Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2023"
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TL;DR: This paper explored the body as a site of mediation in the poems of Blackacre, which showed how the supposedly inherent reproductivity of women speakers' bodies mediates their use of poetic language.
Abstract: Abstract:Poiesis, or the process by which something comes into being, is gendered, particularly when it pertains to writing poetry. The fraught connection between the language of creation and embodiment is thrown into sharp relief by Monica Youn’s poetry collection Blackacre (2016), which deals with pregnancy, reproduction, and infertility. This article explores the body as a site of mediation in the poems of Blackacre, which shows how the supposedly inherent reproductivity of women speakers’ bodies mediates their use of poetic language, even—or especially—when the poetry is about the absence of that reproductivity. The figure of the hand, in place of the more gendered womb, manifests the relationship between sensing bodies and written text. Tracing this figure through Blackacre, I demonstrate how an understanding that mediation is creative and productive reveals the source of gendered poietic anxiety: an uncomfortable metonymy between women’s bodies and the language of creation.
TL;DR: In this paper , two entwined cases are explored: Earl Derr Biggers's series of Charlie Chan detective novels of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Henry Chang's five-novel series of Jack Yu novels of early twenty-first century.
Abstract: Abstract:“Minor forms” of literature (in this case the detective story) are far from unimportant to literary history. Gilles DeLeuze and Félix Guattari show us in their treatment of Franz Kafka as a writer with a complex relationship to literature both major and minor that writers who conceive of themselves as minority voices take on an echo chamber of obligations that complicate their work. When the work they intend to produce is also perceived to be “minor” (e.g. the detective novel), echoes multiply. Two entwined cases are explored here: Earl Derr Biggers’s series of Charlie Chan detective novels of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Henry Chang’s five-novel series of Jack Yu novels of the early twenty-first century. Issues of ethnicity, cultural expropriation, exilic melancholy enrich and transform their works in a “minor form.”
TL;DR: DeLillo's Libra as mentioned in this paper is a fictionalization of the events leading up to the Kennedy assassination that considers the telos of conspiracy theory in a fictional context, using conspiracy theory as a kind of prismatic heuristic.
Abstract: Abstract:Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) is a fictionalization of the events leading up to the Kennedy assassination that considers the telos of conspiracy theory in a fictional context. DeLillo uses the Kennedy assassination to animate epistemological questions that both destabilize and seek to restore notions of agency, authority, intentionality and collectivity, using conspiracy theory as a kind of prismatic heuristic. DeLillo engages these various concepts under the sign of a conspiracy aesthetic, that is, an aesthetic that deploys the unverifiable precepts of conspiracy theory as if they were real. My treatment ultimately considers the political/ethical valences of fictional narratives that produce coherence out of the chaos of traumatic crisis-events in order to conceptualize how DeLillo's novel offers a reparative gesture that is, paradoxically, grounded in paranoia.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors argue that Nella Larsen's radical potential is sustained by and past the novel's end, through the textually unconfirmed nature of her presumed death and its violation of the physical laws Larsen employs as symbols.
Abstract: Abstract:In the first queer and trans phenomenological reading of Nella Larsen's Passing, I argue that Clare's radical potential is sustained by and past the novel's end. I make this argument through two central interventions: the theorization of a new amalgamated analytic of instability, and a close reading of Passing for the radical politics this amalgamation makes visible. I read Clare's passage through the window as sustaining her radical potential through the textually unconfirmed nature of her presumed death and its violation of the physical laws Larsen employs as symbols.
TL;DR: Chabon's novel Telegraph Avenue (2012) offers a feel-good narrative of interracial male sociability by way of its fictional Brokeland Records store as discussed by the authors , yet at the same time, the novel purposefully evokes the dire economic consequences of America's racialized history in cultural fields as diverse as midcentury urban redevelopment and the American music industry.
Abstract: Abstract:Michael Chabon’s novel Telegraph Avenue (2012) offers a feel-good narrative of interracial male sociability by way of its fictional Brokeland Records store. Yet at the same time, the novel purposefully evokes the dire economic consequences of America’s racialized history in cultural fields as diverse as midcentury urban redevelopment and the American music industry. Ultimately, however, the novel dodges the gnawing fact that its privileged interracial bonhomie avoids the harder truths of American racial and economic history. In gesturing toward but finally not grappling overtly with the devastating economic effects of American racial policy, Telegraph Avenue is symptomatic of a certain strain of American ideology that regularly reduces racism to a problem to be solved simply via diversity rather than through economic justice.
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TL;DR: The authors argue that the romantic and gothic elements of Tourgée's fiction are inconsistent with his political goals, and argue that it is indeed those elements that challenge readers to see the workings of ideology in daily life.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay explores the potential political power of Albion Tourgée's 1881 novel A Royal Gentleman. Despite longstanding critical assessments that the romantic and gothic elements of Tourgée's fiction are inconsistent with his political goals, I argue that it is indeed those elements that challenge readers to see the workings of ideology in daily life. Borrowing from a Lacanian film theory paradigm developed by Todd McGowan, I demonstrate that A Royal Gentleman encourages readers to see that the world slavery has made is a construction the novel's characters normalize through fantasy. I also consider how the novel's gothic elements disrupt readerly expectations and thus, again, call attention to ideological beliefs as constructions. Indeed, with its use of romantic excess, A Royal Gentleman may avoid some of the limitations that both the literary deployment of sympathy and realism brought to the postbellum fight for racial equality.
TL;DR: In Atlas Shrugged as mentioned in this paper , Taggart's "consubstantial" union with Galt legitimizes both predatory capitalism and the leadership principle, and a hyper-Augustinian detachment from the Christian "world" that precedes their advent permits maximum solipsism and xenophobia.
Abstract: Abstract:Academic criticism of Atlas Shrugged has focused on Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and issues of gender; these studies have not yet accounted for the novel's appeal to seemingly antithetical audiences—Christians, anarchists, and arguably fascistic members of the alt-right. Redefinitions of Christianity in the work of Derrida and Nancy can account for this heterogeneity by emphasizing its suspended referent, in and beyond apocalypse and revelation. A hyper-Augustinian detachment from the Christian "world" that precedes their advent permits maximum solipsism and xenophobia, an orientation made possible by the acknowledgement of only one, messianic other. Taggart's "consubstantial" union with Galt legitimizes both predatory capitalism and the leadership principle. For Nancy, especially, such a potential was always inherent in Christianity.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors examine how two recent Shakespeare novels exemplify a group of recent fiction that explores how women's selves form in relation to Shakespeare and argue that a "middlebrow feminism" emerges in Susan Fraser King's Lady Macbeth (2008) and Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters (2011).
Abstract: Abstract:This essay examines how two recent Shakespeare novels exemplify a group of recent fiction that explores how women’s selves form in relation to Shakespeare. I argue that a “middlebrow feminism” emerges in Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008) and Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011) as their female protagonists both rely on and react against Shakespeare to shape their identities. Working in tandem with their paratextual promotional apparatus, the novels imply that women readers possess a similar ambivalence toward Shakespeare. I suggest that this fiction redefines for a new era an American middlebrow tradition that has long construed the reading of Shakespeare as a vehicle for self-education, improvement, and advancement. In the essay’s conclusion, I investigate the feminist possibilities and limitations of the identities, both individual and collective, that women’s Shakespeare novels cultivate.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors argue for the importance of the American West to both life and art, focusing mainly on the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s but also looking ahead to the work Merrill would do in the future and in which the West would continue to play an important role.
Abstract: Abstract:Just as Merrill's previous volume, The Fire Screen, was pervaded by Greece, Braving the Elements is pervaded by the American West, a region generally not thought much of in connection to either Merrill's life or his art. In this essay I argue for the importance of that region to both, focusing mainly on the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s but also looking ahead to the work Merrill would do in the future and in which the West would continue to play an important role, most notably The Book of Ephraim in particular and The Changing Light at Sandover in general, poems the central concerns of which, from climate change to atomic weapons research, are concerns that continue to affect the West to this day.
TL;DR: In this paper , a look back at a hundred-year-old play, Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, alongside its production and reception histories, and in the broader context of early twentieth-century efforts by African American writers to reclaim and rewrite their past.
Abstract: Abstract:It’s common in both academic and popular discourse to think of a strong sense of identity as rooted in one’s relationship to a personal and collective past, but what are the pitfalls of this presumption, especially when it comes to the relevance of the Black past for Black (and for white) Americans? This article pursues this question by way of a look back at a hundred-year-old play, Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, alongside its production and reception histories, and in the broader context of early twentieth-century efforts by African American writers to reclaim and rewrite their past. Reading the play in these contexts enables a critique of the contemporary impulse to cordon off the Black past as morally relevant only for Black Americans as well as a discovery of the possibilities and limits of shared recognition and responsibility for that past.