US Literature Research Articles

Greenspace, Inflammation, Cardiovascular Health, and Cancer: A Review and Conceptual Framework for Greenspace in Cardio-Oncology Research.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of global morbidity and mortality. Cancer survivors have significantly elevated risk of poor cardiovascular (CV) health outcomes due to close co-morbid linkages and shared risk factors between CVD and cancer, as well as adverse effects of cancer treatment-related cardiotoxicity. CVD and cancer-related outcomes are exacerbated by increased risk of inflammation. Results from different pharmacological interventions aimed at reducing inflammation and risk of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACEs) have been largely mixed to date. Greenspaces have been shown to reduce inflammation and have been associated with CV health benefits, including reduced CVD behavioral risk factors and overall improvement in CV outcomes. Greenspace may, thus, serve to alleviate the CVD burden among cancer survivors. To understand pathways through which greenspace can prevent or reduce adverse CV outcomes among cancer survivors, we review the state of knowledge on associations among inflammation, CVD, cancer, and existing pharmacological interventions. We then discuss greenspace benefits for CV health from ecological to multilevel studies and a few existing experimental studies. Furthermore, we review the relationship between greenspace and inflammation, and we highlight forest bathing in Asian-based studies while presenting existing research gaps in the US literature. Then, we use the socioecological model of health to present an expanded conceptual framework to help fill this US literature gap. Lastly, we present a way forward, including implications for translational science and a brief discussion on necessities for virtual nature and/or exposure to nature images due to the increasing human–nature disconnect; we also offer guidance for greenspace research in cardio-oncology to improve CV health outcomes among cancer survivors.

Fascism, Populism and the Myth of the American Revolution in 20th Century US Literature

This essay examines the significance of the American Revolution as a literary trope and a rhetorical device in shaping US political imagination. The Revolution fostered both utopian and dystopian rationales, justifying radical experiences such as fascism. I will examine this relevance in Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934) and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935).

Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature by Jolene Hubbs

Reviewed by: Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature by Jolene Hubbs David A. Davis Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature, by Jolene Hubbs. Cambridge University Press, 2022. 191 + xi pages. $110 cloth, eBook. Poverty leaves an indelible mark in the form of a self-consciousness that never completely fades. Growing up poor white in rural Georgia, I learned the difference between my family, who lived in a trailer, and the families of other kids, who lived in houses. I heard the jokes told about poor whites, developed the sense of shame that comes with poverty, and felt the resentment that comes with marginalization. As a literary critic, I am inclined to notice how poor white characters are portrayed, and I realize that they tend to be depicted as either depraved or pathetic, and I also notice that literary critics tend to be reluctant to address issues of class in southern literature. Jolene Hubbs’s book Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores how middle-class southern writers have depicted poor whites to define their own social superiority and how recent poor white writers resist their marginalization. She notes that white poverty tends to be distinctively associated with the US South, and she argues that “poor white southerners appear throughout US literature as embodiments of whatever wealthier white people are most eager to distance themselves from” (8). She uses literary case studies from four periods—the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and the 1990s—to illustrate how poor whites have been depicted as foils for class status, ignorance, racism, and obesity. In her study, she explains that middle-class writers project deviance onto poor whites in a pattern that illustrates America’s evolving social anxiety. Hubbs focuses her analysis on five writers as illustrations of middle-class anxiety projected onto poor white southerners in southern literature. The book is much more representative than exhaustive, and each chapter functions as a case study for representations of poor whites in specific time periods and in relation to specific social contexts. While poor whites have an extensive and formative role in both the US South specifically and the United States generally, the book extrapolates from particular examples. In each chapter, Hubbs establishes a prevailing [End Page 225] tendency for depictions of poor whites in a time period, such as the Gilded Age of the 1890s, in the works of several writers and then contrasts the prevailing depiction with the somewhat different representation of poor whites in the work of a specific writer. This dialogue reveals tension between how poor whites are depicted in mass media, magazines, and print culture and in the work of authors who have offered more sophisticated impressions of poor whites. Most of the book, with the exception of the final chapter, explores southern middle-class authors’ depictions of poor whites, which diminish the ability of poor whites to influence how they are perceived, leaving a distorted perception of them. She contends that poor white authors have not been able to represent themselves effectively until the late twentieth century. Therefore, the first three chapters focus on middle-class writers and the concluding chapter focuses on two contemporary writers with poor white roots, and the book reveals, unsurprisingly, that poor whites offer a much more complex depiction of social class than middle class writers who project deviance onto white poverty. The depiction of poor white southerners as deviant, lazy, and problematic extends at least as far back as the early colonial period with William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line (1728), which characterized southern poor whites as indolent lubbers. Since then, poor whites have been portrayed as alternately problematic or praiseworthy depending upon the political or rhetorical agenda of the author. Thomas Jefferson, for example, described them as the foundation of civil society, whereas old southwestern humorists caricatured them as ignorant and depraved. In the first chapter of the book, Hubbs begins her analysis after Reconstruction, when the regions were reunified but sectional differences continued to linger. She describes how poor whites were portrayed in The Atlantic Monthly after the Civil War, at a time when “white poverty came to be treated as a social and personal pathology,” and...

The predictable campaign: Theory and evidence

Are campaigns epiphenomena? The dominant answer in the US literature seems to be Yes. Outcomes are driven by ‘fundamental’ considerations in place before the campaign begins, such that dynamics within the campaign reflect the elimination of ‘accidental’ considerations. Multi-country comparisons, where they exist, tend to be fragmentary. Where they are not fragmentary, they are taken from so high an altitude that critical interpretive details are lost. Also fragmentary, surprisingly, is documentation of the US case itself. This paper identifies two overlapping but distinct claims: about frontrunners and about incumbents. We also identify an insufficiently recognized fact, that the very idea of a ‘fundamental’ is contested, and that this broadens the scope for potential within-campaign dynamics. We employ rolling cross-section survey data from the US, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and Canada.

“Georeferencing” and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s narrative strategy (on the material of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”)

The article approaches the narrative strategy employed by a famous American horror-writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft in his only novel “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” (1927) and introduces new terms – “georeferencing” and “georeference.” By the latter we mean a toponymical allusion, i. e. an implicit reference to the precedential text incorporated in a toponym (e. g. the author mentions Transylvania to make a georeference to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”). Lovecraft employs georeferencing and other forms of literary allusions to medieval legends, as well as to famous gothic novels written by his predecessors Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gustav Meyrink, Bram Stoker, etc. to create a meaningful context for his own novel. His goal is to create a common hypertextual universe, which can and will be productively navigated by a prepared reader. This strategy makes it possible for the reader to uncover hidden logics behind the fragmentary discourse and even foresee the outcome of the central battle between the principal characters. Lovecraft’s sophisticated intention and expert plot-structuring allows us to view “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” as a daring Modernist writing of the period, as well as to reassess Lovecraft’s reputation and cultural impact on the US literature of his time.

Health Care Fictions: The Business of Medicine and Modern US Literature

AbstractThe literary and cultural dimensions of the longstanding US political debate over public versus private health care have been critically underexplored. How did early twentieth-century US writers portray the business of medical care within a stratified US economy? In Robert Herrick’s The Healer (1911), Wallace Thurman and A. L. Furman’s The Interne (1932), and Frank G. Slaughter’s That None Should Die (1941), the problems of inequality, profit, and corruption plague the practice of professional medicine. The writers of these novels do not, for the most part, blame the trouble with care on individual nurses, doctors, or other medical staff. Instead of exposing the power of individual medical practitioners to exploit bodies, these novels call attention to the power of capitalism and inequality to distort and derange the mission of medicine. Yet, the political critiques offered by health care fictions are foreclosed by anxieties about collective reform and government intervention in health care. So, this article asks why some of the most sustained literary treatments of capitalist medicine in US literature ultimately retreat from the structural critiques that they themselves raise.

Politics, Aesthetics, and the Critical Humanities: Revisiting an American Tradition?—An Interview with Ross Posnock1

Ross Posnock is Anna S. Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, where he studies and teaches US and European literature and intellectual history. Ross Posnock was Andrew Hilen Professor of American Literature at the University of Washington before teaching in the English department at New York University from 2000 to 2004. From 1998 to 2017 he was series editor of Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press) and is a contributing edit...

Telling America’s Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy

Abstract This article argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar US literature. Highlighting the role of liberal internationalism in US cultural outreach, I contend that the state mainly sent authors like Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not to demonstrate the superiority of US civilization, but rather to broadcast an American commitment to international cross-cultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors didn’t so much help the state achieve its propaganda goals—indeed, this rarely proved the case—as find in their assignments an opportunity to ponder the international meanings and possibilities of US literature. For many of those figures, courting foreign publics inspired a reevaluation of the scope and form of their own literary projects. Testifying to the inadvertent yet integral role of cultural diplomacy in the worlding of US letters, works like The Mansion (1959), Life Studies (1959), “Cultural Exchange” (1961), and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) reimagine the literary in a global, mobile, and distinctly political register.

Racial and ethnic disparities in access to minimally invasive gynecologic surgery for benign pathology.

To review current US literature and describe the extent, source, and impact of disparities that exist among Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in surgical route and outcomes for hysterectomy, myomectomy, and endometriosis surgery. Despite the nationwide trend toward minimally invasive surgery (MIS), BIPOC women are disproportionally less likely to undergo MIS hysterectomy and myomectomy and have higher rates of perioperative complications. African American women, in particular, receive significantly disparate care. Contemporary literature on the prevalence of endometriosis in BIPOC women is lacking. Further, there is little data on the racial and ethnic differences in endometriosis surgery access and outcomes. Racial and ethnic disparities in access to minimally invasive gynecologic surgery for benign pathology exist and these differences are not fully accounted for by patient, socioeconomic, or healthcare infrastructure factors. Initiatives that incentivize hiring surgeons trained to perform complex gynecologic surgery, standardized pathways for route of surgery, quality improvement focused on increased hospital MIS volume, and hospital-based public reporting of MIS volume data may be of benefit for minimizing disparities. Further, initiatives to reduce disparities need to address racism, implicit bias, and healthcare structural issues that perpetuate disparities.

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Book Reviews: Spring 2021

Book Reviews, of: Baskin – Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster WallaceÖzcan – Understanding William T. VollmannEve – Thomas Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault, AdornoCrews – Books are Made of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary InfluencesEmre – Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America Stephan – Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First CenturyCrosthwaite – The Market Logics of Contemporary FictionSilbergleid and Quynn (eds) – Reading & Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations [a note from the Book Reviews Editor: if you’re interested in reviewing a book on any aspect of unconventional post-1945 US literature, please send an email proposing a review to reviews@pynchon.net]

Prevalence of Antibiotic Allergy Labels in a Tertiary Referral Center in Belgium

Antibiotic (AB) allergies are among the most frequently occurring adverse drug reactions. In US literature, AB allergy labels (AAL) are reported in 10% to 15% of patients' charts; however, large-scale European analyses are scarce. To retrospectively assess the prevalence of AAL in a tertiary referral hospital in Belgium between 2010 and2018. Patients who consulted and/or were hospitalized during the study period, who had been labeled with an AB allergy, were selected for further analysis. Of 1,009,598 unique patients (outpatients, n=736,469; inpatients, n= 273,129), 28,147 patients (3%) were registered with 1 or more AAL, being 1% of outpatients (n= 9562) and 7% of inpatients (n= 18,585). Women were more likely to carry an AAL (68%) compared with men (32%, P< .001). In patients with an AAL, 9% had multiple labels and 5% had labels for multiple AB classes. Most frequently, beta-lactams were involved (84% of AAL), followed by quinolones (7%) and sulfonamides and macrolides (both 3%). Moreover, 88% of the reactions were self-reported, mostly being an unspecified rash (53%), whereas only 3% were considered confirmed AAL. With an overall prevalence of 3%, the burden of AAL is less in our Western European center compared with US reports. However, this prevalence most likely still represents an overestimation of genuine AB allergic patients because most labels lack confirmation and/or specifications. Our work indicates that knowledge of the local epidemiology of AAL is necessary to estimate the impact of better allergy labeling anddelabeling strategies.

ʻJudicial Activismʼ in Europe: Not a Neat and Clean Fit

Abstract Achieving a proper balance between enforcing the constitution and avoiding that the courts exercise a policy-making function that that is better left to legislatures is not without its difficulties. In the United States, this issue has gained substantially higher traction giving rise to intense activism talk. The relevant American literature has exerted a deep fascination abroad, also in the light of the current globalization of constitutional discourse. Yet, the article intends to advance two claims: first, it warns against an uncritical import of US-style notions of judicial activism to continental Europe; second, it argues that contemporary research on comparative judicial activism currently has low explanatory utility. The first section takes a glimpse of the relevant US literature ‒ both legal and empirical ‒ to shed light on the multidimensional essence of the concept. Section 2 proceeds to articulate three sets of tentative reasons why activism talk should be ʻhandled with careʼ. These reasons pivot on considerations around structure, culture, and type of decisions in continental Europe. After parsing out each aspect, an argument is made that US-style judicial activism is too dependent on the US form of government; too divisive and as such unsuitable to the different European legal professional culture; and misleading, as the way European constitutional courts display activism in their decisions is distinctive. Ultimately, the article argues for the avoidance of US-style notions of judicial activism in European constitutional discourse.

White Slave Fiction, So-Called

AbstractIn the early twentieth century, the widespread belief that young white women were at risk of being captured and forced into sex work led to significant legislative victories, and this crisis also shaped US literature in surprising ways. When writing about so-called white slavery crossed over from the spheres of journalism, social reform, and the law into fiction, authors devised a suite of quasi-empirical literary techniques that turned the dubious facts of white slavery into the stuff of popular art. Novelists drew heavily on juridical and social scientific evidence to lend authority and specificity to stories that they insisted (counterfactually) were gravely true. White slavery fiction marries empiricism with sensationalism, data with melodrama, cold statistics with exaggeration and falsehood. This essay examines the literary empiricism of Reginald Wright Kauffman’s 1910 novel The House of Bondage and the amateur literary criticism of progressive anti-vice reformers to examine a tradition of mutual borrowing between nonfictional genres such as the report, tract, and newsletter and modern US fiction. An analogy between slavery and forced sex work was pivotal to the social critique that white slavery novels existed to forward. Yet the genre’s catalyzing metaphor circulated a radically dehistoricized, racist conception of enslavement for a twentieth-century white readership, drawing its figurative vocabulary and sense of political urgency from chattel slavery while eliminating any concern with Black men, women, or children.

A Season for Listing: Melville and Wharton Offer Perspective on Pandemic Reading Practices

A Season for Listing:Melville and Wharton Offer Perspective on Pandemic Reading Practices María Carla Sánchez (bio) List, noun: A catalogue or roll consisting of … names, figures, words, or the like. In early use, esp., a catalogue of the names of persons engaged in the same duties or connected with the same object; spec. a catalogue of the soldiers of an army. —Oxford English Dictionary We are a listing people. The year 2020, a time of pandemic, protest, and election—PPE of a different sort—produced legions of statistics, data, charts, and graphs marking its progression. The Covid-19 pandemic developed and continues to exist in many forms: medical, political, economic, and social, each with its own taxonomic lexicon. For many Americans, comprehending those forms has come through interaction with lists: the employed and unemployed, the believing and the skeptic, the asymptomatic, the sickened, and the dead. Regardless of individual health, each of us in the United States, now 330 million and counting, occupies a spot on a pandemic-related list. Typically generated by a state health department, these lists divide us into categories of fully, partially, or unvaccinated persons—categories we now know coincide discomfitingly with political affiliation, economic wellbeing, and educational status. [End Page 140] But we could also determine the categories in which family, friends, and neighbors reside by inquiring about something else: whether they took an interest in or followed a pandemic reading list. As soon as the nation's first shelter-in-place and stay-in-place orders were issued in mid-March 2020, the nation's liberal-oriented print and social media set about guiding its audience's literary consumption. For a significant portion of the populace, the quarantine would be spent reading.1 These reading lists encompass a variety of texts, and they do so for members of certain categories: consumers of newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post; followers of popular sites such as the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed; payers-of-attention, occasional or otherwise, to influential celebrities like Oprah; the college-educated; city or suburb dwellers; and now, likely vaccinated persons who voted for the forty-sixth president. The year of PPE has cleaved us into ever more sharply drawn and divided segments of a citizenry. Studying pandemic reading lists allows us to see nuances of that segmentation. It also reveals sobering trends: the persistence of punitive logics of work and virtue signaling that should be familiar to scholars of the US nineteenth century, and the eclipse in the popular press of the very works that many such scholars hold dear. Books of all genres can represent "comfort reading" during stressful times, writes Ceri Radford, and as we shall see, readers indeed went in varying directions, including "dystopias, social justice, and steamy romance."2 But late in the pandemic's first spring, as news broke of three more killings of Black Americans by police, two of them documented by painful, horrifying video, thousands of citizens flowed into the streets to protest institutional racism—and then returned home again to read, albeit in a precise direction. "The stay-at-home orders for millions of people across the world have radically changed how we spend our time," declared the New York Times on 17 [End Page 141] April 2020.3 One month later, as the only US newspaper to maintain a full-fledged book review section, the Times announced the appearance of titles such as White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist on its bestseller lists.4 Now a year on from those initial events and well into what many of us call a new normal, several of these volumes still sell briskly. Americans—some Americans at least—are reading a great deal these days, in response to a world less stable on its axis. But they are not reading much nineteenth-century US literature. One might well ask why, and what they are missing? In what follows, I examine a selection of pandemic reading lists to see what they can tell us about how Americans responded to pandemic, protest, and the election in their literary diet. While a reading list offered by NPR, for instance, doesn...

Canon to Right of Them, Canon to Left

Canon to Right of Them, Canon to Left Robert T. Tally Jr. (bio) For those who lived through the “Canon Wars” that raged within and among English departments and other bastions of the humanities during the 1980s, the present state of the literature curriculum at most schools may be dissatisfying. I suspect no one is very happy with the results, such that they are, of that epochal struggle. Proponents of a “traditional” canon undoubtedly feel that they lost the war, as English majors today can just as easily take courses on the Harry Potter series or The Wire as on Shakespeare and Milton in most departments. But advocates for reforming, expanding, or even more radically, eliminating the canon probably find that far too little has been done, and that the addition of a few more writers and texts to the mainstream curricula have hardly transformed literary studies, at least, not as much as had been desired. In some cases, it may not be clear whether there is any coherence at all, canonical or otherwise, in college and university literary studies. Way back when, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, along with E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (each published in 1987), combined with controversies over required reading lists as Columbia, Stanford, and other major universities, turned the academic and curricular debates about canons into a topic of national conversation, featured on Sunday morning news shows and newspaper Op-Ed pieces. Conservative screeds like Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990) and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991) connected the canon debates to a more broadly politicized “culture war” between traditionalists and revolutionaries, a war that made for rather strange bedfellows in the decade to come. Perhaps the most significant figure weighing in on the matter, both within the groves of academe and in the broader media culture, was Harold Bloom (no relation to Allan), whose 1994 book The Western Canon was not only a defense of the canon and its contents from those he dubbed the “school of resentment” but also itself a canon-forming act. With each of its chapters devoted to an individual, canonical author, and with its infamous appendix comprising a list of the writers Bloom personally deemed canonical, The Western Canon could be accepted by many credulous readers as the canon after all, so influential and authoritative was Harold Bloom. The recent publication of The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, edited by David Mikics, by the Library of America — itself another sort of canon-forming institution — will undoubtedly be viewed in some quarters as authoritative in designating a canon of US literature, for Bloom’s name still carries some weight among those who care about such things. However, times have changed. For one thing, as his obituaries may have served to remind us, Harold Bloom may well be the last academic literary critic to have such celebrity outside of academe, and it is unlikely that any living professor of literature will be able to sway public opinion concerning the necessity of reading works by this or that writer. Where Allan Bloom had complained that students read too much Nietzsche and not enough Plato, today’s “conservatives” do not seem very interested in promoting any sort of reading at all; meanwhile, today’s “liberals” seem reluctant to speak of required reading at all, other than to promote works that might serve tutelary or ideological purposes, perhaps, or more tepidly, to affirm that reading itself is somehow innately virtuous. The very idea of a literary canon has become rather dubious, which is why this collection of essays by Bloom, given this title, seems rather anachronistic, and in more ways than one. By establishing Emerson as the fons et origo of a particularly American “literary genius,” Bloom urges a particular line of thinking that decides in advance what is to be valued — the Self above all — and what is not in the United States. He dutifully includes several anti-Emersonians, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and even Edgar Allan Poe, whom he loathes with special enmity, but it is clear that these are outliers within the cult of individuality he places at...

FOOD AS A CONCEPT OF CULTURE AND INDIAN CODE IN JHUMPA LAHIRI`S WRITING

The purpose of the article is to analyze the culinary concept with Indian gastronomy code analysis in the context of the transcultural paradigm in Jhumpa Lahiri`s writing (an American writer of Bengali origin). In the article we used the following methods: cultural and historical (defining the role and place of Lahiri`s writing in US literature of the twentieth century), historical and typological (determining the specifics of themes, motifs, images, story features of the writer`s works), functional (clarifying the features of Lahiri`s poetics), hermeneutic (interpretation of various aspects of the literary text), narratological analysis (specifics` analysis of Lahiri`s narrative manner), biographical (revealing the reflection of author`s personal experience in her writing), the principles of postcolonial and decolonial criticism (rethinking the problem of �otherness� in transculture discourse). The author of the article notes that food serves as conditional language for characters and as cultural code that interprets by �ours� only � Indian culture representatives. It is indicated that in the context of transcultural understanding, food and the process of its preparation are of particular importance: usual home-cooked dishes are synonymous of protection, security, peace, belonging to one�s home; instead, the presence of �other� exotic dishes makes it possible to get acquainted with the culinary preferences of another culture, as well as to trace the basic similarities and differences.Therefore, cultural culinary differences are found in the kitchen, where the characters are accustomed to spend most of the day and especially carefully prepare the dishes. An interpretation of cooking as a true art is associated with Jhumpa Lahiri`s marginalized / border characters: you need to remember how much, when, and what kind of spices add to the dishes. As a true Bengali women, the characters skillfully prepare �their� traditional dishes. As a result of cooking of two dozen dishes, the smell of mutton curry and pulao (a traditional Indian vegetable pilaf) is especially heard in the rooms. There is a �cultural mix� in the kitchen: Indian dishes are prepared with the help of American household appliances. The �food� concept embodies a cultural phenomenon and allows understanding the features of national Indian cuisine; it is a cultural code that gives meaningful information. The semantic structure of lexical units that fill the �food� concept in Lahiri`s works, as well as cultural and value aspects of this concept are widely represented. It is important to distinguish between home-made daily food or holiday treats, and food as an element of Indian national culture. The writer describes in detail the traditional Indian dishes and the usual, hastily prepared, daily American ones. The reader gets a complete picture of the traditional festive dishes of Indian cuisine. Thus, the structure of the �food� concept can be represented as follows: the names of traditional everyday food (Americans and Bengalis) and traditional American and Bengali holiday dishes. Food is directly connected with gender issues. Eating habits and the way of cooking determine a woman`s identity as well as her difference. Food emphasizes woman`s cultural affiliation: in Lahiri`s writing it is shown that food serves as sacred ritual and art for Indians, in contrast to the American habit of hunger satisfying with semi-finished products. It is noticeable that within Lahiri`s texts the verb �to eat� has a lot of synonyms: to consume, to guzzle, to have, to lunch, to be full of something, to throw down, etc. Using such a variety of lexical and semantic series of one verb, the author reveals the characters` attitude towards traditional Indian cuisine. But what important is not what synonymous series of the word �food� the author uses, but that it conveys Indian culinary customs and traditions. Expressing not meaning but sense, food continues to be an element of Indian national culture.

Leaky Masculinities, Porous Nations, Queercrip Affiliations

Vulnerable Constitutions draws together queer studies and feminist disability studies to produce new visions of queercrip masculinity in twentieth-century US literature and culture. Introducing the concept of "antiprophylactic citizenship," this monograph redefines the contours of masculinity not as invulnerability, but as radical openness, revealing the transformative properties of leaky boundaries in terms of the body as well as the nation-state. Barounis's meditations on immunity, masculinity, and the viral speak presciently to a world altered by pandemics and mass debility.

Collaborative Futures: Arts Funding and Speculative Fictions

According to scholars of literary sociology, US arts institutions—from the federal government to the writers’ colony to the creative writing program—have been central to the shaping of US literature for the better part of a century. This paper offers a preliminary investigation of the global crowdfunding platform Kickstarter as an emerging arts institution. Drawing on Kim Stanley Robinson and Marina Abramović’s artistic collaboration as a case study, the paper argues that the appearance of the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) in Robinson’s novel New York 2140 troubles the author’s stated generic commitments to “realist speculative fiction”—fiction that bases its vision of the future on the state of things in our present. In addition to furnishing uncertain conditions of production for the novel, Kickstarter’s funding model solicits short-form speculative fiction organized around neoliberal selfhood from its artists. With the assistance of Kickstarter’s networked platform, the MAI’s capital campaign reimagined private funding as public performance art, as dutiful civic engagement, and as reward for artists willing to narrate entrepreneurial optimism.

Science Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature

AbstractSince 1965, Asian American authors have been key mediators of science fictionality, defined as a postwar fantasy that associates endless, industrial-led economic expansion with racialized groups of upwardly mobile professionals. This status is a consequence of the occupational concentration of Asian immigrants into professional-managerial careers, especially in scientific and technical fields: a phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) along with the debut works of recent Chinese American women writers, including Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), this article describes a dialectic of science fictionality and post-65 Asian American literature in which the latter develops autopoetic tendencies that register occupational concentration in genre, theme, characterization, and trope. This reorientation of post-65 Asian American literary history to the material conditions of science fictionality, rather than ethnic self-expression, has implications not only for understanding that history but also for generalized periodizations of contemporary US literature like the “genre turn,” which risk eliding the specificity of minority literary histories.