Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2019"
TL;DR: In this article, the author stages a critique of her town's religious and aspiring middle-class attitudes, and the ideologies that underpin them: neoliberalism, individualism, and conservative Christian thought.
Abstract: Abstract:Housekeeping reconfigures white, rural, lower-middle-class Protestantism as a critical epistemology of inventive social potential. Through the narrator-protagonist Ruth, the novel stages a critique of her town’s religious and aspiring middle-class attitudes, and the ideologies that underpin them: neoliberalism, individualism, and conservative Christian thought. On the one hand, she provides ethnographic accounts of the town, through which it becomes metonymic of rural, white, lower-middle-class life. But much of her narrative transpires in a different mode: portrayals of nature that relocate American Transcendentalism in a Protestant lineage. This revision of Transcendentalism is not merely philosophical; rather, it reveals that a critical approach to rationality, and to the conservative Christianity conjured by Ruth’s ethnography, is available via Protestantism. The novel’s depiction of her identity as universal casts whiteness and middle-class-ness as neutral categories. But in doing so, it also blurs the social real enough to reimagine the political contours of its subjects.
3 citations
TL;DR: The Well Wrought Urn as discussed by the authors explores the role of attentiveness in the formation of close reading and demonstrates that at the heart of American New Criticism there lies a notion of reading that assumes a unique capacity for animating otherness.
Abstract: Abstract:This article challenges the assumption that close reading is an apolitical and ahistorical practice by reading Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn alongside his seminal work on William Faulkner. These texts expose the crucial role “attention” plays in the formation of close reading, and demonstrate that at the heart of American New Criticism there lies a notion of reading that assumes a unique capacity for animating otherness. Brooks labors to cultivate in his reader an attentiveness so profound as to lead to self-deadening. However, this self-erasure is not a solely negative process in his mind, since it allows the reader an intimate encounter with the literary text as alterity. This New Critical model of reading unexpectedly corresponds to Jacques Derrida’s hauntological ethics. By bringing into dialogue Brooks, Faulkner, and Derrida, this essay offers a new view of the values that underlie close reading as a contemporary method of literary interpretation.
3 citations
TL;DR: O'Hara wrote his poems in an American work environment that was, at mid-century, becoming increasingly defined by bureaucracy and its corresponding ethos of organization, efficiency, administration, and paperwork.
Abstract: Abstract:Frank O’Hara wrote his poems in an American work environment that was, at mid-century, becoming increasingly defined by bureaucracy and its corresponding ethos of organization, efficiency, administration, and paperwork. O’Hara’s reaction to bureaucracy was undoubtedly an ambivalent one: though O’Hara’s work periodically includes signs that he found administrative routine and structure appealing, he was ultimately not able to ignore what he perceived as dehumanizing and even perilous about bureaucratic norms in the cold war era. To counter the deleterious nature of a highly administered society, O’Hara sought to explore the utopian purpose of his writing, wherein poetry might offer an alternative to bureaucratic schedules and temporality, the stultifying tedium of office work, and the bellicose mentality of the cold war period.
3 citations
3 citations
TL;DR: This paper revisited William Dean Howells and his realist novel A Hazard of New Fortunes in light of the recent speculative turn in philosophy, and used it as a case study to reflect on the fortunes and hazards of speculative realism as a contemporary influence on literary criticism.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay reconsiders William Dean Howells and his realist novel A Hazard of New Fortunes in light of the recent speculative turn in philosophy. Drawing on developments in thing theory and speculative realism, the essay uses Howells’s novel as a case study to reflect on the fortunes and hazards of speculative realism as a contemporary influence on literary criticism. While skeptical of its break with language and consciousness, it finds in speculative realism a fresh approach to dramatizing how the thingness of literary works often exceeds representation and gives form to speculative thought more hospitable to things and their involvements. Inspired by the speculative turn, the essay works to navigate the contemporary hazards of thinking things, while still preserving what William James once celebrated as the “active element in all consciousness.”
2 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how Capote integrated the contemporary tension surrounding photography and photojournalism into his work In Cold Blood, which is a novel that combines factual reporting and expression as a fine art.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay contributes to existing scholarly research on Truman Capote’s relationship with photography by exploring how Capote integrated the contemporary tension surrounding photography and photojournalism into his work In Cold Blood. The oxymoronic genre of this book, the “non-fiction novel” as he called it, is experimented with by combining two different dimensions of photography: factual reporting and expression as a fine art. Comparing two types of identifications through photography in the text, this essay examines how he adopted polarized language on photography to create a new literary genre. In doing so, referring to Walter Benjamin’s “unconscious optics” of photography, this essay discusses how Capote used “unconscious impulses” to portray the murderer Perry Smith as a victim of his traumatic past, reconstructing the cruel incidents as an American tragedy.
2 citations
TL;DR: The authors studied the exclusion of enslaved people from the study of the history of the book and theorized a method of reading non-alphabetic marks in the material texts through which we encounter the presence of figures like Primus Fowle.
Abstract: Abstract:From 1756 until his death in the early 1790s, Primus Fowle, an enslaved African American, performed typographical and press work involved the in the publication of The New-Hampshire Gazette and other materials printed at the press owned by Daniel Fowle. With the archive of print Primus Fowle created as its object of study, this essay historicizes the exclusion of enslaved people from the study of the history of the book, and theorizes a method of reading non-alphabetic marks in the material texts through which we encounter the presence of figures like Primus Fowle.
2 citations
2 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines two recent "social media" novels that feature protagonists who excessively use social media technologies: Jarett Kobek's I Hate the Internet: A Useful Novel Against Men, Money, and the Filth of Instagram (2015), and Natasha Stagg's Surveys: A Novel (2016).
Abstract: Abstract:This essay examines two recent “social media” novels that feature protagonists who excessively use social media technologies: Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet: A Useful Novel Against Men, Money, and the Filth of Instagram (2015), and Natasha Stagg’s Surveys: A Novel (2016). Kobek’s novel offers an ironic “morality lesson” about the social and political risks digital media platforms can create for free expression and contemporary literary culture, while Surveys is driven by its protagonist’s obsessive blogging that transforms her into a minor Internet celebrity. Focusing on both texts’ thematic deployment of the Internet, I explore the productive literary anxieties that new media and digitally-mediated expression create for literary culture and authorial self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. To that end, the two novels demonstrate how the mere use of digital communication technologies has exerted great influence on how we understand the affective politics of free expression, literary authorship, and online celebrity.
1 citations
TL;DR: The body of space in Call Me Ishmael, through the book's re-narrativization of space, corresponding typographical or haptographical spacing, and concurrent poetry, discloses an aesthetics of fleshly space surfacing within and against the symbolic economy of call-me-ishmael.
Abstract: Abstract:Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) redirected Melville scholarship, American Studies, and American poetry. Known for historicizing the whaling industry as the American frontier, by exploring Melville’s experience and poetics of “Space,” criticism has largely read Olson’s seminal concept of space negatively, as an empty, receptive and feminized field which Olson’s mythology, geography, and discourse expands over, projects and inscribes; however, the material, corporeal, insurgent form of space found lacking in this context is precisely the topos underlining Call Me Ishmael. By introducing the body of space in Call Me Ishmael, through the book’s re-narrativization of space, corresponding typographical or haptographical spacing, and concurrent poetry, this article discloses an aesthetics of fleshly space surfacing within and against the symbolic economy of Call Me Ishmael.
1 citations
TL;DR: This article examined the memoir of Jeffrey Brace (1742-1827), a black Revolutionary War veteran and emancipated slave who settled in Vermont soon after his manumission in the 1780s.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay examines the memoir of Jeffrey Brace (1742–1827), a black Revolutionary War veteran and emancipated slave who settled in Vermont soon after his manumission in the 1780s. Focusing on Brace’s memoir The Blind African Slave, or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace (1810)—an anti-slavery narrative transcribed by a white lawyer—I imagine the text being in conversation with ideas central to the ideological formation of the early United States. While in Vermont, Brace tried to live as a republican citizen, but he experienced very specific barriers: his children were forced into indentured servitude and his wife subjected to violence while tapping trees for maple sugar. Brace articulates a model of republican belonging that rhetorically and materially stages his freedom. Brace’s text offers possible alternatives to reframing the gendered implications of nineteenth-century African American life narratives.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors turn to the alimentary canal to theorize the fecological body and find that the spatiality inherent to the human body offers a promising way to account for the symbiosis of the human microbiome as a heterotopic influence on embodied identities.
Abstract: Abstract:Responding to Linda Nash’s elegy for the ecological body in Inescapable Ecologies, this essay turns to the alimentary canal to theorize the fecological body. Whereas the ecological body focuses on the body in space, fecological bodies portray the body as space. This essay theorizes such spaces through two short texts from the early twentieth century that are set within bodies: Mark Twain’s “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” and George Chappell’s Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera. These narratives depict the human as simultaneously character and setting in order to decenter the anthropocentricism inherent to bodily openness that only emanates outward rather than inward as well. Informed by a contemporary scatological lens, the spatiality inherent to the fecological body offers a promising way to account for the symbiosis of the human microbiome as a heterotopic influence on embodied identities.
TL;DR: Poe as discussed by the authors used invisible ink to puncture fantasies of democratic conviviality by emphasizing the way secrecy (vis-à-vis invisible ink) allows for the formation of control over black bodies.
Abstract: Abstract:Known today as “invisible ink,” nineteenth-century writers called the chemical concoction that concealed writing by another name—“sympathetic ink.” Readers encountered descriptions of sympathetic ink throughout American magazines, newspapers, and books. Capitalizing on the widespread interest in sympathetic ink, Edgar Allan Poe incorporated the device into his popular 1843 story, “The Gold-Bug,” but not for sociable ends. Poe instead uses invisible ink to puncture fantasies of democratic conviviality by emphasizing the way secrecy (vis-à-vis invisible ink) allows for the formation of control over black bodies. Evoking the longue durée of American political history, “The Gold-Bug” presents a seventeenth-century treasure map written in invisible ink that brings together murder, transatlantic slavery, and white antebellum control over black labor. In Poe’s hands, the fire that makes invisible ink visible simultaneously brings forth recurring temporalities of violence.
TL;DR: The notion that commons are the key to redeeming all that ails us under the regime of modern capital has been examined in this paper, where some misleading elements of that redemptive framing are identified.
Abstract: Abstract:Commons are popping up everywhere—internet sites, professional platforms, neighborhood networks, seed banks, time banks, land trusts—everyone wants to be part of one. This essay embraces the argument that good things can come from commoning. But it questions the notion that commons are the key to redeeming all that ails us under the regime of modern capital. It studies some misleading elements of that redemptive framing before mapping out some corrective lessons offered by the history of actually existing civic and natural resource commons schemes, lessons that concern practice, method and theory.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a concept of post-postmodern, which is based on the assumption that the Freudian unconscious is historically specific and the Lacanian unconscious, modeled on the conventions of cinematic representation, more aptly describes the modernist subject.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay offers a concept of the “post-postmodern” working off of the premise that the unconscious is historically specific. Thus, the Freudian unconscious, modeled according to the conventions of industrial reality, provides its greatest explanatory heft in regard to a realist subject. The Lacanian unconscious, however, modeled on the conventions of cinematic representation, more aptly describes the modernist subject, while an unconscious modeled on televisual principles best serves to understand the postmodern subject. In this context, the post-postmodern unconscious may reflect the synergistic world of new media, where reality is accessed rather than mediated, and the archive, instead of delimiting personal experience, is created by it. Post-postmodern reality, therefore, may characterize an eclectic and sui genris tapestry of rhizomatic connections. This phenomenon is exemplified by the difference between the 1977 Marina Abramovic postmodern performance, “Imponderabilia” and that performance’s incorporation in the post-postmodern MoMA retrospective of her work.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) argue that the writer systematically captures the reader with literary tropes couched in allusions, metaphors, symbols, and attention-seeking cues.
Abstract: Abstract:This paper studies the relationship between the writer and the reader, in particular how the author engages a disengaged and world-weary public imagination in Europe after the First World War. To this end, I have formulated what I call capture theory, with which I will analyze T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). I differentiate between capture and receptive theories, and argue, using cognitive psychology and theories of imagination, how the writer systematically captures the reader with literary tropes couched in allusions, metaphors, symbols, and attention-seeking cues.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors place Junot Díaz's first collection of short stories about immigration and the diasporic experience in conversation with recent scholarship in the field of food studies, and situates the book's treatment of what Kyla Wazana Tompkins terms "eating culture" within theorizations of DÍaz's decolonial imagination.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay places Junot Díaz’s first collection of short stories about immigration and the diasporic experience in conversation with recent scholarship in the field of food studies, and situates the book’s treatment of what Kyla Wazana Tompkins terms “eating culture” within theorizations of Díaz’s decolonial imagination. Moments of eating, digesting, and expelling in Drown critique the epistemic and embodied histories of colonial domination and white supremacy. Resisting the assimilation to which the diasporic subject must presumably aspire, these acts of eating serve as decolonial ruptures. Drown challenges us, in an era of increased mobility and global food consciousness, to consider how foodways pave the paths of the mobile, exposing unequal sociopolitical realities and mapping productive ways of taking these seemingly intractable forces to task.