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Queer Studies Now; or, The (Political) Economy, Stupid American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Jordan Alexander Stein
The 1990s witnessed the origin of a decades-long “discipline problem” in queer studies, a conflict between empirical and theoretical approaches, and the two monographs under review—lesbian and gay historian Marc Stein’s Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism and queer theorist Lee Edelman’s Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing—might seem like excellent candidates to reprise
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Trilling Redux American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Geraldine Murphy
This short essay considers the cultural and historical context of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished, unpublished novel in response to Michael Kalisch’s essay for this issue. Written in the 1940s, The Journey Abandoned (editor’s title) reprises Trilling’s preoccupations in The Liberal Imagination with anti-Stalinist liberalism and Cold War modernism and emphasizes the importance of American literature to
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William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969) American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Matthew Pethers
This article takes the distinctive publishing history of William Williams’s Robinsonade novel Mr. Penrose as a prompt to challenge conventional assumptions about the temporal logic of textual recovery. Scholars typically make a case for the value of forgotten or neglected texts by emphasizing forms of “creative anachronism” in which an author is said to be ahead of their time in ways only recognizable
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Archives of Rejection American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Joshua Kotin
What can we learn about unpublished literature—and literature as such—by studying rejected literature? Each of the article’s four sections connects an archival document or set of documents to a topic in literary history and theory. In the first, a ledger tracking submissions to Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1882 leads to a discussion about recovery projects. In the second, a century of Houghton Mifflin
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History in Oblivion American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Timothy Yu
The new editions of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Exilée and Temps Morts from UC Press provide an opportunity for reflection on the texts’ histories. First published in 1982, just before Cha’s tragic murder, Dictée languished in obscurity until being rediscovered by Asian American critics in the 1990s. In the last few years, Dictée has gained increasing mainstream recognition, but that recognition
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“Somewhere listening for my name”: Black Queer Kinship and the Poetry of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Rona Cran
This essay is about poetry, publication, and intergenerational caretaking in the context of a mass death event—the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It reads the work of contemporary Black, queer American poets Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, and Pamela Sneed for their intertextual and interpersonal engagement with queer and of-color literary texts and voices (in particular, those of Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon, and
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Unpublishing as Form: Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and the Thresholds of Periodical Publication American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Francesca Bratton
Rejections are a given in any poet’s career. This essay considers how rejections and the idea of the unpublished fragment might shape poetic form, how practical decisions might turn into aesthetic ones. Both Hart Crane and Jack Spicer had careers among magazines, the experiments of their writing entwined with ephemeral publishing cultures and communities. This essay explores how, through their own
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American Literary History in Pieces American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Bryan Sinche
Daniel Diez Couch’s American Fragments offers a scholarly analysis of the fragment, a mainstay of American print culture in the early national period. In American Fragments, Couch argues that fragments were central to both American aesthetics and American political culture. Insisting that the fragment was an inclusive and progressive form that invited readers to consider the relationship between a
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Missing and All Too Present: The Limits of the Unpublished American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Adam Rounce
This essay examines two peculiar examples of the unpublished from two eccentric authors: Joe Gould’s fragmentary Oral History (probably commenced in the 1910s) and Arthur Inman’s Diary (the 17 million words of which run from the 1920s to Inman’s death in 1963). Neither of these works can be fully published in any conventional way, and the essay examines the reasons why, looking at the history and myths
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Trilling Unfinished American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Michael Kalisch
This essay offers a close reading of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished second novel, The Journey Abandoned (2008). Drawing on Trilling’s essays and private journals, it considers how The Journey Abandoned’s unfinishedness speaks not only to some of the thematic preoccupations of the novel itself—a story of thwarted literary ambition and wasted creative talent—but also to some of the broader currents in
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Data Bodies American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Rebecca B Clark
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
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Unpublished Saints: Making Mexican Martyrs in American Archives American Literary History Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Anita Huízar-Hernández
In the early 1940s US–Mexico borderlands, two siblings named Carlos and María de la Torre dedicated years of their lives to drafting, revising, and completing, but not publishing, a 32-page biographical profile of their close friend Fidel Muro, who had been executed by the Mexican government for his participation in the Cristero War (1926–1929). The completed semblanza, which the De la Torres titled
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Writing the Indigenous Americas American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Mark Alan Mattes
Rather than reading these works as polemics invested in an either/or choice on the matter of expansive or narrow definitions of writing, I suggest that each contribution be understood as an act of scholarly generosity that proffers decolonial ways of interpreting the communicative media of the Indigenous Americas.
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Genre Fiction without Shame American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Andrew Goldstone
When literary scholars enter the terra incognita of cheap fiction, they risk mistaking established customs of the land for baleful signs of the times. Commercial fiction has a history of its own whose internal logic would be worth understanding more clearly, and not only in opposition to literary fiction, in order to avoid reifying either.
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A Plantation Illogic: Narrating Proslavery’s Imagined Futures American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Tomos Hughes
This essay explores the temporal and narrative dimensions of speculative proslavery thought, considering proslavery political economy in particular as a genre that articulates a vision of capitalist modernity unbound by liberal accounts of national futurity. This defense of slavery has its formal correlate in an ambivalent embrace of the speculative novel as a means for imagining slavery’s extension
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Childhood Studies and the Politics of Horror American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Laura Soderberg
Three [new] scholarly works … examine narratives in which childhood frightens both the children themselves and, more often, the adults observing childhood. … The childhoods they show can be both other and othering.
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Character and Conduct American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Jeannine Marie DeLombard
The Robinsons’ lawsuit raised the question of just who embodied servitude in the post-Reconstruction US: the formerly enslaved, African-descended passenger or the normatively white railroad conductor? Focusing on the classical, medieval, and early modern periods, recent books by Julie Stone Peters, Noémie Ndiaye, and Urvashi Chakravarty offer Americanists fresh perspectives on the intersecting discourses
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Towards the Cli-Fi Historical Novel; Or, Climate Futures Past in Recent Fiction American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Greg Forter
In The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson argues that the historical novel of the future will have to be science-fictional. My essay contends that it will have to be climate-fictional. Like Jameson, I focus on the connections between late capital’s reification of the present and the forms of time-consciousness that such reifications foreclose. But, I place Jameson into dialogue with Jonathan Crary
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Washed Ashore at High Tide: Music in Contemporary Science Fiction American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Eric Weisbard
Music, with its strong role in the politics of memory, has socialized the linguistically speculative, giving science fiction a groove that bends prose for queer, Black, and indie-minded futurity.
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Mark Twain, the Talking Cure, and Literary Form American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Max Cavitch
[The] significance [of Mark Twain’s Autobiography] for the story of mental health in America has as much to do with its form as with its content—an innovative autobiographical form that Twain crafted not only out of personal upheavals but also with acute insight into the depth psychology of his time.
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The Madness of America American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Sander L Gilman
The essays in this volume of American Literary History devoted to the echoes of medical discourse in American literary culture represent the best of our contemporary approaches to the Medical Humanities. In my essay-comment, I pose the question about how “American” such queries are in the cases presented. My answer is that they are very American, often in surprising ways.American patients’ central
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Resistance and Other Pathologized Products of Madness American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 David T Mitchell
Impositions of madness revisit a founding dispossession that undergirds settler colonialism in the Americas as the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and resources and African slave removals. . . . In taking up this diagnostic “in-between,” both works endeavor to rescue madness from the cultural work it performs as pathologizing of so-called Black barbarity and so-called Indigenous
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Modeling Therapy as Discourse in Twentieth-Century American Literature American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Mark Algee-Hewitt, Lisa Mendelman, Anna Mukamal, Kendra Terry
This article uses quantitative methods of cultural analytics in order to trace points of contact between the discourse of therapy as it emerges in the encounter between patient and clinician and in the language of twentieth-century US novels. Our computational analysis moves away from considering therapy as a diagnostic tool, either for characters or authors, and towards thinking about therapy as a
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Fighting for Real: Truth and American War Memory American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Jonathan Vincent
This essay-review considers two recent books on the subject of American veteran memoir—Stephen Cushman’s The General’s Civil War (2021) and Myra Mendible’s American War Stories (2021). Surveying military conflicts centered on the US Civil War and the more recent wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan, both authors examine a range of veteran nonfiction writing, and with the explicit purpose of speaking to
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The Disordered Ordinary American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Shari Goldberg
How do we notice when illness is present amid the ordinary, when illness turns and stretches it, without presuming a rupture must occur?
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Comics and American Cultural Policy American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Bart Beaty
This review considers the contributions of two 2021 monographs—Christopher J. Gilbert’s Caricature and National Character: The United States at War and Paul Hirsch’s Pulp Empire: A Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism—each of which examines the role of cartooning in shaping attitudes towards warfare, imperialism, and nationalism in the US in the twentieth century.The highly repetitive and remarkably
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The Mismeasure of Manabozho: Unsettling the Science of the Mind in Henry R. Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Ittai Orr
This article recovers early Native American writing that challenges the premises of nineteenth-century mental science and its support for colonialism. It demonstrates how the manuscripts and correspondences of Irish-Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her brother William Johnston, particularly Johnston’s translation of the Anishinaabe story of the simultaneously clever and foolish trickster Manabozho
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Beyond Diagnosis: Representing the Hotline in The Slender Thread American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Hannah Zeavin
Revisiting the little-noted 1965 film, The Slender Thread, this article argues that its representation of the suicide hotline constellates midcentury anxieties concerning psychiatric care, race, and gender. The Slender Thread provides a story of the suicide hotline at an “early crossroads” in the history of the suicide hotline as it “turned . . . toward cure and the carceral while gloving that power
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Madness, and What Passes for Civilization: The Way We Diagnose Now American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Jonathan Sadowsky
Two new books, one by a journalist and one by a historian, reveal enduring and novel paradoxes of mental illness and its treatment. The mentally ill are, perhaps by definition, people whose perception of reality departs from the consensual. Yet they often have uncanny insights that elude the healthy. Sometimes the mentally ill value aspects of their illness experience but also welcome the relief from
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Diagnosis, Literature, and Legitimation American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Andrew Gaedtke
This commentary responds to several patterns in the articles that constitute the special issue on “Diagnosing America” and underscores questions of legitimacy related to the history of psychiatric diagnoses. Clinical diagnosis often operates as a speech-act through which a patient’s distress is made recognizable and legitimated. However, diagnostic categories have long been plagued by questions of
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Crossing Forms American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Elda Tsou
The turn in Asian American studies to questions of Indigeneity and settler colonialism is of recent vintage considering that in the 1910s, Thind and Ozawa both grappled with their vexed relation to the figure of the native.
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Diagnostic Logic and Forensic Reading: The Case of Wieland American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Lindsey Grubbs
At the end of the eighteenth century, professional and lay audiences alike negotiated the lines between mental health and disorder, questioning whether criminal behavior, for example, laid within medicine’s jurisdiction. This essay examines the role of literature in developing a “diagnostic logic” that trained readers in evolving forms of mental surveillance. First, it shows how physicians like Benjamin
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How (and How Not) to Study Porn American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Kathleen Lubey
Over the past several decades, porn studies has cohered as an interdisciplinary field built by scholars of feminism, race, media studies, history, literature, sociology, gender studies, and queer theory. The most compelling recent work in the field, like Heather Berg’s Porn Work (2021) and Steven Ruszczycky’s Vulgar Genres (2021), approaches pornography as a broad textual and cultural field rich with
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Diagnosing America: The Literatures of Mental Health in the US American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Lisa Mendelman, Gordon Hutner
Once one is alive to it, scholarship on the literatures of mental health in the US seems to be everywhere, though it is evolving out of so many different sources that its parameters as a subfield can be hard to establish. That is, many studies not overtly focused on psychology and well-being investigate these concerns—from studies of national political mindsets to gendered, racialized, and otherwise
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Polypharma Fiction American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Beth Blum
This article examines how the rise of polypharmacy changes the novel genre’s response to the pain of anxiety and its narrative interest. Necessarily focusing its scope while also registering the fluidity, complexity, and exigency of contemporary psychopharmacological experience, it focuses specifically on how anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications are activating an ongoing reassessment among
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The Curious Case of Tommy (Woodrow) Wilson American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Martin Halliwell
This essay review explores the representation of the twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, in a curious project involving Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and US diplomat William C. Bullitt that began soon after Wilson’s death in 1924. The article focuses on political scientist Patrick Weil’s investigative account of this collaborative project in his 2023 book The Madman
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Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Our Discipline American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Faye Halpern
This essay situates Marianne Noble’s Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson (2019) and Hannah Walser’s Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (2022) in the current conversation our discipline has been having about sympathy/empathy. Noble and Walser describe ways of knowing other minds
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Dickens and Shakespeare and Longfellow, Oh My!: Staging the Fan Canon at the Nineteenth-Century Authors’ Carnivals American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Michael D’Alessandro
Beginning in the 1870s, the short-lived fad of “Authors’ Carnivals” swept through American cities. At each carnival, hundreds of locals costumed themselves as famous literary characters, performing amateur theatricals and tableaux vivants based on their favorite books. Unexpected character combinations frequently appeared on the same stage. Shakespeare’s Falstaff stood beside Dickens’s Little Nell;
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The Anthropocene and the Apocalypse American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Michael Newbury
This essay reviews recent scholarly work on EcoHorror and Post-Apocalyptic science fiction. It pays particular attention to the influence of Stacey Alaimo’s call for attention to the ethics of “transcorporeality” when it comes to reading horror, a need to imagine the human and nonhuman not as a binary but as intermeshed and mutually dependent. Hybridity in horror might thus present something not monstrous
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Whites Aren’t Alright American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Jon Mitchell
This essay evaluates how the three writers under review contribute to a persistent discussion about American identity and the many debates that still circulate around it—what it is and isn’t, and who it includes, fails to include, or shouldn’t include. Individually, each author tries to add nuance and contemporary problematics to the debates. Collectively, moreover, they remind the reader that, despite
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And Where that Language Does Not Yet Exist American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 L H Stallings
This essay-review is centered on two recently published contemporary works about language, literature, embodiment, and ritual: Ana-Maurine Lara’s Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (2020) and Mecca Jamila Sullivan’s The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Poetics in the African Diaspora (2021). Exploring creative and critical praxis as method and object of study, both authors provide innovative studies
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On Reading Berlant Reading the World American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Robyn Wiegman
This essay offers a close reading of Lauren Berlant’s posthumously published book, On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022), while addressing its place in the critic’s body of work, especially in relation to the field changing project of Cruel Optimism (2011).This is a Lauren Berlant book . . . which means that readers are tasked with following a critical eye that has grown increasingly more interested
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Trust Exercise: The Form of Race in the American Post-Identity Novel American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Ellen Song
[Trust Exercise] reminds us that visibility and recognition, for racialized groups who desire the psychic satisfaction of being and feeling seen, are also fraught and contingent on those doing the viewing.
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“For the Women Who Came Before”: The Hidden Hands of Literary Recovery Scholars American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Mary Chapman
This essay review discusses the Reclaim Her Name project and Radicals, a two-volume anthology of writings by US women.Collaboration and community have been at the heart of the feminist recovery of American literary works from the beginning.
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Exporting Expertise American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 David James
Literary scholars are understandably keen nowadays to compensate for institutional vulnerability by asserting the field’s indispensability. But they haven’t stopped there. Critics are positioning themselves at the metacritical epicenter of solutions to crises in the humanities at large. Is this a mark of extradisciplinary generosity, a selfless imparting of reformist know-how? Or is the appetite for
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Race, Urban Heat, and the Aesthetics of Thermoception American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Hsuan L Hsu
Drawing on recent research on the intersections of race and atmosphere, this essay considers thermal sensation as a nonrepresentational sensory modality for staging atmospheric racial disparities. I begin with discussions of research on the physical, psychological, and affective consequences of heat exposure and scholarship on the disparities encoded in thermal landscapes—especially “urban heat islands”
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The Long History of Climate Change: 1621–2026 American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Karen Piper
This article approaches climate change as long history, looking backward to European colonial changes in land usage around the globe and forward to scientists’ predictive capabilities for understanding future threats. Time, the article posits, is a central component to understanding climate change from a transnational perspective. For many indigenous communities, climate change is merely part of a
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A Survey of the Literature American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Joan Lubin
Datafication has a literary history. This essay takes up that history to repair to the apparent novelty of contemporary mass personalized politics the history of the novel as one cultural technology for personifying the masses. The machinery of mass personalization was set in motion long ago. However discrepant its emergent scenes may now seem, they have been multiply fused along the way, issuing from
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Liberalism and Critique American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Eli Jelly-Schapiro
The three books under discussion here evince the dialectic of liberalism and critique, and the imperative of joining critique and self-critique. Rachel Greenwald Smith’s On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal (2021) is a trenchant meditation on the cultural logics of liberalism in the moment of its putative triumph and global generalization. Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair:
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Exceptionalism and Difference in American (Literary) Studies American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Jeffrey Lawrence
This essay evaluates contemporary approaches to the study of American Exceptionalism through a review of two recent books: Ian Tyrrell’s American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea (2021) and Jordan Carson’s American Exceptionalism as Religion: Postmodern Discontent (2020). The essay argues that the two books provide compelling accounts of how discourses of American exceptionality have come
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Odds on Erasure: The Status of the Novel on the Receding Horizon of Democracy American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Mary Esteve
Literary sociology’s recent turn to contemporary publishing has brought renewed attention to Percival Everett’s acclaimed novel, Erasure (2001), which satirizes late twentieth-century media and publishing culture and raises concerns about the status of the literary novel. An episode in which literary-prize jurors cast their votes suggests the novel’s engagement with the discourse of democracy as well
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Racial and Social Democracy in Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Justin Mitchell
In 2011, Kenneth Warren boldly asserted that the collapse of Jim Crow spelled the end of African American literature. While many have sought to refute Warren on the grounds that the social conditions which originally underwrote African American literature persist in the guise of structural racism and mass incarceration, this essay focuses on Warren’s claim that such literature “constitutes a representational
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Sovereign Flows and the Obligation of Repayment American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Christopher Pexa
Stephen Graham Jones’s 2020 novel, The Only Good Indians, depicts the haunting and killing of four Blackfeet friends—Ricky, Lewis, Cassidy, and Gabriel—by the spirit of an elk cow called “Elk Head Woman,” who stalks the men after they have killed her and her unborn calf. Their punishment, and the unpayability of their debt to the ghost, entail asking what lies beyond a regime of rights when those rights
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Secrecy and Democracy American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Matthew Potolsky
This essay reviews five books that challenge established modern assumptions about the nature and necessity of privacy, transparency, and the secret, and, in doing so, raise more general questions about the longstanding belief in the Enlightenment tradition that secrecy is a tool of conspiracy and therefore inimical to democracy.At a moment when old assumptions about privacy and transparency are falling
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Daggers at the Throat of Democracy: Democratic Erosion in the US and Abroad American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Bryan Trabold
Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics (2021), edited by Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli, and Rhetorics of Democracy in the Americas (2021), edited by Adriana Angel, Michael L. Butterworth, and Nancy R. Gómez, both examine the complex relationship between rhetoric and democracy. In terms of their immediate scholarly objectives, these volumes clearly succeed. Nineteenth-Century American
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Melville, Insurrection, and the Problem of the Nation American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Andrew Hoberek
In contrast with the standard reading of Moby-Dick (1851) as marking a turn in Melville’s writing from the realist to the symbolic, this chapter focuses on Melville’s realistic representation of insurrection in the chapter entitled “The Town-Ho’s Story.” It does so to argue that Melville understands insurrection as both central to democracy and at odds with politics organized around the nation. Moby-Dick
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“Why Talk About the Children?”: James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and the Future of Care American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Habiba Ibrahim
This essay argues that the child—especially the unborn child that is all potential—has a notably figurative function in the Black literary imagination of the 1970s. The child shifts the emphasis from an ideal nationalist subject (or the aspiration to be such) toward the interactions and ethics of care work. This shift is explored in the novel form, so this essay turns to James Baldwin’s If Beale Street
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Novel Theory Beyond Democracy American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Michaela Bronstein
Why has scholarship persistently treated novels about politics as irrelevant to the politics of fiction? This essay examines moments when scholarship sidelines novelistic representation of political activism and action, and suggests that novels of politics trouble a persistent gesture in scholarship by which novels and their characters are treated as representative—individuals standing in for classes
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Chicanx Counterstories: Legal Narrative in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 José A de la Garza Valenzuela
Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) offers a fictional dramatization of two of the Chicano Movement’s most defining historical moments: the LA student walkouts and the death of Ruben Salazar, a Chicano journalist. This essay analyzes how Acosta’s narrator and stand-in, Buffalo Zeta Brown, contests the criminalizing legal narratives about Chicanxs produced by courts in the
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The Novel, the Demos, and Genres of the Human American Literary History Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Nancy Bentley
The post-Civil War novels discussed in this essay allow us to see not just the failure of liberal recognition to enfranchise freedpeople but also the legible misrecognition of how humanness is known and lived by Black subjects. By tracing uncanny or syncopated humanness that is manifest most clearly in Black kinship, these novels demonstrate the genre’s ability to represent incommensurate orders of