Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2003"

Utopia Latina: The Ordinary Seaman in Extraordinary Times

Abstract: As a discipline, Latino Studies bases its claim to significance on the imminent transformation of Latinos into the "majority minority" in the United States: a claim that is proleptic in nature, yet untheorized as such. This essay seeks to contribute to a philosophy of Latino history by exploring the phenomenon of "anticipatory consciousness," as described by Bloch and Benjamin, in Francisco Goldman's 1997 novel The Ordinary Seaman, pointing out its links to works by Melville and Jose Marti.

White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby

Abstract: This essay argues that The Great Gatsby may be fruitfully read against African American models of identity formation of the late teens and Twenties. Like Gatsby, passing and Americanization fiction render racial and national identity theatrical. Gatsby's parties, given minimal attention in Fitzgerald scholarship, miniaturize the process of identity formation that characterizes the novel as a whole. Theatrical modes of identity formation are not limited to the novel's parvenus, however: showing how even the novel's elite are fully implicated in the culture of imitation, Fitzgerald refutes the possibility of any identity as "the real thing."

Harlem's Queer Dandy: African-American Modernism and the Artifice of Blackness

Abstract: Investigating the figure of the queer black dandy in the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance, this article argues that African American modernists such as Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent revise nineteenth-century, European models of dandyism and decadence in order to critique the cult of authenticity surrounding the cultural construction of blackness. Their rebellion against the commodification of black identity gives birth to a new aesthetic that combines the naturalized simplicity and vigor of primitivism with the artifice of decadenceÐmaking legible a distinctly African American incarnation of the new forms of desire, identity, and community emerging in modern, urban culture.

Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy's Border Fiction

Abstract: Cormac McCarthy's novels are usually seen as belonging to one of two longstanding regionalist literary traditions, Southern Gothic or the Western. This essay considers McCarthy's border fiction instead as part of an emergent borderlands discourse that is at once bilingual, multicultural, and revisionist. Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses represent key moments in the history of the Southwest region in which they are set; both novels in effect remember the dis(re)membered bodies lost in the violent struggle over territory. McCarthy's border fiction challenges provincial models of US literary history and ought to be reconsidered within postnationalist American studies.

Going Home: Hemingway, Primitivism, and Identity

Abstract: This article explores Hemingway's fascination with primitivism, specifically his cross-cultural and cross-racial identification with Native Americans and Africans. The primitive serves as a space of self-creation and exploration for Hemingway from his youthful association of the primitive with (re)creation and transgression to its role as a figurative home amidst the alienation of modern culture. Focusing on his African safaris, the article suggests that while his interest in primitivism reveals Hemingway's longing for authenticity and origins, his racechanges and intimate identification with the primitive ultimately create an awareness of the hybridity and performativity of identity.

The Melting Pot That Boiled Over: Racial Fetishism and the Lingua Franca of Jack Kerouac's Fiction

Abstract: The racechanges in Jack Kerouac's fiction originate in racial fetishism. Kerouac's arrested Oedipal narratives and his related myth of Native Canadian ancestry lead to ambivalent identifications with black subjects, who exhibit characteristics that more properly belong to Kerouac's mother. These identifications exhibit a fetishistic play of presence and absence. Accordingly, Kerouac's racechanges are unstable formations designed to consolidate an ethnic minority writer's American national identity, his autochthonous link to a gendered landscape and his volatile sexuality. When Kerouac's fiction is read in "translation," his joual mother-tongue dramatises a psychosexual crisis in national belonging.

Fictions of the Trans-American Imaginary

Abstract: In a variety of discursive and material forms, artists, activists and cultural critics are in the process of documenting a shift in latetwentieth-century notions of what constitutes a nation, a people, and even subjectivity itself. This shift has important implications for the categories and frameworks through which literary scholars are approaching the study of modern fiction. In contrast to former paradigms by which national identity and sovereignty have been understood in the United States, emerging forms of study variously organized around notions of the \"new\" or \"post-nationalist\" offer strikingly different conceptions. Eschewing notions such as consensus, uniqueness, or even subversion in the construction of the national subject that have often guided American literary historiography, the essays collected in this special issue of MFS participate in the production of this alternative by articulating the idea of the transnational imaginary as a guiding concept. The trans-American imaginary is \"transnational\" to the degree that \"American\" fiction must be seen anew as a heterogeneous grouping of overlapping but distinct discourses that refer to the US in relation to a variety of national entities. Even in the earliest periods of US national formation in the early nineteenth century, American literary discourses were already produced by a large variety of popular forms, genres, styles, and modes uneasily grafted together to form symbols of plurality and respresentativeness. Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, for example, \"sought in their central texts to incorporate as many different popular images as possible and to re-

Whispers of norbury: sir arthur conan doyle and the modernist crisis of racial (un) detection

Abstract: This study examines Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the \"Superman\" detective Sherlock Holmes, and his anxieties of race detection. Experiencing a racial crisis upon meeting Henry Highland Garnet, a former African American abolitionist, I argue that Doyle's failure and anxiety in detecting race and his consequent popularization of detective fiction (which, significantly, utilizes an \"exact science\" of detection) reveal that the emergence of the detective fiction genre is in direct response to the threat of racial passing. This is further evidenced through \"The Yellow Face,\" a story of race passing in which Holmes is confronted with one of his rare cases of failed detection. As a result, I show that the fear of \"racechange\" witnessed in both Doyle's life and fiction emphasizes that one cannot look at the politics of passing without a wider examination into the genre of detection.

Which America Is Ours? Martí’s “Truth” and the Foundations of “American Literature”

Abstract: According to many critics of affirmative action and curricular reform, minorities have made overwhelming gains in higher education and completely taken over English departments1 The reconfigured canon, as demonstrated by the new “American literature” anthologies, surely demonstrates for these critics that inequality and discrimination are things of the past and that we should get back to just reading texts as texts rather than continuing to politicize education Such criticisms of teaching “American literature” politically from a critical, multicultural perspective rely on a false and inaccurate assessment of the current state of US universities, something of which the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reminded me In an article on affirmative action, the Chronicle notes that, “[t] aken together, African-American, Hispanic, and American Indian scholars represent only 8% of the full-time faculty nationwide And while 5% of professors are African American, about half of them work at historically black institutions The proportion of black faculty members at predominantly white universities— 23%—is virtually the same as it was 20 years ago” (Wilson, A10) Given that “Hispanics” make up 125% of the total US population and that blacks are 123%, our representation on university faculties is appallingly low (US Bureau of the Census, 3)2 Furthermore, although there were 61,000 “Hispanics” with doctoral degrees in the United States in 2000 (Newburger and Curry, 25),3 there were well over 350,000 “Hispanics” incarcerated in the United States4

The Epistemology of Slave Conspiracy

Abstract: This essay envisions an American literary history that would allow for a comparative study of race, slavery, and nation. Comparing two 19th century novels, one Cuban and one US, that draw on a 1844 Cuban slave uprising, Gillman examines the political and cultural work slave revolts do in different national contexts. The essay also discusses the reception of Helen Hunt Jackson and Harriet Beecher Stowe by the Latin American intellectuals Jose Marti and Roberto Fernandez Retamar, a revisioning that transforms these novelist from examples of an undervalued literature of women's sentimental reform to central texts of Our American literature.

Diaspora Cruises: Queer Black Proletarianism in Claude McKay's A Long Way from Home

Abstract: My analysis of A Long Way from Home (1937) subjects the memoir's closeted narrative to a poem collected in one of McKay's first publications, Constab Ballads (1912) as well as passages from his novel Home to Harlem (1928). A Long Way from Home takes steps to suppress its queer voice and proletarian presence. Though shadowy, such imprints may be traced-despite McKay's care in suppressing the entangled presences of "the love that dare not speak its name" and his onetime persistent dedication to Communism.

That "Ugly Word": Miscegenation and the Novel in Preapartheid South Africa

Abstract: This essay outlines the part played by miscegenation (crossracial sex) in the elaboration of racial identity in South Africa before 1948. It explores representations of miscegenation, and links between miscegenation and \"racechange\", in South African English novels of this period, including Perceval Gibbon's Souls in Bondage and Margaret Harding, William Plomer's Turbott Wolfe, Peter Abrahams's The Path of Thunder, and particularly Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's Stepchildren. It reads these novels as developing a stock theme in South African literature, and as exemplary of the interplay between history, ethics, and aesthetics in the genre of the novel.

From Modernity's Detection to Modernist Detectives: Narrative Vision in the Work of Allan Pinkerton and Dashiell Hammett

Abstract: Allan Pinkerton was both the architect of the first national detective agency and author of a series of extremely successful post-Civil War memoirs narrating the activities of his agency. After working as a Pinkerton Agent for almost seven years, Dashiell Hammett consciously intervened on the narrative tradition of Allan Pinkerton with a series of detective fictions critical of the detective's visual authority. Considered together, the work of Pinkerton and Hammett enact a visual and epistemological drama fundamental to the emergence of modernism in America.

Doing things with ethics: beloved, sula, and the reading of judgment

Abstract: Recent critical history has seen renewed interest in theorizing the ethics attributed to literature. What such interests mean for reading drives the argument of this essay, which contends that an ethics of literature emerges out of the reading problems posed by Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula. Centered on protagonists whose narratives defy communal as well as literary convention, Beloved and Sula compel readings insistent in their efforts to delineate resolution. Yet in their ceaseless provocation of reading both novels demand that judgments be made even as they suspend the determination of such judgments.

Slave Cyborgs and the Black Infovirus: Ishmael Reed's Cybernetic Aesthetics

Abstract: ion of African-American slave subjectivity. Along with the dehumanization of Africans, antebellum discourses simultaneously infantalized slaves, veiling the plantation constellations of power with sentiment. Swille's deployment of the rhetoric of slavery as domesticity punctuates much of the irony surrounding the character of Uncle Robin, whose pervasive control in the plantation's operation is also made invisible through paternalistic rhetoric. Reed captures the contradictions of proslavery discourse as Swille, who depends upon Robin to read everything from Dr. Cartwright's theories to Lincoln's \"Compensatory Emancipation,\" pronounces blacks to be a \"childish race\" in \"need of someone to guide them through this world of woe or they'll hurt themselves\" (37). Proslavery theories of black inferiority mask the plantation \"realities\" of the managerial centrality of black labor and control. Noting that most \"employees\" are not allowed to use the telephone, for example, Swille states, \"I permit Uncle Robin to use it because he's such a simple creature, he wouldn't have the thought powers for using it deviously. He's been in the house so long that he's lost his thirst for pagan ways and is as good a gentleman as you or me\" (34). Thus, at the outset of Flight To Canada, Reed insinuates the slave in an ever-shifting ideology, configured between a scientific discourse that posits the Negro as an inferior animal and a historical plantation practice that relies upon the Negro as the essential driving force of operations. An exaggerated example of this is Mammy Barracuda's role as the puppet master of Mrs. Swille, who resigns so much agency to Mammy that the plantation mistress no longer controls her own bodily movements. Reed's protean inscription of the slave as domestic help, familial child, and agrarian tool is co-constituted alongside disavowed qualities of the slave as shadow master, gentleman, and wielder of spirits and literacy. Such fluid topographies of identity do not posit for the Negro any of that essentialized nature normally associated with Enlightenment models of the liberal human subject. Reed's fiction underscores that the slave as a discursive subject never obtains essential fixity. In Flight to Canada, as in history's discursive genealogy, we witness the \"Negro\" in America ascend into a matrix of cultural fields as a subject whose natural boundaries and rhetorical affiliations remain in taxonomic flux. Therefore, when Uncle Robin shifts from slave to cyborg, he is not moving from human to hybrid, but from one kind of hybrid to another—a kind of positive evolution toward greater specificity. Uncle Robin's is not the only evolution presented in the novel, however, and we must not fail to recognize the curious exactitude

Speaking in Typeface: Characterizing Stereotypes in Gayl Jones's Mosquito

Abstract: At what point do identity tropes turn into their negative counterpartNstereotypes? How much identity is too much? These are the questions at the heart of Gayl Jones's most recent novel Mosquito, which explores the line between racial characterization and racial stereotyping, specifically in terms of African-American configurations of latinidad. Jones blurs the boundaries between orality and literacy, stereotypes and (round) characters by producing a novel that is a form of textual verbalization, where literate habits of reading are challenged through oral modalities of (flat) characterization and storytelling.

Beckett's Measures: Principles of Pleasure in Molloy and "First Love"

Abstract: Toward the beginning of the first part of Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Molloy utters the following words concerning the object of his endless discourse: "My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?" (Three Novels 36). This passage is one of the very many in Beckett in which life, or at least a particular life, is seen as so utterly given over to stasis and the death drive, so entirely dominated by a closed circle of potential permutations of behavior, sentiment, ratiocination, and expression, that it is always already "over," despite the contingency that it may in fact seem to be continuing in time. In similar fashion, when Beckett's characters claim to be speaking from beyond the grave, they speak from a death equally beyond that of the tomb, the latter allegorizing the burgeoning dying of their continual living. If the question of death is pervasive in Beckett's work, this is precisely because it is not a death that could be simply and formally opposed to something that would be called life. In Beckett, as is well known, we are consistently confronted with living as a modality of dying. Beckett's work often troubles the distinction between life and death, progress and regression, pleasure and unpleasure, in a manner that, as we shall see, seems not unrelated to some of the interrogations of Sigmund Freud. For the moment, however, it is crucial to examine the place of language in relation to these questions. For in the phrase cited above, if Beckett does indeed point to the inadequacies of language, it is not in any absolute metaphysical sense but only regarding a contingent technicality: that of finding a tense or mood that could at once englobe the completive and non-completive aspects, a tense that would not insist on establishing an absolute difference between what is "over" and what "goes on." Beckett here appeals to a tense that could chart this infinitude of finality which is Molloy's life, certainly; but in addition to that, a tense such as the one Beckett envisions would also tend to destroy the deictic present, the simultaneity of utterance and reference upon which all effects of subjective presence depend. Beckett's linguistic dismantling of deictic and subjective temporality will be led to its conclusion in The Unnamable and the Texts for Nothing, foreshadowed in this passage and many others in Molloy. But let us also turn our attention to the manner—more consonant, perhaps, with the traditions of lyric poetry than of the novel—in which Beckett here explicitly searches for a new measure or space of inscription, a mark and a marker. Such a measure, of course, would be asked not simply to "represent" the oscillations, permutations, and rhythms that Beckett's works recount, but also to take its place among them, to become itself one of the many pendular movements through which the Beckettian economy writes itself. Not only a measure in the sense of a standard for representing or charting, Beckett's measures are also acts—and measuring is one of the actions most frequently taken within the Beckettian scene of writing.

Secret integrations: black humor and the critique of whiteness

Abstract: The category of black humor has a racial resonance when applied to American fiction of the 1960s. A recurrent object of critical interest in this body of comic writing was the function of "blackness" in the formation of "white" identities. In Bruce Jay Friedman's "Black Angels" and Terry Southern's "Twirlin' At Ole Miss" desperate individuals are shown negotiating their sense of self in ambivalent exchanges with an imaginary other. Thomas Pynchon, in "The Secret Integration," analyzes an adolescent act of imitation across racial lines as an effort to overcome socially prescribed differences. And in "Lost in the Funhouse," John Barth locates racialized fantasy as a constitutive element of sexual maturation.

In Search of the "Mexican Elvis": Border Matters, "Americanity," and Post-state-centric Thinking

Abstract: How can we map the Americas in our age of globalization as a cohesive but complexly differentiated space? How can literary and cultural studies become less state-centric? John Rechy's The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez and the songs of the Mexican Elvis, El Vez, provide insight into these issues. The diverse cultural discourses signified upon in these works reflect the embeddedness of the subaltern subject in a variety of cultural discourses and material practices produced by the flows of global capital. They think beyond the state and thus suggest the need to re-imagine the borders of trans-American cultural studies.

Property and Identity in The Custom of the Country

Abstract: In this essay I argue that The Custom of the Country (1913) is less a novel about divorce or the invasion of New York by the nouveau riche than an exploration of the impact of unprecedented fungibility and commodification of property on personal identity. Wharton articulates her sense of the consequences of changing property relations in the text not only in terms of the constitutive relationships between persons and (often family) property but also in terms of competing vocabularies.

Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory (review)

Abstract: ing-class mobility whereby the home becomes a feminized site of \"dead-end dreams and captivity\" (189), and being without a car means being trapped in welfare dependence. Often left behind by a mobile husband, Donofrio ponders his privileged relationship to the road, asking the reader \"why did he always get the car?\" (188). Smith understands the limitations of her organizational method and concedes that for women of color, other concerns might predominate. For women displaced from home, \"issues of gendered citizenship, diaspora, and the (de)colonization of subjectivity [. . .] assume primacy\" (xv). Nevertheless, as an analysis of white women's privileged access to travel, Smith's study offers an important assessment of the forces enabling some twentieth-century women to challenge the gendered politics of mobility and claim moving lives for themselves.

The Business of Patriarchy: Black Paternity and Illegitimate Economies in Richard Wright's The Long Dream

Abstract: This essay examines how in The Long Dream (1958) Wright portrays the developing consciousness of a man torn between filial allegiance to his black father and social subservience to white patriarchal authority figures. Recognizing Wright's interest in Freudian and Marxist theories, I argue that Wright uses this father-son relationship to explore the psychological and economic effects of racialized patriarchy in twentieth-century America. Wright's protagonist derives from his father an understanding of his own social illegitimacy, but he also inherits from his father both material and symbolic means by which to challenge this racist social order.