My dissertation develops a theory of “Multitude Modernism” by examining signal instances of what I call “democratic epiphany” in literary works by writers of color and leftist artists in the 1930s ...and 1940s, notably Richard Wright, H.T. Tsiang, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Steinbeck. My study analyzes narrative moments, often in the plot’s climax, where a compassionate protagonist momentarily unites, sometimes even merges with, their broader social communities. During these surrealistic moments of “democratic epiphany,” surrounding populations are transformed into a single entity, a transcendent social collective no longer bound by repressive structures of race and class. I contend “democratic epiphany” can be understood not only as radical writers’ imagined alternative to oppression but also as the aesthetic of an era. Drawing on the scholarly contributions of Michael Denning, Alan Wald, Floyd Chueng, and Michael Tratner, my dissertation examines American writers’ subversion of High Modernist practice to forge a modernism of their own making. Though significant work has been done in recovering the existence of a distinctly leftist modernist movement, few studies formally account for these strange moments of social synthesis. Attending to writers from an array of ethnic affiliations, my chapters seek to account for the ways in which democratic epiphany articulates the convictions of a multiethnic pluralism that blossomed throughout the interwar period.
This dissertation investigates the literary style of four modernists—Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Mae West—in terms of camp. As Susan Sontag suggests in her essay about ...camp, the concept is useful in reexamining the interrelationship between form and content (In my discussion, I use form and style interchangeably). According to Sontag, it means not only literary style, but it also includes fashion styles. Since camp is a practice, intentional or not, it deconstructs what is supposed to be natural and essential, Sontag’s reappreciation of form leads to the question of performativity. As the subtitle of my dissertation suggests, the purpose of using camp is to examine the ways in which the authors’ literary performance constitutes their gender and racial identities. My camp reading is to see those authors’ act of writing as a performance through which they established their public images. It should be noted that I do not locate the authors’ sexuality and racial identities as the cause of their performance but as the effect of their act of writing.
This dissertation examines the use of fairy-tale allusions to explore masculinity in four novels published during the Cold War period. This notable focus on men and masculinity held in common across ...these four novels from four different decades is interesting because it suggests that the shift in focus to women and feminist ideals in fairy-tale revisions of the 1970s and after is even more stark a shift than has yet been recognized by scholars. This dissertation finds that Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White (1967), and Ross Macdonald’s novel Sleeping Beauty (1973) all subvert a reader’s expectations of one or more character types drawn from traditional fairy tales, in some cases going so far as to invent an entirely new character type. These new and different character types each show the difficulty in performing Cold War gender norms, which aim to divide gender roles into the strict binaries of “hard” and “soft.”
Because it had to be in Hemingway/Nick Adams country, the obvious choice was Petoskey, where the Hemingway family went to shop and have a good time, not far from Walloon Lake and the cottage.
The distinction between travel and tourism they helped develop hinges on what counts as an authentic experience and on how much work is required to achieve it.1 Hemingway's Esquire "Letters" both ...perpetuate and illuminate the distinction between traveler and tourist, highlighting some of the problems inherent in a tourism industry that attempts to cash in on a traveler's ethos. To cite just a single example from today: it may seem ludicrous when Holland America Cruises claims that the thousands of people it shuttles to the Caribbean or to Alaska each season aboard luxurious cruise ships will encounter a unique cultural and aesthetic experience, but the admixture of luxury and adventure remains a key trope in their advertising rhetoric.
...she added simply "I'm not a perfectionist." ...her tastes have come a long way since her childhood, when her favorite was "Automobile Girls along the Hudson. The Henry Altemus Company's Catalogue ...of Best and Least Expensive Books for Real Boys and Girls advertises the Automobile Girls series, saying that "No girl's library-no family book-case can be considered at all complete unless it contains these sparkling twentieth-century books."
Crystal Spears, who received the award for Outstanding Paper Presented by a Graduate Student for her paper "Removing, the Masks of Lady Liberty: The Grotesque in the Literatures of the 'Defeated ...Americas'"; Aime Wiegard, who was awarded the Karen Lentz Madison Scholar Gypsy Prize for her piece "'Neither a Servant Nor a Family Member': Recognizing the Unsustainable Nature of Stratification in our Profession"; and Jeffrey Gross, who was honored with the James R. (Dick) Bennett Award for Literature and Peace for his essay "Sustaining Refusal and Imagining, New Societies: The Scarlett Letter, 'Bartleby,' and the Production of Space." ...our readers might recall that in our first conference proceedings, we remarked on the challenge of collecting and selecting essays.
In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Hemingway's hero, Harry, constantly associates writing with death, which speaks to Juba Kristeva's claim that language, literary language in particu- lar, skirts an ..."apocalypse" at the "fragile border . . . where identities (sub- ject/ object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so" (207). According to Kristeva, literature reveals the abject by forcing us to confront the linguistic barrier we place between ourselves and meaninglessness and "compels language to come nearest to the human enigma, to the place where it kills, thinks, and experiences enjoyment all at the same lime" (206). ...for Momaday, story telling " evolve s into that mature condition of expression we call 'literature'" (89), literature becomes the refuge which, while forcing us to face the void beneath our social and linguistic structures, also allows us the agency to generate meaning-to generate Truth-and so to shore up our fragile being.
This study explores evidence that Ernest Hemingway read much more of James Joyce's Ulysses than has been previously assumed and also discusses Hemingway's reception of his unbound press copy via ...Joyce's request to Harriet Shaw Weaver that she then relayed to Sylvia Beach. Regarding the question of Hemingway's second copy of Ulysses, mentioned by his biographer Michael S. Reynolds, the study confirms that Valerie Hemingway now owns that copy, and there is an examination of how deeply Ulysses influenced Hemingway including his glowing letters about the book to Maxwell Anderson and Ezra Pound, his inscription to Joyce in a first-edition copy of A Farewell to Arms, and his reference to Ulysses in his posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream. It is suggested that further exploration of what Hemingway learned from Ulysses is warranted.
Not only does much of The Sun Also Rises take place in gossipy settings such as the cafés of the Montparnasse district or Montoya's hotel, but Jake Barnes, our newspaperman narrator, writes a gossip ...column. There is a certain amount of spying and eavesdropping in the story as well. This note offers a brief overview of The Sun Also Rises as a novel of gossip and, in the case of Jake Barnes on Robert Cohn, mean-spirited gossip at that.
