American Literary Studies Research Articles

:Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

:<i>Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures</i>

Casa en que nunca he sido extraña: Las poetas hispanoamericanas: identidades, feminismos, poéticas (Siglos XIX-XXI)

Casa en que nunca he sido extraña: Las poetas hispanoamericanas: identidades, feminismos, poéticas (Siglos XIX-XXI)

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

The dominant twenty-first-century critical trend in African American literary studies, perhaps most recognizable in Harlem Renaissance scholarship, has been redefining the meaning of the study and its historiography. The movement’s origins are found in the work of such scholars as Cheryl A. Wall and George Hutchinson, who argued for a deep dive into the archive to present a more nuanced view of the New Negro movement while challenging various critical assumptions about the role of publishing. Meanwhile, a related trend toward research in African American print culture and the history of the book arrived, characterized by the early scholarship of Carla L. Peterson and Todd Vogel, with more recent work by such scholars as Brooks E. Hefner and Kinohi Nishikawa expanding the print culture studies focus. Yet not enough work of this kind has been done on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century period. Like much of the research above, Elizabeth McHenry’s To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship combines the various trends, adding to print culture studies scholarship that seeks to unearth a more comprehensive turn-of-the-century African American literary historiography. To Make Negro Literature impressively illuminates a vast field of African American literary and educational history. McHenry concentrates on material publishing conditions, “authorship’s sustainability and literature’s form and function,” the bond “between Black writing and emerging audiences and agendas,” and “the frameworks that structure ways of organizing how to talk and think about literature and the literary” (14). Among the most intriguing aspects of the study, and likely to invite debate, is McHenry’s application of queer theory to the literary art of Mary Church Terrell.

Afterword: Precarity, Pedagogy, and the Public

AfterwordPrecarity, Pedagogy, and the Public Krista Comer (bio) Anyone close to the academic job market or to humanities graduate students or early career PhDs will feel the urgency that coeditors Surabhi Balachander and Jillian Moore have put at the center of their introduction to this singular special issue. Conceived importantly as a platform for emerging scholars juried by their editor peers, WAL readers find seven essays that range widely in critical topics, in hybrid creative/critical methodologies, and in a sense of audiences for research well beyond university readers. We also find the coeditors’ arguments about new critical turns in the field of western American literary and cultural studies toward, as they say, the personal and the pedagogical. Underlying the case for these turns are serious questions about where, how, and from whom “critical turns” might come when the infrastructures that have supported graduate education, faculty research, and organizational longevity are being dismantled. In the face of humanities crises, defunded university research, far fewer new tenure lines, the collapse of the job market, and imperiled association memberships— including in the Western Literature Association—how will research grow and thrive? As Balachander and Moore note, nearly ten years have gone by since I edited a 2013 special issue for Western American Literature titled “Young Scholars.” The name, incidentally, came to be in the editorial process. My original call for papers was circulated as “Emerging Field Directions from Younger Scholars.” At the time, a set of critical interventions and openings seemed afoot in new research, and the hope was a special issue could provide opportunities for junior scholars and graduate students as well [End Page 193] as a significant occasion for the field. I hoped also to give back as someone who had had quite a time on the market myself; indeed, the year I was WLA President in 2002 I had just moved to assistant professor from a lecturer appointment. If I felt job prospects were urgent in 2002, in 2013 that urgency was different and deeper. The field keywords of that moment included “postwest,” “postregionalism,” and “critical regionalism.” Un-conflating these concepts, which were muddied in one another, allowed me in the introduction to track their divergent claims and politics and to address directly the implications of the concept of the rhizome, especially as they bore on feminist frameworks, settler colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty—keywords that were then emergent. I remember the number of essays I received, far more than could be accepted for publication. When I look back at the abstracts—as I did in thinking about this special issue—and when I think of very recent conferences and WAL essays, I see in them all various critical turns that have since, in my view, become widespread alongside settler frameworks and Indigenous sovereignty, namely: land ethics, place accountability, climate justice, eco-grief, and climate dread. With this “Emerging Scholars” special issue, the precarity of humanities research itself is rightly registering as a focus for the field of western American literary and cultural studies. In the hands of contributors, the demands of precarious scholarly environments are forcing the issue of research that reaches toward new publics and audiences and speaks in voices that likely skirt the classic conceptual training of graduate seminars. This sea change in who any of us writes for, why we write, where we publish, and the ability to conceive of a public-oriented criticism read by nonspecialists, is extremely important. Unlike western writers or historians, literature and culture scholars of the US West have not been as institutionally well-placed or secure in universities or popular authority. The need to innovate research practice and method and expand our audiences is fundamental in order to survive as knowledge producers who make a difference in consciousness about what “the US West” means or does. In very different ways, both Alison Turner’s work in “Perfectly [End Page 194] Designed for Connections: Zine Making in Denver Shelters” and Mika Kennedy’s creative nonfiction piece, “Peregrination 2036,” point toward research methods that support a western American literary and cultural studies of the future. Turner’s engaged research practice is one of collaborative relation with writers and artists who she...

The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel by Anna Pochmara

Reviewed by: The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel by Anna Pochmara Michaela Corning-Myers (bio) The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel, by Anna Pochmara. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. 256 pp. Cloth, $114.95; Paper, $29.95; Ebook, $28.45. Anna Pochmara’s The Nadir and the Zenith is an excellent study of melodrama and temperance in late nineteenth-century fiction. Over the course of this concise and well-structured text, Pochmara seeks to achieve five goals. The first is a historical-aesthetic reclamation of the Nadir era, “the historical moment when black people’s status reached its lowest point” (1), as a productive period for African American fiction as prolific and multi-faceted. The second is defining the political consciousness of this era and type of literature. Third, Pochmara defines the political locus of the genre of naturalism as utilized by African American authors during the Nadir era. Fourth, Pochmara argues for the affective force of naturalism in the sense that there is a deep and sometimes indivisible relationship between sentimentalism and naturalism. Finally, Pochamara closely examines how ethical temperance in literature, manifesting as self-discipline among its youthful female characters, fosters social and political community. Pochmara draws from a compact archive of 26 primary texts published from 1876 to 1902. She also refers to an impressive bibliography of works from critics writing within the schools of neo-Marxism, critical race theory, and intersectional feminism. Pochmara’s refreshing text is emblematic of a crucial directional shift in studies in American literary naturalism over the last eighteen years: texts written by African American authors have been understudied at a substantial detriment to our field. Pochmara displays with acute attention to historical context the ways in which African American writers of this era were very much in tune with the literary— and political—conversations that evolved from the Antebellum Era into [End Page 100] the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. In fact, these authors drove that conversation with rigor: there could be no conversation about the political health of the United States without discussion of the emancipated slave, the African American emigrant workers in the North, and the continued activism of African Americans as they fought for better economic conditions and against the growing tide of anti-Black violence. Within this historical context Pochmara situates her compelling study of novels published in the Nadir era by Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Amelia E. Johnson, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Pochmara maps a trajectory from midcentury sentimentalism into twentieth century naturalism as evinced by these authors. Pochmara makes three distinct interventions in the field of African American literary studies and literary history. First, she argues that the “New Negro” woman is posed in direct contrast to her antebellum-era progenitors, particularly in her assertion of control in her community (e.g., as an effective and inspiring teacher) and in her private life (e.g., in her assertion of her right to accept or reject marital suitors or decide her family members’ living situations). Pochmara’s second intervention asserts that the female “mulatta” character is central too in the texts produced by African American male writers. Pochmara’s third intervention situates her study within the field of literary history studies. She is critical of “atemporal” analyses, in particular ones that develop critical tools that could not have been adopted or understood in the era to which they are applied. Pochmara’s interest is in examining a body of work over a short period of time. She seeks specifically to enumerate and parse through the ways authors over time examined the same ideas in different ways. Across all seven of the texts Pochmara closely examines, authors unrelentingly engaged with the genres, subjects, and social ideas of their time. Pochmara’s study serves specifically to show how these novelists utilized the “mulatta melodrama” to discuss the political, social, and economic issues of the Progressive Era. The structure of the mulatta melodrama is emblematic of a relationship between the present and the past. Embodied by the past are the father—white, paternalistic, and failing—and...

The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte

Reviewed by: The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte Elizabeth Chant Uriarte, Javier. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. New York and London: Routledge, 2020. 306 pp. Javier Uriarte's The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America represents an innovative contribution to the well-established field of nineteenth-century Latin American literary studies. Via an analysis of works by four authors—Sir Richard Francis Burton, William Henry Hudson, Francisco "Perito" Moreno, and Euclides da Cunha—and working across the national contexts of Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, Uriarte brings these texts and milieus into an insightful dialogue that illuminates how the multifaceted notion of the desert was constructed and interpreted through travel writing in response to the conflicts that waged in each country during the post-independence period. Uriarte's Introduction underscores the importance of understanding the desert as a created space, highlighting the singular role of war in this process across these four nations. Notably, he observes that the trope of the desert as an "elemental void" (Uriarte Introduction) was maintained by both foreign travelers and Latin American politicians alike in the nineteenth century, thus rationalizing The Desertmakers' selection of texts from across languages and borders in order to properly examine the construction of said space. By focusing on travel narratives, The Desertmakers is able to emphasize the particularly unique approach to travel writing that the situation of war provides, especially the "violent spatial reconfigurations" that it imposes (Uriarte Introduction). As such, the three concerns of the book's subtitle, "travel, war, and the state", are shown to be interdependent in the fabrication and maintenance of the desert primarily as a psychological [End Page 303] milieu. Here, war is defined as "the necessary instrument of desertification", paving the way for state mapping and railways to "do the work of expansion" (Uriarte Introduction). Thus Uriarte elucidates the intertwining of the imagined desert with the tangible outputs of capital expansion and state consolidation in nineteenth-century Latin America, a concern of all four authors examined in this study, as they both abhor and encourage the incursions of capitalist modernity into the countryside. Chapter One examines British expeditioner Sir Richard Francis Burton's (1812-90) Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay (1870). Focusing on one of this experienced traveler's less studied texts, Uriarte traces the image of the ruin in Burton's narrative, identifying it as one of the first accounts to feature a vision of South America as a ruin prior to an act of destruction, in this case the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70). While Uriarte's reading of Burton's transformation from "witness" to "adventurer" in his later writings is shrewd, this chapter's insights into the construction and understanding of Paraguayan space are particularly discerning (Uriarte ch. 1). Uriarte notes how the territory is "blurry and appropriable" in the text and argues that "Paraguay is evidence of the perverse logic of the warlike gaze that can see only the desert that war itself has created" (Uriarte ch. 1), making reference to the apparatus that supported state incursions into the desert and thus worked to create new kinds of voids. The second chapter of The Desertmakers assesses the Anglo-Argentine naturalist William Henry Hudson's (1845-1922) The Purple Land (1885), a semiautobiographical novel featuring the violence and conflict that marred Uruguay in the 1860s and 70s as its backdrop. Uriarte centers his reading around the issue of Great Britain's informal empire in the region, charting how the fictional Anglo-Argentine narrator Richard Lamb's journey gradually yields a critique of imperial endeavors. The "positive valuation of nature" (Uriarte, ch. 3) that underpins Lamb's perspective and has informed much of the scholarship on Hudson's writing is therefore connected by Uriarte to Hudson's own observations of state oppression and violence. Further, Hudson's criticism of the British Empire is interpreted by Uriarte as a potential explanation for his absence from the English literary canon, especially since the desert encountered here is a marginal territory far from the British imperial center. Chapter Three reads Argentine naturalist and statesman Francisco "Perito...

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Personal and Pedagogical Perspectives

Guest Editors’ IntroductionPersonal and Pedagogical Perspectives Surabhi Balachander (bio) and Jillian Moore (bio) In early summer 2021 Amy Hamilton, the editor of Western American Literature, invited us to guest edit this special issue on the work of emerging scholars. She, and we, thought we might be uniquely suited to it because, as PhD candidates and as the graduate student representatives to the Western Literature Association, we are ourselves emerging scholars in the field. We curated an issue of our peers, joining them in contouring the growing edges of western American literary studies. We cannot underscore enough the importance of this move, which put the “peer” in peer review, and thank Amy for the insight and humility she showed in inviting us to edit this issue. The previous WAL issue of this kind, the spring and summer 2013 “Young Scholars” issue, came out nearly ten years ago. That issue was edited by Dr. Krista Comer, who has graciously written an afterword for this issue that traces a scholarly arc between the earlier issue and ours. Because of Krista’s afterword, we will not go into details about the content of the previous issue but will only state that, within and outside of the academy, a great deal has changed in the last nine years. If we are to attempt to summarize this ponderous decade, we might say that it has been characterized by precarity. The tenure-track academic job market, particularly in the humanities, has continued to worsen both steadily and dramatically, leading to increased uncertainty—and consequently anxiety—around employment for scholars. Emerging scholars must often accept non-tenure-track appointments without security or leave the academy entirely. Academic organizations, including the Western Literature Association, have also become more precarious, with declining membership numbers forcing a reconsideration of purposes and goals. And of course the COVID-19 pandemic, which [End Page ix] has completely transformed nearly every aspect of all of our lives, has accelerated already existing forms of academic precarity and introduced us to many more—for example, many of us, especially those with risk factors that increase our vulnerability to COVID infection, might experience the classroom or other university spaces as precariously unsafe. As a result of this all-pervading precarity, we chose to shift from the “Young Scholars” of the previous issues to “Emerging Scholars,” so as to deemphasize chronological age and emphasize a more active reshaping of academic standing—and in our call for abstracts, we explicitly defined emerging status by precarity within the academic system, welcoming submissions from graduate students, pre-tenure or non-tenure-track instructors, and scholars outside the academy, among others. While humanities departments have been undergoing years-long tectonic shifts that greatly affect emerging scholars, the COVID-19 pandemic and current episodic conditions have forced us to confront new waves of academic fallout, many spurred by rapidly decreasing funding, dissolution of tenure-track positions, and ever-present biased, racist, and ableist educational practices that maintain the established hierarchies. Especially since the publishing of the 2013 “Young Scholars” issue of WAL, emerging scholars have called these complexities into question, building scholarship, research, and pedagogical practices that are designed to challenge such academic concerns readily and courageously. The scramble to find a foothold within academia is often accompanied by the pressure to publish. Thus, one aim of this issue is to alleviate this pressure by offering an important publishing opportunity for often occluded voices. The essays contained in this issue reflect the current epoch of academic work, much of which is categorized by inclusivity—as it relates to insight, genre and form, and teaching ethics. Likewise, we believe these essays contribute to the current cohort of scholars working to help shape a new face of academia. It has been exciting and energizing to edit this special issue because much of the work of making academia more inclusive and responsive is especially alive in the field of western American studies, which has been contending with a legacy of traditional, unabashedly settler colonial western imagery. The American West and its [End Page x] literature and culture are embedded with issues that have plagued scholars of the field. For instance, our members are long-time...

The Renaissance Revisited

The Renaissance Revisited

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier Rachel Rubinstein Benjamin Schreier. The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 224 pp. Benjamin Schreier's The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature announces its ambitions with a book cover modeled on that of Philip Roth's iconic Portnoy's Complaint. Determinedly provocative, polemical, and pugilistic, Schreier's manifesto continues his efforts in 2015's The Impossible Jew to unsettle the fundamental dependence of Jewish American literary study on "the representational capacities of the word 'Jewish'" (7). Schreier, Yiddish for "screamer," is the longtime editor of the superb journal Studies in American Jewish Literature (for which, full disclosure, I serve as the book review editor); there is no one better positioned than he to diagnose and comment upon the current state of our field. Schreier's introduction and first chapter lay out his metacritical approach to Jewish American literary study: that identity should be understood as an epistemological rather than ontological category; that Jewish American literary study needs to release itself from the expectation that it reflect Jewish American historical reality and indeed declare "independence from history"; that Jewish studies is the analysis "not of Jews, but about how we know about Jews"; and that the organization of the "new" Jewish studies around terms like "identity," "ethnicity," and "culture" has in fact resulted in the field's isolation and exceptionalist "insiderism." The book's central chapters lay out the postwar literary "breakthrough" narrative that has fundamentally shaped the sense of Jewish American literary history, focusing on its point of origin with Irving Howe's use of Yiddish in his literary anthologies, and then on its "fall," or at least a limit case of Jewish textuality: Cynthia Ozick's critique of John Updike's Bech stories in the 1990s as inauthentic "passing" narratives. Schreier writes that the Roth, Bellow, and Malamud "emergence" narrative is "perversely restaged" over and over again as the "formation scene" of the Jewish American literary field, as scholars repeatedly attempt "to prove the field's proper institutional place and professional legitimacy" (40). But the provocation of Rise and Fall inheres less in Schreier's assertions than in his style. Commingling high theory with an aggressive, jocular familiarity, what was described by one reviewer as scabrous and funny in The Impossible Jew feels more bitter, competitive, and personal here. Portnoy's Complaint provides more than just the cover design; unwittingly Schreier seems to re-enact the gendered, familial psychodrama of the novel. Ruth Wisse and Cynthia Ozick, for whom Schreier reserves his most acrid invective, take turns as the vilified Sophie Portnoy; a number of female colleagues are the book's Hannah Portnoys, the overlooked sister Alex both depends upon and condescends to; and finally Alana Newhouse serves as the abused Monkey. (Or perhaps Newhouse is Brenda Patimkin, imported from another fiction, since Schreier devotes a two-page footnote to a scorching denunciation of Newhouse for her inability to adequately theorize her own nose job—or maybe for having had a nose job and not feeling [End Page 209] bad about it.) Finally, Michael Kramer, to whom the book is dedicated and who, in his acknowledgements, Schreier frets will not "endorse" it, is clearly his Dr. Spielvogel. I will confess that I am one of those scholars—mostly women—mentioned by Schreier as doing Jewish American literary studies wrong. While I am in the company of scholars I admire, I find myself gazing sadly across a mystifying chasm of methodological purity at a much smaller cohort of scholars I admire equally and who, according to Schreier, are getting it right. It is not just that Schreier praises a handful of only male scholars, and singles out primarily women for doing the kind of identitarian, "biologistic," or nationalist literary work he despises (which he identifies even in the work of scholars who critically interrogate such terms) or that when he does insult men he does so in considerably gentler terms than he does women. It is that his blind spots end up limiting his...

On Dissonance and Its Functions in Asian American Criticism

Abstract Building upon recent work in Asian and Asian American studies, this essay explores dissonance, rather than disinterestedness, and its function and form for literary studies in our present time. It is inspired not only by my rereading of Matthew Arnold’s essay but also the convergence of key events over the course of the last few years, ranging from recent attention to Asian and Asian American cultural production to anti-Asian hate crimes. As an Asian Americanist, I research and teach in a field whose very emergence was tied to activist claims for institutional and disciplinary space. I therefore find it profoundly difficult to imagine our endeavors in American literary studies as “disinterested.” I am less invested in making the case whether or not the study of Asian American literature “matters”; rather, here I explore why Asian American literary studies—a method that seeks out and dwells in dissonance and urgency rather than disinterestedness and patience—might be a model worth continuing.

Slow Criticism: American Literary Studies as a World

AbstractThe authority of art in US society has declined even as cultural criticism has expanded and diversified, spreading to many sectors of society. While these conditions have affected American literary studies, scholars in the field produce criticism that can be distinguished from the criticism in other sectors by its commitment to historicist thought and by disciplinary standards for what it means to produce a “new reading.”

Toward Critical State Studies: Bringing the Democratic State Back into American Literary Criticism

Abstract This essay starts from the apparent disconnect between democracy and the State in American literary studies. Taking the case of antebellum US literature (James Fenimore Cooper and Lydia Maria Child), it contends that literature is one place of elaboration of a democratic statecraft. Nineteenth-century US literature has been read as both complicit with and resisting to reigning models of statecraft endorsing racial domination, bureaucratization, and the monopoly of violence. However, we remain indifferent at our own peril to the potential forces of State as a democratic public authority and of state regulation as a non-arbitrary public provision. Putting American literature to the test of statecraft and statecraft to the test of literature, critical State studies proposes to revisit literary practices as a mode of critique in nineteenth-century state building. Nineteenth-century literature, I argue, both facilitated and performed this critique. Reading nineteenth-century US literature from the perspective of critical State studies—here, reading The American Frugal Housewife as a manual of democratic regulatory practice, or The Pioneers as an attempt at democratic environmental governance—allows us to investigate how literature, as a mode of representation and a political practice, gives shape and voice to alternative modes of statecraft. Turning the State into a methodological problem, a pressure point of generative possibilities, critical State Studies requires that we attend to an alternative genealogy of the State and recover a past that has not yet been present in our reading of American literature.

The Postliberal Aesthetic; or, How Can Literary Criticism Help Unsettle America’s Polarization?

Abstract This essay interprets the present moment as marked by democratic crisis and assigns to American literary criticism the task of responding to it. While American democracy faces multiple crises, the essay contends that current levels of polarization make it impossible to effectively address any of them. In this situation, literary studies confronts a dual challenge: it must, first, come to terms with its own contribution to the dynamics of polarization and, second, consider whether it can help undo it. Adopting a cultural–sociological perspective, the essay identifies literary studies as an institution that consolidates the politico-cultural identity of the “new middle class” and contributes to the culturalization of politics underlying contemporary polarization. However, the essay contends, American literary studies has the capacity to help revive democratic culture if it nurtures reading practices that unsettle fixed identities. To that end, the essay singles out various recent theories of reading whose democratic potential is grounded in their shared premise that literature is a communicative act. In interpreting these models of criticism as a potential way out of the malaise of polarization, the essay makes a call to revisit, reevaluate, and reformulate the tradition of liberalism.

“That Grim Sphinx”: Literary Historicism and Tourgée’s Toinette Novels

Abstract [W]e need to continue the key conversation in the field about how to revitalize literary historicism. Matthew Arnold and Tourgée can help to contribute to this conversation. This essay puts the Reconstruction novelist Albion Tourgée in dialogue with the English critic Matthew Arnold in an effort to revitalize the role of literary historicism in American literary studies today. Specifically, it offers a case study of Tourgée’s three Toinette novels (1874, 1879, 1881), all relatively neglected, to make the case for the importance of continuing to study nineteenth-century American literature at least in part in a national frame, but one that takes account of the complexities of temporality. One of the functions of American literary criticism at the present time should be the continued recuperation of lost or neglected voices like Tourgée’s. A more pronounced attention to literary historicism, as the writings of both Tourgée and Arnold suggest, does not mean having to reproduce the exceptionalism and blindnesses of the past or present, especially if critics reject a rigid historical contextualism.

Victoria Aarons (ed.), The New Jewish American Literary Studies

Victoria Aarons (ed.), <i>The New Jewish American Literary Studies</i>

У истоков российской латиноамериканистики. Лев Самойлович Осповат — к столетию рождения. Лев Осповат. Как вспомнилось (фрагменты)

The article is a tribute to the famous scholar Lev Samoilovich Ospovat, who together with his wife Vera N. Kuteishchikova, paved the way for the Latin American literary studies in the USSR. Lev Samoilovich started with his studies of Pablo Neruda’s life and work; he was the first to write and publish a book in Russian on the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda: A Survey of His Work (1960). A year later on the basis of this book, he defended his PhD dissertation. Subsequently, its author, critically reflecting on his experience, admitted that he often followed some officially imposed stereotypes in the interpretation of Neruda’s work and evolution. At the same time, even in this book one clearly sees an attempt to overcome the stereotypes, especially with regard to the attribution of Neruda's poetry to the method of socialist realism, and to understand the poetic world of the Chilean poet not only in connection with his political activities. L.S. Ospovat became widely known as the author of two books from the series “Life of Outstanding People” — Federico Garcia Lorca and Diego Rivera and a number of brilliant articles and prefaces. The result of Lev Ospovat’s Latin American studies was the book New Latin American Novel he co-authored with his wife; the book retains its value up to nowadays. At the end of his life Ospovat became interested in Pushkin studies and published several articles containing interesting discoveries in this area. The article is accompanied by fragments from Lev Ospovat’s memoirs that of L.S. Ospovat, which allows the reader to get an idea of the kind, highly intelligent, honest and very attractive person.

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier Saul Noam Zaritt (bio) The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity. By Benjamin Schreier. Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 228 pp. The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature begins with a startling claim: "Nothing testifies to the etiolation of the field of Jewish American literary study—my field—so much as the fact that so few people ever fight about anything" (1). The claim is startling because by traditional metrics—say, number of books and articles published per year—the field is healthy. Yet one of Schreier's central claims is that despite this activity, there has been little debate on the terms of Jewish American literary study. While in other fields there is repeated theorization of concepts like ethnicity and race, there is something of a silence around "Jewishness" in Jewish American literature. Schreier argues that the coherence of "Jewishness" is often taken for granted, observing how critics, from the postwar to the present, view Jewish American writing as directly reflecting a recognizable and legible Jewish population. This Schreier calls the field's "ethnological" foundation, in which a descriptive, ethnographic mode of literary study [End Page 99] precedes and precludes critical analysis. He identifies how critics circle around the idea of "breakthrough," in which a group of writers (Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and others) is seen as emerging out of immigrant origins to arrive in the American mainstream, becoming representative figures of Jewish American history. The Jewishness of these writers is taken as a given, their writing automatically cohering within a narrative of Jewish American arrival that often turns on ideas of model minorities and on the uninterrogated convergence of Ashkenazi Jewishness and whiteness. Schreier calls this "autoethnography" nationalist, "ancillary" to a normalized and self-evident "historical record of Jews in America" (9). This leads, for Schreier, to a dangerous insiderism, in which Jewish intellectuals labor in service of a closed cultural system rather than interrogate the grounds of discourse. Schreier demands instead a shift from "an analysis of Jews" to an analysis of "discourses about Jews" (10). In Chapter 1, Schreier tracks how "breakthrough" came to dominate the field, outlining the field's "ambivalent foundation" and contested relationship with multiculturalism (39). He notes how institutionalizing the mythologized success of Jewish American assimilation distanced the field from the critical approaches of ethnic studies; at the same time, the mainstreaming of Jewish difference threatened the cherished exceptionalism of Jewish culture. This resulted, paradoxically, in the ghettoization of Jewish American literary study at the moment of its "emergence." Chapter 2 extends this critique to the instrumentalization of Yiddish literature within this narrative: "The Yiddish literary past was repurposed … as that manifestation of Jewish cultural heritage that could become a nostalgic object of identification for American Jews, the consumption and capitalization of which promised the affective reproduction of Jewish American identity" (74). Concentrating on Irving Howe's anthologies, Schreier shows how Yiddish was ossified through "ideological capture" to support the idea of "breakthrough" (78). Chapter 3 considers the concept of ethnicity, analyzing Cynthia Ozick's criticism to show how Jewish ethnic identity became a "fulcrum on which the Jewish American literary field was able to consolidate" (161). The project of Jewish identity comes to "normalize an ethnologically representational historicism as the authoritative way of thinking about Jewish American writing" (124). Schreier maps this "history of Jewish American literary history" onto the work of a string of literary critics—Leslie Fiedler, Howe, Ruth Wisse, Ozick, and many others. His approach is stridently polemical, revealing how critics produced a normative Jewish population "whose history is the duty … of Jewish studies intellectuals to uncover, archive, and narrate" (170). From Ozick's trouble with multiculturalism to Wisse's [End Page 100] nationalism, Schreier takes a measure of joy in assaulting these thinkers, often leaving the topic of a given chapter well behind in order to pursue a line of critique. Schreier's text brims with aggression, repeatedly answering the challenge of the book's opening sentence. But what does this aggression ultimately do...

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...

Canadian literature as an American literature : CanLit through the lens of hemispheric American literary studies

This paper addresses the noticeably low presence of Canadian literature in hemispheric American literary research. The fact that hemispheric literary studies focuses on a comparison of the United States and Spanish America is partly because of Canada's marginal position in the Americas, its lack of identification with the continent, and Canadian scholars' reluctance to engage in hemispheric studies due to their insecurity concerning cultural identity and the discipline's potential imperialistic impulses. By examining a representative history of Canadian literature and several literary studies for intersections and tangencies between Canadian literature and other literatures of the Americas, this paper will demonstrate that there are natural links between them, which make a transnational comparative approach to Canadian literature both legitimate and desirable.

Ein preußischer Postbeamter oder ein postmoderner Provokateur?

Abstract This article concerns itself with Gérard Genette’s reception in Germanophone literary study. Through an analysis of the rhetorical substrate from which Genette’s terminology draws its specific tension, the article determines that Genette is not only an excessive systematist, but also and simultaneously an author who battles received attempts at order and who foregrounds doubts about the idea of order. In this way, he displays a kinship with such theorists as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The receptions of the rhetorical construction of Genette’s texts and of the particular strategies of structuralism to which that construction refers did not occur synchronously in French, American, Russian, and German literary studies. The article demonstrates that, while German literary theory occasionally discusses Genette’s positioning within the field, there remains a general absence of the recognition that practically all of his books display a definite proximity to deconstruction, and that this proximity plays a central role in Genette’s enire theoretical edifice. This text is, last but not least, a call to read literary-theoretical texts in their aesthetic contexts.