Both Critic and Not: A Case Study of David Foster Wallace’s Literary Reviews and Essays

??? COHPAnATIST general will profit from this important body of scholarship. Most important, the many critics of"theory" in our discipline, those who lament the second-rate scholarship and fatuous generalizations ofcareless ideologues and ignorant culture critics and thereby dismiss the entire theoretical enterprise, will meet here with worthy opponents, formidable thinkers who articulate sophisticated philosophical positions, avoid reductive historical generalizations, and challenge realist epistemological assumptions in their domain ofgreatest strength—that ofscience and technology. Ronald BogueUniversity ofGeorgia REVIEWS THEO D'HAEN AND HANS BERTENS, eds. "Closing the Gap": American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997 (Postmodern Studies 20). 267 pp. Judging from a number ofrecent reappraisals ofpostmodern fiction, the antifoundational approaches developed by postmodernism in response to Cold War ideologies have appeared outmoded to some ofus after the collapse ofthose normative metanarratives in the events of 1989. In volume 5 of 7Ae Encyclopedia ofWorld Literature in the 20th Century (ed. Steven R. Serafín. New York: Continuum, 1993), Robert F. Kiernan notes that postmodem metafictionists have "ceased in the 1 980s to enjoy the critical deference they received in the late 1960s and 1970s [...]. [Their works] found only limited audiences, not just because they are inherently difficult books, but because their self-reflexive conceits and multidimensional, nonlinear combinations of fantasies, joke, and horror seem to many readers a throwback to the intellectual temper ofthe 1970s" (26). As this description suggests, the swerving away from experimentalism has ideological motivation. The prevailing tendency after 1989 has been to push postmodern innovation to the margin as part ofa counteroffensive against those alternative paradigms deemed responsible for the current crisis of authority, identity, and values. Critics ofvarious stripes want to "rescue" fiction from its engagement with language and the subversive ideologies ofthe sixties, returning it to conventional forms ofrealism. The recent Modern Library list ofthe 100 best twentieth-century novels in English is a case in point. Few postmodernists made the list (Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, E. L. Doctorow, John Fowles, and Salmon Rushdie). Conspicuously absent were Coover, Pynchon, and Reed, but also Atwood, Morrison, and Walker. In an amnesic revision mat took literature back one or two generations, the list reinstated the primarily white male canon from Joyce and Fitzgerald to Saul Bellow, William Golding, and James Dickey. By contrast, the writers featured in Theo D'haen and Hans Bertens' collection ofessays on the reception ofpostwar American fiction in four Western European countries are exactly those left out by the Modern Library list: Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Gilbert Sorrentino, Thomas Pynchon, and Ronald Sulenick (Paul Neubauer, "The General Reception of Postmodern American Literature in Germany " 9); also postmodern feminist and ethnic authors like Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Marilyn French, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, and Alice Walker. The primary Italian bibliography ofBarthelme, William S. Burroughs, Coover, James Purdy, and VcH. 24 (2000): 171 REVIEWS Pynchon "is almost as rich as the American one" (Daniela Daniele, "The Fate of Postmodern American Fiction in Italy" 149). In Spain, certain translations of Barthelme, Cisneros, Don DeLillo, Gaddis, Jerzy Kosinski, Morrison, Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Kurt Vonnegut have run through several reprints (Francesco Collado-Rodríguez, "The Columbus Connection: American Postmodern Fiction in Spain" 177, 178-81); so have Vonnegut's works in the Netherlands (Frans Ruiter, "The Reception ofPostmodem American Fiction in the Netherlands" 223) or those ofAbish, Barth, Coover, Federman, and Pynchon in Germany (Neubauer 12, 24). Federman's German bibliography may soon overtake his American one, including for example radio plays not performed in the US. Academic criticism in Western Europe has devoted monographs not only to Pynchon and Vonnegut, but also to William Gass, Federman, feminist metropolitan fiction, or postmodern short story writers, treating their works as "acts ofdefiance and critique," attempts to break open official history and develop "ironic and parodistic counter-histories oftheir own" (Neubauer 82, 88). Substantial literary anthologies and collections of essays, such as Gerhard Hoffmann's three-volume Der zeitgenössische amerikanische Roman: Von derModerne zur Postmoderne (1988), have supplemented the picture, refining or problematizing its contours. The convergence oftranslation, magazine criticism, and academic research has ensured a multidimensional "reception of...

Reviewed by: From Camelot to Obamalot: Essays on Medieval and Modern Arthurian Literature Kevin J. Harty Joerg O. Fichte , From Camelot to Obamalot: Essays on Medieval and Modern Arthurian Literature. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2010. Pp. 202. ISBN: 978-3-86821-256-3. £24.50. You can't tell a book by its cover, nor, it would seem, by its title. This intriguingly titled volume is simply a collection of a dozen essays in English by the author, eleven originally published, some in German and some in English, in collections of essays by diverse hands—and, in one case, in Connotations—since 1991. The final essay, from which the volume takes its title, is partially devoted to a brief frenzy in the American and foreign press once Caroline Kennedy endorsed then-candidate Barack Obama for president which speculated that an Obama presidency would usher in a new Camelot and worthy successor to her father's brief time in office. Six essays discuss medieval Arthuriana; six, modern. The usefulness of this slim and somewhat expensive paperback volume depends upon how valuable the reader finds a collection of a dozen essays in English by Professor Fichte on topics such as Arthurian verse romance, twelfth-century Arthurian history, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the death of Arthur, Middle English Gawain romances, the relationship between the Queste del Saint Graal and Malory, Galahad's depiction in modern Arthurian literature, the Grail in contemporary American fiction, the world of the Round Table in contemporary German drama, utopian and dystopian elements in Anglo-American Arthurian fiction in the last two centuries, and Tennyson's Idylls. [End Page 128] Kevin J. Harty La Salle University Copyright © 2012 Arthuriana

The article looks into the conceptual status of a collection of essays. This subject is investigated by using a number of different methods, of which the most significant ones are analytical, historical and cultural, with a general cultural and philosophical approach to understanding the essence and the semantic scope of the creative functions of a collection of essays. Particular attention is given to the relevance of the creation of a collection of essays as a special art form in the culture of the Silver Age. The article defines the reasons for a collection of essays and its specificity as a form of the presentation of the solely personal thoughts. The most significant characteristics of a collection of essays are identified in the example of the analysis of the collected volume of essays by D. S. Merezhkovsky “Eternal Companions”. Special attention is paid to the creation of the collection of critical essays as a reflection of the author’s thoughts and the era itself. For this purpose, the articles included in the content of the collection are analyzed. The specific subjectivity of the author’s comprehension of the literary works is noted, and in general it is fully consistent with the spirit of the times of the Silver Age. It is emphasized that the essays included in the collection reflect the dynamics of Merezhkovsky’s thoughts. The essays collected in the volume conform with the general mainstream of the author’s thoughts, they can be understood as a single whole, and the collection itself can be regarded as a form of the representation of a creative personality in the artistic culture of the Silver Age. Special attention is given to the personality of the publisher who was a good acquaintance of Merezhkovsky P. P. Pertzov. Following the analytical procedures carried out on the texts in Merezhkovsky’s collection “Eternal Companions”, it is noted that the characteristic features of the author’s ideas present him not only as a literary critic, but mostly as a thinker. Eventually, the general conclusions are made: the collection of essays goes beyond the limits of only one author, the principles of its organization are indicated, and the importance of the author’s interpretation of the literary and cultural events as a whole is noted.

Tricksters are usually defined as non-heroic male characters obsessed with food, sex, and general merrymaking, occasionally changing shape and even gender but eventually returning to their masculine self. But is this necessarily true in contemporary ethnic literature? The current essay explores the notion of the trickstar, or the female trickster, in Afghan- American fiction, analysing the three heroines in Khaled Hosseini’s 2007 novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, which is a mother-daughter story set in Kabul at the turn of the millennium. In order to place this text into a cultural context and underscore the significance of the trickstar figure, it is compared to a traditional Afghan folk tale, “Women’s Tricks.” Two research questions are at the centre of this article: (1) In what ways are trickstars from Afghan folklore similar to the heroines of Hosseini’s novel? and (2) What roles do his heroines perform as pro-social trickstars?

B o o k r e v ie w s Leslie M armon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999/2001. 336 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by W illiam M . Clem ents Arkansas State University, State University Leslie Marmon Silko has been one of the most frequently studied of the Native American writers who emerged in the last third of the twentieth cen­ tury. Her short fiction and the novel Ceremony, which appeared in the 1970s, assured her a central position among those writers, and she has received con­ siderable critical attention for the past quarter century. By 1979— just two years after the novel’s publication—American Indian Quarterly devoted an entire issue to Ceremony, and there has been a steady stream of scholarly crit­ icism of Silko’s work ever since. The current volume, a paperback edition of a book originally published in 1999, is a welcome addition to that body of criticism. Each of the thirteen essays brought together by Barnett and Thorson contributes to our under­ standing of Silko’s work. A couple of general features of the whole collection merit particular attention. All the authors demonstrate the relevance of the complementary perspectives of postmodernism and the indigenous Native American aesthetic out of which Silko writes. The most current literary theo­ rists inform the essays, but so do the ideas about art and literature articulated by Silko herself and other American Indian writers. The editors also chose essays that examine underexplored Silko works. Though not ignored, the oftendiscussed Ceremony is seldom mentioned; only one essay concentrates on Silko’s important first novel. Instead, these scholars focus on the collection Storyteller (1981) and particularly on Silko’s second novel, Almanac of the Dead (1991). Since the latter book has often been misunderstood and underappreciated, devoting more than half of its pieces to it makes this collection especially valu­ able. The essays on Almanac of the Dead— from Paul Beekman Taylor’s ambi­ tious investigation of how Silko has regained in the novel some of the esoteric meanings that Europeans and Euro-Americans have appropriated from Native American sources to Janet St. Clair’s analysis of the novel’s homophobic imagery to Janet M. Powers’s comparison of the novel to Dante’s C ommedia (to cite only a few of the insightful articles in the collection)— afford real oppor­ tunities for enhanced appreciation of a work that makes many readers uncom­ fortable. Also, one essay (that by Daniel White) treats Silko’s nonfiction, an important component of her literary work that is often relegated only to pro­ viding context for the discussion of her fiction and poetry. A preface by Robert Franklin Gish, an introduction by the volume’s editors, and a biographical sketch of Silko by Robert M. Nelson precede the critical articles. Connie Capers Thorson’s bibliographical essay and bibliography of primary and secondary materials round out the book. 116 WAL 37.1 Spring 2002 Readers should be aware that nothing by Silko published after 1996— the year when the nonfiction collection Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit appeared— has been treated by the essayists. Consequently, her most recent novel, Gardens in the Dunes (1999), did not make the chronological cut. Nevertheless, this collection of essays is essential reading for anyone interested in Silko’s work, especially Almanac of the Dead. Reading the Fire: The Traditional Indian Literatures of America. Revised and expanded by Jarold Ramsey. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. 360 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Tol Foster University of Wisconsin—Madison This review begins with a confession: I dreaded reading another book about the “pure” Native oral tradition, with its implication that contemporary written texts by Native authors are somehow deficient and corrupted because they refuse to be static artifacts of a frozen culture. I also feared another book that refuses to contextualize Native literature within its specific culture and time. There is none of that in this book. Instead, we gain through Ramsey’s work strong methodologies and awareness of the stakes and pitfalls in a package that is downright pleasurable to read. The fruit...

The Portraits of Henry James J. A. Ward, Rice University I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his topic. —Henry James, Portraits of Places To Henry James the analogy between painting and fiction was always useful and appropriate. James commonly used the analogy to stress the representational as opposed to the didactic or moral purpose of fiction. Thus in "The Art of Fiction" he affirms his belief that "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. When it relinquishes this attempt, the same attempt that we see on the canvas of the painter, it will have arrived at a very strange pass. ... It is not expected of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven; and the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete" (PP 378).1 James's habit of drawing parallels between painting and fiction is more particularly evident in his frequent use of the term "portrait" interchangeably both as a literary concept and a type of painting. Almost from the beginning of his career, James regarded the portraiture of character as the main intent of his novels, as he also came increasingly to attribute the highest importance to portraiture in painting. In his essay on John Singer Sargent he wrote, "There is no greater work of art than a great portrait" (PE 277). His art criticism demonstrates his special attraction toward portraits, those of Van Eyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney, Copley and numerous others in addition to Sargent. In a relatively brief span of his career—1881 through 1888—James used the words "portrait" and "portraits" in the titles of three books: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), his earliest masterpiece of fiction; Portraits of Places (1883), a collection of travel essays; and Partial Portraits (1888), a collection of essays on literary artists. At the present time we may be inclined to find little importance in the similarity of titles of these works: the word "portrait" has come to be regarded as a genteel Victorian formula having little to do with the form or the substance of the work given such a bland title. But in each of these titles James employs his terms thoughtfully and literally. He means by "portrait" a visual, psychological, and dramatic rendering of a character. In The Portrait of a Lady he is clearly concerned with the internal as well as the external character of Isabel, as he is also concerned with those subtleties of personality that can be revealed only through a complex action that extends over a period of years. As James's preface to the novel emphasizes, the representation of Isabel Archer is his prime and exclusive purpose; the other characters and the plot itself are to 2 The Henry James Review be regarded as no more than the "heroine's satellites" (PL 11). When it appears in the titles of a book of travel writings and of a book of literary criticism, the term "portraits" obviously takes on a more metaphorical meaning. But in choosing Portraits of Places and Partial Portraits as the titles of his collections, James surely wishes to announce the unusual intentions of these works—the representation of geographical locations and literary works as human characters, or perhaps as non-human subjects to which the author responds as though they were, in some sense, human beings. I The concept of portraiture seems a useful approach to The Portrait of a Lady. It provides a convenient way of discussing that novel in relation to the fiction that immediately precedes it, as well as the nonfiction James wrote during the same period. Like subsequent critics, James well recognized that The Portrait of a Lady was the culmination of his apprentice fiction. He believed that he had discovered a rich subject in the international theme, especially in the stories of young American girls in Europe, but that he had nearly exhausted it. He also felt that it was time to prove himself with the achievement of what his letters refer to as his "big...

W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a r y S c h o la r s h ip 2001: T h e Y e a r in R eview G a r y S c h a r n h o r s t Since the founding of Western American Literature (WAL) some thirty-five years ago, western American literary scholarship has come of age. N o less than in the study of other regional and national literatures, scholars in our field now deploy a variety of critical tools in their work, from the New Critical to the New Historical, Marxist, feminist, post­ colonial, ecocritical, and biographical. In this essay I review a selection of such essay-length scholarship published during the last calendar year. (I omit all books commissioned for review in WAL.) Much of this scholarship— indeed, nearly half of it— focuses on Native American and Chicano/a literature, though Willa Cather remains the most stud­ ied individual western writer with Cormac McCarthy and Sherman Alexie a distant second and third. In addition to several monographs and collections of essays, three special issues of scholarly journals were devoted to western American lit-crit: one on Cather in American Literary Realism (ALR), another on “The Literature and Popular Culture of the U.S.- Mexican Border” in Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, a third on “Representations of American Indians in Contemporary Narrative Fiction Film” in Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL). In all, the scholarship on western American literature last year demonstrates yet again that “the West” has borders that are fluid in a literary no less than in a geographical sense. N i n e t e e n t h - a n d E a r l y T w e n t i e t h - C e n t u r y F i c t i o n All reports of James Fenimore Cooper’s demise seem to be prema­ ture. Diane Price Herndl in “Style and the Sentimental Gaze in The Last of the Mohicans” (Narrative 9:259-82) contrasts Cooper’s novel with Michael M ann’s 1992 movie “to think through some contradic­ tory positions on sentimentalism, the gaze, and the politics of race.” More to the point, Herndl suggests that Cooper uses sentimental tropes ironically to criticize sentimentality and that Mann grafts a sentimental style onto a historical narrative— all to conclude that there may be gazes that are not about desire or control (in the Lacanian or Foucauldian senses) but about “concern.” A very theoretical essay, though a useful corrective (I think) to standard interpretations of “the gaze.” Andrew G a r y S c h a r n h o r s t Doolen’s ‘“ Snug Stored Below’: The Politics of Race in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers” (Studies in American Fiction 29:131-58) claims, though not entirely persuasively, that the first novel in the Leatherstocking saga allegorizes the “underlying current of racial violence that unsettles the formation of an ideal republic.” In “Go East, Young Man: Class Conflict and Degenerate Manhood in Mark Twain’s Early Writings” (WAL 36:233-57) Joseph L. Coulombe examines the ways in which Twain massages his western nanatives, partic­ ularly Roughing It, much as he had done in The Innocents Abroad, to appeal to a genteel eastern readership— which may in turn account for the osten­ sible “inconsistencies” in the text. My own note “A Coda to the TwainHarte Feud” (WAL 36:81-87) documents Twain’s unwillingness to aid Harte’s destitute daughter Jessamy in 1907 and how news of her predica­ ment colored his memories of Harte in his autobiographical dictation. Sara E. Quay’s “American Imperialism and the Excess of Objects in McTeague” (ALR 33:209-34) notes how Frank Norris’s novel equates things with characters and relates the fetishizing of such objects as N oah’s ark figurines, gold coins, and clothing to late-nineteenth century dreams of empire and anxieties over ethnic difference. Despite its engaging title, Jane Kuenz’s “The Cowboy Businessman and ‘The Course of Empire’: Owen Wister’s...

The first time I met Ned Stuckey-French was spring semester, 2011. I was a master's student at Florida State University wanting to add his class, “The American Essay and Magazine Culture.” I hadn't been able to register online because the class was full, so I'd shown up the first day, hoping to rely on the instructor's kindness. Problem was, five or six others had the same idea, swelling the number of students to well over twenty. After Ned called the role and realized the situation, he grinned and said, “All right. You're all in.”I grew familiar with that grin as the weeks went on. Tall with a runner's build, Ned was easygoing and affable yet full of seriously good information as we dug into selected personal essays, readings on the craft of nonfiction, and assignments that had us researching the original publishing contexts of various essays. He'd modeled this curriculum on his book The American Essay in the American Century (University of Missouri Press, 2012), which came out that May. That book, along with his co-writing credit on the eighth edition of Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Pearson, 2010) and his co-editing of Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to our Time (University of Iowa Press, 2010) with Carl Klaus, solidified his case for tenure, a process that at the time I knew little about. All I knew was that Ned had taken an interest in me and my nonfiction writing, had suggested we play golf, had offered to read my work outside of class. He even proposed I write a book review for Fourth Genre, this section that he helmed from 2008 until just before he died of cancer in June 2019.During the eight years I knew him, Ned became more than a professor. He was my golf buddy, my loyal friend, but most importantly, he was my mentor: my guide into the channels of publishing and academia, my role model for the kinds of conversations and interactions I might have in this field. That's why when I saw the announcement, more than a year after his death, of a posthumous collection of his essays, I rejoiced. I was happy for the world to get to read Ned's creative (“as opposed to destructive?” I can hear him saying) nonfiction. And I was happy for Ned.One by One, the Stars, according to editor John T. Price's foreword, builds upon “a collection of essays [Ned] had been working on” that “remained unfinished at the time of his death.” In three parts, the book includes more than a dozen previously published essays and discussions of the form, along with a few unpublished pieces. The nine essays of Part 1 trace Ned's coming of age, from inquisitive child feeling out his parents’ dysfunctional marriage, to adolescent caretaker for his younger siblings, to politically minded teen staking his claim with Bobby Kennedy. The essays of Ned's youth unfold with remarkable thought, feeling, and technique. “South Side,” for instance, revisits an evening in Chicago, during the early 1960s, when the French family automobile needs late-night service from a Black-owned garage. “My dad is fidgeting with the change in his pocket and still nodding too agreeably,” Ned recalls, as his father lingers by the car, while in the waiting room, between his mom and the Black attendant, “Things are a little too friendly.” The present-tense narration, along with Ned's keen awareness, allows these explorations of racial and marital tensions to hum like the motor under the hood. “Backyards,” too, explores the dynamics of adult interactions when the neighbor, Earl Butz, comes to ask, “‘Whatcha doing up there, Charley?’” Ned's dad, Charley, is building a treehouse in the French backyard that's decidedly less well-kempt than the Butzes’. The two fathers are agriculture professors who later do stints in Washington, DC—Earl Butz for Nixon and Ford, Charley French for Carter. “I was only twelve and I didn't know all that these backyards can symbolize,” Ned writes, “but I registered the differences.” Likewise, national politics come to bear in “Meeting Bobby Kennedy,” but Ned keeps the focus local, on Indiana spring, 1968, his senior year of high school, and the living rooms he visits while canvassing for Kennedy. The moment Ned manages to shake hands with Bobby on the tarmac of the local airport before a campaign rally resonates with immediacy and detail. It's one of those moments, as Ned demonstrates, a person never forgets.After the first seven essays, Part 1 travels to Boston, with “Mass General,” the hospital where Ned worked as a janitor for ten years after graduating from Harvard, moonlighting as a union organizer. An earlier version of this essay appeared online as “A Real-World Education: Revisiting Studs Terkel's Working,” though this version is much more extensive. I'd heard Ned tease the idea of writing a book-length memoir about this time, and I always wished he would. Maybe he was getting around to it, but what we have here is a measured and detailed account that interrogates Ned's motivations to forfeit the privilege of his Ivy League degree while finding himself more privileged all the same, by virtue of his being a tall, straight white guy, than his fellow janitors. The labor drives fail in the end, due in part to the hospital's union-busting consultants, though Ned doesn't give up on the socialist ideal. “I still believe in socialism,” Ned declares, “because for me the socialist vision is one of peace, opportunity, and equality. To me, it is still the only vision that is hopeful and makes sense.”On the heels of Ned's ruminations over race and class and where he and his family fit in the social equation, Part 1 ends with a grace note. “It is the end of May, and Elizabeth and I are taking a walk,” begins the brief, lyrical essay “Walking the Tracks.” After all his youthful striving and labor organizing, Ned has taken a job as an English teacher in Indiana, where he's met Elizabeth Stuckey, his future wife and the mother of his two daughters, the person whose last name he'd affix to his own. The couple finds groundhog bones and identifies wildflowers, with Ned's mind ranging over his class and his students, before climbing atop “an abandoned silo that stands by itself like a bunker.” From there, the land unfurls, the farmhouses and hunting camps, Venus overhead, “and then, one by one, the stars.” It's an arresting image, title-worthy, the whole pastoral essay indicative of Ned's impressive range.The last time Ned and I met up in person was at the AWP conference, 2017, in Washington, DC. We'd made a plan to catch up over beers, and on a Friday afternoon after panels and the book fair, I held down a high top in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel while Ned got the first round. Conference-goers chattered and their glassware clinked all around us while others streamed past, in and out of the February chill. I was an MFA student then, in my third year at Emerson College in Boston. Ned had written me a stellar letter of recommendation for nonfiction programs, and several schools had tried to recruit me. One Midwestern professor, when I'd flown up for the campus tour, had shaken my hand and told me, with an earnest smile, “I'll be your Ned Stuckey-French of the Midwest.” Ned let out a big belly laugh that day in the lobby when I told him that story. All the same, he thought I'd made the right decision to accept the offer in Boston, his old stomping grounds.We finished our round and Ned went back to get us another, and although I offered, he got the third round, too. Meanwhile, people he knew kept yelling out his name, rushing over to shake his hand. Former students, colleagues, folks he knew through writing and editing. He introduced me to all of them. We had a blast that afternoon, and we managed to talk a bit about our work, too. I'd written my second book review for Fourth Genre by then, and I'd taken the helm as editor-in-chief of Redivider, Emerson's graduate-student-run literary magazine. All the while, I was working on a Bob Dylan-themed manuscript for my MFA thesis, and Ned asked what I knew about Dylan's walking off the set of the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963, which wasn't much. Ned had been looking into the incident, when Dylan left after Sullivan's staff told him not to play “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” as part of a study in middlebrow culture. Middlebrow was Ned's next project, his extension of The American Essay in the American Century, which tracks the essay genre from the late nineteenth century through just after World War II.Part 2 of One by One, the Stars hints toward what that middlebrow book might've looked like. In terms of the essay genre, middlebrow, as I understand it—though Ned would've challenged me here—has to do with meeting readers where they are, not offending their sensibilities with lowbrow antics or forcing them to contort their minds into highbrow figurations. Within that realm of accessibility lies Elvis, for whom Ned delivers a good-natured defense in “An Argument for Elvis.” Ned thinks hard about anti-Elvis skepticism among white intellectuals, which, he admits, “in some corners of myself I share.” But then, he writes, “I've looked hard at my residual anti-Elvisism and decided it's rooted finally in class bias.” The rest of the essay finds Ned deconstructing a list of reasons to disdain Elvis—he's dumb, he's racist, he's not Dylan, and so on—in a fun and funny romp that finally finds The King “anything but banal.” The ensuing essay, “Thank You, Jon Gnagy,” occasioned by Ned bonding with his daughter over YouTube videos of the painting teacher's old television shows, addresses middlebrow culture directly: “I am middle-class and middlebrow, a product of mid-twentieth-century American middlebrow culture.” Ned proclaims, “My family's journey parallels that of the country's new middle class.” The final essay of Part 2, meanwhile, “The Book of Knowledge: Essays and Encyclopedias,” attempts to define middlebrow by what it's not: an encyclopedia entry. As a college student home for summer, Ned writes his dad's annual World Book Yearbook entry on agriculture. Interestingly, none of that entry makes it into the essay, but instead a discussion of Roland Barthes and the essay genre presages the craft discussions to come in Part 3 as Ned asserts, “But here's the rub, essayists: Isn't the essay . . . well, isn't it middlebrow?”“Considering that this might be the last opportunity to publish Ned's essays under one cover,” John T. Price writes in the foreword to One by One, the Stars, he and Elizabeth laudably decided to add Part 3, consisting of four craft essays not included in Ned's original manuscript. The first of these, “Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing: Toward a Definition of the Essay,” has become a staple of many nonfiction classes, including the ones I'm now teaching, post-MFA, at various colleges in Boston. Ned frames the personal essay as “split at the root” between Montaignean meandering and Baconian empiricism, though my students, as time goes on, tend more and more to point out the patriarchal Eurocentrism of such a claim. Even Ned, in an e-mail interview he and I did in April 2017, admits “the comparison is reductive, but I do think those threads have always twined their way through the essay tradition.” We'd tapped Ned to be the judge that year for the Redivider nonfiction contest, and we did the interview as a means of promotion. Reading it now makes me cringe, the way I mischaracterized the thrust of Theodor W. Adorno's “Essay as Form,” though Ned set me straight: the way I extended Ned's work as a “communist trade-union organizer” to make the claim that the essay genre itself is “essentially communist,” yet Ned was having none of that. The way I asked him outright what he might be looking for in a winning essay, which led him to quote “Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing,” in that “the word essay has collected its own passel of adjectives: personal, formal, informal, humorous, descriptive, expository, reflective, nature, critical, lyric, narrative, review, periodical, romantic, and genteel.” For the contest, there was no need to be prescriptive. Any kind of essay, if well executed, might've worked.Per usual, in our interview, Ned was gracious in his responses and brilliant in his breadth of references. That generosity of spirit rings through Part 3’s “An Essayist's Guide to Research and Family Life,” first written for the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Ned's nine enumerations for why to do research as an essayist include “Getting It Right,” “Time Travel,” “Adult Education,” and more, like “Being Alert to Life,” which Ned certainly was. The final piece for One by One, the Stars—“My Name Is Ned: Facebook and the Personal Essay”—features a panel presentation Ned delivered in 2011 when he explored how Facebook might facilitate essay discussions and even publications, but also how the medium might detract from our work. For as long as I knew him, Ned's Facebook use was prodigious, legendary. He used the platform to share and promote, to cheer on new essays by folks he knew and those he didn't, to celebrate the birthdays of great essayists. Even more impressive were the political debates he engaged in with his brother-in-law and a cast of right-wingers, each of whom he took seriously, all while Ned's left-wing writing community periodically chimed in. Ned took them seriously, too, engaging viewpoints, pointing out fallacies, pleading for humanity between all parties. Those Facebook skills, as well as Ned's organizing know-how, came in handy in 2012 when business-minded factions of higher education threatened to shutter the University of Missouri Press, which had just published Ned's book The American Essay in the American Century. Ned led the charge through a lively and proactive Facebook group, an e-mail campaign, and a traditional media presence that managed to save not only that university press, but the University of Akron Press in 2015, the University Press of Kentucky in 2018, and others along the way. Any university administration in the 2010s that threatened to defund its university press had Ned to reckon with. As a result, Ned became the inaugural winner of the Associated of University Presses Stand UP Award in 2020, a posthumous achievement that, like One by One, the Stars, solidifies Ned's legacy.As much as I enjoy One by One, the Stars and celebrate Ned's life while doing so, the book, as a posthumous collection, raises questions regarding the slippery line between author and editor. Of Ned's original manuscript, which covers Parts 1 and 2, Price's foreword notes, “Ned's familiar handwriting cover[ed] the pages. He had left extensive editing notes throughout, everything from sentence-level changes to follow-up research questions to plans for reshaping and rearranging the chapters.” All the same, while reading, I can't help but wonder whether Ned, in the end, would've made that particular choice, or included that particular piece. For example, the word “schizophrenic,” by my count, appears three times throughout the book in adjective form, an ableist construction I imagine Ned would've excised if given more time. Likewise, the fifth essay of Part 1, “Who Should be President in 1968?,” previously unpublished, is illuminating both to Ned's childhood nerdom as he sends questionnaires through the mail to significant cultural figures, and to the cultural climate of the time as he dissects their responses. The essay itself, however, feels bulkier than the rest, less well resolved. Likewise, Part II's lead-off essay, “The Edsel Farm,” made a lot more sense in terms of details, asides, and section endings once I realized it originally appeared in an anthology of essays about upstate New York. That anthology's editor, another friend and closer contemporary of Ned's, Bob Cowser, Jr., notes in his own review of the book for the Fourth Genre website, “The editors make little effort to eliminate repeated passages in the separate essays, reprinting all in previously published form, but the effect is to add emphasis to the themes that bind the collection.” While that may be true—and while those repeated passages do highlight Ned's fixations—I can't help but wonder what cuts and additions Ned might've made to smooth out the collection.The piece that still puzzles me most, the collection's penultimate essay, is Ned's infamous “Dear John” letter to John D'Agata. I happened to be there in attendance at AWP in 2012, in Chicago, when Ned stalked down the aisle fashionably late to a packed conference room. On that panel, with the help of the Fourth Genre book editor who predated him, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Ned delivered a methodical takedown of D'Agata's invented details in his lyric nonfiction, namely, The Lifespan of a Fact. “Dear John,” Ned begins, “I'm afraid it's over between us,” and then proceeds to pick apart the author's words. That afternoon in Chicago, during the Q&A, some of D'Agata's students from University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program came to his defense, accusing the panel and others that week of character assassination. I reviewed that panel for the Brevity Blog, perhaps adding to the lore as I claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that the panelists had “scrambled to shield themselves from AWP field guides-turned-projectiles.” Price's forward characterizes the Q&A as “a very loud debate” (Price's italics). Ned picked up on the thread, too, later in 2016, in the Los Angeles Review of Books when reviewing D'Agata's nonfiction anthologies. It's a companion piece, perhaps, to “Dear John,” and it might've been included in One by One, the Stars as such. In it, Ned stumbles upon an interview response where D'Agata references his “queer self.” Upon reflection, Ned writes,As a queer man long hesitant to acknowledge my own queer self, I tuned in closely to this section of Ned's review. I probably should've asked him about it during our e-mail interview, or even that day over beers in Washington, DC, but I wasn't out yet. I'd be out soon, but not yet.All the same, the end of that D'Agata review in the Los Angeles Review of Books takes on a strange, mocking tone as Ned invites D'Agata to collaborate with him on a collection of queer essays. Ned volunteers to include his own “Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing” alongside any number of even though Ned didn't to any On of class, Ned was On he was still and I know he was striving to do because the came up the last time I saw Ned in day after Ned and I had in the lobby at AWP in Washington, DC, we into each at the book I was with my at the time, and I introduced to Ned, is my his Ned said, I'm Ned, We all was knew I was though I wasn't and I wasn't out to Ned, though he knew too. In the next he us to a panel he was on that afternoon, but and I We were MFA students, there to Redivider, on from and and made plans for imagine Ned would've us at his panel, would've to hear our in the I do it I'd be Maybe Ned took our as a his It but there was another as with D'Agata later that at he me a I into some and very to the as we were for the I Ned a him that all was We him, we him, my friend and that came the that he had though he and the was The next year I came out and my and though Ned to for the he and Elizabeth were certainly From then on, Ned his to and And although I didn't him in person for a while, we kept in through Facebook and And I was writing my third Fourth Genre book review early in when Ned told me his cancer had he me the same good the same of essays to the same for A few he was can't of what Ned's final collection would've looked how it might've from this And I that the itself, while is also The full and final book Ned would've written doesn't All the same, One by One, the Stars is a to Ned this collection is no less than a

William R. Macnaughton, ed. Critical Essays on John Updike. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. 308 + viii pp. Steven Mailloux. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.228 pp. Steven Moore. A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recognitions." Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.337 + xi pp. Craig Hansen Werner. Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction Since James Joyce. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. 237 + x pp. Each of the books under review belongs to a separate genre of academic literary commentary. At one end of the ordinary spectrum (scholarship, criticism, theory) is Steven Moore's A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recogni- tions," a work of scholarly annotation which also includes other material designed to assist the puzzled reader of Gaddis' complex novel. There are two works of criticism, one a collection of reviews and essays on the works of John Updike, the other a suite of essays loosely tied together by the idea of James Joyce's influence on various American writers. Lastly, Steven Mailloux's Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction is a work of theory; it is an attempt to improve upon the formulations of reader-response theory offered by Culler, Iser and Fish. I wish not only to assess each work in the light of its purpose, but to comment upon some of the implications of each enterprise.

Reviewing the purpose novel : reception, social reform, and the limits of persuasion in turn-of-the-century American fiction

Confucianism and Modernity—Insights from an Interview with Tu Wei-ming Bingyi Yu and Zhaolu Lu On November 6 and December 5, 1997, we visited Tu Wei-ming, professor of Chinese history and philosophy and Director of the Yenching Institute at Harvard University. The questions we brought to Professor Tu were manifold, but we had one concern that was central. It seemed to us that although we are entering a new millennium, the basic human dilemma remains fundamentally the same as it has been through the ages: we must all live together on this planet, but we fight among ourselves for the limited available resources. How can we make this turn into a new century—this turn of the millennium—a genuinely human turn in the best sense? What mode of thinking will enable us to create a new world civilization—and not just a new "world order"? How will our past, particularly our many cultural traditions, affect our future? As members of the scholarly community who are Chinese, we are especially concerned with the question of what role Chinese culture, in particular the Confucian tradition, can play in the remaking of our world. During our two interview sessions, we made known our concerns, and Professor Tu shared some of his most recent thoughts on the relationship between traditional Confucianism and modern civilization. He also elaborated his earlier views on the history of civilization, on the construction of planetary culture, and on the modern relevance of traditional Confucianism. For this article, we have organized some of the results of our interview under three headings: (1) the clash of civilizations and the dialogue of civilizations, (2) Confucian humanism and the "New Humanism," and (3) tradition and modernity. The Clash of Civilizations and the Dialogue of Civilizations In 1993, one of Tu's colleagues, Professor Samuel P. Huntington (at Harvard's Olin Institute of Strategical Studies), published an essay titled "The Clash of Civilizations" (Huntington 1993). In this essay, Huntington claims that international political conflicts and the future of human development can both be explained in terms of a clash of civilizations, and he further elaborates this theory in his 1996 work The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington maintains that historically the sharpest and cruelest conflicts are all deeply rooted in the divergences of civilizations from each other. He claims that in the future a divergence between Western and non-Western civilizations, rather than political and economic differences, will define the battleground where international conflicts arise, and that the clash between traditional Confucianism on the one hand and both Islam and the non-Islamic West on the other will be the focal point of international conflicts. These conflicts will determine the future structure and orientation [End Page 377] of international politics. So far, this "clash of civilizations" theory continues to receive a strong response worldwide that is both favorable and critical.1 Professor Tu criticized the Huntingtonian understanding of civilization as a rather one-sided point of view that represents a fashionable but unhealthy current that has persisted in American society since the end of the Cold War and is typical of the narrow-minded political model that has come out of that era. Although the "clash of civilizations" theory continues to be widely popular, Tu predicted that its influence will decline, because its very foundation is problematic. First of all, it does not correctly represent the mainstream currents in modern civilizations. Tu emphasized that it is a dialogue of civilizations, not a clash, that appropriately characterizes this mainstream. Moreover, conflict exists not just between civilizations; it arises internally, within each civilization system as well. Countries and regions around the world are confronted with the conflict between improving material life and maintaining moral and spiritual values, between fostering economic growth and preserving the environment, between protecting individual rights and safeguarding the community, between change and stability, and so on. Problems like these are not unique to any one civilization system. The fact that these problems are common to different civilization systems indicates that a wide-ranging dialogue between different civilizational and cultural streams is both possible and necessary. In the 1940s the German philosopher Karl Jaspers proposed...

Reviewed by: Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861 by Siân Silyn Roberts Ellen Malenas Ledoux (bio) Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861 Siân Silyn Roberts Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 239 pp. Within the past fifteen years, scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth century—such as William Keach, Helen Thomas, and Laura Doyle, among many others—have argued persuasively that Anglophone literatures of the Atlantic world must be considered part and parcel of the same cultural phenomenon because of the profound social, linguistic, and legal ties that bind the United Kingdom and the Americas. Siân Silyn Roberts herself has recently published a compelling argument for recognizing the gothic’s global scope and influence in a 2014 essay collection entitled Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century. Given Roberts’s expertise in the transnational gothic and her consistent reference to its import throughout Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861, the book’s main claims and chosen primary sources appear incongruous with their scholarly context. On the one hand, Roberts notes that one cannot responsibly write about the American novel without reference to transatlantic exchange, and the book’s introduction explicitly denies an urge to describe American exceptionalism or “to assume that a drive toward literary autonomy produced an indigenous body of works in response to exceptional forms of national experience” (18, 26). Yet at the same time, Gothic Subjects argues for a uniquely American form of gothic subjectivity, suggesting that “novels on both sides of the Atlantic were attempting to work out problems in theories of the subject and government, but this cultural work arrived at a fundamentally different conceptual result in America than in British literary culture” (6). This different result forms when “works of gothic fiction imagine Americanness as an ability to change, adapt, travel, and even subsume individual difference and cultural particularity beneath forms of mass collectivity” through a process of “detaching identity from geographic origin, consanguinity, or exemplary political status” (7). In essence, she suggests that both the British and the American novel grapple with notions of individuality and sovereignty that stem from a common Scottish [End Page 612] Enlightenment (mostly Lockean) source, but that what the respective national narratives do with that struggle is distinctly different. Drawing on theoretical constructs from Leonard Tennenhouse (diaspora), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (rhizome), and Michel Foucault (population), Gothic Subjects argues that American representations of subjectivity are particularly performative, disrupted, relational, and abject. Roberts’s individual analyses within the ensuing chapters of the many fragmented gothic subjects extant in early American fiction—Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, Roderick Usher, Sheppard Lee, Hester Prynn, and Clotel, among others—are, in themselves, useful and robustly support her claims about how American literature struggles “to confront a disconnect between transmitted cultural forms and the new social setting in which they took root” (4). Chapter 1 discusses American adaptations of British models of the social contract, suggesting that American authors such as Sally Barrell Keating Wood and Charles Brockden Brown use the gothic mode to investigate what individual sovereignty means in an ethnically and culturally diverse environment. Chapter 2 examines the concept of the wilderness and “going native,” arguing that American novels and captivity narratives challenge the notion of individual autonomy in favor of a model of subjectivity that is relational and resonant with indigenous American cultures. After the first two chapters establish a trend toward the “transitive, mutable model of the subject,” chapter 3 takes on textual challengers to this vision (113). Roberts argues that, rather than viewing subjectivity as adaptive, works by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Montgomery Bird deploy “the cultural materials of the gothic to imagine a collective social body built from discrete and autonomous parts” (115). Yet as chapter 4’s discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) suggests, by the mid-nineteenth century, American authors began to contend with “the population”: those individuals who are members of a nation yet lack autonomy, for example, slaves, women, children, and political prisoners. These arguments are extended throughout the final chapter on slavery and...

Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow have the distinction of editing the first book of its kind: a collection of critical essays devoted to lesbian literature in English, along with several essays by contemporary lesbian novelists. Although Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions does not do for AngloAmerican literature what George Stambolian and Elaine Marks did for the French variety in their landmark study, Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts, Critical Texts, Jay and Glasgow's book has similar ambitions and echoes the latter's title. One is tempted to overlook the book's flaws out of sheer gratitude that it exists. Big and baggy, Lesbian Texts and Contexts consists of twenty-two essays that range generically from personal narratives to high deconstructive theory and that treat mostly twentieth-century American fiction, with forays into the nineteenth, as well as into British, French, Quebecois and Native American fiction. Heterogeneous in quality as in style and subject matter, the collection offers a few strong essays but many more weak ones. Jane Marcus's fascinating but haphazard Sapphistory: The Woolf and the Well, in which

In this project I analyze women as exchangeable property and their value as seen in Theodore Dreiser’s novels Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. I will also examine Dreiser’s life and world views, and their relationship to these works. Using white slavery crusades and narratives in turn-of-the-century America as my historical framework, this study, in an attempt to reinterpret the notion of “women in trade,” will focus on gender issues and female identity in the context of urban capitalism. I contend that women being exchanged and their reduction to property can capture and evince their state in social transformation, a discussion based on the rationale and political ideologies stemming from white slavery issues. Carrie and Jennie, with their seeming prostitution in the metropolis, not only manifest contemporary social desires and fears, but also indicate the author’s ambivalent mindset toward the consumerist world. Chapter one will provide an overview of white slavery and associated narratives in turn of the century America, and their relationship to gender and class issues. Chapters two and three analyze the texts of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. I will explore women as personal property and how their market value functions in the novels in comparison to white slavery narratives. The span of the two novels stipulates Dreiser’s view onto capitalism, and thus this research will highlight the author’s personal life, particularly his relations with women. Additionally, I will examine Dreiser’s publishing history, in order to delve into the significance of women in trade in his works. In sum, women and exchange underwrote manifold valences that can help us examine and redefine sexual politics and exchange activities in response to the mechanisms of urban capitalism. These mechanisms motivated Dreiser’s literary creations and impacted his career, as well as reader reception of his works, from white slavery narratives to Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt.

Reviewed by: The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century eds. by Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel Michael Germana Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel, eds. The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. 360 pp. $27.85. Ralph Ellison's œuvre and scholarship on his life and work have each grown considerably since his death in 1994. Previously uncollected and/or unpublished essays and works of fiction by Ellison have appeared in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), an edition of the Book II typescript of Ellison's unfinished second novel, Juneteenth (1999), Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000), and the most complete version of Ellison's second novel manuscript yet to be assembled, Three Days before the Shooting… (2010). Interest in Ellison among literary scholars has similarly increased in recent years. As a consequence, more books and essays about the author have appeared since the turn of the millennium than were published in the preceding five decades. Twenty-first-century scholarship on Ellison hasn't been entirely encomiastic, however. A small but influential chorus of critics remains fixated on the author's shortcomings, whether real or imagined, as a writer and an activist. Foremost among these critics are Arnold Rampersad and Barbara Foley whose critical works, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007) and Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (2010), respectively, express disillusion with, if not disappointment in the author. Together, they make a Procrustean bed for the National Book Award winner. Foley contends that Ellison, the author, abandoned a more pointed (and, in her estimation, more empathetic) materialist critique in Invisible Man when he revised the novel into its published form. Rampersad, by contrast, faults Ellison, the man, for not being expansive enough in his social interactions with and encouragement of black artists and intellectuals. Each takes a negative and fundamentally myopic view of the author's life and work. Foley dismisses Ellison's shift from proletarian realism to "depoliticized mythic individualism" (83) as a sellout to Cold War liberal ideology in general, and to its literary critical adherents in particular. Rampersad, in turn, (ab)uses Ellison's social calendar to draw misleading inferences about the author's perceived lack of political engagement, and to suggest that Ellison was too busy smoking cigars in the Century Club and currying favor with powerful whites to fulfill a legacy that the publication of Invisible Man (1952) ought to have inaugurated. Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel's The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century constitutes a collective rejoinder to these views—views that, as Robert Butler and Ross Posnock show in their contributions to the collection, dogged Ellison even at the pinnacle of his success. Rather than take the author to task for what could or should have been, the volume's contributors portray Ellison as a visionary, not only of the post-segregation period, but also of twenty-first-century American society and culture. The result is an ambitious collection of essays that, in the esteem of its editors, "represent the most far-reaching and original assessment of Ralph Ellison's entire career and body of work ever published" (30). [End Page 151] This is a bold claim, but it is also an accurate one. Indeed, The New Territory is an important work of Ellison scholarship that evinces a generosity of scope, sense of possibility, and complexity of analysis befitting of the author's corpus. It promises to do for Ellison's reputation what Foley and Rampersad have done to it. The fourteen essays that comprise the collection are, with the exception of John Callahan's speculative but rewarding conclusion, divided into three parts: one on new approaches to Invisible Man, a second on Ellison's unfinished second novel, and a third on Ellison's transhistorical view of American culture. The collection is worth obtaining for the essays on Three Days alone. Here, for the first time, is a substantial cross-section of work by scholars earnestly grappling with Ellison's unfinished tome, posthumously...