American Literature current issue

Our Phillis, Ourselves

Brooks, J. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

This essay challenges the image, popularized by Henry Louis Gates Jr., of eighteenth-century African American poet Phillis Wheatley "on trial" before a jury of eighteen white male judges. Brooks argues that there was no trial and that Wheatley instead made her career by cultivating an intricate network of relationships to white women. Because Wheatley crafted elegiac and occasional poems for her white female auditors in exchange for their support, these women exerted a disproportionate influence over the shape of her published Poems (1773). Their participation in this transactional, sentimental culture of mourning enabled white women to indulge feelings of self-consciousness, self-regard, and willful passivity imbricated with their increasingly privileged merchant-class status. It also allowed white women to evade taking responsibility for their economic privilege—a privilege capitalized on the unfreedom of enslaved men and women like Wheatley—and ultimately to evade their responsibility to the poet herself. This essay, then, explores the racialized and gendered dynamics of sentimentality in eighteenth-century American literature as well as their continuation in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminism.

Past Presentisms: Suffering Soldiers, Benjaminian Ruins, and the Discursive Foundations of Early U.S. Historical Novels

Letter, J. J. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Letter investigates the impact of the present in early historical fictions and how that present is manifested in the elaborate allegorical structures of the first popular novels to emerge after the War of 1812. Specifically, the figure of the suffering Revolutionary soldier, central to both James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy and John Neal's Seventy-Six, serves as a contemporary allegorical expression of historical change, a figure best explained by Walter Benjamin's definition of the allegorical ruin. The suffering soldier complicates national origins and resists narrative closure. As a literary figuration, this soldier represents a disruptive discourse in the early nation, one that contradicts master narratives of progress and national destiny. Thus, the suffering soldier complicates criticisms of early popular novels by suggesting a highly complex cultural function for the genre. Presentism as an early national orientation suggests an alternative to historical progressivism and antiquarianism, both of which depend on linear approaches to the study of early U.S. culture and literary history. Cooper, when read alongside his contemporary Neal, reveals a deeply conflicted temporal sensibility, one as much concerned with past losses as it is hopeful of future gain. Historical allegories, because they articulate between past and present, offer an important discursive frame for studying the emerging significance of novels in early national culture.

Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for the Picture: Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature

Chaney, M. A. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Chaney analyzes cartoons representing slaves and slavery from the British satirical periodical Punch, or the London Charivari to argue that African American readers such as Frederick Douglass engaged in an evolving role as readers, interpreters, and users of Punch's iconographic discourse—even when, after the outbreak of the Civil War, the political sensibilities of the British periodical were no longer sympathetic to the cause of abolition. Reading the ekphrastic relation between Punch cartoons of Shakespearean mock-ups of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis and Douglass's citation of these images in various mid-nineteenth-century speeches, Chaney argues that this intertextual and transatlantic dialogue with Punch enabled Douglass to renegotiate inscriptions of racialization, authority, and iconic celebrity. Beyond the cartoons, key pieces of evidence utilized in the essay include humorous asides from Samuel Ringgold Ward during an 1853 address of the Congregational Union in England, Douglass's speech "The Proclamation and a Negro Army" (1863), and several of Douglass's statements about the racial and political value of his hair from various sources.

A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville's Poetic Turn

Marrs, C. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Marrs's essay considers how Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) provides an immanent account, or inside narrative, of the author's transition from novelist to poet. Focusing on the relation between his figurations of time and the structures of his verse, Marrs argues that Melville's turn to poetry originates not in a politico-aesthetic reversal or withdrawal—as some critics have argued—but rather in a revised understanding of historical change. In his experience of the Civil War, Melville comes to perceive history as an agent of destructive repetition. This altered historical sensibility, Marrs demonstrates, not only leads him to conjoin the South's rebellion to an extended series of upheavals, from the bloody coups of ancient Rome to the peasant rebellions of medieval France, but also stimulates the very form of his poetry, in which damaged rhymes, broken meters, and twisted syntax attempt to carry the weight of the war and its chronopolitical meanings. In Battle-Pieces, the war's historical significance becomes a matter of intense formal interest, as Melville connects the mechanics of his verse to an idea of aesthetic time according to which poetry's aleatory and self-determined temporality exceeds or escapes the force of historical necessity. What Melville creates in Battle-Pieces through this fusion of politics and aesthetics is nothing less than a novel lyric form, one whose strange capaciousness has everything to do with its refractions and rearrangements of historical time.

Colored Empires in the 1930s: Black Internationalism, the U.S. Black Press, and George Samuel Schuyler

Taketani, E. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

First in the chronological table of world affairs relevant to any argument concerning the black internationalism of the 1930s is the Italo-Ethiopian War. George Samuel Schuyler, then the most prominent black journalist in the United States, stood in for international-minded black Americans at the vanguard of the pro-Ethiopian campaigns.

For all its obvious concerns with issues of black internationalism raised by the Italo-Ethiopian War—and though it gripped the black popular imagination of its time—Schuyler's Black Empire, originally serialized from 1936 to 1938 in the Pittsburgh Courier, has not attracted much attention from modern critics, largely due to the uncomfortably violent racial scenarios it depicts. Yet, as Taketani's essay suggests, to address such seemingly objectionable scenarios is to confront the origins of black internationalism in the race war fantasy that gained global currency in the media surround of the mid-1930s, triggered by the rumored alliance of two colored empire-nations, Ethiopia and Japan.

Black Empire, narrated in the first person by one Carl Slater, ex-reporter for the Harlem Blade, presents a rendition of race war that both participates in and parodies the production of the mediagenic fantasy it reflects in the aftermath of the Italo-Ethiopian War. By allowing the signifying "colored empire" full play in the black imagination, Black Empire affords a deeper understanding of the objectives of mid-1930s black internationalism.

Richard Wright's Oneiropolitics

Tuhkanen, M. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Tuhkanen argues that Richard Wright, with his references to dreaming in Native Son, Black Power, and elsewhere, develops a theory of postcolonial becoming, where the world's extant realities are challenged by the different "speeds" of the oneiric realm. In the controversial travel narrative Black Power, Wright figures the movement of decolonization in terms of dreaming and waking. Here, his engagement with oneirocriticism continues the work of the postcolonial and African diasporic writers who have been drawn to Shakespeare's Caliban in their efforts to conceptualize (post)coloniality. It also links his thinking to Western philosophy, including Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, in which the task of thought is frequently understood in terms of an awakening. Tuhkanen suggests that in Wright and Husserl the slippery distinction between dreaming and wakefulness is best represented by the topological figure of the Möbius strip. While Wright often understands the oneiric world as an escapist realm of whimsical or guilt-ridden daydreaming, it also seems to offer possibilities—often figured as speeds—that are unavailable within the extant phenomenological horizon. Moving from oneirocriticism to oneiropolitics, Wright thus turns to "dreaming" to illustrate a movement of decolonization whose speed and trajectory may radically depart from those of Western modernity.

Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System; Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England

Tennenhouse, L. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature; The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930; All That Remains: Varieties of Indigenous Expression

Huhndorf, S. M. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America; Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America

Faherty, D. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture; Popular Print and Popular Medicine: Almanacs and Health Advice in Early America

Rusert, B. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville's Early Works; African Culture and Melville's Art: The Creative Process in "Benito Cereno" and "Moby-Dick."

Wallace, R. K. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Devils and Rebels: The Making of Hawthorne's Damned Politics; The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture; Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading; Herman Melville and the American Calling: The Fiction after "Moby-Dick," 1851-1857

Gurley, J. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism; Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age

Stein, J. A. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration; Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State

Rabinowitz, P. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Love and Marriage in Early African America; Reading Marriage in the American Romance: Remembering Love as Destiny

Lutes, J. M. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Imagining the African American West; Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West

Comer, K. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915; A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism; Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and U.S. Culture, 1935-1947

Aldama, F. L. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:21 PST

Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s.; The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880-1920

Lee, J. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos; Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States; Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas

Fox, C. F. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression; Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars

Clarke, M. T. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature; Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

Sivils, M. W. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965; Poetic Obligation: Ethics in Experimental American Poetry after 1945

Damon, M. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950; New York and the Literary Imagination: The City in Twentieth-Century Fiction and Drama

McNamara, K. R. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott; Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995; Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics

Golding, A. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction; Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women

Roemer, K. M. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South; James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile

Vogel, S. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

Brief Mention

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST

Announcements

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:29:22 PST