Frères Ennemis focuses on Franco-American tensions as portrayed in works of literature. An Introduction is followed by nine chapters, each focused on a French or American literary text which shows ...the evolution/devolution of the relations between the two nations at a particular point in time. While the heart of the analysis consists of close textual readings, social, cultural and political contexts are introduced to provide a better understanding of the historical reality influencing the individual novels, a reality to which these novels are also responding. Chapters One through Five, covering a period from the mid-1870s to the end of the Cold War, discuss significant aspects of the often fraught relationship from the theoretical perspective of Roland Barthes' theory of modern myth, described in his Mythologies. Barthes' theory helps situate Franco-American tensions in a paradigmatic structure, while at the same time it is supple enough to allow for shifts and reversals within the paradigm. Subsequent chapters explore new French attitudes toward the powerful, potentially dominant influence of American culture on French life. In these sections I argue that recent French fiction displays more openness to the American experience than has existed in the past, and as such contrasts with the more static American approach to French culture.
Between the newly canonized novels of the 1790s and the long-familiar novels of the 1820s, early American literary magazines figured themselves as museums, bringing together a multitude of notable ...content and enabling readers to choose what to consume. A transatlantic literary form that refused to break with British cultural models and genealogy, the early American magazine had at its center the anonymous authority of the editor and a porous distinction between reader and author. Esteemed subscribers were treated as magnets to attract other subscribers, and subscribers were prompted to become contributors, giving these early American publications the appearance of public forums. The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture reexamines these publications and their reach to show how magazine culture was multivocal, as opposed to novel culture, which imposed a one-sided authorial voice and restricted the agency of the reader._x000B__x000B_In this first book-length study of the history of American magazine culture in the colonial and early national period, Jared Gardner describes how those who invested considerable energies in this form--including some of the period's most important political and literary figures such as Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving--sought to establish a very different model of literary culture than what came to define American literary history and its scholarship. He cautions against privileging novels or authors as the essential touchstones of American literary history and instead encourages an understanding of how the "editorial function" favored by magazine culture shaped reading and writing practices._x000B__x000B_Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, Gardner reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives. This important work revisits largely lost interventions in the forms and politics of literature and sounds a vibrant call to radically revise early American literary history.
\Images of upraised fists, afros, and dashikis have long dominated the collective memory of Black Power and its proponents. The "guerilla" figure-taking the form of the black-leather-clad ...revolutionary within the Black Panther Party-has become an iconic trope in American popular culture. That politically radical figure, however, has been shaped as much by Asian American cultural discourse as by African American political ideology. From the Asian-African Conference held in April of 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, onward to the present, Afro-Asian political collaboration has been active and influential.In Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities, author Rychetta Watkins uses the guerilla figure as a point of departure and shows how the trope's rhetoric animates discourses of representation and identity in African American and Asian American literature and culture. In doing so, she examines the notion of "Power," in terms of ethnic political identity, and explores collaborating-and sometimes competing-ethnic interests that have drawn ideas from the concept. The project brings together a range of texts-editorial cartoons, newspaper articles, novels, visual propaganda, and essays-that illustrate the emergence of this subjectivity in Asian American and African American cultural productions during the Power period, roughly 1966 through 1981. After a case study of the cultural politics of academic anthologies and the cooperation between Frank Chin and Ishmael Reed, the volume culminates with analyses of this trope in Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Alice Walker's Meridian, and John Okada's No No Boy.
Review of:
American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970
, David Wyatt (ed.) (2018)
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 385 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-107-16539-7, h/bk, £89.99
Sandra Gunning draws on nineteenth-century African diasporic travel writing to explore the conditions and possibilities of race, gender, sex, and class that early black Atlantic travel enabled.
Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s Literature by offering insight into the historical black ...experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries. Moore traces black women writers’ creation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in literature from the colonial era work of Phillis Wheatley to the postmodern work of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Through their characters Moore shows how these writers re-create the identity of black women and challenge existing rules shaping their subordinate status and behavior. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and other social science theory, Moore examines the maternal iconography and counter-hegemonic narratives by which these writers responded to oppressive conventions of race, gender, and authority. Moore grounds her account in studies of Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. All these authors, she contends, wrote against invisibility and powerlessness by developing and cultivating a personal voice and an individual story of vulnerability, nurturing capacity, and agency that confounded prevailing notions of race and gender and called into question moral reform. In these nine writers’ construction of feminine images—real and symbolic—Moore finds a shared sense of the historically significant role of black women in the liberation struggle during slavery, the Jim Crow period, and beyond.
Digital and electronic technologies that act as extensions of our bodies and minds are changing how we live, think, act, and write. Some welcome these developments as bringing humans closer to ...unified consciousness and eternal life. Others worry that invasive globalized technologies threaten to destroy the self and the world. Whether feared or desired, these innovations provoke emotions that have long fueled the religious imagination, suggesting the presence of a latent spirituality in an era mistakenly deemed secular and posthuman. William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo are American authors who explore this phenomenon thoroughly in their work. Engaging the works of each in conversation, Mark C. Taylor discusses their sophisticated representations of new media, communications, information, and virtual technologies and their transformative effects on the self and society. He focuses on Gaddis's The Recognitions, Powers's Plowing the Dark, Danielewski's House of Leaves, and DeLillo's Underworld, following the interplay of technology and religion in their narratives and their imagining of the transition from human to posthuman states. Their challenging ideas and inventive styles reveal the fascinating ways religious interests affect emerging technologies and how, in turn, these technologies guide spiritual aspirations. To read these novels from this perspective is to see them and the world anew.
The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 is the first major volume of its kind to focus on Native literatures in a postcolonial context. Written by a team of ...noted Native and non-Native scholars, these essays consider the complex social and political influences that have shaped American Indian literatures in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on core themes of identity, sovereignty, and land. In his essay comprising part I of the volume, Eric Cheyfitz argues persuasively for the necessary conjunction of Indian literatures and federal Indian law from Apess to Alexie. Part II is a comprehensive survey of five genres of literature: fiction (Arnold Krupat and Michael Elliott), poetry (Kimberly Blaeser), drama (Shari Huhndorf), nonfiction (David Murray), and autobiography (Kendall Johnson), and discusses the work of Vine Deloria Jr., N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Sherman Alexie, among many others. Drawing on historical and theoretical frameworks, the contributors examine how American Indian writers and critics have responded to major developments in American Indian life and how recent trends in Native writing build upon and integrate traditional modes of storytelling. Sure to be considered a groundbreaking contribution to the field, The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 offers both a rich critique of history and a wealth of new information and insight.
Chicano Nations argues that the transnationalism that is central to Chicano identity originated in the global, postcolonial moment at the turn of the nineteenth century rather than as an effect of ...contemporary economic conditions, which began in the mid nineteenth century and primarily affected the laboring classes. The Spanish empire then began to implode, and colonists in the new world debated the national contours of the viceroyalties. This is where Marissa K. Lopez locates the origins of Chicano literature, which is now and always has been postnational, encompassing the wealthy, the poor, the white, and the mestizo. Tracing its long history and the diversity of subject positions it encompasses, Chicano Nations explores the shifting literary forms authors have used to write the nation from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.Lopez argues that while national and global tensions lie at the historical heart of Chicana/o narratives of the nation, there should be alternative ways to imagine the significance of Chicano literature other than as a reflection of national identity. In a nuanced analysis, the book provides a way to think of early writers as a meaningful part of Chicano literary history, and, in looking at the nation, rather than the particularities of identity, as that which connects Chicano literature over time, it engages the emerging hemispheric scholarship on U.S. literature.
