portrait of Washington, D.Cs Capitol in his short story \"Avey.\" The appearance of the Capitol in \"Avey\" marks a turning point in the story because the narrator is implicated in the very history he attempts to record: he becomes a witness in a way that is quite different from the act of witnessing defined by Paul Rosenfeld in his classic essay on Stieglitz in the 192 1 issue of The Dial. On the surface, Toomer held Stieglitz the artist in very high esteem. When in 1922 Toomer told Gorham Munson that \"mystery cannot help but accompany a deep, clear-cut image,\" he would later repeat almost the same words to praise the photographer's art. Yet the collage effect of Cane, with its use of overlapping images that continually return to the terror of American history, created a Gothic world that lay

Some Notes on Gertrude Stein and Deixis

Abstract: I ERTRUDE stein early took the \"postmodern\" lead of profoundly 'questioning, while at the same time enlisting, the deixis inherent in a linguistic act. Now language itself, to be significant all, must begin with deixis, word by word. It cannot help calling up the signified of a \"horse\" for the signifier of those letters, and it cannot further help triggering all the interesting epistemological dynamics of reference that will connect the signified to the real beast with hooves and mane sweating in the field. Nouns, verbs, and whole propositions go through a comparable deixis. They cannot avoid pointing. But how mediate between the fact of pointing and the epistemological dynamics? Such a mediation could not simply go about pointing; it would have to show the epistemological structure, which could happen by skewing the pointing. In the light of questions about deixis, Gertrude Stein's powerful leverage can be derived from her systematic distancing of the referent from her immediate sentences in what could be called a super-Stoicism. She forces her sentences to stand free by refusing an ordinary prepositional correspondence to the referents of her words, taken one by one, in the context she has established for them. Aristotle's logic breaks down propositions into the term constituents of assertions. They are referential, term for term. The whole sentences of Stoic logic, however, are first of all \"linguistic,\" leading the way to the self-referentiality and skewing of relation of wotd to object through arbitrariness that has variously occupied thinkers from Peirce and Saussure to the present. As Derrida is the pupil of both Freud and Husserl, so Gertrude Stein was

Henry James Returned

Abstract: With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped. ("TS" 212-13)

Ordinary Language Criticism: A Manifesto

Abstract: 'hen convictions are hard to come by, skepticism must serve instead. But we need, all the more, the courage of our skepticism, lacking which even faith may be a preferable attitude for criticism to assume. I wish to propose such a critical faith—a faith which skepticism, conceived generously enough, in fact elicits. For the moment, however, to elaborate the context in which such a project finds its urgency, what needs attention is the peculiar weakness with which much of current American criticism entertains both the one and the other. It is a weakness, especially, in current criticism of American letters, where the result has been an impasse that threatens even the considerable achievements of such criticism in opening the American literary landscape. Thus despite its recent successes in undermining long-established traditions of language and literature, criticism in the skeptical vein has not quite come to terms with its need for the very idea of tradition, which seems indispensable for establishing alternative literatures. Its revolutionary aims of unsettling canons and histories come into conflict with its simultaneous goal of settling new histories and new canons. Its skepticism and its faith work at cross-purposes. And, indeed, they must. For they will not really work at all until they work together. Ungrounding canonical America must appear a pecu-