Showing papers in "Studies in American Fiction in 2017"

'The past is not a foreign country': John Weir's AIDS fiction

Abstract: In John Weir’s 2006 novel, What I Did Wrong, the narrator, Tom, a CUNY creative writing lecturer now in his forties, recounts his performance in a school play called Impromptu. Before he even delivers his first line—“Who are you? What do you want of me?”—a fellow pupil in the audience starts to jeer: “Shut up, faggot.”1 A chorus of invective follows, a cacophony of “queer bait” and “gay boy.” It is clearly a traumatic memory—he returns to it several times—but it is also a dramatized moment of selfawareness in which the narrator realizes that his queer subjectivity will invariably oscillate between stage fright and the safety of theatrical distance. Though the line is addressed to another character on stage, it comes across both as a fourth-wall-breaking provocation to the audience—an invitation for the other boys to do their worst—and a self-questioning, transposed into the second person; or, as Tom glosses it, “a real moment [. . .] taking place in somebody’s actual life in the guise of a performance about people searching for real moments in their actual lives” (96). It is an episode he will still be analyzing years later:

Lydia Maria Child's The Rebels: Allegory and the Feminist Troping of American Literary History

Abstract: James Otis, Jr., one of Boston’s early Revolutionary heroes, had been suffering from mental illness for more than a decade when he was struck by lightning and died in May of 1783. Otis had risen to prominence in the 1760s as the brilliant legal mind behind the colonial defense against British taxation, but his illness had forced him to retire before the outbreak of the war, and he slipped into relative obscurity as the other Founding Fathers of the American nation emerged. After his death, Otis’s private papers were lost. Yet, despite the dearth of materials, in 1823 William Tudor published a biography of Otis that attempted to reconstruct his life through the public documents that survived. As Tudor notes in the preface: