Loose ends: closure and crisis in the American social text

Abstract

In this study of American cultural production from the colonial era to the present, Russell Reising takes up the loose ends of popular American to craft a new theory of narrative closure. In the range of works examined here - from Phillis Wheatley's poetry to Herman Melville's Israel Potter, from Henry James' The Jolly Corner to Disney's Dumbo - Reising finds endings that violate all existing theories of closure, and that expose the often unarticulated issues that inspired these texts. Reising suggests that these nonendings entirely refocus the narrative structures they appear to conclude, accentuate the narrative stresses and ideological fissures that the texts seem to suppress, and reveal shadow narratives that trail alongside the dominant story line. He argues that unless the reader notices the ruptures in the closing moments of these works, the social and historical moments in which the narrative and the reader are embedded will be missed. This reading not only offers new interpretive possibilities, but also uncovers startling affinities between the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the fiction of Henry James, between Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Melville's Israel Potter, and between Emily Dickinson's poem I Started Early - Took My Dog and Disney's animated classic. Pursuing the implications of these failed moments of closure, Reising elaborates on topics ranging from the roots of domestic violence and mass murder in early American religious texts to the pornographic imperative of mid-century nature writing, and from James' descent into naturalist and feminist fiction to Dumbo's explosive projection of commercial, racial, and political agendas for postwar U.S. culture. General readers interested in American literature as well as students of literary theory will find Loose Ends enlightening and provocative.