Kinds Of Writers Research Articles

John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years

John Dos Passos is a notoriously difficult writer to evaluate. His best-known works—namely, Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1937)—are massive and forbidding. Experimental novels without protagonists, fractured by avant-garde narrative techniques, these texts offer few of the satisfactions of traditional fiction and sometimes seem as disorienting as the onrushing modernity that stands as their central subject. And then there's the thorny issue of the author's politics. Throughout his life, Dos Passos made no secret of his shifting allegiances. As a young man, fully committed to Socialism, he publicly defended Sacco and Vanzetti, wrote for the New Masses, and in 1928 made the obligatory pilgrimage to see the Soviet experiment in action. As an old man, he contributed to the National Review and endorsed Barry Goldwater for president. Barry Goldwater. For this apostasy, critics have consigned most of Dos Passos’ post-U.S.A. writings to oblivion.Filled with fresh insights and new information, the eleven essays contained in Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling do full justice to this difficult writer's unique genius. In part, this volume seeks to cast new light on Dos Passos’ writing during the interwar period by decentering U.S.A., his masterpiece, and privileging Manhattan Transfer, as well as lesser-known works such as Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), In All Countries (1934) and The Garbage Man (1926). At the same time, the collection grapples with some big questions: What kind of writer is Dos Passos exactly? What is the relationship between his fiction and history? And to what extent do his political views shape his work?In response to the last of these questions, several of the contributors define Dos Passos as (to use his own term) a “chronicler”—a writer, in other words, committed to capturing what he called the “raw structure of history,” as opposed to imposing an abstract ideological agenda. Most of the chapters examine specific bits and pieces of this “raw structure,” everything from burial practices during the Great War to New York fashion customs in the 1920s, and consider their significance within Dos Passos’ allusion-saturated texts. The writer's relationship with Spain, both before and after the outbreak of war in 1936, emerges as a major focus as well.Coeditors Aaron Shaheen and Rosa María Bautista-Cordero have done an excellent job curating the collection—there isn't a single weak chapter—and with fewer than a dozen essays in a book of nearly 300 pages, each author has the room to fully develop an argument, a rare luxury in an edited volume. All the essays are well-written, dense in a good way, and mercifully free of theoretical opacity. Some are superb. These include Bautista-Cordero's important reevaluation of Adventures of a Young Man (1939), one of Dos Passos’ most maligned texts; Alberto Lena's illuminating comparison of Manhattan Transfer with King Vidor's silent film The Crowd; Lauro Iglesias Quandrado's meditation on the narratological “idiosyncrasies” displayed in Manhattan Transfer (his essay goes furthest in answering the big questions at the heart of this volume); Jessica E. Teague's detailed consideration of Dos Passos’ exposure to Soviet theater and his aborted ambitions as a playwright; and William Brevda's tour de force reading of straw hats and Arrow collars (exceptionally freighted signifiers, as it turns out) in Manhattan Transfer, the finest essay in the collection.My only disappointment: I wish the editors had included an essay on Three Soldiers (1921), an early milestone in Dos Passos’ development as a literary “chronicler” and one that would doubtless have yielded new meaning if addressed within the framework of this fine collection.

Lu Town: Theme Parks and the Commodification of Literary Culture in China

This essay investigates Lu Town, a theme park dedicated to the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) that was established in Shaoxing, China, in 2003. The theme park is a recreation of a fictional town that is an amalgamation of settings from some of Lu Xun’s short stories. The essay seeks to answer the following questions: What happens when the works of a complex and serious writer get popularized in the three-dimensional form of a themed space? Why would one build a theme park around this kind of writer, and how would you capture in a theme park the trenchant critique of rural or small-town social life and traditions in his works? What meanings are invested in this ‘leftist’ writer in a neoliberal ideological climate in which notions of class exploitation and class struggle have all but disappeared? In the process the essay presents a detailed description of the park, based on visits in 2004 and 2018, and an overview of recent changes undertaken to make the park more profitable in the competitive domestic tourist market. The authors argue that Lu Town, driven by commercial concerns, presents a positive, nostalgic representation of small-town Jiangnan life, one that is starkly at odds with the ironic and sardonic attitude Lu Xun often took towards it in his stories.

Regular Visitors

Regular Visitors Monica Ferrell (bio) inside every body is a blue wardrobe, and inside the wardrobe is an unremarkable lockbox, and inside Mila's was a picture of the man behind the counter at the café called Regular Visitors. His skin resembled a lamb's—that is, if you took a lamb and butchered it, then sheared it free of hair and massaged into it expensive toners and those moisturizers from Korea or Kiehl's that even the straight men among millennials seemed to wear. About as long ago as this man was old, she and her college friends used to play a game called Killed in the Initial Attack. There was nothing to the game beyond a mean-spirited hypothetical conjecture in which you imagined a scenario like the one from that movie Red Dawn, where America was being invaded by a foreign enemy. Who among them would go down first, stupidly wounded by the first tank, innocently stepping on the first grenade? Now Mila had a good answer for a game she no longer played. The man [End Page 5] behind the counter at Regular Visitors would. His teeth, presented in a smile each time he slid a coffee across the marble toward her, were guileless. "What will you have?" That's the way he took an order. It was so deferential, so Old World, especially in combination with the starched white apron he always wore, the half pencil he'd occasionally lift from the nook above his ear to jot down complex instructions on a little flip-top book of graph-lined paper, furrowing his fine forehead with the effort. He seemed to self-identify as a kind of writer; now and then she'd spotted him putting that poor mustard-colored notebook through its paces even when only she was around, and this one time when she rested a novel she was reading on the countertop as she poked in her wallet for her regular-visitor punch card, he'd twisted his long torso around to her side to read its title, sounding its words out with effort like a child. "Is this a good book?" She could see the bluish muscle working in his neck as he spoke. "He's Norwegian," she said, idiotically. Puckering his lips, the man on the other side of the counter put his hands to either side of the cover and studied it as though it were going to be on a test. "I've heard of him. Do you pronounce the K?" "Yes," she'd breathed. He nodded. "I thought so," he said, and grinned, a gymnast who'd stuck his landing. When her college friends used to play Killed in the Initial Attack, they'd rank Mila among the last to go, as she remembered, one of the final survivors. They said something about her spying—no, it was that she would turn double agent, using her sexual wiles to save herself with whichever side won. Mata Hari, they'd called her. It was vaguely dishonorable, the light they'd cast her in, tinged with a generalized racism made worse by the fact they clearly didn't know Mata Hari wasn't Indian, or even a real Asian at all. Odd to think how she had lost her wiles so thoroughly that she was now beneath the invaders' notice and could escape their bullets by simply not being seen. She had attained the fabled power of [End Page 6] cockroaches, she guessed, since like them she had become imperishable, a survivor who would persist through anything. ________ on tuesday mornings, Mila made breakfast for and dressed her five-year-old son and one-year-old daughter, then gathered them into coats, hats, gloves, and shoes and carried the littler one while holding hands with the bigger one down two flights of stairs. On her arms were threaded five bags: bag for Lily's daycare, bulging with diapers and wipes; bag for Jeet's school, heavy with lunch and snacks; bag with the breast pump, adapter, brick-sized ice pack, and bottles; her own work bag filled with books and papers; and her handbag. Sometimes Jeet would pretend to...

A writer, her doppelgänger, a baby, and a chorus of ghosts all try to get their story straight

A writer, her doppelgänger, a baby, and a chorus of ghosts all try to get their story straight Brendan Kiernan Diane Brown. Every Now and Then I Have Another Child. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2020. 163 pp. US $19.00. ISBN: 9781988592404 Diane Brown's Every Now and Then I Have Another Child evades sentimentalities or poetic pieties. It is far more interested in jokes, in writing itself, in pointing out the absurd self-regard of the writer's cosmos. [End Page 301] Babies tell stories; pictures on the walls give poems to the readers. A doppelgänger bullies her way into a creative writing teacher's house. The heavy stuff will blow you away; the mundane will make you laugh (when is the last time you laughed at poetry?). The rest will bore you. Unlike a romantic poet, Brown does not hold her verse to the titanic obligations of transforming everyday life. Sometimes, morbid jokes and self-effacement suffice in keeping us invested in her world. We play along—we are game to play her games. While a capable craftsperson with poetic verse, Brown invents slippery plot conceits and alter egos to entrap the anguish under all the artifice. Grief, oblivion, and the longing for redemptive love: these are the preoccupations of Brown's impressive, idiosyncratic, and uneven collection. As Brown's collection goes on, you feel more and more that Brown resents the vulnerability and direct confession that poetry obliges. Conventional poetry is like conventional motherhood in her work—noxious, suffocating, tragic, impossible in its demands of this particular poet. In "What's Expected," Brown literally tells us, "I'm not that kind of writer" (57). Indeed, as the work goes on, you see more clearly that the bewildering and inventive world of Diane Brown's poems has been structured around Brown trying to invent a new form of poetry to suit her persona. Her character Joanna Lodge wants to be the unbounded writer who is inured to the cliches and superfluities of the contemporary poet's life, yet she still stews and broods in the tragedies that haunt her. The more I read, the more I see a writer trying to assert herself precisely as she constructs herself. A reader needing to assert him- or herself turns into a drag fast, but Brown's self-deconstructions and self-destructions still feel more fun than poetry should be. You may find that after eighty pages of playful prose poems, you have had plenty of uncommonly good poetry. But then you still have Brown's eighty-page dessert coming your way. This is also by far the least appetizing course Brown offers, replete with a messy mélange of halfhearted murder mystery plots. Once thoughtful, disturbing, and wry meditations on oblivion and loss now have been overwritten by cop interrogations that Brown's gotten tired of writing even as she is writing it. Brown finishes "How We Give Ourselves Away" with an insight that then burdens the work as an extended premise: "Have I stepped over the line/into reality, a murder mystery?" (78). All the moving poems seem to go into hibernation in the latter sections of Brown's collection until her excellent and crafted poem "Yes" near the end of the volume. The Baby poems—narrated by a Baby that Brown has invented—early in the work stun with their macabre beauty. But later in the collection, in "The Manifesto," the Baby narrator stops crying out for love, instead engaging in meta-commentary on other poems in the collection: "The Boy on the Wall wasn't a good fit/for her or this story. The reader/might think it a step too far" (118). Why bring me into this? Brown confirms that she has worn out her welcome with us readers. The serpentine world that she has created in the first part of her work folds into gummy neurosis of the worst kind, an author outsourcing critique to her readers. None of the playful self-regard feels fun anymore. Still, one should take Brown seriously as an idiosyncratic talent. If this collection lost two-thirds of its poems, with a judicious editor biopsying all the murder...

Translator's Note: Exchanging Different Versions of Jokes with Ariel Magnus

translator’s note Exchanging Different Versions of Jokes with Ariel Magnus I first came across Ariel Magnus’s work back in 2012 when I was working on an anthology of Argentine writers for the city government . The texts tended to be sent to me already excerpted with little context or explanation, and generally that wasn’t a problem: I can usually get the gist of a voice and plot pretty quickly, or at least well enough to produce a decent version in English. With Magnus’s texts, though, taken from the novel El hombre sentado (The sitting man), I was all at sea. El hombre sentado, I learned, is a kind of po-mo novelization of a film-poem by the Swedish director Roy Andersson, inspired by the poetry of César Vallejo. Or, in other words, pure existentialist angst filtered and condensed through various different mediums right onto my computer where it was about to undergo a transformation into yet another language. Having kind of gotten my bearings, I think I was able to produce a good rendering , but more importantly, Magnus was now very much on my radar. Looking through his bibliography, it was obvious that he’s a writer who likes to play with literary concepts and genres; heck, you can see it just from his author photo: the pate and facial hair seem specially designed to accentuate the sparks flying off of that mad-scientist brain of his. No doubt about it, I wanted to work with him. I got my first chance when the Short Story Project asked me to translate one of his stories, “Doing Your Duty,” for their extraordinarily ambitious program (check it out if you haven’t come across it before). This was a very different text from El hombre sentado, far more organic, gritty, and (oh, bane of translators) full of sparkling wordplay. This time I got to send my queries to Ariel, and we soon hit it off; essentially working on a translation with him boils down to exchanging different versions of jokes. It’s fun. Subsequently, Seagull Books asked me to translate his novel Chess with My Grandfather (originally scheduled for this year but now Covided into 2021), an extraordinary novel based around the diaries of a grandfather he never met and the World Chess Championship played in Buenos Aires in 1939; a blend of real life, madcap schemes, acute political, philosophical, and literary reflection, and, of course, lots of jokes. I hope I’ve done it justice. But really all you need to know about Ariel is that he’s the kind of writer who thinks it’s a good idea to produce a book consisting of a hundred one-hundred-word stories and another hundred onehundred -character aphorisms. And that he’s able to pull it off: some of these ministories boast more depth and brilliance than several rather well-regarded novels I don’t care to name. And all you need to know about me as a translator is that I think it’s a good idea to try and translate them. The challenge, obviously, was to match the word count, and I find that Spanish tends to shrink by about 10 percent when transferred into English, but that actually gave me (or rather us: I naïvely thought that the restrictions would reduce the scope for author comments; I was wrong) a little more leeway when trying to find the right combination of words and phrases to reflect what in the original is a glorious exercise in playful brevity. It’s for the reader to determine whether we’ve been successful. Translator Kit Maude lives in Buenos Aires. Editorial note: Turn to page 31 to read Maude’s translations of Magnus’s flash fiction, and visit worldlit.org to read their interview together. by Kit Maude Notebook 10 WLT WINTER 2021 ...

Translator's Note: Exchanging Different Versions of Jokes with Ariel Magnus

translator’s note Exchanging Different Versions of Jokes with Ariel Magnus I first came across Ariel Magnus’s work back in 2012 when I was working on an anthology of Argentine writers for the city government . The texts tended to be sent to me already excerpted with little context or explanation, and generally that wasn’t a problem: I can usually get the gist of a voice and plot pretty quickly, or at least well enough to produce a decent version in English. With Magnus’s texts, though, taken from the novel El hombre sentado (The sitting man), I was all at sea. El hombre sentado, I learned, is a kind of po-mo novelization of a film-poem by the Swedish director Roy Andersson, inspired by the poetry of César Vallejo. Or, in other words, pure existentialist angst filtered and condensed through various different mediums right onto my computer where it was about to undergo a transformation into yet another language. Having kind of gotten my bearings, I think I was able to produce a good rendering , but more importantly, Magnus was now very much on my radar. Looking through his bibliography, it was obvious that he’s a writer who likes to play with literary concepts and genres; heck, you can see it just from his author photo: the pate and facial hair seem specially designed to accentuate the sparks flying off of that mad-scientist brain of his. No doubt about it, I wanted to work with him. I got my first chance when the Short Story Project asked me to translate one of his stories, “Doing Your Duty,” for their extraordinarily ambitious program (check it out if you haven’t come across it before). This was a very different text from El hombre sentado, far more organic, gritty, and (oh, bane of translators) full of sparkling wordplay. This time I got to send my queries to Ariel, and we soon hit it off; essentially working on a translation with him boils down to exchanging different versions of jokes. It’s fun. Subsequently, Seagull Books asked me to translate his novel Chess with My Grandfather (originally scheduled for this year but now Covided into 2021), an extraordinary novel based around the diaries of a grandfather he never met and the World Chess Championship played in Buenos Aires in 1939; a blend of real life, madcap schemes, acute political, philosophical, and literary reflection, and, of course, lots of jokes. I hope I’ve done it justice. But really all you need to know about Ariel is that he’s the kind of writer who thinks it’s a good idea to produce a book consisting of a hundred one-hundred-word stories and another hundred onehundred -character aphorisms. And that he’s able to pull it off: some of these ministories boast more depth and brilliance than several rather well-regarded novels I don’t care to name. And all you need to know about me as a translator is that I think it’s a good idea to try and translate them. The challenge, obviously, was to match the word count, and I find that Spanish tends to shrink by about 10 percent when transferred into English, but that actually gave me (or rather us: I naïvely thought that the restrictions would reduce the scope for author comments; I was wrong) a little more leeway when trying to find the right combination of words and phrases to reflect what in the original is a glorious exercise in playful brevity. It’s for the reader to determine whether we’ve been successful. Translator Kit Maude lives in Buenos Aires. Editorial note: Turn to page 31 to read Maude’s translations of Magnus’s flash fiction, and visit worldlit.org to read their interview together. by Kit Maude Notebook 10 WLT WINTER 2021 ...

The Steadfast Attention of Sigrid Nunez

The Steadfast Attention of Sigrid Nunez Tara K. Menon (bio) A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez (Picador, 1995)Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez (Harper, 1998)For Rouenna by Sigrid Nunez (Picador, 2001)The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez (Picador, 2007)Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2010)Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2014)The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2018)What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2020) In 2018, Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award for The Friend, her rousing novel about a woman who, after the suicide of her friend, finds herself saddled with grief and a two-hundred-pound Great Dane. Nunez is no stranger to prestigious prizes (she is the winner of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship) or to critical acclaim (each of her seven previous books was widely lauded), but the combination [End Page 640] of this award and the universally rapturous reviews of the novel finally found her, at the age of sixty-seven, the wide readership she deserves. (In my opinion, Nicholas Ortega’s gorgeous cover design with its regal Harlequin Great Dane and beach-ball-bright colors deserves partial credit for the novel’s commercial success.) Her modest acceptance speech at the awards ceremony displayed the same qualities — honesty, humor, warmth — that give the novel its appeal: I was lucky enough as a child to have had a mother and teachers who taught me that whatever happened in life, however bad things might get, I could always escape by reading a book. I was lucky enough to keep on meeting them, people who believed that reading and writing were the best things a person could do with her life. And to learn what Alan Bennett was getting at when he said that for a writer nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people because however dreadful, it may be of use. I became a writer not because I was seeking community but rather because I thought it was something I could do alone and hidden in the privacy of my own room. How lucky to have discovered that writing books made the miraculous possible, to be removed from the world and to be a part of the world at the same time. And tonight, how happy I am to feel like a part of the world. She was faultlessly gracious, but listening closely you got the sense she might have preferred to be at home with a book. Nunez views writing as an exalted vocation; it requires a lifetime of dedication and as few distractions as possible. She didn’t marry or have children, she supplements her writing income with adjunct teaching, [End Page 641] and you will not find her on social media. She is, in other words, the kind of writer whose demise the man at the center of The Friend laments. The man, who is the unnamed narrator’s friend, mentor, and onetime lover, is addressed as “you” throughout the novel. “You” is a writer and teacher who is full of contempt for his students. He rails against everything: the commercial ambitions of aspiring young writers, the desire for “safe spaces,” accusations about writing as cultural appropriation, and, especially, complaints about his inappropriate behavior in the classroom. For a man who has spent his life sleeping with his students, this political correctness thing really has gone too far. The old-fashioned word for “you” is womanizer; some might say shameless lech. Today, whatever you choose to call him, he’d be the subject of a Title IX investigation. For what it’s worth, Nunez doesn’t paint the young women as agency-less victims of his advances. Instead, the many willing participants are in it for “the thrill of bringing an older man in a position of authority to his knees.” (The novel teems with astute sociological observations.) The narrator paints a scathing picture of an out-of-touch and endlessly self-pitying man, but you also get the sense that she shares his dismay about the fragile youth, his contempt for self-obsessed, gossip-mongering...

Building Meaning: Constructions of Imperial Power in Domitianic Architecture, Visual Culture, and Literary Sources

Abstract Domitian’s architecture was much denigrated, and nuanced readings of his buildings were closed off. His damnatio memoriae was remarkably complete. Buildings act as theoretically open spaces where meaning is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. Imperial buildings exist on a conceptual continuum with humbler structures. Domitianic architecture is read through the poetry of Martial and Statius, through elite writers such as Pliny, Suetonius, and Dio, and through Domitian’s own coinage and inscriptions. Senatorial survivors justify their continued existence through denigration of Domitian’s buildings, but Domitian himself becomes a kind of writer, constructing his own existence through his utterances on and in architecture.

The Politics of Citing: José Martí, Oscar Wilde, and the Renaissance of Author Photography

My article reexamines two chronicles by José Martí in which the Cuban intellectual discusses Oscar Wilde’s arrival in New York and his first public lecture there. I take a suspicious approach to these chronicles, proposing a critical reading of Martí’s decision to blindly cite the eccentric Irish dandy. Martí’s first chronicle about Wilde, which appeared in Caracas on 21 January 1882, can be read as an artifact that emphasizes the relevance of author photography. I argue that the photographs of Wilde that Napoleon Sarony took in New York City and the legal and other controversies that developed around them constitute a renaissance of author photography as a self-figurative vehicle and attempt at material autonomy by a new kind of writer in the public sphere. Photography composes a luminous skin that can not only operate on the materiality of the author but also respond to the lustful eyes that look at it.

The information sources of the first Spanish Newspapers (1618- 1635): the construction of information credibility

This paper analyses the information sources used in a large corpus of news items published in Spanish printed newspapers between 1618 and 1635. The initial aim is to determine how information credibility was constructed in both historical and rhetorical terms. To this end, the rhetorical construction of credibility in the news stories are analysed by focusing on the information sources that these reveal or conceal. And in order to determine whether or not these sources were deliberately concealed, the frequency with which ‘on deep background’ attribution appears is examined. The methodological approach on which this study is based is Historical News Discourse, which applies the conclusions and methods of critical discourse analysis to newspapers of the past, in addition to contextualising and explaining the results in terms of journalism history and communication approaches (Conboy, Brownlees and Broersma, among others). In this work, we contend that the discourse analysis of the first printed newspapers is essential for gaining further insights into how the journalistic profession consolidated its position in Spain thanks to a new form of auctoritas based on discourse competence. The gazetteer or journalist emerged as a new kind of writer, whose credibility and reputation depended on his ability to access, organise and reveal –according to rhetorical patterns recognisable to readers– the information sources available to him.

The information sources of the first Spanish Newspapers (1618-1635): the construction of information credibility

This paper analyses the information sources used in a large corpus of news items published in Spanish printed newspapers between 1618 and 1635. The initial aim is to determine how information credibility was constructed in both historical and rhetorical terms. To this end, the rhetorical construction of credibility in the news stories are analysed by focusing on the information sources that these reveal or conceal. And in order to determine whether or not these sources were deliberately concealed, the frequency with which ‘on deep background’ attribution appears is examined. The methodological approach on which this study is based is Historical News Discourse, which applies the conclusions and methods of critical discourse analysis to newspapers of the past, in addition to contextualising and explaining the results in terms of journalism history and communication approaches (Conboy, Brownlees and Broersma, among others). In this work, we contend that the discourse analysis of the first printed newspapers is essential for gaining further insights into how the journalistic profession consolidated its position in Spain thanks to a new form of auctoritas based on discourse competence. The gazetteer or journalist emerged as a new kind of writer, whose credibility and reputation depended on his ability to access, organise and reveal –according to rhetorical patterns recognisable to readers– the information sources available to him.

Waking up as Alan: Game novelisation and the player-reader-writer

‘What kind of writer are you?’ So the question is asked of Alan Wake, best-selling novelist embedded in his own horror story in Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake (2010), and subsequent novelisation by Rick Burroughs (2010). What kind of writer you are is a question which has long vexed not only genre fiction authors, but also those writers whose work feeds on/back into established narrative worlds. Game novelisation, the ‘reverse’ adaptation of videogames into novels, has attracted almost no academic enquiry to-date, and is much maligned by critics. Yet game novelisation is a writing and publishing practice on the increase, and when considered in overlap with the voluminous quantities of game fan fiction published online, transformative narrative practice is a phenomenon which begs greater attention within creative writing. While there is much work to be done on game novelisation and game fan fiction in terms of its place, reception and impact within gamer and publishing landscapes, from a creative writing viewpoint there is value to be gained in teasing out aspects of writing that are unique to these practices, and to consider how immersion in narrative world building is altered by the player cum reader cum writer. Using Alan Wake as one example, this article presents selected contextual discussion before performing a reflection on my own experience of narrative world building as player, reader and writer.

A Poststructuralist Interpretation of Art

Among the French philosophers who discuss the literature of writer Marquis de Sade, Maurice Blanchot presents a unique interpretation. For Blanchot, literature is the theme par excellence on which his entire oeuvre has been built. It is not, however, the case that Blanchot reads several literary forms and invents new concepts to map out a certain form of literature. His thinking about literature is indeed accompanied by an ideal and his interest goes out to a particular kind of writer, namely the writer who feels closely related to revolution. This implies that Blanchot is interested in Sade because his literature is both an illustration of a certain ideal, and is stuck in the revolutionary moment of radical negation.

Mr. Dog

Mr. Dog Don Zancanella (bio) Every night Vic's children want to hear him read Goodnight Moon. He's not sure where the book came from. Maybe it was a baby shower gift, maybe his in-laws sent it, but it's definitely the current favorite of four-year-old Leah and little Marie: Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere. The girls' enthusiasm isn't shared by their mother. Teri finds the book tedious. "When they ask for it, I tell them to pick a different one," she says. "Enough is enough." At a backyard cookout, Vic mentions Goodnight Moon to some other parents. Every one of them nods in recognition and says something like, "Isn't it great?" or "It might be the best kids' book ever." But when they're done exclaiming, Teri says, "I liked it at first but not any more. The day they outgrow it can't come soon enough." "Be careful what you wish for," replies their friend Melissa, whose children are eight and ten. "Mine just want to play games on my tablet. Bedtime reading is a thing of the past." One day Vic looks at the copyright page and is surprised to find Goodnight Moon was published in 1947. He doesn't remember encountering the book during his own childhood. Or even books like it. Maybe that's because his parents weren't big readers. They subscribed to the daily newspaper, but books belonged in school. In Vic's opinion it's the language of Goodnight Moon that makes it so beloved. The illustrations are bright and childlike but that's not what kids find engaging. In fact, Leah and Marie no longer care if he even shows them the pictures. He asks them what they like about the book [End Page 394] and, although they're not a religious family, Leah says, "It's kind of like a prayer." It occurs to him that the author, Margaret Wise Brown, might have written more books, so the next time he takes the girls to the public library, he investigates. Sure enough, there are several others (alongside multiple well-worn copies of Goodnight Moon). One is called The Important Book, another The Runaway Bunny, and a third one is Mr. Dog. He finds himself unexpectedly intrigued. Everyone agrees Goodnight Moon is excellent but he's never heard anyone express a more general appreciation for "the works of Margaret Wise Brown." Perhaps she was the kind of writer who produced a single masterpiece and nothing afterward quite measured up. He checks out all three so they can judge for themselves. They'll read them before bed tonight. The Runaway Bunny is forgettable. A baby bunny runs away and the mother bunny chases after him, presumably demonstrating the mother's steadfast love. But the plot is predictable from page one and there's no phrase that even comes close to matching "goodnight air." Marie's eyes glaze over and Leah starts talking to her orange elephant before he's halfway through. The Important Book is more interesting. On each page is a picture of an object, followed by its attributes: "A spoon is like a little shovel, you hold it in your hand, you can put it in your mouth …" However, the description ends with a subtle twist: "But the important thing about a spoon is that you eat with it." It's as if the author is saying, "Ignore the form, it's the function that counts." Leah and Marie are interested but also bewildered. "Daddy, I don't understand," Leah says. "What's it about?" He's not sure what to say. Each page is a small philosophical puzzle. It's not surprising that it's less popular than Goodnight Moon, but it has its own charm. However, the one that really grabs him is Mr. Dog. It's about a boy and a scruffy dog who meet and become great friends. Eventually they move in together. The dog is exceptional. According to Brown, "he [End Page 395] belonged to himself." Not only that, but he likes strawberries and his name is Crispin's Crispian, of all things. This one the girls...

‘Snob Value’: Gender and Literary Value in Mary Stewart

All of Mary Stewart’s novels are rich in reference to other texts: most possess titles and epigraphs taken from a range of literary sources, and many of their plots are influenced by other works. Stewart, famous for her bestselling romantic thrillers, describes feeling that she needed to prove her worth—that she was required to demonstrate a particular level of literary awareness in order to earn her title as a particular kind of writer. However, Stewart associates her literary allusions with pleasure, something which, as the author discusses, undermines their literary value as it is calculated by the highbrow. This mixed attitude towards literary value is characteristic of Stewart’s work: the author argues that a complex negotiation of cultural capital and canonicity can be read throughout her oeuvre. With a focus on This Rough Magic (1964), this article shows that Stewart’s writing works to undermine the notion of the canon and redefine traditional notions of literary value, as well as reflect on the challenges faced by women writers. By comparing reviews of Stewart’s work with those of her male contemporary Ian Fleming, the author demonstrates how notions of gender and literary value affected the way Stewart and her novels were received and perceived.

Reading Henry Miller in the New Millennium

Reading Henry Miller in the New Millennium Daniel Manuel Mendoza (bio) Sit in on any creative writing course and you are likely to see a lot of unwarranted praise. The writing workshop as it exists today is equivalent to group therapy, where the professor—instead of reading every MFA candidate’s work with a critical eye—applauds even the most embarrassing attempts as works of creative genius. The issue is that writers in the MFA programs rarely read the greats. How could they? The MFA workshops typically consist of a three-hour weekly meeting where we get to hear embarrassing attempts at memoir or poor imitations of Alice Munro. The MFA reading lists I have seen have two primary texts: some kind of writer’s handbook full of silly exercises more appropriate for old ladies and works of contemporary fiction—provided by the professor’s friends. Professors, critics, editors, and writers feel the overwhelming necessity to give lip service to the “concerns” of authors who are a racial minority or who identify with an alternative lifestyle. The politically correct environment of contemporary arts has brought on this necessity. Today, every genre has a community that serves as a “safe space” for these groups. They all come complete with a university funded journal, a small press, and a set of conferences at AWP every year. Even the parties at AWP are designated by genres. If you do not fulfill the aesthetic or moral aspects of any such genre, you are unwelcome. Me and Joe Haske—another working-class writer—accidentally walked into a party sponsored by a big east coast writer’s retreat one night in LA. We were quickly made aware of our mistake when an older man in a camel hair jacket turned to us and said, “Well young men, you certainly look like you have a few tragic stories to tell.” The rest of the crowd snickered and we finished our drinks, drank a few more, and then headed back to our bar on skid row. I don’t take issue with the growing diversity of contemporary literary fiction. If it weren’t for the encouragement of diversity, I wouldn’t have had the opportunities to study where I have and then work with American Book Review, Pleiades, or Boulevard. I do take issue with the vacuum it has created. We have become a culture that is afraid of stepping out of our groups. We no longer challenge our assumptions and we have failed at creating a more complex body of literary work. In the world of literary fiction today—both in MFA programs and in the journals—the works of Miller would have no place because they challenge the politically correct assumptions we have come to accept as fact. When Miller is talked about it’s usually in the context of his antifeminist and hyper-misogynistic attitude. One recent critic of Tropic of Cancer (1934) asserts if it “has traveled from banned book to spiritual classic that tells us ‘who we are’? A reasonable objection is that ‘we’ cannot include women, unless a woman is comfortable with her identity as a half-witted ‘piece of tail.’” Is it reasonable to object to Miller’s work as one that is unacceptable for contemporary readers—particularly female readers? And what do we make of the female readers that find other valuable aspects of Miller’s “spiritual classic”? Further, should we ban all books that portray women in a negative way? Perhaps the Old Testament and Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) should be off the shelves, as well? When we evaluate a work of art we should keep in mind the importance of analyzing it with the complexity it deserves. To consider any work of art from any time period with one-sided judgments does a great disservice to our culture. When we threaten the legitimacy of Miller’s art because of one narrow aspect of his work, then we risk making the same mistake this country has made in its attempts to ban the works of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Like Whitman, Melville, Twain, and countless other American writers, Miller’s work provides a wealth of philosophical and...

Genre Is Not a Four-Letter Word: Satisfying and Subverting Reader Expectations

Genre Is Not a Four-Letter Word: Satisfying and Subverting Reader Expectations Lou Berney (bio) Thank you all for having me here this evening. It’s a pleasure and an honor. I’d especially like to thank Julie Chappell, who extended the invitation to me. Julie can’t be with us tonight, unfortunately, so I can speak with complete honesty about her. She’s a wonderful writer, teacher, colleague, and friend, and I hope I don’t let her down. When I tell someone I write crime novels, I’m usually greeted with one of three facial expressions: Expression #1: Wide eyes, raised eyebrows, big smile. As in, “That’s awesome!” Expression #2: Knitted brows, nervous smile, rapid blinking. As in, “You know how to murder me and get away with it, don’t you?” (I do know how, by the way.) Expression #3: Chin lifted, nose pointed down at me, smug smile. As in, “Oh, for a moment I thought you were a real novelist.” In some circles, that last reaction is not uncommon. When I was in graduate school, for example, a student submitted a short story to our workshop. The story was about a couple of guys who find a bag of money in the woods and go on the run from some other guys who want the money back. The workshop started and—I remember this very clearly—one of the other students pushed the story away like it was this weird smelly knot of hair and gunk he’d fished out of a clogged drainpipe, and he said, “This is a crime story.” Well, my first idea, when I started planning this talk, was to fight that fight and make the case that crime stories (and so-called genre fiction in general) is worthy of serious consideration and study. But I know this is an enlightened bunch. You read and teach writers such as Raymond Chandler and Megan Abbott and Georges Simenon and Patricia Highsmith and Walter Mosely and Viet Nguyen. You believe that there’s good fiction and there’s bad fiction, there’s literature and there’s [End Page 6] product, and a crime novel—like any other novel—can be set down on either side of the ledger. So then I started to consider the Deep Thoughts that I might have about crime fiction. What’s the source of its universal appeal? What does it tell us about the dark corners of our own minds and hearts? Et cetera. But the problem, I have to admit, is that I don’t really have any Deep Thoughts. I’m the kind of writer who has to focus on the nuts and bolts of what I’m doing. Voice. Character. Plot. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, I have to stare for a long time, often an embarrassingly long time, before I understand what I’m seeing. In essence, I’m always trying to write a novel smarter than I am. For your sake and mine, then, I’m not going to attempt any Deep Thoughts tonight. Instead I’m going to talk about crime fiction, and so-called genre fiction in general, in the only way I can talk about it with any confidence or enthusiasm or expertise: from the perspective of a writer, one writer, for whom an understanding of genre—of conventions and expectations—is crucial. For several years I made my living mostly as a working-class Hollywood screenwriter. I got paid, but not millions, which means I had to go up for a lot of different kinds of writing assignments. Here’s what happens in a typical meeting with a producer. She’ll say, “Hey, Lou, so we’ve got this project we need a writer to tackle—it’s a light romantic comedy or psycho-sexual thriller or inspirational family sports drama or animated action-adventure set in a dystopian future where giant harpy eagles have enslaved mankind. Would you be into something like that?” And I’ll say, “Are you kidding me? You won’t believe this, but I have been passionate my entire life about psycho-sexual thrillers or inspirational family sports dramas or animated action...

Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility by Arianna Dagnino

Reviewed by: Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility by Arianna Dagnino Michael Jacklin Dagnino, Arianna.Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2015. x + 240 pp. $45.00. Mobility is a fact of contemporary life. Whether voluntary or forced, experiences of relocation are shaping the lives of millions and, increasingly, literature is turning to matters of transcultural and translingual identity that follow such relocations. In Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, Arianna Dagnino asks: “Who are contemporary transcultural writers and how do they differentiate themselves from other kinds of writers?” (3). Dagnino’s study contributes to theoretical work that has developed the concept of transculturation, a term originating in the writings of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s, adapted in the 1980s by Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama, and expanded upon more recently by European scholars including Mikhail Epstein and Wolfgang Welsch. The book is structured in two parts. The first is a series of creative nonfiction accounts of interviews with five transcultural writers. The second is a critical exegesis in which the author surveys the theoretical field of transcultural writing in a form of “distant reading” (18), after Franco Moretti, and draws out a set of key traits of transcultural novels. By “distant reading,” Dagnino does not mean statistical analysis of a large body of texts, but rather the analysis of “aggregated data” from others’ studies (18), with “data” referring to the qualitative findings of Epstein and others. Although Dagnino claims that this approach does not substitute for close reading, the weight of theory and the limited references to fictional texts in the second half of the book left this reader wishing for more of the creative insights that characterize the interview accounts of the first section. Transcultural writers are those “who do not belong in one place or one culture— and usually not even one language—and who write between cultures and are interested in the complex dynamics of cultural encounters and negotiations” (14). In selecting the authors for her study, Dagnino had three criteria: the subjects’ variegated cultural identities; their lived transcultural experiences across a number of countries; and, for each, a creative transcultural literary work or body of work (10-11). Her interviewees include Inez Baranay (Australian and Hungarian), Brian Castro (Chinese, Portuguese, Australian), Alberto Manguel (Argentinian, German, Canadian), Tim Parks (English, Italian), and Ilija Trojanow (Bulgarian, German, Kenyan). For each of these writers, cultural heritage is complicated by migration or, as Dagnino prefers, “creative transpatriation,” a process of critical distancing from one’s place and culture of origin (129). Trojanow, for example, is Bulgarian-born, but grew up in Kenya, attending a German-language school; he now lives in Austria and writes in German. Baranay, who writes in English, was born in Italy to Hungarian parents, and has lived for extended periods in India where her novels Neem Dreams (2003) and With the Tiger (2008) were first published. [End Page 513] This diversity of geographic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds provides a broad palette for the interviews. Herself a novelist as well as an academic, Dagnino frames the interview section in a quasi-narrative of a (fictional) visit to Istanbul, a city where cultures collide and connect, and where she (imaginatively) meets four of the five writers. The fifth, Parks, is “diffused” throughout (91), a distant commentator on others’ views. This playful, post-modern approach to literary scholarship, though not without risks, is here a delight. Dagnino did indeed interview the authors, though not in Istanbul. Their resituated quotes are stitched together with citations from their novels, Dagnino’s reflections, and—most daringly—extracts from the author’s own diaries, providing glimpses into Dagnino’s past and establishing her own transcultural credentials as she comments on locations ranging from Zimbabwe to Australia. These autobiographical insertions will make the book of interest to scholars of auto/biography as well as of the contemporary novel. Overall, this nontraditional approach to literary analysis is effective in conveying both the author’s and the interviewees’ understandings of transcultural writing, and its deliberate blurring of boundaries is inspired by, and illustrative of, this...

"The pleasure of writing is inconceivable": William Hutton (1723-1815) as an Author

William Hutton started life as a child labourer, but rose to become a bookseller, stationer, and wealthy paper merchant. Like many autodidacts, he longed to be an author and published 15 popular books. This article examines Hutton’s remarks on ‘writing’, which reveal his motives, methods, and goals of authorship. It also gauges his impact on the literary marketplace by analysing 65 periodical reviews of his works. Hutton’s books were based on personal experience, and mixed memoir and biography with historical, topographical, and travel writing. They suited the nation’s thirst for entertaining formats and established him as a new kind of writer, who produced lively, unlearned books for a commercial age. Hutton’s breach of polite norms and opinionated style horrified the literary establishment. But they also attracted readers lower down the social scale, who enjoyed irreverent views on political, religious, economic, and social issues. Hutton thus had an impact on two contrasting groups of readers and put Birmingham and northern regions on the national literary map. Together this author and his critics offer a portrait of the evolution of authorship, the spread of knowledge and taste, and the creation of cultural identity in a time of literary change.

Authors as Creators of Art: The Collaborative Shaping of Literary Writers in Ch’angjo

In the early 1920s, when aspiring writers still strived to conceptualize modern literature in Korea, the ideas and images of a literary author were not firmly established. Facing the recalcitrant prejudice against art as vulgar entertainment, those writers tried to settle into the idea of modern literature as “divine” art by adapting Romanticism to Korea. Coterie magazines, such as Ch’angjo (Creation, 1919–21), played an important role in circulating modern aesthetics. Yet they also provided a platform for those writers with aspirations to collaboratively perceive what kinds of writers they were. By examining discourses on art, essays about the writers themselves, and prose fiction on artists in Ch’angjo, I argue that the figure of the writer as a creator of art was socially made in 1920s Korea through coterie magazines, which connected the members’ shared practice of portraying artists to their collective projects of self-making.