American Realism Research Articles

Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism ed. by Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Seibel, and Klaus H. Schmidt

Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism ed. by Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Seibel, and Klaus H. Schmidt

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A “RESCUE CULTURE”. INSOLVENCY GLOBALIZATION

We are heading towards a phenomenon of internationalization and globalization of the substantiation of law, due to the fact that Romania is, inevitably, part of the process of integration and reflection of its own identity in a European and global context. Ultimately, law derives from observing the society and analysing its needs, passing through the filter of equity the final legal form in order to ensure the completeness of law, and also the structural coherence of society. Although the continental European legal culture is attached to the “general will”, globalization managed to erase many of the symbolical boundaries between the legal culture promoted by the Common-law, the one promoted by our system deeply markedby the Romano-Germanic System, and also the legal system outlined by American Realist trends, thus allowing the law to become the result of the self-adaptation of the society, not just the creation of the State.

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Book Review| October 01 2018 Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism. Edited by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden. 2017. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2017. 304 pp. Cloth, $64.95; ebook, $64.95. Ann M. Ryan Ann M. Ryan Le Moyne College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2018) 51 (1): 86–87. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.51.1.0086 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ann M. Ryan; Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism. American Literary Realism 1 January 2018; 51 (1): 86–87. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.51.1.0086 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 CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

8. Infrared Reflectography of Edward Hopper’s High Noon: Questions of Authentication

An unprovenanced oil study, purportedly by the early American realist Edward Hopper (188* -1967), was purchased in 2007 on eBay by a pair of brothers from Ontario. It is a smaller, poorly-executed near-copy of Hopper’s High Noon at the Dayton Art Institute. Given that detailed diary entries by Hopper’s wife, Josephine, note only that four charcoal sketches preceded the final version of High Noon, and fail to mention an oil study, Gail Levin, the author of Hopper’s catalogue raisonné, has conservatively concluded that it can at best be assigned to a dedicated follower. Can Infrared Reflectography of the two paintings shed light on the question of authenticity? Many pigments used by Hopper become transparent in the Near Infrared spectrum, a fact verified by a test-panel. By using a DSLR camera, converted to detect IR, charcoal sketches on the primed canvas of the original were revealed. While IR Reflectography reveals earlier stages in the composition of the authentic High Noon, stages suggested by the charcoal sketches, IR does not provide positive proof for the authenticity of the oil sketch. The issue of authenticity became further complicated when the media, led by the Globe and Mail, took up the case of the owners and overstated the IR results. At present the IR investigation suggests only that the oil study was painted by a follower working from either Josephine’s diary or, more intriguingly, from Hopper’s own sketches, which are held in a private collection.

An Infrared Examination of Edward Hopper’s High Noon

An unprovenanced oil study, purportedly by the early American realist Edward Hopper (188* -1967), was purchased in 2007 on eBay by a pair of brothers from Ontario. It is a smaller, poorly-executed near-copy of Hopper’s High Noon at the Dayton Art Institute. Given that detailed diary entries by Hopper’s wife, Josephine, note only that four charcoal sketches preceded the final version of High Noon, and fail to mention an oil study, Gail Levin, the author of Hopper’s catalogue raisonné, has conservatively concluded that it can at best be assigned to a dedicated follower. Can Infrared Reflectography of the two paintings shed light on the question of authenticity? Many pigments used by Hopper become transparent in the Near Infrared spectrum, a fact verified by a test-panel. By using a DSLR camera, converted to detect IR, charcoal sketches on the primed canvas of the original were revealed. While IR Reflectography reveals earlier stages in the composition of the authentic High Noon, stages suggested by the charcoal sketches, IR does not provide positive proof for the authenticity of the oil sketch. The issue of authenticity became further complicated when the media, led by the Globe and Mail, took up the case of the owners and overstated the IR results. At present the IR investigation suggests only that the oil study was painted by a follower working from either Josephine’s diary or, more intriguingly, from Hopper’s own sketches, which are held in a private collection.

Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James: The Shadow of John Ruskin by Tomoko Eguchi

Reviewed by: Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James: The Shadow of John Ruskin by Tomoko Eguchi Mirosława Buchholtz Tomoko Eguchi. Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James: The Shadow of John Ruskin. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. 216 + vii pp. $81.82 (Hardback). Henry James met John Ruskin (1819–1900) in London in March 1869 thanks to his mentor Charles Eliot Norton. Ruskin had already attained eminence as an art critic and the author of Modern Painters (1843), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) and was increasingly inclined to voice his opinion on contemporary social and political issues in such books as Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Time and Tide (1867). By the time of making this acquaintance, Henry James had published over fifty reviews and a dozen tales. Within days of attending the famous critic’s lecture, the young author could, on one hand, boast in a letter to his friend (John La Farge) about an invitation to dine at the home of Ruskin and, on the other, comment critically in a letter to his mother about “the fitful flashes” of Ruskin’s “beautiful genius” (qtd. in Gale 570). In her comparative study of the two aesthetes, Tomoko Eguchi proves what is only to be expected: James did not follow uncritically any Cicerone, however celebrated he may have been. Perhaps it is this urge to step out of anyone’s shadow that makes him so endearing and his works so lasting to this day. Eguchi focuses on the attitudes of Ruskin and James to aestheticism and its interrelations with factuality, morality, and Christianity, as shaped by German Romantic philosophy. She seeks the roots in Ruskin’s and James’s biographies and the manifestations in their writing. The implied question throughout the book seems to be: If Ruskin was indeed “a Luther of the arts” (qtd. in Eguchi 4), who was Henry James? Certainly not a mouthpiece for the Counter-Reformation. While Ruskin serves as a point of reference, the study concerns primarily the works of Henry James, from his travel writing and selected tales to his critical essays and three novels: Roderick Hudson (1875), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and The Tragic Muse (1890). The chronology of his publications is [End Page E-14] the guiding principle of the division into six chapters, in which discussion of the three novels in the light of Ruskin’s (and not only his) influence alternates with analyses of travel writing, tales, and critical essays by Henry James. At the outset Eguchi addresses a number of crucial “isms,” arguing that both James and Ruskin had idealist and naturalist sides (5) and that James, though usually grouped with realists, is not quite a realist (7). His aesthetic standpoint has been placed by literary scholars within American realism, French realism, and German idealism (8). As Eguchi explains, James’s understanding of German philosophy was, however, second-hand knowledge and shaped by British and American Romantic writers (11). The main line of reasoning in her book concerns James’s gradual integration of realism and Romanticism and creation by 1890 of his own aesthetic “creed” (13). These two “isms” alone denote and connote such an abundance of tropes and offshoots that it is only too easy to get lost in this jungle, or else in an attempt to cut the most straightforward path, to pare down too much. Another strategic question is that of how late “early” could be. Eguchi refers to James’s letter to Charles Scribner’s Sons (July 30, 1905) in which the novelist points to The Tragic Muse as the last fiction of his early period (13, 164). If by his own account James’s literary apprenticeship stretched to his late forties, are we to assume that he was so very modest or so very coquettish? Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James has all the virtues of a book that grew out of a Ph.D. dissertation: it is neatly structured, it contains quotations from most (if not all) relevant sources and comments on these quotations, too, and it...

Why Genre Matters: A Case for the Importance of Aesthetics in the Verse Memoirs of Marilyn Nelson and Jacqueline Woodson

Why Genre Matters:A Case for the Importance of Aesthetics in the Verse Memoirs of Marilyn Nelson and Jacqueline Woodson Richard Flynn (bio) In a 2016 article in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Giselle Liza Anatol discusses Jacqueline Woodson's memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), in light of the "postcolonial Gothic," arguing that reading the book as Gothic (in the tradition of African-American Gothic works such as Virginia Hamilton's Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush or Toni Morrison's Beloved) may help disrupt "the stark border that has arisen between realist genres and fantastic ones in literature for young people" (405–6). She laments that Woodson's book "will be discussed primarily—and perhaps exclusively—as a work of African American realism, as literary nonfiction, or as aligned with the conventions of bildungsroman or life writing" (405). Anatol argues that the "dualism" she identifies as "the stark border" between the genres of realism and fantasy "only serves to inhibit the publishing world's acceptance of narratives that refuse to fit into easy categories and thus restricts the publication of more texts by African American and African diasporic writers who have been raised in cultures that refuse such sharp distinctions." Anatol's argument is compelling. However, except for a footnote in which she notes that it is a "stunning collection of poetry" (417), she does not discuss Brown Girl Dreaming as poetry. For there is another stark border in the field of children's literature studies, the border between children's fiction and other genres of children's literature, especially poetry. Mike Cadden has described the verse novel as a hybrid form that occupies a "place between poetry and drama . . . drama and the novel," a form that "serv[es] as a nexus among the three genres," by combining "the [End Page 109] most complementary aspects of those forms" ("Verse Novel" 26). He argues that critics "may be pursuing a false choice by insisting that the verse novel be one thing or the other." The "'problem' of the verse novel," he argues, does not lie in "reconciling the poetic and prosaic" (21). Looking at the verse novel as a hybrid affords the teacher with considerable pedagogical possibilities. "Studying the verse novel," Cadden writes, "will build in students an appreciation for other blends and crossovers so common in contemporary literature, such as multimedia texts, multigenre texts, intertextuality, and cross-audience texts" (26). Nevertheless, there is a problematic subtext in Cadden's discussion in his suggestion that a focus on the poetic qualities of verse novels is a dead end because, especially in the case of novels composed of free verse lyrics, the authors aren't writing poetry at all, but "enjambed prose written to emphasize a preferred pace and rhythm of speaking to the self" (22). While Cadden includes poetry as part of his potentially productive hybrid, he dismisses the necessity of paying critical attention to poetry and poetics in evaluating the book-length verse narrative. Emphasizing "novel" over "verse," he underestimates the importance of the verse novelist's skill as a poet. If a verse novelist indeed produces nothing more than "enjambed prose," that would seem to me to represent a significant aesthetic failure. In From Tongue to Text, Debbie Pullinger discusses the differences between the lyric and the narrative that "have important implications for thinking about children's poetry" (25). "Where narrative's concern is with external events and its mode is retrospection," she writes, "lyric's is on internal events and its mode is introspection" (20). This is not to say that "lyric and narrative [are] mutually exclusive" (20)—Pullinger offers the example of lyrical prose—but as she notes, citing a number of critics including myself, "children's literature critics used to swimming strongly in the clear flow of narrative fiction often seem to find themselves stranded when they enter the muddy puddles of poetry" (5). The works I will be discussing in this essay, Marilyn Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry (2014) and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming are, strictly speaking, verse memoirs1 rather than verse novels. In his contribution to this special issue, Cadden discusses the common peritextual features that Woodson's...

Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage by Jacob Gallagher-Ross

Reviewed by: Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage by Jacob Gallagher-Ross Dorothy Chansky Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage. By Jacob Gallagher-Ross. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; pp. 248. On the morning I started this review, Dictionary. com's "Word of the Day" was transmundane, defined as "reaching beyond or existing outside the physical or visible world." The everydays in Jacob Gallagher-Ross's stunning, highly original book are relentlessly dependent on the physical or visible (and auditory) world in which we are enmeshed, yet they are simultaneously the stuff of magic, epiphany, and wonder—precisely the transmundane. Gallagher-Ross's four chapters plus a coda parse the alchemical workings of an unexpected quintet of artists whose deployments of the ordinary yield what the author unabashedly calls the re-enchantment of the quotidian. The book opens with the iconic question posed by Emily Webb at the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town: "Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?" (3). Gallagher-Ross is neither interested in nostalgia nor traditional American realism, which depends on a representation strategy built on "a consensus view of what constitutes the real" (48) and that privileges "hegemony over the quotidian" (7). His subjects locate art in the ordinary, "finding meanings in habitually invisible or abject phenomena" (27), mostly bypassing narrative and eschewing "reified depth psychology" (29). They work with the idea that "the world [End Page 435] we know is a shifting point orbited by uncountable minds, all an equal claim on reality" (60). If I have understood Gallagher-Ross's project, then, his detailed and perceptive descriptions of the work of Wilder, Lee Strasberg, Stuart Sherman, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Richard Maxwell expose only half of the materials from which they spin their gold. The overlooked materiality and aurality of the quotidian come to life and acquire significance in the theatre only when these intersect with the other half of the ingredients: the subjectivities—no two alike—of the spectators whose sensibilities the material components can awaken to wonder and to feelings too easily brushed aside in the glut of sensory overload that too often passes for all there is of the everyday. Accordingly, "reimagining spectatorship" (35) drives both the objects of study and Gallagher-Ross's own thinking. The rubric under which all the unexpectedly magical everydays in the book take place is technology. Wilder used speed and the passage of time to explore and inspire new ways of seeing. In Pullman Car Hiawatha and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, via movement in modern vehicles (trains and automobiles), the ever-changing landscapes—natural and human-made—rushing by and visible through windows prompt ever-shifting responses. In Our Town and The Long Christmas Dinner, putative mimesis is undone by the time travel the playwright uses to remind us that "everything solid melts away into time" (70). Gallagher-Ross's takeaway is that "the act of perception, of noticing, creates the aesthetic experience" (67). Life may be precious and fleeting according to Wilder, but that idea is of little consequence absent an audience to ratify it. Strasberg's influence on American acting training is, refreshingly, not the focus of the chapter called "Mediating the Method"; rather, Gallagher-Ross examines how Strasberg's relentless use of tape recorders coupled with his awareness of the importance of film work for his trainees brought "orphan sounds into theatrical speech" (76). You want "truth"? The unvarnished version is captured—warts, tics, and all—best by the wholly impartial means of the electronic recording device. Ironically, "the Method's immediacy was deeply mediated, its mediations intended to provide access to unmediated reality" (82). This mimesis was in the service of portraying truthfully a world increasingly noisy, distracting, and chock full of mechanically produced stimuli. Sherman's weird and wonderful performances present what Gallagher-Ross labels (borrowing from philosopher Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei) an "ecstatic quotidian" (105ff.). Sherman called the pieces "spectacles" (ibid.), offering a rich series of them between 1975 and his death in 2001. His strategy was to use commercially produced items such as plastic figurines, fake...

Sudanese Magical Realism: Another Kind of Resistance to the Colonial/Imperialist Power?

In a postcolonial perspective, magical realism is generally associated with Latin American literary production, even if the works of some African authors writing in English and in French are increasingly analysed in terms of magical realism. However, the impact of this literary movement on Arabic literature is still largely understudied. Sudan offers several examples of authors whose fiction could be considered as belonging to magical realism. A better understanding of Sudanese magical realism and its criticism in Arabic may reveal some shortcomings of the Euro-American theory and enlarge its definition. For instance, the idea that the social and political criticism of magical realism focuses on the West as a colonial agent does not fit the Sudanese examples: the Sudanese authors concentrate their criticism on national political powers, the colonial past being often secondary. A second example is the language: Euro-American criticism considers that African magical realism authors ‘africanize’ the languages of the former colonial powers, as a form of cultural revenge; however, the status of Arabic in Sudan cannot fit this theory. A third example: religious hybridity in Latin American and African magical realism is considered to result from the encounter between Christianity and local beliefs. But the Sudanese examples clearly underline the encounter between Islam and African beliefs, a dimension which is absent in Euro-American postcolonial criticism.

UNASUR beyond Brazil: Argentina’s position in support of the South American Defense Council

Abstract In the course of the negotiations for the creation of the Defense Council (CDS), there were two proposals on the table: either to form a collective security alliance, or to establish a flexible forum for cooperation. The aim of this article is to analyze the motives, limitations, and scopes which determined that Argentina opted in favor of the flexible scheme.Keywords: Unasur; South American Defense Council; Argentina; regional security. Received: August 24, 2016 Accepted: March 24, 2017 Introduction I n the course of 2008, amid contradictions, tensions, and different turns of events, the Argentine government evolved from a position of distrust regarding the creation of a Unasur South American Defense Council (CDS henceforth), to one of explicit support. In the initial stages of the negotiations, Argentina rejected the notion that the Council should take the shape of a collective alliance – proposed by Venezuela – and at all times showed clear support for the model involving a forum to discuss policy coordination – in line with Brazil. The position of the Argentine government was that, supposing the project in question was viable, it should be of a simple, agile, and gradual nature. In other words, “cooperation” would be affirmed but “integration” would not be mentioned, and Venezuela’s proposal regarding the creation of a unionist military axis would be swiftly discarded. Moreover, the word “integration” would not appear at all in the text of the CDS founding Treaty – as though integration and defense were irreconcilable concepts, in line with American realist theories.

Negotiating Reality: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock, or “A Vaudeville Nightmare”

In the course of a career that spans half a century, from the Vietnam era to the America of Barack Obama, Sam Shepard has often been labelled as a “quintessentially American” playwright. According to Leslie Wade, “[d]rawing from the disparate image banks of rock and roll, detective fiction, B-movies, and Wild West adventure shows,” Shepard’s texts “function as a storehouse of images, icons, and idioms that denote American culture and an American sensibility” (Sam Shepard 2). The article addresses Shepard’s work in the 1990s, when - as suggested by Stephen J. Bottoms - the writer’s prime concern was with depicting “a Faustian nation mired in depravity and corruption” (245). The discussion centres primarily upon a brief anti-war play first presented by the American Place Theatre in New York City on 30 April 1991, States of Shock, whose very title appears to sum up much of the dramatist’s writing to date, aptly describing the disturbing atmospheres generated by his works and the sense of disorientation frequently experienced by both Shepard’s characters and his audiences. The essay seeks to provide an insight into this unsettling one-act play premiered in the wake of the US engagement in the First Gulf War and deploying extravagant, grotesque theatricality to convey a sense of horror and revulsion at American military arrogance and moral myopia. It investigates how Shepard’s haunting text - subtitled “a vaudeville nightmare” and focusing on a confrontation between a peculiar male duo: an ethically crippled, jingoistic Colonel and a wheelchair-using war veteran named Stubbs - revisits familiar Shepard territory, as well as branching out in new directions. It demonstrates how the playwright interrogates American culture and American identity, especially American masculinity, both reviewing the country’s unsavory past and commenting on its complicit present. Special emphasis in the discussion is placed on Shepard’s preoccupation with the aesthetics of performance and the visual elements of his theatre. The essay addresses the artist’s experimental approach, reflecting upon his creative deployment of dramatic conventions and deliberate deconstruction of American realism.

The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White. Brook Thomas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. ix+378.

The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White. Brook Thomas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. ix+378.

Contemporary Legal Realism

This short chapter, which is prepared for the Encyclopedia for Law and Social Philosophy (Mortimer Sellers & Stephan Kirste eds., 2017), surveys three recent attempts to reconstruct or revive the legacy of American legal realism. The New Legal Realism is a law-centered species of empirical legal studies, which is focused on law on the ground and seeks to translate social science and synthesize its findings into law. NLR scholars are committed to constructive legal action and attuned to the changing faces of law in an increasingly globalized environment. Brian Leiter, by contrast, conceptualizes American legal realism as a naturalized jurisprudence, aimed at assisting lawyers to predict outcomes. His main substantive claim is that realists developed a robust naturalistic account, both concerning how judges decide and regarding the premise of law’s predictability for legal insiders. His main jurisprudential point is that legal realism necessarily relies on legal positivism, or more specifically: that legal realists are tacitly hard positivists. Finally, the author of this chapter argues that the real legacy of American legal realism is the realist view of law as a dynamic institution or, more precisely, a set of institutions, embodying three constitutive tensions: between power and reason, between science and craft, and between tradition and progress. What realists find most distinctive about law, in this view, is the uneasy but inevitable accommodation of these constitutive tensions.

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism ed. by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden

Reviewed by: Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism ed. by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden Mary E. Papke (bio) Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism, edited by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. 295 pp. Cloth, $64.95. The title—Haunting Realities—of Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden's edited volume of essays is an evocative one, though the subtitle—Naturalist Gothic and American Realism—complicates one's first notion of the book's subject. The intentional ambiguity of the adjectival constructions immediately poses critical questions—what is haunting American realism, and how does naturalism or, perhaps, the naturalistic inform the American gothic? Whether the book will address in equal measure both the gothic and American naturalism and thus stand as a noteworthy addition to naturalism studies can be determined only by a careful reading of each essay as well as then considering whether the volume coheres as a sustained engagement with naturalism studies. The union of naturalism and the gothic is not, of course, an altogether surprising one since both depend in great part on the irruption of the past into the present, whether that past be figured as heredity or as the uncanny. How one defines each literary mode in turn determines whether this union is a shotgun marriage or a companionate one, whether the partners are being forced together, or whether the two exist in equal balance and work to the benefit of both. One determining factor is whether the creative work in question focuses in the main on dark romanticizations of fate or demonstrates instead concerted engagement with determinist ontology/philosophy. The editors negotiate this issue by evoking inclusivity in their definition of naturalism as a subset of realism. Broadening the coverage of the essays to those works not engaging determinism as a central ontological belief system, they nevertheless find significant naturalistic tropes within the works under study. The volume as a whole thus offers deep readings of naturalistic and naturalist works, both of which types are clearly invested in Gothic effects and aesthetics, literature that the editors feel remains uncannily relevant for present-day readers. [End Page 244] The editors highlight this continued importance of late nineteenthcentury naturalist gothic works in their opening gambit in the introduction—a gothic invocation of coming darkness, written not by one of the classic naturalists but by E. L. Doctorow. This gesture toward the present day allows them to introduce the long narrative of naturalist gothic documentation of forces beyond our control that determine the crisis of subjectivity we experience at this moment: "the 'invisible hand' haunting capitalism, the perceived horrors of mechanization, and a growing and urbanized consumer culture with its associated fluctuations in social class, racialization, and gender" (1–2). These forces, they posit, are "the horrors of the real" (1). Naturalism, they argue, focuses on "an ultrareality" (2) and, in many works, "the monstrously real" (5). The essays they have chosen for the volume all focus on works that depend for their effect upon "a Gothic ruin inflected through Darwinian science and Spencerian philosophy that can only be rendered as horrific or ghostly in human apprehension" (4). Part I includes consideration of proto-naturalist and naturalist works that center on gender as the chief determinant of life possibilities. Stephen Arch's "Seeing Gothically: Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons" is an apt choice for an opening essay in that it introduces the female gothic used as a means "to negotiate reality" (24), the gothic figured not so much, then, as a mode or as "true" (24) but as a strategy. Cassandra Morgeson, he argues, moves from being seen as possessed to gaining self-possession by writing herself beyond the very distinct boundaries of confinement and female victimage that characterize the female gothic. Arch here somewhat paradoxically describes the female gothic as both imprisonment and inspiration for agency—uncanniness becomes canniness once one learns the self-protective strategy of interior secrecy and gains external economic security. While the essay makes some mention of heredity and thwarted primal sexual drives, its chief contribution is its insistence upon the gothic as engendering female agency in this mid-century American novel (an effect lost...

Theodore Roosevelt and American Realism

Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy as president was animated by a desire to see the United States play a leading role in world affairs. He utilized skillful diplomacy, energetic executive action, and credible naval capabilities to support this forward role, while avoiding strategic overextension. In Latin America, Roosevelt looked to forestall European intervention and secure U.S. predominance. In Europe and East Asia, he sought to promote regional balances of power, while working under strict constraints imposed by Congress and U.S. public opinion. In the end, Roosevelt navigated these constraints as well as international events with considerable success. His presidential tenure is a good example of American foreign policy realism in action.

Dismembering Tennessee Williams: The Global Context of Lee Breuer's A Streetcar Named Desire

Dismembering Tennessee WilliamsThe Global Context of Lee Breuer's A Streetcar Named Desire Daniel Ciba (bio) Over the past sixty years, Tennessee Williams has become one of the most widely produced playwrights worldwide; his works have been translated into many languages, and he is considered by some to be the American Shakespeare.1 As new productions reinterpret the meanings of A Streetcar Named Desire, directors, actors, critics, and audiences attempt to answer questions about the global significance of Williams's most canonical text. Contemporary critics' resistance to and dismissal of Ivo van Hove's Streetcar (1999), deconstructed around a bathtub, confirms a culturally constructed "true" interpretation, generally agreed on by American critics, which firmly locates the text as realistic, performed by realistic characters, and set in a realistic New Orleans.2 Lee Breuer's production of Streetcar, performed at the Comédie Française in Paris in 2011, serves as an example of the complicated politics underlying productions of Streetcar that eschew the realism now associated with the original production and the subsequent film, both directed by Elia Kazan. Reading Breuer's production as an example of cross-cultural dialogue on the global stage, I intend to adapt the concept of "counter-memories" as theorized by Michel Foucault to accentuate the distance between Breuer's nonrealistic global contextualization of the play from memories of Kazan's "realistic" American contexts. In an essay investigating the concept of genealogy via the philosophies of Nietzsche, Foucault develops the term "counter-memory" as a means of discussing the differences between history and reality. To Foucault, counter-memory illustrates an opposition to the monolithic construct of history, which supports the institutionalization of discourse surrounding an author. Foucault claims that the vast difference between constructed history and its counter-memory is a historiographical issue: "We want [End Page 64] historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or point of reference."3 According to Foucault, when considering the sum of an author's work, there exists a dominant history that is assumed to be true, but there also exists a counter-memory that runs counter to that dominant history. Foucault notes that these oppositions "imply a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a counter-memory—a transformation of history into a totally different form of time."4 By transforming the temporality of history, Foucault seeks to recover Nietzsche's ideas from cultural inscription. Counter-memory, as Foucault describes it, offers an opportunity for historians and critics to escape ideologies that only communicate dominant hegemony. In this analysis, I define counter-memories as disruptions to the culturally inscribed hegemonic reading of a production history. Because Streetcar has entered the American canon as an example of the now globally transmitted institution of American realism, Williams has achieved the status that Foucault attributes to Nietzsche. Williams's works function not only as individual texts that can be interpreted in numerous ways and performed in numerous styles, but also, collectively, as an ideological discourse. In order to adapt Foucault's discursive concept into a practical method for this production history, I assume that much of what has been written about Kazan's production conveys the ideological flaw that Foucault identifies with history. I read moments from Breuer's production as counter-memories to dismember the hegemonic cultural memories surrounding Kazan's production and more thoroughly analyze the global elements beyond a simple comparison to Kazan's. Dismemberment, in relation to the global conversation inherent in Breuer's production, means more than a metaphorical ripping apart of the normative memories surrounding Williams's corpus, especially as they are remembered as sites of institutionalized American realism. I use the verb "dismember" to represent terms employed in my examination of Breuer's production that emphasize the process of remembering beyond the normative concepts typically evoked by production histories. Thus "dismember" becomes an umbrella term for all of the processes derived from my reconsideration of these counter-memories. Although I do not always use the verb dismember, mainly for the sake...

The Second Phase of Realism in American Fiction: The Rise and Fall of the Social Self

Contributing to the current effort to rethink American realism, this essay concentrates on the work of second-generation realist novelists both well known (Dreiser, Wharton) and forgotten (Robert Grant, Robert Herrick, and Booth Tarkington). I argue that, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, American novelists did for fiction what their contemporaries, the pragmatists, did for philosophy: they reconceive the modern subject for a new modernity. Like the philosophical tradition of the previous two centuries, earlier realist fiction understood the liberal individual as the exemplary modern subject. However, in an age characterized by “the regress of self-sufficiency and the progress of association,” as one contemporary economist had it, liberal individualism’s stock dropped among a number of thinkers—artists and academics alike. As the essay demonstrates the way in which novelists participate in this culturewide effort to transform realism and redefine modern subjectivity in the US, it also challenges the received relationship between women and consumption. To overturn the standard view that consumption was largely a solipsistic activity in women, I show the ways in which this body of fiction, together with pragmatist writings, exposes the thoroughgoing sociality of consumer culture.

Unbalanced. Questioning the Concept of Emotional Equilibrium in Post-War American Realism

Unbalanced. Questioning the Concept of Emotional Equilibrium in Post-War American Realism