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New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights Prose Studies Pub Date : 2024-07-26 Rona Kaufman
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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The Happiness of the British Working Class Prose Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Nathan TeBokkel
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Taking authorial liberties: Thomas Hobbes on the occasion of Leviathan Prose Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Samuel G. Wong
How did Thomas Hobbes describe the circumstances that, in his view, allowed him to write Leviathan? And come to express there, without apparent constraint (as many horrified contemporaries attested...
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Foreclosed futurity and genres of care in Barbara Peabody’s The Screaming Room Prose Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Max Casey
Medical humanities scholars such as Arthur Frank have long argued that subjects being able to tell the story of their lives within a coherent, linear temporal framework is beneficial to the patient...
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The intersection of trauma and the sublime in Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave: a critical analysis Prose Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Argha Bhattacharyya
Based on a critical analysis of Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir Wave through the lens of sublimity and trauma theory, this paper argues that the discursive interplay of trauma and sublime in the text ...
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Microhistories of the Holocaust: between factual and fictional narrative Prose Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Radu Harald Dinu
This article explores the complex relationship between fact and fiction in Holocaust narratives, focusing on the often-overlooked realm of microhistory. By applying Gérard Genette’s approach to nar...
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Atrophy in Dalit literary criticism: role of translators in overcoming the five absences Prose Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Kunwar Nitin Pratap Gurjar
In this paper, I review works of Dalit literary criticism in regional languages and their absences in the English language. The paper discusses five absences that continue to make Dalit literary cr...
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Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Carolyn Williams
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 43, No. 2, 2022)
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William Apess, religious liberty, and the conversion narrative Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-29 John C. Havard
This paper reads Pequot William Apess’s (1798–1839) The Experiences of Five Christian Indians (1833) in light of Apess’s equation between racial equality and religious liberty. Disgusted by the pre...
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Strange mythologies: cultural and linguistic opacity in Argonauts of the Western Pacific Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Bede Scott
During the years he spent conducting fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, Bronislaw Malinowski became convinced that foreign cultures should be studied in their entirety, as fully integrated, “organ...
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The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Kandice Sharren
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 43, No. 2, 2022)
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Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Desirée Henderson
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 43, No. 2, 2022)
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Forms of presence: experience of time in Inara Verzemnieks’ memoir Among the Living and the Dead: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-18 Artis Ostups
This article draws on the presentist strand of contemporary philosophy of history to expand on the idea of the presence of the past, attuning it to the spectral and traumatic approach to history. I...
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Insolent Proceedings: Rethinking Public Politics in the English Revolution Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-11 N. H. Keeble
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 43, No. 2, 2022)
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Introduction to Struggle and Hustle: Trans and Queer Nonfiction Prose Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-04-05 Lisa Hager
ABSTRACT Trans and queer people have long both been written about and written about themselves in popular nonfiction prose. Indeed, nonfiction prose’s sense of immediacy and materiality insists on self-defined reality of people who challenge conventional notions of gender, sexuality, gender expression, race, disability, class, geography, size, immigration status, and employment—daring to imagine what
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Thomas Spence’s meat for pigs: satire, utopia, and radical agrarianism Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Frank Palmeri
Thomas Spence, arguably one of the most important radical thinkers of the 1790s, was adept in his use of literary forms. Arising from the conviction that private property in land is the source of m...
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Canonizing the mundane: narrating and transgressing the Nigerian queer self/selves in Unoma Azuah’s Embracing My Shadow and Chike Frankie Edozien’s Lives of Great Men Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Emily Shun Man Chow-Quesada
ABSTRACT Discussions of LGBTQIA+ rights are still taboo in parts of Africa where traditional and religious values remain significant. As public discussions of queer life can bring about marginalization and threaten personal safety, some Nigerian authors have opted to present literary queer selves. Few studies of queer African autobiographical writing have been conducted. This article examines Unoma
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Inappropriate objects: on gender, self, and parenthood in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Rebekah Galbraith
ABSTRACT Reproductive ideology defaults to a cisnormative gender framework, but memoirs on parenthood by LGBTQIA+ writers reframe the taxonomy of pregnancy as a queer experience. This article will examine how the relationship between absence and intimacy in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) and Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (2021) challenges
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Feeding social change: the queer digital essays of Eva Reign, Mayukh Sen, and Andy Baraghani as transformative portraiture of contemporary food struggle and intersectional experience Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Edward A. Chamberlain
ABSTRACT As a popular form of nonfiction, the genre of the digital magazine essay is a fitting means of chronicling the lives of queer and transgender culinary figures both past and present. In the past decade, a range of digital culinary magazines have begun to create spaces for recounting the personal stories and history of culinarians, who at times have been overlooked. To examine these phenomena
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The usufructuary ethos: power, politics, and environment in the long eighteenth century Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Alexander Dick
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 43, No. 1, 2022)
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Prose of the world: Denis Diderot and the periphery of Enlightenment Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-10 Andrew H. Clark
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 43, No. 1, 2022)
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‘Every lover is a destroyer’: queer abuse and experimental memoir in Melissa Febos’ Abandon Me and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-26 Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain
ABSTRACT This article will focus on Machado’s In the Dream House and Melissa Febos’ Abandon Me to explore how nonfiction approaches the complexities of queer intimate partner abuse. Although working in non-fiction, Machado rewrites “the dream house” in over 100 different genres, with each small chapter of the book reaching for a new form to express the generally unspoken nature of the cycle of abuse
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Against struggle and hustle: form of the queer travel narrative in Kate O’Brien’s Farewell Spain Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-26 Megan Faragher
ABSTRACT The interwar was a period of emergent travel narratives by women, though masculinity still permeated the genre: books like Isherwood and Auden’s Journey to a War (1939) or Evelyn Waugh’s Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) were met by books like Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), as increasingly mobile women writers met men in a field from which they had been excluded. The self-othering
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Memories of desire: reading backwards movement in Rigoberto González’s Butterfly Boy Prose Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-26 Ruben Zecena
ABSTRACT Analyzing Rigoberto González’s memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, I underscore how a queer Chicanx subject grapples with loss, violence, and non-belonging through the physical and imaginary act of “backwards movement.” González reaches back into memories that are painful at the same time that they are fulfilling. He takes a journey to Mexico to visit a town that was formative
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Collaborations and coalitions of care: a review essay of On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint Prose Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-09 CE Mackenzie
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 42, No. 3, 2021)
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Review of Female Husbands: A Trans History Prose Studies Pub Date : 2022-11-18 Simon Joyce
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 42, No. 3, 2021)
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Book traces: nineteenth-century readers and the future of the library Prose Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Grant Hurley
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 43, No. 1, 2022)
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Postcolonial Lack: Identity, Culture, Surplus Prose Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Fouad Mami
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 43, No. 1, 2022)
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Epistola de mensuris et ponderibus Serum seu Sinensium (Oxford, 1688) by Thomas Hyde: a forgotten chapter in the history of sinology Prose Studies Pub Date : 2022-09-12 Timothy Brook
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 43, No. 2, 2022)
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Magical Habits Prose Studies Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Suzanne Bost
(2021). Magical Habits. Prose Studies: Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 197-198.
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Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Prose Studies Pub Date : 2022-03-04 Taylor Janeen Pryor
(2021). Black Madness :: Mad Blackness. Prose Studies: Vol. 42, Orientation and Recognition in Contemporary Illness Narratives.Guest Editors:Rosario Arias, Rosalía Baena, Marta Cerezo, pp. 126-128.
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Mixing memory: discovering and narrating the other selves of Alzheimer’s Prose Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-05 Marilena Parlati
ABSTRACT The essay reads life writing related to dementia by carers, daughters and patients from the viewpoint of Sara Ahmed’s works on orientation and of the phenomenology of the embodied mind suggested by Thomas Fuchs. The texts analyzed here are two first-person narratives by carers such as Linda Grant’s Remind Me Who I Am, Again (1998) and Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir Tangles (2011), and two
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Review of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-27 Sheila Giffen
Published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Vol. 42, No. 3, 2021)
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Orientation and recognition in contemporary illness narratives Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-21 Rosalía Baena
ABSTRACT What does it mean to live with breast cancer, anorexia, chronic pain, dementia, or COVID-19? How does it feel to care for aging parents or to live with people with Alzheimer’s? Contemporary illness memoirs foreground these experiences, offering readers insider accounts of lives marked by infirmity. This special issue of Prose Studies presents six critical readings of contemporary experiences
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Repetition and recognition in YouTube narratives of Covid-19 survival Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-21 Nieves Pascual Soler
ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the structures of recognition underlying the reception of three video narratives telling stories of Covid-19 survivors. Published by top US news networks between March and April 2020, these recordings were intended to reassure the American public that the epidemic would be contained. Taking as its point of departure Priscilla Wald’s work on repetitive patterns in the formula
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The cartography of pain: spatial, social, and biographical disorientation in Suzanne E. Berger’s Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile (1996) Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-19 Shadia Abdel-Rahman Téllez
ABSTRACT This article deals with the concept of disorientation as intrinsic to the experience of chronic pain and disability, implying the disruption of spatial directionality and biographical continuity. This experience of spatial and existential displacement is the critical point of Suzanne E. Berger’s chronic pain memoir Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile (1996). Building upon Sara Ahmed’s
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Artistic self-representations and cognitive complexity in Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-16 W. Michelle Wang
ABSTRACT This essay elucidates how Rita Felski’s critical concept of recognition—and its corresponding emphases on relationality and intersubjectivity—serves as a productive mode for examining representations of illness and the challenges associated with end-of-life care in the graphic memoir form. In Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014), not only does the cartoonist chronicle
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Three uses of recognition in Emma Woolf’s anorexia recovery memoir An Apple a Day (2012) Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-21 Rocío Riestra-Camacho
ABSTRACT In this article, I employ illness narrative theory to analyze Emma Woolf’s recovery from anorexia through autobiographical writing. This is a novel approach, insomuch as anorexia memoirs focusing on recovery are a rare phenomenon, as are their analyses. This essay narrows this gap by exploring Woolf’s articulation of anorexia recovery through a phenomenological perspective, using the concept
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The body’s unruly event of illness: (re)orienting the cancer memoir in Anne Boyer’s The Undying Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-10-29 Laura De La Parra Fernández
ABSTRACT This paper argues that Anne Boyer’s The Undying (2019) reorients the writing of illness memoirs, in particular the breast cancer memoir. Thinking of the ill body as a “queer orientation,” following Sara Ahmed (2006), I analyze how Boyer reconsiders and attends to different ways of narrating the ill body going beyond genre conventions. I consider how Boyer’s memoir assesses the “crisis of care”
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Russia as “Pattern or Example”: John Milton’s A Brief History of Moscovia (1682) Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-10-25 Matthew W. Binney
ABSTRACT Scholars agree that Milton offers primarily a negative view of Russia in A Brief History of Moscovia, yet some have also identified positive descriptions of Russian czars, people, and church. Negative and positive descriptions work together in relation to Milton’s view of the past and his focus on one state, offering a “Pattern or Example” that emerges from his distinctive political philosophy
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Elizabeth Bishop’s queer lists Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-09-13 Alyse Knorr
ABSTRACT Mid-20th-century American writer Elizabeth Bishop used lists in her notes to collect and select language for her poems and to think associatively on the page, blurring the worlds of the everyday and the literary. Bishop’s archival drafts, published poetry, and published prose evince a poetics of list-making that provided the writer with a means of achieving highly accurate descriptions that
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Hearing and reading: responding to the Articles of Perth in the 1618 court sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Buckeridge Prose Studies Pub Date : 2021-08-25 Travis J. Knapp
ABSTRACT Although we often study the printed text of sermons, most originated as oral performances. Because the apparatus of printed versions tends to amplify the political and polemical aspects of a sermon, this focus has led some scholars to read sermons as they would polemical tracts, while ignoring an important purpose of the genre—the spiritual edification of hearers. This essay considers both
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Leavis and Trilling: a common pursuit Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Paul Andrew Woolridge
ABSTRACT F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling were two of the more impassioned spokesmen for critical intelligence in twentieth century letters. Part of the continued fascination with both these figures is the clear roles they played as critics writing for distinct publics. The discursive personae they created in assuming this function offers a revealing look into the nature of mid-century criticism during
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The Ruthless Morocco in Brick Oussaid’s Mountains Forgotten by God Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Mohamed Belamghari
ABSTRACT In her well-renowned essay, “Can the subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak has called into question the agency of the subaltern to speak, especially in the postcolonial era. While Spivak answers her question in the negative, other writers (I take the case of Brick Oussaid’s Mountains Forgotten by God) have proven the contrary when they first chose to write about their life-stories and those of
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Against a reading of a sacred landscape: Raja Shehadeh rewrites the Palestinian presence in Palestinian Walks Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Hania A. M. Nashef
ABSTRACT In his introduction to Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh remarks that in spite of the great number of travelers to Palestine, travel literature, for the most part, willfully ignored the living experience and existence of the land’s inhabitants. Often, Palestine was the imaginary place that was continuously invented to confirm religious and political beliefs. The Biblical imagination, along
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Cosmopolitan travellers in a “deterritorialized” world: transcultural encounters in Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (2000) Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Nadia Butt
ABSTRACT This paper explores cosmopolitan travellers with reference to transcultural encounters in Pico Iyer’s travelogue The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. My main argument is that the travelogue, covering Iyer’s lifetime in America, Europe, and Asia, not only illustrates the different aspects of the ‘global soul’ as a ‘global traveller’ but is a compelling statement
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Constructing an activist self: Greta Thunberg’s climate activism as life writing Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-08-24 Ana Belén Martínez García
Climate change and the concerns it raises for the environment and all those inhabiting planet earth, human and nonhuman alike, have prompted waves of activism since the last decades of the twentiet...
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Latinx enough?: whiteness, Latinidad and identity in memoirs of finding “home” Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Melissa Castillo Planas
ABSTRACT Growing up in a mixed household with a Mexican father and a white mother, my identity as a Latinx was always in question. Through memoir writing and in conversation with Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines, and Anika Fajardo’s Magical Realism for Nonbelievers: A Memoir of Finding Home, I explore guilt, white privilege, and Latinx identity to unearth
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Family stories: sentimentality in the narrative lives of Óscar, Tania, and Valeria Martínez Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 María Carla Sánchez
ABSTRACT In this essay I examine the brief narrative life of Óscar Ramírez Martínez and his daughter Valeria, arguing that we understand the stories told by their surviving family and sympathetic members of the media as acts of narrative rescue: explicit attempts to speak for, validate the actions of, and elicit compassionate response on behalf of persons who can no longer act for themselves. However
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Troubling border representations in Mexican cultural studies and U.S. Central American cultural studies Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Julio Enríquez-Ornelas
ABSTRACT Foregrounding Tell Me How It Ends: an Essay in 40 Questions (2017) by Valeria Luiselli and Unaccompanied (2017) by Javier Zamora, I explore how the authors self-represent in their work and, more pressingly, how they represent the unaccompanied minor experience. I situate Luiselli‘s work as an example of what I consider the Paz-Rodríguez Complex. This transnational cultural process plays out
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Translating nations in a global era: Valeria Luiselli´s approach to the child migrant crisis Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Macarena Garcia-Avello
ABSTRACT American public opinion toward immigration policies and the legal status of Latinx immigrants have been heavily impacted by economic and political tides throughout the twentieth century. While the Trump era has been regarded by many scholars as an inflection point, this research contends that his electoral victory was merely one of the numerous symptoms lying at the heart of a nativist wave
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Snapchat page Mitú: challenging the patriarchy? Or just obsessing over Flaming Hot Cheetos? Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Hannah Grace Morrison
ABSTRACT In this analysis of a personal social media user experience, I will consider how the Snapchat discovery page fulfills their proclamation as “culturally relevant content” (We are Mitú YouTube) that is reflective of the lives of young Latinos and how the page opens up some spaces to critique and question normativity while still excluding and favoring certain narratives over others. Like many
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Guilt, shame, anger and the Chicana experience: Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart as voice of resistance Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Mario Grill
ABSTRACT Much scholarly attention has been paid to Latinx fiction. Less scholarship has focused on Latinx nonfiction, especially in the contemporary period. This essay focuses on the affective and political function of the Chicana memoir, particularly Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart (2019). I explore how the emotions evoked by such a memoir aid in resisting dominant narratives of oppression
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Preexisting question: how do you document the undocumented? Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 John-Michael Rivera
ABSTRACT How do you document the undocumented? This essay resurrects the spectral logic of this inquiry. The question rises out of a “gore capitalist” logic that controls life and death with every inscription, every material document. The essay locates this inquiry in the first document to document the “things” of “terra incognita,” the period of the economic expansion into the Americas, Bernardo de
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Undocumented Latinx life-writing: refusing worth and meritocracy Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Stacey Alex
ABSTRACT This article analyzes undocumented Latinx nonfiction life-writing as creative resistance to dehumanization and as a vehicle for new conceptions of Latinx subjectivities and experiences. It investigates how The Undocumented Americans (2020) by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio and Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (2016) by Dan-el Padilla Peralta counter
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(Un)documenting single-panel methodologies and epistemologies in the non-fictional cartoons of Eric J. García and Alberto Ledesma Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Maite Urcaregui
ABSTRACT This article analyzes how two Latinx cartoonists, Eric J. García and Alberto Ledesma, use the single-panel form to critique and reshape national discourses of immigration, citizenship, and the US-Mexico border. By distilling non-fictional referents and triangulating multiple perspectives, the single-panel cartoon is uniquely positioned to portray the complex epistemological stakes of immigration
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Latinx political cartooning during the COVID-19 global pandemic: coping and processing via Lalo Alcaraz’s and Eric J. Garcia’s social artivism Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Jessica Rutherford
ABSTRACT This essay explores the way in which the political cartooning of Lalo Alcaraz and Eric J. García uses parody and satire, the stylistic linchpins of the genre, to help their followers process and cope with the physical and social disease brought on by the COVID-19 global pandemic. From their distinctly Chicanx perspectives, Alcaraz’s and García’s cartoons chronicle the way in which U.S. imperialism
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Trans-hemispheric artivism: Mexican and Latinx Grafica Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Lenny M. Cauich Maldonado
ABSTRACT In this article, I connect the resistant, sociopolitically expressive graphic art created in Mexico with the political artivist work of U.S. Latinx nonfiction cartoonists creating today. I do so by identifying these contemporary artists within a history of Mexican political graphica that I trace back to 1900. In so doing, I include a brief list of events in Mexico since the beginning of the
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Putting the prose nonfiction back in Latinx literary and cultural studies: mainstream restrictive nodes and liberatory Latinx webs Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-05-03 Frederick Luis Aldama, Katlin Marisol Sweeney
Note: Huge gratitude to Lalo Alcaraz, Eric J. Garcia, and Alberto Ledesma for gifting us permission to reprint their work. Prose nonfiction is ubiquitous. Expositions, essays, biographies, memoirs,...
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Public confidences: Hazlitt’s “Table-Talk” and the Romantic familiar essay Prose Studies Pub Date : 2020-01-02 Traynor F. Hansen
ABSTRACT The familiar essay is one of the most neglected genres of Romantic prose. Recent criticism of the essays of Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, the familiar style’s most articulate defender, has sought to assimilate the genre into a tradition rooted in the periodical essays of Addison and Steele. Yet Hazlitt’s more immediate influence was Michel de Montaigne, who modeled sincere