American Literary Imagination Research Articles

Do Poems about Guns Make Guns Poetic?

Abstract Poems by Dean Rader, Montana Ray, Danez Smith, Brian Turner, and Elizabeth Willis register a perplexing trend in American poetry: the use of gun and bullet tropes in poems indirectly or not at all about guns. Many of the poets employing these tropes publicly oppose gun violence and promote poetry as a refuge from it, yet their poetry, paradoxically, affirms guns’ literary power. The five poets selected for this study represent different styles emitting from diverse histories, ages, and literary backgrounds. Their poems likewise branch across a range of contexts and levels of abstraction. Studied together, their poetry exposes the centrality of guns not only to US America's collective self-image as a social body and national power but also to the American literary imagination. In light of this apparent contradiction, this essay considers what the pervasiveness of gun and bullet tropes suggests about the efficacy of poetry as enemy, accomplice, or rival of guns.

Postcolonial Black Motherhood: Dismantling Controlling Images in Jesmyn Ward's Bois Sauvage Novels

Abstract Centering on Jesmyn Ward's two recent novels, this article begins with the literary through line from Toni Morrison's early novels to Ward's constructions of Black mothers in the twenty-first century of a fictional rural Mississippi. As Morrison before her, Ward archives Black women's lived experiences to reconfigure not only an American literary imagination but also the past itself to explore Black women's oppressions from the slave era to our contemporary moment. Ward's novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing express the social constructions that have burdened Black women, especially mothers, since the slave era. Through the social framework of controlling images as defined by Patricia Hill Collins, this article dissects U.S. social hierarchies that discriminate against Black mothers’ intersectional identities while theorizing how Black women feminist writers have strived toward self-definition and liberation. Implicit in the construction of these dominant social hierarchies is the postcolonial condition of Black mothers and women who have contested the colonial project of slavery, the imperial project of expansionism, and the postcolonial project of mass incarceration and lynchings. Most importantly, Ward illustrates how these controlling images and social constructions of racialized motherhood have concealed the structural oppressions experienced by Black women every day. Thus, I argue these two novels dismantle the controlling images surrounding Black mothers while examining how motherwork and othermothering constitute radical interventions that disrupt our racist, sexist culture and society. By reappropriating their past and self-defining their present, the Black mothers in Ward's novels uncover structural oppressions and reveal the critical connections between enslaved mothers and contemporary Black mothers.

The Hetaera's Monster: The Sublime Mother in the Slasher Film Genre

The Journal of Popular CultureEarly View Original Article The Hetaera's Monster: The Sublime Mother in the Slasher Film Genre Charles E. Hicks, Corresponding Author Charles E. Hicks [email protected] Search for more papers by this author Charles E. Hicks, Corresponding Author Charles E. Hicks [email protected] Search for more papers by this author First published: 22 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13186Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Works Cited Arnold, Sarah. Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. Palgrave, 2013. Baffes, Melanie. Love, Loss, and Abjection: The Journey of New Birth in the Gospel of John. Pickwick, 2016. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror: Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Princeton UP, 1992. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism. Zone, 1991. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton UP, 1995. Geyskens, Tomas. “ Literature as Symptomatology: Gilles Deleuze on Sacher-Masoch.” Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze's Debate with Psychoanalysis, edited by Leen Bolle, Leuven UP, 2010, pp. 103– 16. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Halloween. Directed by Rob Zombie, Dimension, 2007. Halloween II. Directed by Rob Zombie, Dimension, 2009. Harrington, Erin. Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. Routledge, 2018. Hollinger, Karen. “ The Monsters as Woman: Two Generations of Cat People.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas UP, 2015, pp. 346– 58. Jenkins, Barbara. Eros and Economy: Jung, Deleuze, Sexual Difference. Routledge, 2017. Kaplan, E. Ann. “ The Case of the Missing Mother.” Feminism & Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 466– 78. Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. Routledge, 1992. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1988. Kristeva, Julia. “ Julia Kristeva.” Women Analyze Women: In France, England, and the United States, edited by Elaine Hoffman Baruch, and Lucienne J. Serrano, New York UP, 1988, pp. 129– 48. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982. Mattoon, Mary Ann. Jungian Psychology in Perspective. Free Press, 1981. Mulvey, Laura. “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminism & Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 34– 47. Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind. Indiana UP, 1993. Powell, Anna. Deleuze and the Horror Film. Edinburgh UP. 2005. Red Dragon. Directed by Brett Ratner, Universal, 2002. Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago UP, 2006. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York UP, 2010. Sobchack, Vivian. “ Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas UP, 2015, pp. 171– 92. Studlar, Gaylyn. In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. Illinois UP, 1988. Tarr, Clayton Carlyle. Gothic Stories Within Stories: Frame Narratives and Realism in the Genre, 1790-1900. McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017. Verhaeghe, Paul. “ Enjoyment and Impossibility: Lacan's Revision of the Oedipus Complex.” Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, edited by Justin Clements, and Russell Grigg, Duke UP, 2006, pp. 29– 49. Williams, Linda. “ When the Woman Looks.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas UP, 2015, pp. 17– 36. Wood, Robin. “ An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Wayne State UP, 2018a, pp. 73– 110. Wood, Robin. “ Race with the Devil.” Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Wayne State UP, 2018b, pp. 67– 72. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Routledge, 1992. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

The greatness of smallness: Amos Oz, Sherwood Anderson, and the American presence in Hebrew literature

ABSTRACT This article offers a comparative reading of stories by Amos Oz and Sherwood Anderson to propose “smallness” – evoked by genre, setting, and literary devices – as a vital literary strategy structuring Oz’s works. Manifestations of smallness, fundamental to the twentieth-century American literary imagination, are indispensable in Oz’s stories. Paradoxically, both Oz’s literary modernism and his status as a “world author” can only be understood in the context of the small, the provincial, and the local that Anderson elevated to the status of great literature, suggesting that not only European literature but also (non-Jewish) American writing has influenced Hebrew literature

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History. Michael Hoberman

The title of Michael Hoberman’s A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History is inspired by Seymour “the Swede” Levov, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), who, in that text, purchases “a hundred acres of America,” thus symbolizing a sense of belonging for himself and future generations. With this reference, Hoberman alludes to the sense of place—its presence, absence, meaning, and formative influence—that propels forward even as it roots the Jewish American literary imagination. Hoberman’s superb study extends from the 1850s to the new millennium. Considering the relationship of Jewish American writers to the land and geography they inhabit and shape (and that, in turn, shapes their identities), Hoberman navigates a delicate triangulation of Americanness, Jewishness, and Jewish Americanness. The richness of Hoberman’s work is partly a feature of its extensive chronology, which includes 150 years of literary history, and partly due to his...

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman

Reviewed by: A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman Benjamin Schreier (bio) A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History By Michael Hoberman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. xii + 183 pp. In one sense Michael Hoberman's short, smart, and pithy new book addresses a fairly straightforward topic: "The subject of this book is the historical relationship between the Jewish American literary imagination and the sense of place" (2). Accordingly, it sets itself a fairly straightforward task: namely, as he writes toward the book's close, "The essays in the book represent my best attempt to explore the role that the geography of North America has played in shaping the Jewish American literary imagination" (155), or, as he describes that attempt toward the book's opening, to explore "the ways in which Jewish subjects have engaged the long-standing American tendency to contemplate and experience geography as a crucible for the formation of cultural identity" (2). And yet, as we see in this last formulation, there's something more at work in Hoberman's work: critical energies more profound than merely parochially straightforward. The book's great strength—and its offering to the field—is to provide a way to de-exceptionalize Jewish American literary study; for once we recognize the role of geography in Jewish American writing, once we appreciate its "territoriality," we recognize that it shares its ground with other American writing and literatures. To understand "geography as a basis for literary and cultural continuity" is to understand Jews in America as neither "oppressed outsiders" nor "excessively complacent recipients of American privilege" (4), but rather as Americans actively engaged in experiencing and writing like other Americans. [End Page 299] This represents a critically significant—and salutary—departure from the way the field has heretofore conceptualized itself (though "taken itself for granted" is probably more accurate, at least if you ask me). One of the historicist side effects of multiculturalist pluralism in the humanities is that it's frequently easy to think of ethnicity- or identity-based literatures as more or less discrete entities—with African American literature indexed to something more or less knowable as African American experience, Queer literature indexed to something more or less knowable as Queer experience, and so forth—and it's easy as well to eschew theorizing how those various siloed experiences and symptomatic literary formations interact with, overlap, or interdetermine each other (other than, maybe, some gestures toward a minoritarian idea of oppression). In Jewish American literary study this thought-formation is often intimately bound up with, and indeed inextricable from, a foundational sense that immigration is the only real theory the field needs—that is, that Jewish American literature essentially tracks the chronologically progressive history of Jewish immigration to the United States (thus do scholars preoccupy themselves with talk of literary generations, for example, or with how temporal distance from the scene of immigration determines the contours of the literary imagination of identity). But with its focus on geography rather than immigration, A Hundred Acres of America explicitly challenges this often-unacknowledged immigration theory of Jewish American literature. As Hoberman succinctly claims in the Introduction, "This book argues that a rich and complex relationship with American geography itself, and not merely the immigrant experience, constitutes a central reference point and touchstone for the development, over the course of several centuries, of a Jewish literary consciousness in the United States" (4). In chapters on frontier writing by Jews in early America, on late nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-twentieth-century intellectuals who emphasized the Jewish presence in colonial American cities (and who therefore substantiated claims both to the "cosmopolitan and pluralistic origins of America's oldest cities" [46] and "Jewish participation in early American history" [53]), on early- to mid-twentieth-century middlebrow and middle-American Jewish writers (in which writers [End Page 300] like Edna Ferber challenge our preconceived romantic notions of regionalism by representing small towns as continuous with "other American environments" [78]), on late-twentieth-century Jewish writers' contestations of the pastoral mode, on turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury literary returns to the shtetl...

Anne Spencer's "Natural" Poetics

CLA JOURNAL 185 Anne Spencer’s“Natural”Poetics Carlyn E. Ferrari “. . . Nature merely demands that we be fresh in the Spring.” “If people were like flowers, an hour is all I’d ask of them—and you— if people were like flowers [?]” – Anne Spencer Janie’s pear tree, Maud Martha’s daffodils, and Shug Avery’s transformation of God from male authoritarian into trees, birds, and air represent a rich—yet overlooked—tradition of Black women’s natural world writings and theorizing. Embedded in the narratives of Black women’s writings is a poetics of the natural world, a poetics that enables Black women’s subjectivities to be reimagined.1 Though environmental literary criticism remains an overlooked site of inquiry in Black women’s writing, Maureen Honey addressed the significance of the natural world to New Negro women writers nearly thirty years ago in her seminal work Shadowed Dreams. Honey argues that such women writers as Anne Spencer, Zora Neale Hurston, Bessie Mayle, Ethel Lee Newsome, and Mae Cowdery identified with nature because it was something that, like Black women, had been corrupted and dominated by white male oppression; therefore, they used nature as a vehicle through which to articulate their gender and racial oppression (8). For Black women, in particular, nature can be a difficult symbol through which to mediate one’s gender and sexuality because of its fraught colonial legacies.2 Just like the land, Black women and their bodies were marked as a natural resource to be exploited. Western understandings of humans’ relationship to the environment posit that human beings are dominant over the natural world and non-human creatures. This thinking stems, in part, from the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 1:28, which reads: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, 1 In my use of “poetics,” I am referring to the theory and practice of studying linguistic techniques in literature. This should be distinguished from “discourse,” which I am using to signal the existence of a body of scholarship on the subject of Black women writers’ self-representation. 2 I use “colonial” to signal “colonization,” the process of appropriating a geographical region for one’s own use, which also involves domination over, removal of, and/or genocide of indigenous peoples. Within the context of this analysis, I am alluding to both the pre-history of the United States in British North America and colonization projects under 19th and 20th century European and North American colonialism that rendered Black women an always-available natural resource to be exploited in various ways. 186 CLA JOURNAL Carlyn E. Ferrari and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’” (KJ21). This notion of dominion, however, did not extend to black individuals. As Carolyn Finney explains in Black Faces, White Spaces, ideologies about African Americans and their relationship to the environment were being developed at the same time as other racial ideologies, and black people have been systematically and institutionally denied access to the environment just as they have been excluded and alienated from other facets of American society (35). Both in American society and in the American literary imagination, the outdoors is represented as a “white space.” However, African Americans are deeply, intimately, and historically connected to the environment, and their stories have yet to be told; their environmental imaginaries have yet to be considered. This deep, intimate, spiritual connection to the natural world is clearly seen in the poetry of Anne Spencer, as it was her renowned garden at her home in Lynchburg, Virginia, that served as her muse. Both Spencer’s daily life and poetry were“interwoven with her garden”and, through her poetry, we see the significance of the natural world from the often-negated perspective of an African American individual (Frischkorn and Rainey 45). In addition to providing a voice for black environmental imaginaries, Spencer’s poetry also challenges pervasive stereotypes specific to black women and their bodies. As a black woman writing about nature in an intimate fashion and looking to nature for inspiration...

Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination

Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2016

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2016 Mike Witcombe (bio) What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2016, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook (2016). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author's last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in "Book Chapters" and are cross-listed according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth's texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions. Mike Witcombe Mike Witcombe is Lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University, where he researches contemporary Jewish-American fiction. He is currently co-editing an essay collection for the Open Library of the Humanities titled "New Voices in Jewish-American Fiction," and has additional research interests in baseball fiction, videogames, and the history of psychoanalysis. His article on Roth's drafting process for the Kepesh novels was published in Philip Roth Studies 13.1 (Spring 2017). BOOKS McDonald, Paul and Samantha Roden. Philip Roth Through the Lens of Kepesh. Humanities-Ebooks, 2016. Google Scholar EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Gooblar, David and Aimee Pozorski, editors. Roth After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination, Lexington Books, 2016. Google Scholar EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Gooblar, David and Aimee Pozorski, editors. Roth After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination, Lexington Books, 2016. Google Scholar BOOK CHAPTERS Brauner, David. "Performance Anxiety: Impotence, Queerness, and the 'Drama of Self-Disgust' in Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire and The Humbling." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 61-78. Google Scholar Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska. "'A Human Being Lives Here': Philip Roth on Scandals and the American Presidency." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 29–42. Google Scholar Calder, Alex. "'I told my wrath, my Roth did grow': Anger in Operation Shylock." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 95–108. [End Page 133] Google Scholar Coughlan, David. "Exit Ghost Writer: Philip Roth." Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 97–114. Google Scholar Douglas, Christopher. "Recapitulation and Religious Indifference in The Plot Against America." If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right, Cornell UP, 2016, pp. 117–50. Google Scholar Gelbart, Amy. "'[Sticking] to a plan completely": Performance, Affective Adaptation, Memory, Pretend Play, and Suicide in Philip Roth's The Humbling." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 149–66. Google Scholar George, Joseph. "Assimilation and Appropriation: Contest and Collaboration in Global Suburbia." Postmodern Suburban Spaces: Philosophy, Ethics, and Community in Post-War American Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 163–80. Google Scholar Guillain, Aurélie. "Stalkers, Furies and Comforters: Roth's Grave Comedy of Persecution." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 79–94. Google Scholar Hayes, Patrick. "'With an accomplice no less brilliant than Jean Genet': A Comparative Approach to Roth's Autofiction." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 43–60. Google Scholar Mack, Michael. "Ageing and Modern Jewish Writing and Thought." The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging, edited by Geoffrey Scarre, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 149–67. Google Scholar Morley, Catherine. "'My Kinsmen, My Precursors': Philip Roth, Epic, Influence, and Bardic Proclivities." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 109–26. Google Scholar Nadel, Ira. "Roth @ 25: Publishing Goodbye, Columbus." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 19–28. Google Scholar Newton, Adam Zachary. "'I was the prosthesis': Roth and Late Style." Gooblar and Pozorski pp. 127–48. Google Scholar Parks, Tim. "Philip Roth." Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations Between Them. Yale UP, 2016. yale.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.12987/yale/9780300215366.001.0001/upso-9780300215366-chapter-009 Google Scholar Pozorski, Aimee. "Introduction—After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. xiii-xxii. Google Scholar Shechner, Mark. "Newark: The Shtetl." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 167–80. Google Scholar Shostak, Debra. "'Every...

Excerpt from <em>Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination</em>

Excerpt from Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination (Wayne State University Press, 2015)

41. Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination, 1850–2010

41. Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination, 1850–2010

Palimtextual Tracts: Susan Howe’s Rearticulation of Place

Palimtextual Tracts:Susan Howe’s Rearticulation of Place Mandy Bloomfield (bio) In an account of the circumstances under which she wrote the poem “Thorow” during an extended stay at Lake George in 1987, Susan Howe writes: If there is a Spirit of Place that Spirit had me in thrall. Day after day I watched the lake and how weather and light changed it. I think I was trying to paint a landscape . . . but my vision of the lake was not so much in space as in time. I was very aware of the commercialization and near ruin at the edge of the water, in the town itself, all around—but I felt outside of time or in an earlier time and that was what I had to get on paper. For some reason this beautiful body of water has attracted violence and greed ever since the Europeans first saw it. I thought I could feel it when it was pure, enchanted, nameless. There never was such a pure place. In all nature there is violence. Still it must have been wonderful at first sight. Uninterrupted nature usually is a dream enjoyed by the spoilers and looters—my ancestors. It’s a first dream of wildness that most of us need in order to breathe; and yet to inhabit a wilderness is to destroy it. An eternal contradiction. (“Difficulties” 20–21) [End Page 665] Here we see the poet positioning herself ambivalently within a powerful tradition of “the poetry of place.” From the narratives of the earliest European settlers, through the Romantic writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, to the modern poetry of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, and Gary Snyder, landscape and geography have played a central, albeit shifting, role in the American literary imagination. Howe explicitly invokes D. H. Lawrence’s notion of a “Spirit of Place,” which he understood as a “terrestrial magnetism,” an elemental “vital effluence . . . vibration . . . chemical exhalation” (6) infused, as if by osmosis, into American writing. Finding this mystical sense of connection between writing and place compelling, she articulates a yearning to transfer onto paper something of the landscape’s precolonial “wildness,” its “vital effluence” untainted by the damage of subsequent history. But her initial “if” implies skepticism toward such notions. In particular, she highlights how historical violence has shaped this place and her relation to it, and also how, as the descendent of “spoilers and looters,” she is implicated in this history. Furthermore, she recognizes that the very fantasy of “uninterrupted nature” in which she momentarily indulges is itself a construction that emerges from this history and culture of appropriation. Howe’s prose thus oscillates between a seemingly naive desire for an encounter with a primordial realm “outside of time” and a heightened awareness of the historical forces that have shaped the landscape and necessarily mediate all responses to it, including the very desire for unmediated encounter. This is indeed a poetics of place caught in “eternal contradiction.” Such conflicting impulses are typical of Howe’s poetics more generally. As Brian Reed has so cogently observed, “[a] duck-rabbit combination of skepticism and transcendentalism is . . . a foundational part of Howe’s worldview” (par. 25). I want to suggest that this characteristic feature of her work is particularly salient for environmentally oriented debates about the poetics of place. The “eternal contradiction” performed by Howe’s place-based imagination corresponds quite strikingly with an argument in ecocritical circles between strongly constructionist perspectives and what Greg Garrard neatly characterizes as “the poetics of authenticity,” which seeks an “unmediated encounter with the real world that rescues [End Page 666] the subject from the corrupt modern world of representation and simulation” (168). This tension has been present within ecocriticism since its beginnings in the 1990s, when this emergent field defined itself against the poststructuralist “linguistic turn” in the humanities, seeking to reinstate nature as referent in the face of very real anthropogenic destruction. In Kate Soper’s ubiquitously cited formulation, “It is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer; and the ‘real’ thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level...

Visitations of the Dead: Trauma and Storytelling in Bao Ninh's <em>The Sorrow of War</em>

Visitations of the DeadTrauma and Storytelling in Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War Andrew Ng (bio) Although very much a part of the American literary imagination in the late twentieth century, the Vietnam War remains an enterprise still in search of Vietnamese writers. To date, relatively few Vietnamese authors have attempted to recount the harrowing years of and following the war that witnessed the defeat of a Western military superpower by an Asian army dependent on guerrilla tactics and the force of determination. For these writers, however, victory is fundamentally a hollow nationalist discourse that speaks little of the experiences of ordinary Vietnamese who had to endure extreme suffering and loss, the effects of which often continue even decades later. In novels like Duong Thu Huong’s Novel without a Name (1995) and Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1994/2005), and The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) by the Vietnamese American lê thi diem thúy, the war inevitably translates into traumatic memory [End Page 83] that profoundly lodges survivors in a state of existential immobility. Despite being works of fiction, these powerful narratives capture the lingering vexation of unspeakable grief that haunts individuals marked by such a history, and how they manage it. Importantly, novels like those written by Bao Ninh and lê thi diem thúy express the tragedy of the Vietnam War not only in what they tell but through how they tell it as well. Arguably, these texts acknowledge that there are properties of war memories that language alone cannot convey and which thus require other narrative means to signify them. To this end, stylistic conventions frequently associated with postmodern literature are especially appropriate: these formal qualities not only intimate the conditions of trauma but vicariously re-create for the reader the mental and physical sensations (i.e., confusion, blackouts, compulsive behaviors) related to a lived circumstance that has been incontrovertibly damaged by trauma. Focusing on The Sorrow of War, this essay will demonstrate how certain stylistic practices, such as the fragmented narrative and the deliberate disavowal of temporal organization, are rehearsed in the novel to textually give shape to trauma. The Sorrow of War, whose Vietnamese version remained unavailable until ten years after the publication of its English translation in 1994 (the novel also won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize that same year), has since become one of the twentieth century’s most important war narratives. Despite a brief ban in Vietnam, it is today regarded as the country’s most beloved novel, “a book celebrated for its relentless, humane depiction of the generation that fought the war” (Thien 2011). The novel, partly autobiographical, is written by Bao Ninh, who during the Vietnam War served with the Glorious Twenty-Seventh Youth Brigade. Of its original five hundred members who went to war in 1969, only ten survived. Set in 1976, the story primarily revolves around Kien, a forty-year-old war veteran serving as a member of the Missing in Action Remains Gathering team. Interspersed between accounts of carrying out this gruesome task are intimate memories about the war, which Kien endeavors to record in writing despite the obvious emotional and psychological struggles it causes him. In the end, Kien disappears from his story altogether, leaving behind his manuscript to be subsequently passed on to an unnamed narrator. It is this narrator who would eventually [End Page 84] piece together the war veteran’s fragmented story and produce the narrative that is set before the reader. From this brief summary, formal narrative features corresponding to postmodern literature are already apparent in Bao’s novel. This article explores some of these features, but it will especially consider the manner in which they impart the complexity of Kien’s unclaimed experience (i.e., trauma) that invariably culminates in irresolvable grief. A discussion of the unrepresentable immediately follows from this introduction. Both postmodern aesthetics and trauma theory deploy this concept to describe, respectively, the sublime and trauma’s resistance to language’s signifying agenda, but as I will demonstrate, they do this in fundamentally different ways. What characterizes the unrepresentable (or unspeakable) in trauma may indeed...

Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. 317. Cloth $49.00. Paper $22.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessDarieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. 317. Cloth $49.00. Paper $22.00.Amy Abugo OngiriAmy Abugo OngiriUniversity of Florida, Gainesville Search for more articles by this author University of Florida, GainesvillePDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 99, Number 1-2Winter-Spring 2014Rediscovering the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.99.1-2.0160 Views: 30Total views on this site Copyright 2014 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Scaffold in the Marketplace

Samuel Johnson haunted the nineteenth-century American literary imagination, and there is no more compelling example of this than Nathaniel Hawthorne, who modeled his uniquely reticent form of authorial exemplarity in Johnson’s sociable shadow. This essay looks at a neglected dimension of Hawthorne’s historical and moral endeavor in his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850), by considering his fascination with both the great Augustan moralist and the elusive, mobile, and seminal historical genre that shaped that fascination, the anecdote. The genre of exemplarity par excellence, the anecdote is also, in Joel Fineman’s words, “the literary form that uniquely lets history happen by virtue of the way it introduces an opening into the teleological, and therefore timeless, narration of beginning, middle, and end.” The anecdote is thus the “hole within the whole” from which alternative histories, including the true histories known as romances, can emerge. Hawthorne’s lifelong preoccupation with James Boswell’s anecdote of Johnson’s penance in Uttoxeter Market roots a uniquely American fictional hero (aka Arthur Dimmesdale) and Hawthorne’s distinctively melancholic mode of American authorship, in Johnson’s English singularity.

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and the United States

The United States looms large in the Latin American literary imagination. From Domingo Sarmiento and José Martí in the nineteenth century to Octavio Paz and Alberto Fuguet in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many Latin American writers have depicted the United States in their writings and pondered the cultural and historical significance of their powerful neighbor to the north. But perhaps no Latin American writer has had as close—and complicated—a relationship with the United States as Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes was a fierce critic of American culture and United States foreign policy; at the same time, there was much that he admired about the United States, and it was clear that he was eager to have his voice heard here.

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination / Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination / Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body

Extravagant abjection: blackness, power, and sexuality in African American literary imagination

Extravagant abjection: blackness, power, and sexuality in African American literary imagination

The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South

Reviewed by: The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South Lisa Hinrichsen (bio) Harris, Trudier. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. Resonating with W. E. B. Du Bois’s prediction in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line, Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason- Dixon Line assesses the landscape of African American consciousness one hundred years later, arguing that the afterlife of slavery and subjugation on southern soil continues to disturb and inspire African American literary production. For Harris, the lingering anxiety and fear surrounding the South as a historic site of white privilege and black degradation initiates what she terms a “confrontation” in the work of all African American writers, whereby they must negotiate a fundamental ambivalence about membership in a society that calls their belonging into question. In setting up the South as ground zero for African American literary consciousness, Harris contends that all African American writers, even those not born below the Mason-Dixon line, feel “compelled to confront the American South” (1). As her emphasis on the word “compelled” makes clear, Harris argues that the charged relationship between writer and region is part of a rite of passage into African American belonging: “African American writers cannot escape the call of the South upon them . . . Not one of them considers himself or herself truly an African American writer without having confronted the South in some way” (2). Thus, all African American authors are, as the provocative title of her first chapter indicates, “Southern Black Writers No Matter Where They Are Born.” Through negotiating a polarity of repulsion and attraction inherent to a history both traumatic and triumphant, African American writers seek the space to enable “creativity operating under the influence of history” (1). Over the course of ten brief chapters, Harris explores the fraught intersection between the South and African American literary imagination, reading native-born black Southerners such as Ernest J. Gaines, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, Phyllis Alesia Perry, [End Page 1384] Tayari Jones, Edward P. Jones, and Raymond Andrews, alongside non-Southern writers James Baldwin, Octavia E. Butler, and Sherley Anne Williams. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line focuses on contemporary African American fiction (1964–2003), but the scope of the work that Harris examines deliberately stretches across genres, genders, themes, and storylines to support her sweeping claims. The range of her text thus functions to interject into and expand conversations about the relationship between geography and identity formation, African American identity and creativity, intersections between African American and European American writers, and Southern literature and culture. Her introductory chapter explores the way the South comes to represent a “cultured hell” (3) for African American writers, a phrase she borrows from Claude McKay’s poem “America.” “The South” is, for Harris, a slippery nexus of meanings, and her argument shifts, at times problematically, between the South as an idea, a geographical place, and a historical experience. While her text consistently foregrounds how regionalism remains a relevant marker of social, cultural, and individual identity, Harris needs to be more explicit in detailing how both the South and the color line have been reconfigured in the late twentieth century through cultural and political changes such as the struggle for civil rights and the Black Power movement, which fundamentally altered the terms of this historical confrontation and raised key questions about cultural and individual self-determination. Subsequent chapters explore the psychosexual dimensions of this confrontation in James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964); the struggle to claim black masculinity in Ernest J. Gaines’s “Three Men” (1968); the rewriting of African American agency under slavery in three neo-slave narratives: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003); the spatial and temporal portability of racial fear in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poetry (1988); heteronormativity and queer masculinity in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989); the relationship between folk communities and fear in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998); Tayari Jones’s efforts to domesticate fear in her...