Raymond Carver Research Articles

The Mentelles: Mary Todd Lincoln, Henry Clay, and the Immigrant Family Who Educated Antebellum Kentucky by Randolph Paul Runyon

Reviewed by: The Mentelles: Mary Todd Lincoln, Henry Clay, and the Immigrant Family Who Educated Antebellum Kentucky by Randolph Paul Runyon Mark A. Neels The Mentelles: Mary Todd Lincoln, Henry Clay, and the Immigrant Family Who Educated Antebellum Kentucky. By Randolph Paul Runyon. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. Pp. [viii], 271. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-7538-6.) The United States, it is often said, is a nation of immigrants. The ingredients in the melting pot of U.S. society have been added over time and have each had a particular impact on the nation's development. Such was the case with the French immigrants to the United States in the first wave of immigration after the American Revolution. Their stories have a familiar ring to them. Fleeing with their families from the political and social turmoil enveloping their homelands, they arrived in the United States, where they were compelled to adapt their worldviews to a new environment. Some thrived in this new world, while others were overwhelmed by it. This immigration story is encapsulated by the Mentelles [End Page 440] of Kentucky, the subject of a new book by Randolph Paul Runyon published by the University Press of Kentucky. Runyon, professor emeritus at Miami University, has focused his career on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American cultural history. His resume includes books on poet-authors Robert Penn Warren and Raymond Carver, abolitionist Delia Webster, and French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. In this new work, Runyon uses the recently digitized papers of Constance de Salm, as well as several depositories in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri, to examine in detail the lives of Augustus Waldemar and Charlotte Victoire Mentelle. Particularly, he focuses on their associations with Mary Todd Lincoln and Henry Clay, claiming early on that his sole purpose in writing the book "is to provide as full an answer as we are likely to have to the question, who was this woman who was such an important figure in her [Mary Todd Lincoln's] life?" (p. 2). In chronicling their lives, Runyon is careful not to paint the Mentelles in a hagiographic light—a trap easy to fall into given that he is a descendant of their daughter Lucretia. Their association with the famous figures of American history, he claims, did not make them any more deferential to them—their private letters reveal much disdain for their American neighbors—and the connections are not nearly as fascinating as the Mentelles' own story of immigration to and survival in America. Far from fleeing revolutionary France, as the Mentelles claimed, the true reason for their immigration originated with their strained relationships with their parents, Runyon writes, as well as their fostering a child out of wedlock—facts that would have shocked their Kentucky neighbors. Waldemar, unable to devote himself to a trade or profession, was pressured by his parents to leave France for America but drifted about for years before arriving in the early 1790s at the French community of Gallipolis in Ohio. Charlotte joined him there a few years later. From there, they migrated to Kentucky, eventually landing in Lexington, where Waldemar experienced a tumultuous professional career, while Charlotte's French boarding school attracted the attention of the well-to-do of Lexington society. Runyon's work is an excellent social history in that it studies the impact of ordinary people on otherwise extraordinary ones. As one reads this book, the question naturally arises, would we know about the Mentelles save for the important men and women whose lives they touched? Perhaps not, but that is beside the point. By stressing the Mentelles' importance to their cultural educations, Mary Todd Lincoln and Henry Clay made sure that historians would know the names of Waldemar and Charlotte Mentelle. Mark A. Neels Western Wyoming Community College Copyright © 2019 Southern Historical Association

Acceptance of death in Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”

This paper discusses the ways Raymond Carver depicts death in one of his most well-known short stories “A Small, Good Thing.” It deals with Carver’s minimalism as a literary device used to portray the communication (or lack of it) between the characters. The paper may be divided into three parts, showing the different stages of dealing with the protagonist Scotty’s death that his parents go through. The first part addresses denial, grief, and different ways in which people react to the death of a loved one. The second part elaborates on miscommunication as a leitmotif in Carver’s stories and shows the complete breakage of communication between the characters; namely between Scotty’s parents and the doctor, the baker, and the nurses, to name a few. The final part delves into the act of eating as a small, good gesture of kindness that brings people together and calms them down when a person dies. The end asserts that we constantly attempt to understand one another and, unfortunately, often fail to do so because of the unreliable and multi-faceted nature of language.

Implication And Omission In Ernest Hemingway’s "Hills Like White Elephants" Raymond Carver’s "Why Don’t You Dance" Richard Ford’s "Great Falls" And Bobbie Ann Mason’s "Shiloh"

Ernest Hemingway developed the “Theory of Omission” by which he would deploy interrelated techniques of implication and omission with the aim of strengthening the narrative and creating certain effects on readers. To provide additional evidence with respect tohis influence on the leading figures of American literary minimalism, this article argues that the narrators of Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t you Dance,” Richard Ford’s “Great Falls,” and Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh” employ the techniques of implication and omission in order to engage readers in the construction of meaning and make them feel more than they understand the emotional reality of the marital dissatisfaction, which is left beneath the surface of things, as does Hemingway in “Hills Like White Elephants.” To this end, the analytical and the comparative study is carried out using Wolfgang’s Iser Reception Theory.

Minimalism as Detoxification

Whether in La Monte Young’s 5-hour piano solos or Richard Serra’s 100-foot steel sculptures, minimalism has never been minimal. Nor would minimization explain what is distinctive about the sentences of Raymond Carver or Mary Robison when Ernest Hemingway simplified form 50 years earlier. This essay argues that late twentieth-century minimalism is best understood as a practice of detoxification. It emerged in the United States in the same decade that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring visualized an omnipresent threat to American domesticity from environmental pollution, a threat minimalists conflated with racial and sexual anxiety and sought to expunge in their style.

“The new geography,” material science, and narratology’s space-time dichotomy: Notes toward a geographical narratology

AbstractThis essay places narratology’s emphasis on space-time within the emergence of the discipline of geography and the rise of a materialist, hard science orientation in US institutions after WWII, ultimately arguing that a nascent geographical narratology should aspire to the broad intellectual scope of geography’s origins. “The new geography,” which emerged in 1887 and focused comprehensively on the relation of humans to the earth’s surface, subsequently contracted and fragmented with the post-war emphasis on material science. Likewise expanding in the rationalist post-war climate, classical narratology emphasized logical categories, especially the space-time dichotomy, divorced from human meanings. Today, cognitive research suggests that narratology’s enduring space-time paradigm occludes the constructive realities of both human relations to physical locations and reader processes. Drawing on discussions of space in narrative theory and in current cognitive research on navigation, Easterlin demonstrates that readers and viewers, rather than building spatialized storyworlds, construe space in a functional, piecemeal manner. Finally, maintaining that the area ofplace studiesand an ecological approach to reading are two components of a broadly interdisciplinary geographical narratology providing a nuanced, psychologically contextualized approach to human-environment relations and narrative, Easterlin demonstrates their utility in readings of stories by Raymond Carver and Lydia Davis.

“Irreversible Torpor”: Entropy in 1970s American Suburban Fiction

Although entropy has been identified as a theme in urban American fiction of the 1960s, it is far more significant in a strand of 1970s suburban fiction, in Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974), John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and the stories of Raymond Carver. I argue that in these texts the suburbs function as closed systems, subject to entropy, and that the suburbanite protagonists have a heightened sense of physical and metaphysical entropy, a reflection in part of the prevailing sense of irreversible economic and cultural decline and decay in that decade

“Without Hope and Without Despair”: Narrative Representation, Anti-Sentimentalism, and the Question of Finance Capitalism in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral

“Without Hope and Without Despair”: Narrative Representation, Anti-Sentimentalism, and the Question of Finance Capitalism in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral

Raymond Carver as “the American Chekhov”

Raymond Carver as “the American Chekhov”

Carver, Cavell, and the Uncanniness of the Ordinary

A predominant misunderstanding of philosophical importance of paying attention to our is that it supplies us with a standard of correctness. In contrast to this view, it is arguedhere that and are so difficult to bring into view and that this is something both J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein maintained as well. It is precisely failure to notice these kinds of difficulties that often leads philosophers into philosophical problems and metaphysical speculation. The philosopher who most clearly has stressed that the everyday is something difficult to get into view is Stanley Cavell, and he has also linked concept of to Freudian concept of uncanny. The idea of Unheimlich contains suggestion that there is something uncanny about that which is open to view because it is open to view. Thus, if real problem with ordinary language is that we philosophers take ourselves to be in full command of our already and need not think more about it, then a presentation of our own familiar that presents familiar as something unfamiliar, homely as strange, might be exactly what philosophy needs. This is one thing Raymond Carver's short stories achieve. The instability and flexibility here discerned does not warrant philosophico-theoretical correction, but is rather a place where complex, nuanced, and morally charged nature of our comes into view. We are vulnerable to each other's wordings, but that vulnerability may itself be very bond that holds us together.

Close to the Bone: Mary Robison Reconsidered

Close to the Bone: Mary Robison Reconsidered Justin Taylor (bio) On a dormant blog called “Gordon Lish Edited This” there are some blurry photographs of a personal letter on Alfred A. Knopf letterhead—a blurb request—that Lish sent to someone named Bill, to accompany the uncorrected proof of a book he had acquired. It was February of 1979: I stood on my left ear to work up special notice for Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah, for their stories, and I do not think my will to raise a rumpus for these two young writers was thereafter judged too assertive or misplaced. Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and Hannah’s Airships have proved themselves notable additions to the record of the contemporary American short story, and I am of a mind in that account. I am also of a mind to think the same will be proved of Mary Robison’s Days. [End Page 719] Robison was thirty at the time. Today she is the author of eight books, six of which are being reissued by Counterpoint throughout 2018–19. The project began in January with her novel Why Did I Ever, followed in May by Tell Me: 30 Stories. Two novels, Subtraction and One D.O.A. One on the Way, appeared in September. Her first novel, Oh!, and her second collection, An Amateur’s Guide to the Night, will round out the package in February 2019, to coincide—wittingly or otherwise—with the fortieth anniversary of her debut, and let’s just never mind that Days is not among those titles being reissued. (Also excluded is Believe Them, Robison’s third collection.) I understand why Counterpoint chose Why Did I Ever as the inaugural title in the reissue series. It’s arguably her best-known work, having achieved something approaching cult-classic status—at least among the MFA set. The book is written in 536 numbered sections (some have titles, some don’t), most of them small enough to fit on an index card. Here’s Robison describing the composition process to Bomb in 2001: “I would go out, take a notebook. Or drive, or park wherever and take notes. . . . Some berserk conversation I overheard. The crap on the radio. This big, brilliant cat. Ridiculous weather. Then it was months before I read over the scribbles and realized they had a steady voice, and that there were characters and themes.” Three ex-husbands or whoever they were. I’m sure they have their opinions. I would say to them, “Peace, our timing was bad, thelight was ugly, things didn’t work out.” I’d say, “Althoughyou certainly were doing your all, now weren’t you”. I would say, “Drink!” [End Page 720] That’s section 4 of the novel presented in its entirety. It is short enough to tweet (I checked) but then so are Kafka’s aphorisms, Martial’s epigrams, and every haiku ever. What makes Robison feel so startlingly contemporary is her sense of humor, the way it toggles between flatness and agitation, exhaustion and incredulity; the way she juxtaposes specificity and vagueness, pivoting from snark (“I’m sure they have their opinions”) into fantasy (all those “I would”s); the way the acid tone of the prose betrays just a hint of wistfulness, perhaps even regret. The novelist Adam Wilson, writing in the online journal 4 Columns, rightly describes Why Did I Ever as “the spiritual spawn of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler’s Speedboat, and the missing generational link between those and recent works like Jenny Offill’s aphoristic divorce drama Dept. of Speculation, Rachel Khong’s diaristic Alzheimer’s comedy Goodbye, Vitamin, and the entirety of Tao Lin[.]” This genealogy, and specifically Wilson’s notion of a missing link, may contain a clue as to why this particular cultural moment feels optimal for a Robison renaissance. I remember encountering Why Did I Ever when it was new. I was attracted to the format and thought it was pretty funny, but I couldn’t quite grok what the author was up to. The whole thing seemed, frankly, a little self-indulgent and a little undercooked. Rereading...

Sandra Lee Kleppe, The Poetry of Raymond Carver. Against the Current

While he was publishing short stories, Carver never ceased writing – and publishing – poems that came out in six volumes during his lifetime and were later collected into one volume by Tess Gallagher and William Stull (All of Us: The Collected Poems, 1996). This book offers a very original analysis of Carver’s poetry in the light of recent literary theories that take into account the latest developments of hard sciences (in Neuroscience, in particular). Carver’s poetry has been given far less...

Mourning and Recovery in Tess Gallagher's Moon Crossing Bridge (1992

Becoming the basis for psychoanalytical examination and analysis of grief, Freud's essay Mourning and Melancholia aptly explains these two modes. Critics like Peter Sacks and Jahan Ramazani have appropriated Freud's work to study the elegy, the former developing a normative (i.e., restitutive, idealizing) model while the latter adopting a melancholic (violent, recalcitrant) one. This paper argues that in the contemporary American poet Tess Gallagher's Moon Crossing Bridge (1992), a volume written after the death of her lover and husband the well-known writer Raymond Carver (1938-1988), Sacks' paradigm of the mourner's movement from loss to consolation and Ramazani's paradigm of violent mourning overlap, though Sacks' paradigm persists to the end. She displays an interplay between melancholic and consolatory mourning, some of her poems tend more in one direction, others move dialectically between the two. Her move from her initial numbness to her decision to resume her life as a human being and as a poet shows that her elegies express the various stages of her grief though not in a definitely ordered sequence (only occupying herself literally with her lover's body and her visit to his grave may seem to follow a logical sequence). To emerge from her grief, Gallagher works through complicated feelings of attachment, loss, and bereavement until she becomes free and uninhibited again. She is driven to bear her sorrow alone, and her experience of grief comes to be sometimes bizarre, oftentimes pathetic,but strongly painful. She repeatedly confronts loss, anger and denial, recapitulates her relationship with Carver, creates an internal satisfactory image of him, and finally giving him up to the larger forces of nature. She shows elements essential to mourning such as becoming aware of the reality of loss, confronting anger, recollecting and then severing attachment to her dead lover, reckoning with substitutive signs of him

Raymond Carver and the voices of everyday life

PurposeAll scholarly writing must straddle the universal and the particular. The universal is commonly addressed in terms of theoretical frameworks and analytical models, supported by the objectivity norm that has guided scientific inquiry since its inception. The particularities, on the other hand, the details and the nuts and bolts of everyday life and organizational reality, are oftentimes associated with subjectivity and therefore raise concern regarding the scholar’s preferences and convictions. In order to better balance objectivity and subjectivity in the organization studies literature, it is important to pay attention to how the choice of literary style may apprehend and convey organizational realities. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachDiscussing the role of literature, and the work of the American short-story writer and poet Raymond Carver, more specifically, as a domain wherein language resonates with the pace and breathing of everyday life, it is suggested that an increased level of “lyrical sensibility” in scholarly vocabularies is conducive to more nuanced accounts of organizational practices. To substantiate Carver’s argument, ethnographies of occupational work is referenced and compared to Carver’s work.FindingsCarver’s emphasis on writing stories and dialogs that do not hide behind jargon, nor impose unnecessary literary experiments or heavy-handed literary vocabularies on texts, is exemplary to organization researchers. In particular, Carver emphasizes the role of materiality and objects in his stories, the understated tension and concealed conflicts in social situations and relations, and points at how individuals interpret situations wherein they are located; in many cases, leading to apathy and indolence as the protagonists cannot consider meaningful ways to handle perceived issues or to move along. Carver’s emphasis on mundane experience is therefore conducive to a wider recognition of subjectivity in organization studies.Originality/valueThe paper broadens the discussion about organization studies writing by introducing the work of Raymond Carver, a seminal author only sparsely featured in organization and management studies.

Reckless Writing Is the Best Writing: An Interview with Dong Xi

A wide-ranging discussion between author Dong Xi and academic Fu Er, conducted at Guangxi University for Nationalities on June 29, 2012. They discussed Dong Xi’s life and work, including Dong Xi’s childhood in rural Guangxi and how it shaped his writing, key literary influences such as Franz Kafka and Raymond Carver, the editing process, Günter Grass, social messages in his fiction, minimalism, social realism, experimental fiction, humor, the economics of writing, the declining audience for literary fiction, adapting his fiction to films and television, future writing projects such as a planned detective novel, writer’s block, and spiritual crises.

ATVB Named Lecture Review-Insight Into Author: Edward A. Fisher.

ATVB Named Lecture Reviews–2013 George Lyman Duff Memorial Lecture Insight Into the Author: Edward A. Fisher, MD, MPH, PhD, Department of Medicine (Cardiology), the Marc and Ruti Bell Program in Vascular Biology, and the Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease, New York University School of Medicine Neither of my parents had anything to do with science. My father worked in a pawnshop, and my mother had a vocational high school diploma in sewing. I think my initial interest in science was pretty much instinctive: isn’t everyone curious as a child? This was reinforced by excellent science teachers in the New York City public school system, especially at my high school, the Bronx High School of Science. My parents worked hard to give my brother and me educational opportunities they never had, and it turns out we both used these to become scientists, he a physical chemist. Why I chose metabolism as a field is based in part from my clinical experiences when I was a pediatrics resident at Duke. We had a chief of metabolism, Jim Sidbury, who was very inspiring. We talked at length about some of the patients with metabolic disorders, and he encouraged me to get the hard science training needed to understand biochemical mechanisms, to make more accurate diagnoses, and to improve treatments. He also pointed me to a joint graduate program at MIT and the Harvard-affiliated hospitals in metabolism, and in one of my first year courses, I attended a lecture by Jan Breslow on lipoproteins, which led to my joining his lab. I already mentioned two mentors, Jim Sidbury and Jan Breslow, who also became role models as highly successful physician-scientists in the area of metabolic disease. When I became an assistant professor of biochemistry at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Julian Marsh, …

The Morals of Stories: Narrating Judgment in Carver, Borges, and Englander

In short-fiction pieces by Raymond Carver, Jorge Luis Borges, and Nathan Englander we continually find characters telling stories in order to influence other characters' moral judgment. Drawing on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur, and Peter Goldie, I demonstrate how narration accomplishes such an impact on judgment by working through the functions of narrative identity, ultimately serving to direct our empathy and to complicate our application of principles. The stories here considered illustrate the centrality of narrative in moral reflection, in the sense that certain configurations of narrative may have the effect of unhinging our moral presumptions.

Keywords for Southern Studies ed. by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson

Reviewed by: Keywords for Southern Studies ed. by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson Sarah E. Gardner Keywords for Southern Studies. Edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson. The New Southern Studies. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. [viii], 411. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4962-6; cloth, $89.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4061-6.) Ever since Raymond Carver published his collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (New York, 1981), the formulation has been well used. From Nathan Englander's homage to Carver in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (New York, 2011) to New Yorker parodies—such as Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwartz's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Doughnuts" (May 10, 1999)—the conceit is now so commonplace, so well-worn, that it has perhaps lost its usefulness. (The September 17, 2015, Huffington Post article, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Hepatitis C," may have been the tipping point.) The thirty short essays that make up Keywords for Southern Studies, edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson, suggest otherwise. In fact, Thomas F. Haddox employs the phrase in his essay on literature. Whether or not the contributors fall back on this wording—and most do not—the premise nonetheless undergirds much of the work presented here. What we talk about when we talk about segregation, then, or the Native South, or labor, or the black Atlantic, or indeed a whole host of other terms crucial for understanding the American South varies depending on time, place, disciplinary training, who is doing the talking, and who is doing the listening. [End Page 1024] The collection effectively and persuasively makes clear that there is nothing fixed or stable about the South. The field of southern studies is similarly unbounded. As the editors of this volume note, southern studies "is remaking itself" (p. 1). How then to pin down something that is constantly in flux? One does not try to do so, of course, for the attempt would be not only foolish, but also quite possibly pernicious. The consequences of limiting, defining, or imagining a fixed way of approaching a field of inquiry are, after all, real. The essays in Keywords for Southern Studies each point out the binds we have written ourselves into when we essentialize. Whatever southern studies is, then, the editors write, "it is mimed by the form of this volume, which does not presume to present a canon, a comprehensive account, or a curated catalog that demarcates the contours of a stable, shared field" (p. 1). Instead, the volume makes available "an idiosyncratic collection of essays on keywords" that its contributors deem "critical for the project of southern studies" (p. 1). The result, the editors readily concede, is a collection that is "contingent and fragmentary, but capacious enough to hold side by side various disciplinary and theoretical approaches, generational affinities, and intellectual perspectives on an arena of inquiry whose boundaries are constantly being renegotiated" (p. 1). Matthew Pratt Guterl's essay, "Plantation," serves as a useful example. He opens with a reasonable, if accusatory, assumption: "we usually imagine that a plantation is a uniquely southern thing: a big antiquated farm, set in the land of moonlight and magnolias, peopled by large numbers of poor, dark-skinned workers, and presided over by a small white minority" (p. 22). What's more, he continues, "We understand this representation of the plantation to be fixed in time, as an expression of the slaveholding South, from the settlement of the colonies until the Civil War's conclusion" (p. 22). That the word plantation conjures up this image—at once nostalgic and comfortable because the slaveholding plantation, along with its unsavory political implications, was destroyed by war—is itself an argument that has had legs since Lost Cause mythologizers evoked it during the late nineteenth century. A rich vein of scholarship tells us something else altogether, as Guterl makes clear, but a vibrant tourist industry counts on our discounting the plantation complex's "bone-breaking, race-making past" (p. 29). What we talk about when we talk about plantations matters profoundly...

Gothic Matters of De-Composition: The Pastoral Dead in Contemporary American Fiction

In Alice Walker’s vignette “The Flowers,” a young black girl’s walk in the woods is interrupted when she treads “smack” into the skull of a lynched man. As her name predicates, Myop’s age and innocence obstruct her from seeing deeply into the full implications of the scene, while the more worldly reader is jarred and confronted with a whole history of racial violence and slavery. The skeleton, its teeth cracked and broken, is a temporal irruption, a Gothic “smack” that shatters the transience of the pastoral scene with the intrusion of a deeper past from which dead matter/material de-composes (disturbs, unsettles, undoes) the story’s present with the violent matter/issue of racism. Walker’s story is representative of an important trope in fiction, where the pastoral dead speak through the details of their remains, and the temporal fabric of text is disrupted by the very substance of death. Against the backdrops of Terry Gifford’s post-pastoral and Fred Botting’s Gothic understanding of the literary corpse as “negative[ly] sublime,” this essay explores the fictional dead as matter unfettered by genre, consistently signifying beyond their own inanimate silences, revealing suppressed and unpalatable themes of racial and sexual violence, child abuse and cannibalistic consumerism. Along with Walker’s story, this study considers these ideas through new readings of Stephen King’s novella The Body, Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While these writers may form an unlikely grouping in terms of style, each uses pastoral remains as significant material, deploying the dead as Gothic entities that force the reader to confront America’s darkest social and historical matters.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924–2013

Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924–2013

Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924–2013

Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924–2013