Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2013"

Dis-abled Citizenship: Narrating the Extraordinary Body in Racial Uplift

Abstract: I her autobiographical sketch , Shadow and Sunshine (1906), Eliza Suggs tells a story of being approached by strangers while riding on a train in the makeshift baby carriage that gave her mobility. Suggs, who due to an “extreme case of [childhood] rickets” never grew to more than thirty-three inches tall, had such fragile bones she could not walk, and, as a result, her memoir recounts what is a primal scene in disability narratives: of being stared at and being compelled to explain what happened and why she is different (56). In this scene, however, Suggs is not simply a disabled artist taking control of the stare and reversing the look on her normal bodied interlocutors. She is also an African American woman at the turn of the twentieth century riding on a train car from Orleans, Nebraska, where her family had relocated during the westward migration of African Americans, and at a time shortly after the famous Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Fergusson (1896) upheld the constitutionality of Louisiana’s separate but equal train cars laws. Her testimony, thus, brings together a politics of race and a politics of disability to re-imagine questions of freedom, access, mobility, rights and citizenship. It is also a testimony that has remained largely invisible in narratives of African American literary history and disability studies.1 While many of the strangers question whether Suggs is “smart,” “can talk,” or has “got feet,” or “can use her hands,” one patronizing woman’s remarks particularly become the focus of Suggs’ ironic mockery:

Alterity and the Radical Other in Post-9/11 Fiction: DeLillo's Falling Man and Walter's The Zero

Abstract: They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angling in ever-tightening circles toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch and then close enough to see that it wasn’t a flock of birds at all—it was paper. Burning scraps of paper. All the little birds were paper. . . . Behind the burning flock came a great wail and a moan as seething black unfurled, the world inside out, birds beating against a roiling sky and in that moment everything that wasn’t smoke was paper. Jess Walter, The Zero, 2006

The Office of The Dead Letter

Abstract: T inaugural issue of Beadle’s Monthly, a Magazine of To-day (January 1866) opened with “Ball’s Bluff,” a poem by Augustine J. H. Duganne about the failed Union attempt to cross the Potomac at Harrison’s Island in October 1861.1 Best described as a rout, the battle of Ball’s Bluff was not one the magazine’s predominantly Northern readers were likely to recall with pleasure; seventeen hundred Union soldiers assaulted the river’s steep banks—fewer than half returned. Mere weeks after the battle, T. Hal Eliott captured Northern horror at its devastation in the poem “Ball’s Bluff—October 21, 1861,” in which an enraged speaker orders mothers, fathers, and lovers to ask, “Who answers for these lives,— / Who let them die?” (Friedlander 1588). These questions linger for Eliott, but they are answered decisively five years later in Duganne’s poem, which has no problem assigning blame for Ball’s Bluff; the soldiers were not allowed to die but were murdered by the “false” and “hostile” South (5). “Heroic” Union soldiers were, he writes, “mowed down like cattle” by “wild” Confederate “demons,” “reckless with rebel spleen” (5). If the battle of Ball’s Buff revealed the “unchivalric character of the Civil War” to Eliott’s readers in 1861 (Friedlander 1588), five years later “Ball’s Bluff ” would transform the battle’s “grand despair” into the storied stuff of legend, Union soldiers into martyrs to “Freedom’s Will” and “Freedom’s Cause” (5).2 This brief comparison provides a crucial context for reading the next item in Beadle’s Monthly: the first installment of Metta Victor’s The Dead Letter, An American Romance.3 Identified by Catherine Nickerson as the first full-length detective narrative by a woman in the United States, The Dead Letter follows “Ball’s Bluff ” literally and thematically, for it too considers the horror of murder in the context of the Civil War. Like Duganne, Victor is eager to identify the guilty, but her ambitions

The Evangelical Press, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Human Medium

Abstract: Between 1835 and the publication of the final installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era in April 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published some three dozen pieces in the New-York Evangelist (1830–1902), an influential evangelical weekly newspaper known for its abolitionist views.1 This body of articles—a generic smorgasbord that includes temperance tales, religious parables and allegories, sentimental fiction, spiritual biography, literary criticism, Biblical fiction, poetry, and antislavery sketches—represents a substantial portion of Stowe’s publications in periodicals and gift-books during this period, and by far the largest number of her articles published in any single publication.2 Stowe’s work for Godey’s Lady’s Book and the National Era are well known to literary historians (Hedrick 133, 135–37; Smith), but her work for the Evangelist has received no sustained critical attention.3 Recent scholarship by Candy Gunther Brown, Gregory S. Jackson, and David Paul Nord (among others) has explored the considerable influence of religious print culture, and Protestant evangelical print culture in particular, on nineteenth-century American culture and literature. This scholarship provides an opportunity to examine Stowe’s work for the Evangelist more closely. What does it mean that the most popular novelist of the nineteenth century received her literary apprenticeship in one of the period’s most influential evangelical weeklies? And how does it put pressure on literary histories that narrate the development of the literary or the aesthetic precisely in terms of the decline or secularization of the religious?4 In the present essay my aim is not to claim Stowe as an evangelical—a Christian who affirms the four doctrinal positions outlined in

The Oxymoron of American Pastoralism

Abstract: P has been variously defined in American literary studies. In European literature the pastoral persisted as a distinct genre and self-conscious literary tradition from Theocritus and Virgil through the eighteenth century. Major eighteenthand nineteenth-century American authors alluded to this tradition, but they could not really lay claim to it, for as this essay will argue, the European pastoral was inapplicable to the American setting, both socially and ecologically: socially because although early AngloAmerica was by no means a classless society, the distinction between landowners and shepherds was scarcely relevant in the young United States; and ecologically because the pastoral way of life, defined as a subsistence based upon herds of livestock, was not indigenous to America. Leo Marx’s landmark The Machine in the Garden employed the concept of pastoral to explain the primitivist and agrarian strain in American thought in the face of modern industrial technologies. In his introduction Marx wrote of how “the shepherd . . . seeks a resolution of the conflict between the opposed worlds of nature and art” (22). But the shepherd, who “is often the poet in disguise,” does not, at least in America, herd sheep. In Marx’s formulation American pastoralism is an ideology that has mediated conflicting desires for technological progress and bucolic retreat, “a desire, in the face of the growing power and complexity of organized society, to disengage from the dominant culture and to seek out the basis for a simpler, more satisfying mode of life in a realm ‘closer,’ as we say, to nature” (“Pastoralism” 54). Those lines from a 1986 article updating his renowned 1964 book, as well as a new afterword to a 2000 reprint of it, emphasized the political valence

Sending Word: Sarah Winnemucca and the Violence of Writing

Abstract: S winnemucca’s 1883 autobiography Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims recounts the tragic, frustrated history of the Paiutes’ contact with white people both on reservations and through the documents that traversed the continent.1 In the winter of 1878–79, the federal government ordered the Paiutes to be moved from the Malheur Reservation in southeastern Oregon to the Yakima Reservation in the state of Washington; Yakima was far from the regions of Nevada, Oregon, and California that had been their home, and they were ordered to make the journey in the dead of winter and with inadequate supplies. Seeking the return of the Paiutes to Malheur, and decrying many years of mistreatment by the government and reservation agents, Winnemucca records her repeatedly thwarted efforts to facilitate written communications between the Paiute and the federal government. Throughout the text, she emphasizes the great distance between the West and the nation’s capital and bemoans the even greater gap between reality and the documents that travelled from agents to Washington, D.C., and back again. The daughter of a chief, Winnemucca had been educated in white schools, and her English fluency and literacy led her to play a prominent mediating role in these written exchanges and to travel in 1883 to Boston, where she lectured extensively and worked on her book in association with Mary Mann, who became her editor, and Mann’s sister Elizabeth Peabody, the prominent Transcendentalist. Scholars have focused, understandably, on Winnemucca’s faith in the capacity of language to mediate between cultures and to effect change. Cheryl Walker has argued, for example, that “in Sarah’s mind a clear representation of suffering must

Language and Democracy: Meaning Making as Existing in the Work of Gertrude Stein

Abstract: I ‘portraits and repetition, ’ an essay in Lectures in America, written for her 1934 American tour, Stein speaks about how she came to understand the link between her writing and identity. The first time she had a sense of James’s idea that repetition is impossible (in any exacting manner) was as an adolescent when she moved from California to live with “a whole group of very lively little aunts” in Baltimore. These aunts evidently had many stories to tell, and since there were “ten and eleven” of them, the stories were repeated frequently.1 However, in the retelling of those stories, Stein heard difference, making her realize that as human beings, we always, even slightly, alter what we see or hear. She recognized that one cannot repeat in any strict sense, and that to live entails an engagement in a process of ongoing repetition with a difference. At seventeen she had not yet made the connection between this idea and her concept of writing;2 however, as she narrates in “Portraits and Repetition,” the awareness played a crucial role in her developing conviction that writing alive and present to reality, not a copy or representation, functions through a continual repetition with a difference or what she calls “insistence” (2:290). This leads her, with the help of James, her teacher at Radcliffe (1893–1897), to comprehend an inextricable

The Ghosts of Radicalisms Past: Allen Ginsberg's Old Left Nightmares

Abstract: The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names . . . . Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

"The stricken community": Recidivism and Restoration in American 9/11 Fiction

Abstract: Q predictably, the narrative response to 9/11 has had the effect of galvanizing two established paradigms in readings of contemporary fiction, namely trauma studies and simulacrum theory. And yet, if we are to credit the psychosocial doctrine emerging from this new critical orthodoxy, American pre–9/11 fiction was already busy spawning crafty shams in order to defuse trauma. This trauma was either genuinely American (Beloved, Blood Meridian, Leviathan, American Pastoral) or somewhat imported (Gravity’s Rainbow, How German It Is, Running Dog, The Tunnel). In view of this continuity, one is tempted to interrogate the widespread assumption that 9/11 ushered in not just a new American era but also a new body of literature (Morley 295; Keniston & Quinn 3; Houen 422). It seems to us doubtful that such a resilient artifact as the American novel in English should yield to such a naïve and mechanically reactive psycho-sociologic. Admittedly, most interpretations of 9/11 fiction subscribe to the following argument: the WTC attacks made visible the pervasiveness of a trans-national terror accountable only within the historical logics of globalization (Baudrillard 158; Žižek, Welcome 38; Butler, Precari-

Lattice-Glyphs: The Intensive "Small Poetry" of Susan Howe's Recent Work

Abstract: S howe’s poetry has always been noteworthy for the strikingly spare way that she deploys lines, words, and sometimes cropped pieces of words in page-space. Her work, like that of Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen—and, more recently, poets like Rae Armantrout and Myung Mi Kim—might be considered exemplary of an under-acknowledged yet powerful mode of American writing: “small poetry.” The term, posited over and against words like “short” and “lyric” (though not opposing or excluding those terms), comprises both forms and practices. It points to an American strain of refusal and active hesitation in writing—Howe characterizes it as Antinomian “demurral” (Birth-mark 1)—that articulates itself chiefly through a semiotics of page, book, and collaged language, rather than through handed-down lyric prescriptions.1 Poets of this category—channeling

The Wealthiest Man in the Empire: Ben-Hur as Model of Evangelical Political Engagement

Abstract: T introduction to the 2003 signet edition of Lew Wallace’s 1880 epic novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, is written by none other than Tim LaHaye, a leader of the conservative evangelical movement and co-author of the best-selling Left Behind series. LaHaye begins this rapturous essay by declaring, “You are about to read one of the finest novels ever written,” and goes on to describe it as both a spiritual and literary inspiration: “I am going to make a confession. This is the book that made me realize that fiction could be used to send a message that is even more important than the story” (v, x). In a 2008 essay on the Ben-Hur tradition, Howard Miller suggests that LaHaye’s introduction is part of a renewed effort to market this novel to a specifically evangelical audience. In 2000, Focus on the Family, then under the leadership of James Dobson, released a radio dramatization. In 2003, Ben-Hur was reproduced as an animated feature, starring the vocal talents of Charlton Heston. Of this evangelical rediscovery of Ben-Hur, Miller says, “In Ben-Hur’s Christ narrative they [evangelicals] found affirmation and identity in a culture from which they felt increasingly alienated” (173). The fervent efforts of evangelical leaders to encourage lay readers to pick up this novel indicate that they see in this Union general’s work a relevant expression of the values promoted by their movement. The continuing relevance of Ben-Hur (the novel that surpassed Uncle Tom’s Cabin to become the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century) to American popular culture and religion speaks to a need

Joseph McElroy's Plus: A Novel of Wonder

Abstract: J mcelroy’s 1976 novel, ‘plus,’ experiments with the idea of unifying mind, matter and communication in a narrative act. The story unfolds as the emergence of mind and consciousness from the disembodied brain matter of an engineer. From a semi-conductor state the mind evolves, rebels, and is dispersed spectacularly as pulviscular matter. Told in free indirect speech suggestive of the output of a notational apparatus recording each movement in the mind’s way to thought and communication, the novel dramatizes the relation between mind and body, and addresses, once again, one of the crucial nodes of modernist speculation: the relations among subjectivity, embodiment, and communication. Both thematically and philosophically Plus foregrounds the relation of techno-science and literature in contemporary media ecologies by addressing the problem of identity in relation to the cognitive and epistemological status of a non-human growing organism which retains (or grows) a form of proto “will” or sense of “self,” and by posing the problem of the philosophical status of literature vis-à-vis its disciplinary others in conditions of multiple competing discourses and media. In so doing, Plus interrogates from a post-humanist vantage the notion of the cognizing subject by forcing its semantic constructions under the pressure of scientific concepts. In the process, seemingly familiar notions and objects—memory, identity, knowing, being, loving, feeling, perceiving—are radically altered by their “capacity to affect or [be] affected” by science, to follow Brian Massumi’s neo-Spinozian theory of affect. And this affection, this capacity to “enter into relations of movement and rest” (15), generates a language in which the unfamil-

James Weldon Johnson and the Genteel Tradition

Abstract: J weldon johnson’s f irst book of poetry, Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), might be the least recognized of his contributions to African American literature. Though well received by contemporary magazines from the Literary Digest to The Crisis, it was dwarfed by the popularity of Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) and by the achievement of his second collection, God’s Trombones (1927). Later critics have tended either to neglect Fifty Years or to denounce it as bland and conventional (Collier 352; Fleming, James Weldon Johnson 42–43; Kinnamon 174–76). Indeed, its genteel forms and values seem outdated on the eve of the Harlem Renaissance, a period that saw the publication of Claude McKay’s radical protest poems and the rise of the NAACP, of which Johnson already was an active member. Its reception by the general public, however, was much more favorable than such retrospective categorization suggests. At the time, Johnson was widely known as the author of the “Negro National Anthem” (his early poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing”), and the title poem of Fifty Years, which remains one of Johnson’s most popular compositions, had been published to great applause in the New York Times (Levy 145–46; Kinnamon 174). This contradictory reception points to the many facets of Johnson’s early work, which includes clichéd comedy songs about black life as well as uncompromising editorials on the race question, imitative poems as well as attacks on imitative poetry.1 In the words of his biographer Eugene Levy, Johnson “pleased many and antagonized few”; he was virtually the only prominent African American to maintain good relations with both Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois throughout their struggle for black leadership (Levy

The Church of Fact: Genre Hybridity in Huckleberry Finn and Silas Lapham

Abstract: T here has yet to be a study of the graphic connections between Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Rise of Silas Lapham. This gap is surprising for a number of reasons. Not only were these American “realist” masterpieces completed during the same one-year period and serialized simultaneously in The Century Magazine, but they were written at a time when their mutually admiring writers stayed in frequent, enthusiastic contact—writing letters; swapping manuscripts; trading visits between Clemens’ Hartford and Howells’ Boston homes; even (especially) collaborating on a comedy, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, whose premise was so outlandish and whose props were so dangerous that the play to this day is virtually unproduceable. More to the point, Howells pored over Huckleberry Finn’s page proofs while he was midway through Silas Lapham, citing “the pleasure of admiring a piece of work I like under a microscope” (Smith 2. 484). But this critical gap also makes sense. The novels are fundamentally different. Apart from their divergent regionalisms (Southwest and Northeast), they appear to be generically at odds: one a loosely threaded first-person picaresque that follows the “adventures” of a hapless orphan from one improbable scrape to the next, the other a carefully structured, omniscient novel of manners that charts the “rise” (and inevitable fall) of an arriviste businessman and his socially aspiring family. One’s structure is serpentine, the other pyramidal. One’s language is coarse, the other decorous. Huckleberry Finn mines its narrator’s salty voice and tough conscience for shocking ironies and biting social

World Trade Centers and World-Wide-Webs: From Underworld to Over-Soul in Don DeLillo

Abstract: W we might in retrospect consider the nondialectical twinning in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, the double lls, the linguistic Twin Towers that also form the backbone of DeLillo’s name, return as uncanny doubles on the front and back covers of Underworld. That novel takes place at what has been construed as a last moment of an old world, before the September 11 attacks, when the internet still offered hope of a non-commercialized transcendence of national, racial and gender divisions. For DeLillo, the world-wide-web, a new circular Over-Soul and symbol of spiritual globalization, might mend the divisions, the twinning, of Mao II, Coke Two, the Twin Towers, East and West, the Cold War—the binaries of the world above ground. In Mao II DeLillo used the Roman (Western, non-Arabic) numeral II to construct the purported difference between East and West. DeLillo uses the same parallel lines to frame the towers and frontispiece of his next novel. But Underworld rewrites the xenophobic politics of Mao II, situating spiritual rebirth in the East, and in a collective identity— most emblematized by the world-wide-web—that DeLillo had previously treated with ambivalence. Perhaps what is most surprising is that,

Parting at the Windmills: Malamud's The Fixer as Historical Metafiction

Abstract: W it comes to tracking metafictional experiment in post–World War II American literature, Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer is probably not the first text that comes to mind. To be certain, at the time of its publication the book received broad popular and critical acclaim as a remarkable historical novel,1 and it has remained for readers and critics an uncanny post-Holocaust rendition of a pre-Holocaust historical instance of irrational anti-Semitic persecution. The story is based on the famous 1911 Mendel Beiliss case, in which a Ukrainian Jew was incarcerated for over two years on a fabricated charge of blood libel, the false but recurrent anti-Semitic claim that Jews make human sacrifices as part of their religious practice. In Malamud’s rendition, protagonist Yakov Bok, a shtetl Jew recently arrived in Kiev who manages to live and work illegally outside the Jewish quarter, finds himself suddenly and wrongly accused of stabbing a young boy and using his blood in a religious ritual. The rest of the novel tracks the mounting hardships of Bok’s subsequent imprisonment—because Bok will not sign a confession, the Russians will not indict him and Bok cannot obtain a trial, transforming his prison confinement into a potentially interminable affair made even worse by attempts by the authorities to extract an admission from him through unconventional means—and the intellectual free-fall he suffers as a result. Published in the same year as Thomas Pynchon’s landmark metafictional wild-goose chase, The Crying of Lot 49, and two years before John Barth’s Lost in

Motion Studies: Vitalism in Gertrude Stein's Work

Abstract: O the course of the spring and summer of 1917, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas drove their first, specially ordered Ford motor car from Paris to Perpignan. As delegates of the American Fund for French Wounded, they traveled to deliver medical supplies, often gave rides to the soldiers themselves, and eventually set up supply stations in Nîmes and then Alsace where they stayed until the end of the war. Stein would later call this their “war work” (Autobiography 189), a work which had so much to do with this car that it would change the way Stein conceived of her other work, her “ultimate business as an artist” (Lectures 195). For Stein, the Ford does a work analogous to what she does, which is the work of the motor inside— both a mechanical movement and a creative, generating movement. This is composition, after all, and the car goes in the way composition does by moving mechanically like the hand that moves, but also moving generatively like the mental process of writing. The car does the kind of work that Stein does, and it does a work for her by becoming the figurative and literal carrier for her work. This is particularly true when the car is not moving, but going; that is, when its movement both works as composition and works for Stein’s composition so that she can write and not drive, but still be “going.” She even composed “Composition as Explanation” while sitting on a Ford car—not writing and

Shame and the Politics of Punk Fiction

Abstract: I an episode from the final season of a certain Reagan-era crime drama, Dr. R. Quincy, medical examiner, investigates the murder of a male teen killed inside a Los Angeles nightclub during a performance by punk band Mayhem.1 The victim’s punkette sweetheart, while not the actual assailant, is charged with the homicide primarily due to the testimony of her progressively mortified mother, who has told investigators feverishly that she had of late been coming home to find her daughter “burning cigarette holes in her arms, shredding her clothes to bits, taking pills, and locking herself in her room listening to that violence-oriented punk rock music that does nothing but reinforce all those bad feelings.” Awash in such histrionics, the program—today a cult favorite among punks, spawning the band Quincy Punx and the song “Quincy Punk Episode” by the postpunk group Spoon—insists that the parent of such an embarrassing child heed the signifiers punk subculture flaunts and act with quick aplomb to expunge its degrading influence. Many years following the demise of Quincy, M.E., Aaron Cometbus and his self-deprecating cohorts Sluggo and Little Suicide attempt to escape their inner–San Francisco punk squat by taking up residence at a low-rent bungalow in Berkeley they affectionately christen “Double

Silencing the Dead: Washington Irving's Use of the Supernatural in the Context of Slavery and Genocide

Abstract: I washington irving’s first book-length publication, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), the narrator attempts to describe “a typical domestic situation” in post-revolutionary United States. A scene of “a happy regulated family” of Dutch origin is introduced: the father smoking a pipe, the mother knitting stockings, and

Why Read E. D. E. N. Southworth

Abstract: P the century’s most popular and bestpaid author, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth (1819–1899) wrote serials, turned into roughly fifty+ novels. Today Southworth’s history is best known—even exclusively known—for one novel, The Hidden Hand (1888), which seems to promote only one way of subverting the social order—cross-dressing—rather than Southworth’s more characteristic way, insanity or mania, as a way to challenge American norms. She was often considered a Southern author (her novels often occur in Virginia and Maryland) and devoted to “Christian human sympathy,” a sympathy that converts cultural problems into individual moral afflictions, and then reconverts them, by each novel’s close.1 This Christian sympathy was also related to how her moral values take precedence over legal rights, such as in Brandon Coyle’s Wife (1893), where the heroine believes she must contest her husband’s rash decisions (361). These struggles help her characters to realize how American ideals are undermined by “moral insanities,” manias resulting from a variety of causes, including unstable marriages, controlling fathers and uncles, disappeared or isolated characters, social ambition, asylum imprisonment, secret marriages, altered identities (women dyed to look as quadroons), possible infanticide, and paroxysms (especially after childbirth). My purpose in this essay is twofold: to introduce readers to the range of her novels by exploring her use of moral insanities and to address how Southworth envisions national issues about commitment and duty. Southworth began publishing her novels with Retribution in 1849, and she ended with the same belief in insanity as a deep, internal revolt against what she calls—in relation to Ishmael (1876)—her “National work” (letter to Bonner, December 1875). Part of this project

Pragmatism after Humanism: Peirce, Rorty, and Realism

Abstract: E at the beginning, as far back as peirce and James, two distinct and opposed traditions have seemed to operate within pragmatism, as if from the start it was denied an identity even with itself. As H. O. Mounce claims, “The development of Pragmatism from Peirce to Rorty exhibits a movement between two sets of ideas which are directly opposed to each other. The former may be taken as a paradigm of Realism; the latter of Anti-Realism. The two have nothing in common except that they are called by the same name” (229). Richard Rorty’s pointed exclusion of Charles S. Peirce from the contemporary revival of pragmatism draws the most visible boundary between these two movements, a rejection motivated in part by the fact that “Peirce . . . continued to believe in the eventual possibility of reaching truth” (Diggins 12). Peirce’s concept of “reality” exceeds Rorty’s concept of “belief ” and therefore seems to betray a metaphysical realism that marks the other side of an important distinction: that which must be rejected, outcast, or excluded in the name of a proper pragmatism. However, a closer look reveals that Peirce’s experimental philosophy is a curious and hybrid monstrosity roaming freely over the fences that Rorty patrols with such admirable vigilance. As John Patrick Diggins notes, Peirce’s thinking can seem hopelessly confused (and con-

O Sing the Marbles: Typos, Losing, and the Portable Cultural Histories of James Merrill

Abstract: A culture also collapses if its words are interchangeable. We all know militaristic euphemisms for destruction. “Taking out” someone is not quite the same thing as “take-out” Chinese food—but if we can accept a language that says “taking out” does not mean death or annihilation, if we accept that as a conventional public metaphor, something happens to morality and to the ethic contained in the word as well. Derek Walcott, “Interview with Bill Moyers”

How the Other Is Not Allowed to Be: Elision and Condensation in Avatar

Abstract: W ‘avatar’ achieves a postcolonial statement in the most obvious imaginable brushstrokes, there persists in the film a latent narrative of the superiority and dominance of the EuroAmerican male; in Avatar the primitive exists within a master narrative of European psychology and mythology.1 Consequently, Avatar’s narrative of anti-imperial zeal is the manifest content which represses a latent narrative of mastery and possession of the (m)other. Specifically, the latent content of Avatar is the desire for the possession of an archaic feminine-primitive.2 As such, Avatar illustrates the totalizing schema of Freudian psychoanalysis. By using psychoanalysis to examine this narrative of mastery, we can invert that exegesis onto Freud to illuminate how he participates in the self-same schema.3 Because the film is the product of a cultural climate in which such a colonizing desire is socially and morally reprehensible, Avatar represses this latent narrative with a manifest content which fulfills an opposing and socially acceptable wish; indeed, it is the postcolonial critique of the repressed oedipal narrative. In other words, “in cases where the wish-fulfillment . . . has been disguised, there must have existed some inclination to put up a defense against the wish; and owing to this defense the wish was unable to express itself except in a distorted shape” (Freud, Interpretation 175).

The Queer Dialectic of Whitman's Nation: "Let" in "Respondez"

Abstract: O published as “poem of the propositions of Nakedness” in 1856, then without a title in 1860, the poem that we know as “Respondez” only appeared as such in the 1867 and 1871–72 Leaves of Grass. If, as Sam Abrams claims, “Respondez” is “a poem widely regarded as the most important in the entire Whitman corpus” then it occupies a strangely marginal position in that corpus (32).1 Easily overlooked because of its exclusion from the first and final editions, the poem is better known to a few critics of Whitman than it is to a general readership.2 It is probably best known to other poets— and is, ironically, more often printed in anthologies and selections than “complete” editions of Leaves of Grass.3 “Respondez” clearly stands out, although theories of why are not forthcoming. Louis Zukofsky famously wrote that it was “Whitman’s greatest poem,” quoting the work in its entirety but without further comment at the end of Prepositions+ (218–21).4 Likewise in 1947 William Carlos Williams claimed it as exemplary of “a new formal necessity touching all verse” (qtd. in Abrams 32), going on to read twenty-five lines of the poem also without further comment. In not commenting, Zukofsky and Williams alert us to its slipperiness, for quoting “Respondez” is far easier than offering an interpretation or capturing it within a general framework.

The Tramp & the Culture Industry: Adorno, Chaplin, and the Possibility of Progressive Comedy

Abstract: A man stands in front of a conveyor belt , hands incessantly tightening bolts on featureless products as they pass before him one after the other, the belt’s speed increasing with each demand from a distant, vigilant supervisor. Never speaking, the man does his best to increase the speed of his quick twists of the wrist to keep up with the movement of the conveyor belt. As the pace increases, the man eventually falls behind and runs alongside the conveyor belt, desperately trying to complete the job. Instead of catching up however, the man is pulled onto the conveyor belt and is swallowed by a hatch into which the products have been falling. The scene shifts to a screen full of large cogs, the man pulled across and between them, from one to the next, his hands still turning in the same twisting motion, as if he still were able to turn the bolts on the nameless products rather than being pulled between the cogs of the industrial machinery made large. Miraculously, he is neither crushed nor spit out the other end, but pulled back to safety, his hands still turning, as he deliriously falls into a ballet, wanting to turn every bolt-like object before him—buttons, body parts, a fire hydrant—until he eventually collapses into a shell of the man he once had been, overrun by the machinery, unable to see anything but cogs until he has a nervous breakdown. On its surface, this series of images from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times would appear the perfect expression of T. W. Adorno’s conception of the culture industry, in which “the progressive technical domination of nature becomes mass deception and is turned into a

The Ends of Identity Politics and the Case of King Kong

Abstract: T many versions of king kong—from the three major Hollywood films of 1933, 1976, and 2005 to the endless iterations in B-movies, comic books, and other pop-culture productions around the world—offer multiple interpretive opportunities for those working in the field of American Studies. King Kong is more like a cultural form or cultural ritual than an independent textual event, and as such it perennially repeats many of the themes that have animated American Studies and cultural studies in recent years: from the racial politics of sentimentalism to the dynamics of transnational contact zones, from the critique of heteronormativity to the questioning of the exceptionalism granted state violence, to name only a few charged areas. It might well seem that King Kong returns—often at moments of socioeconomic crisis like the Great Depression in 1933, the (first) Great Recession of the 1970s, globalization and the purported clash of civilizations after 9/11—to provide audiences with ways of participating in these old dilemmas in new historical contexts. In this fashion, it is possible to understand King Kong as one of the great cultural rituals of the “American Century.” This essay is interested in one small part of this repeated, ritualistic performance: namely, the way the Hollywood versions of the film re-enact the transformation of economic inequality into cultural difference. This central structure of the Hollywood King Kongs is almost immediately recognizable. All the films begin with economic depression or recession and end with questions of identity differences. Economic

James's Broken English: Metaphors and Meaning in the Prefaces

Abstract: I his introduction to ‘the art of the novel,’ the first work to present Henry James’s prefaces to The New York Edition as a related whole, rather than as a series of discreet entities, R. P. Blackmur warns his reader of the difficulty involved in reading these exceptionally dense essays. As Blackmur predicts, “At the least we [the readers] shall require the maximum of strained attention, and the faculty of retaining detail will be pushed to its limit. And these conditions will not apply from the difficulty of what James has to say— which is indeed lucid—but because of the convoluted compression of his style and because of the positive unfamiliarity of his terms as he uses them” (ix). Implicit in Blackmur’s warning, which rightly emphasizes the interpretive challenge that James’s late style poses, is the segregation of James’s abstract ideas about writing from James’s writing itself. If reading the prefaces is difficult, Blackmur suggests, it is not because James’s ideas are incoherent, but because he expresses them in terms that are unfamiliar, and in a style complicated by its “compression.” As a seminal critical text in the Jamesian canon, Blackmur’s introduction in many ways sets up a divorce of theoretical content from the form that embodies it, which many subsequent Jamesian critics have inherited. What Blackmur’s subtle distinction obscures is that the style in which James writes the prefaces thoroughly entwines with some of the theoretical assertions that the prefaces make; indeed, the figurative language of the prefaces (specifically, the many and various metaphors that comprise so much of these texts) is itself a kind of theoretical assertion, namely, that meaning in prose fiction should be multiple. As I argue, the proliferation of metaphorical language in the prefaces in its various

Contending Forces' Intellectual History: Emerson, Du Bois, and Washington at the Turn of the Century

Abstract: W pauline hopkins began her 1900 novel, Contending Forces, with an epigraph taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s address on “Emancipation in the British West Indies,” she was not merely selecting a convenient expression of antiracist sentiment from a figure well known to audiences white and black. Rather, Emerson’s presence at the moment one opens the book persists throughout the novel, not only in a later epigraph, but also as an unattributed source for many quotations within characters’ speeches and conversations. Emerson is even more deeply embedded in one of the novel’s major speeches, which borrows heavily from his address on emancipation in the West Indies without acknowledging the address as a source or even marking the use of Emerson’s words as quotation. The degree to which Emerson’s presence is woven into Contending Forces demands that we reconsider Emerson’s role in the novel and, more fundamentally, the work the novel performs. Mapping out the traces of Emerson in the novel’s speeches, conversations, quotations, and epigraphs calls attention to the ways Contending Forces is highlighting, consolidating, and ultimately revising a