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Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2012"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In an interview with "the national review" following the legalization of same-sex marriage in his state, Mitt Romney, stated, “Marriage is principally for the nurturing and development of children. The children of America have the right to have a father and a mother" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: I an interview with ‘the national review’ following the legalization of same-sex marriage in his state, the then-Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, stated, “Marriage is principally for the nurturing and development of children. The children of America have the right to have a father and a mother” (Gallagher). His comment here implies that the victims of such unions would be the children raised by same-sex parents. A year later, in an interview with Chris Matthews on the television show Hardball, Romney complicated his stance:

18 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, Caraminero-Santangel et al. present a survey of the literature of culture and theory in Latin America, focusing on the relationship between culture and theory.
Abstract: This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://musejhuedu/journals/arizona_quarterly_a_journal_of_american_literature_culture_and_theory/v068/683caminero-santangelohtml#b34

8 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) as discussed by the authors is one of the most famous works in the history of reading and reading theory, where Oedipa Maas, a suburban housewife, is named executrix of the estate of a former lover.
Abstract: R between modes of reading and a cold War construction of “America” animate Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). When Oedipa Maas, a suburban housewife, is named executrix of the estate of a former lover, her conception of reality is unhinged and she learns how to read. In the process of making sense of the estate’s apparent link to a renegade mail carrier organization called the Trystero, Oedipa uncovers what could be either an international conspiracy or an elaborate hoax created by her erstwhile lover, Pierce Inverarity. Interpreting the Trystero mystery leads Oedipa to become increasingly estranged from the world of suburban conformity and increasingly aware of an alternate world made up of those excluded from the dominant culture. Oedipa never learns for certain what Trystero means or even if it exists; what she does learn is that there is more than one mode of interpretation and that the act of interpretation bears significant political consequences. Oedipa’s move from social, cultural, and interpretive security to a wholly new and other uncertainty is thematized in scholarship that reads Lot 49 as a brave, new, paranoid world with its own rules of meaning making. This reading functions not unlike the Remedios Varo painting Oedipa views in Mexico City, “Bordando el manto Terrestre” (1961) (“Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle”). In this painting, several “frail girls with heart-shaped faces . . . prisoners in the top room of a circular tower” are weaving a tapestry that not only “spilled out the slit windows and into a void” trying to fill that void, but also “was the world” (Pyn-

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the stands at Dodger stadium, huge blue letters instructing fans to “Think Blue” are placed high in the hills for the whole crowd to see, and the players can’t muster a victory on their own, the collective brainpower of the Dodger faithful will make the difference that puts them over the top as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: W you sit in the stands at dodger stadium and gaze beyond the outfield bleachers, you first see parking lots—acres and acres of flat pavement, hazy and rippled from the heat. At the edge of the parking lots are hills, absent any signs of life save for a smattering of palm trees and brush. These hills surround the parking lots that surround the stadium, making the entire area—referred to as Chávez Ravine even before the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958—resemble a giant shimmering wok. Directly opposite the stadium, set up high in the hills for the whole crowd to see, are huge blue letters instructing fans to “THINK BLUE.” Presumably, when the players can’t muster a victory on their own, the collective brainpower of the Dodger faithful will make the difference that puts them over the top. Of course, a more paranoid reader might wonder what the sign distracts us from. Think blue as opposed to what? Instead of thinking about how Manny Ramirez failed to lead the Dodgers to the World Series? Instead of thinking about how much your seats cost? Instead of

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The anonymous tattered man standing poking at the corpse of Jim Conklin, whose death he has just witnessed alongside the novel's protagonist, Henry Fleming, is peculiar but also not particularly unique in the novel; as critics have long noted, Red Badge is seeped in the thematic and formal visibility of death, in the stakes of death's imaginative visualizations and in its halting, repetitive appearances in the narrative.
Abstract: The anonymous tattered man stands poking at the corpse of Jim Conklin, whose death he has just witnessed alongside the novel’s protagonist, Henry Fleming. The scene is peculiar, but also not particularly unique in the novel; as critics have long noted, Red Badge is seeped in the thematic and formal visibility of death, in the stakes of death’s imaginative visualizations and in its halting, repetitive appearances in the narrative. Fleeting examinations of corpses—casual touches and long looks— punctuate the novel, itself an 1895 post-mortem of the American Civil War that it obliquely reproduces. So like death more generally, and like the particular deaths in Red Badge, this scene archives what we know to be a “regular,” repetitive event as much as it calls attention to the singular strangeness of death’s arrival at any particular moment, its status as a “funny thing.” Repeatedly translating “Jim” as character into a “reg’lar

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article examined the relationship between violence, global space and political subjectivity in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Glamorama and found that these somewhat disparate narratives share an aesthetic logic of violence and global space, a logic based on a metaphorical equation between bodily violence and descriptive discourse.
Abstract: T essay examines the relationship between violence, global space and political subjectivity in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Glamorama. By analyzing the depictions of violence in these novels, I want to theorize an aesthetic of globalization and a corresponding figuration of subjectivity that I see in a number of particularly brutal postmodern narratives including popular horror films on the order of Eli Roth’s Hostel, James Wan’s Saw and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and literary texts such as J. G. Ballard’s fiction and Cormac McCarthy’s recent novels, No Country for Old Men and The Road. What these somewhat disparate narratives share is an aesthetic logic of violence and global space I’m calling rendering, a logic based on a metaphorical equation between bodily violence and descriptive discourse. In order to capture this equation, my pun on rendering is meant to refer, on one hand, to the discursive act of constructing a representation and, on the other hand, to the visceral act of processing a carcass for consumption. In this double sense, both painting and butchering are rendering. Indeed, the visceral sense of rendering, i.e. the physical butchering of a body, points toward the symbolic commodification of said body as meat. That is to say, the bodily register of the term gestures toward the discursive register and vice versa. As an aesthetic phenomenon at work in Ellis’s fiction, then, this metaphorical equation of the visceral and the discursive—an equation I am terming rendering—articulates an abstract space of globalization and a melancholic subject homologous to this global space.

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Prince of Cranks and the “Apostle of discord,” I.Donnelly as discussed by the authors was a populist politician, bestselling novelist, and armchair historian who often seemed to embody the conspiratorial imagination of late nineteenth-century Populist culture.
Abstract: I donnelly, the populist politician, bestselling novelist, and armchair historian, was never short on sensational revelations. Nicknamed “The Prince of Cranks” and the “Apostle of Discontent,” he often seems to embody the conspiratorial imagination of late nineteenth-century Populist culture. Donnelly’s novels, speeches, and essays abound with a startling array of offbeat theories and speculations. His works include a pseudo-scientific history of the lost continent of Atlantis, two massive volumes claiming that Shakespeare’s plays contained a secret code, three conspiracy-themed novels, and extensive writings claiming that international bankers had used the Civil War as a pretext for enslaving the American people. Donnelly’s conspiracy theories and sensational revelations were rooted in the essential belief that hidden human forces are at work all around us, shaping seemingly disparate events, and that these forces are discoverable through careful attention to our surroundings.1

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Carreras as mentioned in this paper argued that composers knew what they were doing, and that the experiments that had been made had taken place prior to the finished works, just as sketches are made before paintings and rehearsals precede performances.
Abstract: Formerly, whenever anyone said that the music I presented was experimental, I objected. It seemed to me that composers knew what they were doing, and that the experiments that had been made had taken place prior to the finished works, just as sketches are made before paintings and rehearsals precede performances . . . . Now, on the other hand, times have changed; music has changed; and I no longer object to the word “experimental.” John Cage, Silence

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Melville's 1855 story "the tartarus of maids" both enacts and ironizes the phenomenon this essay aims to explicate: the pervasive sexualization of antebellum working-class women in cultural representation.
Abstract: H melville’s 1855 story “the tartarus of Maids” both enacts and ironizes the phenomenon this essay aims to explicate: the pervasive sexualization of antebellum working-class women in cultural representation. The story recounts the January visit of the male narrator, a “seedsman” who seeks supplies for his growing business, to a paper mill in the remote, treacherous, “shaggy-wooded” mountains of New England (324). The paper mill’s Dantean setting helps introduce the story as industrial allegory and sets the stage for the encounter that follows (324–25). Melville’s narrator “take[s] in” the “scene” in one “sweeping glance,” and—as in many accounts of male visitors to the Lowell mills—the scene is infused with eroticism; that the narrator’s guide is called “Cupid” suggests Love’s reign in the factory, while the first machine the narrator sees produces “rose-hued note paper” impressed with a “wreath of roses”—seemingly the stuff of “love-letters” (327–29), perhaps the pink and white Valentines (often decorated with Cupid’s image) mass produced by the 1840s (Shank). However, contrary to the “romance of labor” penned by factory celebrants, the narrator’s re-presentation of factory work is characterized not by the idealized portrayal of “factory Queens” but by images of female servility and dehumanization. In “Tartarus,” the factory appropriates the women’s sexuality, draining the pale, “blank-looking” women of erotic and reproductive vitality; for Melville, the figured contrast between the

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Atlantic Monthly published three autobiographical essays by Dakota Sioux author Zitkala-Ša that recount her experiences with Indian boarding schools in the last decades of the nineteenth century as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: I early 1900, ‘the atlantic monthly’ published three autobiographical essays by Dakota Sioux author Zitkala-Ša that recount her experiences with Indian boarding schools in the last decades of the nineteenth century.1 The essays are characteristic of The Atlantic Monthly in both their literary quality and the contribution they provide to the cultural construction of the “American experience,” yet they distinguish themselves by challenging preferred narratives of that experience. The January 1900 issue, in which Zitkala-Ša’s premier essay appears, leads with the first installment of another autobiography, that of William James Stillman, an artist and writer whose standard approach to the American success story confirms readers’ generic expectations and sense of national identity. Two chapters of Mary Johnston’s popular novel To Have and to Hold also accompany “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” but unlike Zitkala-Ša, Johnston prefers a literary account of Anglo-Indian contact “In Which an Indian Forgives and Forgets,” the title of Chapter 31. Barbara Chiarello observes that Stillman’s, Johnston’s, and other Atlantic Monthly contributions by Anglo Americans upheld the publication’s reputation as “a respected journal that reflected and (re)produced American ideologies” (9). “By appearing in the Atlantic,” Chiarello suggests, “Zitkala-Ša’s essays [too] may have done just that” but with the distinct purpose “to transform” (9, 8). To Chiarello, “resistance literature” like that of Zitkala-Ša “functions

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Black Book as mentioned in this paper is a collection of essays written by Toni Morrison and published in 1974 with the goal of being a "scrapbook" of African American history, and it was the first book to reach the number one position on the New York Times best seller list.
Abstract: W ‘the black book’ was published in 1974 , with Toni Morrison as its in-house editor, it was an immediate commercial and critical success. With the hardcover priced at $15.00 and the paperback at $5.95, an eye-catching cover that echoed the design of a quilt, and an introduction by Bill Cosby, it was aggressively marketed to a mass audience. Cosby recorded five radio commercials: 160 press kits containing the book, the Cosby tapes and scripts, and quotes from an array of black artists and celebrities (including Muhammad Ali, B. B. King, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Davis, Alex Haley, Max Roach, and Alice Walker) were mailed to disk jockeys at blackoriented radio stations across the country. A “Black Book” record was cut, with lyrics based on the poem—written by but not attributed to Morrison—that graced the back cover. Morrison made numerous media appearances to promote the book. Parties were held in Chicago and New York; the star-studded gala at Charles Gallery, a restaurant on Harlem’s 125th Street, on 4 March 1974 was widely reported by local media, including television, radio, and newspapers. The effort paid off: on 15 April 1974, The Black Book was number nine on The New York Times trade paperback best seller list (Random Box 1146). Co-edited by collectors Middleton Harris, Morris Levitt, and Roger Furman, the self-described “scrapbook” of African American history, won critical acclaim. In a competitive season, The Black Book garnered a nomination for the 1975 National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category, alongside Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Pirsig’s counterculture classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Woodward and Carl

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: To see distinctly the machinery of any work of art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: To see distinctly the machinery—the wheels and pinions—of any work of art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist:—and, in fact, it too often happens that to reflect analytically upon Art, is to reflect after the fashion of mirrors in the temple of Smirna, which represent the fairest image as deformed. Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, 1849

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Coetzee has argued that the need to intimate the worst of himself in several of his novels may appear to be a kind of grudging penance for feelings of moral complicity endured and resented as the unjust accidents of historical circumstance.
Abstract: I company with samuel clemens and gunter Grass—writers I have discussed comparatively in an earlier essay (Robinson)—South African novelist and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee has wrestled in his writing with a sense of anguished moral entanglement in his country’s crimes against humanity. In their very different ways, all three writers answer potently competing impulses to confess and to conceal their accusing self-knowledge. Clemens is the least conscious in his literary negotiations with conscience. Repressed memories of slavery surface unsummoned in his writing, where they give rise to bad faith evasions or baffled retreats into silence. Grass, by contrast, has been shrewdly knowing in his fictional dissections of national guilt in post-Holocaust Germany, but failed until very recently to disclose the damaging truth of his own involvement in the moral debacle. In a very real sense, I believe, we owe the gift of his insights into national guilt to his own half-century of public denial. Coetzee’s writing is similarly torn on the topic of apartheid, but in ways so various and seemingly contradictory as to suggest a desire on his part to invite and at the same time to frustrate critical scrutiny. Over the course of a long career, his attention has been less focused on the actual horrors of modern South African history than on the moral challenges faced by white people entangled in them. The need to intimate the worst of himself in several of his novels may appear to be a kind of grudging penance for feelings of moral complicity endured—and resented—as the unjust accidents of historical circumstance. As Sam Durrant has argued in a rather different critical framework, Coetzee’s “novels seem to replay the agony of his implication in apartheid” even as they “are modes of protesting this affiliation” (19).

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925-26) as mentioned in this paper is a collection of African American folk music written by James Weldon Johnson and published in the early 1920s.
Abstract: I n t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n s t o h i s c o m p a n i o n anthologies The Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925–26), James Weldon Johnson succinctly outlines the two central justifications for his project. One is the active role of the spirituals in the development of a self-conscious black American art: “This reawakening of the Negro to the value and beauty of the Spirituals was the beginning of an entirely new phase of race consciousness. It marked a change in the attitude of the Negro himself toward his own art material; the turning of his gaze upon his own cultural resources” (1:49). The other is directed at white Americans, who, he says, have been “awakened” by the spirituals “to the truth that the Negro is an active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as well as a creature” (2:19). The two audiences share a common ignorance, until recently, of the black American cultural heritage—in Johnson’s figure of speech, they have been asleep to it, and the valuation of this heritage can begin as soon as their eyes and ears are opened. In other words, aesthetic education merely involves showing his readers what has been there all along; white Americans will then recognize the full humanity of black Americans by acknowledging them as fully capable of creating culture, while black Americans can start putting these “cultural resources” to use. Johnson’s hopes were common among anthologists of black folk music in the 1920s and ’30s, who, as mediators between folk singers and an urban readership, also confronted a number of pressing questions as to how, exactly, this “awakening” would occur. Was cultural recognition

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: There is a fair amount of sexual contact among the older males in Western rural areas as discussed by the authors, which was probably common among pioneers and outdoor men in general, and is found among ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in general.
Abstract: There is a fair amount of sexual contact among the older males in Western rural areas. It is a type of homosexuality which was probably common among pioneers and outdoor men in general. Today it is found among ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in general—among groups that are virile and physically active. These are men who have faced the rigors of nature in the wild. They live on realities and on minimum of theory. Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex, irrespective of the nature of the partner. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey et al.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors recast artist/poet Joe Brainard's undervalued I Remember text (1970-75) as an astute consolidation of Pop poetics, a polyvalent form with broad appeal: as endearing, anecdote-based assemblage; as shrewd art/literary hybrid; and as pointed commentary upon prevailing poetic paradigms.
Abstract: F late-modernist painters opposed (in critic Clement Greenberg’s terms) to “using art to conceal art,” perspective-based realism proved the apex of vulgarity (“Modernist” 68). Similarly, for prominent advocates of postwar poetic experiment, the adoption of a first-person “I” limits a poem’s scope to one of narcissistic confession and/or self-inflating insight. Yet this reductive preference for the abstract over the representational gets problematized with the advent of Pop—both in Pop painting, and in Pop poetics.1 For just as the serial repetition of Warhol’s readymade icons produces as dramatic a dispersal of single-point perspective as any “flattening” of the pictureplane ever could, so Pop lyricism provides as provocative a critique of Confessionalist norms as does any overtly “opaque” text (Greenberg, Collected 29).2 Of course, Pop lyricism’s fusion of prepackaged data and perspectival multiplicity remains less renowned than does Pop painting’s.3 But by reconsidering the narrative complexities of Warhol’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop output, I aim to recast artist/poet Joe Brainard’s undervalued I Remember text (1970–75) as an astute consolidation of Pop poetics—of a polyvalent form with (potentially) broad appeal: as endearing, anecdote-based assemblage; as shrewd art/literary hybrid; and as pointed commentary upon prevailing poetic paradigms. Crucial to Pop-art’s departure from static, single-point perspective—to its construction of a dynamic, multiplicitous perspectivism—is its reintroduction of narrative trope within the avowedly anti-narrative discourses of postwar painting and, later, poetry. Crucial to the estab-

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For the hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the first Leaves of Grass, although my curiosities had long since turned elsewhere, I revived this project and found that a succession of critics had noticed “The Raven” in “Out of the Cradle.” Each critic made more or less of the echoes as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Brit, an Irish setter, died of heatstroke, and the 1966 Barracuda’s engine blew along the way, but once I reached a research library, I scoured biographies and notebooks and satisfied myself that Poe was there. For the hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the first Leaves of Grass, although my curiosities had long since turned elsewhere, I revived this project and found that a succession of critics had noticed “The Raven” in “Out of the Cradle.” Each critic made more or less of the echoes.1 Milton Hindus found, as I did, that “the longer we consider the matter, the more parallels between the two celebrated poems emerge,” but he resisted seeing the parallels as intentional on Whitman’s part because Whitman told himself not to refer to other poets or poems (5). Ned Davison compared and contrasted the two poems and concluded that, whether consciously or not, Whitman “derived artistic stimulation” from Poe (6). Joseph M. De Falco argued that Whitman’s extensive revisions of the poem for the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass demonstrate Whitman’s struggle

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Big Clock as discussed by the authors describes a super-calculculator that is connected a number of adding machines into a single unit and solves equations unknown to and beyond the grasp of its inventor.
Abstract: N a r t h e b e g i n n i n g o f k e n n e t h f e a r i n g ’ s corporate thriller The Big Clock (1946), George Stroud, an employee of Janoth Enterprises, meets “a titan in the world of mathematics; he had connected a number of adding machines into a single unit, and this super-calculator was the biggest in the world. It could solve equations unknown to and beyond the grasp of its inventor” (5). This description of the mathematician and his “super-calculator” situates Fearing’s genre novel near the end of a lively decade of experimentation with calculating machines that culminated in the mainframe computer and the emergence of the computer age.1 The introduction of computing machines would not leave untouched mechanical metaphors such as the “big clock” of the novel’s title, and would inflect the image of organizations as bureaucratic machines. Over a decade earlier, in 1933, Wallace J. Eckert, with the aid of IBM, had developed a “calculation control switch” to link different IBM punched card accounting machines. The basic arithmetic function of each accounting machine, when combined into an automated sequence, allowed Eckert’s punched card “system” to swiftly perform complex calculations (Bashe et.al. 22–23). While working at the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau at Columbia Uni-

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Land of Little Rain (1903) has a secure place as a pioneering American environmental text, though what remains most challenging to contemporary readers is Austin's blurring of the romantic with the real, of the human with the nonhuman, and of the spiritual with the material as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: M austin’s ‘the land of little rain’ (1903) has a secure place as a pioneering American environmental text,1 though what remains most challenging to contemporary readers is Austin’s blurring of the romantic with the real, of the human with the nonhuman, of the spiritual with the material.2 As an environmental text with claims both to realistic objectivity and mystical insight, The Land of Little Rain is difficult not only to interpret, but also, as Austin’s personal friend and collaborator Ansel Adams demonstrated, to illustrate.3 Adams’ well-known photographic illustrations in a 1950 edition of the text capture only partial glimpses of Austin’s land: the aridity, the harsh or dramatic vistas and mountains, the curious rock formations, the noman’s land parameters of the region.4 What Adams’ photographs do not (or perhaps cannot) capture are Austin’s equally romantic efforts to reveal a high desert region filled with sensuous, intricate, nurturing (but sometimes deadly) communal relationships between human and non-human life. In fact, one of the most striking images in the text is Austin’s consuming and repeatedly-stated passion for the beauty of “desertness,” a concept she associates both with the physical land and with its spiritual nurturance (Land 5). Like other past and present environmental writers, Austin laments the deleterious aspects of capitalist consumer culture to the environment; however, in The Land of Little Rain, she promotes a different kind of consumerism, one which deliberately mixes the “color of romance” (17) with an often harsh realism to stimulate in her readers a metaphoric appetite for the spiritual and sensory delights of the region. Unlike the brutish capitalist consumerism she credits to

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In 2009, American poet fanny howe won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Prize for her 18 volumes of innovative, exploratory poetry as mentioned in this paper, which may indicate that Howe, a poet who has long been at the edges of any number of literary mainstreams, has finally stepped into the current and gained the audience that her poetry has always simultaneously repelled and required.
Abstract: I 2009, american poet fanny howe won one of literary culture’s largest purses for her some 18 volumes of innovative, exploratory poetry. The $100,000 Ruth Lilly Prize followed two other major awards (the Lenore Marshall and the Griffin) and may indicate that Howe, a poet who’s long been at the edges of any number of literary mainstreams, has finally stepped into the current and gained the audience that her poetry has always simultaneously repelled and required. Howe has published widely in other genres too, writing autobiographical essays, prose meditations, short stories, and young-adult novels, as well a significant but less-often recognized body of literary fiction: some eleven novels. Of late, the novels have joined Howe’s poetry as objects of some renewed interest. In 2006, five were revised, collected, and reissued under the title Radical Love. Oddly enough, though, the poetry prizes seem to have done the sales of her fiction little good. They were always what Howe called “failures on the marketplace”

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In National Treasure as mentioned in this paper, a Da-Vinci-code-meets-Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark affair features a high-stakes pursuit of treasure.
Abstract: T post-election, 2004 thanksgiving weekend offering from Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer, National Treasure, presents a complicated yet familiar storyline cast in decidedly uncomplicated, nationalistic terms. This Da-Vinci-Code-meets-Raiders-of-theLost-Ark affair features a high-stakes pursuit of treasure. In this patriotic version of the quest romance, that treasure is a millennia-old accumulation of monetary and cultural wealth, protected from time immemorial by the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and the revolutionary founding fathers.1 Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicholas Cage) is an historian whose family has sought the treasure for generations. His quest pits him against the diabolical—and notably British—Ian Howe (Sean Beane) as the two race through several eastern U.S. cities, following a seemingly endless set of clues based on historical events and found in some of the United States’ most treasured historical landmarks. The key to locating the treasure is, appropriately, an invisible map inscribed, improbably, on the back of the Declaration of Independence. In a pivotal scene near the end of the film, Ben and his father Patrick (Jon Voight) discover empty what Ben believes should be the treasure’s depository, a room at the bottom of a cavernous hole located beneath

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For instance, this article pointed out that the author of the novel Jane Eyre does not see the lens through which she sees her own reality, and her past is part of that reality.
Abstract: I for any first-person narrative, that the narrator is a real person. Take Jane Eyre as an example, advertised on the title page as “an autobiography.” Jane has lived an adventurous life and now strives to record it. She tells the story of her past in order to project a certain self-image, and she may thus reveal at least as much about her present self as she does about her past self. In the telling her childhood is revised and altered—perhaps even distorted to the point that some of the recollections would not be corroborated by others. We can recognize the artifice in her retrospective telling, since she records childhood conversations with the presumption of word-forword memory. But there are also changes that she would be less aware of. Her memories of childhood, like anyone’s memories, have drifted imperceptibly in accordance with interests, values, and preoccupations developed later in her life. We can say, more generally, that Jane does not see the lens through which she sees her own reality, and her past is part of that reality. Readers might decide that they can identify her biases in ways that she cannot, and, in an effort to see the past as it really was, take what Jane reveals about her values as a mature narrator and then subtract the elements that seem to be later revisions. Of course,

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors consider the aphorism as it appears in the writing of Emerson, and by extension Thoreau, Frost, Stevens, and Stein, to be symptomatic of these authors' desire to be both popular (that is, accessible to his or her culture) and critical of the commonplaces that define that culture.
Abstract: T quote thoreau seems irresistible, as attested by the numerous occasional books that, extracting from his writing its pithy and toothsome phrases, anthologize him piecemeal, often by thematic rubric.1 Equally irresistible is the urge to dismiss such anthologies, and the aphorisms they reproduce, as banal—misleading, in the way that they make representative moments in Thoreau’s notoriously contradictory writing that may not in fact be representative, thus suggesting to the reader an immediate accessibility to the determinate meaning of the texts from which such anthologies draw their material. Representative of this stance is Richard Poirier who considers the aphorism as it appears in the writing of Emerson, and by extension Thoreau, Frost, Stevens, and Stein, to be symptomatic of these authors’ desire to be both popular (that is, accessible to his or her culture) and critical of the commonplaces that define that culture. “Thus it is,” he concludes, “that the ‘Emerson’ who is said to have had such enormous influence on American life and American thinking is the aphoristic Emerson, which is not Emerson at all as I am able to understand him” (“Why Do Pragmatists” 355). This characterization of the aphorism as antagonistic to “serious” reading is echoed, although not explicitly theorized, in many accounts of Thoreau’s similarly aphoristic prose.2 Indeed, Thoreau seems particularly susceptible to such a critique, in that the gravitational pull of his aphorisms—illocal and extrapersonal—seems incompatible with what is conventionally championed about his writing: its invigorating attentiveness to a particular locale, both temporally and spatially bounded by the formal demands of his preferred mode of composition, the “excursion.” At stake here, then, in these competing stances is a methodological question of how, very broadly, Thoreau’s essays are to be read and/or

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Parker as discussed by the authors argues that many of the novels' most significant events (Quentin Compson's suicide, for example, or Temple Drake's rape) pass undescribed, and that the kernel of the story is precisely what vanishes into the words that describe it.
Abstract: W faulkner’s novels are as famous for what they conceal as for what they reveal. Criticism brims with discussions of their withholding—of those critical narrative moments that, bewilderingly, remain unseen by, and inaccessible to, the reader. Many of the novels’ most significant events (Quentin Compson’s suicide, for example, or Temple Drake’s rape) pass undescribed; John Matthews claims that these “central moments . . . function more as absences in the story that surrounds them,” and that “the kernel of the story is precisely what vanishes into the words that describe it” (21). Robert Dale Parker agrees that while many of Faulkner’s novels are “told and twisted around a single event . . . that event, even as it determines nearly all we read, is defiantly withheld” (4). Thus Faulknerian interpretation demands that the reader decipher not only speeches and actions but also silences and absences—the novels’ narrative holes. Even then, Parker concludes, “the main thing we know reading Faulkner is that we don’t know the main thing”—especially, perhaps, when we can’t see the main thing (3). But there is on one hand the unseen, and then, on the other, there is the unscene. Readers of Shakespeare (whose work, Faulkner once commented, provides “a casebook on mankind” [Conversations 65]) also wrestle with questions of the unspoken and the unknown.1 In her seminal essay “‘The Rest is Silence’: Ineffability and the ‘Unscene’ in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Marjorie Garber observes an “inexpressibility topos” in Shakespearian drama, of which “perhaps the most remarkable” features are what she calls “unscenes”: “deflected or unseen scenes that take place offstage and are reported by an observer, usually an anonymous or disinterested ‘Gentleman’” (43).2 I wish to apply the

Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: The Impossible: Gertrude Stein this article, a review of Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, is the most accessible of all Stein's works, and is also the most successful of her attempts to do what can't be done.
Abstract: In 1957, soon after the release of his first volume of poems, John Ashbery was asked by Poetry magazine to review Gertrude Stein’s posthumously published Stanzas in Meditation. The title of Ashbery’s review, “The Impossible: Gertrude Stein,” was not intended to dissuade the reader from approaching what is arguably the least accessible of Stein’s works. Rather, “The Impossible” identifies the ambitious compass of Stein’s poem, which Ashbery would praise as “the most successful of her attempts to do what can’t be done, to create a counterfeit of reality more real than reality” (Selected Prose 15). The difficult task Ashbery imagines Stein setting herself in Stanzas, however, is not so impossible that the young poet himself was not able to accomplish it within the scope of his own review. Ashbery writes, “There is certainly plenty of monotony in the 150-page title poem… but it is the fertile kind, which generates excitement as water monotonously flowing over a dam generates electrical power” (11). This is a beautiful metaphor, slyly convincing and totally unreal—for dammed water passes through turbines housed within the dam or adjacent to it, not over the dam, as Ashbery suggests. Yet with this impossible hybrid of landscape and artifact, this dream dam, Ashbery not only “creates a counterfeit of reality more real than reality,” he also expresses in offhand form what would become a career preoccupation: to misrepresent the line between the natural and the artificial, and to recuperate what is normally deemed waste (here, monotonous writing) as a source of poetic strength.