American Literary Culture Research Articles

Writing for Goony Friends: Jane Bowles, Weak Theory, and Coterie Aesthetics in Midcentury American Literary Culture

Writing for Goony Friends: Jane Bowles, Weak Theory, and Coterie Aesthetics in Midcentury American Literary Culture

The Madness of America

Abstract The essays in this volume of American Literary History devoted to the echoes of medical discourse in American literary culture represent the best of our contemporary approaches to the Medical Humanities. In my essay-comment, I pose the question about how “American” such queries are in the cases presented. My answer is that they are very American, often in surprising ways.American patients’ central nervous systems are exhausted; their energy reserves depleted by the world which they inhabit.

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry

Reviewed by: To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry Sara Rutkowski To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship. By Elizabeth McHenry. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 295. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4780-1451-5; cloth, $104.95, ISBN 978-1-4780-1539-4.) Each of the four chapters of Elizabeth McHenry’s new book, To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship, offers a luminous venture into a little-known corner of African American literary history at the turn of the twentieth century. In her first chapter, McHenry introduces readers to a body of history and criticism she calls “racial school books”—works sold by subscription that charted racial history and effectively provided an alternative curriculum in classrooms for Black students in the Midwest and the South. McHenry delves into how volumes like William Krogman and Henry Kletzing’s Progress of a Race (Atlanta, 1896), which have long been excluded from consideration as “literature,” became sites of “the advancement of literacy and literary education” (p. 15). The next chapter focuses on the proliferation of bibliographies that cataloged Black print culture. As McHenry explains, these lists became a way of [End Page 372] establishing parameters of and giving “purpose and legitimacy to Black literature” (p. 79). Daniel Murray’s bibliographies for the 1900 Paris Exposition and the bibliographies W. E. B. Du Bois published in the early years of the twentieth century “have much to tell us about how the subjects of Blackness were being mapped, aesthetically imagined, and politically mobilized” (p. 128). McHenry then shifts to T. Thomas Fortune, the writer largely responsible for Booker T. Washington’s literary career. She describes Fortune’s efforts to make Washington “literary”—and by extension to give authority to Black literary production (p. 131). But Fortune sacrificed his own writerly ambitions, and his fiction fared poorly in the literary marketplace while he constructed Washington’s authorship. Finally, McHenry explores the life and work of Mary Church Terrell, a notable journalist and activist whose aspirations as a fiction writer were met with nothing but letters of rejection from white publishers. Yet as McHenry maintains, Terrell’s continued insistence on submitting her short stories in the face of certain refusal, as well as her careful archiving of her correspondence with publishers, formed part of “a furious and systematic assault on a segment of a publishing institution intent on denying the complexity of racial identity” (p. 234). On its surface then, To Make Negro Literature is a composite of long essays linked by somewhat hidden subjects that occupy the same historical period, a period that McHenry argues has been largely ignored or conveniently treated as an extension of Reconstruction or a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance. But McHenry’s goal in this volume is not about—or not simply about— correcting this critical oversight and isolating a new period of Black literary history. Instead, she sets her sights on something much larger: reframing how scholars perform literary studies. By expanding critical attention to texts that have been dismissed as insufficiently literary, to devalued readerships, to Black print culture, and to the labors of writers who failed to find success, McHenry is attempting to “rejigger both our understanding of turn-of-the-century African American literary culture and our conception of the appropriate objects of African Americanist literary inquiry” (p. 11). Indeed, the concept of failure is the thread that runs through these chapters, as McHenry invites us to consider how failure—in contrast to the accomplishments of widely studied writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt—operates as a “rich site of theorization” (p. 5). Drawing on concepts from queer studies, she shows how failing can be conceived as “a rejection of what is” if we look at how Black literary practitioners found ways to “audaciously reject and refuse the place assigned to them and the disrespect shown to their intellectual lives as segregation and disenfranchisement were formalized and codified” (p. 6). What McHenry has done is valuable, then, not only for the wealth of material she has unearthed, but also for...

Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi

Reviewed by: Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi Madeline Zehnder Stokes, Claudia. 2021. Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $79.95 hc. 288 pp. Putzi, Jennifer. 2021. Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $69.95 hc. 320 pp. In a 2016 profile of the poet Eileen Myles, journalist Emily Witt coined the "Theory of the Bad Copy"—a distillation of Myles's belief that copying can be a vehicle for artistic and social change. According to Myles, who has suggested that Black Sparrow Press published them "as a bad copy of Charles Bukowski," people often break with the past by presenting as imitations of established figures (Witt 2016).1 Copying may ease difference, but it also allows new artists to slip through the door and shake things up. The Theory of the Bad Copy suggests that as much as contemporary Western society professes to value originality, it more readily cleaves to the familiar. Latent in the concept of a "bad" copy is the critique that failures of imagination cloud audience ability to recognize what is new or original. At the same time, there's something subversive about a copy characterized by its badness. In a culture that outwardly praises innovation while denigrating imitation, the bad [End Page 146] copy disrupts, slyly reframing the act of copying as creative work. Myles themself has described copying as an essential part of their poetic labor: "[copying] is a form of loving the world. … It is a form of chanting and I do it for religious reasons. I mean it's my default position" (Myles 2020). Practices of imitation also offer social and creative resources for the nineteenth-century Americans whom Claudia Stokes and Jennifer Putzi discuss in their respective monographs. Yet while Myles embraces copying as a mode of introspection and individual renewal, these earlier American authors copy and imitate primarily to forge networks and connections—with the past, with the literary establishment, with each other. Challenging the assumption that originality is a timeless artistic value, Stokes and Putzi explicate unoriginality's appeal for particular nineteenth-century American audiences by pairing close readings of texts with attention to material conditions of textual production, circulation, and use. The nexus of the textual and the material has been a generative site for thinking about the role of copying in the nineteenth-century United States. In recent decades, scholarship including Meredith L. McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003), Lindsay DiCuirci's Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (2018), and the Viral Texts Mapping Project (est. 2012) has positioned reprinting as an important heuristic for understanding early American literary culture. Research on nineteenth-century African American literature, including the essays in Early African American Print Culture (2012), has been crucial to recovering the social and political functions of copying, including how practices such as quotation index nineteenth-century Black American authors' orientation toward the collective. While both Stokes and Putzi engage this scholarship to examine how copying organizes material and social practices, their respective studies help connect the study of material texts with questions and methods drawn from aesthetics and poetics. Together, Old Style and Fair Copy invite scholars to take unoriginal texts seriously as literature—and to ask why the unoriginal has become cause for literary dismissal in the first place. In Old Style, Claudia Stokes charts the rise and fall of unoriginality as a "legitimate aesthetic mode" in the nineteenth-century United States (2021, 2). Revisiting a familiar story of the early national period as an era of print expansion, Stokes shows that even as some authors and publishers deployed novelty to compete for attention [End Page 147] in a crowded market, others advocated for treating the borrowed, familiar, and traditional as markers of literary skill and taste. For many early nineteenth-century Americans, Stokes argues, originality was suspect. Being perceived as literary was less about producing iconoclastic newness than showcasing knowledge of literary...

Poe in Cyberspace: Web 1, 2, 3 . . .

Poe in Cyberspace: Web 1, 2, 3 . . .

Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender by Casey Kayser

Reviewed by: Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender by Casey Kayser Susan N. Mayberry MARGINALIZED: SOUTHERN WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS CONFRONT RACE, REGION, AND GENDER, by Casey Kayser. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. 218 pp. $99.00 hardback; $30.00 paperback. Casey Kayser's new book, Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, counters the "deep, historical prejudices against every term of the label 'Southern Woman Playwright'" (p. 5). She positions her work as a response to the call by Robert McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige for scholars to expand their 2002 collection Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism, the first and hitherto only book-length study of female dramatists with attention to their southern roots. Agreeing with McDonald and Paige that the works of women playwrights have been omitted from the history and criticism of southern literature, Kayser widens her critical scope to include dramatists well beyond the "artistic Trinity" of Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman (p. 5). Marginalized represents Kayser's detailed intervention into the twenty-year silence that followed Southern Women Playwrights as she outlines "the factors that affect the prejudice and the problems" these artists face, "which are rooted in geographical, ideological, interpretive, and genre-based challenges" (p. 5). Her study of their works unearths a pattern of the playwrights' conscious strategies to counter their marginalization. Kayser responds to Gary Richards's claim that "the South's relation to theater remains a troubled one," explaining this "fraught relationship" most simply as "a departure geographically from the northern center of American theatre culture, New York City" (p. 17). She acknowledges, however, an ideological opposition as well: The South is often seen as an aberration alongside the rest of the nation, for which New York City serves as an iconic symbol. I argue that the uneasy relationship Richards describes is also rooted in factors related to the nature of the dramatic genre, which is marked by unique features that present a challenge for depictions of the South, especially on stage. (p. 17) Kayser employs Una Chaudhuri's theory of "geopathy"—which delineates places as problematic for dramatists and the characters they create—to illuminate the particular restraints on southern women playwrights. Kayser demonstrates the deliberate attempts of Hellman, Henley, and Norman to avoid assumptions based on the regional identity of their characters or their own southern roots (p. 5). As Kentucky-born Norman mentioned in a 1986 reading at Alfred University and emphasizes in her prescript notes to her 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning play 'night, Mother, "Under no circumstances should the set and its dressing make a judgment [End Page 367] about the intelligence or taste of Jessie and Thelma. . . . Heavy accents, which would further distance the audience from Jessie and Thelma, are also wrong" (qtd. p. 3). Norman clarifies the rationale for her approach in a 1987 interview: When you are even remotely from the South, there is always this judgment: People in the South talk funny and they aren't very smart, and they sit around on the porch all the time. One has to fight that. I want to give the characters a real chance at getting through to the audience. To do that, I had to get rid of all the things that stood in the way, like locale, accents, dialect. (qtd. pp. 3-4) Kayser establishes in clear, relatively jargon-free prose that southern female playwrights are quite aware of the South's identity in the national imaginary as a "backwards" region. They also recognize their critical audience to be what Jill Dolan describes as "the privileged, visible, speaking 'majority,' widely known as white, middle-class, and male" (and, Kayser would add, not southern) and their theatrical success to be reliant on the staging of a play in an American city most antithetical to the South, New York City (p. 4). Ultimately, Kayser asks, how can their marginalized position as female playwrights within American literary and theater culture, in some cases lesbians or women of color, not affect their dramatic choices? While she draws from a broad theoretical basis, including American drama and theater scholarship, feminist and queer theory, performance studies, and southern...

Wasting time? The politics and poetics of feminist waiting

ABSTRACT In this article I analyse the politics and poetics of waiting, as it is represented in feminist fictions of the 1970s, through reference to relevant philosophies of time. Focusing on examples drawn from American literary culture, I trace how writers including Lisa Alther and Marilyn French have envisioned the role of waiting in women’s oppression and liberation, and ask why feminist fictions so routinely explore the issue of gender inequality through the experiences of those who wait. Extrapolating Henri Bergson’s claim in Creative Evolution (1907) that waiting sharpens the individual’s consciousness of time, I investigate the emotional valences of waiting and its literary articulations, arguing that the agitated feelings associated with waiting – from excitement and anticipation to impatience and dread – work to establish an affective temporality of waiting that comes to characterise the feminist novel in the 1970s. More pressingly, perhaps, as depictions of waiting acquire currency as salient animations of women’s asynchronous temporality, I explore the extent to which attempts to represent women’s fears and desires in time might, for certain subjects, model new forms of ethical engagement and political action.

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Eyzehu M'koman Shel Zevakhim? [What is the Site of the Ritual Sacrifice?] Yiddish Writers Encounter the Chicago Meatpacking Industry

Eyzehu M'koman Shel Zevakhim? [What is the Site of the Ritual Sacrifice?]Yiddish Writers Encounter the Chicago Meatpacking Industry Jessica Kirzane (bio) Yiddish poet Pessie Pomerantz-Honigbaum's poem "Vintn" ["Winds"] depicts Chicago by following the path of winds that sweep through the city, rushing in from Lake Michigan where the poet loves to stroll, making their way through the smog of the city and back out of the dense cityscape to its wide parks at the city's outskirts.1 The poem begins and ends with beauty and natural expanse, the pleasures of a walk on the shoreline, the elegant symphony of the winds dancing through the parks. In its center, though, winds howl through crowded, dusty streets, past the "raykh zaln" [halls of wealth], presumably the business district and stock exchange, and the "geshtank fun dayne shlakht-heyzer" [stink of your slaughterhouses].2 According to the poem, the central features of the city itself were these twin entities: wealth and poverty, capitalism and industrialism, steel-framed skyscrapers and stockyards. Pomerantz-Honigbaum's concise description of what she understood to be the emblematic features of her city was consistent with the way the city was represented and understood within and beyond Yiddish-language writing in the early twentieth century. For Yiddish writers, the word "Chicago" was often synonymous with the stockyards or shekht-heyzer [slaughterhouses] with which they closely associated the city and its role in American industrialism and the abuses of capitalism.3 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the stockyards of Chicago stood as symbols of the new industrial economy of America, its modern innovation and its human costs, not just for Yiddish writers, of course, but the world over. The "Square Mile" of packinghouses and animal pens was encircled by railroad lines that pumped livestock into the Chicago market and meat out into the world. Visitors to [End Page 31] Chicago by rail were immediately confronted by this spectacle of thousands of cattle, calves, hogs, and sheep being led to the famed meatpacking plants.4 The stockyards were a tourist destination that defined Chicago for a fascinated public in the post-Civil War era and beyond.5 Together with the wealth of the city's wide boulevards and skyscrapers, the stockyards came to be central to an understanding of the economic role of the city, and the meaning of modern American capitalism itself. Yiddish writers, whether visiting or living in Chicago, were taken by the spectacle of the meatpacking industry, where the efficient factory-style slaughter attracted thousands of tourists eager to witness the processes that constituted the pinnacle of modern human productivity. They expressed their impressions of the factory in a distinctly Yiddish and Jewish idiom, drawing upon Jewish language, ritual, and memory, as well as shared leftist politics, to represent the stockyards for their reading communities. By examining Yiddish writers' views of the Chicago stockyards, one can explore the Jewishly inflected ways that writers approached their participation in a popular tourist activity that is not specifically understood as a Jewish or immigrant activity. One can also discover the ways they participated in broader American literary culture and linked it to global Yiddish politics and writing. An examination of these sources demonstrates how the Yiddishreading community understood and judged the social and political landscape of America using the interpretive tools and cultural understandings they embedded in their shared Yiddish language and culture. An examination of these sources also illuminates what seems to have been a common phenomenon of Yiddish writing about Chicago—that it was often describing a transient experience. Chicago boasted a large Yiddish-speaking community, much of it concentrated around the city's Near West Side, with a wealth of Yiddish newspapers, charitable and relief organizations, schools, and other institutions. But a significant percentage of Yiddish writing depicting Chicago was penned by tourists, visiting literary figures giving readings or lectures, and individuals who spent only a short time in Chicago before moving on to other Yiddish communities such as Los Angeles.6 A focus on Chicago Yiddish writing could easily overlook these perspectives in order to paint a picture of Chicago Yiddish writers from among the literary figures and cultural activists living...

Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis

Reviewed by: Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis Aimee Armande Wilson Gender in American Literature and Culture. Edited by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. v + 375 pp. $39.99 cloth/$32.00 e-book. Gender in American Literature and Culture seeks to build on previous generations of feminist and gender studies scholarship. The chapters "honor the tradition of feminist recovery projects," "follow in the wake of previous critics who have redefined some of the texts that are considered canonical," and challenge "the well-entrenched white patriarchy that has often narrowly defined what counts as literary" (3). These may be familiar goals, but they are nevertheless important ones. The outcomes that the earliest feminist literary critics set out to achieve are still as worthy as they are unattained. This is not to suggest that no progress has been made but to recognize that much work remains. As editors Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis point out, "decades of canon-busting have barely nudged white male authors from their primacy of place" (3). Current issues get top billing in Gender in American Literature and Culture; a small sampling includes #MeToo and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movements, settler colonialism, transphobia, and attacks on reproductive rights. The book's scope is admirably diverse, citing "texts by forty-three white authors and forty-six writers of color, written as early as 1630 and as recently as 2018" (3). Many of these authors are well known, such as Anne Bradstreet, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston. The book covers just as many lesser-known authors, too, including Gerda Saunders, author of a contemporary Alzheimer's memoir, and 'Afīfa Karam, an early-twentieth-century Lebanese-American journalist, novelist, and translator. As with any volume covering such a large swath of authors, topics, and time periods, comprehensiveness is impossible. The editors admit that they are not attempting comprehensiveness and, furthermore, confront the intellectual flaws of such grand-sweep styles of literary scholarship. In one of the most insightful moments in the introduction, Lutes and Travis establish the scope of the book while simultaneously commenting on the state of literary studies in 2021: "While we believe that understanding the cultural and historical operations of gender in the United States is more pressing than ever, we also recognize that a chastened model of literary criticism has emerged, one that is less confident in its transformative potential, more skeptical of liberatory claims, and more modest in its sense of what it can accomplish" (2). Although the volume was completed before the global pandemic and its continuing fallout, the inequities laid bare by these events were evident long before, and the writers in this volume respond to those extant [End Page 125] inequities. If anything, the pandemic years have made this book timelier and more urgent. As would be expected given this feminist approach, the volume does not shy away from political issues. Indeed, the feminist underpinnings of the volume can be seen in the editors' open embrace of presentism. Lutes and Travis state that the book "responds to this cultural and political moment with chapters that are presentist and activist but also keen to avoid overreaching" (2). At its best, the presentism employed by the writers in this volume simultaneously considers differences between historical periods as well as bridges between them in service of a better understanding of the conditions that led to current tragedies and political flashpoints. Each of the book's three thematic sections is organized chronologically. In the first, "Intimacies," writers consider literary depictions of intimate relationships. Chapters focus on the various forms of desire and violence contained in these relationships. Standouts include Marion Rust's "Post-Reproductive Female Sexuality and the Early American Novel," which is part of a resurgence of scholarly interest in sexuality in early American literary studies, and Travis M. Foster's "The Effeminate Man in Nineteenth-Century America," which considers the intersection of masculinity, eugenics, and white supremacy in the popular press. "Aggressions," the second section, "demonstrate[s] that gendered violence is endemic to American literary history and culture" (8). This section is the strongest of the...

Pragmatics of Democracy: A Political Theory of African American Literature before Emancipation

Abstract “Pragmatics of Democracy: A Political Theory of African American Literature before Emancipation” reads scenes of embodied experience in early African American literary culture to theorize how persons come to regard democratic cultures as productive of the most excellent forms of life. The book proposes a typology of these iterative bodily events which dispose persons toward democratic subjectivity: ecstasy, violence, impersonality, respectability, and autonomy. [E]arly African American narratives offer speculations, categories, and hermeneutics concerning democracy grounded in Black life amid new-world chattel slavery that sometimes contradict, sometimes complement those that prevailed in early US political thought.

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Discipline and Abolish: A dialogue about writing, power, and mass incarceration

Discipline and AbolishA dialogue about writing, power, and mass incarceration Caleb Smith (bio) and Rachel Kushner (bio) Over the past two decades, Rachel Kushner has earned a reputation as a writer of strikingly memorable, keenly drawn, and exhaustively imagined characters. Each of her three novels—Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018)—revolves around people who are often underrepresented within the spaces of American literary culture, from convicts and bikers to agricultural executives and prison guards, and the force of their personalities is the propellant that moves the plot vigorously forward. Her new essay collection, The [End Page 85] Hard Crowd: Essays, 2000–2020, is as richly peopled as her works of fiction, and as obsessed with systems of power, iconoclastic art, and carceral politics. Caleb Smith, a professor of English and American Studies at Yale University and a longtime friend of Kushner’s, is a scholar of the American criminal justice system, the author of two books of nonfiction—including The Prison and the American Imagination (2009)—and the person to whom Kushner often turns to discuss the ethics and histories of incarceration. The two first encountered each other at BOMB magazine, where both worked, in 2001. They spoke on Zoom in April, Kushner from a residency in rural Wyoming, Smith from New Haven, and revisited the dialogue afterward over email. Their conversation touched on novelistic prose and the economics of the prison system. —the editors ________ caleb smith Making my way through The Hard Crowd, I felt almost like I was getting to follow the development of your sensibility. There is your childhood in an unconventional family, with beatnik parents who would go on to become scientists, and then there are the coming-of-age years in the underground world of Bay Area bars and rock clubs. There are passages about moving to New York, writing about the arts, and in the title essay you reflect on how memory shapes your novels. Throughout, you have a way of finding the personal detail that makes each character feel strange and real, full of charisma and a kind of complicated glamor that has nothing to do with fame. Of course I was especially inclined to read the book in a personal light, since the twenty years you name in your subtitle, 2000 to 2020, basically tally the span of our friendship. rachel kushner Yes, twenty years, the friendship with you and the span of this collection almost perfectly overlapping! It’s surprising [End Page 86] to me now, looking back, the directions we each went in life, since that era when we first met. You’re a professor of literature, and I’m a published author, and so many of our interests have converged over the years, almost in eerie ways. And yet our experiences together two decades back didn’t exactly anticipate our respective futures. At BOMB, we were both still trying to figure out our niche. At the time, I didn’t feel confident yet about my own writing, or imagine myself into the New York literary world. You and I bonded immediately, but it wasn’t over shared ambition; we bonded over our amusements, which sometimes derived from encountering the actual people behind the books or the visual art; their demeanor, whether gracious or neurotic, and what they had to say, surprising, or not. Looking back into the deep past, I see such continuity in terms of the worlds we’ve each explored in our own work, and how all of that dilates both fast and slow, with other people who were there for our lives as they unfolded and transformed. It was actually because of that job at BOMB that I wrote “Girl on a Motorcycle,” which is the first essay in The Hard Crowd and was the first essay I ever published. (It was collected in an anthology called She’s a Bad Motorcycle: Writers on Riding.) I think I’d been an interviewer for BOMB and needed a bio for the contributor’s page, but because I hadn’t done anything worth noting, I did that obnoxious thing where you’re like, “So-and-so has worked...

Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to ReconstructionCatholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary ImaginationSacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American LiteratureThe Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to ReconstructionCatholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary ImaginationSacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American LiteratureThe Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture by John Gatta

Reviewed by: Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture by John Gatta Lars Erik Larson (bio) Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture John Gatta Oxford University Press, 2018. vii + 286 pp. $36.95 hardcover. Conventional views oppose spirituality and materiality; to connect with the former, one must either withdraw to the mind’s monastery or enclose oneself in a world-eclipsing temple. But as John Gatta’s latest book aims to show, this dichotomy is false: material place (houses, rivers, paths, cemeteries, geological sites, university campuses, and even cities) can help us find a spiritual center. Creative literature, the book asserts, maps how religious encounters with such places are achieved. Studies of literary place-making have a long tradition, and theory’s spatial turn of the past few decades have led to richly interdisciplinary explorations of the urgencies of spatial considerations. Gatta’s niche within this ferment is the spiritual angle, which even the mature field of ecocriticism has not fully plumbed. Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture expands on the broad timespan of Gatta’s previous eco-focused study Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in American from the Puritans to the Present (2004), to incorporate more of the human-built environment in the making of the sacred. In Gatta’s aim to show that the literary imagination both describes and creates spiritual place, chapters move across types of topoi: spirituality in literature’s houses (Thoreau’s economic cabin, Stowe’s slave abodes, Hawthorne’s haunted seven-gabled house, Cather’s Anasazi cliffs); sites of mobility (Carolyn Servid’s Glacier Bay, Momaday’s nomadic re-tracings, Muir’s saunterings); imagined space (Whitman’s spatial transcendence, Marilyn Nelson’s palimpsestic Tuskegee, Alfredo Véa Jr.’s Southwest squatter community); and outdoor geographies (Hawthorne’s Niagara Falls, Melville’s seas, Edward Abbey’s deserts, Lincoln’s Gettysburg, and the New York City sidewalks of Kazin, Day, and Baldwin). The book then shifts to a concluding [End Page 225] pedagogy-based chapter, on using the site of the university to teach undergraduates the skills of spatial attention, contemplative learning, and place-making—which the previous chapters have exemplified. The book’s presentation is unabashedly personal: Gatta moves frequently from literary points to personal encounters with the literature’s eclectic spaces. At times, the logic of the places the book covers seems to arise from the happenstance of the author’s own connections with them, rather than offering a more deliberative system of selection. These personal asides in places derail from the book’s aims (as when Gatta’s following of the fate of Stowe’s birth-home gets treated far longer than the pages can justify). But the author remains unfazed by the sometimes-desultory drift of chapter structure. After all, the personalized tone models the humanist practice of what it preaches—which suits a book that concludes in a directly pedagogical emphasis. Spirits of Place is strongest when it mines the rich set of tensions at the heart of its subject: of topophilia’s mix of materialist and spiritual longings; how a place like Devil’s Tower/Bear’s Lodge in Wyoming exemplifies “how conflicting sacralizations can converge upon a relatively limited space of terrain” (142); Wendell Berry’s “globally engaged localism” (101) set in dialogue with Ursula Heise’s skepticism of localism; Edward Abbey’s atheistic anticlericalism set against his own ecospiritual proximity to “John Calvin’s sense of the nonhuman world as a theatre of divine glory” (172). Aside from a few points from thinkers like Husserl, Bachelard, Tuan, and Heise, the book does not draw significantly from the theoretical storehouse that the spatial turn has generated, while also avoiding much in the way of theological criticism. This absence enables the study to stay compact, straightforward, and lucid. But it also limits Gatta’s ability to take a critical stand beyond the series of humanist commonplaces it points to. The lack of a more specific theoretical framework also limits the book’s ability to break new ground in its specific area of spirituality, as the subject remains generalized. In categorizing the divine, Gatta aims to be admirably open-minded, encompassing such spiritual forms as the polytheistic...

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture by John Gatta

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture by John Gatta

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet