American Fiction Research Articles

Dreams and Disillusionment: A Critique of the American Dream in American Fiction

This paper examines the vanity and consequences of the American Dream in four novels: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Jack London's The Iron Heel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. A socio-political analysis of these authors and their works exposes the hollow nature of the dream. The Jungle is discussed from a racial and economic perspective, highlighting the plight of Jurgis and his Lithuanian family who are disillusioned in their pursuit of success. The Iron Heel is examined politically, showcasing the struggle between the capitalist class and workers. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald presents a social satire, critiquing the death of American ideals sacrificed for materialism. The Grapes of Wrath analyzes the American Dream through the Joad family's migration and exploitation. The study compares the treatment of the American Dream in these novels, referencing texts, socio-economic contexts, and relevant critical works.

Transparent Citizenship: The Racialization of Privacy in Post–World War II Japanese American Fiction

Abstract Written in the wake of the Japanese incarceration and the emergence of new Cold War discourses around race, privacy, and democracy, Hisaye Yamamoto’s and John Okada’s works mark a shift from the specific targeting of Japanese Americans as individuals whose citizenship was contingent upon enforced transparency to the broader suspicion of the more generalized “Oriental” as a figure whose opacity becomes an excuse for racialized surveillance and policing in the name of national security. As formerly interned or imprisoned individuals, Yamamoto’s and Okada’s protagonists begin their stories already understanding the contingency of their right to privacy and the expectations of transparency that attend their reentry into the mainstream of US society. This article argues that Yamamoto’s and Okada’s depictions of this transparent citizenship not only critique the limitations and burdens of proof that it places on racialized (and otherwise minoritized) individuals, but also articulate ways to think differently about citizenship itself. What if US citizenship were understood as a formation that did not fetishize the role of individual agency in the process of self-determination? What if the goal of transparency was not to expose or condemn the individual but to better illuminate the parts that individuals play in the construction of our society, and the complexity of their connections to others? And how might transparent citizenship be reconceptualized to empower, rather than infantilize, citizens vis-à-vis the state, by giving us information we might need to imagine and remake the power dynamics of this relationship?

The Information Isolation Trope: Isolation, Infection, and Information Silos in Early American Literature

Many early American novels feature at least one character who becomes physically isolated, is restricted access to communication, becomes ill, spreads their sickness, and then either dies or becomes permanently disabled. This repeated pattern of isolation, infection, information, and death/disability underscores just how concerned early Americans were with the potentially harmful effects of information silos. The concern with information siloing, at first glance, seems anachronistic to early America. Eli Pariser popularized the concept of a “filter bubble” in 2011 when lamenting the many ways that algorithms create echo chambers and political fragmentation. While this essay concurs that content-recommendation bubbles are exacerbated by new media technologies, early American novels suggest that people have been worrying about the regulation and isolation of information since the dawn of the new republic. Early American novels—particularly those published between 1789 and 1815—are often read as seduction narratives, didactic narratives, or both; this article argues that attending to this pattern offers a new way of reading early American fiction that underscores just how concerned readers and writers were with the potentially harmful effects of information silos and the regulation of information on the body, the body politic, and public health.

Affect and the (Un)Doing of Trust in 20th and21st Century Black and Asian American Fiction and Nonfiction

Affect and the (Un)Doing of Trust in 20th and21st Century Black and Asian American Fiction and Nonfiction

Losing the West, Finding Western Worlds

Abstract “Losing the West, Finding Western Worlds” explores how recent critical work in Western American studies breaks apart the region’s foundational myths and invites readers and reviewers to revise understandings of this popular, enduring, and protean genre. Reflecting on four studies that interrogate Western American fiction, film, and comic books (two monographs by British scholars Mark Asquith and Neil Campbell; a study of the Black Western by film historian Mia Mask; and a collection of essays edited by Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol on varieties of comic book westerns produced around the world), the essay considers how this diverse cohort of scholars pursues a common imperative to unlearn “the West” and sets new directions for literary and cultural studies of the region. Through rereadings of the work of writers and actors who fracture and reassemble the heroic settler narrative from the perspective of outsiders, these critics contend, the West can emerge as a place whose stories offer more complete understandings of the past, whose heroes illuminate the political challenges of the present, and whose writers provide the right words for imagining a better future.

“A Western Outpost of the Punjab”

By forcefully inserting itself within the landscape and history of California, “near the confluence of the Feather and Sacramento rivers” in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Bhira Backhaus’s Under the Lemon Trees (2009) moves beyond the common tropes of Asian American fictions in which memory is invoked primarily in terms of nostalgia or loss, to emplace itself within the very specific geographical locale and physical landscape of the small town of Oak Grove in northern California (48). The text adopts an emphatically regional frame as a strategic move to stake a claim to inclusion within the body politic of the nation through filiations to the land that have been forged by living in close proximity with it—working the soil, learning its many qualities, and becoming conversant with seasonal rhythms. In doing so, Under the Lemon Trees gestures to more-than-human kinship structures and a sense of place that transcends institutional taxonomies of “citizen” and “immigrant” alike.

‘It's all there in the language’—a conversation with Garrett Stewart

AbstractWhat does a famed literary theorist have to say about the interaction between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’? Well, if he's Garrett Stewart, the celebrated agent of pyrotechnic style in the service of durable insights across disparate disciplines and media, then we have much reason to lean in and listen. Stewart is the author of 20 books that range with uncanny competency across Victorian narrative, contemporary American fiction, written auralities, poetics and prose stylistics, cinematic evolution from silver oxide to screen pixel, book art, scenes of reading in painting, and most recently, the vocal drama of Barbra Streisand. The distances between his disciplinary terrains are as vast as his close readings of them are coordinated and trenchant. Here, sitting down before a shared conversational canvas, Stewart fields questions from David LaRocca, who asks how he, if he, thinks about the program of literature and philosophy. LaRocca, editor of the recent Attention Spans: Garrett Stewart, a Reader (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the forthcoming Bandwidths: Reading Across Media with Garrett Stewart (Bloomsbury), tracks the urgency of our moment—in which literature and philosophy are independently besieged and yet may concede little rapprochement. Where does philosophy happen in literature (a philosopher's question) is turned around by Stewart such that we see literature conjuring philosophy at the level of the sentence. We are not peering ‘in’ so much as looking ‘at’ the art of literature teaching philosophy through refined reading and the analytical inquest of the syllable and the sayable. Anyone who works at the fraught fissure of these realms will benefit from the ways Stewart makes literature and philosophy sensible to one another—even as he productively unsettles the terms and conditions of their affiliation.

Creators and Created Beings in Twentieth-Century Latin American Fiction: Creating Questions by Amy Frazier-Yoder (review)

Creators and Created Beings in Twentieth-Century Latin American Fiction: Creating Questions by Amy Frazier-Yoder (review)

The Strong Black Women of the film American Fiction: An Exploration Using the Africana Media Representations Quadrants Model

The Strong Black Women of the film American Fiction: An Exploration Using the Africana Media Representations Quadrants Model

The role of performative verbs in the English educational discourse in British and American fiction

The issues of performativity of the English educational discourse (EED) are considered. Under the educational discourse, the authors understand the educator's statements to the educatees in order to make an educational impact on them. The aim of the study is to define the types and characteristics of performative verbs in the English educational discourse. The authors suggest that performativity can become one of the important characteristics of educational discourse. The data for this study were collected from the English-language fiction of the 19th–21st centuries, devoted to the problems of education and upbringing. Attention is paid to performative verbs as the basis of EED. The classifications of Austin, Searle and Apresyan are taken as starting points. The results of the analysis show that performative verbs are typical of the EED, but their activity and frequency vary. The performativity of a verb depends on its position in the sentence. In some positions in the sentence, they may lose their illocutionary power and the ability to carry out an action; in this case, they are used in the phatic function. The analysis shows that the EED has a high degree of performativity, which can be considered a characteristic feature of the discourse under study.

Reception and the Real in 20th and 21st Century American Short Fiction: Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1969), Ben Marcus’s “Cold Little Bird” (2018) and Brian Evenson’s “Born Stillborn” (2019)

The reader of contemporary post-(post-)modern American fiction is in the process of giving up on her impossible quest for a simple dialectic of information, meaning and representation. Today, the literary form, especially when experimental, calls on its reader not just to make the experience of the real as it is mediatized by fiction, but to take part in its extension beyond the written word. Indeed, I would like to argue that in the process of reception, the reader is invited to grasp the text in a way that makes her, more than an interpreter or an analyst, a manufacturer of sorts. Thus, she draws from her reading experience—both intellectual and somesthesic, as proposed by Pierre-Louis Patoine in Corps/texte. Pour une théorie de la lecture empathique (Cooper, Danielewski, Frey, Palahniuk), Lyon, ENS Éditions, 2015—a new “text” that translates a novel perception and understanding of the real.Already mediated on the page by the vanishing author, the real in contemporary fiction thus calls for a re‑mediation from the reader, which might originate in some type of “reliaison”, to quote André Green’s concept (« La déliaison », Littératures, no. 3, October 1971, 33–52). This redoubled operation, during which the reader’s relationship to literary history and philosophy intervenes, makes her an architect of the product of her reading experience, namely her renewed connection to the real, both mediated by fiction and unmediated in her own experience of the world.A potentially limitless mirror effect is thus created, the real being (un)faithfully reflected in a play on representation and reaction. I would like to argue that the origin of these processes is—potentially among others—what I chose to call “the margins of affect”, a negative place that serves as an echo chamber for the reader’s (ap)prehension of the text.

The Pre-History of White Feminism in Amatory Fiction

This article reads amatory fiction through the image of white women’s tears, and it argues that amatory fiction assists in eighteenth-century racialization by idealizing a feminine affect that mobilizes passivity for status. A spectacle of sympathetic attention, white women’s tears exemplify the affective work of white feminism, which singularly analyzes power through gender. Lacking intersectionality, white feminism upholds white supremacy and enables constituents to wield gender oppression self-servingly. This article locates and deconstructs that affective dynamic in Delarivier Manley’s “The Wife’s Resentment” (1720), Penelope Aubin’s “Conjugal Duty Rewarded” (1721), and Eliza Haywood’s “Female Revenge” (1727). These retellings of heroines navigating adulterous lovers depict feminine virtue as passive and essentialize this virtuous passivity within the logic of whiteness. This narrativization victimizes the heroine and purchases her sympathy, which protects her virtue and maintains the heteropatriarchal standards that initially threatened her. This genealogical consideration reframes the affordances of amatory fiction within hegemonic affect.

:Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1765–1885

:<i>Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1765–1885</i>

Women’s Leaving Home Experiences in Mother-Daughter Narrative in Post-1990s Chinese American Fiction

This article aims to investigate the trope of &amp;ldquo;home&amp;rdquo; and the representation of women&amp;rsquo;s leaving home experiences in mother-daughter narrative in post-1990s Chinese American fiction. Amy Tan&amp;rsquo;s The Valley of Amazement (2013), Celeste Ng&amp;rsquo;s Everything I Never Told You (2014), and Little Fires Everywhere (2017) are selected in the case study to illustrate the new characteristics of women&amp;rsquo;s leaving home experiences and the changing cultural connotations of &amp;ldquo;home&amp;rdquo; in Chinese American fiction in the new era.

Journalistic Practices in Difficult Times: The Cases of Fictional Television Series Borgen and El Caso in Denmark and Spain

This study sets out to understand how journalism is represented in the Danish fiction series Borgen and the Spanish series El Caso: Crónica de Sucesos. The aim is to provide an understanding of how journalism is conceptualized in non-American fiction. Through textual analysis, we found out that Borgen (years 2010 and up) represents a generational and evolutionary conflict in which journalistic values are restrained by political and commercial imperatives reflecting challenges in Danish journalism. As such, this series criticizes the free press myth—commonly found in American fiction series. El Caso (1960s) also engages with this myth through the representation of journalism practices embedded in Spain’s Francoist regime that balance public and political-religious interests. However, El Caso smooths over this conflict to illustrate how journalists cleverly overcame the censorship of the Catholic church. Both series explore the gendered and cultural obstacles of their respective contexts and eras.

Thinking About Race in American Fiction and Origin

America has been multicultural from the beginning of the country’s inception. Blacks and whites have lived together throughout this history. The movies have also evolved during their history to include relations between subcultural groups, especially between Blacks and whites. Depictions of racial relations have evolved through different stages in the movies over time. Recent movies have displayed some new features. Blacks are affected by accounts of race that depict interracial relations and the constraints on African Americans. White views about race in general and Blacks in particular have had a major impact on the lives of African Americans. A new form of race depictions has emerged recently, as shown in two new films, American Fiction and Origin.

Politicized Rhythms:, Feminist Orations In American Fiction

Politicized Rhythms:, Feminist Orations In American Fiction

Американский двойник / американский психопат в творческом тупике

The article focuses on American fiction and detective thrillers where the writer and his double feature as central characters. Such a combination has not previously received special attention. The divided mind provides a wide range of possibilities for fascination and exploring the fundamental fears of fragmentation and potential destruction of the Self. In Stephen King’s novella “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (1990), crime, duplicity, madness and dissociative amnesia are integrated into the story of the writer's block. The present article, among other things, analyzes the adaptation of the novella — David Koepp’s Secret Window, 2004. Besides, it highlights the changes that the script underwent. Koepp came up with his own ending that was radically different from the Epilogue of King's story. Alongside with madness proper, King's horror and Koepp's film deconstruct the writer’s block as the result of unresolved traumas and the cause of a whole bunch of pathologies, as well as the fear of breakdown. The novella and its screen version are, in fact, phenomenological studies of mental disorders. A close comparative analysis shows that the film offers a rare example of the superiority of adaptation over the original. A particular attention in the article is paid to the imagery of ears of corn in the film, functioning both as a cannibalistic grotesque and as a visual metaphor of success.

Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785–1885 by Georgia Brady Barnhill (review)

Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785–1885 by Georgia Brady Barnhill (review)

The Mercurial Effects of Abstract Reflection: Troubling Hegemonic Cultures of Knowledge in Ted Chiang’s Short Math Fiction and Richard Powers’s Maximalist Arboreal Novel

Abstract Narrative fiction that combines mathematical or scientific discourses with a pronounced interest in the topic of reasoning, particularly the mercurial effects of abstraction, unfolds an especially multi-faceted engagement with hegemonic cultures of knowledge. The contrastive analysis of two contemporary works of American fiction illustrates the role that the affordances of aesthetic form thereby play: Ted Chiang’s “Division by Zero”, a short story concerned with mathematical and empathic cultures of knowledge, and Richard Powers’s maximalist novel The Overstory, a climate change novel that challenges plant disparity awareness in Western culture. Powers’s novel can be seen as a critical response to the anthropocentric cultures of knowledge encapsulated in Chiang’s short story.