Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2003"
TL;DR: The post-indian emerges from the earlier inventions of the tribes only to contravene the absence of the real with theatrical performances; the theater of tribal consciousness is the recreation of real, not the absence in the simulations of dominance as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The postindian warriors hover at last over the ruins of tribal representations and surmount the scriptures of manifest manners with new stories; these warriors counter the sutveillance and literature of dominance with their own simulations of survivance. The postindian arises from the earlier inventions of the tribes only to contravene the absence of the real with theatrical performances; the theater of tribal consciousness is the recreation of the real, not the absence of the real in the simulations of dominance. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners
13 citations
TL;DR: In this vein, Maori cannibalism was set in a context of ritual warfare; the consumption of human flesh paralleled that of birds and fish in hunting rituals, and men consumed at cannibalistic feasts were referred to as ''fishes,'' and ''first fish'' being eaten by a chief who thus acquired control over the land of the vanquished as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In this vein, Maori cannibalism—well-documented from contemporary nineteenth-century accounts—was set in a context of ritual warfare; the consumption of human flesh paralleled that of birds and fish in hunting rituals. Men consumed at cannibalistic feasts were referred to as \"fishes,\" and \"first fish\" being eaten by a chief who thus acquired control over the land of the vanquished. I. M. Lewis, Religion in Context: Cuits and Charisma
11 citations
TL;DR: In many ways, the passage is a bit like Huck Finn himself, a kind of outcast child of the parental body of the book as mentioned in this paper, and when made to identify himself he chooses the name of the murdered child in a ghost story that he has just overheard, though it is questionable whether Huck's tears are involuntary or a ploy for sympathy.
Abstract: I OMMENTARY on the \"raftsmen's passage\" section of Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) usually centers on the conundrum of whether or not to include it as part of the text of the novel's chapter 16. Twain scholarship has reached no consensus on how the passage should be handled editorially, much less on the meaning of the passage for the novel as a whole. In many ways, the raftsmen's passage is a bit like Huck Finn himself, a kind of outcast child of the parental body of the book.1 The relative neglect of the raftsmen's passage in Huckleberry Finn commentary is surprising when we consider the traumatic heart of the episode. After the raftsmen's boasts and story-telling are finished, Huck is accidentally found hiding in a woodpile at the far edge of the raft at the edge of the firelight; he is roughly pulled from his hiding place and, while naked, intetrogated and threatened. He begins crying, though it is questionable whether Huck's tears are involuntary or a ploy for sympathy, and when made to identify himself he chooses the name of the murdered child in a ghost story that he has just overheard. The best interpreter of the passage, Peter G. Beidler, long ago suggested that Huck
8 citations
TL;DR: In America the family, in the Roman and aristocratic signification of the word, does not exist. All that remains of it are a few vestiges in the first yeats of childhood, when the father exercises, without opposition, that absolute domestic authority which the feebleness of his children renders necessary and which their interest, as well as his own incontestable superiority, warrants as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: I ? America the family, in the Roman and aristocratic signification of the word, does not exist. All that remains of it are a few vestiges in the first yeats of childhood, when the father exercises, without opposition, that absolute domestic authority which the feebleness of his children renders necessary and which their interest, as well as his own incontestable superiority, warrants. But as soon as the young American approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are relaxed day by day; master of his thoughts, he is soon master of his conduct. In America there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence: at the close of boyhood the man appears and begins to trace out his own path. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
7 citations
TL;DR: Gilroy as discussed by the authors argued that Wright was led astray from the realistic and naturalistic styles of fiction to which his expetience in the segregated South gave rise by the heady influence of friends like Sartre and others like Blanchot, Mannoni, and Bataille, whose inappropriately cosmopolitan outlooks poured their corrosive influences on his precious and authentic Negro sensibility.
Abstract: He [Richard Wright] was, this argument tuns, led astray from the realistic and naturalistic styles of fiction to which his expetience in the segregated South gave rise by the heady influence of friends like Sartre and others like Blanchot, Mannoni, and Bataille, whose inappropriately cosmopolitan outlooks poured their corrosive influences on his precious and authentic Negro sensibility. . . . There is a further suggestion, shared by both those who exalt and those who have execrated Wright as a protest writer, that he should have been content to remain confined within the intellectual ghetto to which Negro literary expression is still too frequently consigned. His desires—to escape the ideological and cultural legacies of Americanism; to learn the philosophical languages of literary and philosophical modernism even if only to demonstrate the commonplace nature of their ttuths; and to seek complex answers to the questions which racial and national identities could only obscure—all point to the enduring value of his radical view of modernity for the contempotaty analyst of the black diaspora. Paul Gilroy, TL· Black Atlantic
6 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, Colacurcio argues that none of the characters and events in The Scarlet Letter really map onto those involved in the Antinomian Crisis of 1638.
Abstract: ven had he not named Anne Hutchinson in The Scarlet Letzter, Nathaniel Hawthorne tempts his readers to engage the relation between the Puritan society of his narrative and that of history in 1638. In both, a breech of Puritan law is at issue: adultery might suggest to some a \"monstrous birth.\" And the question of public speech figures prominently: Hester Prynne's refusals and Anne Hutchinson's abundant expressions. However, as Michael Colacurcio states, \"Clearly . . . the relationship is not one of 'identity': tempting as the view might be made to appear, The Scarlet Letter is probably not to be read as an allegory of New England's Antinomian Crisis\" (178). Through detailed archival work, Colacurcio demonstrates convincingly how none of the characters and events in Hawthorne's novel really maps onto those involved in the Antinomian Crisis of 1638. Comparable, however, are Hawthorne's literary figures of Hester Prynne and Anne Hutchinson, found within the textual relations of his larger body of writing. As Colacurcio argues, Hester Prynne passes through a certain kind of antinomianism, \"only to emerge as a version of the sexual reformer already 'typed out' in Hawthorne's 'figure' of Mrs. Hutchinson as independent and reforming 'female'\" (184). Hawthorne's description of Mrs. Hutchinson in his sketch of the same name involved working out his own commentary on \"the woman,\" a term that refers simultaneously to Anne Hutchinson as female and to woman as a category, both of which were vocally political, seemingly to Hawthorne's dislike in 1849.
5 citations
TL;DR: Gatsby becomes a sort of detective novel, with one critic concluding that Gatsby was indeed, as he lamely claims, driving the car that killed Myrtle Wilson, while another asserts that Daisy knew that Myrtle was as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Like nick caRRAWAY ' s two most direct and famously perplexing statements of simultaneous approval and disapproval of Jay Gatsby, the whole of The Great Gatsby is strung tautly on apparent self-contradiction (6, 162). While the novel's formal effect depends strongly on the strategic gaps of modernist natrative, their provocative ambiguity is both muddied by a surprising number of blunt declarations and emphasized by the fact that most such declarations are thoroughly undercut immediately or eventually by othet evidence. The question of Nick's reliability that has prompted so much critical ink undershoots the mark; Nick seems to go out of his way to make us a dubious audience, from his opening invitation to look for the \"obvious suppressions\" in \"the intimate revelations of young men,\" to his claim of unique and absolute honesty at a moment of patent deception, to the novel's final lines, which caress us seductively as they declare that we are all doomed to repeat the tragedy we have just finished reading (6, 64, 189). Arguments that attempt to correct Nick's account are often provocative in revealing just how difficult it is to attach certainty to much in his natrative, but they inevitably attempt to build something solid on and out of what they must simultaneously acknowledge is shifting sand. Gatsby becomes a sort of detective novel, with one critic concluding that Gatsby was indeed, as he lamely claims, driving the car that killed Myrtle Wilson, while another asserts that Daisy knew that Myrtle was
5 citations
TL;DR: In fact, women generally greeted the car enthusiastically, even privileging it over such basics as food and clothing according to the Lynds' ''Middletown study''.
Abstract: rOMEN's access t? the automobile not only threatened \"yesterday's order of things,\" it profoundly transformed American culture and helped to shape twentieth-century American literature. Women generally greeted the car enthusiastically, even privileging it over such basics as food and clothing according to the Lynds' \"Middletown\" study. \"We'd rather do without clothes than give up the car,\" said one mother. Another woman asserted, \"I'll go without food before I'll see us give up the car\" (Míacííetown 255, 256). This indeed constitutes a threat to yesterday's order of things—and today's. Clearly, the automobile challenged assumptions about the role of domesticity, female responsibility, and even women's identity. The advent of automobility touched women across the country, helping to break down boundaries between urban and rural life, opening up possibilities, particularly for women, to get out of the house, and, in so doing, also eliding the boundaries of class and gender. No longer relegated to the home, women now drove into the public sphere, exercising control over the latest technology. Christie McGaffey Frederick remarked in a 1 91 2 Suburban Life article,
4 citations
TL;DR: Empirically, nature always wears the colors of the spirit as mentioned in this paper, and it is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance, for nature is not always tricked in holiday attite, but the same scene which yestday bteathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is ovetspread with melancholy today.
Abstract: Yet it is certain that the power to ptoduce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, ot in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For nature is not always tricked in holiday attite, but the same scene which yestetday bteathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is ovetspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a deat friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down ovet less worth in the population. Emetson, Nature
3 citations
3 citations
TL;DR: The authors used the literary device of a weary and unexpectedly halted traveler, a device that suggests disruption, anomaly, and something vaguely old fashioned, and it is actually shorthand for a local and translocal history.
Abstract: In 1869, Bret harte published \"Miggles\" in the Overfond Monthly. In this story, a washed-out bridge obliges stagecoach passengers and employees to spend a stormy night in the Sierra Mountain home of a former prostitute. An 1895 issue of the Atlantic Monthly included Sarah Orne Jewett's \"The Life of Nancy,\" a story that focuses on the lifelong but intermittent friendship between a Harvard socialite and a young woman from a coastal Maine fishing-farming community. The events of Jewett's story begin when the Harvard man stays beyond the hunting and fishing season as a city boarder in the young woman's family farmhouse because his friend is nursing an ankle injury. Both local color stories bring about interactions between local and traveling characters with the literary device of a weary and unexpectedly halted traveler, a device that suggests disruption, anomaly, and something vaguely old fashioned. Despite the device's outworn feel, it is actually shorthand for a local and translocal history. By using this device, Harte and Jewett reflect on the changes in the cultures and economies of the places where they became adults and began to write. By weaving the device into their fiction in the way that they do, they work to correct some of the inaccurate and offensive stories about those places repeated by the increasingly numerous travelers, tourists and members of the travel industry moving to or through those places.1 They narrate a history that allows for sociability and tenuous respect between social groups who were often in conflict in the course of their lifetimes. Their
TL;DR: In American Nervousness (1881) as mentioned in this paper, the North American Review published Dr. George Beard's "English and American Physique,\" one of the many papers that would eventually comprise American nervousness, a treatise on neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion.
Abstract: Not long after Henry Adams ended his term as its editor, the North American Review published Dr. George Beard's \"English and American Physique,\" one of the many papers that would eventually comprise American Nervousness (1881), Beard's popular treatise on neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. All of Beard's work is nervous about nervousness, but none of it so much as American Nervousness, which asserts that \"modern civilization\" has caused a \"very rapid increase of nervousness\" in America (vi). Initially, Beard argues that nervousness is caused primarily by the proliferation of five things: \"steampower, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women\" (vi). The fact that \"the mental activity of women\" could end up in this list of technological and discursive shifts requires an astonishing leap to which I will later return. Equally bizarre is the way this rather short list of causes begins to grow as Beard attempts to account more rigorously for the rise of neurasthenia. By the end of American Nervousness, he has enumerated scores of secondary and tertiary causes, and eventually this proliferation itself seems to strike him. \"More than all, perhaps,\" he says, is \"the heightening and extending complexity of modern education in and out of schools and universities,
TL;DR: For instance, this paper pointed out that the gaze can be used to enforce relations of inequality and to bear witness to such relations in transformative ways, and pointed out the need to focus on an "ethical and restorative" social practice.
Abstract: From slave narratives to videotapes of police brutality, public representations of blacks in America often turn on issues of spectacle, witness, and surveillance—issues relating to an often racist or at least racially determined gaze. But critics often stop at an admittedly justified focus on the objectifying and oppressive aspects of visual representation, without discussing what an ethical form of visual practice might look like. Thus, Herman Beavers coins the term "racial gaze" to designate "a mode of voyeurism that takes on aoristic significance in the context of nineteenth-century American racial relations"; and Ellison criticism is filled with references to white scopophilia and visual obj edification—as is much of Invisible Man itself (Beavers 205 ).' But, in addition to enforcing relations of inequality, the gaze can bear witness to such relations in transformative ways. Hortense Spillers's caveat that the culture worker needs to "break through the 'perceptual cramp' that focuses his/her eyeball on 'The Man' " suggests that simply to dismiss the visual is not sufficient: instead, we need to focus on an "ethical and restorative" social practice that often assumes the specular and intersubjective form of "giving oneself to be looked at" (96). Claudia Tate issues a similar warning about the "protocols of race" under which "we readers and scholars—black and nonblack—generally expect literary works and critical studies by African Americans to contest racist perspectives and the resulting oppression" (3); "By repeatedly inscribing the negative effects of racism on black characters, the modernist black
TL;DR: Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil as discussed by the authors is a semi-autobiographical work by W E B Du Bois, which explores the implications of social interaction across the color-line, with some even daring to suggest that breaking taboos against miscegenation might have a positive effect on social relations.
Abstract: ����� afterthe1903appearanceofhiswidelyacclaimed The Souls of Black Folk, W E B Du Bois published a second major semi-autobiographical work: Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil1 Although the recipient of far less critical scrutiny than its justly famous predecessor, Darkwater is equally compelling for its diversity of subject matter, depth of feeling, and revision of traditional autobiographical and biographical conventions2 Like Souls, Darkwater also makes use of fictional and poetic modes: several of the book's ten chapters are followed by a separate verse or parable that strives, often in mythic or quasi-religious terms, to augment or elaborate upon topics raised in the non-fiction prose, and many of the chapters themselves are partially or entirely fiction3 Intriguingly, some of these parables and stories explore the implications of social interaction across the color-line, with a few even daring to suggest that breaking taboos against miscegenation might have a positive effect on social relations In essence, these scenarios imagine possible liaisons between consenting adults as a means of underscoring both the pressing need for mutually beneficial interracial relationships and the barriers that exist to prevent them from forming and flourishing Yet, as this essay shows, these stories merit greater scrutiny not only for the fact that they stretch social boundaries and violate taboos, but also because, in the process, they establish their own specifically gendered limits as to who may participate in interracial liaisons, and in
TL;DR: Hollywood has been Busy of late demythologizing presidential history, providing intimate portraits of flawed and vulnerable men in films such as Jefferson in Paris, Nixon, and Thirteen Days as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Hollywood has been Busy of late purportedly demythologizing presidential history, providing intimate portraits of flawed and vulnerable men in films such as Jefferson in Paris, Nixon, and Thirteen Days. But the number of historically revisionist films about real presidents pales in comparison to the recent plethora of films about fictional ones. In an eight-year period (1992-2000), Hollywood released more than fifteen films either directly about a fictional president or that feature one in a prominent role.1 Why such a dense cluster of celluloid presidents? Writing for American Spectator, Mark Steyn remarks that \"every summer Hollywood makes a point of releasing movies with the kind of president it would really like\"—idealized correctives for perceived lack (45). More specifically, in \"State of Denial,\" J. Hoberman argues that The American President was \"step one\" in \"the remaking of the President [Clinton)\" (17). But this is only part of the picture, for many Hollywood films seem to revel in portraying the president as a perfidious villain. In \"The president and the image,\" Stella Bruzzi has observed that both kinds of presidential films have been made possible by two factors: the \"greater accessibility\" to the political and private lives of the presidents afforded by the media and the \"petvasive disillusionment\" born of the well-publicized failings of Nixon and Clinton in particular (16). Bruzzi sees the presidential characters in such films as falling into two broad categories: \"the good saviours\" and \"the destructive demons.\" Once again, though, this is only part of the story, which is both more complex than this antithesis allows and more familiar than one might think. For in response to the particular crisis of faith
TL;DR: Stegner was a firm believer in the necessity of finding one's "place" in the world, and he claimed several such places as his own, East End, Saskatchewan, Salt Lake City, Utah, and rural Vermont prominent among them.
Abstract: t the time of his death in April, 1 993, Wallace Stegner had „been living in California for nearly fifty years. He was of course a firm believer in the necessity of finding one's \"place\" in the world, and he claimed several such places as his own, East End, Saskatchewan, Salt Lake City, Utah, and rural Vermont prominent among them. But if California—more specifically, Los Altos Hills, a rural setting near Palo Alto, where Stegner was for years the Director of the Stanford University writing program—was where he resided longest, it was also the place he loved the least. \"Whete you find the greatest Good,\" Joe Allsten observes of California, \"there you will also find the greatest Evil, for Evil likes Paradise every bit as much as Good does\" (Stegner, All 54). The troubles in Eden, which in Stegner's eyes grew more numerous and acute in the post-war years, were the urban sprawl, the smog, the noise, the commercial greed and vulgarity, and the environmental degradation that came with rapid population growth. The trouble was dramatically compounded in the 1 960s with the advent of the counter culture, and most especially with the drug and sexual revolutions that came with it. In 1965, when Harper 6k Row invited him to do a book about the history and ecology of California, Stegner declined. \"I'm not sympathetic enough with California to do it justice,\" he wrote to his agent (Benson 308). Two years later, in a Saturday Review essay on \"California: The Experimental Society,\" he complained about superficiality, hedonism, acquisitiveness, and \"extreme permissiveness,\" concluding that \"California is a state in which it is at times almost intolerable to live\" (28).
TL;DR: In the room where Jackson gave his famous "Let us cross over the fiver and rest under the shade of the trees" (SJ 751) as discussed by the authors, a double-rope trellis bed with acorn posts at the corners was used as his deathbed.
Abstract: IHAVE just come out of the small frame office building where Jackson died, 10 May 1863, giving this Confederate sentence to world literature: \"Let us cross over the fiver and rest under the shade of the trees.\"1 I thought the place would have some power, some presence. It does not. Inside I walked on the original floor, regarded furniture, looked at Jackson's gray uniform, hung, displayed. Here is the deathbed, an antique double-rope trellis bed, acorn posts at the corners. Seven days Jackson lay in it, doctors treating him, his closest aides hovering, his wife, Mary Anna Morrison Jackson, soon at his side, his petsonal servant, Jim Lewis, providing towels and bandages, removing bowls and bottles. Seven days Jackson lay in this bed suffering the terrible wound, the loss of his left arm at the shoulder, getting better early on, articulate in conversation, poetic in his laconic phrasing, at times imagining his return to the battlefield. On the fourth day, relapse, something like pneumonia, a fatal illness. On the seventh day his wife gently breaks it to him that he will die before sunset. \"Doctor,\" said Jackson, \"Anna informs me that you have told her I am going to die today. Is it so?\" (SJ 751). On the seventh day, in this bed, Jackson is at the river giving his final order. It is now the coldest emptiest bed you could imagine, its coverlet tight, no particle of Jackson's being present, no sense ofthat final oracular sentence remaining. Ranger historians, in brown and olive uniforms, are federal officers. Nothing they say, in whatever accent, encourages emotion. Outside I stand blinking in the sun, dumbly looking at the severe landscaping, its sparse, weird shrubbery. The flagpole in the parking lot is noisy. A large federal American flag is flapping in the brisk May wind, the halyard rattling against the pole. The Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park presents four major Civil War battlefields: Fredericksburg (1862), Chan-
TL;DR: Personism as discussed by the authors addresses itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's lifegiving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.
Abstract: ion in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. . . . Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. . . . Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. . . . Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's lifegiving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a
TL;DR: This paper argued that the word used wrongly distorts the woild and the word was made good from the start, that it remains so to this second, and that antithetical poetries can and should co-exist without crippling one another.
Abstract: I believe in a hardheaded art, an unremitting, unrepentant practice of one's own faith in the word, in one's own obstinate terms. I believe the word was made good from the start, that it remains so to this second. I believe words are golden as goodness is golden. Even the humble word brush gives off a scratch of light. There is not much poetry from which I feel barred, whether it is arcane or open in the extreme. I attempt to run the gamut because I am pulled by the extremes. I believe the word used wrongly distorts the woild. I hold to hatd distinctions of right and wrong. Also that antithetical poetries can and should co-exist without crippling one another. They not only serve to define the other to a much more exacting degree than would be possible in the absence of one or the other; they insure the persistence of heterogeneous (albeit discouragingly small) constituencies. While I am not always equal to it, I appreciate the fray. . . . Important, I believe, to resist closure in one's own work while assiduously working toward its completeness. Detrimental, I think, the dread of being passed on the left as is the deluded and furthermore trivializing notion of one's
TL;DR: Faulkner's failure to capture the glory of the image is the crux for any intetrogation into the writer's aesthetics as mentioned in this paper, and this failure is the reason that the story escapes as the encounter with the divide between subject and object, writer and materials.
Abstract: riLLiAM faulkner agonized over his writings, he meticulously reworked them, he had something to say that demanded that he state it properly. ' Faulkner insisted upon the exactness of both form and content, that he recapture the image precisely, so that the story harbored in the imagination might unfold. But Faulkner, like his character Addie Bundren, knew \"that words don't even fit what they are trying to say at\" (AlLD 136); the image cannot be captured as image. This left the laureate—and many of his later critics—with the belief that the story, the most splendid story, is to be identified by the level of its failing to recapture the glory of the image. This failure, then, would prove the crux for any intetrogation into Faulkner's aesthetics. Walter Slatoff, for example, reads this failure to the conclusion that Faulkner's \"finished work becomes, in a sense, the record of a process, the record of the artist's struggle with his materials, rather than a record of his victory over materials\" (253). The implication here is that the gulf between subject and object, writer and materials, emerges in the work of the writer: that the story escapes as the encounter with this divide. In such an instance, writing reveals the distance between word and image. Critics, moreover, have also under-