Pulitzer Prize-winning Research Articles

Study of Slave Psychology as a Result of Slavery in The Context of the Color Purple

Slavery is an issue of great importance in American history. It affected black generation very badly and imprinted unforgettable impacts on their lives. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Pulitzer Prize winner novel is a remarkable work which has been written in Afro-American scenario. Present study aims to investigate the psychological effects of slavery on behavior of slaves and their imitation of their oppressors. Current study signifies the basic psychological impacts produced by oppression and gives information about slave psychology. The prime importance of present work is that it draws a relationship between literature and psychology, and describes the significance of literature for studying human mind and behavior. In accordance with current research work Frantz Fanon’s theory of Alienation and Psychology of Oppressed (1961) has been followed. Qualitative mode of paradigm has been used and data has been analyzed textually. Present work has found that slavery has immense affects on slaves’ mind set. They unintentionally imitate their masters and try to become tyrant like them and show their violence towards weaker.

Self-Identification in Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the most important American poets and short-story writers. She is the Poet Laureate of the United States (1949-1950), Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry (1956), National Book Award winner (1970) and recipient of Neustadt International Award for Literature (1976). Bishop is famous of writing poems implicitly referring to her personal life and suffering. The objective of this research is to study the life and poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and to show how her life is reflected in her poems through self-identification. However, the research is divided into three sections and a conclusion. Section one is an introduction. It consists of two parts. The first part sheds light on Bishop's life, how she grew up, her suffering, the things and persons she lost in her childhood, the places she lived in and their effect on her. The second part of this section deals with her literary career. It tackles her poems, short-stories, style and use of self-identification. Section two is completely devoted to Bishop's poem Sestina. This poem describes the moment her mother is taken to the asylum. Here, Bishop constructs a picture of a grandmother and a grandchild on a gloomy autumn. She identifies her sadness with the rain, the failing light, the water drops on the iron kettle and drawings. However, the section tackles the paraphrasing, form and analysis of the poem. Section three deals with Bishop's poem One Art. This poem is a villanelle. At the beginning, the poet talks about losing. She suggests that we get used to loss by losing little things like house keys and wasting time. You become comfortable with these losses and then you would be ready to cope with the big ones. By talking about loss, the poet indirectly identifies her own loss. In the end, she confesses that she is talking about a dear person. Anyway, the section shows the paraphrasing, form and analysis of the poem.

Placing Facebook

Facebook is challenging professional journalism. These challenges were evident in three incidents from 2016: the allegation that Facebook privileged progressive-leaning news on its trending feature; Facebook’s removal of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Napalm Girl” photo from the pages of prominent users; and the proliferation of “fake news” during the US presidential election. Using theoretical concepts from the field of boundary work, this paper examines how The Guardian, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter editorialized Facebook’s role in these three incidents to discursively construct the boundary between the value of professional journalism to democracy and Facebook’s ascendant role in facilitating essential democratic functions. Findings reveal that these publications attempted to define Facebook as a news organization (i.e., include it within the boundaries of journalism) so that they could then criticize the company for not following duties traditionally incumbent upon news organizations (i.e., place it outside the boundaries of journalism). This paper advances scholarship that focuses on both inward and outward conceptions of boundary work, further explores the complex challenge of defining who a journalist is in the face of rapidly changing technological norms, and advances scholarship in the field of media ethics that positions ethical analysis at the institutional level.

Literature and Learning in Marilynne Robinson’s Novel Gilead

AbstractLiterature and learning play an important role in Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead (2004). By focusing on the author’s many references to books, literature and learning, the present paper attempts to study their individual contextual occurrences and explores how they saturate the discursive substratum of the novel’s major themes. The paper claims that a special role attributed to books and learning, and particularly to the Greek New Testament, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and The Essence of Christianity, sheds significant light on the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the meaning of life, one of the novel’s central concerns.

The Indian Diaspora in America as Reflected in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

Over the last 20 years, the Indian diaspora in the USA has suddenly come of age, numerically as well as economically. This growing confidence can be seen in the literature written by writers of Indian origin settled in the USA. Shunning sentimentality and overt nostalgia, this latter-day diasporic writing is laced with humour and a critical though affectionate tone directed towards their Indianness. Foremost among these voices is Jhumpa Lahiri. Pulitzer Prize winner Lahiri is the author of two novels and two short story collections. Deeply attached to her Indian heritage, yet wanting desperately to assimilate into the cultural melting pot of American society, Lahiri’s fiction is suffused with a complex biculturalism. With Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction at the centre, my article will focus on this tug-of-war of alienation and assimilation that is at the heart of every immigrant experience.

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

Humanism and Terrorism: On the Dialogic Imagination of a Grotesque Reality

This article addresses the question as to how humanism should relate to the evil of terrorism. The main source of inspiration is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral by Philip Roth. In this novel, the struggle between a father and his extremist daughter mirrors a struggle between different social imaginaries of America, raising intriguing questions concerning humanism, especially with regard to Bildung. The inability of the main characters to reconcile the conflicting ideals reveals a weakness in Bildung humanism. This humanist school is blind to the conflicting desires, emotions, and passions that lie behind the battle of ideas. Dialogic imagination can help us relate to destructive forces and desires that oppose the humanist ideal of reason. Bildung humanism—with its higher ideals of order, synthesis, and perfection—collides with the capricious human condition. Furthermore, the novel demonstrates that extreme violence or even terrorism can be a reaction to the pursuit of order and perfection. Ideals that deny the existence of imperfections are in themselves violent. Without an occasional reality check, idealism easily turns into blind arrogance. This unintentionally fuels terrorism. Bildung humanism has a responsibility to reflect profoundly on these side effects of idealism. This article seeks to contribute to a realistic reflection on the struggle between humanism and terrorism.

Critical Thinking as Cold War Weapon: Anxiety, Terror, and the Fate of Democracy In Postwar America

In the years following World War Two, American intellectuals set out to salvage what they could from the heritage of liberal-democratic western thought. In the wake of destruction, atomic peril, and holocaust central assumptions about rationalism, progress, science, and communications had eroded, all to be replaced by general sense of fear and anxiety.2 Scanning the dusk of world war and the dawn of cold war, it was difficult not to see that something terrible had happened to humanity. As one historian elegiacally observed, Never before had progress seemed so fragile, history so harmful or so irrelevant, science so lethal, aggregations of power so ominous, life so full of contingencies, human relationships so tenuous, the self so fragile, man so flawed (Graebner xi).Eager to identify the roots of the devastation, pierce the hovering dread, and take measures to prevent recurrence, authors and academics from across the political spectrum believed they had found culprit in Enlightenment philosophy and remedy in modernist culture. The eighteenthcentury faith in reason and human nature, its demystification of social norms, religion, and tradition, and its leveling of hierarchy seemed to mark tragic turning point in the history of civilization. No longer beholden to eternal ideals, the common man fell victim to ephemeral ideology; belief in the inherent goodness of the noble savage and the onward march of progress had led to a new kind of barbarism (Adorno and Horkheimer xi). Tracing direct line from Rousseau to Hitler and Stalin, these scholars and writers lamented that liberal architects of political philosophy had placed too much weight on cognition and creature comforts rather than souls and sensibilities. Rootedness, recognition of sin, and respect for eternal principles better served the needs of individuals in the modern world.3From CIA offices in Foggy Bottom to the garrets of poets and groves of academe came strikingly similar strategies for protecting freedom and democracy from the kind of turmoil unleashed by World War Two and from the onward march of communism. They entailed creating cultural stability: fostering works of the imagination; cultivating an aesthetic sensibility; and imbuing sympathy for fellow citizens that complemented, rather than corroded, the republican civic virtues of thrift, modesty, self-discipline, and industry. They translated those hopes into plan to reground moral values in political philosophy inflected with the transcendent values of literature, creating an undercurrent in American intellectual and cultural life. In their endeavor to rebuild critical moral foundation for American society, they took part in trans-Atlantic exchange of ideas that welcomed into the fold Warsaw bloc poets. These anti-communist, staunchly individualist writers argued that the road away from totalitarianism-one that led to the liberation of captive minds-lay in wrestling with complex literature and developing interpretive depth.Elite high culture, which valued ambiguity, complexity, irony, and nuance-in place of simple-minded platitudes or politically engaged social novels-promised to tease out meaning in morally tangled postwar world. Public intellectuals, writers, artists, academics, and even national security leaders across the political spectrum became convinced that, in order to save democracy from totalitarian terror and dogma, Americans had to develop critical thinking skills, read widely and deeply and, in the realm of culture, privilege difficulty, and complexity. This conviction welded with other developments in postwar American intellectual life to fuse new attitude toward thinking itself.4Indeed, interest in the mind's functioning was everywhere in art, academia, and literature during the Age of Anxiety (as W. H. Auden's 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume branded the era). Reading between the lines and working to strengthen your mind became best practice, whether literary critic's explication of text, psychologist's Rorschach test, Scientologist's auditing session, or Holden Caufield's ferreting out of phonies. …

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The present study addresses the problem of how the two US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton use statements judged to be false by the Politifact site while delivering their campaign speeches. Two corpora of Clinton’s and Trump’s alleged lies were compiled. Each corpus contained 16 statements judged to be false or ridiculously untrue (‘pants on fire’) by the Pulitzer Prize Winner site Politifact. Some statements were accompanied by the video recordings where they appeared; others had no video recordings affiliated because they are either tweets or their events had not been recorded on Youtube or elsewhere. The present research made use of CBCA (Criteria-based Content Analysis) but as a stepping stone for building a new model of detecting lies in political discourse to suit the characteristics of campaign discourse. This furnished the qualitative dimension of the research. As for the quantitative dimension, data were analyzed using software, namely LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry & Word Count), and also focused on the content analysis of the deception cues that can be matched with the results obtained from computerized findings. When VSA (Voice Stress Analysis) was required, Praat was used. Statistical analyses were occasionally applied to reach highly accurate results. The study concluded that the New Model (NM) is not context-sensitive, being a quantitative one, and is thus numerically oriented in its decisions. Moreover, when qualitative analysis intervenes, especially in examining Politifact rulings, context plays a crucial role in passing judgements on deceptive vs. non-deceptive discourse.

Andersonville and the Literature of Violence

Andersonville and the Literature of Violence Patrick Cesarini (bio) In 2015, MacKinlay Kantor's Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War novel Andersonville was reprinted for the first time in 15 years. The reissue has a new cover but no introduction to acquaint new readers with a book that several prominent judges in the 1950s called "our greatest Civil War novel." I've written this essay partly as such an introduction, which should be useful for those who haven't read or even heard of this important book. But, I also want to use the occasion of Andersonville's latest iteration to raise some issues of novelistic categorization—specifically what it means to classify a book as a Civil War novel, a War Novel, a novel of Modern War, etc. Andersonville is a depiction of the most notorious of the Civil War prison camps—what was officially named Camp Sumter, in southwest Georgia. The camp was an open-air rectangle, 17 acres square, surrounded by a 15-foot high pine-log stockade. About 13,000 men perished there in 16 months, between February 1864 and May 1865 (MacPherson, 796, 802). In a sense, the prison camp itself is the novel's main character, but the book is also a panoramic, composite portrait of the United States during the antebellum period and the war, in that Kantor depicts life in the prison from the perspectives of multiple Union soldiers who were sent there as well as the Confederate guards who watched and sometimes shot them, the doctors who treated them (or tried to), the officers who ran the Camp, horribly, and even some local civilians who watched the monstrosity being born in their midst. For almost every character whom he introduces, Kantor writes a rich life-story up to the point where each man enters the hellish prison camp. The fullness of so many represented lives is what accounts for Andersonville's nearly 800-page length. I find the effect of Kantor's arrangement incredibly powerful—and heartbreaking. Over and over, we meet some fellow—from Maine or Michigan, Iowa or New York—and we watch him emerge into young manhood from out of his family life, in all its particulars—and then we see him die, in almost every case, and die in the most degrading fashion. The result is that even the most ordinary of the lives depicted—even those pre-war lives that seem tough, unlucky, or unpleasant—comes to seem like a most-longed-for paradise, compared with the utterly wretched end to which every one of them is brought: a death by starvation, exposure, disease, accident, or murder, all depicted in fairly horrific detail. Nevertheless, it surprised me that some historically minded admirers of the book, such as Bruce Catton and Henry Steele Commager, have [End Page 253] said that Andersonville was the best novel about the Civil War.1 I naively assumed that such an accolade would have to go to a book that depicted battles primarily. But, now I think I see what they meant. It is a variation on what Walt Whitman meant when he lamented repeatedly in his Civil War diary that the real war was too vast—too vastly heroic and horrible—ever to get into the books.2 That, for me, seemed at first to be MacKinlay Kantor's achievement. To me, it felt like he did get the real war, and in some sense the whole war, into his book. And, this is partly because, as many historians agree, the Civil War was one of the first truly modern wars, and modern wars are horrible in ways that we still have trouble seeing clearly, and I believe MacKinlay Kantor saw that.3 Over and over, the novel juxtaposes the narrative of an individual, normal (pre-war) life with a horrible end to that life—not an end on the battlefield either, but an end that seems wholly unnecessary and irrelevant to the Civil War's larger meaning or purpose. And, so I would say Andersonville defamiliarized both war and peace; at least on a first read, it renewed my horror of war at the same time that it renewed my appreciation...

A Web of Life: An Ecocritical Study of Jane Smiley’s Moo

Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley’s Moo is a novel concerning some stories happening in a Midwestern agriculture university named Moo University. A variety of characters and threads of plots are involved in the novel. The arrangement of the characters and stories seem complex and mixed, and some parts of the stories are presented through the animal perspective. In order to figure out the reasons behind, the paper sorts out the characters and lines in the complicated structure, analyzes the interactions between animals and humans, and expounds on the interrelatedness in the web of life mainly from an angle of ecocriticism and ecofeminism. Through the ecocritical study of Moo , Jane Smiley’s ecological ideologies are also revealed.

Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

ABSTRACTDiaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts.

Deconstructing Death: Derrida and the Scene of Execution

I would like to begin with a rather spectacular vision of the death penalty, one that brings together, with great irony, the death penalty, the possibility but also the impossibility of its abolition, and the 'American spirit'. Here is that vision:I would like to see a law passed which would abolish capital punishment, except for those states which insisted on keeping it. Such states would then be allowed to kill criminals provided that the killing is not impersonal but personal and a public spectacle: to wit that the executioner be more or less the same size and weight as the criminal (the law could here specify the limits) and that they fight to death using no weapons, or weapons not capable of killing at a distance. Thus, knives or broken bottles would be acceptable. Guns would not.The benefit of this law is that it might return us to moral responsibility. The killer would carry the other man's death in his psyche. The audience, in turn, would experience a sense of tragedy, since the executioners, highly trained for this, would almost always win. In the flabby American spirit there is a buried sadist who finds the bullfight contemptible - what he really desires are gladiators. Since nothing is worse for a country than repressed sadism, this method of execution would offer ventilation for the more cancerous emotions of the American public.1The author of this fight-club-phantasy - this unadulterated AmericanGladiators-meets-Thunderdome scenario - is Norman Mailer. The same Norman Mailer who would, some twenty years later, go on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'true life story' The Executioner's Song (1979), which depicts in 1109 pages the events surrounding the execution of Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah in 1977 (Gary Gilmore was the first person executed in the United States after the re-instatement of the death penalty in 1976). 'The Executioner's Song' is, of course, also the title of a 1982 NBC film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Rosanna Arquette.2But before the book, and before the movie, Mailer wrote a short article, titled 'A Program for the Nation', from which I have just quoted an excerpt. This article was written in response to a survey from Esquire magazine in 1959,3 in which 150 famous people were queried about the 1960 U.S. Presidential election: 'What, to your mind, should be the most important issues in the election' (Presidential Papers, p10)?Now if I turn to Mailer's program for the nation here, it is not only because he addresses capital punishment as an important, presidential issue. It is also because he insists on the scene of execution in America. There is a scene, says Mailer, that is not being seen: a hidden and invisible and perhaps even disavowed scene. This scene, says Mailer, must be made visible; it must be literally seen (this is his irony). America must see what it refuses to see: the scene of execution. What Mailer goes on to describe, however, is a rather unAmerican scene: no lethal injection here (or to put it less anachronistically: no hanging, no electric chair, no gas chamber here). Instead Mailer stages his American scene of execution as an epic historical drama, as an archaic and sadistic scene.Indeed, what Mailer's phantasy makes visible is not only a Roman scene. It is also a second (or even third) scene, which is really a kind of primal scene: 'In the flabby American spirit there is a buried sadist who finds the bullfight contemptible - what he really desires are gladiators'. In the deep, dark, fleshy recesses of the American soul lies a desire that is older, younger, more primitive, more archaic than a desire for (European) bullfights. It's a desire for cutting weapons and a desire for human, rather than animal, sacrifice. Thus, Mailer's insistence on the scene of capital punishment leads him, as it were, behind the scene(s), to the scene's latent structure: 'Since nothing is worse for a country than repressed sadism, this method of execution would offer ventilation for the more cancerous emotions of the American public'. …

Applying Schauffler’s Role of ‘Ecological Conversion’ in N. Scott Momaday’s Writings to Shape Human Bondage with Nature

American literature and its canon for the past few decades have been frequently subjected to the study of eco criticism. The contemporary eco criticism pays more attention to the works of native American writers categorizing their works as „nature or land based‟. The four elements of nature – earth, air, water and fire form a major part of their literature. Marina Schauffler in her work Turning to Earth identifies and labels a group of writers as „ecological writers‟ since, “these writers integrate a profound spiritual and philosophical sense about the earth into their practical lives”. In this work she also exploits „six phases of ecological conversion‟ namely remembrance, reflection, revelation, reciprocity, resistance and ritual. Among these group of „ecological writers‟, she deals with one of the major native American writers and Pulitzer prize winner N. Scott Momaday. His works serve as a major source for the study of ecological elements. According to Schauffler, these six phases have eventually helped the writers to transform themselves and experience an ecological awareness and awakening. Momaday‟s works are enriched with resources of nature and through the exploration of his usage of „ecological conversions‟, it is plausible to enlighten the mankind about the strong bond with the nature. The concept of theory leads to practices and therefore the literature at the basic level in a theory form may induce the humankind practically to conserve and ensure the preservation of nature. Native American literature serves as a major source which can pave way for the promotion of preserving nature in practice.

A Compromise and Resist World Feminism Analysis of the Age of Innocnece

<p>Edith Wharton (1862-1937), a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a distinguished female novelist at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work <em>The Age of Innocence</em> contributes much to the formation of a female literary tradition. Wharton’s subversion of male discourse can be well traced in her novel <em>The Age of Innocence</em>. However, Wharton does not become a destroyer of her age due to the limitation of her time; instead, she shows an open submission and hidden resistance to the patriarchal system.</p><p>This thesis aims to analyze causes of Wharton’s duplicitous voice by the means of <em>The Age of Innocence</em> textual analysis in order to reveal her special strategy of text hidden behind this contradictory attitude.</p>

Eugene O’Neill: The Contemporary Reviews ed. by Jackson R. Bryer and Robert M. Dowling

Reviewed by: Eugene O’Neill: The Contemporary Reviews ed. by Jackson R. Bryer and Robert M. Dowling Jeff Kennedy Eugene O’Neill: The Contemporary Reviews. Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Robert M. Dowling. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Hardback $160.00, 991 pages. The field of Eugene O’Neill studies has been in constant expansion since the first full biography of the Nobel Prize-winning O’Neill appeared in 1962, written by Arthur and Barbara Gelb. The collection of resources about this four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, which includes letters, work diaries, interviews, photos, critical reviews, scripts (even one recently found that was believed to have [End Page 129] been forever lost), continues to grow with exciting new discoveries. Tao House, O’Neill’s former home in Danville, CA and a recognized U.S. National Park (the only one in the country dedicated to theatre), is slowly unveiling a treasure trove that can be found in their catalogued resources at the Travis Bogard Reading Room and Archive, whose namesake was an O’Neill scholar and whose own papers share much in the way of important research. Thankfully for those who continue to study this playwright, touted by many to be America’s greatest of the twentieth century, new resources continue to illuminate his work and life. Into this canon comes a major contribution in a new volume edited by lauded scholars Jackson R. Bryer and Robert M. Dowling: Eugene O’Neill: The Contemporary Reviews. Bryer has contributed greatly to O’Neill studies in the past with his The Theatre We Worked For: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill, Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, and Edna Kenton’s The Provincetown Players and the Playwright’s Theatre, 1915-1922, all three co-edited with the aforementioned Bogard. Dowling has become important to O’Neill scholarly research with his books Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill and Eugene O’Neill and His Early Contemporaries: Bohemians, Radicals, Progressives and the Avant Garde, co-edited with Eileen J. Herrmann; and his recent O’Neill biography Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts, nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography in 2015. The continuing excellent work of these two scholars is on display in this new collection, which is the first of its kind to collate the largest number of critical reviews of O’Neill’s plays ever published. Beginning with Bound East for Cardiff in 1916, the reviews continue through 1967, including O’Neill’s four posthumously produced plays Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Touch of the Poet, Hughie, and More Stately Mansions. The editors have wisely streamlined their collection by deleting substantial sections of plot summaries (with the volume still being 991 pages), not including second reviews by the same critic and, with minor exceptions, including only one review per publication of any single play. However, rather than just ignore these other reviews, they are listed in an “Additional Reviews” section throughout. The volume begins with an introductory biography of O’Neill’s life and work written by Dowling that masterfully summarizes his significant impact on American Modern Drama and gives a chronological history of his work. The reviews are then organized by play in chronological order of their opening performance, with information included as to the place of performance, date, director, set design, and a list of the cast as given in the play’s opening night playbill. The compilation allows for a previously unimaginable number of reviews to be viewed in one resource. For example, O’Neill’s first major full-length play and first Pulitzer Prize winner Beyond the Horizon is here reviewed by thirty-three different critics in as many different publications, with an added eight reviews listed in the “Additional Reviews” section. Each review is also listed by author, title, publication, date of publication, and page numbers—all important information to those citing research [End Page 130] references. As the editors mention in their introduction, O’Neill made friends with many of the major critics of the day and, unlike today, this did not disqualify these critics from reviewing his plays for publication. This collection allows the reader a chance to...

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Reviewed by: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead Stacy Parker Le Melle (bio) Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.* When Cora, the protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad boarded an escape train in antebellum Georgia, fleeing the only landscape she’d ever known, the Black conductor turned around and said: “Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll see the true face of America” (69). At first, Cora saw darkness. So much darkness. Until they arrived at the first stop: South Carolina. The underground railroad representative who met them, a white man named Sam, assured them the following: “You’re a long way from Georgia. South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south. You’ll be safe until we can arrange the next leg of your trip.” And with that, Cora began her new life, and despite this exchange happening on page 91 of a 306 page narrative—meaning I should know better than to think this could mean happily ever after—I felt hope. I couldn’t help it. Perhaps it’s the seduction of the American dream, seducing again. A new place means hope and possibility. Until it doesn’t. On New Year’s Day 2017, at 3:30am, I finished Colson Whitehead’s gripping novel The Underground Railroad. I’d purchased the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner and Oprah Book Club selection over the previous summer but had put it down early, not ready to go back to plantation life after watching the harrowing first season of the WGN series Underground. Underground showed slavery’s horrors, but also honored the enslaved characters’ will to love and protect, their mighty sacrifices made to survive. The characters transcended fiction, felt like stand-ins for our ancestors. That’s why I stayed with the show. When I picked up Whitehead’s novel again, I found horror in every direction, but the insight—and magic—went deeper with his book-length storytelling. In The Underground Railroad, we follow a young enslaved woman named Cora as she makes her way northbound, each state its own “state of possibility.” She rides trains that are magically real—the tangible “underground railroad” had been the locus of early attention for the book. Yet her journey follows a cruel pattern: whenever she finds a haven, she finds the familiar suffering behind the façade. In South Carolina, her first exit off the underground railroad, she relishes a structured new life where she can work as a domestic, live in a dormitory, and go to school. This new life feels utopian, given the tortures of Georgia; the white people seem committed to “racial uplift” and creating communities where Blacks and whites could co-exist in peace. But the tilt begins. Cora is assigned a new job as a “type” in a natural history museum. She is kept on perpetual display as an African woman rotating between scenes of an African village, a slaveship, and an American plantation. At a doctor’s appointment she must rebuff the doctor’s offer of sterilization, and later her dorm proctor’s requests that [End Page 936] she talk-up sterilization with her peers. Soon she learns that the out-of-state white doctors who had deluged South Carolina’s new hospitals were running syphilis experiments on local Black men. Cora realizes she has made a horrible mistake: If they had been sensible and kept running, she and [fellow runaway] Caesar would be in the Free States. Why had they believed that two lowly slaves deserved the bounty of South Carolina. That a new life existed so close, just over the state line? It was still the south, and the devil had long nimble fingers. And then, after all the world had taught them, not to recognize chains when they were snapped to their wrists and ankles. The South Carolina chains were of new manufacture—the keys and tumblers marked by regional design— but accomplished the purpose of chains. They had not traveled very far at all. (145) As Cora’s story progresses, she travels through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and ultimately “The...

Father of Route 66: The Story of Cy Avery by Susan Croce Kelly (review)

Reviewed by: Father of Route 66: The Story of Cy Avery by Susan Croce Kelly Brian M. Ingrassia FATHER OF ROUTE 66: The Story of Cy Avery. By Susan Croce Kelly. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2014. Generations of Americans knew Route 66 as the “Mother Road” that connected Chicago to Los Angeles via St. Louis, Tulsa, Amarillo, and a host of other southwestern cities and towns. Starting in the 1920s, the road became significant for its role in transporting motoring travelers and migrants westward to California. As Susan Croce Kelly shows in Father of Route 66, the road did not create itself. Rather, progressive Tulsa oilman Cyrus “Cy” Avery was a major figure in planning and shaping the route. A straightforward yet lively account of Avery’s life, this book is a valuable resource for those interested in the history of the early-1900s “good roads” movement, Great Plains progressivism, and Route 66. Cyrus Avery was born in Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna valley in 1871, just six years after the Civil War. In 1884 his father moved the family to what was then Indian Territory. By 1904, Cy had graduated from William Jewell College near Kansas City and formed the Avery Oil and Gas Company in Vinita, Oklahoma. In 1907, the twenty-six-year-old moved his family to Tulsa, a city that was positioning itself to be “the financial, business, and transportation center for those oil fields” (18). Avery became a land speculator, snatching up Native American allotments, as well as a real estate developer. He developed parts of Tulsa’s African-American Greenwood neighborhood and even contributed land for city parks and the municipal airport. Avery was also instrumental in implementing the Spavinaw Water Project, which brought good drinking water to Tulsa in the early 1920s. Most significantly, Avery was a major proponent of the movement to build good, paved roads that would connect far-flung cities and towns. A “joiner” and “promoter” (38), he never missed a chance to spread his highway gospel. Avery was a member of the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) and was elected president of the Associated Highways of America (AHA) in 1922. Through such organizations, Avery pressed federal, state, and local governments to fund highway improvements. While serving as Oklahoma highway commissioner in 1924 he promoted a law that implemented one of the nation’s earliest gasoline taxes for funding roads. In 1925 and 1926, Avery helped plan the original interstate highway routes authorized by the 1921 Federal Aid Highway Act. A particularly fascinating chapter in Father of Route 66 details the lengthy debates and negotiations that ended up giving the road the famous designation “66”—rather than the round “60” (which Avery had initially preferred) or the less sonorous “62,” which was favored by factions that wanted “60” to designate the trans-continental highway that passed from Virginia Beach to California via Kentucky. This is a thoroughly researched biography. Kelly has dug deeply into Avery’s manuscript collection at Oklahoma State University–Tulsa, as well as papers located elsewhere in Oklahoma, Missouri, and the National Archives. She successfully places Avery’s life and work in historical context. At times the book does tend to slip into hagiography, with the author implying that no other person could have made Route 66 into a reality. Kelly is correct, though, in stating Avery’s tremendous impact on the famous road. When Cy Avery died in 1963, Route 66 “had been the muse for a Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, a long-running television show, and an ever-popular song” (3). It had carried legions of Americans across mountains and deserts before rolling into Hollywood [End Page 153] and terminating “on a sandy Pacific beach” (3). Although Route 66 was decommissioned in 1985—when it had been replaced by multiple segments of the post–World War II Interstate Highway System—the meanings of Avery’s road continued to reverberate. America’s metaphorical main street now lives on in memory, nostalgia, and popular culture references—as well as frontage roads, bypasses, and isolated sections of cracked pavement. This biography helps us understand the building of the 2,400-mile concrete ribbon that fostered westward travel during...

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction John Kinder (bio) Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture. By Gwyneth Anne Thayer. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2013. The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. By Adam Rome. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. 2013. Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement. By David Naguib Pellow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2014. On June 19, 2015, a team of biologists, including Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the 1960s bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), published a brief study in [End Page 17] Science Advances on the future of life on the planet. Their forecast was dire: the world is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, a cataclysmic biotic collapse on par with the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Since 1900, more than 450 vertebrate species have disappeared, an extinction toll that will continue to increase over the next few centuries. “If the currently elevated extinction pace is allowed to continue,” they warn darkly, “humans will soon (in as little as three human lifetimes) be deprived of many biodiversity benefits” (read: the basic ecological conditions necessary to sustain life as we know it). And it is not like we can simply wait for things to improve: “On human time scales, this loss would be effectively permanent because in the aftermath of past mass extinctions, the living world took hundreds of thousands of years to rediversify.”1 As if that were not enough, the report’s authors blame human activity for the looming crisis. In their reckoning, global society has exploited the Earth’s living systems to the breaking point—and everyone, every thing, will pay the price. Ehrlich and company are the latest in a long line of commentators to raise the specter of anthropogenic (human-induced) extinction. As journalist Sarah Kaplan points out, a 1998 poll of four-hundred scientists taken by the American Museum of Natural History found that “70 percent believe the Earth is in the midst of one of its fastest mass extinctions, one that threatens the existence of humans as well as the millions of species we rely on.”2 Since that time, warnings of global catastrophe have only gotten louder. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), writer Elizabeth Kolbert predicts the current extinction event will “continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”3 Recently, world leaders have also begun to raise alarms about the implications of environmental destruction. At the 2015 graduation of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Barack Obama called climate change a “serious threat to global security.”4 And just one day before the release of the Science Advances report, to the outrage of climate-change deniers and Earth exploiters worldwide, Pope Francis issued a more than one-hundred page encyclical condemning human destruction of the world’s ecosystems.5 Meanwhile, twenty-first century popular culture churns out apocalyptic visions of mass extinction and environmental collapse. Looking toward the future, films like John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009), David Michôd’s The Rover (2014), and Frank Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) paint a grim picture of a biosphere on the brink of destruction. And yet, when confronted with the most important topic of our time—possibly of all time—the field of American Studies has largely responded with silence.6 In a recent article in American Quarterly, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson observes, “American studies, the academic discipline arguably most dedicated to progressive political engagement, social justice, and activism, has for the most part ignored climate change and the still-accelerating consumption of fossil fuels despite our awareness of the catastrophic environmental and human consequences.”7 Much the same can be said about American Studies’ engagement [End Page 18] with human-animal studies (HAS), an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex relationships between human and nonhuman animals. Over the last two decades, HAS...

<b>The Intertextual Dimension of Otherness in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake</b>

The Intertextual Dimension of Otherness in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The NamesakeAbstract The work of the Pulitzer prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri has been referred to as a solid representation of diaspora and immigrant literature. One of her most famous books, the novel The Namesake (2003), illustrates the experience of dislocation psychologically exploring the identity crisis and the sense of alienation. Nevertheless, the novel offers the opportunity of a trans-textual approach that leads to a philosophical vision of the traditional issues of alterity. The aim of the paper is to explore the extent to which an intertextual reading of the novel can provide a better understanding of the multitude of socio-cultural and identity questions the book raises. The resonance of Nikolai Gogol’s name, work and tumultuous existence transgresses the pages in layers of meaningful interpretation of Otherness as a duality of name and cultural affiliation. The never read essential text, Gogol’s short story The Overcoat, shapes the tragic paternal imagery in a continual struggle of the inner self to clarify the sense of displacement and hybridity.