Anglo-American Writers Research Articles

Nabeul … Taroudant . El Jadida . . Tangier

Beckett’s knowledge of the history of imperialism has left abundant traces. Irish colonial history in particular provides a fertile ground for allusions and residual echoes in many of his texts, and this facet of his writing has received close attention. His alertness to the history of colonial conquest, exploitation and oppression is evident on the peripheries of his bilingual oeuvre too – notably, in his translations for Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology and Octavio Paz’s Anthology of Mexican Poetry, and in minute alterations to some of his manuscripts revealing a careful reflection on the historical and political weight of words. Charting Beckett’s exposure and responses to the history of decolonization in its French and francophone contexts, however, has proved more challenging, owing to the difficulties posed by the work’s multiple cultural and linguistic positionalities, which are often treated as matters of secondary importance. This essay attempts to destabilize and expand the coordinates commonly used when thinking about Beckett as a postcolonial writer, by considering his relation to the postcolony through the prism of his long stays in the Maghreb between 1969 and the early 1980s. Retracing Beckett’s steps in Tunisia and Morocco, I delineate postcolonial and neocolonial imaginaries around Beckett’s creative process that are more challenging and uncomfortable than the evidence previously scrutinized elsewhere, and I pay particular attention to the awkward sense of colonial presence underlying marginal texts such as his Tangier mirlitonnades. The extended periods Beckett spent in Tangier proved immensely generative for him; here, I examine his relation to Tangier in light of the city’s colonial history as an International Zone and a much-fetishized haven for expatriate Anglo-American writers, offering a portrait of Beckett that conveys his simultaneous involvement and non-involvement with his surroundings.

Interpretation of the title complex from the standpoint of synergetic science (on the material of works of English and American literature)

This article is devoted to the consideration of the title and other elements of the text in the context of synergetic science. In this article, the author examines in details the synergetic science in language, analyzes deeply the principles of synergetics from the point of view of text linguistics and lingvo-stylistics, based on the materials of literary works of Anglo-American writers. The author of the article convincingly proves that synergetics helps to understand better the processes, occurring during the decoding of the titlecomplex, which also includes an epigraph-quote.

How to be Modern: The Darantière Press and Anglo-American Writers in France

The collaboration between Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, and the Dijon printer Maurice Darantière that resulted in the first printing of Ulysses in 1922 was commemorated in a 1988 study by the modernist scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté: Maurice Darantière, les années vingt: bibliographie d’imprimeur. The bibliography appended to the investigation of Darantière's publishing history (1900-1928) reveals a remarkable number of volumes of English-language poetry, essays and fiction during this period. Along with French translations of a range of English-language short stories (by Sherwood Anderson or Edgar Allan Poe), Darantière’s catalogue boasts over a dozen English-language volumes, including those by some of the key figures of anglophone literary modernism (Bryher, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H.D.). Darantière’s willingness to print books in a language other than French is a tribute not only to the audaciousness of his enterprise but to the network of influence established among Anglo-American writers, publishers and booksellers in France in the first decades of the twentieth century. What can a new examination of the Darantière collection (Bibliothèque municipale, Dijon) bring to light about the mediation of avant-garde Anglo-American writing in France and what Lawrence Rainey has called the “commodification” (44) of modernist print culture? The contribution of Darantière in the dissemination of Anglo-American literary experiment will be measured alongside the expanding role of the printer, from craftsman to vector of the new expatriate writing.

AUTHORIAL PRESENCE IN SERBIAN AND ENGLISH COAUTHORED SOCIAL SCIENCE ARTICLES

This paper examines the means by which authors’ presence in co-authored articles is signaled directly in Serbian and international research articles belonging to social sciences and written in English by Serbian and native English speakers respectively. By comparing 15 Serbian and 11 international articles, the study tested the hypothesis that Serbian authors avoid the use of first-person pronouns in order to demonstrate authorial modesty, compared to English-speaking authors, whose direct usage of the first-person plural was expected to occur regularly. Additional research questions asked were about the discourse functions performed by first-person plural pronouns referring to the co-authors of the texts, as well as the use of the inclusive/exclusive we by the two examined groups. The results showed that Anglo-American authors use considerably more first-person pronouns in their research articles, although their placement in separate article sections had a similar pattern in both groups. According to Dontcheva-Navratilova’s (2013) taxonomy, the two dominant discourse functions performed by the authorial we were those of the recounter of the research process and the opinion-holder, although with their order switched between the groups. Finally, neither group used the inclusive we to a great extent, except for the Intro+Lit section of the papers, where its inclusion in the text grew up to 52.5% in the Sr group, but only 23% in the AnAm group. These results suggest that cultural practices in establishing authorial presence between Serbian and Anglo-American writers may be closer than previously thought.

“Books Shape Man”: A Study of Bibliomemoirs on Major Anglo-American Writers

The bibliomemoir is called a story about a story and very popular in the Western literary world. But it is rarely being dealt in Korea. This paper focuses on reading bibliomemoirs written about ten representative British-American writers who have changed the author s life. Traditional modern literary criticisms were impersonal and objective, preventing readers from easily approaching canons. However, sympathetic and friendly reading of canons in bibliomemoirs serves as a good catalystic guide to the Anglo-American major works for ordinary readers. In addition, in an increasingly mechanized era, the spread of reading by emotional and integrated reading by bibliomemoirs can revive the desire to read not only in the stagnant English literature classrooms but also in the sluggish domestic literary world, thereby cultivating culture and achieving selfgrowth. Above all, the sympathetic reading of bibliomemoirs allows the restoration of warm humanity to be formed and implemented.

Representations of translators and translation in Japanese fiction

This paper examines some 40 Japanese fictional works containing portray-als of translators or translation (here understood as including interpreting). It explores Japanese writers’use of translation as a metafictional device, the extent to which these works (mis)represent reality, whether they are positive or negative depictions, and the insights they provide into how translators and translation are regarded by Japanese authors and, by extension, the Japanese public. Recurring themes are analyzed, such as marginality and identity issues, power and fidelity, author/translator relations, attitudes toward translators, and translation as a profession and business. Of par-ticular interest is the question of how Japanese depictions might differ from those by Anglo-American writers.

Representations of translators and translation in Japanese fiction

This paper examines some 40 Japanese fictional works containing portray-als of translators or translation (here understood as including interpreting). It explores Japanese writers’use of translation as a metafictional device, the extent to which these works (mis)represent reality, whether they are positive or negative depictions, and the insights they provide into how translators and translation are regarded by Japanese authors and, by extension, the Japanese public. Recurring themes are analyzed, such as marginality and identity issues, power and fidelity, author/translator relations, attitudes toward translators, and translation as a profession and business. Of par-ticular interest is the question of how Japanese depictions might differ from those by Anglo-American writers.

Ideology in Polish Translations of Anglo-American Literature

Ideology has always influenced translation, yet this fact became a topic of scholarly research only in the 1990s. The working of ideology in literary translations most often manifests itself as a conflict of value systems. From vast reservoir of foreign sources, the native axiology absorbs values that it needs to sustain its culture. It is not a coincidence that Anglo-American literature, propagating ideas of democracy and individual freedom, became popular in Poland in the first half of the nineteenth-century when Poland did not exist as a state. Only a century later, American literature was the most popular of all foreign literatures in pre-1939 Poland. World War II changed this situation, and the Soviet-controlled apparatchiks favored translations that were “politically correct.” Yet, because of their connections with earlier revolutionary movements, avant-garde Anglo-American writers were often published during the communist regime, for example Virginia Woolf, whose novels were standardized to appeal to the tastes of popular readers. After Poland regained independence in 1989, the national book market was privatized and commercialized, and avant-garde literature needed advertising to get noticed. Cormack McCarthy’s novels were translated into Polish on the wave of popularity of the Coen brothers movie based on No Country for Old Men. The two Polish translations of McCarthy’s novel try to sound like a typical hard-boiled realistic fiction. This is where the ideology of consumerism meets the ideology of communism: literature is a means to sustain – and control – a cultural monolith, where all differences are perceived as possible threats to social order.

Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray

Reviewed by: Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray Richard A. Kaye Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Ed. Kate Hext and Alex Murray. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. $54.95 (cloth); $54.95 (eBook). This collection brings new attention to modernism's self-repression—and the repression by critics—of its origins in fin-de-siècle decadent poetics. Examining a tantalizing range of Anglo-American writers, the contributors variously make a case for decadent writing as entwined with modernist achievements. Running through the volume, too, is an emphasis on the ways in which decadent literature determined a queer poetics that stood astride modernism in the writing of familiar writers such as Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, H.D., Hart Crane, and Carl Van Vechten as well as lesser-known figures such as Margaret Sackville, Ada Leverson, Bruce Nugent, and Donald Evans. The trio of decadent/queer/modernist concerns informs the essay by Vincent Sherry, whose 2018 book Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence is itself a pioneering work tracing the neglected sinews linking modernist artistry and decadent aesthetics. Here Sherry considers the legacy of decadence in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Beckett, in which queer, minor characters (St. John Alaric Hurst of Woolf's The Voyage Out, Baron Felix in Barnes's Nightwood) wander like ghosts from the Wildean past. Drawing on the argument of Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Sherry suggests that these writers found considerable value in forgoing a viable, erotically normative future. The modernist reliance on a decadent midVictorian legacy informs Howard Booth's essay on Lawrence's adoption of Swinburnean tropes in his fiction, particularly Swinburne's use of the Pan figure and the theme of nympholepsy, the belief originating with the Ancient Greeks that human beings could be inhabited by nymphs. For Lawrence, such tropes "imagine a resolution of the split and division between humankind and the world" (186). In later fiction such as St. Mawr (1924), however, Lawrence will come to see such breaches as unbridgeable as he sought to conceive of a futurity beyond or without modernity. [End Page 797] Wilde's imprisonment for "gross indecency" casts a shadow over much of this volume. Nick Freeman explores post-1895 writers such as John Edmund, Max Beerbohm, and Hector Hugh Munro (Saki), all of whom borrowed the stylistic strategies of decadent writing while dispensing with, through playful satire and elegant evasiveness, its immoral or scandalous scenarios. Kristin Mahoney revisits the career of Wilde's friend Ada Leverson, whose parodic fictions provided a light critique of dandyism even as they sought to find a place in decadence for feminist aspirations. Joseph Bristow brings fresh insight to the legacy of late-Victorian aestheticism in the work of another feminist, the poet and pacifist Margaret Sackville. Sarah Parker explores the Baudelairean elements in the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who sought to invigorate the spirit of Les Fleurs du Mal (she was one of the volume's first female translators) with irony, humor, and a markedly American idiom. This volume resurrects a number of forgotten modernists indebted to the decadent movement. Douglas Mao discusses the literary career of the Greenwich Village poet Donald Evans, whose press Claire Marie published Stein's writing. Mao considers the place of "cuteness" and "naughtiness" in Evans and Stein's work, two features of 1890s sensibility that become denigrated in an age of high modernist seriousness and austerity. Kirsten MacLeod offers a fine reading of Van Vechten's 1923 Jazz-age novel The Blind Bow-Boy, where decadent and camp aesthetics commingle (the novel's title is a campily lascivious reference to a line in Romeo and Juliet: "… the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt shaft"). Michèle Mendelssohn draws on original archival research to explore the life and work of the African-American writer Bruce Nugent, whom Mendelssohn describes as "one of the few African American writers" of the Harlem Renaissance "with the audacity to challenge homophobic prejudice and explicitly portray interracial sensuality" (a characterization that perhaps overly...

Why Can't the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?

Why Can't the English Teach Their Children How to Speak? Matt Cohen (bio) and Samantha Gilmore (bio) American culture of the early republic has long been described as a revolution against British culture. The development of American literary style was, consequently, studied through the ways in which American writers supposedly distinguished themselves from British writers: a matter of negations, creations, novelties, or inevitable expressions of the land or spirit. Ezra Tawil's Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic (Philadelphia, 2018) joins a chorus of critics of early American literary exceptionalism, insisting that American literary style initially grew less out of a push back against than a dialectical embrace of British literary patterns. Like Leonard Tennenhouse and Elisa Tamarkin most recently, Tawil insists that American writers were not Anglophobic so much as Anglophilic.1 Tawil approaches the "uncomfortable problem of cultural indebtedness" by tracing the origins of "national distinctiveness" and outlining how such an aspiration became embedded in literary style (13). He distills the way this question has tended to be posed: "Is American literature an allochthonous body of Old World learning and letters that has been transferred to the New World, or is it an autochthonous growth from American earth? From where does its prestige and vitality originate, its transatlantic origins or its cisatlantic destination?" (16). Tawil's answer is, in effect, both: the "American voice" was derived "out of a deliberate operation of cultural negation or subtraction" (35). It took a lot of thinking about transatlantic connections, Tawil observes, for white American authors to come up with what could be claimed as homegrown literature. Paradoxically, U.S. literature by Anglo-American writers from 1780 to 1800 exhibits both a self-conscious differentiation from European norms and a preservation of those same tendencies—particularly when the norms were models of how to be literarily distinctive. Tawil calls this process—in an apropos echo of John Keats—"negative affiliation" (17). His evidence comes partly from [End Page 525] literary marketplace positioning but is more significantly drawn from style. The British conversation about "taste" in writing formed the imaginative framework within which American stylistic differentiation emerged. The specific stylistic straw men were Britain's supposedly "hypercultivated and artificial" writing, counteracted by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's earnest "incorrectness"; its "art of the polished and the beautiful," contrasted with Charles Brockden Brown's erratic gothic sublime; its fictions of "artifice, disguise, and hypocrisy," which writers such as Susanna Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster would counter with their "artless, sincere, and plainspoken" style (11). These contrasts were already built into British writing, Tawil observes, in infra-Anglophone struggles over religious and class morality. Tawil's first chapter on "Noah Webster's American-Style English" is compelling. Webster walked a tightrope in moderating a linguistic debate between his American lexicographical project and that of Samuel Johnson. "Webster's solution to the problem of a national language," Tawil writes, "was not to invent a new vernacular but rather to 'reform the mode of spelling' " (35). But he also did not elect to uncover the elements of vocabulary or syntax that North American denizens had invented or evolved that differentiated them from English speakers elsewhere, as later writers such as Walt Whitman would do. A top-down change of style was prescribed instead, one that impacted the "middle register between surface and depth, form and content" (39). Tawil observes that this approach, a "modal change," was a model for how imaginative writers would proceed: like keeping the English alphabet while adding a diacritical mark to indicate pronunciation, literary stylists retained European precedents but in tasteful, virtuous modes. It may be equally significant for thinking about style as a cultural phenomenon to note that Webster's plan didn't work: articulated as a reform as such, Webster's plan drew public mockery.2 Still, Tawil's useful caution is that while it's tempting to see in Webster's rhetoric a "linguistic declaration of independence," in practical fact his propositions were rooted in "a deeply dialectical understanding of transatlantic cultural relations, the balance between tradition and innovation, and the interplay of cultural adoption and adaptation" (41–42). It wasn...

English and Croatian citation practices in research articles in applied linguistics: a corpus-based study

As a mandatory constituent of academic writing, citation allows writers to acknowledge other scholarsʼ work and to position their research against it, showing thus both contribution to previous knowledge and research novelty (Hyland 2004). Previous research has documented not only cross-disciplinary (Hyland 2004) but also cross-cultural variations, with a general tendency of Anglo-American writers to use more citations than writers of some other cultural backgrounds (Hyland 2005; Mur Dueñas 2009). By exploring the frequency, preferred types, and reporting structures of citations in two comparable sub-corpora of research articles in applied linguistics in English and Croatian, the present study aimed to provide an insight into the patterns of cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of academic citation. The corpus comprised 32 research articles that were sampled from the representative English- and Croatian-medium publications in applied linguistics and analyzed manually. The extracted instances of citations were categorized according to the pre-established taxonomies of the citation types (Swales, 1990) and reporting structures in academic writing (Thomson & Tribble 2001). The frequency analysis showed that the English writers used more citations as opposed to the Croatian writers, which is in line with previous cross-cultural research on the use of citations (Fløttum, Dahl & Kinn 2006; Mur Dueñas 2009). In both sub-corpora writers used more non-integral than integral citations, with the highest frequencies reported in the Introduction section of research articles. The overall findings point to the saliency of the congruent types of reporting structures in both citation formats across the two sub-corpora, with the human subjects being most frequently used in integral citations and non-reporting being the most frequent reporting structure in non-integral citations. However, in non-integral citations English writers used non-human subjects at a significantly higher frequency than Croatian writers, which suggests that in the English citations investigated more importance is placed on research activities than human agents. Whereas similarities in the use of citations between English and Croatian writers may be accounted for by the congruent disciplinary variable, the differences seem to be related to the specifics of a wider socio-cultural background in which academic writing is embedded.

ENGLISH EMERGENCIES AND RUSSIAN RESCUES, c. 1875 – 2000

This article is the first installment of a three-part contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia. The series of three examines the ways in which Anglo-American writers, from the mid-nineteenth until the late twentieth century, turned to Russian literature and literary theory to escape the otherwise inevitable influence of French avant-garde literary movements. These writers—Henry James in part 1, Donald Davie in part 2, and the “American Bakhtinian” critics in part 3—found in Russian examples a responsible yet radical and morally oriented alternative to what they considered the extravagant, haughty, and corrupt aestheticism of French literary culture. Thus, these essays concern the interplay of xenophilia with xenophobia. Part 1 treats James's turn, commencing around 1875, to the example of Ivan Turgenev as a way of getting beyond the example of Flaubert and the other “grandsons of Balzac” with whom he was then keeping company in Paris. Turgenev and Flaubert were both Realists, but the Russian writer, in contrast to the French, cared not only for verbal beauty but also for what James called “moral glamour” in the art of fiction.

The Other Milk: Reinventing Soy in Republican China by Jia-Chen Fu

Reviewed by: The Other Milk: Reinventing Soy in Republican China by Jia-Chen Fu Sau-Wa Mak Veronica (bio) Jia-Chen Fu. The Other Milk: Reinventing Soy in Republican China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. xi, 276. Paperback $30.00, ISBN 978-0-295-74403-2. This significant book offers a refreshing new approach to the study of China through a discussion of soybean milk, nutrition, and nutrition scientists from the late nineteenth century to post-socialist China. Jia-Chen Fu has clearly put in a lot of effort to produce a book that covers many areas. She analyzes food and nutrition scientists in relation to the Chinese modernization project and China's relationship to global modernity and imperialism, and thus the book is about food, health, modernity, and nation-building. The concept of "reinventing soy" runs through the book in response to the questions of how the Chinese diet was defined as "an inadequate one that imperiled the nation and how a local foodstuff was reinterpreted, rediscovered, and reassigned social and scientific meanings in an attempt to solve the [End Page 300] problem of inadequacy during the first half of the 20th century" (p. 5). The author views the history of soybean milk through the lens of local gazettes and other documentary records. The book is divided into seven chapters, preceded by an excellent introduction that sets out the historical and cultural issues. Chapter 1 describes how the soybean, originally domesticated in China, became a modern commodity in the global market by the turn of the twentieth century, referring particularly to Li Shizeng's technological innovations in making soybean products in Paris. Fu maintains that in the emergence of the global soy trade, "soybeans had accrued a variegated cast of meanings: famine food, fertilizer, animal feed, export commodity, and a base for industrial products such as soap and paint, as well as a modern superfood whose credentials were supported by science" (p. 39). These multiple forms and functions enabled the soybean to become a hot commodity in the European and American markets. It is interesting to discover that the immediate beneficiary of the burgeoning global trade in soybeans, as a source of oil in particular, was not China but Japan, whose "improved transportation infrastructure and system of banking and credit undergirded the soybean trade from Manchuria to the rest of the world" (p. 28). It was in this context that Li's soybean experiment in Paris set the stage for the development of soybean milk in China. Chapter 2 describes the role of modern knowledge in overcoming the cultural bias that associated dietary patterns with race and personality traits. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo-American writers, including James Harrison Wilson and Arthur Smith, tended to describe the Chinese diet as "unhealthy" and lacking in "fastidiousness" and it was associated with unsophisticated characters who did "not recognize or practice the value of punctuality, accuracy, sympathy or sincerity" (p. 55). To challenge this racial stigma by making use of modern science, Chinese intellectuals conducted quantitative dietary surveys in metropolitan centers to account for individual and national vigor. Chapter 3 describes the process of building a scientific argument for Chinese nutritional inadequacy. Fu discusses the rat-feeding experiments and dietary studies conducted by Chinese biochemists Luo Dengyi, Zheng Ji, and Wu Xian during the 1920s and 1930s. These nutrition activists argued that "what the Chinese diet lacked were 'good' proteins from protective foods" (p. 81). They were keen to represent the Chinese diet in biochemical terms so that "it could be compared with other national diets, and it could serve as a gauge by which to evaluate China's standing within an emerging capitalist world order that fetishized qualities like efficiency and productivity. But once translated into calories, carbohydrates, proteins and fats, the Chinese diet also emerged as a technical problem that the Chinese themselves were equipped to solve" (p. 87). Chapter 4 describes how soybean milk became an essential food for children's growth and development, substituting for the cow's milk that was [End Page 301] prized as the essential protective food among the Western scientific community. The presence of cow's milk in local...

Experiments in Genre: Baroja's Vidas sombrías and the Short Story in English

Encouraged by the author's identification of his literaryinfluences—Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoyevsky and Stendhal— little critical attention has been paid to transnational connections that go beyond PíoBaroja's interest in nineteenth-century English, French or Russian literature, but which instead coincide with his own novelistic apprenticeship. This article considers Baroja's anticipation of changing paradigms in European and North American prose fiction, by suggesting alternative, but compelling, comparisons with the theories and practice of contemporaneous international figures, such as Henry James and James Joyce, among others. The article analyses Baroja's first published work, the collection of short stories entitled Vidas sombrías (1900), in the context of the English, Irish and American short story at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses firstly on the central importance of individual consciousness rendered through experimental narrative techniques in line with the fragment or ‘sketch’ of contemporaneous Anglo-American writers; secondly, pictorial and spatial form; and thirdly, the emphasis on the Gothic, supernatural or ‘uncanny’. Baroja's fiction, from its earliest incarnations, intersects with both the English and American tradition, simultaneously revealing nineteenth-century influences through Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism, in the transition to Modernism in all its varied forms.

‘Were it worth knowing’: what Rebecca Kinsman can and cannot say about the Chinese in Macao

This essay accepts that discourses (in the Foucauldian sense) shape what we know and can know about the world, but this process is extraordinarily complex. The 1840s can be viewed as a time of particularly significant ideological shifts in imperial and colonial attitudes towards China. Critics have often highlighted a transition in colonial representations of China from Romantic ‘Orientalism’, which tends to exoticise alterity as distant or alien from the observing self, to the later Victorian imperial gaze (so well described in Pratt's Imperial Eyes), which tends to ‘incorporate, in an ethnographic gesture, otherness in a framework of familiarity and sameness’ (Kuehn, 79). The essay does not view this general trend as a strictly linear process, however, and contends that a range of approaches to alterity were available to, and often employed by, Anglo-American writers of the time. With the above in mind, I investigate the way in which various competing nineteenth-century tropes interact with Quaker ideology to mould Kinsman's representations of the Chinese in Macao in some of her letters during the mid-1840s.

Future memories

Although the concept of foresight is now widely used by Anglo-American writers, the Romance-language countries have continued to refer to the concept of la prospective or prospectiva since the early 1960s. Despite cultural differences, the two concepts are very similar. Nevertheless, the author argues that prospective is closer to strategic foresight. The prospective attitude does not wait for change and then react; it aims to master expected change (preactivity) and to induce a desired change (proactivity). Preactivity is what guides all approaches to future studies, forecasting, scenario planning and foresight. Proactivity is more voluntarist, and aims to bring about the desired changes by means of strategic planning. This leads to a hopeful message: We just have to rethink the problems to move forward. The author highlights the enduring relevance of several key thinkers ranging from Saint Augustine and Seneca to Gaston Berger and Igor Ansoff. He emphasizes the importance of a collectivity's thinking together about the future and taking action. Overall the article pleads for rigor yet some common sense explains the utility of participatory foresight with simple tools (morphological analysis, prospective workshops). In conclusion, this article emphasizes two symmetrical errors: ignore the existence of a hammer when in front of a nail or consider every problem a nail because you have a hammer!

The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, or, What's Literature Have to Do with It?

The ease with which Wolfgang Iser's work on the act of reading was assimilated into US critical debates in the 1970s and early 1980s seems to make it an exception to Edward Said's observation that theories take on different meanings as they travel from one national context to another. If the work of other influential theorists at the time—Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard—highlighted their “foreignness,” the concurrent rise of a home-bred version of reader-response criticism and Iser's engagement with Anglo-American writers and critics helped him to pass through US customs as if he had nothing to declare. In fact, his work crossed the US border with such ease only because some of its key concepts were misunderstood. Helping to generate his widespread popularity at the time, that misunderstanding also contributed to the relative neglect of his work once reader-response criticism was no longer a fad in faddish America. What, after all, was to be gained by reading work no longer on the cutting edge?

Civic Humorism and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay

Civic Humorism and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay Richard Squibbs I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"1 Ralph Waldo Emerson's embrace of whim as fundamental to the cultivation of self-reliance comes near the end of a long struggle by Anglo-American writers to imagine meaningful civic relations in an increasingly fragmented world, a struggle which extends back from Emerson into the periodical essay tradition. From the various old humorists populating eighteenth-century essay serials to the essays' personae themselves, whimsicality registers a perplexing sense of personal disconnection from everyday social life. And while Emerson exceeds the irenic language of the periodical tradition in declaring contemptuously that "[s]ociety is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater," he does so to defend an ethical posture central to that tradition: the imperative to keep "in the midst of the crowd . . . with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."2 The persistence of this language of cultivated disinterest into the mid-nineteenth century, and its central place in one of the key texts of American romanticism, is less surprising once we recognize that the ethical stance posited by the British and early American periodical essay is imagined as a palliative to a society riven by economic self-interest and devoid of civic consciousness. In many ways, the social political milieu of Jacksonian America standing in the immediate background of Emerson's essay recalls the writing periodical essayists saw on the walls of eighteenth-century London and Edinburgh, and early nineteenth-century New York and Philadelphia.3 In conceiving imaginative ownership of time as a core index of personality, and adopting irony as its characteristic rhetoric, Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Washington Irving, and other essayists offer [End Page 389] "whimsicality" as an antidote to the unreflective, self-involved bundle of compulsions they identify as modern individualism. This whimsical individual, enlightened not so much by critical reason as by his refusal to surrender his personality and creative idiosyncrasy to the culture of consumption proliferating around him, later bequeaths to Emerson a rhetoric with which to oppose the "smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times."4 Yet Emerson's hope that self-reliance "is somewhat better than whim at last" shows his sense that whimsy, as he inherited it, had already done all the work it could do in forging the paradoxical alignment of strong individualism with universal humanity that Emerson is after. As a result, he tries to get beyond the conceptual conundrum that has dogged whimsicality from the beginning; namely, that the language of republican civic virtue that elevated the initial claims of whimsy to an ethical posture also threatens to undermine the stance by virtue of its internal logic, according to which whim can appear as little more than a quietist retreat from civic engagement. This consciousness of whimsicality's dual face as a principled, public stand against mindless consumerism and a defeatist refusal to engage these cultural forces head-on resonates through literary serials from The Tatler to Irving's Salmagundi. It thereby allows us a unique vantage from which to examine the imaginary publics that these periodicals cast as objects of critique, and as horizons of possibility. Critics have long acknowledged the early periodical's key role in creating the sense of critical publicity essential to the development of a secular civil society. In their overlapping, if distinct, ways, Jürgen Habermas, Terry Eagleton, Michael Warner, and others relate the reflexive form and circulation of essay serials to formal characteristics of the modern public sphere. For example, Habermas remarks of Joseph Addison's and Steele's publications that, in them, "the public held up a mirror to itself," coming into "self-understanding . . . through entering into 'literature' as an object."5 Yet these accounts tend to identify periodicals like The Tatler and The Guardian with mainstream consensus, or, in Warner's case, with a functioning republican public sphere. Grasping whimsicality as...

In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860 (review)

Reviewed by: In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860 Timothy Sweet (bio) In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860 Edward Watts Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006284 pp. The legacy of French colonization has received a great deal of attention from historians following studies such as Patricia Nelson Limerick's [End Page 237] The Legacy of Conquest (1987) and especially Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991), which replaced or at least supplemented Turnerian teolology with descriptions of "the racial, political, economic, and ethnic complexity of the frontier" (Watts 220). This terrain has been of less interest to literary scholars, however, with the rare exception of Gordon Sayre's comparative study, Les Sauvages Américains (1997). The undergraduate literary canon, even in the wake of the Heath anthology's multiculturalist revisions, has similarly minimized the French past, especially in contrast to the Spanish. The fifth edition of the Heath gives us only three French selections in volume A (to 1800) as compared with a dozen Spanish. The "Spanish America" section of volume B (1800–1865) contains several Anglophone selections, as well as Spanish writings in translation. The Norton, evidently returning to an Anglo orientation with the seventh edition after a foray into multiculturalism, has excised the French altogether (represented in the sixth edition by Champlain), while retaining at least recognition of Hispanic origins in selections from Columbus, Casas, and Cabeza de Vaca. The anthologies represent largely presentist responses to the legacy of imperial success: the persistence of the Spanish and the decline, after 1763 and 1803, of the French. The French decline is the foreground of Edward Watts's In This Remote Country. Watts investigates how the Anglo-American empire understood what it replaced in the "middle ground" that flourished prior to the War of 1812: the French and Métis culture of voyageurs (rivermen), coureurs de bois (fur traders), habitants (peasant farmers), associated Native Americans, and a few acculturated Anglos. Watts argues that Anglo-American writers found in the French colonial past grounds on which to debate the future of the United States: "Could it learn to live in peace with itself, its neighbors, and the rest of the world, happy on the margins of world power rather than at its center?" (5). It was still quite possible to entertain an optimistic answer to this question during the antebellum era, as dissident writers drew from a nostalgic French past a vision of a culture "less greedy, less racist, less aggressive" than America was turning out to be (4). This book continues Watts's ongoing project of bringing the Old Northwest into the early and antebellum American literary canon. In An American Colony (2002), Watts traced the development of a distinct literary culture in the Old Northwest, arguing that the region is best understood as an internal colony of the United States. Watts and David Rachels made [End Page 238] a wealth of documents from this literary culture (as well as from the Old Southwest) newly available in a classroom anthology, The First West: Writing from the American Frontier, 1776–1860 (2002) (reviewed in EAL 2003). In In This Remote Country, Watts gives us a means of approach and an argument for canonical recognition of commentators on colonial French and Métis culture such as Henry Marie Brackenridge, James Hall, Juliette Kinzie, and William Whipple Warren. None of these writers is anthologized today, except in Watts and Rachels's The First West. Hall is familiar (though seldom read) as Melville's source for the story of Colonel Moredock in the "Indian-hating" chapters of The Confidence Man. The others are virtually unknown, even though, as Watts demonstrates, they share our current disciplinary preoccupations with nation, race, class, and gender, seeing in the French and Métis past an alternative narrative of American origins and a critique of Anglo imperialism, racism, acquisitiveness, and patriarchy. Watts shows how some of Hall's stories, for example "A Legend of Carondolet" from Legends of the West (1832), would pair nicely with Irving's "Sleepy Hollow" or "Rip Van Winkle," both pitting Yankee culture against a prior, less acquisitive...

Reviving Julia Peterkin as a Trickster Writer

Southern writer Julia Mood Peterkin (1880-1961) preserves a distinct insular American community in her novels as she chronicles the lives of rural South Carolinian African American farmers known as Gullah. During the 1920s and 1930s, her work was highly acclaimed and extremely controversial because it crossed sensitive racial borders; however, in recent decades, Peterkin's fiction has been neglected because she was an AngloAmerican writing of a rural Afro-American community, concentrating on folk life. Until now the terms regionalist and primitivist have diminished Peterkin's reputation and damaged chances for a revival of her important literary works. However, when viewed in the context of trickster literary theory, Peterkin's fiction secures a legitimate and unique place in American literary history due to its revolutionary depiction of African Americans. During her twelve-year career, Peterkin produced four novels: Green Thursday (1924), Black April (1927), Pulitzer Prize-winner Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), and Bright Skin (1932). Additionally, she authored A Plantation Christmas (1935), and numerous articles, short stories, and literary reviews. Her collaboration with photographer Doris Ulmann resulted in Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933), a rare collector's item currently fetching over $6,500 US for a first edition, jacketed trade issue and up to $50,000 US for a deluxe edition. Each of the 350 signed, numbered deluxe copies includes ninety copperplate photogravures of Gullah residents from Peterkin's plantation depicting various customs and practices that, like basketmaking, can be linked to West and Central Africa, such as river baptism, grave ornamentation and carrying heavy loads on top of the head (Collins 55). The fine designed type, handmade wove paper and binding materials, and photogravure prints account for its desirability and soaring value (Jacobs 131). For a woman with no literary connections, who began writing at age forty from a rural farm in an era with few technological conveniences, her accomplishments are impressive. Reversing earlier literary trends, Peterkin avoids working out the sticky issue of racism by portraying complex, diverse characters of African heritage in an insular Gullah community without AngloAmerican presence. She once wrote, I mean to present these [black] people in a patient struggle with fate, and not in any race conflict at all (qtd. in Robeson 785). During her career, she successfully presented American cultural diversity to white, middle-class Americans, sans the moonlight and magnolia sentimentality or stereotypical racial caricatures previous Southern writers used to sugarcoat issues such as class, race, and gender. Speaking through an improvised spelling of Gullah dialect, Peterkin offers a rare literary example of the master using the slave's language. She is one of the earliest and most successful Anglo-American writers to cross racial borders by writing from the minority perspective, particularly Gullah. Peterkin created a fictional setting, Blue Brook Plantation, basing her narratives on the intimate life stories of Gullah servants living on her husband's farm, Lang Syne Plantation, during the 1920s. Susan Williams describes the Gullah culture as remote settlements of black people who no longer seemed bound by the ritual relationships of paternalism (Devil 17). The area where Gullah culture thrived, also known as the Sea Islands, extends 200 miles from northeast of Charleston, South Carolina to south of Brunswick, Georgia ... surrounded by tidal swamps [that] sometimes extend 50 miles inland (Smith 289). Because Gullah slave descendants were geographically isolated, they were able to retain aspects of African culture in their creolized community; therefore, Peterkin's record of Gullah culture is invaluable to American cultural studies. Authors may be considered trickster writers if their lives and work cross cultural boundaries and confuse the distinctions set by the presiding dominant institutions. …