Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2010"

The Mexican Revolution in the Eyes of Katherine Anne Porter and Nellie Campobello

Abstract: T literature of the u.s. south has found new life in the burgeoning field of inter-American literary studies.1 Both the U.S. South’s literatures and its histories have played key roles in the academic attempt to connect the literatures and histories of the United States to those of Latin America and the Caribbean from the groundbreaking work of Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia’s 1986 collection, Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America, through Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s “invitation or come-on” (5) to study American literatures side by side in his 1990 edited volume, Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? to Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine's recent collection, Hemispheric American Studies. The U.S. South aptly serves as the metaphorical bridge between the northern and southern halves of the American hemisphere because, as Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith argue in their introduction to Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, “the U.S. South comes to occupy a space unique within modernity: a space simultaneously (or alternately) center and margin, victor and defeated, empire and colony, essentialist and hybrid, northern and southern (both in the global sense)” (9). With the importance of the U.S. South in this inter-American conversation, it is surprising that very few scholars examine the work of Katherine Anne Porter from a hemispheric approach, especially considering Porter’s involvement in Mexican art and politics in the early 1920s and again in the early 1930s.2 Thomas F. Walsh’s Katherine Anne

"A Culture of Violence and Foodsmells": Amiri Baraka's The System of Dante's Hell and the War on Poverty

Abstract: O of the most unl ikely inst itut ions to benefit from President Johnson’s War on Poverty was the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) in Harlem, founded by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, and others. Its immediate patron was Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, a community action project established under the Kennedy administration to deal with the problems of inner city youth. In the summer of 1965, the Johnson administration channeled over two million dollars into the program, hoping to cool down tempers after the riots of 1964 (Krosney 83). Due to the bureaucratic chaos created by the need to spend so much money in a short period of time, it was relatively easy for Baraka and his compatriots to acquire funding for their venture; in his autobiography, Baraka estimates that “we must have got away with a couple hundred grand and even more in services when it was all over” (307). Throughout the summer, BARTS staged black nationalist street dramas that ritualistically enacted the deaths of liberal whites and integrationist blacks, accompanied by avant-garde jazz by Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and Archie Shepp. It was not what the architects of the War on Poverty had in mind, and Sargent Shriver eventually terminated the theatre’s funding, denouncing its plays as “scurrilous” and “obscene” (Levine 55). The incident, which drew national attention and helped undermine congressional support for the War on Poverty, dramatized some of

From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Creation of Literary Value

Abstract: W the editors of Harper’s Bazar published Anita Loos’s serial novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes over six months in 1925, they were asking a question that parallels, in terms of aesthetic value, Lorelei’s more humorous problem with money: how much modernism is in literature and art?1 How do you begin to acknowledge it, and thus reap the rewards of knowing it? How do you make modernism pay, not for experimental writers themselves but for Harper’s Bazar readers? Frankly hostile to experimental literature and art in the nineteen teens, the magazine had only recently, with hesitation, begun to treat aesthetic modernism as potentially legitimate as high culture. In the nineteen teens, while the more modernist-friendly Vanity Fair’s art reviews tried to accommodate the aesthetic visions of both modernists and their antagonists in the Academy of Arts and Design, Harper’s Bazar printed an anti-modernist screed by the Academy’s secretary.2 In addition, a regular columnist known as “The Bachelor” frequently found time to deride experimentation in art as so much rubbish. In the early twenties, Bazar writers just began treating modernism as something their read-

Some Assembly Required: The Embodied Politics of Infinite Jest

Abstract: W in at over two pounds, david foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest cautions by its sheer heft that reading the novel will be an embodied experience. In finding a place to balance its weight or endlessly flipping back to the endnotes, reading this book becomes a curiously physical task. These excessive qualities call attention to the body consuming the text, but the novel also announces the extraordinary bodies between its covers. At a distended 1,079 pages, the most obvious anomalous body is perhaps the text itself. Wallace constructs this unconventional textual body from a series of nonlinear episodes, shifting points of view, and nearly one hundred pages of explanatory endnotes. His experimentation with freakish textual forms finds expression in the bodies of the characters as well. Wallace populates his novel with wheelchair assassins, gargantuan infants, the “Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed,” and a host of characters with congenital malformations. Rather than read these extraordinary elements as merely the offshoot of creative innovation, I argue that unusual physical bodies provide a model for reading the textual body and vice versa. This homology of physical and textual forms finds its crystallizing expression in Wallace’s image of the characteristic asymmetry of athletic bodies. Slipping into the boy’s locker room at the Enfield Tennis Academy, Wallace describes how these teens have “the classic look of bodies hastily assembled from other bodies’ parts, especially when you throw in the heavily muscled legs and usually shallow chests and the two arms of different sizes” (100). In imagining the body as a lopsided collection of parts, this scene offers the physical analog to Wallace’s irregular,

Malinche's Legacy: Translation, Betrayal, and Interlingualism in Chicano/a Literature

Abstract: I 1519, when the would-be conquering of Mexico general Hernán Cortés met the indigenous woman known as Marina (or Malinche), no one could predict the result of this encounter between the Spanish and the Indian, man and woman, colonizer and colonized, free and enslaved, dominating discourse and “minority” language. And even today no one is quite certain what exactly this convergence produced, and who seduced whom, and at what price. Entrenched accounts portray Malinche as a betrayer of her own people who facilitated Cortés’s colonization of Mexico and then mothered a race of bastardized mestizos that eventually displaced the “pure” indigenous native population of Mexico. More recently, Chicana feminists have attempted to repossess Malinche as a heroic individual who mitigated violence against her people or as a religious woman dedicated to her own worldview.1 What is clear is that for many contemporary Chicano/a writers (male and female) Malinche functions as a multivalent sign of their multiple loyalties—the need for both fidelity and betrayal—as cultural translators who must mediate between the U.S. and Mexico, the written and the oral, English and Spanish, a dominant discourse and a “minority” one. Every act of translation, Barbara Johnson argues, must be viewed as both an act of fidelity and infidelity: “The translator ought . . . to be considered not as a duteous spouse but as a faithful bigamist, with loyalties split between a native language and foreign tongue. . . . The bigamist is thus necessarily doubly unfaithful,

Physics and Metaphysics: Lessons from Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

Abstract: I her novel ‘ceremony,’ set in new mexico where uranium mining and the Manhattan project so profoundly affected human and environmental history, Leslie Marmon Silko employs an account of the physical world that is remarkably similar to theories proposed by contemporary physicists. Silko does not use the methods or words physicists generally do such as laboratory experiments, mathematics, principles, and laws. Instead her methods are experience and story, and her findings are expressed in the Native American terms of her Laguna heritage as embodied by her central character, Tayo. Tayo never knew his white father, and his Indian mother died when he was a small child. His mixed heritage brands him as an outsider in the world of the white army and in the eyes of his aunt who begrudgingly raises him. As the novel opens, he is returning to the reservation, a traumatized World War II veteran whom Army psychiatric treatment has been unable to cure. Tayo and the world are falling apart, unable to keep the past, nourish the present, or seed a productive future. Tayo needs a cure much more encompassing than what Army medicine can proffer, and so does the world which has been been misshaped by a truncated scientific approach. At the beginning of the novel, we learn that “the only cure . . . is a good ceremony” (3). As Laguna writer Paula Gunn Allen, writes, “what Tayo and the people need is a story that will take the entire situation into account” so that “spirit, creatures, and land can occupy a unified whole.” Allen continues, “that sort of story is, of course, a ceremony” (Sacred 124). Though Silko’s account of reality shares some features with quan-

On the Hollywood Chain Gang: The Screen Version of Robert E.Burns' I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! and Penal Reform of the 1930s-1940s

Abstract: Even as I write this meager description of a Georgia chain gang, I realize words or language cannot give an exact presentation of the malicious cold brutality that we encountered. One was never allowed to rest a moment but must always be hard at work, and even moving in the mass of chain was painful and tiring—yet if one did not keep up his work greater terrors and more brutal punishment was in reserve. . . . And fear and despair clutched my weary heart. Was this a nightmare? Was it the hell I once read of in “Revelations,” or was I going insane? Robert E. Burns, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!

Mapping Black and Brown L.A.: Zoot Suit Riots as Spatial Subtext in If He Hollers Let Him Go

Abstract: Zoot Suit Riots as Spatial Subtext in If He Hollers Let Him Go T violent clashes that took place on the streets of Los Angeles from June 3–10, 1943—collectively referred to as the “Zoot Suit Riots”—were enabled by the city’s unique history of metro-regional development. As previous scholars have suggested, though many view L.A. as a quintessentially urban region—a reputation perpetuated by its history of urban-style riots—Los Angeles’ fragmented and sprawling pattern might more aptly be described as the geographic inevitability of a suburban-style investment in the ideologies of privatization and racial segregation.1 From imperial conquest to contemporary development, race has framed the vision of what Los Angeles should be and for whom it would be a “promised land.” Margaret Marsh writes that “the white, middle-class, midwestern Protestants who wrested Los Angeles from its original settlers had the opportunity to create the kind of city that they believed represented the hopes and dreams of people like themselves. Their world view, which in the words of one historian ‘everywhere dominated the layout of greater Los Angeles,’ was suburban” (165). Beginning in the 1920s, this tide of white, middle-class migrants transformed Los Angeles into “one of the most ‘Anglo’ of all American metropolises—overwhelmingly ‘white’ and native-born” (Abu-Lughod 134). But in the 1930s and 1940s, the displacement of working-class families by the Dust Bowl and an influx of African American migrants, primarily though not exclusively from the south, mitigated this middleclass “Anglo-cizing” of Los Angeles. Describing the effect of World War II on the city’s population, historian Josh Sides notes, “Between

"A True Picture of Facts": Cinematic Realism in Dreiser's An American Tragedy

Abstract: I 1919, theodore dreiser took an advance from publisher Horace Liveright to work on The Bulwark (1946) but instead moved to Los Angeles to begin writing An American Tragedy (1925). Even before moving to the newly established American film capital with a working studio actress (Helen Richardson, his eventual wife), Dreiser had been a regular filmgoer, the author of several (unproduced) film scenarios, and (he claimed) a potential studio head.1 So in many crucial ways Dreiser lived physically and psychologically closer to film and filming than most writers of his generation, especially while writing what is perhaps his most important novel. Yet scholars rarely think of Dreiser’s work as having any relationship to film, and when they do, they almost inevitably see that relationship as adversarial. This serious misunderstanding obscures film’s importance in An American Tragedy and even in literary history. The tendency to see Dreiser’s work as insulated from or hostile to contemporary Hollywood film comes in large part from Dreiser’s wellknown hatred for Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 adaptation of An American Tragedy. Dreiser eventually sued Paramount over that adaptation because he saw it as “a deliberate attempt to botch the American Tragedy” (Letters 2: 521) and “not so much a belittling as a debauching process” (“Real Sins” 211). The lawsuit led to a bitter public feud with von Sternberg, a squabble that afforded Dreiser an opportunity to portray himself as a great writer wronged by Hollywood hatchet-jobbery.2 Since then, the feud’s salience in the history of An American Tragedy seems to

The Beat Cops of History; or, The Paranoid Style in American Intellectual Politics

Abstract: I take as my starting point in this paper the fact that the present moment has witnessed a resurgence of the production of the privileged socio-political genre of paranoia, the conspiracy narrative. From recent high profile films such as the remake of the Cold War classic, The Manchurian Candidate (2004), The Constant Gardener (2005), Syriana (2005), State of Play (2009), Watchmen (2009), and the adaptation of one of the most widely read popular conspiracy narratives of all time, The Da Vinci Code (2006) (a film about which I’ll have a few things to say in the final section of this paper), to the collective project of organizations such as Scholars for 9/11 Truth and David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom, the conspiracy narrative has become once again a prominent aspect of contemporary American culture. There are a number of factors that could account for this rise in conspiracy visions—the violences of corporate globalization; the events of September 11, 2001; the emergence of the new security state; the documented activities of the Bush administration; and the general climate of fear, suspicion, and paranoia accompanying the global War on Terror, first envisioned and brought into being by prominent members

"The World was Home for Me": Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Sentimental Public Sphere

Abstract: T illustrate her claim that women ought to perform what she called “that social service which is our first duty as human beings,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman concluded that her greataunt Harriet Beecher Stowe ultimately proved more useful as a writer than as a parent: “Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a great book. She had children too—good children as children go—but her value to the world was through the book more than the children” (“Social Darwinism” 713–14). Gilman’s contention that a woman’s work might matter more than her children appears to controvert everything Stowe and the other sentimentalists held dear, violating the tenets of the cults of domesticity and motherhood by prioritizing the public over the private sphere, work over home, and books over babies. Gilman rejoiced in her sacrilege, mocking in many of her poems and essays the cultural tendency to glorify the home as a haven from the heartless world. In one poem, for instance, she parodies the notion of the home as sacrosanct:

Bodies in Transition: Transcendental Feminism in Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: O of margaret fuller’s earliest recorded meditations on embodiment is a meditation upon a corpse. In her Memoirs, Fuller recalls her feelings as she faced the death of her young sister, Julia Adelaide.1 Although Fuller rejects the “sad parade” of the funerary rites as fundamentally disconnected from the “sweet playful child,” she does not reject death itself; instead, noting that Julia Adelaide’s “life and death were alike beautiful,” Fuller finds a strange appeal in death. Perhaps the equanimity with which she views death stems from her belief that death offers lessons about life. Fuller’s summative statement about the event—“Thus my first experience of life was one of death” (13)—evidences this belief, and underscores the didactic nature of her moment of mourning. Like Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson learns from the death of a family member.2 He famously uses the death of his son Waldo to sketch the limits of self-reliance in his essay “Experience.” Emerson’s horrible realization, his grief that grief can teach him nothing, springs from his startling discovery that even the closest interpersonal relations can only offer facades of intimacy and connection. Reflecting on this phantom closeness, Emerson registers his surprise that “something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves

Revision and Identification: Emerson and the Ethics of Skepticism and Sympathy

Abstract: I can prove quite challenging to attempt to champion Emerson as ethicist these days. In light of powerful and nuanced critiques of Emersonian individualism, critiques which Emerson certainly supplies enough ammunition for, as well as continued interest in the “cultural work” of literature, such a championing of a man who unabashedly asserts that “A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him” (490) is apt to leave one feeling that his case must rest upon a significant degree of sophistry.1 Yet, there are those of us who will risk, or will at least brave being accused of, engaging in perhaps the greatest of philosophical sins and nonetheless make the attempt. James Albrecht, for instance, diverges from John Carlos Rowe’s now widely accepted reading that Emersonian transcendentalism and ethicopolitical commitments are “fundamentally at odds with each other” (25) and that the former “works to rationalize present wrongs rather than bring about actual social change” (40) by arguing that Emerson’s writings “do not reflect [the] absolutist extremes of autonomy and determinism”—or, to adopt Stephen Whicher’s classic formulation, freedom and fate—but instead reflect a process of “limited transcendence,” one which “extend[s] his balanced, proto-pragmatic analysis of the power and limitation of individual acts” (178, emphasis added). Taking an altogether different approach, Gustaaf Van Cromphout, responding to critiques of Emersonian transparency, insists that Emerson was in fact

An Introduction to Neonativist Collectives: Place, Not Race, in Cather's The Professor's House and Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent

Abstract: T essay offers a critical introduction to neonativism, a term I use to describe authorial refusals of the racially essentialist and “retrogressive” tendencies of political nativism in early-twentieth-century American literature. “Nativism,” as we encounter the term most frequently in literary and cultural studies, describes racialized political xenophobia, often, but certainly not only, in America. The mid-nineteenth-century Know-Nothing Party, discriminatory anti-immigration acts (such as the Immigration Act of 1924), and present-day debates concerning “amnesty” for “illegals” all share a certain nativist agenda, be it explicit (as with the Know-Nothings) or implicit (as it informs today’s immigration debates). Nativists nostalgically prefer an (imaginarily homogenous) “previous America” to the polyglot, heterogeneous America that actually exists. Thus, nativism is marked by “retrogression,” as I term it, an active and ideological nostalgia for a mythic past of racial uniformity. Nativists, as nativism’s foremost analyst John Higham has noted, are fearful that America will become a messy amalgam of indistinct peoples. Nativists are hostile to change, particularly concerning the complexion of the national people. These two attributes, fear and hostility, as Higham makes clear, convert what might be a simple distaste for a certain ethnic group into the particular national phenomenon that is nativism.1

Why Poetry Matters: The Transpersonal Force of Lyric Experience in Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos

Abstract: R critics in modernist studies have been eager to expose the often unsavory ideological commitments lurking at the basis of modernist aesthetics. There is perhaps no richer—and more contentious—locus for examining the vexed question of the status of ideology in modernism than The Cantos, Ezra Pound’s great “poem including history.”1 Ironically, the recent critical obsession with history and ideology in The Cantos has threatened to turn the poem into something more like a historical tract written incidentally in poetic form. Much of the drama and energy of The Cantos derives from the complex interplay of what might be called the poem’s lyric and historical modes. The lyric mode of The Cantos is most often characterized by affective immediacy, elevated diction, aphoristic-philosophical pronouncement, and an emphasis on the natural and the transhistorical. The historical mode, by sharp contrast, is usually characterized by strident didacticism, quotidian and often vulgar prose, close attention to historical particulars, and the privileging of rationality over affect. The oppositions are

To "tell again in many ways": Iteration and Translation in The Souls of Black Folk

Abstract: A elaborating his notion of double consciousness and introducing the central tropes of the soul, the veil, and the color-line, W. E. B. Du Bois closes the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk with a brief, critical statement: “And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk” (107). The rhetorical strategy that Du Bois describes here is one of iteration, of repetition with a difference. He invokes sameness—“the striving in the souls of black folk”—as well as difference—the need to tell the story again in many ways. The story of the “souls of black folk” for Du Bois is not a singular, unified, or consistent narrative, but a multifaceted and fragmented story that demands to be told and retold in “many ways.” In Souls, this iterative approach allows Du Bois to explore the complexity of double consciousness, to represent the various experiences of life within the veil, and to give weight to the experiences of the community as well as the individual.1 Not only does this practice of “tell[ing] again in many ways” explain Du Bois’s approach in writing Souls, but more importantly, it quite accurately describes his primary mode of discursive and political engagement throughout his long career. Here, I examine how Du Bois’s enduring practice of telling again in many ways operates as a diagnostic strategy for analyzing systems of racial, economic, and sexual domination and, at the same time, offers a new matrix for rethinking race and nation.

Transnationalism at the Impasse of Race: Sui Sin Far and U.S. Imperialism

Abstract: E as histories and theories of transnationalism have become of central importance to recent scholarship in Asian American literary studies, critical treatments of Sui Sin Far’s groundbreaking work have only glanced over how it evokes the complexities of trans-Pacific social relations at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Ever since Sui Sin Far was acknowledged in the pioneering Asian American literary anthology Aiiieeeee! (1974) as “one of the first to speak for an Asian-American sensibility that was neither Asian nor white American” (Chin, et al. xxi), the reception of her writing has burdened her with the responsibilities attendant to her status as the inaugurator of an ethnic literary tradition.2 Working from an ethnic studies rubric that understands the dynamics of race within a U.S. national framework, such critics have championed Sui for presenting an empathetic and realistic view of Chinese immigrants starkly different from stereotypes circulating in an era of virulent racism. To account for the ideological underpinnings of establishing Sui as the origin of Asian American literature, Viet Nguyen explains how critics privileged “writers who were ‘authentic,’ meaning that the literature they wrote was more ‘truthful’ in regard to the experiences of Asian Americans than the stereotypical, often racist representations of Asian Americans in popular culture and historical discourse” (34).3 Yet as important as these issues of cultural representation are, they have obscured the histories of transnationalism and racialization that Sui’s stories engage so compellingly, where narrative conflicts carry not only an explicit

"Death Beneath this Semblance of Civilization": Reading Zitkala-Sa and the Imperial Imagination of the Romantic Revival

Abstract: I august of 1899, only four months before the Atlantic Monthly printed the first in a series of autobiographical stories by a Yankton Dakota woman writing under the name Zitkala-Sa, the same Bostonian periodical published an essay by Henry Dawes. The essay by the former senator from Massachusetts, titled “Have We Failed With the Indian,” detailed what Dawes considered to be the successes of “our [federal] policy with the Indians,” policies that had been in effect since the 1887 passage of legislation carrying the senator’s name. The Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act, was established to radically reconfigure the relationship between native communities, their land, and the United States by endeavoring, in the former senator’s words, to “fit the Indian for civilization and to absorb him into it” (281). As such, the act moved to dissolve communal land-holding practices, with the linked goal of dissolving tribal community, by allotting reservation land to individual landowners: “one hundred sixty acres to heads of families” (283). Moreover, the law ostensibly offered political enfranchisement, via citizenship that protected these landholdings by opening “to these Indians, as to all other citizens, the doors of all the courts,” extending “to them the protection of all the laws.” To facilitate this assimilation of native communities into the national body, off-reservation boarding schools proliferated around the country (based on the model of the

Retelling the Retold: Race and Orality in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin

Abstract: S according to walter benjamin, can be distinguished from novels by two essential features: first, “the storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others” and “makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.” Second, “every real story . . . contains, openly or covertly, something useful” (87, 86). Understanding Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as a story, rather than a novel, and listening to it as Benjamin charges that stories must be listened to, that is, as an act inspired by the “communicability of experience,” one that bears “a universal accountability of meaning,” changes the listener/reader’s encounter with the text and transforms the story’s message (83, 84, 86).1 While the narrative is constructed around differences in race, geography, political ideologies and religious convictions—differences that at times seem to defy any sense of cohesion—ultimately, the usefulness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is its illustration of how stories generate a sense of shared experience. At its most useful, and its most powerful, Uncle Tom’s Cabin democratizes the experience of narrating and listening to stories. Democratize, here, means that the story itself becomes the great equalizer: it is adapted widely, bears meaning for all, and inspires listeners to become storytellers. This is seen most clearly when Eliza and her son Harry escape across the Ohio River, a scene that endures as one of the most memorable and emotionally turbulent moments in the narrative in large part because it

Hawthorne's Transnational Coup: Double-Crossing the Na(rra)tion

Abstract: T idea of “america,” its “national fantasy,” as Lauren Berlant defines it (4–5), reveals a complex network of discursive practices, a network that represses, by definition, the diachronic insofar as it represents America as something necessary, mythic, ideal, utopian—a phantasy, indeed. Puritanism installs the commonplace—still not uncommon today: America is not a common place; it is, instead, a sacred stead, the Homestead in the Sky. Transcendentalism further elaborates the ideological dimensions of this mise-en-scène: America is natural, belongs to nature itself—“nature’s nation,” nature’s very own.1 With this “turn” of events, Jacksonian democracy, taking its own time, cements the final piece of Uncle Sam in place: cross-dressed in Mother Nature’s skirt, natura naturans, America henceforth transforms, transcends itself: e pluribus unum: a plural One, integral, complete, a whole unto itself.2 America invites this mix of metaphors, the symptoms con-fused. It (always already) arrives on time; it needn’t bide its time; its history and destiny are manifest, (re)cite the same event— timely yet timeless at once. Thus progress mistakes itself, takes itself for granted: here, to call upon Kant, time falls from its hinges. Sublation knows its whereabouts. Simultaneously, “America” knows nothing of borders. It borders the sublime. Self-contained, yet uncontained, it is, by definition, exceptional, the exception to geography and politics. Bound by possibility alone, what borders it naturally belongs to it (including the Oregon Territory). It’s not by chance Thoreau remarks that “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. . . . That way the nation is moving,

Hogs, Not Maidens: The Ambivalent Imperialism of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Abstract: D the increased critical attention mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court has received in recent years, little progress has been made in resolving what I see as the central problem of the novel: what do we do about the fact that Hank Morgan, an ultimately vile character responsible for the murder of thousands, nonetheless acts in the service and promotion of genuinely laudable ideals, such as democracy, equality, the prohibition of slavery, and so on? Hank is a murderer and a tyrant, but he murders and tyrannizes in the name of these undeniably good things. Most recent analyses of the novel tend to throw this proverbial baby out with the bath water, and see Hank as the personification of Twain’s growing disgust with the moral implications of American capitalism, industrialism, and militarism. However, by reading the novel only as a satire on the despotism of wealth and technology in the nineteenth century, current critics mirror the reception of the novel by Twain’s contemporaries, who saw it by and large as a light-hearted mockery of archaic medieval values still present in European culture.1 There is perhaps a temptation to split the difference between these two strains of criticism, and to see Twain’s novel as mocking certain elements from the sixth century and certain elements from the nineteenth, without committing to a complete condemnation of one or a complete celebration of the other: religious superstition is bad, this reading might go, but so is technological utopianism; total authority invested in a king is bad, but in precisely the same way that total authority invested in a

Raising Eden in Death Comes for the Archbishop

Abstract: The Bishop and his Vicar were riding through the rain in the Truchas mountains. The heavy, lead-coloured drops were driven slantingly through the air by an icy wind from the peak. These raindrops, Father Latour kept thinking, were the shape of tadpoles, and they broke against his nose and cheeks, exploding with a splash, as if they were hollow and full of air. The priests were riding across high mountain meadows, which in a few weeks would be green, though just now they were slatecoloured. On every side lay ridges covered with blue-green fir trees; above them rose the horny backbones of mountains. The sky was very low; purplish lead-coloured clouds let down curtains of mist into the valleys between the pine ridges. There was not a glimmer of white light in the dark vapours working overhead—rather, they took on the cold green of the evergreens. Even the white mules, their coats wet and matted into tufts, had turned a slaty hue, and the faces of the two priests were purple and spotted in that singular light. (63–64)

The Demands of Time in Harold Frederic's The Market-Place

Abstract: I the 1960s, a group of critics , including Edmund Wilson, Thomas O’Donnell, Hoyt Franchere, Austin Briggs, Jr., and Stanton Garner, sought to rectify the lack of criticism on Harold Frederic. However, forty years later, this previous revival appears to have had limited results. Only Frederic’s 1896 novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware, still draws almost all the critical attention, despite the initial popularity of his final and posthumous work, The Market-Place. In this witty, fast paced, fin de siècle novel, Frederic depicts a clash of social orders. As capitalism advances and the market-place gains dominance, the cultural remains of English aristocracy survive in pockets, at once resistant, moribund, and often absurd. The transition to modernity is not a smooth, linear evolution, but rather, as Fredric Jameson argues, an overlay of different realities, not a simple displacement of one mode of production by another, but a patchy subordination in which older vestiges still remain (95). One way Harold Frederic represents this transition is through competing notions of time; for example, the leisure class, with its conspicuous consumption, idles in gardens and, as it attempts to adapt to the new world, founders under the vigorous demands of clock-time that drive the market-place. Moreover, the uneven process of modernization shapes the characters’ consciousness, particularly that of Joel Stormont Thorpe. “Does it take deep intuition to comprehend,” asks Karl Marx, “that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in a word, man’s consciousness, change with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations, and in his social life?” (228–29). A lively response can be found in Frederic’s novel, in his creation of protean identities whose confused values—despite the English setting—reflect the tensions inherent in American mythology.

Lorine Niedecker and the Matter of Life and Death

Abstract: I the mid-twentieth-century rural world of Lorine Niedecker’s poems, speakers long for physical comfort and for technological conveniences to ease their labor. They talk about their desire for and their relationships with handcrafted and machine-made objects. In short poems deftly arranged on the page, Niedecker conveys the significance a piece of clothing or a patched roof can make in assuring warmth, and describes a functional plumbing system with love and relief. Seemingly mundane details such as “radio” and “heat” are infused with desire and life-or-death significance. To describe the condition of financial desperation, Niedecker employs the language of frustrated love—in her poems, everyday objects and human bodies circle around each other, eluding and longing for each other, generating questions about the relations among love, money, and the body. For Niedecker, objects are instrumental in sustaining life as well as in creating, thwarting, and fulfilling desire. Niedecker is often identified as an “Objectivist” poet. The “object” in “Objectivist” is usually in reference to the idea of poem-as-object, which involves a close attention to the visual and aural presence of the poem, and to the desire of the poets to achieve a level of objectivity in representation. The “non-human” figures prominently here, but the relation between Objectivist poetry and non-human objects has not been studied in depth. Niedecker’s use of nature and natural imagery has been examined, most recently in the collection Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, but the role of manmade objects, particularly those which are referenced throughout Niedecker’s poetry, has not been thoroughly read. Several scholars have provided valu-

After Acknowledgement: Theodore Parker as Representative Man

Abstract: “C writes ralph waldo emerson , “is a game of circles” (408). Yet Theodore Parker, sitting everywhere but inside a circle of canonical texts, is a voice that’s hard to hear. Ironic, perhaps, for a man whose tombstone reads “The Great American Preacher” and whose extensive list of lifetime correspondences includes figures such as Lydia Maria Child, Charles Sumner, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Peabody. “Near, but not within, New England transcendentalism,” (Dirks 136), he is a manifestation of Emerson’s new and therefore unapproachable American.1 Indeed, Parker looms largely silent in present American literary history. Wholly committed to intuitive philosophy, but accused by Henry Steele Commager and others of “systematically ransacking of the facts of history with the tools of science” (“Dilemma” 269), Parker is at once hailed and defamed by his contemporaries. His obsessive reading habits, dogged religiosity, and allegiance to ordinary words, compose his uniquely simultaneous reliance on the “method of the natural philosopher . . . [and] the method of the metaphysician” (World 234). In the heart of the 1933 New England Quarterly article, “The Dilemma of Theodore Parker,” the 1950 article asking, “Was Theodore Parker a Transcendentalist,” and the 2002 book-length American Heretic lies Parker’s seemingly incommensurate practice and theory.2 It might be said that America’s conception of “self-reliance” institutes the polarity of his reception. Buried overseas in Florence, Italy, he is, quite literally, foreign in America. Representations remain, yet, as Parker would show, we have yet to come to terms with representation. “In our schools as our farms, we pass over much ground, but pass over it poorly” (Parker, “Political Destination” 158),