Joseph Skibell’s powerful novel A Blessing on the Moon forms a particularly original addition to the Holocaust “canon.” First published in the United States in 1991, the novel has been translated into several languages. The grandchild of a Jew who fled Poland, Skibell has spoken in interviews about the loss of many of his close family members, a topic that was not discussed, as he has described: 
This silence, I think, haunted me as a child and formed my character in a number of ways…. So the book is an attempt on my part to recover from the silence a family history that, except for a clutch of photos and whatever is encoded genetically, had all but disappeared.1

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

The Fantastic Novel: Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon

The novels of pioneering Korean American author Richard E. Kim require an expanded transnational reading practice that foregrounds intra-Asian geopolitical contexts rather than US-centric contexts. Careful attention to the context of Japanese imperialism and to Kim’s strategies of representation shows that Kim’s novels present a masculinized vision of national empowerment that reimagines the history of Korean colonial subjugation and positions Korea as a fully independent modern power. In this way, Kim’s work challenges Cold War-influenced perceptions of Korea that position Korea and East Asia as subordinated territories under broader US influence and control. His novels also underscore important intra-Asian tensions, often overlooked in critical discourse, that have profoundly impacted Asian American cultural production. Over the past fifteen years, Asian American studies has experienced a resurgence of interest in Richard Kim’s work, due in part to the disciplinary shifts in the field brought about by the transnational turn. Several scholars have contributed greatly to the development of transnational Asian American studies, including David Palumbo-Liu, Rachel Lee, Kandice Chuh, Aihwa Ong, Victor Bascara, Naoko Shibusawa, and Jodi Kim. The groundbreaking work in the field is perhaps Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996), which argues that understanding the figure of the immigrant from Asia “is fundamental to understanding the racialized foundations of both the emergence of the United States as a nation and the development of American capitalism” (ix). Lowe broadens her focus beyond US borders to include US intervention in Asia and to highlight the process by which the Asian immigrant becomes assimilated (and not assimilated) into the nation. Lowe proposes “a new political subject allegorized by the ‘immigrant’”—a subject “articulated simultaneously within both U.S. national and global frameworks” (34). Recasting Asian Americans through the figure of the immigrant has encouraged Asian Americanists to reconsider the significance of Asian contexts in the field. The transnational turn has shown how the field’s traditional focus on discrimination within the United States often draws attention away from the profound ways that US actions involving Asia have shaped the lives and the public

Plotting Colonial Independence: Intra-Asian Conflict in the Novels of Richard Kim

Reflections on Closure, Identity, the Past and the Law, in Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night and The Glass of Time and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White

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"Words Are No Good": The Curse of Signification and the Curse of Faulkner's South

The commercial climate of contemporary television drama is a fiercely Darwinian environment. For every intelligently written, high-concept drama which amasses scores of episodes and a passionate following, there are dozens which fail at the pilot stage, or after a timid, half-length first season. For every The Sopranos, there is a Carnivale; for every Desperate Housewives, there is a Pushing Daisies. The commercial failure of so many new shows is the inevitable consequence of the industrial logic of TV3, in which “... today’s production circumstances, highly commercialised as they are, ironically appear to have yielded a context facilitating creativity and distinctive product, indeed “quality television”, at the “high end” of the industry, in TV drama.” (Nelson, 2007: 161) The attempt to provide new and distinctive examples of “quality” programming encourages experimentation with the content and form of television drama, as program makers seek to attract and maintain a share of an ever more fragmented audience. However, the risk and expense involved in the production of high-end television drama also often leads to the abrupt cancellation of shows which fail to fulfill their economic imperative by attracting a diverse and lucrative audience. As early as 1995, J.T. Caldwell was already able to write that:

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

The Fantastic Novel: Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon

Plotting Colonial Independence: Intra-Asian Conflict in the Novels of Richard Kim

Reflections on Closure, Identity, the Past and the Law, in Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night and The Glass of Time and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White

"Words Are No Good": The Curse of Signification and the Curse of Faulkner's South

Premature withdrawal: searching for satisfaction in the endings of Pushing Daisies and Carnivale