'Another History': Alternative Americas in Paul Auster's Fiction

Abstract

Even though Paul Auster's work has been influenced by European writers, he is also a fundamentally American writer. His settings, many of his literary references, his characters and most of his themes are certainly American. And so is his interest in American history and reality. Moon Palace (1989), for example, deals with the creation of the myth of the American Dream as the country extended its frontier westward. One of the ways for Auster to express his concerns is the creation of parallel fictions like 'Kepler's Blood', a story-within-the-story which fictionally rewrites the origins of the US. Almost two decades later, Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) creates another Western American fiction by moving forward and describing a parallel nineteenth-century North America and a country called 'the Confederation'. Finally, in Man in the Dark (2008), Auster's effort at the creation of alternative Americas reaches the twenty-first century by showing a country where the 2000 election has led to secession and war. This essay analyses the parallel worlds created by Auster to question American myths and archetypes, particularly as they relate to the origins of the myths behind the creation of the United States of America.     

‘The Greatest Thing in North America’: Delmore Schwartz and Europe

Abstract

An argument is presented that Delmore Schwartz’s celebrations of his European literary heritage accentuate the ways in which he might be regarded as a specifically American poet: he cannot help but Americanize his European sources. These engagements also, however, unsettle the notion of a purely American poetry since they suggest that American writing can only be understood in relation to English and European traditions. Taking his concept of ‘international consciousness’ as its premise, the study examines how Schwartz’s allusions simultaneously serve to align his poetry with European works and to distance it from them. It also assesses Schwartz’s admiration for the international perspectives of modernist mentors (particularly T. S. Eliot), observing how this aspect of their work influences his own. A reading of ‘The Ballad of the Children of the Czar’, a poem in which Schwartz characteristically sets individual experience against a worldwide stage, is also given.     

Pulping the Black Atlantic: Chester Himes’ A Case of Rape and the Limits of Expatriation

Abstract

This article examines the early expatriate career of Chester Himes, and his overlooked Paris-set novella A Case of Rape (1956). Scholars have identified postwar Paris as the locus of a ‘Black Atlantic’ cosmopolitanism that allowed African American writers to transcend American racial and literary regimes, and in particular the stigma of black ‘protest’ fiction. By contrast, this article argues that Himes’ exile was paradoxical; defined by an exchange, rather than an ‘exceeding’ of American racial and literary stigmas. First, I explore the fetishistic racial politics that energized the Left Bank’s construction of black expatriates as symbols of individualist, masculine, and specifically western transgression. Second, I examine the way in which A Case of Rape, and its narrative of the false conviction of four African American expatriates for rape, dramatizes this paradox. With supreme irony, the novella sees the expatriate celebrity merge with a central symbol of the African American ‘protest’ novel: the black male rapist of white women. Finally, I argue that A Case of Rape is of particular importance for the ways in which it anticipates Himes’ move into pulp fiction. Like his later detective series, A Case of Rape captures Himes’ own disillusionment with conventional notions of authorial autonomy, and literary instrumentality. I conclude that expatriation worked to galvanize, rather than displace, Himes’ interest in the overdetermination of African American literature within dominant western racial discourses.     

Ten Poems of Mato Kosyk (1853–1940) Translated and Introduced

Abstract

Mato Kosyk, the foremost Lower Sorbian (Lower Wendish) poet, was born in 1853 in Werben, fifty miles south-east of Berlin. Despite the limits of his literary inheritance (mainly devotional texts and folklore) he began in his mid twenties to produce secular lyric poetry in profusion. At the age of thirty he emigrated to the USA, where he became a Lutheran pastor, but his poetic activity was interrupted only by his death in 1940. The ten poems of which translations are appended to the article span a period of over fifty years and reflect various chapters in the poet's life story. An unusual feature is the juxtaposition of Sorbian and American themes.     

Native American Literature and Its Place in the Inter-American Project

Abstract

Issues of Native American literature and culture are placed in a comparative and inter-American perspective, where texts from Canada, the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil are discussed and contrasted. Native American texts are analyzed in the context of inter-American literary study, which is defined as an interdisciplinary approach to the literatures of North, Central, and South America. The argument is made that Native American literature represents the cultural and historical foundation of the entire inter-American project.     

'More Than Just a Hill of Beans': Contested Landscapes in John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War

Abstract

The American Southwest is often considered to be a harsh and unforgiving environment, yet it remains an area where indigenous communities have lived for centuries and since being opened up as a tourist destination in the late nineteenth century has witnessed an incredible growth of major urban conurbations. It is a fragile environment coming under increasing pressure and nowhere is this more apparent than in the competition for scarce water resources. Water issues remain high on the political agenda and the threat to small scale acequia farming is under intense pressure from larger agribusiness. This essay, which adopts an ecocritical perspective, revisits John Nichols' 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War , analysing his literary strategies as he explores the ramifications of differing interpretations of land use on the contested landscapes of New Mexico.     

'Exchange is Creation': The Revolutionary Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser and Hugh MacDiarmid

Abstract

The increased cultural authority of science in the early decades of the twentieth century called into question prior cultural assumptions regarding the status of poetry as an important discipline. The debate about the changed nature of the relations between the arts and sciences assumed particular importance for the literary left, as writers, critics and intellectuals debated the role which culture would play in political revolution. In order to broaden our understanding of the left's engagement with the problem of the relationship between the arts and sciences, this article will compare the work of the leftist American poet Muriel Rukeyser with that of the Scottish nationalist and Communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. In particular, I will explore the ways in which their understanding of the essential similarities between the arts and sciences informed their conception of the relationship between poetics and political praxis.     

Mystification as an Artistic Strategy in Milan Kundera's Work

ABSTRACT

Using close reading of Kundera's texts, Jan ?ulík argues that many arguments in Milan Kundera's literary works are deliberate provocations. Kundera's approach is undoubtedly related to post-modernism, although he used his mystification techniques long before the arrival of postmodernism, as early as in the Stalinist 1950s when he published fake quotes from Lenin in official Stalinist publications. In Jan ?ulík's view, it is the purpose of Milan Kundera's systematic use of false facts, distortions and disrupted logic to warn his readers against against the unreliability of words and human communication. Kundera seems to argue that the world in its complexity is basically unknowable and the only thing that is left for us is, in despair, in our ignorace of what is going on around us, to carry out pranks.     

'If we only had some of what they have' Ralph Ellison in Wales

Abstract

During his period as a merchant marine in the Second World War, the African American novelist Ralph Ellison was stationed in Swansea, Wales. His short story 'In a Strange Country', collected in Flying Home and Other Stories (1998), is based on these Welsh experiences, and there are two other unpublished Welsh-based stories among the Ellison papers at the Library of Congress: 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' and 'The Red Cross at Morriston, South Wales'. This article considers these stories as a basis for exploring the cultural and historical connections and correspondences between African Americans and the Welsh. In drawing inspiration from Ellison's critical writings, the article seeks to substantiate a genuinely comparative, transatlantic approach to literary and cultural texts. This approach leads to an exploration of the ways in which the diversity of the Welsh experience – manifested in language, politics and cultural practice – led Ellison to meditate in new ways on the issues of race, nationhood and identity that he would later famously address in Invisible Man.     

Revivifying Russia: Literature,Theory, and Empire in Viktor Shklovskii's Civil War Writings

Abstract

When in 1924 Iurii Tynianov identified Viktor Shklovskii's memoir A Sentimental Journey as a work 'on the margin of literature', he was commenting on the text's generic experimentation. But he also provided an apt label for its geopolitical setting, as war drives Shklovskii back and forth from Russia's dying imperial centre Petrograd to the country's peripheries. The sometimes uneasy relationship between Shklovskii's literary theory and his movement through the disintegrating Empire is this essay's main focus. Drawing on recent scholarship that identifies a fundamental paradox of modern literary theory as both the cosmopolitan study of literature per se and a discipline validated by national literary canons, the essay proposes that Shklovskii negotiates cosmopolitan and national impulses by exploring Russian literature as the expression of a multi-ethnic and multilingual empire. In analogy with Shklovskii's famous dictum that art exists to 'make the stone stony', the argument is made that in his Civil War writings Shklovskii strove to revivify the Russian Empire, that is, to 'make Russia Russian', by presenting his readers with a new and strange view of Russia from its imperial borders.     

Proclamations and Silences: ‘Race’, Self-Fashioning and Sexuality in the Trans-Atlantic Correspondence between Langston Hughes and Richard Rive

Abstract

The article draws on research for a larger project – a (literary) biography of writer, essayist and educationist Richard Rive (1930–1989). In this piece, the correspondence between Rive and Langston Hughes, as well as creative, critical and autobiographical works by Rive, provide the sources for an examination of ways in which the Cape-based writer forged a sense of self in the face of acute racial oppression, and how he left unspoken or deeply encoded his sense of his own homosexuality. Gilroy's notion of the creation of meaning through movement across the Atlantic proves useful to a point, but my argument is that Gilroy's ‘double consciousness’ is more applicable to black diaspora in the north than it is to a figure like Rive, who proves to be far more multivalent and contradictory in his self-fashioning as a non-racialist, a South African and both a black and cosmopolitan writer.     

The moral evolution of the Russian–Yiddish–English writer Abraham Cahan

One of the ways in which Cahan remained culturally Russian was his devotion to the kind of literary realism that embodies a clear system of values. This article examines the kind of values Cahan promoted, looking specifically at how this writer of educative but realist fiction dealt with the disconnect between socialist ideals and immigrant life. It follows the evolution of Cahan’s literary formula from the transparency of the early stories to the cynicism of The Rise of David Levinsky, seeing the seeds for transformation in the “Bintel Brief” advice column of the Forverts, which was executed and possibly written under Cahan’s direction. The moral vision of Levinsky is compared to that of two predecessors with which Cahan was familiar: William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Pyotr Boborykin’s 1881 Russian novel Kitaigorod.     

The Inter-ethnic Return: Racial and Cultural Multiplicity in Foundational Asian American and Chicana/o Literatures

Abstract

This article advocates that inter-ethnic contact and cross-cultural traffic condition the possibilities of imagining Asian American and Chicana/o identities, respectively, in early Asian American and Chicana/o novels. Using Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street as my primary examples, I demonstrate how early Asian American and Chicana/o literatures that have been critiqued almost exclusively within binary analytic paradigms articulate identity within a diverse field of racial and cultural differences. I argue that, in order to regard properly the inter-ethnic trends of recent US fiction and to liberate foundational minority texts from ethnic specific enclaves within US institutions, scholars need to recognize how negotiating a diverse spectrum of racial and cultural distinctions is a critical element of the early Asian American and Chicana/o literary imagination.     

'Re-cognition' of the borderlines of German-American authorship The case of Friedrich Gerstäcker

Abstract

Focusing on the literary life of Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–72), this article attempts to (re-)negotiate the range of 'German-American' authorship in the light of new, transnational views of hyphenated literatures. In the process, it reexamines several of Gerstäcker's best known texts with an eye to their potential hybridity and transnational nature, resulting from the influence of, notably, James F. Cooper and William G. Simms. Gerstäcker, who had read Cooper before he emigrated to the USA, adapted the mode, style and tone of US adventure tales for German purposes – he might even be seen as writing 'American' novels and stories in Germany. This transnational format and the reception of Gerstäcker's works, in both languages and in Germany as well as the USA, make him a special literary figure that transgresses traditional conventions.     

Lena Finkle’s magic arc: hybrid influences in the Russian American graphic novel

ABSTRACT

The article examines Anya Ulinich’s graphic narrative Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel and the novel’s use of visual culture from both the author’s Russian and US American backgrounds. The article interrogates the use of history and timelines, Russian art history and Russian art education in Ulinich’s text. It also analyzes other literary constructs that influenced Ulinich’s novel: US American comics/graphic novels and their use of stereotype, and novels by Russian-speaking Jewish American writers, with their thematized Jewishness.     

Performing India in America through Pragma-Cultural Markers

Intercultural Communication is marked in literary discourse in numerous ways. Diasporic literary discourse representing intercultural communication uses pragma-cultural markers such as food and music as tools of intercultural communication. This paper attempts to examine intercultural communication foregrounding these pragma-cultural markers as represented in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams within the framework provided by Relevance Theory (:249). This paper foregrounds the manner in which writers like Divakaruni deploy pragma-cultural markers to express multiple linguistic and cultural perspectives in their literary narratives, thereby portraying an amalgamation of America and India and facilitating intercultural communication which is a dialectical process, as on the one hand the “America” that is in the hearts, minds, and words of these writers shapes their expressions and on the other, their growing presence in terms of their literary output is changing the definition of American art and culture.     

The institutional origins of American literary history

Abstract

This article deals with the importance of institutions in the construction of literary classifications. Following Mary Douglas, the article offers a double-stranded perspective on institutions that stresses both their social and cognitive anchorage. This is applied to one particular case, namely the genealogy connecting Emerson (and the Transcendentalists) to Jonathan Edwards. The article shows how Perry Miller's 'discovery' of that lineage in 1940 has an institutional history that goes as far back as the early beginnings of American literature as an academic discipline. Part of the function of the discipline, the article argues, is to hide this history in order to bring out the continuing relevance of such taxonomies. The concluding paragraph identifies some implications of this view on institutionalization for current discussions about the (post-) nationality of American literature.     

Literary clinical practice: desire,depression and toxic masculinity in Hamlet

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the notion of a literary clinical practice for which it remains essential to continue to consider those texts that open up a place for a readership, or audience, or even a civilization to consider the endlessly generative failure of its literature to write mental health. Concerned with mental illness that is an effect of language on the subject, the body, and of the enigma of the truth as cause, psychoanalysis is the crucial interlocutor for any literary clinical concern with the maladies of literature and society. In order to re-assess the utility of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to contemporary problems such as depression – perhaps the dominant symptom of our time – this essay attempts a reconsideration of Jacques Lacan’s famous seminar on Hamlet from the perspective of the contemporary clinic of the Lacanian orientation in psychoanalysis led by Jacques-Alain Miller.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

“A Woman's Nature is Like a Great House Full of Rooms”: Edith Wharton's Personal and Fictional Representation of Homes

ABSTRACT

All of her life, the turn-of-the-century American novelist Edith Wharton was extremely sensitive to her environment. This preoccupation resulted in a professional interest in houses and their interior decoration. She created homes for herself, both in America and in France, in which she ensured the conditions for the development of her authorship. She moreover published books in which she expressed her opinions on how a home should be constructed and decorated, which contributed to her reputation as a professional author, but also as an intellectual, a connoisseur, and a cosmopolitan. The average American bourgeois home, which she abhorred, formed a source of inspiration for her literary imagery in the depiction of characters who find themselves entrapped in patriarchal society.