Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing ...world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar Zeta Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial, multiethnic world. This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Coining the term magicorealism to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria.
In Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White , Sarah Gilbreath Ford explores how both black and white southern writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, ...William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Ellen Douglas, and Ernest Gaines have employed oral storytelling in literature. Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White is a study of the historical use of oral storytelling by southern writers in written works. In each chapter, Sarah Gilbreath Ford pairs a white and an African American writer to highlight points of confluence in black and white southern oral traditions. She argues that the connections between white and African American southern writers run deeper than critics have yet explored, and she uses textual comparisons to examine the racial mixing of oral culture. On porches, in kitchens, and on the pages of their work, black and white southerners exchanged not just stories but strategies for telling stories. As a boy, Joel Chandler Harris listened to the stories of African American slaves, and he devised a framework to turn the oral stories into written ones. Harris’s use of the frame structure influenced how Charles Chesnutt recorded oral stories, but it led Alice Walker to complain that her heritage had been stolen. Mark Twain listened to African American storytellers as a child. His use of oral dialects then impacts how Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner employ oral storytelling and how Toni Morrison later writes in response to Faulkner. The interactions are not linear, not a chain of influence, but a network of interactions, borrowings, and revisions. Ford’s pairings lead to new readings that reveal how the writers employ similar strategies in their narratives, due in part to shared historical context. While Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner, for example, use oral storytelling in the 1930s to examine the fear of racial mixing, Ellen Douglas and Ernest Gaines use it in the 1970s to build bridges between the races. Exploring the cultural crossing that occurs in the use of oral storytelling, Ford offers a different view of this common strategy in southern narrative and a new perspective on how culture is shared.
Spiritual conversions figure heavily in such novels as Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. What connects such varied works is that their ...convert-characters are disenchanted with secularism yet apprehensive of dogmatic religiosity. Partial Faiths is the first study to identify a body of contemporary fiction in such terms, take the measure of its structures and strategies, and evaluate its contribution to public discourse on religion's place in postmodern life. Postsecularism is most often associated with philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, William Connolly, Jürgen Habermas, and Gianni Vattimo. But it is also being explored and invented, says John A. McClure, by many novelists: Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and N. Scott Momaday among others. These novelists, who are often regarded as belonging to different domains of contemporary fiction, are fleshing out the postsecular issues that scholars treat more abstractly. But the modes of belief elaborated in these novels and the new narrative forms synchronized with these modes are dramatically partial and open-ended. Postsecular fiction does not aspire to any full "mapping" of the reenchanted cosmos or any formal moral code, nor does it promise anything like full redemption. It is partial in another sense as well: it is emphatically dedicated to progressive ideals of social transformation and well-being, in repudiation of resurgent fundamentalist prescriptions for the same.
Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction explores the vibrant tradition of serial fiction published in U.S. minority periodicals. Beloved by readers, these serial novels helped sustain the ...periodicals and communities in which they circulated. With essays on serial fiction published from the 1820s through the 1960s written in ten different languages-English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian, Polish, Norwegian, Yiddish, and Chinese-this collection reflects the rich multilingual history of American literature and periodicals.
One of this book's central claims is that this serial fiction was produced and read within an intensely transnational context: the periodicals often circulated widely, the narratives themselves favored transnational plots and themes, and the contents surrounding the fiction encouraged readers to identify with a community dispersed throughout the United States and often the world. Thus, Okker focuses on the circulation of ideas, periodicals, literary conventions, and people across various borders, focusing particularly on the ways that this fiction reflects the larger transnational realities of these minority communities.
The first book in many years to take in the full sweep of national fiction, The Dream of the Great American Novel explains why this supposedly antiquated idea continues to thrive. It shows that four ...G.A.N. "scripts" are keys to the dynamics of American literature and identity--and to the myth of a nation perpetually under construction.
In this innovative study,Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins, John Blair Gamber examines urbanity and the results of urban living-traffic, garbage, sewage, waste, and pollution-arguing for a new ...recognition of all forms of human detritus as part of the natural world and thus for a broadening of our understanding of environmental literature.
While much of the discourse surrounding the United States' idealistic and nostalgic views of itself privileges "clean" living (primarily in rural, small-town, and suburban settings), representations of rurality and urbanity by Chicanas/Chicanos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, on the other hand, complicate such generalization. Gamber widens our understanding of current ecocritical debates by examining texts by such authors as Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, Alejandro Morales, Gerald Vizenor, and Karen Tei Yamashita that draw on the physical signs of human corporeality to refigure cities and urbanity as natural. He demonstrates how ethnic American literature reclaims waste objects and waste spaces-likening pollution to miscegenation-as a method to revalue cast-off and marginalized individuals and communities.Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxinsexplores the conjunction of, and the frictions between, twentieth-century U.S. postcolonial studies, race studies, urban studies, and ecocriticism, and works to refigure this portrayal of urban spaces.
Winner of the 2015 Irish Association for American Studies Peggy O'Brien Book PrizeExamines the representation of trauma in contemporary American fiction and non-fiction
This book looks at the way ...writers present the effects of trauma in their work. It explores narrative devices, such as 'metafiction', as well as events in contemporary America, including 9/11, the Iraq War, and reactions to the Bush administration. Contemporary American authors who are discussed in depth include Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Tim O'Brien, Lorrie Moore, Mark Danielewski, Art Spiegelman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anthony Swofford, Evan Wright, Paul Auster, Philip Roth and Michael Chabon.Contemporary American Trauma Narrativesoffers a timely and dissenting intervention into debates about American writers' depiction of trauma and its after-effects.
Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides ...extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.
While American literary history has long acknowledged the profound influence of journalism on canonical male writers, Sari Edelstein argues that American women writers were also influenced by a ...dynamic relationship with the mainstream press. From the early republic through the turn of the twentieth century, she offers a comprehensive reassessment of writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Jacobs, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Drawing on slave narratives, sentimental novels, and realist fiction, Edelstein examines how advances in journalism-including the emergence of the penny press, the rise of the story-paper, and the birth of eyewitness reportage-shaped not only a female literary tradition but also gender conventions themselves.
Excluded from formal politics and lacking the vote, women writers were deft analysts of the prevalent tropes and aesthetic gestures of journalism, which they alternately relied upon and resisted in their efforts to influence public opinion and to intervene in political debates. Ultimately,Between the Novel and the Newsis a project of recovery that transforms our understanding of the genesis and the development of American women's writing.
In this engaging, optimistic close reading of five late twentieth-century novels by American women, Magali Cornier Michael illuminates the ways in which their authors engage with ideas of communal ...activism, common commitment, and social transformation. The fictions she examines imagine coalition building as a means of moving toward new forms of nonhierarchical justice; for ethnic cultures that, as a result of racist attitudes, have not been assimilated, power with each other rather than power over each other is a collective goal.Michael argues that much contemporary American fiction by women offers models of care and nurturing that move away from the private sphere toward the public and political. Specifically, texts by women from such racially marked ethnic groups as African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American draw from the rich systems of thought, histories, and experiences of these hybrid cultures and thus offer feminist and ethical revisions of traditional concepts of community, coalition, subjectivity, and agency.Focusing on Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Michael shows that each writer emphasizes the positive, liberating effects of kinship and community. These hybrid versions of community, which draw from other-than-dominant culturally specific ideas and histories, have something to offer Americans as the United States moves into an increasingly diverse twenty-first century. Michael provides a rich lens through which to view both contemporary fiction and contemporary life.
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