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

Modernism and the Culture of Market Society: Artisanal production, Ulysses , and the circulation of goods

T much of paul auster’s Ghosts, the protagonist detective, Blue, is metaphorically imprisoned in a small room, condemned to the monotony of watching another man, Black, and waiting for him to do something. Eventually, however, Blue begins to break from his routine, leaving his room on occasion because he feels so close to Black that he knows what his counterpart will do even when he is not being watched. Two of Blue’s early adventures expose a blind spot in Blue’s vision, however, a crucial problem for a man whose job it is to watch another. In the first such adventure: “Blue goes to the small grassy yard . . . studying the bronze statue of Henry Ward Beecher. Two slaves are holding on to Beecher’s legs, as though begging him to help them, to make them free at last, and in the brick wall behind there is a porcelain relief of Abraham Lincoln. Blue cannot but feel inspired by these images, and . . . his head fills with noble thoughts of the dignity of man” (189). It is clear in this passage that Blue’s blind spot is race, or in some sense, “color,” despite his name. The statue depicts Beecher as the white hero of the abolitionist movement. The historical truth, however, is more ambivalent, with most accounts of Beecher portraying him not only as an abolitionist, but also as a racist and opportunist whose opposition to slavery was not accompanied by a belief in the social and essential equality of blacks and whites. Indeed, Beecher’s abolitionist

"Everything in the World Has Its Own Color": Detecting Race and Identity in Paul Auster's Ghosts

This essay focuses on the African story in Hemingway's novel The Garden of Eden as a way to explore issues of narrative authority. Instead of privileging the unpublished manuscripts, this essay provides an argument about the significance of the published novel's focus and plot, making clear who and what get sacrificed in the name of narrative closure. The hunt for narrative closure in the published novel parallels the hunt in the African story, ultimately leading to the death of the elephant and its figurative iterations in Catherine and in the characters' explorations of gender and sexuality. As such, the novel sheds light on the complex relations among biographical experience, textual construction, and interpretive practices.

Into Africa: Narrative and Authority in Hemingway's The Garden Of Eden

Climate Change in Literature and Culture: Conversion, Speculation, Education

In Fogg, Moon Palace's traumatized protagonist, Paul Auster addresses the epistemological contradiction between a poststructuralist reality as constructed by the subject through language and an acknowledgment of materiality and the real of referential history. Fogg first commits himself to the postmodern condition and then engages with traumatic repetition that draws him toward the possibility of reference. The genealogical quest structuring Moon Palace demonstrates that a traumatic subject requires presence, a narratable story of the body in time, so as to be freed from the timeless mode of compulsive repetition. As Auster deconstructs such oppositions as subject/object and "I"/body, the novel posits the conditions under which a representational mode of realism may coexist with the postmodern.

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

Citations

Modernism and the Culture of Market Society: Artisanal production, Ulysses , and the circulation of goods

"Everything in the World Has Its Own Color": Detecting Race and Identity in Paul Auster's Ghosts

Into Africa: Narrative and Authority in Hemingway's The Garden Of Eden

Climate Change in Literature and Culture: Conversion, Speculation, Education

Under the Sign of Moon Palace: Paul Auster and the Body in the Text