Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2014"
TL;DR: In this city, where suburb, strip, and urban center have merged indistinguishably into a series of states of mind and which is marked by no systematic map that might be carried in the memory, we wander, like Freud in Genoa, surprised but not shocked by the continuous repetition of the same, the continuous movement across already vanished thresholds that leave only traces of their former status as places as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In this city, where suburb, strip, and urban center have merged indistinguishably into a series of states of mind and which is marked by no systematic map that might be carried in the memory, we wander, like Freud in Genoa, surprised but not shocked by the continuous repetition of the same, the continuous movement across already vanished thresholds that leave only traces of their former status as places. Amidst the ruins of monuments no longer significant because deprived of their systematic status, and often of their corporeality, walking on the dust of inscriptions no longer decipherable because lacking so many words, whether carved in stone or shaped in neon, we cross nothing to go nowhere.
26 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that U.S. imperialism has all but rendered contractual relations between Mexicans and Anglo Americans an impossibility, thereby creating an untenable merger between a republic founded on consensual relations and an empire created through the abridgement of consent.
Abstract: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) illustrates how U.S. imperialism has all but rendered contractual relations between Mexicans and Anglo Americans an impossibility, thereby creating an untenable merger between a republic founded on consensual relations and an empire created through the abridgement of consent. This essay argues that Ruiz de Burton engages the postbellum discourses of gold, value, and race in order to address the deleterious consequences of racializing Mexicans for the purposes of plunder. The text illustrates how the nation’s imperialist practices were creating two systems of meaning—one contractual and the other imperial, which in turn has created a world of contradictions. To be both a republic and an empire means to be both white and Native American, businessman and plunderer, civilized and barbaric. These contradictions debase the value of whiteness and gold, values that only contractual relations can uphold.
26 citations
TL;DR: The Literature and History of Mexican American Farm Workers at UC Berkeley course as discussed by the authors was the first course to explore the relationship between history and the aesthetic features of the literature, which was both critical and pedagogical, became especially important for reading those literary works in which specific historical events have been omitted or suppressed.
Abstract: I 2009, i began teaching a course entitled the Literature and History of Mexican American Farm Workers at UC Berkeley. In the syllabus, I included autobiographies, short stories, novels, and narrative films.1 The purpose of the course was to familiarize students with this important body of literature, but the course also gave me the opportunity to share with them my personal background as a child farm laborer in the San Joaquin Valley of California during the 1960s, and to show the significance of that personal history for the kind of research and teaching I now do at the university. As with any new course, I was immediately confronted with a problem, in this case regarding methods of reading. Specifically, I wanted to understand and be able to explain to students the relation between history and the aesthetic features of the literature. This task, which was both critical and pedagogical, became especially important for reading those literary works in which specific historical events have been omitted or suppressed. Two such works are Elva Treviño Hart’s 1999 autobiography Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child and Robert M. Young’s 1973 film documentary Children of the Fields. In this essay, I shall suggest that to read these and other similar works properly, we need to pay close attention to the dialectical relation between social context and literary form, taking into account not only what the storytellers in these works say, but the manner in which they say it—and the ways in which history exerts its influence even when neglected. But first, to establish the critical parameters of my argument, I shall
12 citations
TL;DR: The Apartment as mentioned in this paper is a critique of white-collar workplace culture that depicts work and leisure as increasingly indistinct, for both are integral parts of a Fordist "mode of accumulation" that depends on mass industrial production, mass commodity consumption, and the vertically integrated corporation.
Abstract: T could be no starker critique of the mid century white-collar workplace than The Apartment (1960). In Billy Wilder’s iconic film, “Consolidated Life” names more than the powerful Manhattan-based insurance company that employs the protagonist C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon); the phrase also describes the modus operandi of the new model of Fordism. The corporation literally consolidates life, extending its rationality beyond the walls of the office in order to underwrite the very elements that we generally regard as exempt from work—the subjects, activities, and spaces of our familial and communal lives. More to the point, The Apartment implies this consolidation by depicting work and leisure as increasingly indistinct, for both are integral parts of a Fordist “mode of accumulation” that depends, Nancy Fraser has argued, “on mass industrial production, mass commodity consumption, and the vertically integrated corporation” (161).1 While Consolidated Life executives spend their after hours as carefree playboys, their leisure never accedes to authenticity, because it is manufactured and canalized by its reliance on commodity consumption. In The Apartment, Fordism even threatens to automate and standardize virtually every aspect of individual existence, right down to the capacity to care for others. What was life—spontaneous, creative, and unpredictable—becomes prefabricated, deadened, and calculable. Thus, Wilder’s film initiates its critique with an indelible image that depicts the common Fordist denominators to which the consolidated life would reduce all leisure, if not all love: the white-collar corporate drone repeating a monotonous task in the open-plan office. But this summary neglects the degree to which cautionary tales
11 citations
TL;DR: The frontier ego as mentioned in this paper is a metaphor of the inner edge of the wave, the meeting point between savagery and civilization, defined by Freud as "a frontier creature, managing stimuli from within and without, occupying a position midway between the id and reality".
Abstract: B it serves as a geographical marker, the frontier is an idea, a metaphor of position or process. That idea is simultaneously physical, political, and psychological. At the same time that Frederick Jackson Turner published The Frontier in American History, one of the twentieth century’s most influential historical works, Sigmund Freud published The Ego and the Id, one of the century’s most influential psychological works.1 Turner described the frontier as “the outer edge of the wave, the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (3). Freud characterized the ego as “a frontier creature,” managing stimuli from within and without, occupying a “position midway between the id and reality” (56). Turner distinguished European frontiers, with established and fortified borders, from the American frontier, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a fluid marker “at the hither edge of free land.” Initially that edge bordered the Atlantic coast colonies; then explorers, armies, and settlers gradually pushed it westward, as the idea of “the West” became a mythic part of American lore. Freud’s metaphor of the frontier ego blends a European model of the border agent, managing tensions between established boundaries, with an American model of boundaries discovered in a continuing process of negotiation: ego with id, superego, and external reality. The process of exploration, struggle, compromise, then settlement or fortress, describes both psychological and social expansion. “Frontier” means confrontation. In psychology, the gradual separation of self from the object world establishes “ego boundaries” that must be regularly main-
10 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that gender is often solely related to white men and there is no inquiry into the knowing subject beyond the fact of being a "woman" or a "man" beyond the notion of a "personality".
Abstract: With gender as the central concept in feminist thinking, epistemology is flattened out in such a way that we lose sight of the complex and multiple ways in which the subject and object of possible experiences are constituted. The flattening effect is multiplied when one considers that gender is often solely related to white men. There’s no inquiry into the knowing subject beyond the fact of being a “woman.” But what is “woman” or a “man” for that matter?
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that a sustained reading of the courtship plot and Lee Ellis's role in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition allows us to see the novel as ultimately envisioning a New South in which racial loyalty still trumps middle-class and professional solidarity.
Abstract: This essay argues that a sustained reading of the courtship plot and Lee Ellis’s role in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition allows us to see the novel as ultimately envisioning a New South in which racial loyalty still trumps middle-class and professional solidarity. It reads the novel’s romantic triangle as a dramatization of the rise of a white middle class whose professional capital overtakes the central role of a plantation-based aristocracy. In the process, this new class remakes a whiteness that fails to significantly challenge either the essential hierarchy of white over black or the bloody lynch law that enforces that hierarchy. Because Ellis, who initially seems one of the least prejudiced whites in the novel, succumbs to race loyalty, his romantic triumph over Tom suggests the hopelessness of any chances for solidarity, highlighting The Marrow of Tradition ’s critique of black middle-class enculturation as a viable form of racial uplift.
8 citations
TL;DR: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as mentioned in this paper argues that the text uses Toklas's loving gaze to establish and recognize Stein's masculinity, as well as to highlight the importance to modernism of her masculine homosocial bonds with her colleagues.
Abstract: This essay tracks the dynamics of vision that animate Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . It argues that the text uses Toklas’s loving gaze to establish and recognize Stein’s masculinity, as well as to highlight the importance to modernism of her masculine homosocial bonds with her colleagues. The Autobiography depicts those ties as very congenial with men such as Sherwood Anderson and with masculine women such as Jane Heap, but more fraught—and more likely to induce perspectival vacillation—with Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso. This multiperspectivalism structures the book and mobilizes multiple narratives of modernism’s emergence. In so doing, The Autobiography eventually reframes Stein’s masculinity and relationship with Toklas as part of the appearance of the new that the text initially attributes solely to the formal properties of modern art and writing.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the meaning and function of ambiguity in the work of Henry James and argue that Jamesian ambiguity ought to be understood as an initial condition that legitimates the processes which invariably seek to eliminate it.
Abstract: This essay reconsiders the meaning and function of ambiguity in the work of Henry James. The first half traces how trends in twentieth-century criticism helped to transform ambiguity from a term of censure into one of approval. The second half reads James’s story “The Figure in the Carpet” as an allegory for a practice of critical reading that rejects ambiguity in favor of certainty, precision, and acuteness. By encouraging readers to shift their attention away from a text’s meaning and onto the facultative virtues exercised in interpretation, the story defends the critical impulse without necessarily endorsing its outcomes. The essay concludes by arguing that Jamesian ambiguity ought to be understood as an initial condition that legitimates the processes which invariably seek to eliminate it.
6 citations
TL;DR: The Pale King as discussed by the authors argues that the inherent boredom of modern life and work is convertible to transcendence, meaning, and happiness, and the repetitions in the text are best read as reflections of, and cures for, the ennui of the postmodern condition.
Abstract: David Foster Wallace’s final manuscript, edited and published posthumously as The Pale King , presents serious interpretive difficulties in both its form and its content. Despite its fragmentary nature and its deliberate embrace of lengthy repetition, it is a unified work that develops Wallace’s earlier thoughts on boredom, conversion, and endurance. The Pale King argues consistently that the inherent boredom of modern life and work is convertible—in a quasi-religious sense—to transcendence, meaning, and happiness. Indeed, it goes beyond argument to imitation; the repetitions in the text are best read as reflections of, and cures for, the ennui of the postmodern condition.
6 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of global economic systems on people's everyday lives are experienced in a highly personal manner but are difficult to understand due to the intricate and abstract nature of international markets and global finance.
Abstract: D the popularity of the occupy movements and the critiques of corporate greed that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, the machinations of transnational capitalism continue to remain elusive to most Americans. The effects of global economic systems on people’s everyday lives—from foreclosures to unemployment—are experienced in a highly personal manner but are difficult to understand due to the intricate and abstract nature of international markets and global finance. Compounding this conceptual difficulty are the overlapping financial interests of transnational corporations and the sociopolitical interests of nation-states. In the southwestern United States, for example, the overlap between the local experience of citizens and the effects of global financial/political networks has exploded into an ideological war regarding the so-called undocumented immigration problem. In places like Arizona, the global effects of transnational capitalism are blatantly minimized or completely dismissed in favor of the “real” criminal threat posed by undocumented migration. Laws such as Arizona’s infamous SB1070 appear as easy and popular solutions to the complicated problems concerning the effects of the global on the local. I begin with the 2008 financial crisis and the issue of undocumented immigration because I find that this specific intersection provides a timely illustration of failures in cognitive mapping. A widely used concept in the social sciences that dates back to the 1940s, cognitive mapping refers to the mental maps we create when structuring and storing spatial knowledge and information. A common example is the imagina-
TL;DR: The authors argue that social construction disconnects Native peoples from formative values, histories, and land rights that constitute the identities they historicize, preserve, and develop, and suggest the tensions between these two positions derive from a general theoretical confusion of social construction with artificiality and ask, What if constructed does not mean artificial?
Abstract: Some critics find social construction a useful concept for theorizing Native identity because it precludes stasis. Others worry that social construction disconnects Native peoples from formative values, histories, and land rights that constitute the identities they historicize, preserve, and develop. This essay suggests the tensions between these two positions derive from a general theoretical confusion of social construction with artificiality and asks, What if constructed does not mean artificial? What if a constructed identity is literally one built out of material circumstances, assembled from the various things, people, and places of everyday life? A close reading of the material foundations of identity in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony recalibrates our understanding of social construction and demonstrates that Native American criticism can benefit from a theory of identity that allows for adaptation, change, and survival, but does not sacrifice the customs, lands, and histories that point to a unique Native American literary tradition.
TL;DR: The difficulties in using regionalism as a descriptive category to discuss late nineteenth-century literature is the series of shifting relationships it has with other terms describing literary production as discussed by the authors, including naturalism, romance, and even local color.
Abstract: O of the difficulties in using regionalism as a descriptive category to discuss late nineteenth-century literature is the series of shifting relationships it has with other terms describing literary production. Not only is there regionalism’s implied connection to realism, there is naturalism, romance, and even local color to consider, if one desires to distinguish between types of regional literary production. Added to this initial framework are the unspoken assumptions concerning intersecting definitions of generic form: the novel is implicitly connected to realism (and later naturalism), while the short story is traditionally associated with regionalism. Further complicating both sets of terms is the implied hierarchical relationship between the realist novel and the publishing industry on the one hand, and the regionalist short story and periodical culture on the other. Collectively, these terms create a series of unequal and asymmetrical relationships that, while informing our current discussions of literature, also exert unseen influence on those debates, primarily because they are more often silently perpetuated than consciously recognized. This essay will not necessarily resolve these issues; I do not intend to do away with my critical predecessors, or offer a newer and, by proxy, better theoretical framework to explain the difficulty of negotiating lit-
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the formal techniques of both writers, particularly their use of temporal conflation, to show that rendering the "shock" of modernity demands addressing the slave trade that linked, and in many ways produced, the modern world.
Abstract: The works of William Faulkner and Aime Cesaire demonstrate that the Black Atlantic’s circuits join the triangle trade not only spatially, but also temporally and historically. Furthermore, they articulate the temporality of a twentieth-century subject defined along the axis of the African diaspora—one who must manage both the (presumably) linear and progressive order of global capitalist industry and the historical vertigo and disenfranchisement of the transatlantic slave trade. This essay analyzes the formal techniques of both writers, particularly their use of temporal conflation, to show that rendering the “shock” of modernity demands addressing the slave trade that linked, and in many ways produced, the modern world.
TL;DR: The authors used the resources of public sphere theory to analyze how Duncan's "The Homosexual in Society" and "The Architecture Passages 9,” and Jess's Paste-Up, "The Mouse's Tail" taken together provide a theory of living directly opposed to the then-hegemonic vision of a pleasure-based family or home life cordoned off from the real world of work and politics.
Abstract: Robert Duncan, a poet, and Jess, a visual artist, were collage artists and life partners; their shared home came to comprise an integral part of their artistic philosophy. This essay uses the resources of public sphere theory to analyze how Duncan’s “The Homosexual in Society” and “The Architecture Passages 9,” and Jess’s Paste-Up, “The Mouse’s Tail” taken together provide a theory of living directly opposed to the then-hegemonic vision of a pleasure-based family or home life cordoned off from the “real world” of work and politics. Collage becomes a way of bringing—as the historical avant garde attempted to do—art and life together, and of forming a political home and family life integrally related to the life of the “outside world.”
TL;DR: The Zero as mentioned in this paper compares and questions both the media discourse that described New York Police Department (NYPD) cops as confident heroes after 9/11 and the trauma discourse that cast them as speechless victims.
Abstract: J walter’s ‘the zero’ (2006) compares and questions both the media discourse that described New York Police Department (NYPD) cops as confident heroes after 9/11 and the trauma discourse that cast them as speechless victims.1 Walter was hired in March 2001 to ghostwrite Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik’s autobiography, and he thus began chronicling before 9/11 life in the NYPD as the story of “everyday heroes” (Kerik xvi).2 With unprecedented “access to all sorts of cops and going’s-on (sic) at ground zero” (Baker par. 21), Walter found himself implicated in a post-9/11 public discourse that labeled cops and firefighters as “Heroes amid the Horror” (New York Times).3 The media’s hero narrative framed 9/11 as a battle of good versus evil, underwriting the political allegory that pitted America against an “axis of evil” (Bush, “State” par. 26) in a righteous “crusade” (Bush, “Remarks” par. 17) for “Infinite Justice” (Pike par. 1).4 The Zero satirizes this nationalistic allegory by contrasting “what happens when a nation becomes a public relations firm” with what happens to Brian Remy, an ex-NYPD cop whose post-9/11 psychological collapse is far more traumatic than heroic (222). Yet even as the novel critiques media stories that mask individual suffering, it also questions the central tenets of trauma theory: that trauma is fundamentally “unspeakable and unrepresentable” (Leys 304), defined by its “literality and nonsymbolic nature,” and thus “absolutely true to the event” (Caruth, “Trauma” 5).5
TL;DR: In the second day of the war, the Red Badge of Courage was replaced by a mule driver as mentioned in this paper, a derogatory comparison to "mule drivers" that gives Henry his Emersonian "new eyes" and sparks his heroic deeds.
Abstract: N the end of stephen crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming, having demonstrated his bravery in battle, “felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of a sturdy blood. . . . He was a man” (103). As is well known, Henry’s confidence in his manhood is potentially, if not necessarily, undercut because, although his company does not know it, on the first day of combat his badge of honor is inflicted by a fellow soldier, who like Henry is in cowardly retreat. Less often noted is that the courage he displays on the second day of battle is set in motion when Henry overhears an officer tell a general that his regiment fights “like a lot ’a mule drivers” (79). This derogatory comparison to “mule drivers,” not a hatred of the enemy, gives Henry his Emersonian “new eyes” (79) and sparks his heroic deeds. The significance of that comparison is illuminated by the book’s first scene, when we are given our only African American in the book. “A negro teamster who had been dancing upon a cracker box with the hilarious encouragement of twoscore soldiers” is “deserted” the moment the possibility of battle arises and the serious business of war begins.1 Even if Crane suggests something cowardly about this desertion, Henry’s assertion of military manhood in response to a comparison with
TL;DR: Cormac McCarthy's writing features perspectives on the human condition strikingly comparable in range and substance with those advanced in The Social Construction of Reality, the classic treatise in the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Cormac McCarthy’s writing features perspectives on the human condition strikingly comparable in range and substance with those advanced in The Social Construction of Reality , the classic treatise in the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. At the focus of their shared interests is the human struggle to erect shields against the encroachment of disorder, a universal recoil from the threat of anomie embodied most forcefully in the dark mystery of death. McCarthy’s early novels ( The Orchard Keeper , Outer Dark , Child of God , and Suttree ) foreground settings in which ordered social formations are severely limited; Blood Meridian gives attention to the influence of forceful constructions of reality in marginal situations; in the border trilogy, romantic social constructions (myths) succumb to harsh actualities; No Country for Old Men offers a window on the perils that await those whose constructions of reality blind them to the forces of chance and death; and The Road dramatizes the attempt to reconstruct a viable social reality in a world reduced to chaos.
TL;DR: This paper argued that Yamoyden demonstrates the incompatibility between the Puritan pursuit of freedom and its self-justification, and uses beloved elements of the natural world to symbolize the vexed problem of coexistence of Native Americans and whites.
Abstract: This essay discusses Yamoyden , a narrative poem published in 1820 by James Wallis Eastburn and Robert C. Sands, in terms of how American literary pioneers utilized and transformed its narrative through their interaction with different regional and cultural/social interests. In this interpretation, Yamoyden is proposed as New York historiography displaced onto New England, fashioned after Washington Irving’s “Philip of Pokanoket,” a romantic understanding of Metacom (King Philip). It is argued that Yamoyden demonstrates the incompatibility between the Puritan pursuit of freedom and its self-justification, and uses beloved elements of the natural world to symbolize the vexed problem of coexistence of Native Americans and whites. The essay puts this reading of Yamoyden into conversation with Hobomok and Hope Leslie , revised versions by Massachusetts authors; The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish , a New York variation influenced by the Massachusetts revisions; and Metamora , a masterpiece of national importance.
TL;DR: In this paper, the figure of the frame as used in two ekphrastic poems, A. E. Stallings's "Empty Icon Frame" and Jorie Graham's "San Sepolcro", is examined.
Abstract: This essay interrogates the figure of the frame as it is used in two ekphrastic poems, A. E. Stallings’s “Empty Icon Frame” and Jorie Graham’s “San Sepolcro.” In their ekphrastic treatment of images of the Virgin Mary, the poems transform literal, metaphorical, and conceptual frames into sacred thresholds. Conventionally, the threshold marks the passage from one realm to another—for example, from the space of the profane to that of the sacred. However, the defining poetic shared between these two texts is the celebration of the threshold space as itself sacred due to its unruly and, consequently, destabilizing force.
TL;DR: The authors provide a review of important works that will offer graduate students an understanding of the larger movements taking place in contemporary Chicana/o studies and provide some historical and critical context with which to frame these conversations.
Abstract: W asked to contribute a literary review for this special issue, one discussing five of the most important contemporary critical works in Chicana/o studies for a graduate student to know, I found the charge somewhat daunting. Undoubtedly, such a book list cannot help but be exclusionary. Consequently, rather than focus on disciplinary specific texts or even works unique to theoretical camps, I chose to think about contributions that push the field in new directions while building on the rich tradition of scholarship already present in Chicana/o studies. This, however, meant that I had to exclude several key texts for the sake of brevity. As a result, the works I have selected for this literary review problematize the politics and processes of identity construction through various approaches while critiquing how those identities are understood, experienced, and read within structures of power. Unique to these texts is also the authors’ attempt to think through what changes or benefits their individual interventions provide to the field of Chicano studies. Simply stated, my aim is to provide a review of important works that will offer graduate students an understanding of the larger movements taking place in contemporary Chicana/o studies and provide some historical and critical context with which to frame these conversations. Broadly, the work of the discipline has been to create a consciousness of Chicana/o existence, to locate a space from which Chicanas/os
TL;DR: In the wake of mary mccarthy's famous attack on Lillian Hellman, made on the Dick Cavett Show in 1980 (that every word she wrote was a lie, including “and” and “the”), and of Hellman's response, other Hellman detractors proceeded to accuse her of inaccurate research, faulty memory, and outright lying in her memoirs as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: I the wake of mary mccarthy’s famous attack on Lillian Hellman, made on the The Dick Cavett Show in 1980 (that every word she wrote was a lie, including “and” and “the”), and of Hellman’s response—indignation and a libel suit—other Hellman detractors proceeded to accuse her of inaccurate research, faulty memory, and outright lying in her memoirs. Martha Gellhorn, calling Hellman an “apocryphiar,” suggested for instance that rather than having experienced an air raid in Spain in 1937, as she describes in her first memoir, An Unfinished Woman, Hellman most likely had heard accounts of the raid a week before she arrived in Valencia, and “her imagination then took over, placing her a bit off key at the center of the apocryphal action” (294). American psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner, who had worked in the antifascist underground in Vienna during the 1930s, as had the title character of Hellman’s portrait “Julia,” published her autobiography in 1983 and said in the introduction that her friends had insisted since the publication of the portrait in Pentimento in 1973 that she must be Julia (xv). Gardiner explained that she had consulted the director of the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance, and neither he nor the former resistance workers he was in contact with had heard of another American woman deeply involved in the resistance (xv–xvi).1 In 1984 Samuel McCracken built on Gardiner’s comments and catalogued the contradictions within the “Julia” portrait itself, using train and boat schedules from the late 1930s to uncover discrepancies in geography and timelines.
TL;DR: The Chicano/a literature has been defined by formal and thematic diversity, much like the European, North American, and Latin American literary traditions from which this new literature emerged as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: F its inception, chicano/a literature has been defined by formal and thematic diversity, much like the European, North American, and Latin American literary traditions from which this “new” literature emerged. As critics have argued for the past several decades, the aesthetic multidimensionality found in Chicano/a works makes this literature worthy of equal consideration alongside older and more established canons, despite its relatively young state. However, due to its (somewhat rightful) affiliation with the Chicano Movement and the civil rights activism of the 1960s, Chicano/a literature is commonly viewed as aesthetically hegemonic by readers unfamiliar with the developments that have taken place in the fields of Chicana/o and American literary studies over the past decades. As is the case with other American racialized canons, like Native American and African American literatures, Chicano/a works are often understood and discussed as focusing strictly on questions of identity, social and political injustice, economic hardship, and the various difficulties involved in managing two or more cultural traditions. Although there is little doubt that American “minority” literatures do foreground such issues, it would be erroneous to consider them hegemonic or one-dimensional in their respective approaches to such universal human concerns. After all, these questions can be found across literary traditions around the world, from the modernist works of Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka to the contemporary writings of José Saramago, Rigoberta Menchú, and Margaret Atwood. Additionally, and perhaps more so than any other American racial minority literary canon, Chicano/a literature has continually redefined
TL;DR: The cover of Lucha corpi's novel Black Widow's Wardrobe (1999) features a woman's illuminated torso, from her mouth upward, is in shadows, as are her arms.
Abstract: T cover of lucha corpi’s novel Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999) features a woman’s illuminated torso (Fig. 1). Her face, from her mouth upward, is in shadows, as are her arms. Her hands emerge from the darkness and are represented in the act of pulling apart her robe to reveal her bare chest. There we see not her breasts but the outline of a house on fire, its flames reaching up to the woman’s collarbones. However, what at first looks like a house also looks like a spider, with the house’s central cupola standing in for the spider’s head and the far-reaching flames extended like spider legs. Then again, the incandescent image bears the same outline as La Iglesia de la Conchita, the sixteenth-century church in Coyoacán, a neighborhood in Mexico City, at which La Malinche, Hernán Cortés’s indigenous mistress, reportedly worshipped (Fig. 2). Each of these images—house, church, spider—correlate with the novel’s plot, which features a protagonist, Licia Lecuona, also known as the Black Widow, who kills her husband. Licia believes herself to be the late twentieth-century reincarnation of La Malinche, and her final act in the novel is to set fire to her own house in Oakland, California. The enigmatic cover image, however, suggests philosophical themes beyond this plot. It recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assertions in Nature that the “nature in us must have some relation to the nature outside of us” (206). The cover image presents a figure both in and of its world—not
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TL;DR: The authors read Ralph Waldo Emerson's argument for a "nation of friends" in "Politics" as Emerson's response to his lament that the power of love, as the basis of the State, has never been tried.
Abstract: The essay reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s argument for a “nation of friends,” in “Politics,” as Emerson’s response to his lament, also in “Politics,” that the “power of love, as the basis of the State, has never been tried.” By a careful reading of that essay, which includes locating “Politics” within the debate in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan between right and law, I argue for a new understanding of time and friendship in Emerson’s thought.
TL;DR: Inscriptions of Placelessness in John Hillcoat's Adaptation of The Road as discussed by the authors, a movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road takes as its subject the horror of a postapocalyptic world in which all semblance of order has been reduced to an ephemeral absent presence that haunts the nameless protagonist and his young son.
Abstract: Inscriptions of Placelessness in John Hillcoat’s Adaptation of The Road ” John Hillcoat’s cinematic adaptation (2009) of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) takes as its subject the horror of a postapocalyptic world in which all semblance of order has been reduced to an ephemeral absent presence that haunts the nameless protagonist and his young son. Ironically, their only means of survival and source of solace is a desolate road strewn with the wreckage of civilization. Central to the Hillcoat’s film is the multivalent use of this road as a simultaneous symbol of refuge and desolation. This article addresses the various ways in which notions of ecological catastrophe and biopolitics help to inform conceptions of landscape and placelessness in order to create a cinematic vision of a not-so-distant future in which the world is, perhaps, just as we have made it to be.
TL;DR: The most recent enactment of this irony comes from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who uses his editorial introduction in The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin (2006) to undertake a "reassessment both of the novel and of James Baldwin's critique, itself now part of the canon".
Abstract: O of the ironies of modern-day literary criticism is that the scholars who identify with the sensibility found in James Baldwin’s essays frequently distance themselves from the author’s fiction. The most recent enactment of this irony comes from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who uses his editorial introduction in The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2006) to undertake a “reassessment both of the novel and of James Baldwin’s critique, itself now part of the canon” (“Introduction” xiii). Although Gates states that his objective is to establish the transcendence of Stowe’s novel over Baldwin’s critique, his method is not, as might be expected, to refute the critique itself. Instead, he turns from Baldwin’s essays to his literary output, and seeks to show that Stowe’s sentimental opus profoundly influenced Baldwin’s fiction. Focusing on the “novels about race” that Baldwin wrote in the 1960s (xxviii), Gates argues that the “Manichean simplicity” which Baldwin diagnosed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) would become the “central flaw” in works like Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) (xxvi). Alleging that the characters in these novels “seem to exist as set pieces for ideological diatribes rather than nuanced explorations of their full humanity,” he determines that Baldwin was never able “to extricate himself from sentimentality” (xxvi, xxx). Ultimately, then, it is a “reassessment” of Baldwin’s fiction that enables Gates to affirm the resilience of Stowe’s novel. Gates closes with the provocative suggestion that the essayist who was Stowe’s most acute critical executor would also become the novelist who was her