Showing papers in "Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction in 2000"
TL;DR: Bakhtin's concept has limits: "an examination of the materials on carnival can also recall limitations, defeats, and indifferences generated by carnival's complicitous place in dominant culture" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: On the surface, Katherine Dunn's novel Geek Love explores how a family of freaks who are the grotesque attractions in their own carnival accept themselves and use their status as freaks to leverage themselves to a position of power within the dominant normative society that marginalizes them. Carnival seems to function as Bakhtin says it does. Yet under closer examination, the carnival setting does not break down hierarchies and liberate the society “from the prevailing view of the world, from convention and established truths” (Bakhtin 34). Mary Russo has noted that Bakhtin's concept has limits: “an examination of the materials on carnival can also recall limitations, defeats, and indifferences generated by carnival's complicitous place in dominant culture.
17 citations
TL;DR: A Thousand Acres as discussed by the authors is a novel in which loyal daughters and sons are bound to honored fathers with unbreakable chains of affiliation, and two confident patriarchs, Larry Cook and his neighbor Harold Clark, feel securely in possession of their children and their acreage; trusting in the permanence of both those holdings, the two farmers compete to extend their ownership of tractors, furniture, and other durable goods.
Abstract: A Thousand Acres seems at the start like a novel in which loyal daughters and sons are bound to honored fathers with unbreakable chains of affiliation. Two confident patriarchs, Larry Cook and his neighbor Harold Clark, feel securely in possession of their children and their acreage; trusting in the permanence of both those holdings, the two farmers compete to extend their ownership of tractors, furniture, and other durable goods. Harold's prodigal son, Jess, returns home in May 1979, having been away since 1966 when he fled the draft and the Vietnam War. Larry's two eldest daughters, Ginny and Rose, live near him, care for him, and cook his meals; his youngest, Caroline, visits frequently from Des Moines.
13 citations
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TL;DR: The main difference between a tragic hero and a clown is that the hero, after taking a pratfall, does not get up again this paper, and therefore, measured in pratfalls, you get more for your money from a clown than from a hero.
Abstract: The main difference between a tragic hero and a clown is that the hero, after taking a pratfall, does not get up again. Therefore, measured in pratfalls, you get more for your money from a clown than from a hero, though pratfall counts are not the preferred way to measure the history and define the destiny of a nation. (Is this a piece being written on the occasion of the death of a President? It is.)
9 citations
TL;DR: Coover's The Public Burning as discussed by the authors was published in time of the 1976 Bicentennial of the United States, but it was delayed by two disruptive years of personal and legal infighting after the book was finished.
Abstract: Had it not been for two disruptive years of personal and legal infighting after the book was finished, Robert Coover's big novel The Public Burning could have been published in time for the 1976 Bicentennial. Those difficult times for the author, as well as the book's odyssey from the first publisher to lawyers and on to different publishers and their legal consultants, are poignantly summed up by William H. Gass in his introduction to the 1998 reissue of the novel by Grove Press.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the relationship between women and history and between femininity and repression from a woman-centered perspective using the conditions Julia Kristeva calls abjection and estrangement.
Abstract: Women writers have a penchant for burning down paternal houses that do not offer their female protagonists satisfactory homes.1 In Daughters of the House, Michele Roberts prefers to transform rather than destroy the house in which her two main female characters reside, a metaphor for the patriarchal symbolic order,2 and she attempts this through an exploration of the conditions Julia Kristeva calls abjection and estrangement. Roger Luckhurst's recent reading of Daughters of the House points to the usefulness of psychoanalytic insights in reading Roberts's text. His essay, like mine, focuses on the relationship between memory and history; but whereas Luckhurst uses theories of mourning and melancholia to discuss repressed histories, I want to use Kristeva's theories of abjection and estrangement to explore the relationship between women and history and between femininity and repression from a woman-centered perspective.
7 citations
TL;DR: The concept of escape is a troubled one, and the unease with which it is approached suggests that the twentieth century's need for and its repudiation of this concept are hopelessly entwined as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The concept of escape is a troubled one, and the unease with which it is approached suggests that the twentieth century's need for and its repudiation of this concept are hopelessly entwined. The very definitions of the term and its cousin, escapism, are ambivalent, reflecting both the immediate dismissal of the concepts and the underlying longing for them. “Escape” has become a daily feature of Western twentieth-century life as evidenced by the way the media trade on the concept in selling holidays, reading material, even perfume. Sociologists Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor point out, “Indeed, we are increasingly surrounded by an ideology which tries to transform every activity into a potential escape. The mundane world is saturated with escape messages” (154).
6 citations
TL;DR: Lee Smith as mentioned in this paper has explored aspects of Southern life, history, and culture, its oral traditions, sacred and secular music, class divisions and race relations, mountain customs, Appalachian folklore, and the spiritual life and beliefs of white Southern fundamentalist churches.
Abstract: Lee Smith recently commented, “In a way my writing is a lifelong search for belief. I have always been particularly interested in expressions of religious ecstasy, and in those moments when we are most truly ‘out of ourselves’ and experience the Spirit directly” (“Notes,” Saving). In more than ten novels and short story collections, Smith has explored aspects of Southern life, history, and culture—its oral traditions, sacred and secular music, class divisions and race relations, mountain customs, Appalachian folklore, and the spiritual life and beliefs of white Southern fundamentalist churches.1 Some of her characters, like Ivy Rowe in Fair and Tender Ladies, resist the salvation offered by the church. Others, like country star Katy Cochran in The Devil's Dream, are “saved” and realize they have been “starving for God's love” all their lives (295).
6 citations
TL;DR: The Texas cowboy was evolved, a fearless rider, a workman of sublime self-confidence, unequaled in the technique and tricks of cowpunching, the most accurate on the trigger and the last to leave untasted the glass which the bartender silently refilled as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: “Fighting; his way with knife and gun,” the Texas cowboy was evolved, a fearless rider, a workman of sublime self-confidence, unequaled in the technique and tricks of “cowpunching,” the most accurate on the trigger and the last to leave untasted the glass which the bartender silently refilled. When the northern trails became an institution the Texan was trail-boss and straw-boss; and as boss he was a dictator. As an underling he was not so successful in the north; with a Yankee boss, or worse yet an Englishman, he cherished a studied disregard for authority, and an assured satisfaction in the superiority of is own ways.
5 citations
TL;DR: The Bluest Eye as mentioned in this paper is a first novel that is described as a kind of narratological compendium, with three different versions of its epigraphic "master" text, several lines drawn from an elementary school primer.
Abstract: The Bluest Eye represents a remarkable undertaking, especially for a first novel. In terms of formal features, it might be described as a kind of narratological compendium. For one thing, the novel incorporates several different forms of textuality. It opens with three different versions of its epigraphic “master” text, several lines drawn from an elementary school primer. That is followed by an italicized “overture,” introducing the primary narrator, Claudia MacTeer, and the dominant motifs of the work—victimization and its causes: It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds. Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame. (5)
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors examine how Wideman places African American subjectivity in the context of a broad field of social relations that are determined quite as often by gender, class, or intergenerational or professional interests and antagonisms as by race.
Abstract: Many of John Edgar Wideman's rich fictions scout the borderlands of African American collective identity, those places where blacks question and confute the hateful stereotypes that hegemonic white culture has written for them. At the same time, Wideman's residence for all of his adult life in the interracial middle-ground—the “goddamned middle” as it is called in Philadelphia Fire—has obviously made him sensitive to many issues that go beyond race, even if questions of race first triggered his awareness (71).1 In this essay, I examine how, in Philadelphia Fire, Wideman places African American subjectivity in the context of a broad field of social relations that are determined quite as often by gender, class, or intergenerational or professional interests and antagonisms as by race.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the relation of events to one another in time need not be seen in terms of linear cause and effect; instead, she tells him, “It all goes along together. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don't know…” (Pynchon 159).
Abstract: At one point in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Leni Pokier tells her husband that the relation of events to one another in time need not be seen in terms of linear cause and effect; instead, she tells him, “It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don't know…” (Pynchon 159). Though her husband fails to appreciate her insight, Leni's intuition of an alternate, metaphorical paradigm for historical process is a revisioning of history—one to which Pynchon repeatedly returns in Gravity's Rainbow and one, I will argue in this essay, that other postmodernist novelists also embed in their fiction.
TL;DR: In this article, we find ourselves at the Martin Beck Theater in Manhattan, not far from the Death Pageant in Times Square, early on the evening of Friday, June 19, 1953, watching a lonely and embittered Arthur Miller watch his play The Crucible (1953).
Abstract: At one blatantly metafictional moment in Robert Coover's The Public Burning, we find ourselves at the Martin Beck Theater in Manhattan, not far from the Death Pageant in Times Square, early on the evening of Friday, June 19, 1953, watching a lonely and embittered Arthur Miller watch his play The Crucible (1953). to which Richard Nixon had that morning contemplated taking his wife. He decided against it because he “couldn't risk giving it any kind of official sanction, and besides, Edgar [Hoover] was probably photographing the audience for his files” (202).
TL;DR: The Lost in the Funhouse as mentioned in this paper is a book in which language and literature are explicitly discussed, and it explores the concepts of facticity and transcendence, existence and essence, as well as ego and spontaneity.
Abstract: Lost in the Funhouse is a book in which language and literature are explicitly discussed. Many critics have thoroughly examined it on those grounds, but they have failed to attend to the underlying themes in the book. Like Barth's early novels, Sartrean ideas about consciousness are the theme of Lost in the Funhouse. It considers the nothingness of consciousness, as well as the resulting impossibility of being sincere or explaining an act. It explores the concepts of facticity and transcendence, existence and essence, as well as ego and spontaneity. Without having those concepts in mind, I believe one misses much in a reading of this book.
TL;DR: Though his eyes are closed, his senses withdrawn, for one vivid moment he sees himself at a distance in the Fairy's arms […] What he sees up there is a decrepit misshapen creature, neither man nor puppet, entangled in blue hair and lying in an unhinged sprawl in the embrace of a monstrous being.
Abstract: Though his eyes are closed, his senses withdrawn, for one vivid moment he sees himself at a distance in the Fairy's arms […] What he sees up there is a decrepit misshapen creature, neither man nor puppet, entangled in blue hair and lying in an unhinged sprawl in the embrace of a monstrous being […] grotesque Hideous Beautiful […] Somewhere, out on the surface, distant now as his forgotten life, fingers dance like children at play and soft lips kiss the ancient hurts away (Pinocchio in Venice 329-30)
TL;DR: The best of Malamud's stories remain continual surprises that compel rereading for their sheer fictional resourcefulness as discussed by the authors, and the best of them remain continual surprise that compel reading for their remarkable staying power.
Abstract: Bernard Malamud's stories possess uncommon staying power. Many are still as vivid as when we first encountered them; the best of them remain continual surprises that compel rereading for their sheer fictional resourcefulness. Like Hawthorne, Malamud achieved, as Robert Alter expresses it, “a whole distinctive style of imagination and, to a lesser degree, a distinctive technique of fiction, as well” (30). Such a combination ineluctably entices us to new readings and new insights. In recent years, for example, no character in the Malamudian canon has enjoyed closer scrutiny than Pinye Salzman, a figure Sidney Richman found almost “too gross to be believed” (119) and Theodore Solotaroff regarded as one of Malamud's “semi-hallucinatory demons” (241).
TL;DR: Coover and McCaffery as discussed by the authors recall where they were on the night of June 19th. 1953, which is the night the Rosenbergs were executed, and what sort of an impact had the trial had on them at that point.
Abstract: Larry McCaffery (LM): Do you recall where you were on the night of June 19th. 1953—which is to say, the night the Rosenbergs were executed? What sort of an impact had the trial had on you at that point? Robert Coover (RC): I was in Nebraska. It was the summer after university graduation, and I was doing odd jobs, waiting to be taken into the Navy, those being Korean War days. One of those jobs was driving a delivery truck for my Dad's newspaper through the back country; it was a small-town newspaper, and I was delivering it to even smaller towns—and, unreliable as it was, it was my main source of news.
TL;DR: The Half-A-Man as discussed by the authors is a book by Mary White Ovington called Half a Man that describes the changes that would happen to make a “Thing” into an “I Am.”
Abstract: Books titles tell the story. The original subtitle for Uncle Tom's Cabin was “The Man Who Was a Thing.” In 1910 appeared a book by Mary White Ovington called Half a Man. Over one hundred years after the appearance of the Stowe book, The Man Who Cried I Am, by John A. Williams, was published. Quickskill thought of all of the changes that would happen to make a “Thing” into an “I Am.” Tons of paper. An Atlantic of blood. Repressed energy of anger that would form enough sun to light a solar system. A burnt-out black hole. A cosmic slave hole.
TL;DR: The Public Burning as mentioned in this paper is a narrative of the writing and publishing of The Public Burning, taken from logs and letters of the time, with a focus on the book's own story, its context there more by implication than description.
Abstract: This is a narrative of the writing and publishing of The Public Burning, taken from logs and letters of the time. Much has been omitted from this sizable chunk of my life that might be of autobiographical curiosity (family, friends, festivities, most reading and travel experiences, writerly and teacherly exchanges, engagement with contemporary art and music, film and photography, and other hobbies and passions, all the distractions, in short, of the ordinary life) in order to focus on the book's own story, its context there more by implication than description.
TL;DR: Gilbert and Gubar as mentioned in this paper argued that the anxiety of influence that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary "anxiety of authorship", a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a "precursor" the act of writing will isolate or destroy her.
Abstract: The nature of literary influence among women authors has long been a fruitful topic of discussion in feminist scholarship. Perhaps the most influential work on the subject remains Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. Outwardly rejecting, but in many respects attempting to complement, the work of Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, Gilbert and Gubar contend that “‘the anxiety of influence’ that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary ‘anxiety of authorship’—a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writing will isolate or destroy her” (48-49).
TL;DR: The Good Negress, A. J. Verdelle's choice of title for her first novel, implies a certain character type, specifically, the obedient female slave.
Abstract: The Good Negress, A. J. Verdelle's choice of title for her first novel, implies a certain character type—specifically, the obedient female slave. Deneese's joy in cleaning and the novel's setting in 1960s Detroit problematize any limited view of the novel as an oppressive statement about contemporary enslavement. I believe Verdelle expects her readers to keep the slavery tradition in mind throughout the novel, and I propose that in form and content the novel both depends on and undermines the literary tradition of the slave narrative.
TL;DR: For African Americans, still seeking to articulate a self-defined subjectivity within and against a sociohistorical context of marginalization and silencing, there are fundamental issues at stake as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The epigraph to this essay points in the direction of critically hazardous terrain. Among other things, it implicitly asks us to consider the part played by racial identity in the shaping of a work of fiction. Is a white writer capable of offering a valid representation of black life, or can only the cultural insider speak adequately of that culture? To what extent does the color of one's skin circumscribe the range of one's imagination? Such questions lead into some of the most intense debates in recent American cultural politics. For African Americans, still seeking to articulate a self-defined subjectivity within and against a sociohistorical context of marginalization and silencing, there are fundamental issues at stake—issues of authenticity, authority, and the ethics of appropriation.
TL;DR: Paco's Story 49 as mentioned in this paper is known only as the anonymous sole survivor of the fire base Harriette massacre, and all who try to help him also try to learn his name.
Abstract: Long after his rescue at Fire Base Harriette, Larry Heinemann's Paco is known only as the anonymous sole survivor—the “famous [… ] nameless wounded man from Alpha Company's massacre” (Paco's Story 49). All who try to help him also try to learn his name. “‘Who are you? What happened here?’” asks Jigs, the Bravo Company medic who first finds Paco; then more insistently, “‘Who are you? What the fuck happened?’” (25). These fundamental questions are echoed by a second rescuer on the medevac helicopter—“‘Who are you, Jack? What's your name? What happened there?’”—and then more gently by Paco's hospital nurse who finally receives a response.
TL;DR: Although in a New York Times Book Review interview Rachel Ingalls has denied that her 1982 novel Mrs. Caliban echoes The Tempest, the parallels between the two works are too compelling to resist as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Although in a New York Times Book Review interview Rachel Ingalls has denied that her 1982 novel Mrs. Caliban echoes The Tempest, the parallels between the two works are too compelling to resist (Miller 7).' Ingalls's text, by intimately connecting its monster with its female protagonist, comments on the inequalities that underlie and pervade Shakespeare's text. But Mrs. Caliban is also distinctly a late-twentieth-century creation that continually questions its own premises. Is its monster real? The novel refuses to answer.2
TL;DR: Coover's encyclopedic critique of McCarthyism in The Public Burning uses stage metaphors to explore the political process building up to the June 1953 executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
Abstract: Robert Coover's encyclopedic critique of McCarthyism in The Public Burning uses stage metaphors to explore the political process building up to the June 1953 executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Each character plays a role that has been carefully scripted by directors Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. President Eisenhower repeatedly utters: “My only concern is in the area of statecraft. […] The effect of the action” (230 and elsewhere, emphasis Coover's). Two major artistic decisions foreground Coover's statecraft as stagecraft: first, his choice to present the executions as an open public spectacle in Times Square and second, his use of Disney to emphasize by exaggeration the staged nature of the trials and executions.
TL;DR: Even without the reminding analog of the recent, ritualized executive pillorying, Robert Coover's The Public Burning still resonates like a venerable B-52 pressed into service.
Abstract: Even without the reminding analog of the recent, ritualized executive pillorying, Robert Coover's The Public Burning still resonates like a venerable B-52 pressed into service. It still comes loaded with chaos and destructiveness, with a version of bottled lightning not usually available in stores—nor even over toll-free phone numbers or on the Internet. Indeed, even after the latter-day “public burning” cum impeachment of the current American president, there is still something disjunctive, unintegratable, and disturbing about Coover's world view, about his novel's development of character, about its importations from fantasy, about its resolution or pseudoresolution.
TL;DR: Mason's In Country as discussed by the authors presents a surface rarely disturbed by signs of its coded structure; the characters and the world they inhabit seem real; the emotional and physical problems they face familiar.
Abstract: Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country presents a surface rarely disturbed by signs of its coded structure. The characters and the world they inhabit seem real; the emotional and physical problems they face familiar. Much of the commentary on the novel, in fact, focuses almost exclusively on the novel's characters—Sam and Emmett particularly—as if they were real people whose lives continue beyond the novel. Sam perhaps forgets about the wounded and impotent vet Tom and advances toward her college degree at the University of Kentucky. Emmett likely goes on to live a happier life while flipping burgers at Burger King rather than flipping out during flashbacks to his Vietnam experience.
TL;DR: The surest bet in the 1996 Republican primary was Richard Nixon as discussed by the authors, and the odds were in his favor, his legacy alive and well in a trio of candidates: former Nixon White House aide Lamar Alexander, former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, and the eventual nominee himself.
Abstract: The surest bet in the 1996 Republican primary was Richard Nixon. The odds were in his favor, his legacy alive and well in a trio of candidates: former Nixon White House aide Lamar Alexander, former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, and the eventual nominee himself, former Nixon Senator-of-choice Robert Dole. Even with protege Pete Wilson having dropped out of the race early on, Nixon was a tangible presence in the 1996 Republican scene. The irony is hard to miss: Nixon is more relevant posthumously than he was during the last two decades of his life. Following the indignity of Watergate, he began a campaign to re-create his own persona through interviews and books (Leaders, In the Arena, Seize the Moment), but the process was not complete until his death.
TL;DR: The authors argue that even if an author's political stance seems well defined, it is difficult to understand how a writer makes meaning rendering difficult any deep understanding of a text's political content.
Abstract: As Judith Fetterley asserts, “Literature is political” (xi). Today it seems apparent to many critics that a body of words is not isolated but relates to the larger culture. However, politics in fiction is not easily characterized. Even if an author's political stance seems well defined, I argue that how a writer makes meaning renders difficult any deep understanding of a text's political content. Politics exists thematically in a text, but it also is deeply embedded in language. The claim that literature is political seems to indicate that what we read makes a difference in our lives, even though attempts to promote a literary canon of culturally relevant works have been problematic.
TL;DR: The authors discuss the relationship between the private activity of writing and the public process by which books are marketed and consumed in Martin Amis's novel The Information and discuss those questions in relation to both the novel itself and the pre- and postpublication controversy surrounding it.
Abstract: Martin Amis's novel The Information raises significant questions about the production and consumption of literature and the conditions of contemporary authorship. In this article, I discuss those questions in relation to both the novel itself and the pre- and postpublication controversy surrounding it- not because I share the intentionalist assumptions of much of the media discussion of that controversy but because the relationship between the private activity of writing and the public process by which books are marketed and consumed is itself one of the novel's main themes.
TL;DR: This paper pointed out that a central feature of much self-reflexive fiction that has been habitually overlooked is its fundamentally comic outlook, which is a characteristic of post-modernism.
Abstract: Although there has been much commentary about the mode of recent American fiction most frequently called “metafiction,” almost all criticism and scholarly research have focused on what are taken to be the “serious” implications of such fiction. “Disjunctions” of various sorts — aesthetic, epistemological, political — have been described and duly assigned their place among the similarly self-conscious practices characteristic of the broader construct of postmodernism. There may indeed be much truth in this line of inquiry (I pursued it in my own doctoral dissertation), but a central feature of much self-reflexive fiction that has been habitually overlooked is its fundamentally comic outlook.