Pulitzer Prize Research Articles

Beyond Black Girlhood

Abstract How can Colson Whitehead’s combining of the generic and the strange in his Pulitzer Prize–winning speculative text The Underground Railroad be read as Afro-Pessimist? This essay seeks to illuminate the ways in which Whitehead’s novel provides narratives of self-making adjacent to coming of age while reinventing the historically white genre of the Bildungsroman for an intersectional identity in early America. Using Geta LeSeur’s The Black Bildungsroman as a point of reference, the author argues that because the protagonist Cora is a Black girl born and raised under chattel slavery and thus forced to come of age before the bulk of the novel, her experience cannot be constrained to a genre defined primarily by Eurocentric traditions and frames of reference. In this way, “girlhood” has never been a possibility for her, making the novel’s ambiguous ending a clearer Afro-Pessimist argument rather than any particular milestone of maturation we see in Bildungsroman. The Underground Railroad is a case study demonstrating how Black speculative fiction authors move through and beyond the Bildungsroman genre by imbuing their Black female subjects like Cora with the agency of self-making, while using speculative elements such as transforming into a railroad to demonstrate the intractable social death of enslavement.

Pauline Lord’s “My Anna Christie” a Century Later

ABSTRACT Pauline Lord’s article “My Anna Christie” (1922) was an important intervention in the discourse regarding Progressive Era brothel dramas. Describing how she researched and originated the title role in “Anna Christie,” Lord’s article was also one of the few pieces about the play written by a woman during this time period. When the piece appeared, contexts for understanding “Anna Christie” had shifted: whereas previous prostitute plays had been censored for obscenity, Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” garnered the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. “My Anna Christie” followed in the wake of two pioneering actresses who portrayed courtesans or sex workers and wrote about it: Mrs. Leslie Carter and Mary Shaw. “My Anna Christie” examines sexual exploitation, abandonment, and double standards of sexuality, conjuring sympathy for Anna’s character. More significantly, Lord interviewed prostitutes as part of her research. Rather than sensationalizing or denigrating sex workers as “The Social Evil,” Lord sought to understand them.

Hernan Díaz on “Trust” in Literature

ABSTRACT Hernan Díaz, an Argentine-American writer, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels published in thirty-seven languages. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1973 and moved to Sweden with his family when he was two. He earned a BA in literature in the University of Buenos Aires, a MA degree at King’s College London, and received his PhD in comparative literature from New York University. His first novel, In the Distance (2017), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. His second novel, Trust (2022), received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.” Díaz is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity, whose essays and stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. This conversation took place in Shanghai, China, on May 12, 2024. It delves into the complexities of trust in literature, exploring the relationship between author and reader, translation and global readership, and the notion of American Dream. It also discusses the nature of narrative, the relationship between fiction and truth, the ethical considerations in fiction writing, as well as Díaz’s transnational experience and academic work.

The Rivals? A Treatise on Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s Howard Stern Appearances and an Extended Commentary on Opposable Thumbs

In his book, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever, Matt Singer provides readers with a thoughtful examination of the twenty-three-year collaboration of two of the most successful and widely known film critics ever to appear on television. As the author discusses, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert worked at rival newspapers—the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times—and they were fiercely competitive, even “mortal enemies” (3). They fought with each other to write the best reviews and land the biggest interviews. In 1975, this sense of competition became even more pronounced when Roger Ebert won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. One year later, however, the two newspaper journalists set aside their differences to argue the merits of current films face-to-face on a small screen pilot on WTTW, Chicago’s public television station.

A Memoir of London: A Reading on Ghazi AlQosaibi’s Bye-Bye London and Anna Quindlen’s Imagined London

This paper aims to present impressions of London “indisputably the capital of literature”, by two culturally diverse novelists and their works: the first is the Saudi diplomat, novelist, and poet Dr. Gazi AlQosaibi’s (1940-2010) Bye-Bye London (2002) and the American renowned Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Qindlen’s (1953) Imagined London (2004). The researcher used a textual analysis approach to analyze the novels. This study is an add-value to the body of knowledge by contributing to the literature of A Memoir of London and Imagined London. It addresses the manifold concept and diverse determinations of images related to the identity of London. In addition, it examines the different representations that reflect the different circumstances, defined by time and place in London. A thorough reading of both works will not only provide many insights about London, the city, but also a literary and intellectual biography of the writers themselves. Thus, a reading of their works, comparing, and contrasting them will be ostensible to further highlight their recollections, reminisces, and experiences of “the capital of the world”. The results showed that Bye, Bye London, and Imagined London are examples of honor to a metropolitan that includes one of the greatest fictional and ancient pasts. These novellas are not as thorough as Peter Ackroyd’s London: a Biography (2001) which Quindlen positions in the volume.

Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?

Abstract Although identity politics dates back to the 1960 s, it has acquired a new urgency since the ascendance of Black Lives Matter in the late 2010 s. And while identity politics, as a critical framework, was developed in the United States, its rhetoric has since been taken up in much of the rest of the world. This article argues that the terminology of US-style identity politics is especially ill-suited to Germany, a country in which race does not exist as a legal category, and discrimination and inequality do not revolve around a Black/white axis. It points out, moreover, that the German appropriation of certain words and concepts – such as diversity, political correctness, cancel culture, woke, intersectionality, and others – clashes both with their usage and meaning in the US and with the demographic changes that have transformed post-Second World War German culture. In order to illustrate this clash, this article compares Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop (2019) with Yael Ronen’s Slippery Slope (2021), a critically acclaimed musical performed in English at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater. It critiques Slippery Slope’s appropriation of the buzzwords of identity politics and notes with regret that German theatres are ill-equipped to perform the plays of the most important playwrights working in the US today, a new generation of African American writers, including Jackson, whose work is steeped in the performance traditions of Black American cultures.

Time, Clocks, and Illnesses in Paul Harding’s Tinkers

ABSTRACT Paul Harding’s Tinkers was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2010. This article examines how the novel employs a unique temporal rhetoric to present a post-Enlightenment worldview. As the chronological narrative sequence is disrupted by the main character’s reminiscences and hallucinations, time becomes disjunctive and fragmentary, which suggests that chaos often prevails in human consciousness. The narrative temporality thus becomes ontologically unstable and unreliable, representing a condition of abnormality and aberration. Moreover, this temporal condition is connected with the novel’s repeated descriptions of clock malfunctions and human illnesses, thereby further emphasizing the idea that disorders are an inevitable human condition. As Harding views the precise mechanisms of clocks as an embodiment of Enlightenment rationalism, the emphasis on these disorders signifies a subtle critique of Enlightenment ideals and a receptive attitude toward the inherent chaotic condition of life.

构建生命共同体

Richard Powers is well known in the contemporary American literary world and he has been hailed as “America’s most promising novelist”. One of his novels The Overstory (2019) is an ode to nature. It is based on eight stories in which humans and trees depend on each other and save each other, presenting a vast, long and subtle world of trees and human society with alienated relationships, and then thinking about the relationship between man and nature. The novel, with its clever design and inventive language, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times bestseller. Therefore, this article tries to use Lefebvre’s spatial theory and Tennis’s concept of community to analyze the process of building a community between man and nature in The Overstory, excavate the social root behind the superficial contradictions in the story, and explore the significance of building a community of life in modern life.

An Analysis of the the Mutual Construction of Individual Memory and Collective Memory in Atonement

Atonement is one of the masterpieces of British author Ian McEwan, which has attracted a lot of attention since its publication, and this novel won him the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. The novel’s protagonist, Briony, makes a big mistake as an adolescent by indulging her imagination, breaking up her sister Cecilia and Robbie, and sending Robbie to prison. Robbie goes from being an Oxford student to a prisoner, and then he goes to the front line in the midst of World War II to get out of prison early. Cecilia, on the other hand, after known this terrible news, breaks with her family to become a nurse. Cecilia and Robbie are finally reunited at last. Briony finds them and repents deeply, telling the truth and apologizes to her sister and Robbie. It seems like an old fashioned happy-ending novel, except none of this reunion is reality. Just as the readers are immersed in the sense of redemption and happiness, the author ends the book with a meta-fictional message telling the readers that the previous happy ending is just a made-up one by Briony in her head, and she writes it down as if it is truly happened , in order to atone for her own sins. She changes the fate of two people and spends fifty-nine years in penance. Previous research angles of scholars at home and abroad mainly focus on narrative art, metafictional ending, war and trauma, the theme of atonement, etc., and what exactly makes Briony made a big mistake, and how she carries out self-salvation, this will take Briony, the main character of the novel, as the object of study, and use Halbwachs’ theory of individual and collective memory to explore her existential dilemma and her self-salvation through the freedom of choice to her self-rescue from her predicament, aiming to reveal McEwan’s use of memory theory and his thoughts on human nature.

Confounded by Time and Love: An Interview with Jericho Brown

Abstract This interview with poet Jericho Brown, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book The Tradition (2019), includes anecdotes from his childhood, reflections on life and writing after receiving a major literary prize, meditations on his role as a teacher, a description of inventing a new poetic form, his journey to declare identity within his art, the upheavals of 2020, and shifting attitudes around social justice, censorship, and public education.

Analysis of Focalization: A Case of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”

Modern studies in narratology provide some fine models to study the structure of novels and stories. The modern narratological approaches divide books and stories into story, narrative, and narration. There is also a further division of these units, the focalization of which is very important. Focalization gives the idea of the center of perception, which means who the focalizer is and what is being focalized. The important advancement in this study is that this approach distinguishes between the narrator and the focalizer and states that the narrator is not always the focalizer. The Grapes of Wrath is one of John Steinbeck's best novels, and it won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

When I Am Asked: Lisel Mueller's Beginning in Poetry.

Why does anyone write poetry? Lisel Mueller (1924-2020) was a poet, author, and translator with a long and much-decorated career. She and her family fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and emigrated to the United States, where she would establish herself as a writer. The poem "When I Am Asked" describes the beginning of her journey into poetry, undertaken during a period of grief after the death of her mother. Her writing would come to include nine collections of poetry and myriad accolades, including the 1981 National Book Award and the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Though her ouvre is filled with evocative works, this piece stands out as particularly relevant to physicians and other writers who find solace by expressing themselves through the art of poetry.

Hope and Healing in Thi Bui’s ‘The Best We Could Do’

Thi Bui's graphic novel, "The Best We Could Do", is a powerful exploration of one journey from war-torn Vietnam. The narrative delves into the anguish of immigration and the enduring impact of displacement on a child, providing an intimate portrayal of the challenges faced by refugees. Bui vividly reconstructs her family's troubled past through poignant illustrations and heartfelt narrations, creating a transportive picture of life in Vietnam and America. The memoir is recognised for its evocative storytelling, making it a touching exploration of the search for a better future and the longing for the past. Through evocative illustrations and heartfelt narrations, Bui vividly reconstructs the troubled past of her family. The narrative explores the anguish of immigration, the lasting effects of displacement on a child, and the search for a better future while grappling with a longing for the past. This ambitious memoir not only serves as a powerful historical record but also delves into the themes of hope and healing amid adversity. As Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize winner, describes it, the book is a poignant journey that both breaks and heals the heart. "The Best We Could Do" stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of challenging circumstances. This paper strives to show the significance of graphic memoirs in academia and society and how they create an alternate history that is humane and de-centres the prevailing accounts that ignore marginalised voices.

Seeking Integration from Fragmentation: Analysis of Collage Strategy in A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which was one of the most innovative experimental novels in contemporary American literature. The book is full of fragmentation and disorder, which needs readers to collage out the integrity of the whole story. This paper attempts to analyze how the technique “collage” constructs a complete story in the end, showing slices of different time periods occurring between the late 1970s and the 2020s.

«ТРИ ЧЕТВЕРТИТОНОВЫЕ ПЬЕСЫ» ЧАРЛЗА АЙВЗА: ЧЕРТЫ НОВАТОРСТВА В ТРАКТОВКЕ ФОРТЕПИАНО

The article is devoted to studying the music of one of the founders of American national music, Charles Ives (1874–1954). Charles Ives was an outstanding American composer, organist and Pulitzer Prize winner. In the context of traditional music, Ives’s piano style gains freshness and innovation through the use of modern writing techniques. On the example of Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for piano (1925), the article traces exactly how traditional and innovative compositional features are reflected in Ives’s work. In these pieces, the composer imposes a new technique of quarter-tone writing based on microtonal and microchromatic intervals. In addition to innovative compositional techniques, Ives employs traditional techniques such as symmetrical episodes, palindromes, whole-tone scales, quotations from American and French national anthems and patriotic songs. The theoretical material used for the publication is the composer’s article “Some Quarter-Tone Impressions”, an important document in which Ives gives a theoretical justification for his innovative quarter-tone system. The article was first published in March 1925 in the Franco-American Musical Society Bulletin. Ives’s article has never before been published in Russian.

From Sex Prisoners to Female Revolters: Feminist Narrative in Norman Mailer’s Novels

Norman Mailer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a chronicler of his time, devoted his literary career to the representation of the western culture and the reality of America by putting his trust in sex and illustrating the gender relationship. In his writings, male are often created as robust, violent and powerful while female are often being bullied, humiliated, and defeated. Thus, Mailer has become one of the prime targets of feminist literary critics, being accused as a “prototypical male chauvinist”, a “warrior for male supremacy”, and a “militarist”. However, what these feminists fail to trace are Mailer’s development of feminist thoughts in his writings: The Naked and The Dead models women as prisoners of sex, having no chance to air their voice; The Deer Park exhibits female as passive angry fighters, trying to be heard but failed; finally, Tough Guys Don’t Dance constructs the dynamic female revolters, claiming the initial feminism success. Thereby, Mailer exhibits his positive exploration of feminism thoughts, his view that reality is not sex but personality and individuality, and his desire for a balance between man and woman. This paper is grounded theoretically on psychoanalysis and feminism with textual analysis of the female characters in Mailer’s three novels, progressing from The Naked and The Dead, through The Deer Park, to finally Tough Guys Don’t Dance.

Jhumpa Lahiri and the Translation Memoir: To Write and Exist Beyond the Mother Tongue

ABSTRACT In 2016, following the publication of her memoir, In Other Words, Pulitzer Prize author Jhumpa Lahiri announced her intention to abandon English to solely write in Italian. Six years later, having become an acclaimed Italian writer and translator, Lahiri returns to English to consider her role as a ‘postmonolingual’ subject (Yildiz) in an era still dominated by a paradigmatic monolingualism. Released in 2022, Translating Myself and Others can be considered to all effects Lahiri’s translation memoir as it extends to the field of translation, the reflections initiated by In Other Words on the questions of language, identity, and cultural assignation. Through the analysis of both texts, this article discusses how the notion of ‘mother tongue’ is progressively deconstructed in Lahiri’s memoirs and how translation and self-translation become the vehicle through which overcoming what Yasemin Yildiz defines as the ‘monolingual paradigm’.

The Modern Portrait of The American Family in Sam Shepard's True West

Sam Shepard (1943-2017) was born to Sam Rogers the sixth and Jane Elaine Schook Rogers on Nov. 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. To keep the family tradition, he was nicknamed Steve to distinguish him from his father who was a military man. The family was moving from a place to another before staying in a farm in California where they raised sheep and grew avocados. At the age of eleven and while Shepard was studying at school, he received a copy of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot from one of his friends which was a new experience for him. In 1963, Shepard moved to New York where his talent of writing developed. He found himself in the middle of a rapidly transforming social and cultural world. At that time, he changed his name from Steve Rogers to Sam Shepard to break his heredity of the name and to distance himself from the ties of the family. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 due to his masterpiece Buried Child.

The Fragmented Family Relationships in Sam Shepard's Buried Child

Sam Shepard ( 1943 – 2017 ), USA. He was a celebrated American dramatist author, actor, a screenwriter and a director. He lived a difficult childhood through moving around several American army bases until his father’s retirement from the army. Due to Shepard’s father’s growing alcoholism and lack of responsibility for his family, young Shepard developed a disagreed relationship with his father, admiring his courage and hard-working personality, yet scorning him for his irresponsibility and unpredictable moods. Shepard's Buried Child, was first presented at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, where Shepard was a playwright in residence from 1974 to 1984. The first appearance of the play was in 1978 and it won a unique prize, the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. The play was described by its author as a "typical Pulitzer Prize winning play". Buried Child, then received fine critical appreciation that reflected its successful revival.

Medea/Media: a glitchy counterfactual

Abstract James Ijames, the winner of a 2022 Pulitzer prize for Fat Ham, loosely based on Hamlet, has just presented a new realization of Medea, Media/Medea, which had its world premiere at Bryn Mawr College and the Community College of Philadelphia in April 2023. This article provides a reading of it, addressing the themes of irony, queer ‘authenticity’, acting, and mothering through the framing of the ‘glitchy counterfactual’ — a conceit we borrow from Legacy Russell’s manifesto for a new Black cyberfeminism to approach the most blatant innovation in Ijames’s version, the unfulfilled infanticide. This astonishing change in the script, which tightly connects Medea with her onomastic negativity and queer unbecoming, urges us to reflect upon survival and survivance in an anti-Black world; it might yield a reckoning in line with Kevin Quashie’s notion of ‘subjunctivity’, Black ‘aliveness’.