Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2016"
TL;DR: This article argued that religious emotion might be a way for black Americans to address the immanently historical and yet timeless psychological and physical effects of slavery, and suggested that such emotion might even be useful for black people.
Abstract: Social scientists George Albert Coe and W. E. B. Du Bois contested the common notion that religious emotion was necessarily excessive and harmful to religious participants. Where Coe held that religious emotion could be reasoned and thoughtful, Du Bois suggested that religious emotion might be a way for black Americans to address the immanently historical and yet timeless psychological and physical effects of slavery.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors investigated the writing of enslaved artisan, David Drake or Dave the Potter, who made some of antebellum South Carolina's largest storage vessels onto which he also incised couplets and signatures.
Abstract: This essay investigates the writing of enslaved artisan, David Drake or Dave the Potter, who made some of antebellum South Carolina’s largest storage vessels onto which he also incised couplets and signatures. Rather than focus on the intelligible words of Dave the Potter, however, this essay seeks to understand the artisan-author’s writing practice by focusing on the slash marks, gaps, and other unaccountable markings. Therefore, although several couplets are interpreted, they are approached with a view toward expanding upon an overlooked category of the “not counted” in David Drake’s repertoire, borrowing the phrase from a jar of 1843 on which those very words ‘not counted’ have been incised. This essay disinters the semiotic potential of Drake’s vessels to show how they reconfigure not only the (material) signifying practices available to an author in Drake’s position, but also the ontological and temporal boundaries of antebellum slavery.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a reading of Egan's novel under the auspices of "time" as constitutive of both music and fiction writing is presented, and the rock songs that are quoted in the novel are investigated with regard to their ability to slow down time, dramatically enact pauses, and foreshorten experience.
Abstract: This article presents a reading of Egan’s novel under the auspices of “time” as constitutive of both music and fiction writing. The rock songs that are quoted in the novel are investigated with regard to their ability to slow down time, dramatically enact pauses, and foreshorten experience. The article theorizes the literary forms Egan derives from punk rock – specifically a form of “punk time” – as an actual device for modulating time within the narrative. As such, Egan’s original incorporation of the aesthetics of punk into her novel as an “apocalyptic disruption” emerges as an attempt to both decelerate time and enact a thoroughgoing transformation of literary art in the face of a cultural climate informed by a pervasive “hyper-reality.”
6 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors use the phrase "from the Camp to the Commons" to index the emergence of the Commons as a transformative biopolitical geography. But they do not discuss the role of the slave plantations in Douglass's theatrical staging of commoning practices.
Abstract: The terms the “Camp” and the “Commons” limit figures within the so-called New World Order and the optics through which to imagine its transformation. Giorgio Agamben discerns a process whereby the Camp can implement access to the Commons in what Walter Benjamin termed the “state of exception.” I intend the phrase “from the Camp to the Commons” to index the emergence of the Commons as a transformative biopolitical geography. In an effort to keep track of the significance of “bare flesh” and the slave plantation to the trajectory “from the Camp to the Commons” in American modernity, I shall first discuss the important role these figures play in Fredrick Douglass’s theatrical staging of commoning practices in his speeches and life narratives and I shall then turn to an explanation of Herman Melville’s transmutation of this assemblage in his account of Ishmael’s triangulated relationship with Captain Ahab and Pip in Moby-Dick .
6 citations
TL;DR: Danielewski and Davis as discussed by the authors use a tradition of ecocatastrophic narratives such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to describe the dangers represented by technological hubris with environmental risks.
Abstract: Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006) and Kathryn Davis’s The Walking Tour (1999) offer accounts of terror and vulnerability in the face of environmental upheavals. While these novels focus on present-day technological developments, climate change, and ecological degradation, they rely on constructs of sublimity made most familiar in Romantic and Gothic conventions of the long nineteenth century. Moreover, these authors’ use of formal experimentation to figure “unpresentable” crises situates their works in a tradition of ecocatastrophic narratives such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Debating terms of naturalness and monstrosity, ecocatastrophic narratives associate the dangers represented by technological hubris with environmental risks. They narrate incommensurable events of ecosystemic changes, the dangers of technological overreach, and the negative affects these interrelated crises elicit.
6 citations
TL;DR: Gertrude Stein's first U.S. publication appeared in the unexpected August 1912 special issue of an avant-garde photography magazine called Camera Work as discussed by the authors, where her portraits “Henri Matisse” and “Pablo Picasso” appeared side-by-side.
Abstract: Gertrude Stein’s first U.S. publication appeared in the unexpected August 1912 special issue of an avant-garde photography magazine called Camera Work . Although her portraits “Henri Matisse” and “Pablo Picasso” appeared there side-by-side, they have subsequently been published and studied separately despite the fact that Stein situated them as a pair and referred to them as a single work. The critical importance of restoring these pieces to their original context is multifold: considering “Matisse” and “Picasso” as companion pieces alters the context and meaning of each while situating Stein’s involvement in the artists’ contentious rivalry. With this publication, Stein moves to legitimize Picasso and discredit Matisse; at the same time, she defies the authority of her brother, Leo, pursues her ambitions to lead their shared salon, and safeguards both her personal and financial investments in cubism.
5 citations
TL;DR: The early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown, although he is often seen as focusing on the moral psychology of individual characters, was primarily a moral sociologist preoccupied with the spread of guilt and moral responsibility across networks and communities of actors as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown, although he is often seen as focusing on the moral psychology of individual characters, was primarily a moral sociologist preoccupied with the spread of guilt and moral responsibility across networks and communities of actors. For Brown, the transmission and transfer of culpability constituted the proper focus of moral science, social analysis, and, what amounted to the same thing for him, literary investigation. “Complicity,” which today can refer to any kind of reproachable association with another’s wrongdoing, is the closest word we have to describe this preoccupation of Brown's. In this essay I argue that moral complicity is not only the analytical focus of Brown’s fiction but also the central concept behind his theorization of literary narrative. I argue, too, that Brown's fiction contributes in important ways to early American thinking about participatory guilt and a closely related concept, restorative justice
4 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the intersection of how three of the most prominent 19th-century serial writers connect brain fever with racial intimacy, a narrative strategy registering cultural anxieties about social stability, is explored.
Abstract: This essay charts the intersection of how three of the most prominent 19th-century serial writers—E.D.E.N. Southworth, Ann Stephens, and Laura Jean Libbey—connect “brain fever” with racial intimacy, a narrative strategy registering cultural anxieties about social stability. A forgotten convention of serial fiction, such fevers introduce other symptoms, like insanity, amnesia, and syncope so that women especially might evade post-Civil War racial fears or desires. In all these novels, mental and psychic debilities signal a culture’s need for reconstruction. All of these writers draw on plots where characters at key moments are struck by “brain fever,” portrayed as lost consciousness, disempowered thinking, psychic damage, erasure of memory and personality—that reveal social dysfunction.
4 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the Turkish censorship trial of William S. Burroughs's The Soft Machine and the cultural response it has engendered. But their focus is on how the book's supporters used the trial in order to raise awareness of repressive governmental practices as well as the often unmentioned issue of homophobia in Turkey.
Abstract: This paper examines the Turkish censorship trial of William S. Burroughs’s The Soft Machine and the cultural response it has engendered. Though the Turkish trial process evokes similarities to the various legal battles Burroughs and the Beats faced in the 1950s and 1960s, the absence of First Amendment guarantees in Turkey and its noted history of stifling dissent raises the stakes for Burroughs’s book and its supporters. An examination of how the book’s supporters used the trial in order to raise awareness of repressive governmental practices as well as the often unmentioned issue of homophobia in Turkey reveals both the continual relevancy of Burroughs’s work for social critique globally as well as the ways in which that critique is transformed in order to be made amenable to local needs and concerns.
3 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that James's novel The Ambassadors and his essay "Is There a Life After Death?" are similarly structured around the pleasures of half-belief in a doomed enterprise.
Abstract: This essay argues that Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors and his essay “Is There a Life After Death?” are similarly structured around the pleasures of half-belief in a doomed enterprise.
3 citations
TL;DR: Many people in and out of political power responded to the onset of the Great Depression with a mixture of bafflement and bewilderment. as mentioned in this paper examines their righteous and sometimes self-righteous emotional response to the Depression and locates that response in three separate archives: classical economics, Christian evangelicalism, and one famous Depression short story, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited".
Abstract: Many people in and out of political power responded to the onset of the Great Depression with a mixture of bafflement and bewilderment. Others, however, experienced no such doubts. For them, the Depression reinforced their understanding of how the world worked and confirmed their most sacred beliefs. This article examines their righteous—and occasionally self-righteous—emotional response to the Great Depression. It locates that response in three separate archives: classical economics, Christian evangelicalism, and one famous Depression short story, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited.” Each of these conveyed a sense that the Depression was a punishment for past mis-deeds, whether economic, spiritual, or moral, and, moreover, was a punishment that had to be endured, even embraced, for the good life to resume. This punitive view of economic contractions would have—and continues to have—disastrous consequences for ordinary Americans, tending to justify, as it does, the suffering of others.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the ways in which the TV series The Bridge/America interferes with current border politics and the creation of "bare life" (Agamben) at the U.S.-Mexican border.
Abstract: This paper discusses the ways in which the 2013-14 TV series The Bridge/America interferes with current border politics and the creation of "bare life" (Agamben) at the U.S.-Mexican border. By engaging its viewers with the state and status of individual and communal bodies in the borderland region and using the corpse on "The Bridge of the Americas" – the "body-that-is-not-one" – as symbol and trigger for its investigation, the series presents a powerful critique of national border politics and their results: the precarity of human lives on the thresholds to the Global North and the states of exception that exist at the U.S.-Mexican border. However, as a cultural artifact, the series also symptomatically reflects the tensions and debates that inform the border as a highly charged terrain in contemporary national, transnational, and cultural politics and imaginaries.
TL;DR: The authors examines Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's feminist lyric poetry and poetics, focusing on how her writing explores the middle ground between French feminism and the Mahayana lineage of Chinese Buddhism.
Abstract: This paper examines Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s feminist lyric poetry and poetics, focusing on how her writing explores the middle ground between French feminism and the Mahayana lineage of Chinese Buddhism. While scholars have discussed Berssenbrugge’s feminist consciousness and its impacts on her innovative lyric practice, little attention has been given to her life-long involvement in the Chinese Buddhist tradition. In this respect, this essay traces the development of her feminist-Buddhist (or Buddhist-feminist) writing from the 1980s through 1990s, suggesting that the Chinese Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin, a popular female deity known as the “Goddess of Compassion,” plays a significant role when Berssenbrugge yields an antiessential form of feminist ethics. Berssenbrugge’s transnational feminist imaginary seeks to promote Guanyin’s ethics of compassion, an ethics that fleshes out the bodhisattva’s maternity and her openness to the suffering other.
TL;DR: In the archetypal American success story, social mobility often depends on physical mobility as mentioned in this paper. But such narratives of individual progress became harder to sustain amid the congestion and economic division of the 19th-century city.
Abstract: In the archetypal American success story, social mobility often depends on physical mobility. But such narratives of individual progress became harder to sustain amid the congestion and economic division of the 19th-century city. Industrialization and poverty brought physical immobility and constraint, elements at odds with temporal narrative itself. Both these changes in city life and the textual crisis they engendered are reflected in the work of Stephen Crane. His New York fiction, built on linear narrative and authorial detachment, tracks individual economic failure in a city divided by class privilege and exploitation. His newspaper sketches, rather, are constructed in spatial rather than temporal terms, with a focus on crowds rather than individuals. Impromptu groupings gather and then disperse, occupying space rather than moving through it. Potential conflict is diffused, the latent energy of the crowd turned into a momentary community that reappropriates and reshapes both city and text.
TL;DR: Although it seems unlikely that Lowell used Moore's poetry as a model, in fact he echoed and imitated her repeatedly as discussed by the authors, and explored his relationship to Moore through Life Studies, and then sketch a broader technique the two poets share: the escape offered by farfetched metaphor.
Abstract: Although it seems unlikely that Lowell used Moore’s poetry as a model, in fact he echoed and imitated her repeatedly. Lowell’s allusions to Moore ask us to rethink this prototypical confessional poet and how he viewed his work; they also show us under-observed aspects of allusion, and give us new reasons to return to influence studies. For Lowell, allusion is a way to get beyond his own style. I explore his relationship to Moore through Life Studies , and then sketch a broader technique the two poets share: the escape offered by farfetched metaphor.
TL;DR: The authors argue that both films are addiction and recovery narratives, with Washington's character requiring external human intervention and Hanks' character finding recovery through divine assistance and technical ingenuity, and that the narrative structure of recovery in each differs.
Abstract: The cultural narratives that supported the United States’ War on Drugs in the 20th century relied overwhelmingly on racial stereotypes to prove drugs were dangerous to both the human body and the nation as a whole. Since the Modern Alcoholism Movement in the 1960s, medicalized perspectives have attempted to remove blame from the addict. However, narratives of addiction and recovery continue to be shaped by racial stereotypes. Two films by Robert Zemeckis— Cast Away (2000), the Oscar-nominated robinsonade starring Tom Hanks, and Flight (2012), the Oscar-nominated story of a drug and alcohol-addicted airplane pilot, played by Denzel Washington—make visible larger cultural narratives about race in addiction in the 21st century. I argue that both films are addiction and recovery narratives. However, the narrative structure of recovery in each differs, with Washington’s character requiring external human intervention and Hanks’s finding recovery through divine assistance and technical ingenuity.
TL;DR: In this article, the author used jazz as a compositional and epistemological methodology to recognize the legacy and technique of jazz music beyond kitsch representations of black Parisian jazz as primitive “jass culture.”
Abstract: Charlotte Carter’s “orchestrated” detective fiction novel Coq au Vin utilizes jazz as a compositional and epistemological methodology. Employed by Blues Woman and practicing jazz musician Nanette Hayes, jazz (as) methodology animates Coq au Vin’s discourse of value to recognize both the legacy and technique of jazz music beyond kitsch representations of black Parisian jazz as primitive “jass culture.” At the same time, the protagonist’s ambivalent affinity for two New York and Paris is contextualized through black diasporic history. In effect, Nanette’s inhabitation of a liminal psychic and physical space within an increasingly commercialized cultural diaspora does not get remedied through a return to home or marriage, marking her exile within/to a “radical elsewhere” both nostalgic and critical.
TL;DR: The authors use the term travel fictions to refer to the ways in which travel narratives often misrepresent, distort, and fabricate notions about the people and places they purport to describe, creating useful mythologies.
Abstract: I use the term “travel fictions” to refer to the ways in which travel narratives often misrepresent, distort, and fabricate notions about the people and places they purport to describe, creating useful mythologies. I also use the term to refer to works of fiction that critique and investigate different types of travel, a genre that has received less critical attention than “non-fiction” travel narratives. I argue that both types of travel literature have been used by many authors to theorize and think critically about travel and migration—an aspect of travel literature that is often overlooked in contemporary criticism. This article discusses the ways in which Paul Bowles anticipated many of the ideas now central to critical studies of travel and migration by over two decades.
TL;DR: O'Hara's quintessential "I do this I do that" style, and especially his time signals, were inherited from Charles Olson as mentioned in this paper, a critique of Olson's contradictory poetics of manly immediacy through machinery on the one hand, and claims to autonomy from commercial culture on the other.
Abstract: This article shows how Frank O’Hara’s quintessential “I do this I do that” style, and especially his time signals (“It is 12:20 in New York a Friday”), were inherited from Charles Olson. O’Hara’s inheritance is also a critique of Olson’s contradictory poetics of manly immediacy through machinery on the one hand, and claims to autonomy from commercial culture on the other. By immersing himself in consumer culture, O’Hara, contrary to predominant interpretations, is not being flippant. Rather, his cataloging of the life of commodities betrays a deep anxiety about the stability of selfhood in Fordism, evinced in the deaths populating his poems. Both Olson and O’Hara reveal how the Fordist fantasy of personal freedom through machinery (especially the automobile) is haunted by its dialectical opposite: men becoming mere moving parts on the assembly line of the administered world.
TL;DR: Hawthorne and Dostoyevsky are united not only by the common subject of crime and punishment but also by their preoccupation the operation of what both regarded as "moral law" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Hawthorne and Dostoyevsky are united not only by the common subject of crime and punishment but also by their preoccupation the operation of what both regarded as “moral law.” In the absence of traditional religious belief, moral law was the writers’ conduit to universal order and to God. Yet what moral law was—real or socially conditioned, naturalistic or supernatural—was a mystery to them and became more so as they explored how the mind operated. The essay focuses on three texts— Crime and Punishment , The Scarlet Letter , and The Marble Faun —but it is not a traditional critical reading; it is a reflection on the vision of the writers as they trace their subject from the conscious and unconscious determinants of crime through its psychological effects to its endpoint in punishment and whatever renewal may or may not lie beyond.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the second part of the essay insists on an affirmative philosophy to be formulated despite loss and death, a set of practices that would take us out of sorrow and lead toward prudence.
Abstract: “Experience,” one of Emerson’s most complex essays, is typically understood to perform a work of mourning for his son Waldo, in the wake of whose death he also revisits his philosophy and reformulates some of its major propositions. Located at the intersection of the personal and philosophical, the essay is thus seen as outlining Emerson’s philosophy of the experiential predicated on disappointment, loss and death. I question that understanding by arguing that the second part of the essay insists on an affirmative philosophy to be formulated despite loss and death. In investigating just how this affirmation of life in the midst of unhappiness is imagined, I offer an outline of Emerson’s ontology and propose that his critique of pessimism in the essay’s second part introduces also an affirmative ethics, a set of practices that would take us out of sorrow and lead toward prudence.