US Literature Research Articles

Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793-1845. Erin Forbes

Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793-1845. Erin Forbes

James Baldwin in the USSR and Post-Soviet Countries, 1970s–2010s

This article explores the history of Baldwin Studies in the USSR and post-Soviet countries (Azerbajian, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine), which is illustrative of literary approaches and interpretations characteristic of Soviet scholarship. First translations of his short stories, essays, and the play Blues for Mr. Charlie appeared in the early 1960s, followed by commentaries in leading Soviet literary and popular journals. For ideological reasons, in the 1960–70s the focus was on the writer’s public stance and involvement in the civil rights movement. It was only in the years of perestroika—“openness”—and the 1990s that his oeuvre in its entirety began to be discussed without taboos, omissions, or ideological bias. In the 2000s, the focus shifted to discussions of aspects of Baldwin’s method and peculiarities of his style. At present, James Baldwin is regarded as a key personality in contemporary US literature, though interest in his literary heritage has somewhat subsided.

Literary Sites of Institutional Confirmation and Critique: Howells in the Study, Cather in the Office

Abstract: Against the backdrop of the current interest in the institutions of literature, the essay deploys Luc Boltanski's social theory of institutional confirmation and critique for a comparative analysis of two key writers in the emergent field of US literature around 1900: Wiliam Dean Howells and Willa Cather. Visiting Howells in the editor's study at Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Cather in the corporate office at McClure's Magazine , the essay traces how each publishing institution not only informs their criticism and correspondence but also seeps into their fiction. Framed by editorial columns and archival materials, Howells's story "The Critical Bookstore" (1913) as well as Cather's early short fiction and her debut novel Alexander's Bridge (1912) can be seen to engage what Boltanski calls the "semantic security" of institutions. Building on sociologically inflected readings of these texts, the essay considers Boltanski's claim that critique is an inherent effect of institutionalization.

Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post-1945 US Literary Studies

Abstract: This essay proposes a movements-based method for studying the development of US literature after World War II. It argues that the cultural materialist and institutionalist frameworks that have dominated post-1945 US literary studies in recent years have systematically overlooked the role of social movements as catalysts for cultural change. Through readings of the literary magazine n+1, the archival materials of Octavia Butler, and novels by a range of other major postwar US authors, it offers an account of how the collective mobilizations of the past sixty years—from Civil Rights, the New Left, and the Women's Movement to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo—have decisively shifted the contours of the US literary field.

Translation and Bildung: siting translation in nation-based anthologies

ABSTRACT This article examines the effects of chronologization on translation in nineteenth-century nation-based anthologies, focusing on the work of two prolific anthologizers, the British John Bowring (1792–1872) and the American poet Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908). While Bowring anthologized the literatures of mostly Eastern European nations in the first half of the nineteenth century and Stedman anthologized US literature in the second half, both men worked within the framework of the monolingual nation-state, leading them to exclude translations, relegating them to the “infancy” of the national cultural as symbolizing dependency and foreign influence.

The Fruits of the LOA

Abstract The marketing claims of the Library of America (LOA) reveal that this institution functions within the tradition of such middlebrow publishing ventures as The Harvard Classics and the Modern Library. All such ventures assure consumers that cultural cache can be theirs through brand loyalty. LOA’s brand identity, however, is fraught with contradictions. While claiming to continue the legacy of highbrow literary critic Edmund Wilson, LOA increasingly publishes volumes devoted to pulp genres that would have been anathema to Wilson. While English departments have been questioning notions of the canon throughout LOA’s history, the publisher, founded in 1980, insists that its books define the canon of US literature. The professoriate, however, has largely ignored LOA’s claims regarding great literature because the publisher also claims to uphold the standards of great scholarship. These brand contradictions serve as a context for assessing a recent addition to LOA’s core collection, William Faulkner: Stories, edited by Theresa M. Towner. I contrast Towner’s editorial methods with those of Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk, who edited LOA’s five volumes of Faulkner’s novels between 1985 and 2003, in order to address what we mean when we say a text is authoritative and corrected.

Imaginary Empires: Women Writers and Alternative Futures in Early US Literature by Maria O’Malley (review)

Imaginary Empires: Women Writers and Alternative Futures in Early US Literature by Maria O’Malley (review)

The Dual Role of Code-Switching in Alejandro Morales’s Reto en el paraíso

ABSTRACT Although most contemporary Chicano authors tend to write exclusively in one language, English or Spanish, they have a range of linguistic options available to them – as would any member of a bilingual community – including code-switching. Code-switching in US literature dates back to the Mexican–American War and has been employed to establish aesthetic or stylistic credibility and to communicate biculturalism or ethnic identity. This article examines the dual role of code-switching in Alejandro Morales’s only bilingual novel, Reto en el paraíso. It explores how code-switching serves as a narrative technique to develop character identity in a bilingual and bicultural context, while also performing some of the socio-pragmatic and communicative functions commonly attested in natural bilingual discourse. Morales’s linguistic choices exemplify how Chicano writers living between two cultures may, and often must, use both languages to depict accurately the intricate cultural and linguistic realities of their characters.

Fugitive Figurations of Chronic Disability: Reconstructing Black Disability Politics in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy

Abstract “Fugitive Figurations of Chronic Disability: Re-Constructing the Black Disability Politics in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy” fills a gap in nineteenth-century Black disability histories that have overlooked questions of chronic disabilities. In Iola Leroy, Harper writes from the perspective of the chronically disabled and offers fugitive figurations that exceed, resist, and stand apart from nineteenth-century representations of white true women’s invalidism and racial pathologizations. Harper uses Iola’s and other characters’ chronic debilities as a social location for imagining an alternative Black epistemology of the chronic with its own “phraseology” to testify to the inseparability of racial and disability justice as a part of Black freedom struggles. As part of its fugitive figurations of chronic disabilities, Iola Leroy also unbinds Black bodies and minds from a disciplinary individualistic productive capitalist time; and it centers an inclusive postbellum Black community of collective mutual care that exposes the limitations of a liberal (white) sentimental politics of sympathy. Harper’s fugitive figurations of chronic disability in Iola Leroy raise important questions about the methods critics use to recover Black disability in nineteenth-century US literature, methods which too often mine for present-day models of disabled medical verisimilitude and visibility rather than excavating the alternative figurations that Black writers such as Harper employed as part of twinned anti-ableist and anti-racist liberation and care practice.

Data Bodies

Abstract This essay examines two recent books that each take up the vexed topic bodies of data in relation to literature and race in the US: Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction and Elizabeth Rodrigues’s Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures. Each book, in its own way, asks literary scholars to take the data corpus seriously as both an object and a method of study. While acknowledging that the collection of bodies of data has long been used to efface, dehumanize, and racialize, So and Rodrigues ask readers not to dismiss reactively the data corpus’s potential to also be an unexpected tool for refuting those same naturalized and totalizing narratives. Contemplating, as they do, the unique temporality and spatiality of the accretion of singular points into a collective data, the books explore what a data corpus looks, feels, and sounds like and what it might tell us about the relationship between bodies, books in twentieth-century US literature, and the stories that have and could be told about both.Thinking in different ways about the vexed relationship between bodies of data, literature, and race in the US, Rodrigues and So each demonstrate that, while data cannot speak for itself, there are some stories we can neither hear, see, nor tell without its help.

Erin Forbes, Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793-1845

Erin Forbes, Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793-1845

«По прозвищу Моисей»: литературные интерпретации жизни Харриет Табмен

The article is devoted to the formation of Harriet Tubman's image in the US literature. Two books belonging to the spread of Afrocentrism and the second wave of feminism — A. Petrie's non-fiction novel A Girl Called Moses: The Story of Harriet Tubman and M. Heidish's novel A Woman Called Moses — are chosen as the material for analysis. The article analyzes the main qualitative characteristics identified as early as in S. Bradford's book Harriet, Moses of Her People that form the discourse of race and gender in the mentioned narratives about Tubman, and identifies the main transformations of these characteristics. Thus, the work of African-American author A. Petrie reflects to a greater extent the sentiments of all her fellow women in the 1950s-60s Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States: while remaining within the generally accepted gender framework of feminine virtues, at the same time, the black woman was stepping out of her allotted racial limits. Furthermore, she shows that slavery is a cultural trauma that still defines how the African American community sees itself and its place in the society and how slavery is remembered as a means of self-identification within the African American community. Created by the white writer M. Heidish in the mid-1970s, during the rise of the second wave of the feminist movement, the novel reflects the very sentiments that characterized this movement and shows the view of a sympathetic Other on the issue of race. Thus, the article establishes the fact that Harriet Tubman plays a very important role in the African-American and women's discourse in the United States as an image that is given the necessary functions and qualities for its time based on the socio-cultural context contemporary to the interpreter.

Ploughing the Field: Controversy and Censorship in US and UK YA Literature

Ploughing the Field: Controversy and Censorship in US and UK YA Literature

The Literary Echoes in Milton Babbitt’s Music

Abstract At his death, Milton Babbitt’s library contained nearly two thousand books, covering a huge array of disciplines and subjects. This literature offers intriguing new contexts for understanding Babbitt’s aesthetics and compositional practice. While scholars have pointed to the influence on his music of analytic philosophy, logic, information theory, and mathematics, I direct attention to the literary, poetic, and linguistic texts and theory that he read. I first outline the ways in which Babbitt’s choices and settings of poetry paralleled trends in postwar US literature departments. Then, drawing from the sources in his library, I describe the roles that ambiguity, cross-reference, allusion, and intertextuality play in three of his songs: The Virginal Book (1988), Quatrains (1993), and Pantun (2000). As I demonstrate, the structuralist poetics of Babbitt’s music results from his creative “misreadings” of Schenkerian analysis, generative-transformational linguistics, and mid-century literary theory on phonology, ambiguity, and intertextuality. Moreover, I argue that Babbitt’s allusive aesthetic should be understood in relation to the rich Jewish exegetical traditions that inspired mid-century theories of literary influence and “echo” (such as those proposed by Harold Bloom and John Hollander). Indeed, reading from Babbitt’s library suggests that for those within his milieu, a composerly imagination that relished and celebrated the proliferative interpretative possibilities of formal structural correspondence reflected a uniquely Jewish artistic and creative sensibility. Listening for these intertexts not only highlights the poetic tensions and allusive ambiguities in Babbitt’s musical structures and punning titles, but also nuances our understandings of postwar US serial aesthetics and ideology.

Beyond Islay : A Brief Literary History of Deaf Utopia and Dystopia

Abstract: The idea of a sign language town, or a Deaf utopia, where Deaf and signing people can come together to live in a geographical or figurative homeland has long persisted in US Deaf life, letters, and literature. In the wake of the Milan Congress of 1880, Alexander Graham Bell's alarming rhetoric concerning "a deaf mute variety of the human race" and the "campaign against sign language," the idea of a homeland, and a Deaf commonwealth took on additional resonance. However, in the absence of geographical sign language towns, utopian and figurative homelands then became an important possible alternative through a communal shared space formed through language, culture, and customs. Homelands for Deaf people can extend to both physical spaces like Deaf schools and Deaf clubs or metaphorical and creative spaces, as in Deaf literature itself. Additionally, this article uses the proclaimed "first Deaf culture novel," Douglas Bullard's Islay: A Novel (1986), about a fictional Deaf republic, as a brief case study of several different overlapping cultural, social, artistic, and literary movements; written Deaf literature before and after this novel is, in some ways, markedly different, and in other ways, much the same due to the ways in which language and modality schemas are invoked in imaginative literature written in English. This study provides additional literary and cultural context for Islay as well as a brief history of Deaf creative writing in prose in relation to key mid-to-late twentieth century Deaf cultural and social movements.

Resident-reported measurements of neighborhood characteristics: a scoping review

Abstract Purpose Because of the growing emphasis on place-based interventions to improve health, we sought to identify commonly measured, resident-reported neighborhood characteristics for use in evaluation studies. Methods A review was conducted of resident-reported neighborhood indicators in 27 published PubMed articles and eight non-academic gray literature sources. Neighborhood domains and items were evaluated across the literature to identify patterns in resident reporting on neighborhoods. Results A diverse range of survey items across reviewed literature comprised the following broad domains: physical conditions, social conditions, community resources, social agency, and neighborhood dynamics. Academic and gray literature varied in their assessments’ focus and the populations considered, with gray literature exploring a wider array of persons, such as those with disability, and positive aspects of neighborhoods. In general, there was a lack of a cohesive framework for measuring neighborhood well-being and no clear agreement on appropriate language and key definitions. Measures relevant to the elderly were largely absent from the US literature. Conclusions Most published articles on neighborhood measurement were derived from the criminology and sociology literature on the origins of violence and poverty. Their measures reflected this negative orientation. Gray literature included a broader perspective on neighborhoods and consideration of alternative populations such as the elderly and people with disability. This review’s identification of common metrics in neighborhood domains paves the way for building consolidated and standardized neighborhood measurement tools that will also fill current gaps in the literature, such as those concerning elderly residents or those with disabilities.

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in US Literature and Culture, edited by Amanda Ellen Gerke, Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan and Patricia San José Rico (Leiden: Brill, 2020)

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in US Literature and Culture, edited by Amanda Ellen Gerke, Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan and Patricia San José Rico (Leiden: Brill, 2020)

#5309 MODELLING LONG-TERM OUTCOMES FOR PATIENTS WITH IMMUNOGLOBULIN A NEPHROPATHY (IGAN) FROM SHORT-TERM PROTEINURIA DATA

Abstract Background and Aims Immunoglobulin A nephropathy (IgAN) is rare kidney disease that leads to glomerular injury, progressive loss of kidney function and progression to kidney failure. Pre-specified interim proteinuria data from ongoing clinical trials is being used as the basis of regulatory approval of new therapies but little is known about the translation of these results to long-term patient outcomes; a topic of particular interest to heath technology assessment (HTA) groups looking to inform decisions on reimbursement before final renal outcome data are available. The objective of this study was to model long-term outcomes for patients with IgAN based on short-term proteinuria data. Method We developed a de novo model including a short-term (36-week) decision tree and a long-term Markov model to capture expected lifetime outcomes associated with treatment for IgAN. We used achievement of proteinuria <1 g/day as a clinically relevant treatment target. The short-term model included data on proteinuria level and distribution of chronic kidney disease (CKD) health states (CKD 1/2, 3, 4, and 5). At the end of 36 weeks of treatment, patients were categorized into groups based on their proteinuria level (<1g/day and ≥1 g/day) and CKD stage before transitioning to the long-term Markov model. In the long-term model, proteinuria level-based, CKD health state transition matrices derived from analysis of UK National Registry of Rare Kidney Disease (RaDaR) data, and transition matrices to dialysis and transplant derived from the US Renal Data System (USRDS) were used. Other included clinical inputs of complications and mortality were derived from extension of US Optum data analyses and literature. Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) was assessed as health state utilities and disutility associated with complications. Hypothetic scenarios of improvement in short-term proteinuria and impact on long term outcomes were tested. Model outputs included life years (LYs) and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). Effectiveness was discounted at 3% annually. Deterministic sensitivity analysis was conducted. Results Over a lifetime, patients receiving treatment that increased the probability of achieving proteinuria <1 g/day by 10% in the short-term, were modelled to have gained an additional 0.388 LYs from reduced CKD/transplant/dialysis-related mortality and 0.633 QALYs from delaying CKD progression to kidney failure. As expected, results improved when the probability of achieving proteinuria <1 g/day increased; with a 30% increase in the probability of achieving proteinuria <1 g/day, LYs gained were 0.562 (Figure 1) and QALYs 0.968 (Figure 2). Results were most sensitive to time horizon and long-term extrapolation of CKD health state transition matrices. Conclusion Despite challenges inherent in the translation of surrogate endpoints to long-term outcomes, combining short-term proteinuria from clinical trials and long-term CKD data from real-world registry and claims-based data provides a solution. Based on modelling, treatments that increase the probability of achieving <1 g/day in the short-term, are expected to provide benefits to patients with IgAN in the long-term including less time with advanced kidney disease, less time on dialysis and avoiding the need for kidney transplant resulting in improved survival, and better quality of life. Refinement and customization of country-specific model inputs will help ensure outputs are relevant for different jurisdictions and as representative of anticipated real-world outcomes as possible.

Cost-effectiveness analysis of a circulating tumor DNA-based molecular residual disease assay to guide adjuvant chemotherapy decisions in patients with resectable early stage colorectal cancer.

e18929 Background: An ongoing prospective study in patients with stage II or III colorectal cancer (CRC) has demonstrated ctDNA testing to be prognostic of recurrence risk and predictive of adjuvant chemotherapy (ACT) benefit. From the perspective of a US payer, we aimed to investigate the cost effectiveness of incorporating ctDNA analysis using the commercially available molecular residual disease (MRD) assay (Signatera™) into standard practice to aid in adjuvant chemotherapy decision-making, where traditional high-risk clinicopathological (CP) features have not shown a significant benefit of ACT in Stage II CRC. Methods: We developed a decision model to project lifetime clinical and economic consequences of different adjuvant treatment-guiding strategies. The model was parameterized using a follow-up of up to 2-years from a recently published data from GALAXY study and the cost data from the US literature. GALAXY is an observational arm of the ongoing CIRCULATE-Japan study (UMIN000039205) that analysed pre-surgical and post-surgical ctDNA in patients with stage II-IV resectable CRC. Costs are presented in 2023 US dollars. Future costs and benefits were discounted at 3%. Results: Compared to the CP predictors alone-based strategy, ctDNA analysis using the MRD assay in combination with CP predictors-based strategy led to an increase of 0.8 life years and 0.7 quality adjusted-Life Years (QALY) and cost savings of $9,771 per patient. Conclusions: The addition of MRD detection by ctDNA to traditional CP predictors aids in adjuvant chemotherapy decision-making in patients with stage II or III resectable CRC and is likely to be cost effective in the US healthcare system. ctDNA testing should therefore be considered for adoption in this disease setting.

Anticolonialism as Theory

Research Article| May 01 2023 Anticolonialism as Theory Yogita Goyal Yogita Goyal YOGITA GOYAL is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and the author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), which won the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA. Past President of ASAP, she has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and US literature and is working on The Genres of Anticolonialism, a study of mid-twentieth-century anticolonial thought and its current revival. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (2023) 162 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.162.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Yogita Goyal; Anticolonialism as Theory. Representations 1 May 2023; 162 (1): 1–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.162.1.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2023 by The Regents of the University of California2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.