American Literary Canon Research Articles

James Baldwin by Douglas Field, and: “A Criminal Power”: James Baldwin and the Law by D. Quentin Miller (review)

Reviewed by: James Baldwin by Douglas Field, and: “A Criminal Power”: James Baldwin and the Law by D. Quentin Miller Michele Elam Douglas Field. James Baldwin. Devon: Northcote House, 2011. 128 pp. $19.95. D. Quentin Miller. “A Criminal Power”: James Baldwin and the Law. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012. 224 pp. $45.95. A self-declared “disturber of the peace,” James Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the most important writers and controversial cultural critics of the twentieth century. His many novels, short stories, essays and plays have become influential standards in the American literary canon, but Baldwin scholarship is less settled. Baldwin continues, posthumously, to disturb the peace and the status quo through [End Page 777] the fresh surge of critical interpretations of his work. We can readily observe, building on (and occasionally upending) the previous scholarship on Baldwin, this critical interest reflected in the plethora of recent conferences, anthologies, and critical collections dedicated exclusively to Baldwin in the last few years. This attention to his life and work is all the more striking because single-author-focused monographs and conference sessions have been in decline in the last decade with the move away from literary histories based on “great men.” The critical celebration of this black, gay, expatriate does not, thankfully, represent a return to that approach, with its implied assumption that history is made by a handful of exceptional men who putatively rose above time and place. Two recent books on Baldwin consider him, by contrast, as an individual of—not above—his time, understanding his iconoclasm as a function of the cultural and political contexts that defined him as other. D. Quentin Miller’s engrossing page-turner “A Criminal Power”: James Baldwin and the Law and Douglas Field’s slim but comprehensive James Baldwin, published in Northcote’s “Writers and Their Work” series, richly locate Baldwin in his specific time and circumstances. This does not render Baldwin provincial, an author tethered to a time whose works speak only to a certain era. Rather, Miller’s and Field’s studies testify to Baldwin’s enduring importance and contemporary resonance. A Criminal Power characterizes the law as a unifying principle across Baldwin’s life and nearly all his literary efforts, finding that Baldwin’s encounters with social injustice, most acutely in conflicts with legal systems both in the U. S. and abroad, shape both the content and form of his writing. Miller opens with a riveting description of Baldwin’s suicide attempt during his brief incarceration as a young man in a French jail, suggesting that this traumatic event catalyzed his growing understanding of the many ways in which the law defines, regulates and oppresses particularly those deemed non-normative. Making causal claims about the biographical basis for creative work could be reductive, but Miller’s study deftly explores the subtler, complex relationships between the lived experience and literary production of his subject. In part because of his capacious understanding of what “the law” meant to Baldwin, I find Miller’s careful readings of both narrative form and content convincing. Miller expands the notion of “law” here to include both the legal jurisprudence of the American legal system as well as an ever-threatening regulatory force with the imminent “power to oppress those without power: the poor, the black, the immigrant, the homosexual, the artist, the drug addict—in short, the hero-victims of Baldwin’s work” (3). The narrative arc of these characters reflects this struggle with the law in both its manifestations, Miller argues, as those who are dehumanized and diminished by the law become empowered (or not) to the degree to which they understand and protest both “the rhetorical and theoretical manifestations of the law” (4). For Baldwin, art becomes a particularly crucial vehicle to reclaim humanity in the face of the law (2), and argues also that creative writers share this recognition of the potency of story-telling, of the way “powerlessness can be transformed to power through narrative” (9). And one recurring plotline in the narratives is the move from “fear to outrage” (3) through expression—the way the characters themselves, Miller argues, try to resist the silencing powerlessness associated with multiple...

Rediscovering Twain: Beyond Huck Finn and the Tall Tale

I was not a “Twainiac,” as many of my cohorts came to call themselves, during the summer of 2011. Yet I understood and valued Twain’s contribution to the American literary canon and had looked forward to attending the NEH Summer Institute “Twain and the Culture of Progress” with the hope that I would gain a fresh perspective. Facilitated by Kerry Driscoll and the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, the institute was a three-week-long intensive study of Twain’s formative experiences in Virginia City, Nevada, as well as in Hartford, Connecticut. We spent time in Virginia City tracing Clemens’s emergence as a writer capable of rendering the nuances of regionalism and humor during westward expansion, and then we studied at the Twain House in Hartford where Samuel Clemens lived the life of Mark Twain. I began my career as a public high school English teacher, so my e xperiences with Mark Twain had been limited to the requisite teaching of the c anonical titles and tales, and in many ways, I had grown tired of it. It had become harder for me to make the text relevant for my students—I had read and taught it so many times that I could anticipate almost all of my students’ questions and responses. I was tired of reading (and trying to explain to sixteen-year-olds) the “duke and the dauphin” chapters and I just needed a break. When I began teaching at the Community School of Naples a few years ago, I vowed, “Never again.” I said to anyone who would listen that I would no longer teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my classroom. Ever. For the last several years, I have adhered to this admonition. However, after spending those few weeks participating in the institute I was ready to invite Sam (I became more intrigued with the man than the myth) and some of his lesser-known characters into my classroom. And while I don’t know if I will ever invite Huck back, I have shifted into using Twain primarily to teach the technicalities of style, satire, and humor in my classes. Certainly Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has a place in the American literary tradition because it is a rich text full of all of the literary devices and tropes of American realism. Yet, too often, teachers are limited—either by their departments or districts or by themselves—in their teaching of this text. They gloss over the moral wrangling that Huck goes through and often work to make everything “come out alright” in the end, but in doing so I think they ultimately do a disservice to their students and the text. Huck’s pivotal decision to face damnation for the man who has now become his friend is complex, and many

O'Neill, Cognition, and the Common Core Standards

O'Neill, Cognition, and the Common Core Standards

American writers’ imaginative empathy for the Risorgimento and emigration

This article seeks to arouse the readers’ interest in the literary works inspired by the Italian Risorgimento and its close connection with emigration to the United States. Though this is not a widely known branch of the Italian–American literary canon, it has, at least, two great merits. Firstly, it helps to project a more positive picture of the average Italian immigrant away from the cliché of the ‘dago’. Indeed, the majority of Italian immigrants were honest and hard-working people, who had escaped from absolute poverty, hoping to build a better future in America, where they generously contributed to its economic and social growth. Secondly, it arouses Americans’ sympathy with Italy’s fight for freedom, if for no other reason, because the ideals at stake were certainly comparable to those of pre-Civil War America. (See the short story ‘Domenico's New Year’, in which the protagonist puts his life at risk for American freedom and democracy.)

Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography by Robert T. Tally Jr. (review)

Reviewed by: Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography by Robert T. Tally Jr. Rachel McCoppin Tally Jr., Robert T. Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography. London: Continuum, 2011. 185 pp. $81.00. How does one place Kurt Vonnegut in the American literary canon? Is he an acclaimed postmodern revolutionary author or a marginal science-fiction dark humorist? Robert T. Tally Jr. addresses this question that continues to arise in considerations of Vonnegut’s works. Tally contends that scholars are not sure where to place Vonnegut’s literary achievements; some, like Jerome Klinkowitz and Todd Davis, place him firmly within Postmodernism, while others have trouble taking his work seriously and continue to label him as marginal. Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography asserts that Vonnegut is neither a postmodern author nor a marginal one; instead, Tally argues that Vonnegut is a modern author tackling postmodern issues, in search of creating the “great American novel.” Tally contends, though, that Vonnegut fails at achieving this elusive goal. His works portray [End Page 315] postmodern American culture and its concepts of idealism, political, economic, and social superiority, and personal identity and responsibility. Yet they purposefully fail to capture the totality of American culture in its present moment because, as Tally argues, Vonnegut serves the role of iconographer and iconoclast; he is a critic of postmodern America, never achieving the “great American novel” because he places postmodern America within a modern context. Vonnegut’s iconoclasm allows his works to hold critical literary merit, not because they capture postmodern American culture, but because in their portrayal and criticism of it, they help readers better understand themselves. Tally analyzes Vonnegut’s fourteen novels to show Vonnegut as an untimely modernist in a postmodern America. He proceeds in chronological order of publication, stating that Vonnegut’s first novels, Player Piano and Sirens of Titan, are among his most frustrated and pessimistic. Tally discusses Vonnegut’s embrace of “misanthropic humanism” as a dominant theme in all of his works. In these initial novels, Vonnegut points out postmodern America as politically, socially, and psychologically flawed. Vonnegut’s “misanthropic humanism” reveals that these problems will not go away because they are intrinsically tied to human nature. Though Vonnegut presents his America in postmodern terms, his message is modern: “Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism offers a model for understanding this [postmodern] condition, while also forcing the writer and the reader to look for other avenues leading to one’s sense of purpose in the world” (xvi). Tally moves to an exploration of Vonnegut’s Mother Night, which, he states, addresses the impossibility of living a modern “authentic” life in postmodern America. According to Tally, Mother Night questions the purpose of human existence; it calls for evaluation of self in a fractured and meaningless world, and its message continues into Vonnegut’s next novels, Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. In these novels, Tally finds a more secured stance of optimism through personal ethical responsibility, which ultimately becomes part of all of Vonnegut’s works and is achieved only through personal separation and examination of one’s place in the world. Tally continues with a discussion of Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, asserting that though these novels perhaps appear the most postmodern in format and content, they again reveal a modern message of morality. Both novels embrace the fated nihilistic components of postmodern culture, while at the same time maintaining a modern love of the ridiculousness of postmodernism and a belief in the good qualities of humankind that continue even among absurdity. Vonnegut’s Slapstick and Jailbird continue to show elements from his earlier novels, but focus largely on the human desire for false security within corrupt communities. Both novels look towards the social and political failures of postmodern America in order to ask readers to abandon hope through institutions. Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard are, according to Tally, imperative to Vonnegut’s repertoire because they detail an alternative to the postmodern condition: these novels reveal Vonnegut’s means towards maintaining a modern sense of meaning in his own life and provide characters that persevere—through the “abstract idealism” (114...

Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America's Asia

The bestselling status of the Autobiography of Mark Twain (2010) and the recent controversy over the 2011 NewSouth edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (in which the n-word has been replaced with “slave” throughout) attest to Twain’s unique appeal as an author of popular and formally sophisticated works that satirize US formations of race and empire. For a broad international audience, Twain exemplifies how literary form and style can be mobilized against racist institutions; at the same time, his writings have provided key examples for critical conversations about the possibilities and limitations of canonical engagements with blackness and empire. Whereas Toni Morrison’s reading of “the Africanist presence” at the “center” of Huckleberry Finn has given rise to illuminating scholarship on blackness in canonical American literature (54), historical dynamics of comparative racialization raise questions about how “Africanist” representations intersected with representations of Chinese immigrants in a period when the figure of the indentured coolie laborer blurred boundaries between traditional notions of freedom and servitude. My book project, “Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia,” draws on recent scholarship on Asian immigration, US imperialism, race theory, and legal history to situate Twain’s race fiction in a comparative perspective: in the intersectional contexts of Chinese immigration restrictions and Jim Crow, even historical novels about antebellum slavery registered fluctuating connections between immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and antiblack racism. Although the project’s focus is on the explicit and implicit comparisons that Twain drew between different racial groups over the course of his career, contextualized

Former Slaves on the Move: The Plantation Household, the White House, and the Postwar South as Spaces of Transit in Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes

Travel writing has been central to the American literary canon. From all possible backgrounds, origins and spaces, religious dissenters, immigrants and others have described their travelling experiences in North America. Within this profoundly American tradition, black Americans’ narratives are a special case. Most scholars agree that their personal accounts are not only autobiographical texts and political manifestos, but also travel narratives. Thus, the slaves’ journey is interpreted both as a physical experience—from the plantation to a free state—and a spiritual one—from ignorance into knowledge. After Emancipation, former slaves continued publishing their life experiences, and African American women became significantly active in autobiographical writing. These women challenged previous roles, and reinterpreted themselves as independent middle class entrepreneurs. Such is the case of the author analyzed in the present article: Elizabeth Keckley. Her journey from the plantation to Washington D.C. becomes an overt challenges to the racial and gender restrictions imposed upon her and gives wings to her desire for independence. Above all, the locations she inhabits while transiting from enslavement to middle class entrepreneurship inform this crucial transformation. By means of her transit, Keckley discovers her identity not only as female member of an oppressed race, but also as an individual who can achieve and prosper beyond the barriers imposed by (white and black) male society.

The Foundation of Latin American Literature and its Emergence in World Literature

The obsession to found new imaginary to Latin American reality and sense of rootlessness bestowed Latin American masters of narratives sense of freedom that traverse imaginary pampa, llano and precolombian ruins without any anxiety of influence of precursor. This essay delves into the relationship of foundation of Latin American literature with the emergence of Latin American literature in World Literature. The crossroads of diachronic literary currents of Latin America with synchronic World Republic of Letters will coordinate the topology of its literature in World Literature. There are few Western writers that encompass from the genetic origin of Civilizations to apocalyptic sense of an end. Borges and Paz along with Garcia Marquez are questioning the origin of their being at the edge of the West. The literature of the West is one in which major questions must be assumed to have been solved. The characteristic feature of Latin American masters that differentiate with European writers is their obsession of total history. They share the anxiety of beginning along with anxiety of influence. The sense of up-rootness always goes with new foundation for something whether it is positive or negative in any Latin American fables. And they yearn for the revelation of total history whether it is Macondo as in case of Garcia Marquez, poetic revelation searching for the eternal present as in case of Octavio Paz, or fantastic region like Uqbar with different metaphysical structure that differs from modern world as in case of Borges. This self-referent notion about their own history and geo-political consciousness as being at the edge in narrative and meta-poetics found new Latin American literary canon to mobilize the ground zero of Capital of World Republic of Letters. These local histories from the geo-political periphery change the global design of World Literature.

My Southern Home or, The South and Its People (review)

Reviewed by: My Southern Home or, The South and Its People Thomas Alan Holmes My Southern Home or, The South and Its People. By William Wells Brown; edited and with an introduction by John Ernest. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. pp. xlix, 247.) Perhaps best known as the first African American novelist (Clotelle), William Wells Brown enjoyed a varied career as an author of fiction, travel narratives, drama, and history, as well as having gained international esteem as an antislavery lecturer and social commentator. My Southern Home represents every facet of his work, and this definitive edition prepared by John Ernest delineates the complexities of Brown’s literary achievements. As Ernest concedes in his introduction, the seams in My Southern Home show. The earlier portion demonstrates the barbarism and cruelty of slavery in the context of anecdotal sketches whose humor relies on caricatures and overt irony; the middle section presents a sociological tour of the Reconstruction South; the latter portion offers philosophic considerations of how ethnic communities of post-Reconstruction America can best interact. Ernest’s introduction traces how Brown developed his final volume from new writing interwoven with reworked, previously published pieces as well as appropriated material from other authors. Ernest offers a persuasive description of this process, indicating that My Southern Home offers Brown’s text and even Brown himself as palimpsest, reconfiguring himself as he adapts his material during the growth of his influence. Readers will note how much Brown’s work matures in confidence and daring near the end of his career. While the basic structure of the early sketches recalls familiar local-color pieces from the humorists of the period (the careful reproduction of the original illustrations emphasizes this characteristic), Brown’s final chapters, in their analyzing of manipulative national politics, the dissonance between spirituality and ostentatious demonstration of faith, and the long-term effects slavery left in the preservation of family and community, carry the persuasive eloquence of Douglass, Jacobs, and DuBois. [End Page 94] In his offering a cogent argument for how we should read Brown, Ernest has performed an admirable accomplishment of textual sleuthing, sussing out the original published pieces for the majority of the works Brown incorporates into his own. Further, Ernest also works with care in presenting how particular elements in Brown’s account change over the course of their many retellings, articulating the questions one cannot help but ask, such as why Brown writes in the voice of a sometimes disinterested observer when offering the slave-time anecdotes, and why he blurs history and fact in his accounts of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction nation. As Ernest notes, Brown’s experience of the South has led him to re-create a “Southern home” within himself, later to be realized through his writing. To his credit, Brown considers the South capable of redemption, even as he struggles with considerations of how it might be saved. The debasement suffered by all in the practice of slavery, as Brown illustrates, continues to require a great deal of education, belief, and justice to overcome; his work retains a timeliness for this reason. John Ernest’s new presentation of Brown’s My Southern Home invites a deeper appreciation if not a reconsideration of Brown’s place in the American literary canon; it should prove to be a valued and welcome volume to historians and literary scholars alike. Thomas Alan Holmes East Tennessee State University Copyright © 2012 West Virginia University Press

In Memoriam: Robert K. Martin

Robert K. Martin, professor emeritus at the Universite de Montreal and eminent Whitman scholar, died on February 19, 2012. Professor Martin's career as a scholar and a teacher in every way lived up to the highest standards of humanist research, pedagogy, and dedicated service to the profession and the community at-large.Even a brief overview of Martin's career demonstrates his remarkable range and productivity as a scholar. His ground-breaking contributions began with his highly influential 1975 Partisan Review essay, Whitman's Song of Myself: Homosexual Dream and Vision, followed quickly by his first book, Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979), which, as Jared Gardner wrote in a review of the 1998 expanded edition, reoriented completely the language in which American poetry was discussed, by insisting that homosexuality tells all there is to say about these poems but that without understanding of the centrality of homosexuality the poems say precisely nothing. A great deal that we take for granted today about the viability and centrality of sexuality as a crucial hermeneutic in cultural and literary studies generally, and in Whitman studies specifically, can be traced to the critical posture Martin adopted in Homosexual Tradition and employed there to such productive and persuasive effect.A similar point can be made about Martin's second major intervention in the American literary canon, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (1986). In this work Martin once again reframed the past in order to foreground its sometimes unexpected connections to the literary, theoretical, and political concerns of the present. In the book's preface Martin wrote: The male couple, as Melville imagined it, can serve as the basis for a reexamination of the way men are called upon to assume roles of power and authority. Melville's representations of alternative relations between men, Martin continued, can serve as an important part of a larger movement that can ally itself to feminist and thinking. In his critical writing Martin was always looking ahead, testing the boundaries of new connections and coalitions, and his invocation here of ecological thinking is one of the earliest I know of what is becoming increasingly familiar today as green criticism. As in so many other instances, Robert Martin got there first.Two vital and recurring aspects of Martin's career are also especially noteworthy, for they encapsulate what made him not only a uniquely vibrant scholar and teacher, but a dear and valued colleague as well. …

Imagining a Transpacific and Feminist Asian American Archive

A brief moment in karen tei yamashita's recent novel i hotel (2010) resurrects a crucial fragment of asian american literary history. Yamashita's book—part send-up and part recounting of actual events—pays homage to and reimagines the multiple paths that were critical to the late-1960s and 1970s Asian American movement. In a small yet important scene, I Hotel highlights how the development of an Asian American literary canon was entwined with the production of heroic masculinity. Three men drive four hundred miles to visit Dorothy Okada, widow of the author John Okada, on a mission of archival recovery and masculinist “heroics” (96). Their adventure begins when one of the men discovers Okada's 1957 novel No-No Boy (now a canonical work) and a letter that mentions the possible existence of an unpublished manuscript by Okada. Ultimately, the trip is unsuccessful. “What happens next,” the narrator tells us, “is history” (97). Confronted by the lack of public interest in Okada's work, Dorothy has burned his papers, and the disappointed men can only ask ridiculously inappropriate questions about the couple's marriage and sexual relationship. In this story, the men who set out to become heroes of Asian American literary studies are thwarted by a woman's failure to preserve the text, and they reduce Dorothy to a supporting role. Yet in recapturing the gendered division at the heart of this defining moment in Asian American literary history, I Hotel also reminds us of other narrative, methodological, and theoretical paths. “As time drags on,” the narrator muses a few pages earlier, “other events step up to the plate, and one begins to wonder why any fork in the road presented the less traveled option” (95).

“They Look Way Above Me, Put Me Out of Their Eyes”: <em>Seeing</em> the Subjects in <em>Precious</em>—An Introduction in Two Parts

"They Look Way Above Me, Put Me Out of Their Eyes":Seeing the Subjects in Precious: An Introduction in Two Parts Suzette Spencer (bio) Upon the 1996 release of Sapphire's novel Push, a reviewer noted that it was "a fascinating novel that may well find its place in the African American literary canon." It has taken years for Push—a disturbing, demanding, and irrepressibly compelling assemblage of young, urban women's stories—to edge its way into American and African American critical spaces. And despite its similarity to, and dialogue with, an important body of black women's literature and film comparable in substance and scope, Push is not now part of the "African American literary canon."1 It has been conspicuously silenced, marginalized, and sidelined—both there and not there, both seen and rendered critically invisible. In this regard it can be described as fundamentally an outlawed work with outlawed subjects—bodies and topics. Poignantly fugitive, it has nonetheless now been rendered even more crucial and haunting still, now more at large than ever, by Lee Daniels's powerful 2009 motion picture Precious, which is itself a momentous and unflinching work of courage and dramatic performance as significant as the novel in mining spaces of gendered violence, silence, and silencing that demand critical confrontation and attention. Neither Precious nor Push is a story of "the black family," "the black woman," "the black man," or "the black community." Both are, rather, powerful stories of injury, hope, the limits of hope, and relentless, sometimes faltering, determination, stories relevant to the lives and experiences of a broad racial spectrum of subjugated young women—American and not, black and not, heterosexual and lesbian— women who are differently situated, to be sure, but who are living, dying, hoping, and loving on the barbed edges of the social and the political. What is the social and the ontological value of these female subjects in the realms where they must fight to live and where they survive and die in [End Page 53] said fights? How are their existential realities and predicaments seen and felt by them, first and foremost, but also, if at all, by those who act upon them socially and politically to foster their life or death? What small threads hold out hope for positive transformation in the lives of these female subjects as they navigate the social, the economic, and the political—their being-in-the-world? What factors constrain slivers of hope, much less their positive transformation into being something other than the subjugated, something other than bodies in abjection, social beings who are produced, engaged, and understood as normative aberration? Are such matters simply a question of the subjugated and marginalized female subject working her way up, as it were, and choosing to defy her subjugation and what has been called by some a politics of victimization? Do such matters merely entail questions of subjugated female subjects choosing the right pathways, the right attitudes and dispositions, the higher ground that will usher them into visibility and into livable lives beyond zones of repression? Whose gaze is important, or should be privileged, when crucial questions of life and premature death are at issue for subjugated female subjects? In the contexts of assaults on young women's lives, unyielding circumstances of traumatic abuse and domestic violence, urgent predicaments of negotiating life with HIV or AIDS illness—in the contexts of these life-threatening exigencies, whose gaze upon the female subject is important and should ultimately be privileged in real scenes of life and in scenes on the film screen?2 Whose mirror, whose eyes? Lee Daniels's film Precious studiously and unapologetically engages with these critical ethical questions. Further, the critical dialogues toward potential answers which the film articulates and which it has provoked among its viewers— these dialogues, and/or the protective silence they have instigated among some class publics—are as complex as the film's female subjects and as the film's contemporary viewers. Critical responses to Precious that completely disregard and evade these crucial questions, or seek to silence them, are not simply indicative of empathetic viewers' emotional difficulty in watching the film's perplexing scenes. They...

Cultures, Canons, and Cetology: Modernist Anthropology and the Form of Culture in Lewis Mumford's Herman Melville

Cultures, Canons, and Cetology:Modernist Anthropology and the Form of Culture in Lewis Mumford's Herman Melville Eric Aronoff (bio) When Leslie Fiedler, in An End to Innocence, wonders whether to call Herman Melville "the discovery or invention of our time," he points to what, in 1948, was then the relatively recent phenomenon of the "Melville revival" of the 1920s—a phenomenon that now stands as one of the most startling examples of canon reformation in American literary history.1 Beyond the remarkable reversal of literary fortune it represents, the Melville revival was situated at an unusual confluence of literary, cultural, and institutional histories. It occurred, as Paul Lauter has observed, during "the ascent of the ideology we call 'modernism,'" as ideas of American identity and art were intensely debated against the backdrop of conflict and change, from the rise of new technologies of communication and consumerism to unprecedented waves of new immigration, labor strikes, and racial violence.2 It was also the period in which both "American literature" emerged as a distinct discipline and the interdisciplinary approach that would come to be called "American Studies" first appeared.3 While other authors underwent reevaluation in this period, no other author's canonization has paralleled so closely the development and institutionalization of American literary studies in the academy through the twentieth century—and thus registered the complexities of the ideological debates that surround it. [End Page 185] The study of Melville studies, then, could be said to be the study of American literature as a discipline. And if, as Lionel Trilling puts it, criticism is the "dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet," the critical reception of Herman Melville is a major intersection where the body count is particularly high.4 Critics promoting the revival during the 1920s denounced their predecessors' Anglophilic, genteel rejection of Melville; midcentury New Critics and myth critics in turn critiqued the 1920s "liberals" for making his books "directly relevant to their concerns and interest"—namely their post-WWI critique of American materialism and conformity.5 With the rise of new historicism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies in the last three decades, New Americanists such as Lauter and William Spanos have targeted the conservative consensus politics of early Americanists, arguing that the Melville revival was "part of an ideological conflict which linked advocates of modernism and of traditional high cultural values . . . against a social and cultural 'other,'. . . portrayed as feminine, genteel, exotic, dark, foreign, and numerous."6 As a bulwark against the perceived threat of women, immigrants, and a restive working class, they argue, "a distinctively masculine, Anglo-Saxon image of Melville was deployed as a lone and powerful artistic beacon against the dangers presented by the masses."7 In perhaps the latest sideswipe in this intersection, Clare Spark takes to task the modernist "liberals" and "radical" New Americanists, arguing that both perpetuate a "conservative Enlightenment" reading of Ahab as an overreaching monomaniac who represents the forces that led to Hitler (for critics in the 1930s-60s) or U.S. imperialism and racism (for New Americanists). Spark in turn charges that these readings themselves are committed to "corporatism" and "ethnopluralism"—philosophical positions rooted in Herder and leading to . . . Hitler.8 A bloody intersection indeed. I would like to complicate these accounts of the Melville revival and, by extension, the relationship between modernism, American literary canon formation, and American Studies by positioning the revival at the intersection of yet another pair of institutional histories: the rise, on the one hand, of the "anthropological" version of culture as relative, whole systems [End Page 186] of meaning and, on the other, of the modernist fascination with the literary text as spatial form, which culminated in the reading practices of the New Criticism. For the Melville revival in the 1920s was also the period in which literary criticism and anthropology attained their modern disciplinary identities, and both did so by reconceptualizing their objects of analysis—or perhaps more accurately, by reconceptualizing these disciplines as centering on what could be seen as objects requiring analysis: in literary criticism, the New Critical conception of the poem; in anthropology, the idea of culture(s). These multiple disciplinary histories, moreover, were intimately related, as...

SEARCHING FOR THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE: THE ‘AFRICANIST’ PRESENCE IN MARK TWAIN'S THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has, despite moves to ban the book nationally as well as have it removed from Junior High School curricula because of its derogatory representation of African-Americans, maintained its status in the American literary canon. Race and racial representation are fundamental to the novel's plot and this paper extends their significance by arguing for the centrality of what Toni Morrison has identified as an ‘Africanist’ African-American presence that pervades and in fact, inspires America's founding literature. The paper argues that Twain's representation of the ‘Nigger’ Jim is contingent on an ‘Africanist’ African-American presence which, ‘real or fabricated’, is premised on a particular idea of blackness signified by Africans. Through a close study of blackface minstrelsy, entertainment popular in the nineteenth-century, this paper investigates (white) Western perceptions of Africa and Africans utilized in African-American literary representations. The paper thus suggests a re-reading of Huckleberry Finn that focuses on the ways in which Africa and Africans are implicated in and central to white and black Western constructions of identity. Far from re-hashing the now banal argument of the racist, and therefore unreadable, character of the novel, this paper hopes to stimulate new readings and discussions of Huckleberry Finn. That is, the paper attempts to interrogate critically the novel's canonical significance and its applicability to (black) African audiences seemingly far-removed from, but integral to, its racial ideology and its literary status, so linking global theories of identity as well as African and (African-) American literary studies.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution , and: Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (review)

Reviewed by: Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, and: Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington Warren J. Carson Lois Brown. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. 690 pp. $45.00. Robert J. Norrell. Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2009. 508 pp. $35.00. The past few years have seen the publication of essential biographies of two important late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures in African American life and letters. Lois Brown’s long-awaited Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (2008) and Robert J. Norrell’s Up from History: The Life of [End Page 286] Booker T. Washington (2009) are both substantial contributions to our knowledge of these two outstanding Americans and add immeasurably to our appreciation of the lives of African Americans during a volatile and troublesome period. The fact that the subjects of these works found themselves in opposition to the other’s philosophy and posturing makes the nearly simultaneous arrival of their biographies all the more interesting. Lois Brown’s monumental work on novelist, editor, and activist Pauline Hopkins seeks to bring a little-known and largely marginalized figure into her rightful place in the African American literary canon. In addition, Brown explores in minute detail many of the little-known facts of black life in New England, especially during the latter half of the 1800s and the first few years of the 1900s. Hopkins is situated in the milieu of the black New Englander and Brown’s careful research reveals many interesting details of a long-obscured history of African Americans in the far Northeast, from Massachusetts to Maine, dating from the time of the founding of the American colonies. Born in Portland, Maine, Pauline Hopkins was a fifth-generation member of a small but influential New England family on her mother’s side that counted among its members the famous Paul family, the poet James Whitfield, and the composer and opera singer Annie Pauline Pindell. Her father’s family was the Northrups, who according to Brown were “one of the most politically active and established African American families in Providence, Rhode Island” (34). Pauline Hopkins’s early life included stints as a performer in musical concerts, singing in various productions in Boston and in various other venues, even being billed periodically as “Boston’s favorite colored soprano.” In addition, Hopkins early on became interested in oratory, and developed into a powerful and gifted speaker on matters of literature, uplift, lynching, and a variety of concerns during the latter part of the nineteenth century that we now recognize as having constituted the woman’s era. Hopkins also trained as a stenographer and held a number of clerical and civil service positions in Boston. The larger portion of Brown’s work on Pauline Hopkins rightly concerns her literary endeavors, and offers particularly careful analyses of Hopkins’s novels Contending Forces, Hagar’s Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood. Brown identifies Contending Forces as an “Ancestral Narrative,” and the most important work among those written by Hopkins. This novel is perhaps best described as a tour de force that explores the power of racism to undermine even the strongest personal and familial constitutions. The narrative follows a family from its beginnings in the West Indies, “moves to the slaveholding South, resumes in abolitionist New England, and finally concludes with two black migrations to New Orleans and London, respectively” (192). Contending Forces was published in 1900 and drew heavily on the challenging facts of the late-nineteenth-century “nadir” for African Americans. It included accurate historical and contemporary references that brought immediate attention to its author, then an officer in the New Era Club and a prominent Boston personality, although Hopkins was not a member of the social elite that included such people as Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell, perhaps the prime movers among those who advanced the colored women’s clubs of the day. Brown successfully argues, through careful literary analysis and astute historical revision, that Hopkins was a force to be reckoned with in the literary, social...

"Slipping back into the vernacular": Anzia Yezierska's Vernacular Modernism

During her 1923 trip to Europe, Anzia Yezierska made the appointed rounds of any serious American author of the early 1920s. According to her daughter and biographer, Louise Levitas Henriksen, Yezierska sought out George Bernard Shaw, Israel Zangwill, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Joseph Conrad to discover the secrets of their writing. The most interesting visit was with Gertrude Stein in Paris, where Stein gave her some typically Steinian advice: Why worry? Nobody knows how writing is written, the writers least of all! (Henriksen 195). The encounter between Yezierska and Stein has essentially gone unexamined in scholarship on these two writers, in part because they inhabit profoundly different spheres of the American literary canon. Despite the fact that they are both Jewish American women of roughly the same generation (Stein was born in 1874, Yezierska around 1880), they have come to represent very different things to scholars of American literature. Stein, firmly embedded in the modernist canon, has only recently been examined under the rubric of ethnic writing by critics such as Maria Damon, Barbara Will, and Priscilla Wald, while Yezierska's rise in American literary studies has been fueled by the interest in the subcanon of ethnic women's writing. (1) Yezierska's 1923 meeting with Stein certainly does not figure as the same kind of watershed moment in American modernism as Ernest Hemingway's arrival at 27 me de Fleums in the previous year. After all, Hemingway approached Stein as an apprentice and Yezierska's meeting occurred after she had already become a successful writer. However, the insistence that Stein remain an unqualified modernist writer, and that Yezierska, at best, be labeled an ethnic modernist suggests an inability of existing literary subcanons to adequately deal with the variety of modernist writing produced in this era. Yezierska was all but invisible to scholars of American literature until the 1970s. Outside a brief mention in Allen Guttmann's 1971 study The Jewish Writer in America, Yezierska was even largely absent from the Jewish American literary canon, which was more kind to conventional realist and modernist figures such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, and Henry Roth. (2) Yezierska's rediscovery by literary critics in the 1970s and 1980s (with the republication of Bread Givers [1925] in 1975, and the publication of the Yezierska collection The Open Cage [1979] and the 1985 edition of Hungry Hearts [1920]) came on the heels of an increasing interest in narratives of working women by feminist scholars. (3) As Mary V. Dearborn notes, Yezierska's fiction is welcomed, in short, because it provides valuable documentary evidence that ethnic women existed (Anzia 108). To both feminist and labor historians, such documentation was crucial to the expansion of labor histories to include more diverse voices in the understanding of twentieth-century labor. Since Yezierska's rediscovery, the scholarship on her work has consistently emphasized ethnicity, gender, and class, placing her in subcanons that write out meetings like the one between Stein and Yezierska. Critics have recently gone so far as to include her in studies of Yiddish literature, even though she never published in Yiddish. (4) Ethnic American writers such as Yezierska have been both blessed and cursed by the last thirty years of American literary scholarship. With the emergence of ethnic studies, many American writers long forgotten by literary historians have reemerged in new editions and made their way into classrooms and scholarly journals. This new attention has certainly been a boon for Zora Neale Hurston, whose work has become an indisputable part of the American and African American literary canons. While less canonical ethnic writers continue to inspire a significant amount of scholarship, the relationship of these writers to the rest of American literary history remains murky. In certain cases, such as Michael North's The Dialect of Modernism (1994), writers such as Hurston and Claude McKay form a background for understanding the racial and linguistic appropriations of already canonized high modernists such as Stein, T. …

From Black Nationalism to the Ethnic Revival: <i>Meridian</i>'s Lynne Rabinowitz

Late in Alice Walker’s novel Meridian (1976), Lynne Rabinowitz recalls her confrontations with a family of Jewish deli owners in the South. During this confrontation, Lynne refl ects on their mutual resentment: the couple judges her as a white woman who associates with black men, and she judges them for forsaking their once-oppressed Jewish community to join the community of oppressors—the dominant Anglo-American culture. This passage takes place after Lynne has sustained a series of tragic losses. She has left behind her family and the creature comforts of suburbia, abandoned her dance career, moved to the South to join the Civil Rights Movement, and married Truman Held, a black revolutionary artist. She has befriended Meridian Hill, a black civil rights activist and the novel’s protagonist, and borne a daughter, Camara, with Truman. She has been rejected by her black friends in the Movement after its ideology became more nationalist. She has been raped by Truman’s friend and then sexually exploited by his other friends. She has lost her daughter to a violent crime and her husband to another woman. She is left wandering, alone, without a community or a cause. Because Meridian remains one of few Civil Rights Movement novels, scholars have focused largely on either the relationship of this text to the African American literary canon or the main protagonist’s (Meridian’s) struggle to balance her loyalties to race with her identity as a woman. 1 In their illumination of these racial questions, few scholars have examined the Jewish character Lynne Rabinowitz. 2 I assert that Walker employs Lynne as a cautionary tale for ethno-racial groups in the US, many of whom, by the time of the novel’s publication, had initiated nationalist movements to advocate for civil rights, foster cultural awareness and pride, and resist dominant culture conformity. 3 Lynne’s tragic narrative of exile serves as an allegory for the fl awed community- and coalition-building of the

To Make an Old Century New

To Make an Old Century New Tess Chakkalakal (bio) Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. By John Ernest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 336 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. By P. Gabrielle Foreman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 280 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. By Eric Gardner. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009. 258 pages. $50.00 (cloth). A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. By Stephen G. Hall. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 334 pages. $65.00 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel. By Edlie L. Wong. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 337 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper). A decade has passed since Elizabeth McHenry declared in this journal’s pages that “the more we know about the range of activities and strategies of resistance used by early black Americans as they worked toward a society that was both multiracial and equal increases the accuracy and sophistication of American cultural history.”1 McHenry’s 2002 book, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, elaborates upon her earlier claim and now five new studies of nineteenth-century African American literature and history continue to broaden our knowledge of early black Americans and African American culture through the recovery of forgotten or neglected writings.2 All five, in different yet compatible ways, document and supplement the turn away from vernacular and oral forms of African American expression that were once central to the formation and study of African American culture. [End Page 1001] It was after all the “discovery” of black spirituals in the mid-nineteenth century, as Jon Cruz explains in Culture on the Margins (1999), “that helped to install the modern hermeneutical orientation toward cultural practices” (3). Although it was Frederick Douglass who first noted the importance of the spirituals to the formation of the black community, it was not until the twentieth century that they became the focus of cultural study. Renaming the form “sorrow songs” in his 1903 study The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B Du Bois situated them at the center of American history and culture. That claim would be echoed by the unnamed protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, who devotes himself to recovering and transcribing the songs of rural southern blacks in his attempt to “catch the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state.”3 Though developed during the nineteenth century as a response to the social and economic conditions of slavery, black religious music as an authentic form of African American culture was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Most notable is the work of Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, which has illuminated both the meaning and significance of the black vernacular to African American literature and cultural production. Partially influenced by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Baker and Gates’s theories of African American literature rely on oral forms, particularly music, to understand not only the meaning of what Gates calls “the black text,” but also the relationship between white and black forms of American culture. While relying on written texts, these critics helped to broaden the idea of literature to include vernacular forms of cultural expression rooted in slave experience. Hence, the formation of an African American literary canon that begins with spirituals, slave narratives, sermons, and folktales. That twentieth-century idea of the black vernacular has been slowly eclipsed in the twenty-first century by an emphasis on print culture, or what Wilson J. Moses calls “a literate tradition.”4 Focusing instead on a wide variety of forms of print culture that include not just novels, poems, and plays but also periodicals and legal cases, all five authors reviewed here share McHenry’s desire to dispel “the myth of the monolithic black community” by expanding our knowledge of early forms of black print culture (15). Recovering and...

The Construction and Revision of American Literary Canon: — Study of The Norton Anthology of American Literature 1979-2003

The Construction and Revision of American Literary Canon: — Study of The Norton Anthology of American Literature 1979-2003

Ariel Dorfman: an aesthetics of hope

Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope is a critical introduction to the life and work of the internationally renowned writer, activist, and intellectual Ariel Dorfman. It is the first book about the author in English and the first in any language to address the full range of his writing to date. Consistently challenging assumptions and refusing preconceived categories, Dorfman has published in every major literary genre (novel, short story, poetry, drama); adopted literary forms including the picaresque, epic, noir, and theater of the absurd; and produced a vast amount of cultural criticism. His works are read as part of the Latin American literary canon, as examples of human rights literature, as meditations on exile and displacement, and within the tradition of bilingual, cross-cultural, and ethnic writing. Yet, as Sophia A. McClennen shows, when Dorfman's extensive writings are considered as an integrated whole, a cohesive aesthetic emerges, an aesthetics of hope that foregrounds the arts as vital to our understanding of the world and our struggles to change it. To illuminate Dorfman's thematic concerns, McClennen chronicles the writer's life, including his experiences working with Salvador Allende and his exile from Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and she provides a careful account of his literary and cultural influences. Tracing his literary career chronologically, McClennen interprets Dorfman's less-known texts alongside his most well-known works, which include How to Read Donald Duck, the pioneering critique of Western ideology and media culture co-authored with Armand Mattelart, and the award-winning play Death and the Maiden. In addition, McClennen provides two valuable appendices: a chronology documenting important dates and events in Dorfman's life, and a full bibliography of his work in English and in Spanish.