American Literary Studies Research Articles

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago

Reviewed by: Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago Charlotte Rogers Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Northwestern UP, 2021. 274 pp. Can literature literally shape the landscape? In Fictional Environments, Victoria Saramago explores this question and others in a thoroughly researched and elegantly written examination of canonical mid-twentieth-century Latin American [End Page 819] novels. The impressive breadth of this book, which analyzes João Guimarães Rosa's Grande sertão: Veredas, Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Clarice Lispector's A cidade sitiada, and Mario Vargas Llosa's Amazonian fiction, is matched by the depth of its engagement with ecocritical theory and the extensive critical bibliographies on each of these well-studied authors. Saramago argues that the fictional texts in her corpus do not merely reflect each author's vision of the physical biome, but rather that they serve as "sites for the production of knowledge about, imaginations of, and interventions in Latin American environments" (5). In doing so, she stakes a significant claim for the ongoing importance of studying canonical novels through innovative theoretical and methodological lenses. Most importantly, by showing how literature informs ecological perceptions, Fictional Environments points out the agency, and therefore the urgency, of literary works on our rapidly changing planet. A major contribution to Latin American literary studies, this book is also essential reading for scholars of the broader field of environmental humanities interested in how literature configures physical spaces and collective imaginations. Fictional Environments proposes that these iconic novels published from the 1940s to the 1960s sparked ecological imaginaries, inspired the creation of conservation areas, and contributed to environmental policies even before the advent of organized environmentalist movements in Latin America. Deforestation, a hallmark of the ecological history of the South American continent that accelerated rapidly in the period she studies, forms the backdrop against which varying forms of extractivism, agricultural industrialization, and urbanization play out. The complex, mimetic relationship between the physical landscape and the fictional realm during times of ecological change lies at the heart of Fictional Environments. Saramago offers sure-footed explanations of the shifting role of mimesis in literary studies, including Auerbach's classic text and Timothy Morton's concept of ecomimesis. The author makes her own original contribution to this field in coining the term "reverse mimesis" to indicate how physical environments have been shaped to more closely resemble literary texts in national parks and conservation areas. At the same time, Saramago shows, referential reality becomes a painfully spectral presence in literary works as deforestation, urbanization, and industrialization make the contemporary landscape diverge sharply from its earlier fictional representations. Rather than organizing her study according to language, geography, or temporality, Saramago divides the book into three sections: "Conservation," "Development," and "The Rights of Nature, the Rights of Fiction." In each section, Saramago offers a bird's-eye view of the literary texts' reception history and socioecological context, and occasionally swoops down to perform close readings of key ecological entanglements in the works themselves. Special credit is due to the editors of the Flashpoints series at Northwestern University Press for retaining the original Spanish and Portuguese quotations in addition to English-language translations, which deepens the richness of Saramago's analysis. "Conservation" consists of two chapters examining how Grande sertão: Veredas and Los pasos perdidos distill environments in fiction and simultaneously shape preservation efforts. For example, the famous sertão is now the site of extensive soy, [End Page 820] corn, rice, and eucalyptus monoculture plantations, and the larger savannah biome known as the cerrado is predicted to disappear entirely by 2030. Saramago's argument for reverse mimesis is strongest in this first chapter, which shows how the Guimarães Rosa Tourist Circuit, the Manuelzão Project, and the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park each attempt to make their protected area imitate the sertão of the novel. This remarkable intervention "challenges the very notion of literary representation as a one-way process" (33). Los pasos perdidos, Saramago proposes, is one of several works (including Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Richard Schomburgk's Travels in...

Minority Formalism, Aesthetic Concepts, and Chuang Hua’s Crossings

This essay engages philosophy of art, Adorno’s aesthetic theory, and Asian American literary studies to show that aesthetic concepts—terms describing the sensory, perceptual properties of a text—are crucial to theorizing minority formalism and minority aesthetic concepts. Using Adorno’s theory of substantial formalism to analyze Crossings (1968), a little-known Asian American novel, this essay shows that rather than being just adjectives describing the expressive qualities of a text or tropes describing its particular theoretical maneuvers, terms such as opaque, non-linear, fragmented, discordant, or dissonant are aesthetic concepts that exert political import through form.

What Is the Transnational Turn in American Literary Studies? A Critical Overview

This article presents a critical overview of the state of the art of transnational American studies in the wake of the so-called transnational turn. After an introduction to key ideas and concepts surrounding transnationalism as applied to American studies and, more particularly, to literary studies—including comparative and international approaches to American literature—I interweave critical arguments with brief reviews of keypublications—monographs, edited collections and individual essays—produced in the US and abroad—particularly Spain—in the twenty-first century. My overview mainly focuses on general literary studies, but it also tackles particular areas such as gender, ethnicity, aesthetics and political transnationalism. My conclusion suggests that the transnational turn will continue to shape our scholarship in the decades to come.

DEDICATION: SCOTT DONALDSON (NOVEMBER 11, 1929—DECEMBER 1, 2020)

Other| December 01 2020 DEDICATION: SCOTT DONALDSON (NOVEMBER 11, 1929—DECEMBER 1, 2020) The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2020) 18 (1): vi–viii. https://doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.18.1.vi Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation DEDICATION: SCOTT DONALDSON (NOVEMBER 11, 1929—DECEMBER 1, 2020). The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 December 2020; 18 (1): vi–viii. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.18.1.vi Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Search Advanced Search This issue of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review—our eighteenth—is dedicated to Scott Donaldson, one of the leading biographers in American literary studies and the author of several defining essays and books on Fitzgerald in particular. Scott was an active member in the Society from its 1990 founding, often delivering keynote lectures at our conferences. He and his wife, Vivie, were also major supporters of the John Kuehl Travel Fund, which awards grants for graduate student travel to our biannual gatherings.When word of Scott’s passing began to circulate on social media during the first week of December, many younger scholars remembered his kindness and encouragement upon attending their presentations and of his critical support for their careers. As Sara A. Kosiba, who organized the program for the 2013 conference in Montgomery, Alabama, wrote upon reading his obituary, “I knew Scott was ill, but this is still sad to see.... You do not currently have access to this content.

Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume One

Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume One

The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times, by Castiglia, Christopher

<i>The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times</i>, by Castiglia, Christopher

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

COVID-19: Pandemic Reading

In 1832, a global cholera pandemic reached US shores Like COVID-19, cholera was a wholly new disease in the United States (although considerably deadlier), and it was, like the novel coronavirus, a poorly understood one that disproportionately affected immigrants and African Americans The cholera pandemic began immediately following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which had triggered a wave of punitive laws against Black Americans The early 1830s was, in other words, a time of brutal devastation for the African American community, particularly in the South How, we might wonder, when faced with horrific violence, systemic injustice, and a descending global pandemic, could an enslaved fifteen-year-old Frederick Douglass do anything but despair? Crucially, he did not Instead, Douglass’s understanding of Nat Turner’s murder, the racist legal retribution that followed, and the horrors wrought by cholera appear in the context of his awakening to the

Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s WarLiterary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary NationModernity and Its Other: The Encounter with North American Indians in the Eighteenth Century

Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s WarLiterary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary NationModernity and Its Other: The Encounter with North American Indians in the Eighteenth Century

Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture

Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture

Letter from the Editors

Editorial| July 01 2020 Letter from the Editors Resources for American Literary Study (2020) 42 (2): v–vi. https://doi.org/10.5325/resoamerlitestud.42.2.v Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Letter from the Editors. Resources for American Literary Study 1 July 2020; 42 (2): v–vi. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/resoamerlitestud.42.2.v Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressResources for American Literary Study Search Advanced Search Issue 42.2 of Resources for American Literary Study features exciting new developments for the study of early and nineteenth-century literature. First in the issue is Stephanie Palmer's “Prospects for the Study of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,” which takes us beyond the Freeman recovery work of the 1980s and 1990s to highlight twenty-first-century discoveries of previously little-known Freeman fiction and new scholarship presenting Gothic, naturalist, ecocritical, feminist-materialist, and queer-theory approaches. Palmer spotlights intriguing possibilities for future Freeman studies, where new attention to race, transnational contexts, aesthetics, and style will further enrich our understandings of Freeman's multifaceted writings.A multipart collaborative forum entitled “Reimagining Early American Literature” next details a new digital resource and illustrates its application as scholars reenvision the early American literary canon. Abram Van Engen's introduction to the forum offers an overview of Exploring Anthologies of Early American Literature, a searchable database with a compendium of information on... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Galaxy, National Literature, and Reconstruction

Brook Thomas, “The Galaxy, National Literature, and Reconstruction” (pp. 50–81) The North’s victory in the Civil War preserved the Union and led to the abolition of slavery. Reconstruction was a contentious debate about what sort of nation that union of states should become. Published during Reconstruction before being taken over by the Atlantic Monthly, the Galaxy tried, in Rebecca Harding Davis’s words, to be “a national magazine in which the current of thought of every section could find expression.” The Galaxy published literature and criticism as well as political, sociological, and economic essays. Its editors were moderates who aesthetically promoted a national literature and politically promoted reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites along with fair treatment for freedmen. What fair treatment entailed was debated in its pages. Essayists included Horace Greeley, the abolitionist journalist; Edward A. Pollard, author of The Lost Cause (1866); and David Croly, who pejoratively coined the phrase “miscegenation.” Literary contributors included Davis, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, John William De Forest, Julian Hawthorne, Emma Lazarus, Paul Hayne, Sidney Lanier, and Joaquin Miller. Juxtaposing some of the Galaxy’s literary works with its debates over how the Union should be reimagined points to the neglected role that Reconstruction politics played in the institutionalization of American literary studies. Whitman is especially important. Reading the great poet of American democracy in the context of the Galaxy reveals how his postbellum celebration of a united nation—North, South, East, and West—aligns him with moderate views on Reconstruction that today seem racially reactionary.

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

La legitimación de los saberes científicos en el siglo XVII novohispano. Sobre la controversia astronómica entre Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora y Eusebio Kino

La controversia astronómica entre Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora y Eusebio Francisco Kino sobre el cometa observado desde el hemisferio norte en 1680 y 1681 fue leída por la crítica a través de categorías dicotómicas, silenciando el complejo mapa de actores involucrados en la producción, publicación y circulación de sus tratados científicos. En este artículo proponemos realizar un análisis que integre los campos de los estudios literarios latinoamericanos y de los Estudios de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad con el objetivo de comparar las redes de mecenazgo e institucionales y las estrategias retóricas que a través del tiempo otorgaron legitimidad a las obras de los contendientes.

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982)

Walter Ong published Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in 1982, synthesizing his career-long concern with the impact of the shift from orality to literacy on various cultures. Scholars of African American literary and cultural studies were coming to redefine their field around the terms orality and literacy at around the same time that Ong published his book; but where Ong stressed historical change or the fall from orality to literacy, African Americanists tended to accent their mutual mediation. This article explores the way that African Americanists, in stressing mediation, return orality and literacy to the concerns of Ong’s ostensible field: media studies.

The (Ever)Lasting Significance of Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon

ABSTRACT Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon teaches us distinct lessons about African American literary studies and its relation to the memory of Africa. In this text, Kossula helps us better understand a transatlantic black identity, the tension that exist between those who remember Africa and those who have adopted a black American identity, and the failures of supposed victories and African emigration. This traversing also reminds us that there can be no agreed upon or stable method for charting literary history. Instead, it encourages us to follow a model of historiography that looks for continuity and is more cross-directional than vertical. The archive, of course, requires such a model. Thus, Barracoon's publication, as an archival artifact especially, is also instructive as evidence of the primacy of the archive in relation to canon formation and literary traditions.

A Storied Place: Jonathan Carver’s Travel Narrative and the Indigenous Map of the Upper Mississippi River Valley

AbstractThis essay recognizes the totality of practices by which Native peoples of the upper Mississippi River valley for centuries oriented themselves to place as an Indigenous map. After limning the map and its material and nonmaterial components, I then place it at the center of a comparative Indigenous-colonizer literary analysis and argue that the manuscript of Euro-American Jonathan Carver’s 1760s travel narrative written in the region is in constitutive relationship to the map. I conclude by turning to printed versions of his narrative to consider how they extend and shape colonialist orientations to the Indigenous map. Attending to how the land has been shaped in partnership with Indigenous text making transforms American literary studies by demonstrating one way that Euro-American texts always were, are, and will be in relation to Native genres.

Art and Our Surrounds: Emergent and Residual Languages

This essay undertakes a review of recent books by T.J. Demos ( Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016) and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017)) and Jens Andermann ( Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (Lands Entranced: Art and Nature after Landscape, 2018)). Demos and Andermann participate in the paradigm shift taking place under the name of eco-criticism, forging connections between the debates around environmental crisis and the fields in which they have written and published previously - art criticism and visual culture and Latin American literary and cultural studies, respectively. Both authors take on the challenge of thinking through the perceptual and conceptual habits that have dominated a relationship to our environment under capitalist modernity (such as the concept of landscape) and how artistic practices might be said to rework those habits. While Demos maps recent efforts to engage ecological concerns and “decolonize nature” across the globe, Andermann looks back to the twentieth century Latin American archive, constructing a local genealogy that harbors an ecological and political thinking that anticipates what is now lived as global crisis; their projects intersect in contemporary Latin American activist art that has gained enough attention to figure as part of a global circuit. The review considers the overlapping points as well as the striking disjuncture in both projects in relation to the different knowledge formations, archives and languages from which each author speaks.

Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse

Reviewed by: Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse Kate Jenckes KEYWORDS Brazil, Argentina, Literature, Avant-Garde, Post-Structuralist Theory, Haroldo de Campos, Oswald de Andrade, Décio Pignatari, David Viñas, Clarice Lispector, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, John Beverley, Alberto Moreiras adam joseph shellhorse. Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina. U of Pittsburgh P, 2017, 264 pp. Adam Joseph Shellhorse’s Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina constitutes a bold and timely intervention in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies. In fact, one of the book’s greatest strengths is its insistence on the importance of thinking about the nature and history of the academic field as an important component of intellectual inquiry, which has become increasingly uncommon given the dispersed, specialized, and generally conflict-avoidant nature of the field today. Shellhorse resuscitates, in a post-memory sort of way, some of the central arguments from the 1990s, when the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies was ablaze with contention concerning the nature and limits of aesthetic representation and its relationship to a thinking of the political. His title seems to echo that of one of the more polemical books of that era, John Beverley’s polemical Against Literature (1993), and indeed, Beverley is cited as an important influence. However, Shellhorse’s approach differs starkly from Beverley’s, and veers more toward the post-structurally informed work of Beverley’s sometimes rivals, Alberto Moreiras, Brett Levinson, Gareth Williams, and Jon Beasley-Murray, who are also cited as critical references for the project. Shellhorse takes as his starting point a concern shared by all of those just named, although it comes in the form of a quotation by Beverley: their work seeks “a way of thinking about literature that is extraliterary, or . . . ‘against literature’” (qtd. in Shellhorse 5). “Literature” here is understood variously as “an exalted form of individual expression and ‘high’ culture,” as a universalizing affirmation of regional identity, and as a regime of representation complicit with hegemonic structures of power (4). Rather than exiting or opposing literature as Beverley did, Shellhorse defines anti-literature from within the literary itself, rethinking writing as an unprogrammatic and multimedial assemblage of forces capable of disrupting hegemonic forms of discourse. His approach is informed by various strains of philosophy, [End Page 136] primarily Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of minor literature and immanence, affect, and corporeality, but also includes Jacques Rancie`re’s notion of a dissensual disruption of established distributions of sensibility, Jacques Derrida’s notion of textuality, and Alain Badiou’s understanding of the poetic event. Shellhorse’s exploration of anti-literary forces within literature leads him to consider the nature of modernism, the avant-garde, and the neo-Baroque in Latin America, and his approach to (anti)literature instills new life into this subject. He argues that the predominant mode of the avant-garde, which sought to break with the past only in order to found a new sense of identity that is both regionally specific and universally recognizable, is fundamentally “literary” in the traditional sense, even as it challenges established norms of literature. What he calls anti-literature, which could also be called anti-avant-garde or avant-garde, involves a radicalization of poetic language that resists any such hierarchy, identitarian discourse, or foundational aesthetic autonomy, affirming instead the potential for writing to reconfigure non-dominating relations with the fundamentally heterogeneous and dynamic elements of reality. Shellhorse stresses the political dimension of such an alternate mode of writing, which eschews political representation per se for an active attention to the limits, excesses, and exclusions of representation, including what he calls the feminine and the subaltern. The case studies of anti-literature are taken from the center and margins of the twentieth-century literary canon, constituting what could be called the prehistory of post-literature. They wind between the conventions of modernism, on the one hand, and the demands of political commitment, on the other, reflecting elements of both but determining relations to politics and aesthetics that are...

Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future by Martin Woodside

Reviewed by: Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future by Martin Woodside Kenneth Kidd (bio) Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future. By Martin Woodside. University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country." Martin Woodside opens his excellent study Frontiers of Boyhood by reflecting on this famous exhortation by Horace Greeley in 1865. Indeed, many young men and even boys did go West, some literally and still more in their minds and hearts. As Woodside emphasizes, the "frontier" of the American West was understood in the late nineteenth century as the place where boys could become the right sort of men: rugged, self-reliant, demonstrably masculine. And, just as important, the presence and activities of boys on the frontier would ostensibly help the nation grow up. Reflecting also on Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Woodside emphasizes how boyhood and the frontier thus "develop through exposure to one another" (11). Including seventeen illustrations, Frontiers of Boyhood adds richly to a body of existing scholarship on American literary boyhood across and slightly beyond the nineteenth century: see, for instance, Marcia Jacobson's Being A Boy Again, Ken Parille's Boys at Home, Lorinda B. Cohoon's Serialized Citizenships, David I. Macleod's Building Character in the American Boy, and my own Making American Boys. Woodside is the first to focus on the frontier's particular importance for boyhood and vice versa. The book contributes not only to children's literature studies and American literary studies but also to studies of the American West, which have neglected the importance of youth on and to the frontier. Woodside's volume appears with the University of Oklahoma Press as part of its William F. Cody series on the history and culture of the American West. The book's placement in the series makes superb sense, as the organizing figure of Frontiers of Boyhood is William F. Cody himself, aka "Buffalo Bill," buffalo hunter, Indian scout, and consummate showman—architect of the world-famous Buffalo Bill's Wild West stage show, launched in 1883. Three of the book's five chapters take up Buffalo Bill and his show and their ongoing legacy. Woodside details how Buffalo Bill's persona and show [End Page 286] were fashioned for a child-friendly audience and thus had to navigate concerns about the show's sensationalism. The focus on Cody as a broker of American youth culture is one of the book's key strengths. Another is Woodside's persuasive account of the dime novel as a form of children's and adolescent literature. Woodside also engagingly explores the role of actual children in frontier mythology. That's not surprising, as Woodside earned his PhD in childhood studies from the (dare I say it?) pioneering program at Rutgers University-Camden. Woodside's introduction nicely sets the stage for the entertaining show that follows. Woodside draws on important work about American adolescence and gender norms by Joseph Kett, Kent Baxter, Sarah Chinn, and Gail Bederman. He makes the case that frontier narratives position the West as a space for white male development through a rhetoric of both "peril and promise" and by delineating "proper" from "improper" boyhood (14). The book proper begins in familiar territory, with a discussion in chapter 1 of the Bad Boy book as practiced by Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland and as approximated by Cody in his autobiography The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill (1879). Turns out, the bad boy book went West too. The chapter offers strong treatment of both Twain and Garland—and trust me, it's hard to say anything new about Twain. But Woodside does it in his engaging commentary on Huck and Tom Sawyer among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories. However, as Woodside stresses, "it is Cody, not Twain, who successfully integrates the dime novel hero with a literary model of successful American boyhood" (42). Building on this insight, chapter 2 reframes the dime novel as a frontier form that walks the same tightrope that Buffalo Bill did with his show. Dime novel authors had to titillate without seeming to endorse violence or glamorize running away, all the more so...