Western Fiction Research Articles

Roy Campbell and the Cowboy-Dandies

With reference to Roy Campbell's notion of an nation, this essay argues that the figure of the cowboy in Campbell's poetry should be read in light of a London cultural scene in the early post-First World War period in which two Modernist performative traditions drew together. The first of these is the energetic celebration of declining frontiers in popular culture through Western film, Western fiction, and rodeo performances, while the second tradition is that of Anglo-European dandyism. Thus, while Campbell's vision of an equestrian brotherhood appears to have colonial roots, I argue that it functions as a generalised ideal, abstracted from a real history of colonialism. Campbell's poetic cowboys are hybrid, labile figures who display spectacular, and apparently redemptive, masculine energy. These figures, I suggest, are emblematic of a Modernist preoccupation, shared with the dandy-writers of the nineteenth century, with the place of individual distinction in the face of the levelling effects of bourgeois and democratic social life. I argue that Campbell's hypermasculinist performances, both personal and poetic, should thus be read as dramatising a typically Modernist symbiosis between the figures of the apparently unrefined frontiersman, and the metropolitan sophisticate.

The Cowboy Prince

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In fall of 2015, Richard Prince exhibited a sculpture titled Cowboy at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea in New York City, which was both predictable and surprising. Prince's long preoccupation with the cowboy image started with the work he produced in the 1980s while working in the tearsheets department of Time magazine. There he became attracted to the images used in Marlboro ads, which employed variations on the mythic, ruggedly handsome character to sell cigarettes. Prince rephotographed the ads with the skills of an amateur, cropping out the logo and ad copy and having them reprinted. That simple action removing the brand identity--stripped the image back to the mythic cowboy-in-landscape by separating it from its intended function. Rephotographing the advertisements began to reverse engineer the process of motivating consumption, focusing on the raw associations triggered by the cowboy image itself. Thereafter (this work continued through the 1990s) Prince's practice became synonymous with the Duchampian tradition of selection, alteration, and critique of authorship. It also aligned with other emerging artists of the time (including Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Sherrie Levine) who were exchanging found objects for found images, repurposing and dissecting a visual culture that had been built up around them for over half a century. Prince later made paintings of cowboys--reworked cover illustrations from cheap Western novels. They served as another forum for Prince to work out his cowboy infatuation--variations on the overdrawn male hero thing itself. Though they demonstrated his willingness to approach the subject with a different medium, the artist's interest in isolating and recontextualizing an existing mythology of images continued. In that sense it was not at all surprising to walk into the Gladstone Gallery and notice Prince's Cowboy--not a photograph or a painting of one, but a sculpture. It appears as a department store mannequin of a young boy, five to seven years old, in spotless buckaroo garb, much like something from an old Sears, Roebuck & Go. catalog. The vintage elements immediately feel like a cheeky resurrection of that early-to-mid-century American cowboy image so romanticized today. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It seems obvious that the cowboy character is one that our culture wants to preserve, even as its authenticity dissolves in the impressions made upon us from the Western genre itself. It is an image connected to the National Rifle Association's rhetoric of the guy with a gun, which seems awfully derivative of American Western fiction but also tied to horribly mutated realities (such as the armed vigilante who recently threatened a Muslim community in rural New York, (1) or the state of Texas legalizing open carry of loaded pistols, (2) or the lone gunman claiming to be a pro-life warrior who killed three people while injuring four others at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, (3) or, as I write this, the armed militia that has occupied a federally owned building at a wildlife refuge in Oregon. (4)) Other blissfully ignored practices, such as Cowboys and Indians facing off' under Friday night lights, perpetuate a symbolic feud in the field of play, while posing real problems in the field of cultural representation (cf. the Washington Redskins). (5) Of course, there are more noble pursuits of the cowboy experience, like the documentary film Unbranded (directed by Phillip Baribeau, 2015), in which four Texas A&M graduates join the effort to save wild mustangs and embark on an extraordinary journey from Mexico to Canada on horseback. Projects like this aim to highlight more civilized ideas like good stewardship of land, livestock, and wildlife--contrasting trigger-happy rugged individualism with environmental awareness and social contribution. After studying the plywood pedestal on which Prince's Cowboy is placed, I realize that the entire piece is cast in bronze--including the pedestal. …

Drinking the Elixir of Nostalgia: Reading Annie Proulx’s “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick”

<p>This essay attempts to interpret contemporary American Writer, Annie Proulx’s short story “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick,” included in <em>Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories II</em>. Applying related historical, sociological, and cultural data and researches, the essay approaches the story by close reading. By exploring the protagonist, Gilbert’s quest for the past values and ethics of the Old West in the contemporary world, this essay presents Proulx’s ambiguous attitude towards those who abides to the old values, despite the sweeping changes. The author argues that Proulxhas shown her views of the oft-discussed issue—nostalgia or progress—in literature, and brought it to a new and profound existential level—a to-be or not-to-be business. At the same time, Proulx has deconstructed American “dime novels” and exposed the delusive nature of this Old West inheritance. Being criticized to be the “new voice”of American Western literature, Proulx has revived the Western fiction and enriched its connotation.</p>

Counter-Counterstorytelling: Rereading Critical Race Theory in Percival Everett’s Assumption

Counter-CounterstorytellingRereading Critical Race Theory in Percival Everett’s Assumption Matthew Mullins (bio) Percival Everett’s story “Warm and Nicely Buried” was first published in Idaho Review in 2001 before appearing at the heart of his 2004 collection, Damned If I Do. The narrative follows deputies Lem Becker and Warren Fragua as they investigate the mysterious death of a young man named José Marotta and the subsequent disappearance of José’s body from the morgue of their small New Mexico town. Warren, the only Native on the sheriff’s department payroll, reappears unchanged in Everett’s 2011 novel Assumption, but Lem is reimagined as Ogden Walker, the reserved and oftentimes out-of-place black deputy, whose heroism and integrity position him squarely in the tradition of classic lawmen of the American West. In Assumption, the José Marotta case is just one in a series of cases that culminates with the murder of Terry Lowell, a local Fish and Game officer. From the outset of this final episode everyone but those who know Ogden best suspect him of Terry’s murder. As the story reaches its climax, Ogden has exhausted every possible lead that might vindicate him, but as it turns out his battle for exoneration has been fueled by guilt not innocence. In a startling twist, Warren confronts Ogden at the scene of the crime in the middle of the night: “Warren couldn’t see his friend’s face, not that he would have recognized him if he could. ‘I think you killed this man right here. Somehow Terry Lowell found you with the body and you shot him, too.’” To which Ogden responds: “That’s pretty much it” (Everett, Assumption 224). With these four words, spoken in a shockingly matter-of-fact tone, the novel capitalizes on its title, eclipsing assumptions about its hero, the themes of guilt and innocence, and the Western genre all in a single revelatory flash. Assumption is not Everett’s first rodeo. Amongst his previous novels at least five have received critical attention for their ties to the Western, including Walk Me to the Distance (1985), God’s Country (1994), Watershed (1996), Wounded (2005), and Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001). As Ogden Walker’s literary genealogy suggests, Everett has also taken up the Western genre in his short fiction. All three of his earlier collections, The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair (1987), Big Picture (1996), and Damned If I Do (2004), trace the contours of at least a few Western towns and characters, as does 2015’s Half an Inch of Water. Literary critics have almost unanimously treated Everett’s Western fiction as revisionist history committed to rewriting the Western with an eye toward the narratives of oppression and marginalization that often go unrecognized or unowned in the genre. Yves Bonnemère and Leland Krauth offer insightful readings of Everett’s characters, who often appear or even claim to be traditional Western character types, but in satirical and ironic ways turn out to be something else. Curt Marder, for instance, the white, would-be hero of God’s Country, “claims to be a real cowboy, a tough fellow, but from the very beginning what he says [End Page 457] points in the other direction” (Bonnemère 149–50). Among other problems, the should-be good-hearted cowboy is plagued by an unshakable racism. “Confronted with black men as well as Indians,” Krauth says of Marder, “he is full of prejudice; he considers all racial ‘others’ not just inferior but even sub-human, savages beneath the law, with no claims to justice” (319). William R. Handley and Michael K. Johnson have examined Everett’s Western writing as a broader body of work, and note two distinct rewriting approaches, the one almost slapstick and the other more subtle. Handley maintains that “if Everett’s other westerns, God’s Country and Grand Canyon, Inc., are mischievous re-workings of generic conventions that call to mind Mark Twain, then Watershed is a non-formulaic but equally revisionist western” (305). Johnson also sees Watershed as a turning point in Everett’s Western fiction, noting that the “more recent stories are often developmental narratives that trace the evolution of...

Islands erased by snow and ice: approaching the spatial philosophy of cold water island imaginaries

Representations of islands in Western fiction typically revolve around tropical islands. Critical discourse tends to reproduce this tendency and rarely addresses the specific spatial poetics of cold-water island fictions. This paper discusses three texts that poetically deploy the geographical inventory of northern snow- and icescapes to challenge essentialist assumptions about islands: D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The man who loved islands”, Georgina Harding’s novel The solitude of Thomas Cave, and Michel Serres’s treatise Le passage du Nord-Ouest. It is argued that these texts reflect on the importance of the horizontal and vertical components of material and textual topographies for the conception and experience of islands. In all three, the physical transformation of the islandscapes by snow and ice serves to put the island concept itself into question. Serres’s philosophical text geopoetically portrays the Arctic archipelago of the Northwest Passage to explore the reciprocal relations between language and the material world. In Lawrence and Harding, the snow-covered islands cease to function as economically productive spaces and turn into complex spatial figures offering a philosophical meditation on islandness as a contradictory and multifaceted condition.

New Literary Portraits of the American West: Contemporary Nevada Fiction by David Rio (review)

Reviewed by: New Literary Portraits of the American West: Contemporary Nevada Fiction by David Rio Cheryll Glotfelty David Rio, New Literary Portraits of the American West: Contemporary Nevada Fiction. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. 300pp. Cloth, $94.95; e-book, $94.95. Although many fine studies of western American literature have appeared in the last ten years, David Rio’s New Literary Portraits of the American West is the first book-length study of Nevada fiction. In this interpretive survey Rio regards contemporary Nevada fiction as both participating in larger trends in new western writing and also possessing some distinctive themes. Nevada fiction reflects broad changes in western writing, such as an inclination to critique the myth of the West in favor of historical accuracy and realism, the depiction of a pluralistic West with a rich tapestry of ethnic diversity, the growing voice of women and representation of female experience, a keen awareness of environmental issues, and explorations of urban experience. Indeed, Rio asserts, the literary West [End Page 262] is at last escaping the noose of formula Westerns to mature as a diverse range of literary fiction of the highest order. New Literary Portraits adopts a three-part structure, covering new western fiction, fictional portraits of Nevada, and trends in contemporary mainstream fiction set in Nevada. In part 1, Rio contrasts formula Westerns with new western fiction, the latter taking a cue from New Western History in its revisionist impulse to reinterpret place, interrogate myths, and turn a realistic rather than romantic eye on the past. In part 2, Rio offers an overview of twentieth-century Nevada fiction up until the 1970s, which, with the major exception of Walter Van Tilburg Clark, recycles stereotypes by playing up mining and gambling, in keeping with Nevada’s national reputation as the “silver state” and the “sin state.” The last forty years have seen a blossoming of serious Nevada fiction, much of it written from a resident’s perspective. In part 3, which comprises 70 percent of the book, Rio analyzes this significant body of work as epitomizing trends in new western fiction, while also exploring unique themes such as Basque immigrants, the Mormon experience, atomic testing and nuclear waste, and Las Vegas. Rio groups his readings of contemporary Nevada fiction into four subsections: “Reinterpreting the Wild West,” “A Multicultural and Feminized West,” “The Environmental West,” and “The New Western City.” Readers will find Rio’s thoughtful and accessible treatments, if occasionally overlapping, to be an enticing entrée into contemporary Nevada fiction, featuring works by Robert Laxalt, Frank Bergon, Thomas Sanchez, Monique Urza, Phyllis Barber, Willy Vlautin, Claire Vaye Watkins, Tupelo Hassman, Jana Richman, Ann Ronald, H. Lee Barnes, Charles Bock, Laura McBride, and others. Does it seem ironic that the first full-length study of Nevada fiction is written by a European and published by a Swiss press? In the introduction the author reveals that he is “a non-American, non-westerner, and non-Nevadan” (18). (David Rio is a professor of American literature at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, where he coordinates a research group, rewest, specializing in the literature of the American West.) I find Rio’s outsider status to be an advantage. Most obviously, Rio does not suffer from the prevailing US prejudice against Nevada. He analyzes authors who have been neglected by US-based critics with [End Page 263] the respect that their work merits. Secondly, the author’s distant vantage point allows him to see the forest and not just the trees. His characterizations of emerging patterns in new western and Nevada fiction are helpful guides for general readers and teachers and might have been missed by someone more immersed in the details and daily life of the culture. And finally, Rio is more open to taking up regional topics than most American critics are. These days it is rare to find scholarly studies of the literature of a US state. The present volume’s willingness to define its study as fiction about Nevada—if unfashionable—yields valuable insights. Rio suggests that “present-day Nevada writing exemplifies the power of fiction to reinvent both a state and a region” (249). I...

The Image of Russia on the Western Screen in the Ideological Confrontation Epoch (1946-1991): From the Late Stalinism to the "Thaw", from "DDtente" and "Stagnation" to the "Perestroika"

This article included the analysis of evolution Russian image representation on the Western (USA, UK, Germany, Canada, France, Italy) screen -- of the period of ideological confrontation (1946-1991): ideological and social trends, myths, stereotypes, illusions, classification of the contents’ models and modifications of genres. The main conclusion: the image of Russia in the majority of the Western fiction films of 1946-1991 is treated as an image of something enemy, alien, different, often hostile...

The Image of Russia on the Western Screen: The Present Stage (1992-2013)

This article included the analysis of evolution Russian image representation on the Western (USA, UK, Germany, Canada, France, Italy) screen – of the period of post-communist modern times (1992-2013): ideological and social trends, myths, stereotypes, illusions, classification of the contents’ models and modifications of genres. The main conclusion: the image of Russia in the majority of the Western fiction films of 1992-2013 is still treated as an image of something, “alien”, “different”, often hostile.

Vision à la dérobée : un lieu commun et ses variations

Kaimami (stolen glimpses) is an important motif in The Tale of Genji, the Japanese equivalent of the scene of love at first sight in Western fiction. Detailed analysis of three examples of kaimami leads to a consideration of variations produced by this motif; the objective is to identify the principal components of the kaimami scene and its significance in the exploration of the mechanisms of desire and illusion at the heart of the Genji.

Creating Anew, Again: Deserted Islands and Textual Inhabitations in Bernardo Atxaga'sObabakoak

Desert islands haunt the Western imagination: textually, cinematically and philosophically, in critical thinking and in reality television, artists, writers and filmmakers seek to inhabit the terra incognita of the empty isle. In these cultural productions, the island takes many guises: it can be a place where rules no longer apply, where Shakespeare’s Prospero brings down magical storms and Golding’s schoolboys descend into savagery; or it can be a place where rules are re-imposed, where Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe colonizes and cultivates the island around him in order to replicate the social subsystem he inhabited prior to his shipwreck. Defoe’s 1719 novel is undoubtedly the most famous Western fiction of desert island life and, just as Crusoe himself bestrides his island, so Defoe’s text bestrides twentieth-century cultural productions of, and about, desert islands, inspiring multiple variants, parodies, and ekphratic translations. In fiction, Michel Tournier’s phenomenological rewriting of the Crusoe story in his 1967 Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday, or, The Other Island) converts the island from passive recipient of Crusoe’s colonization into a life force in its own right. Concrete Island, J. G. Ballard’s 1974 retelling of the story, moves his castaway to a traffic island beneath three motorways near London, morphing Crusoe’s deserted sea into a roaring mass of transportation which proves no less alienating to the protagonist. In cinema, Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 film Cast Away updates the Crusoe story to 1995, replacing Defoe’s sailor protagonist with a Fed-ex employee, and Man Friday with a Wilson Sporting Goods volleyball. The desert island has also proved inspiring

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel (review)

Reviewed by: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel Edwin Whitewolf The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. By Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 416 pages, $28.00. Within the introduction to The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Glenn Frankel explains that what he finds most striking about the film is John Ford’s “ability to weave myth and truth into a seamless fabric” (8). This book is Frankel’s attempt at deconstructing the myths behind the film: the kidnapping of a white settler girl named Cynthia Ann Parker, her assimilation into Comanche society, and her “rescue” decades later by the Texas Rangers. Frankel elucidates how this history has been written, rewritten, and reinterpreted by a number of people and groups, including Ford in his 1956 film The Searchers. The first two sections of the book compose the most compelling half of the narrative when Frankel deals specifically with the mythology of how Parker’s story has been passed down and translated throughout the years by her white and Comanche descendants, as well as by US western writer Alan LeMay and filmmaker John Ford. Frankel deftly deconstructs a number of interwoven mythologies involving white settlers, Comanches, Texas Rangers, western fiction writers, directors, producers, Navajo actors, movie stars, and he convincingly illustrates how the story of one woman became a part of the mainstream US consciousness. Also admirable is how Frankel privileges histories written by women, representing much of the mythology surrounding Parker as the product of male creation: “Each of these male authors created and buffed the macho frontier legend using whatever facts fit their vision and discarding those that were less convenient. But occasionally, someone came along who gathered a more modest, fact-based account” (151). Thus, he privileges the voices of Rachel Plummer, Marion Ross, Susan Parker St. John, and Araminta Taulman in telling this history. It is disappointing, however, that Frankel settles upon a particular representation of the Comanches. He elides the history and cycles of violence that had shaped Comanche/Euroamerican relations for hundreds of years previous to the kidnapping of Parker and portrays the Comanche people largely as marauding, baby-killing rapists bent on the destruction of white bodies. While he comments about the regrettable way US citizens and the US government treated Native Americans in general, he claims, “The modern image of Indians—nurtured by the Native American rights movement, revisionist historians, and the film Dances with Wolves—has been one of profoundly spiritual and environmentally friendly genocide victims seeking harmony with the land and humankind. But the Comanches were nobody’s victims and no one’s friends. They were magnificent, brutal, and relentless” (32). While only a revisionist historian could portray the Comanches as a peaceable or docile people, Frankel portrays them using the language one [End Page 490] would use in describing the great white shark in Jaws (1975). He largely ignores that the Comanches fought back against the Euroamerican encroachment that had dispossessed them from their land and spread disease and famine among them for generations. Additionally, many Native American studies scholars and many people within the Native American rights movement, or even those familiar with it, would take issue with Frankel’s suggestion that they have nurtured an image of Native Americans as anything other than human beings who are not simply figures of a brutal or a romanticized past. Finally, is Frankel proposing that Native Americans were not victims of genocide? Is genocide a word that can only be applied to those victims that can be deemed friendly or incapable of resisting? In the introduction, Frankel explains what he found most fascinating about The Searchers when he watched it in his youth: “What entranced me most were the Comanches. … Ford’s portrait of them is mostly one-dimensional: Indians in The Searchers are for the most part murderers and rapists” (7). It is, therefore, ironic that Frankel largely portrays the Comanches in the same fashion. This lack of historical contextualization is especially frustrating because, otherwise, the book is truly captivating. Frankel’s illustration of how a specific history gave birth to a number of mythologies and how those mythologies in turn...

Leadership That Settled the Frontier

This idea brief explores the leadership lessons displayed by the characters of Louis L’Amour’s western novels. Western fiction can be a powerful tool to engage students and demonstrate many leadership theories and models. This brief examines how L’Amour’s characters can be used to illustrate Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leaders. The author will demonstrate how western literature, specifically L’Amour’s novels, can be a tool to help students see leadership in a new light.

Do You Have Another Good Western? Westerns in the ContemporaryAmerican Public Library

Western fiction, in the view of many authors and publishers affiliated with that genre as well as librarians, feel that the Western has become severely marginalized and, as a result, is more difficult to select to ensure well rounded collections. This study examines the collections of 45 select American public libraries to determine the degree to which 40 non-Spur Award-winning titles are found in their popular fiction collections.

Leadership That Settled the Fronties

This idea brief explores the leadership lessons dis played by the characters of Louis L’Amour’s western novels. Western fiction can be a powerful tool to engage students and demonstrate many leader ship theories and models. This brief examines how L’Amour’s characters can be used to illustrate Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices of Ex emplary Leaders. The author will demonstrate how western literature, spe cifically L’Amour’s novels, can be a tool to help students see leadersh ip in a new light.

Wenyi and the branding of early Chinese film

ABSTRACTThis article reviews the role of wenyi in Chinese cinema from the turn of the twentieth century to the breakout of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Wenyi/letters and arts, a loan word from the Japanese bungei, was associated with western fiction, and concepts of humanism, equality and freedom. These concepts were propagated by translators of Japanese and western literature, many of whom belonged to the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly School and were key agents in the nascent culture industry, leaving their marks in intertwined fields, including literature and cinema. By tracing their crossover activities we find evidence of the fertility of the wenyi concept in early cinema. Furthermore, our findings show that in order to sell motion pictures, the early film industry tended to brand film as a new type of wenyi commodity, thereby mobilizing wenyi as a marketing strategy to help purvey movies to audiences with cosmopolitan aspirations.

“I Am Looking for a Good Western …”: The Western in the American Public Library of the 21st Century

Western fiction, in the view of many authors and publishers in that field as well as librarians, has become severely marginalized and difficult to select. This study examines the collections of 45 select public libraries to determine the degree to which 38 Spur Award–winning titles were included in popular fiction collections.

Who is the Man with No Name? Names and Namelessness in Western Fiction

Who is the Man with No Name? Names and Namelessness in Western Fiction

Singing Sci-Fi Cowboys: Gene Autry And Genre Amalgamation In The Phantom Empire (1935)

This essay examines how The Phantom Empire (1935) – a twelve-part Poverty Row serial starring Gene Autry – combines the musical, western and science fiction genres. While several attempts were made at amalgamating the musical with science-fiction in 1930s Hollywood, such efforts did not ultimately lead to a sustained sub-genre. Comparisons are drawn with the major studio musical/sci-fi efforts Just Imagine (1930) and It’s Great to Be Alive (1933) as a way of contrasting how the musical intersects with science-fiction between Poverty Row and the major studios, as well as how the additional genre of the western affects the dynamic between generic categories in The Phantom Empire. By examining how these films used particular generic elements within their narratives, how they were positioned for exhibitors and audiences at the time, and how film scholarship has subsequently understood the theoretical functions of various generic elements in these films, this essay attempts to find new perspectives on how the generic conventions of the musical, science-fiction, and western genres affected one another in 1930s cinema.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come”

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come” Bill Hardwig (bio) Cormac McCarthy’s fiction is frequently associated with the tradition of literary naturalism. Barcley Owens, for example, considers McCarthy’s novels in the context of theories of naturalism, and Steven Frye articulates McCarthy’s “romantic naturalism,” while James Giles argues that contemporary naturalism comprises a “multilayered determinism” visible in Outer Dark (2). Dana Phillips characterizes McCarthy’s narration as “radically unanthropocentric” (446), and Eric Carl Link discusses McCarthy’s critique of the “cosmic optimism” of American exceptionalism (“McCarthy” 157). Especially in his early work, but really in nearly all of his fiction, McCarthy is committed to a project of peeling away social and cultural conventions in order to explore the non-contingent humanity/animality that undergirds our existence. This reduction of life to its barest realities is one that characterizes many classic naturalist texts. Such a commitment to a naturalist perspective, however, makes McCarthy’s work fit less obviously within science fiction or speculative fiction more broadly. Part of McCarthy’s naturalist impulse involves looking back to a distant, primal, and biological past, one that is antecedent to contemporary social mores or speculative thoughts about the future. At times, McCarthy’s backward gaze and his love of archaic language feel stubbornly resistant to the goals of science fiction. In Future Present, Michael Pinsky characterizes contemporary science fiction as being inextricably tied to the undetermined future, a genre that “favors indeterminacy: probabilities, chaos, wave functions. It resists its own traditional assertions of certainty. . . . Science fiction writes the future. And according to sf, our future apparently consists of both external encounters—technological marvels (and horrors), aliens, and outer space—and internal encounters—the mysteries of the human mind and body” (13). For the reasons I mentioned [End Page 38] above, this description does not mesh well with much of McCarthy’s fiction, especially his Tennessee novels and the early Western fiction. It does, however, resonate with McCarthy’s most popular and recent novel, The Road (2006), which is heavily invested in the uncertainty of the future and contains both Pinsky’s sense of dramatic external encounters (post-apocalyptic destruction) and internal ones (the thoughts of the protagonist as he struggles to survive and to justify this struggle). How, then, to account for McCarthy’s science fiction turn in The Road? What does this shift from the distant past to the indeterminate future do for the ways we conceptualize McCarthy’s work? In this essay, I argue that McCarthy looks to science fiction’s gaze into the future as a means of exploring the issues of trauma, loss, and mourning in a manner different from his earlier work. By imagining the unrealized and destroyed future, The Road reverses McCarthy’s tendency to remove from his narrative the entanglement of modern objects. In this speculative novel, he swivels his orientation towards, rather than away from, cultural artifacts, towards “things.” Bill Brown has developed an approach to literary texts that he calls “thing theory,” an approach that explores the “complex roles that objects have played in American lives” (“Thing” 12). McCarthy’s intense treatment of human-made things in The Road, the proliferation of his use of the term “thing” in the novel, and the tender treatment of these things by the book’s narrator, so different from McCarthy’s desire to shed his narrative of frivolous objects of civilizations, can best be accounted for by thinking about the aesthetic choices he makes when imagining the future. In other words, most of McCarthy’s fiction looks to the past, or the soon-to-be-paved-over present, and sees the trappings of culture and materialism as part of an entire system of forces that lead to artificial and false engagements with living and the world.1 In The Road, these trappings become filled with a radiant power, as McCarthy imagines the disappearance of the world and considers the world that will never be. When faced with the erasure of our current culture, things become resonant with an at times nostalgic meaning for what is gone and at other times a poignant meaning of the expectation of a future that such things evoke...

Allegory and the Critique of Sovereignty: Ismail Kadare's Political Theologies

In a controversial attempt to integrate African, Chinese, and Spanish literatures into world literary canons, Fredric Jameson argued postcolonial texts are necessarily and inevitably allegorical. Jameson proposed all texts, by virtue of their relations to communities embedded within colonial matrix, were national allegories. Whereas Western fiction enforces a radical split between and public, between poetic and political, in literatures, Jameson specified, the intellectual is always in way or another a political intellectual: private individual destiny is always an allegory of embattled situation of public third-world culture and (69, 74, 69). Jameson's theses have been contested subsequently, while category itself has come under substantial scrutiny (see Ahmad and Lazarus). Nonetheless, general alignment between allegory and role of intellectual in societies undergoing postcolonial and socialist transformations bears uncannily on literature of Eastern European well Middle Eastern nations, wherein boundaries between so-called first, second, and third world literatures are permeable experience of dictatorial power in age of multinational capital. (1) Jameson's categorizations did not encompass novelist Ismail Kadare (b. 1936) nor Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), although both authors crafted substantial political allegories from non-European histories. Mahfouz's first three novels, published in 1930s, focused on Pharaonic Egypt. The Egyptian author used past archives as vehicles to critique current social and political problems beneath a historical veneer (Stock vii). (2) Mahfouz returned to Pharaonic Egypt towards end of his life, authoring texts such Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth (1985). (3) Confronted by analogous paradoxes of power, and Egyptian novelist treat distant past less a source of knowledge of individual than a means of making fiction speak, allegorically, to present. For both writers, allegory at once neutralizes political message inscribed into their fictions and makes publication of their work possible. This essay considers Kadare's fictions participants in what can broadly be defined a postcolonial conversation, and elucidations of dynamic Jameson terms third-word allegory, whereby intellectual uses his fictions to comment on society and to pursue, through fictional means, its transformation. Buildings and Bridges During height of its power, Ottoman Empire's bewildered subjects observe Visegrad bridge--constructed in their midst in 1577 and marketed a gift of Ottoman state--with dismay. They now saw with their own eyes, Ivo Andric narrates in his classic The Bridge on Drina (1945), that these glorious buildings involved so much disorder and unrest, effort and expense (Na drini cuprija 22). Observing bridge arching over Drina River, connecting East to West, villagers wonder if generous bridge bequest was blessing they had assumed it to be. Half a century later, in what has been called an Albanian response (Elsie, Literature 173) to Andric's novel, Kadare echoed ambivalence expressed by Visegrad villagers in blunter terms. All great building[s], declared Kadare's storyteller in The Three-Arched Bridge (1978), resemble crimes, and vice versa (94). (4) In gazing at columns, can clearly see blood spattering marble. Given violence is one of several persistent themes forge conceptual cohesion within Andric's seemingly fragmentary narrative (Kokobobo, To or Not to Grieve 69), task of critic is to elucidate why Balkan narrations of state's sovereignty so frequently coalesce around violence. The ambivalences expressed by Andric's and Kadare's protagonists crystallize burden of twentieth-century Balkan narrative: to show how state's violence compromises foundations of its sovereignty. …