Modern American Literature Research Articles

Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism Ed Pavlič Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism. By Rob Wallace. New York: Continuum, 2010. In his Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism, a deft and skillful close listening to the works and experiences of canonical modernist poets Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, Rob Wallace (a professor of literature and a drummer as well) intercedes in a vexed field of collaboration. He attempts to realign the terms of the conversation between poetry and jazz, and to understand improvisation as a discipline—not just, as it has been pejoratively understood (under the shadow of racism), as loose or arbitrary play. [End Page 152] In structure and principled intent, Wallace's intervention recalls no book to my mind more than Frank Lentricchia's classic study Modernist Quartet. As a method, Wallace's work more expertly answers Henri Lefebvre's inimitable call for a textual/contextual rhythmanalysis. Drawing tactfully on recent critical readings and theories of Marjorie Perloff, Ann Douglas, Philip Pastras, Michael North, Paul Gilroy, Aldon Nielsen, Derek Bailey, and others, Wallace attempts to position the act and ethics of "improvisation" as a kind of instrument attuned to a loose theory and method "that can be seen both in a given artist's work and in the life of that artist" (18). The book seems to jettison (to the good, I think) a formalized system of modernist improvisational theory and practice derived from the work and lives of Pound, Hughes, Stein, and Stevens, and their critics. Wallace instead achieves a brilliant and tactful method of listening to the work of these writers as each reaches for their unique sense of sense. I n this way, I think Wallace has exemplified improvisation at its very best, as a crucial (rather than narrowly critical) method of literary listening that aims to ambulate its way far nearer and down closer to the sonic and sensual contours of poetry than academic, theoretical readings often do. Wallace's improvised method of readings keeps one brush on the snare while accenting and shading the works he attends in ways that make us see them (even in their blurriest precision) clearer and hear them better. Within the site of Wallace's hearing, William James's rhythmic pragmatism sounds the ur-rhythms of American literary modernism. Echoing Ross Posnock's The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity, Wallace associates the work of each of his quartet of poets with James's lead in "defining how modern consciousness relates to the pulse of life" (75). In his reading of Stevens' long poems, Wallace credits James for the sense of "ambulatory thought" in his approach to Stevens as well as in Stevens' own approach to poetic method. He goes on: "But this ambulatory thinking takes on special significance for Stevens's poetry when we consider the amount of actual walking he did, and that he often composed his poems while walking" (144). In his reading of Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," a poem so thoroughly composed in its march of tercets, Wallace comes up with a reconception of improvisation that covers his method as well as the subjects of his readings: My reading of the poem as improvisational is based in the more nuanced notion that improvisation itself does not necessarily lead to the exclusion of a desire for certainty. Improvisation itself can never be "pure," and nor can "pure poetry" or a "supreme fiction." Part of the misunderstanding about improvisation across the arts is that non-improvisers often regard it as a magical [or, I would add, a strictly musical] process at best, or a purely free, intuitive, and messy process at worst. But as Sun Ra consistently reminds us, there is a discipline in freedom, and freedom in discipline. (146) [End Page 153] By this subtlety, Wallace's readings walk us back to an open-ended encounter with the sound-sense in the works of Pound, Hughes, Stein, and Stevens. If there is a shortcoming to Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism, it is the somewhat too direct (and so reductive) link between...

Manhattan Transfer , Spectacular Time, and the Outmoded

Manhattan Transfer, Spectacular Time, and the Outmoded Carey James Mickalites (bio) The only substitute for dependence on the past is dependence on the future. John Dos Passos, "Against American Literature," 1916 Modern spectacle, like more traditional historical forms—in which repeated rituals enact shared community values—organizes a public collectivity around its visual centrality. But in following the temporal reproducibility of the commodity form, capitalist spectacle during the second technological revolution dramatizes the experience of the eternally new we customarily associate with modernity, and infuses American literary modernism with unprecedented energies, electric flows, and promiscuous, nervous desires. In its various guises—including advertising, photography, cinema, and the dissemination of spectacular events in the popular press—spectacle also performs and embodies the exponential reproduction of surplus for a presumably collective vision. And in the sprawling historical diorama of 1920s New York that is John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, a jittery fixation on spectacular pleasures of the now, strangely defined by their future outmoded or obsolete status, expresses an epistemology of public being and consumer citizenship that is central to the feeling of temporal and historical dislocation operative within much of American modernism. In her study of cinematic time, Mary Anne Doane argues for two key modalities of modernity that might be useful here: "abstraction/rationalization and emphasis on the contingent" (10-11). The rapid technological advance and economic expansion marking the dawn of [End Page 59] the twentieth century opens the way for both the boom of early cinema and contingency as a forcefully emergent cultural category, in which change and the experience of time itself "[become] synonymous with 'newness,' which, in its turn, is equated with difference and rupture—a cycle consistent with an intensifying commodification" (20). More specifically, Doane distinguishes between the event and spectacle by arguing for different relations to temporal contingency. Cinematic spectacle, at least in its modernist heyday, emerges as one "attempt to deal with the temporal instability of the image [which] involves not the taming of the contingent, but its denial," she argues. "Like the event, spectacle effects a coagulation of time . . . . The event bears a relation to time; spectacle does not. Spectacle is, as Laura Mulvey has pointed out, fundamentally atemporal, associated with stasis and the antilinear" (170). Further, "spectacle functions to localize desire, fantasy, and longing in a timeless time, outside contingency. In this respect, spectacle, in contrast to the event, is epistemologically reactionary, decidedly unmodern," whereas "the event comes to harbor contingency within its very structure" (170, 171). The operative modality of spectacle is, in part, its seeming denial of contingency. But its apparent timelessness, its very "denial" of contingency, is a relation to time. First, effecting a "coagulation of time" presupposes a relation between the spectacle and its temporal status, even if only suggesting a false totality, an absolute present shaped around it. Second, spectacle's denial of its own contingency is part of its temporal structure when this admittedly "unmodern" structure is seen in its modernist, commodified form, as repetitively new image-clusters signifying an ongoing dream of capitalist growth. In its very "timeless time," capitalist spectacle, dependent upon twentieth-century visual technologies, stakes its thrill on the cusp of its own flickering out of public existence, its impending devaluation, or its future outmoded status. As such, spectacle marks a temporal rupture; posing synchronic time in its localized "timelessness," in its necessary newness it also contains a diachronic rupture within its structure. This internal rupture effect, or the radical simultaneity of temporal contingency and a timeless present, significantly informs the fascination and anxieties of modernism's immanent relation to market culture. By appearing as the radically new, the visual event marking the present, any particular spectacle necessarily anticipates its impending outmoded status. And John Dos Passos' New York scene imagines the [End Page 60] subjects of American modernism—with all their typological nervous materialism—as suspended between those two moments. Manhattan Transfer shows how collective and individual experiences of time coalesce around capital's systems of spectacular representation. The novel reshapes realist narrative around the temporal dream-world of spectacle as its own brand of modernism's ambivalent relation to mass culture. But, more to my point, Manhattan Transfer builds...

Improvisation and the making of American literary modernism

Improvisation, despite its almost ubiquitous presence in many art forms, is notoriously misunderstood and mysterious. Although earlier strands of American philosophy and art emphasized what might be called improvisational practices, it was during the modernist period that improvisational practice and theory began to make a significant impact on art and culture, specifically via the African American musical forms of jazz and blues. This musical development held important consequences for the larger artistic, cultural, and political life of America as a whole and, eventually, the world. The historical convergence of jazz and philosophical currents like pragmatism in American culture provides the framework for Wallace's discussion of improvisation in literary modernism. Focusing on poets ranging from Gertrude Stein to Langston Hughes, Wallace's work provides a fresh perspective on the complex circuits of modernist culture. Improvisation and The Making of American Literary Modernism will be of interest to scholars of poetry, music, American and modernist studies, and race and ethnic studies.

The Strange Literary Career of Jean Toomer

The Strange Literary Career of Jean Toomer Michael Nowlin Well before Jean Toomer spent two months as acting principal at Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in rural Georgia in the fall of 1921, he had decided on a literary vocation. He meant, furthermore, not to be just any writer, but the kind of serious artist who would produce something worthy of the name “literature”—a self-consciously avant-garde writer responsive to trends in what he understood to be the most advanced zone of the literary field. Hence his move from Washington, DC, to Greenwich Village, initially at the outset of 1920, and later for a longer period beginning in 1923. We can only idly speculate as to how Jean Toomer might have developed as a writer had he not gone to Sparta and experienced the connection to Southern black history and culture that proved formative to the writing of Cane (1923), the book for which he would be primarily known in his lifetime and for which alone he is posthumously remembered. But I aim here to illuminate several literary-historical problems by recovering Toomer, the aspiring author before his success with Cane, and revisiting the question of what happened to him after Cane in light of his original literary ambition, which never clearly subsided.1 More specifically, through the strange case of Jean Toomer I hope to stimulate some fresh reflection upon the relationship between idiosyncrasy and regularity in literary careers; upon the opportunities and barriers met by African American writers within a literary field that came to be increasingly pressured by modernist norms; and upon the ambiguous status of works critically classified as “Negro,” not least when this is supposed to operate as a mark of distinction. Toomer and the Aristocracy of Culture My conception of the literary field owes much to the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu, but it owes at least as much to the testimony of literary aspirants themselves. Toomer’s point of view in this respect tells us not only about the existence and nature of the distinct subfield or zone of literary [End Page 207] production he managed to access, but reveals this world’s attractions for someone in his particular social position and bearing his particular complex of dispositions.2 His most thorough account of his literary career is in the autobiographical fragment “On Being an American,” written around 1934 in a context of considerable frustration due to his inability to find a publisher for “Eight-Day World,” the novel he considered his true literary masterpiece.3 One runs the risk of arbitrarily privileging any one of Toomer’s several autobiographical records to produce a more race-conscious, more postracial, more spiritual, more political, or more aesthetic Toomer to fit one’s argument. Toomer presents a problem, moreover, in being unusually conversion-prone, and thus in using autobiography rather obviously to defend fluctuating attitudes. I venture to argue nonetheless that his “conversion” to the literary-intellectual life around 1917 was a kind of ur conversion, a prelude to and precondition for the various positions and postures Toomer took up from 1918 to 1936, if not for the rest of his life. His discovery of the “intensely interesting world” of literature in the pages of Bernard Shaw—which led him to Ibsen, then to “the literature of modern England,” then to Greenwich Village, where the prospect of contributing to modern American literature lay before him—“was like a miracle. One day I was one thing. The next, I was a different person. Some fundamental turnover occurred, a transformation. I left the old person behind and became new—and this was my birth” (31–32). “On Being an American” is largely a once-triumphant literary artist’s story of his conversion to and disillusionment with the ideals, ethos, and practices of what he called “the modern American literary world” (34). But it is not an apostate’s narrative, for Toomer was not so disenchanted or alienated as to forsake all claims upon and belief in that world, as his desperate attempt to place “Eight- Day World” between 1933 and 1935 plainly shows. A chief source of that world’s attraction for Toomer was its...

Revisiting the New: Recent Fault Lines in American Modernist Criticism

Revisiting the New:Recent Fault Lines in American Modernist Criticism David M. Ball (bio) Moglen, Seth. 2007. Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $65.00 hc./$24.95 sc. xviii + 324 pp. Herd, David. 2008. Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. $79.00 hc. 212 pp. American modernism is a doubly fraught subject of inquiry. Modernism continues to be defined by its seeming imperviousness to critical definitions, generating a proliferating array of literary critical discriminants, chronologies, and canons. It has been alternately viewed as a response to transformational economic and social changes as well as a perceived abstraction from those changes. Likewise, modernism has been characterized as a period of flourishing generic experimentation [End Page 184] whose core anxieties persist to the present as well as a circumscribed or entirely failed aesthetic and political project, the period remaining one of the slipperiest fish in the literary critical sea. Michael North, whose two towering works The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (1994) and Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999) have contributed indelibly to the contemporary landscape of American modernist criticism, has gone so far as to see this difficulty as a measure of modernist innovation itself: "Attempts to formulate a unified formalist definition of modernism have always run afoul of the fact that modernism ceaselessly creates forms and in so doing confounds critical desires for formal consistency" (1999, 209). Modernism's critical contingency is, for North, a measure of its formal inventiveness, a claim which could be said with equal authority about modernist criticism and theory and their efforts to contend with and contain (however incompletely) a wholly coherent definition of modernism. These generative complications are compounded by the question of America in American modernism, one largely forestalled in early formulations of American literary history. A Library of Congress subject heading for modernist literature from the United States did not come into being until the 1970s—Hugh Kenner's A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975) being the first important study so listed—and the cosmopolitan and transnational orientations of much modernist writing have obscured the role that America has played in the genesis and development of modernism. Indeed, despite being a paradigm of economic, industrial, urban, and demographic change in the twentieth century, America was long regarded as anathema to modernist revolutions in art, literature, and culture, largely figuring into traditional histories of the period only as American-born writers escaped its provincial orbit. Earlier tellings of America in modernism are thus chronicles of belatedness or accounts, as David Harvey claims, of America's "absorption of a particular kind of modernist aesthetic into official and establishment ideology, and its use in relation to corporate power and cultural imperialism" (1990, 37). Even as recent American modernist scholars have argued for a more thoroughgoing and meaningful role for America in the history of modernism, the very notion of "America" is being radically transformed in the wake of the revisionist work of John Carlos Rowe (2000), Amy Kaplan (2002), and a growing chorus of American Studies scholars who have fundamentally reconsidered "America" as a hermeneutically valuable term. As a result, American Studies has seen multiple geographic turns—globalization studies, hemispheric studies, the return of regionalism—embodying trends that have begun to affect modernist studies as a whole, including the edited volume Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity [End Page 185] (2005) and the spring 2009 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on "regional modernism." Thus America, like modernism itself, remains an idea both subject to increasing scrutiny and undergirding an extraordinary amount of scholarly inquiry. Because of this doubly fraught enterprise, the critical impulse in the last twenty years has been toward an increasing heterogeneity in the modernist canon and a consistent troubling of the conventional chronology of so-called high modernism. Building on the work of canon-expanding scholars as distinct as Houston A. Baker (1987), Shari Benstock (1986), and Walter Benn Michaels (1995), among many others, some of the most exciting research in the field in recent years (appearing, at times, under the moniker "new modernism studies") has...

Where the world is not: cultural authority and democratic desire in modern American literature

Where the world is not: cultural authority and democratic desire in modern American literature

Oppen's Pragmatism

This article offers a revisionist reading of the aesthetic of the American modernist poet George Oppen. It seeks, in the first instance, to supplement those established readings of Oppen that have concluded that his work is most profitably understood in the discursive contexts of American literary modernism and modern European Continental philosophy by arguing that such approaches overlook a key indigenous intellectual influence upon his corpus: that body of philosophical inquiry and cultural self-reflection that has come to be known as American pragmatism. The article attempts to rectify this omission by making two simultaneous and complementary suggestions: first, that pragmatic thought opens up a number of formal and semantic questions – indeed, a number of questions about the relationship between form and meaning – that have been too little considered in recent work on American poetry; and second, that something crucial to Oppen's poetry remains unthinkable without sustained attention to the questions and claims that pragmatism places at the very heart of its endeavour. While the relationship between pragmatist thought and Oppen's poetics helps to illuminate a set of concerns that lies at the very core of his aesthetic, the paper will argue, it also reciprocally exposes the limitations of an influential genealogical vision of American literary modernism. To support this contention it examines the ways in which a certain literary version of American intellectual history has reinterpreted the pragmatism of William James in the image of an Emersonian linguistic scepticism in order to establish the historical centrality of a broadly Romantic genealogy of American modernism. The paper concludes by suggesting that a renewed attention to the specific forms and modalities of Oppen's poetry demonstrates not only the inadequacy of this version of literary history to a particular tradition of American poetics, but also promises to recover the force and distinctiveness of the American pragmatist inheritance for succeeding generations of writers.

Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction Suzanne Del Gizzo Amy L. Strong . Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xiii + 174 pp. Over the past twenty-five years, Ernest Hemingway has been undergoing the scholarly equivalent of an "extreme makeover." In the early 1980s, criticism of the great, macho, celebrity writer of modern American literature, who inspired protective loyalty in some critics and outright antipathy in others, seemed to have reached a saturation point. One leading critic even announced that he believed "there was nothing more to be said about Hemingway's fiction" (qtd. in Strong vii). But the publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986 changed everything. Since 1986, Hemingway scholarship has become a boom industry as critics have tackled issues of gender and sexual identity from nearly every conceivable angle and in relation to every piece of writing in Hemingway's oeuvre. As a result, long held beliefs about the author's misogyny and machismo have been challenged, and a newer, less easily pigeon-holed Hemingway has emerged. Amy L. Strong's Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction continues this makeover trend, just as the field appears to be reaching the point of exhaustion again, redirecting attention to Hemingway's interest in race and racial identity. Strong has been interested in Hemingway's relationship to race for quite some time (her first article on Hemingway and native Americans appeared about twelve years ago), but her decision to write what I believe is the first book-length study of Hemingway and race was prompted by the 2005 publication of Under Kilimanjaro, the scholarly edition of Hemingway's book based on his second African safari in 1953–54 (first published in 1999 as True At First Light). For Strong, the publication of Under Kilimanjaro, with its candid account [End Page 842] of Hemingway's desire to become a member of the Wakamba tribe, provides critics with the occasion to address what she rightly sees as the author's lifelong fascination with race as seriously and comprehensively as they have addressed gender issues in his work. She believes the time is ripe to challenge the perception that Hemingway is one of the "whitest writers in the American literary tradition" (11). Inspired by strategies pioneered by Toni Morrison in her groundbreaking study Playing in the Dark, Strong presents her project as "a revisionist reading of Hemingway's work" in which she examines "how Hemingway's fiction looks if we bring his nonwhite characters out of the background and asks how we must define Hemingway's conception of American identity differently when it is constructed on the basis of race" (12, 13). She acknowledges that there is already a sizeable body of scholarship on Hemingway and race, but she claims that these past efforts defanged Hemingway's racial obsessions by translating them into more familiar (and less controversial) motifs in Hemingway scholarship such as father-son relationships, primitivism, lost wilderness, and male initiation rites. The effect, she explains, is that "The critical response to issues of race in Hemingway's works . . . reveals patterns of marginalization, disavowal, and outright dismissal" (4). Her project seeks to remedy this situation by emphasizing Hemingway's awareness of and engagement with the realities of race in the construction of his nonwhite characters and his portrayals of racial interaction. It is an ambitious and worthwhile project, but the results are uneven in part because Strong cannot consistently anchor Hemingway in such realities. The first two chapters on the Nick Adams stories are the strongest in the book and will likely become a standard for future scholarship. In the first chapter, Strong persuasively argues that Nick Adams's identity cannot be fully understood without historicizing his relationship to native Americans, a relationship that she argues is "based on racial domination" (16). Through an effective pairing of "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," Strong captures Hemingway's attempts to present race as both biological and cultural, which allows him to play with racial categories in ways that capture the unstable and shifting power dynamics between Indians and whites. The next chapter focuses on Nick's relationship to...

Native Son

Alfred Kazin was among the considerable number of gifted American writers of the twentieth century who were the children of European immigrants. Late in his life he published a distilled refashioning of his journals in which he reflected on this inheritance. Recalling his awakening love of American literature and art, he wrote: ‘Of course I love all this from the outside, as the first native son after so many generations of mud-flat Russian Jews who never saw the United States. But my personal need is great, my inquiry is urgent.’1 The basis of this passage is a journal entry of 1942, but it is unlikely that Kazin ever entirely lost this feeling of outsiderness.2 Richard M. Cook's biography – the first extensive study of Kazin's life and work – captures well the urgent detachment of his writing about America, and examines his career in the light of the changing political and cultural movements of America in the mid-twentieth century with lucidity and detail. (Students of modern American literature should be particularly grateful to Cook for his clear charting of the intricate relations between twentieth-century American literary criticism and liberal, socialist, and communist critical thought.)

A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (review)

Reviewed by: A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein Andrew Epstein Joan Richardson. A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 327 pp. $29.99 (paperback). Stretching from the typological thinking of the Puritans to trends in contemporary cognitive science, Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism is nothing if not ambitious and wide-ranging. Warmly acknowledging some of the ground-breaking scholars who have gone before her (like Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, Louis Menand, and Ross Posnock), Richardson jumps headlong into the lively conversation these figures have initiated about American pragmatist philosophy and its relation to American literature over the past couple of decades. In true pragmatist fashion, Richardson sees this rich body of work as a provocation rather than a settled account that exhausts the subject. The next turn of the screw she offers to our understanding of the pragmatist lineage is to connect this crucial American outlook to revolutionary developments in modern science, arguing that American philosophy and literature cannot be separated from a whole set of new ways of understanding the natural world those scientific discoveries brought about. Previously the author of the definitive two-volume biography of Wallace Stevens, Richardson tests her premise by examining a roster of authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein—that will be familiar from earlier studies of pragmatism and its legacies. All the players in this batting order, for example, were treated in the chapters of Jonathan Levin’s 1998 book The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism, and studies of pragmatism by Poirier, Giles Gunn, Frank Lentricchia, and others have frequently dealt with these figures in one permutation or another. Picking up where these others have left off, Richardson’s book deepens our understanding of pragmatism, its sources and its ramifications. In particular, and of specific interest to scholars of Henry James, she usefully expands upon other recent studies, like Levin’s, that have explored the profound connections between the intellectual projects of William and Henry James. This is a book about the history of ideas that insistently takes the long view. Richardson sets out to track the often subterranean flows that move across a far-flung, variegated landscape, a terrain that encompasses an interesting and sometimes surprising set of landmarks that extend beyond the group of authors mentioned above: the Puritans, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Jonathan Edwards, Emanuel Swedenborg, Emerson, Charles Darwin, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Henry James, Alfred North Whitehead, Stevens, and Stein, as well as twentieth-century scientists like Niels Bohr, Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett, and Oliver Sacks. In order to make her case that a persistent, enriching dialogue between scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic [End Page 87] discourses has been overlooked in our understanding of pragmatism and American literature, Richardson’s method is to take a quotation from, say, Gertrude Stein, cast backwards to find premonitions of it in Jonathan Edwards or Darwin and forward to locate its fruition in the findings of a late-twentieth century speculative biologist. This sort of bricolage allows Richardson to offer a revealing new map of American literature and philosophy, showing that the evolution of American thought and writing depends upon the intertwining of scientific knowledge and literary experiment. At the start, Richardson contends that the harsh, bewildering “multifariousness of the New World situation” forced Americans into “stretching the inherited language to describe the new facts and to accommodate the fact of feeling in meeting them” (x). “Under the pressure of new natural conditions,” she observes, “new linguistic forms emerge” (13). In other words, the exceptional material conditions that greeted Americans led writers and intellectuals to push the boundaries of language, thought, and form in order to provide their fellow pioneers with a more adequate description of the strange place in which they had found themselves. Provoked by “the strangeness of the New World environment,” they developed a pragmatist attitude towards language, perception, consciousness, and belief, not to mention towards the natural world itself (2). But these writers didn’t only intuit in a general or...

‘Let's Hurt Someone’: Violence and Cultural Memory in the Plays of Neil LaBute

In this essay Ilka Saal examines one of the most perplexing aspects of Neil LaBute's work: his deployment of excessive and gratuitous violence. She insists that such deployment of violence has little to do with a humanist critique of the propensity for evil in all of us, nor with the playwright's biography (as suggested by a number of critics), but instead functions as a satirical interrogation of the mythological significance attributed to violence in American culture. The casual cruelties of LaBute's ordinary mid-Americans point up the central and ‘ordinary’ role that violence has played in the nation's history and self-understanding. Focusing on the example of the one-act play a gaggle of saints and drawing on the theories of Jan Assmann and Richard Slotkin, she shows in what ways LaBute uses violence to interrogate the country's cultural memory and to alert us to the general lethargy that has settled over the nation with regard to the historical violence it systematically exerted against its Others. Ilka Saal received her PhD in Literature from Duke University, North Carolina and is now working as Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond, Virginia, where she teaches modern and contemporary American literature and culture. She is the author of New Deal Theater: the Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Dramatizing the Disease: Representations of AIDS on the US American Stage (Tectum, 1997), and co author of Passionate Politics: the Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008).

Memorial boxes and guarded interiors: Edith Wharton and material culture

In Edith Wharton's works, references to architecture, interior decoration, painting, sculpture, and fashion abound. As these essays demonstrate, art and objects are for Wharton evidence of cultural belief and reflect the values, assumptions, and customs of the burgeoning consumer culture in which she lived and about which she wrote. Furthermore, her mediations about issues of architecture, design, and decoration serve as important commentaries on her vision of the literary arts. In The Decoration of Houses, she notes that furniture and bric-a-brac are often crowded into a room in order to compensate for a lack of architectural composition in the treatment of the walls, and that unless an ornamental object adequately expresses an artistic conception it is better removed from the room. These aesthetic standards apply equally to her construction of narratives and are evidence of a sensibility that counters typical understandings of Wharton as a novelist of manners and place her instead as an important figure in the development of American literary modernism. Essays in this collection address issues such as parallels between her characters and the houses they occupy; dress as a metaphor for the flux of critical fashion; the marketing of Wharton's work to a growing female readership; her relationship to mass culture industries such as advertising, theater, and cinema; the tableaux vivant both as set piece and as fictional strategy; the representation of female bodies as objets d'art; and her characters' attempts at self-definition through the acquisition and consumption of material goods. Many of Wharton's major novels - The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence, and Twilight Sleep - as well as her short stories, criticism, and essays are explored.

Book ReviewManipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature. By Kathy J. Phillips. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Book Review<i>Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature</i>. By Kathy J. Phillips. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Egypto-Modernism: James Henry Breasted, H.D., and the New Past

The paradoxical directive both to “make it new” and to retrieve a usable past has become a commonplace in accounts of American literary modernism. For Pound, Eliot, and H. D., the Classical tradition and its literary monuments provided foundations on which to reinvent poetic form. Moreover, such cultural artifacts served the purpose of articulating an American modernity; as Celena Kusch has argued, American modernists felt “considerable pressure to create an ancient well of artistic experience and ability for themselves.” 1 In achieving these goals, making it new and retrieving the past were neither mutually exclusive activities, nor exclusive to creative writers. As H. D.’s generation of modern poets came of age, Egyptology emerged as an American academic discipline—a key intersection that critics have largely overlooked. James Henry Breasted, the father of American Egyptology and founder of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, would formulate a “New Past” that positioned the United States as Egypt’s cultural inheritor. Influenced by modernist Egyptology as well as by her travels, H. D. came to share with Breasted a belief in Egypt’s cultural primacy. And like Breasted, she would seek a monumental past that did not simply reinshrine the traditional Greco-Roman one. If Europe had a lock on Classical monuments, and the United States lacked monuments in the traditional sense, ancient Egypt offered these Egypto-modernists a new usable past that rerouted Eurocentric cultural transmission. This essay crosses disciplines both in terms of its central figures and its methodology—a collaboration between a lit erary critic and a Classical archaeologist. For Breasted and

Book Review: Phillips, K. J. (2006). Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Book Review: Phillips, K. J. (2006). Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

#$%^&amp;*!?: Modernism and Dirty Words

Most Hemingway scholars are familiar with the anecdote regarding Maxwell Perkins’s squeamishness when it came to discussing editorial changes in A Farewell to Arms. According to his biographer A. Scott Berg, Perkins had informed Charles Scribner that there were three words that couldn’t possibly be printed in Hemingway’s latest book, which both men knew could cement their new author’s reputation after the success of The Sun Also Rises. However, when Scribner asked what the words were, Perkins was apparently incapable of uttering them aloud, and instead had to write them down. A more apocryphal version has it that Perkins had written the words—“fucking,” “cocksucker,” and “shit”—on his calendar under the heading “Things To Do Today.”1 It is informative to read this relatively obscure anecdote alongside the most famous passage in A Farewell to Arms, indeed one of the most well-known passages in modern American literature: Frederic Henry’s thoughts on the relation between language and war. These lines were almost instantly recognized not only as a credo for the austere clarity of Hemingway’s literary style, but also as an eloquent expression of the disenchantment of the “lost generation” he had come to represent.

The novel and the obscene: sexual subjects in American modernism

We have tended to think of American literary modernism as participating in the culture's general rejection of prudery, and how else are we to read modernists' forthright representations of sexual characters? The Novel and the Obscene challenges our vision of the era as sexually progressive by identifying a resonant silence at the heart of the modernist American novel. In spite of novelists' efforts to represent sexuality explicitly, this silence (negative narration) reproduces censorship, rendering it symbolic at the moment of its legal demise. The Novel and the Obscene differs from current scholarship in law and literature, which positions law as the historical key that will unlock the ambiguous literary text. In examining the relation between obscene novels and sexual identity, The Novel and the Obscene instead illuminates the roles of both the novel and obscenity law in establishing sexual identity in American civic life.

Authors Inc: literary celebrity in the modern United States, 1880-1980

The first comprehensive and systematic study of literary celebrity in the twentieth-century United States, Authors Inc. focuses on the autobiographical work of Mark Twain, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. Through these classic American authors, Loren Glass reveals the degree to which literary modernism in the United States is inseparable from the mass cultural forces it opposed. Chronicling the emergence of literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century up through its contemporary manifestations, Glass focuses on how individual authors themselves struggled with the conditions of mass cultural renown. Furthermore, by emphasizing the complex relation between masculinity and modernist authorship in the United States, the book provides a bracing new account of the psychosexual economy of the American profession of authorship. By combining a socio-historical approach with a rhetorical analysis of the autobiographical work in which classic American writers attempted to intervene in the formation of their public personae, Authors Inc. offers a long overdue study of one of the most important, and neglected, aspects of modern American literature.

Can This Woman Be Saved? Birth Control and Marriage in Modern American Literature

Can This Woman Be Saved? Birth Control and Marriage in Modern American Literature

American Poetry and Chinese Art: New Perspectives on a Cross-Cultural Relationship

It was a common belief among classical Chinese poets that poetry and painting shared the same source of creativity (shi hua tong yuan), one that enabled them to transcend the mundane and capture the sudden revelations of visionary moments in a permanent form of beauty. Thus, to paraphrase the Song poet Su Shi's famous observations on the Tang poet Wang Wei, a good poet possesses the capability of making his verse simultaneously display verbal and visual sublimity. Such a conviction, as Zhaoming Qian suggests in his new book, influenced the American poets Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, not only inspiring their creative practices but also constituting the key to an important aspect of American literary modernism that Qian calls the response to Chinese art. Qian's book is both impressively erudite and highly readable, sustained by lucid writing, insightful perceptions, and cogent arguments. By exploring a hitherto overlooked subject, his inquiry makes significant contributions to several fields, including modernist poetry, comparative literature, and transnational cultural production. More intriguingly, it also raises issues impelling us to reconceptualize the enterprise of orientalism. Qian's book is intended to appeal to several types of audience in addition to readers of modern American poetry. This intention is reflected in the thoughtful organization of 14 essays in five parts, a framework that allows him to concentrate on a set of primary issues from coherent perspectives, both critical and chronological, rather than on individual poets. For instance, students of Chinese art and art history would find part 1 particularly informative. In addition to shedding fresh light on the three