'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.     

Frank Capra and Leni Riefenstahl: Politics,Propaganda and the Personal

Abstract

The circumstances that led Frank Capra to view Leni Riefenstahl's notorious documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies, Triumph of the Will, is well-known. What is less known is the extent to which the themes inherent in Capra's filmmaking through the 1930s, and Riefenstahl's own interest in ideas of national identity, social commentary and romanticism in her fictional and documentary films, mapped out a set of cinematic coincidences between the two little discussed in the body of literature devoted to these directors. This article lays out a number of those coincidences and, in the process, compares the theoretical strain of political romanticism that winds its way through Capra and Riefenstahl's work. The iconic and symbolic imagery in their films suggests interesting and important comparative aspects to their canon, but also that a fascination in political romanticism led them to differing conclusions about the impact and threat of media and propaganda forces lined up in alliance with totalitarian powers during the 1930s and '40s.     

Editorial

Abstract

This article considers the way in which documentary writing was used to represent both Cuba and the US South as sites of economic underdevelopment. Focusing on Carleton Beals and Walker Evans’ collaboration of text and photography, The Crime of Cuba (1933), I reorient conventional understandings of 1930s documentary from its focus on the US South and argue that the origins of the form can be traced to a much broader interest in representing poverty throughout the Americas. As areas of the South sunk into uncharted depths of hardship, the nations of Latin America became a frequent point of comparison and served as a way to measure poverty in the US. The role of Latin America as economic and cultural counterpoint to ‘modernization’ took on new significance during the Depression, and the inhabitants of the US South were simultaneously incorporated into this construction of underdevelopment. The narrative of progress was applied to both of these regions as a way of explaining the unequal distribution of wealth in the hemisphere.     

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.     

Making a Difference: Sebastião Salgado and the Social Life of Mobilization

This article is part of a panel discussion addressing the sociological relevance of Sebastião Salgado’s work as well as documentary photography in general. ²     

What is so bad about being rich? The representation of wealth in American culture

Abstract

Today, the USA is the Western nation with the greatest percentage of the world's rich and with the greatest gap between rich and poor. However, there is hardly any national debate or outcry about this growth of wealth polarization. From a Cultural Studies perspective, this puzzling absence of protest raises the question whether and in what way culture plays a role in shaping US attitudes toward economic and social inequality. This article traces these changing attitudes by focusing on cultural representations of wealth in four different stages of US cultural history: the 'Protestant ethic', 'robber barons', 'conspicuous consumption' and the recent 'greed' periods. The article concludes by discussing the conflicting attitudes currently at work in the perception and representation of wealth in US culture.     

Building Solidarity with Subjects and Audience in Sociology and Documentary Photography

This article is part of a panel discussion addressing the sociological relevance of Sebastião Salgado’s work as well as documentary photography in general. ²     

Black and White Photography as Theorizing: Seeing What the Eye Cannot See

This article is part of a panel discussion addressing the sociological relevance of Sebastião Salgado’s work as well as documentary photography in general. ²     

Enabling Fictions: Philip Roth's Prosthetic Anne Franks

Abstract

In this article, it is argued that insufficient attention has been paid to Philip Roth's uses of Anne Frank in his work. Concentrating on the 'Zuckerman' and 'Philip Roth' novels in which Anne Frank is discussed, it is illustrated that Anne Frank functions as a 'narrative prosthesis' not only in Roth's work and within American postwar culture, but that all representations of Anne Frank function as narrative prosthesis. The concept of Anne Frank as narrative prosthesis allows for recognition of the fact that Roth characterises writing and identity as prosthesis. Exploration of Roth's uses of Anne Frank also exposes problematics in his own work, particularly in his representations of women.     

Images,Ideology, and Praxis in the Environmental Movement: Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis Project

This article is part of a panel discussion addressing the sociological relevance of Sebastião Salgado’s work as well as documentary photography in general. ² I focus specifically on environmental sociology.     

'Traveling Barbies' and rolling blackouts Images of mobility in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding

Abstract

This article proposes to read Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding through a critical framework provided by transnational anthropology. Such a framework suggests that approaches celebrating transnational mobility must be balanced against nationally specific forms of constraint. It is argued that Monsoon Wedding bears out precisely such a balance. Nair's film suggests that the mobility of human lives may not be quite as unfettered as that of cultural commodities. Moreover, the filmic narrative insists on a differentiation within the Indian diasporic community. Similarly, some theorists of transnationalism have cautioned that the concept of a 'diasporic community' may serve to obfuscate class distinctions. At the same time, Nair's film is read in conjunction with theories of commodity circulation. Through the image of the 'traveling Barbie', this article explores the ways in which US cultural commodities may be indigenized, while also suggesting that Indians at 'home' may hardly benefit from such indigenization. Rather, Non-Resident Indians may travel from the US to India to buy a token of their own 'Americanness' in Delhi.     

Boris Eikhenbaum's Response to the Crisis of the Novel in the 1920s

Abstract

Focusing on the Russian literary scholar Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959), the present article considers the interrelationship of autobiographical, scholarly and fictional modes of writing. In 1925 Eikhenbaum wrote in a letter of his 'longing for acts, longing for biography'. This article views the scholar's acute sense of diminished agency in the context of the crisis of the novel in the 1920s and discusses how Eikhenbaum's own generic experimentation becomes a means of finding an answer to the question he posed to himself and his age of 'how to be a writer'. The discussion is primarily based on Eikhenbaum's autobiographical sketches in Moi vremennik (My Periodical, 1929) and his scholarly monograph, Lev Tolstoi. Piatidesiatye gody (Lev Tolstoi: The Fifties, 1928), and attention is drawn to the generic, rhetorical and narrative strategies used across these hybrid scholarly texts, which in turn become invested with a certain emotional and ethical charge. In the end, the article shows how, above all, Eikhenbaum's empathetic engagement with Tolstoi marks for him the restoration of 'biography' and the solution to the entwined epochal and personal crises of genre and authorship.     

'Becalmed on Strange Waters': Wordsworth,Reagan and Late Ashbery

Abstract

This essay presents an analysis of 'A Wave', the watershed poem of Ashbery's later career, as a Wordsworthian response, in the medium of the romantic crisis poem, to the rise of Reagan and neo-liberalism. 'A Wave' was composed between 1982 and 1984 amid drastic changes to US domestic and foreign policy that aggravate the necessity for a change in poetic stance from the newly 'central' American poet Ashbery had become. In this context, the relationship is explored between 'A Wave' and a poet similarly engaged in articulating crises of social conscience as part of a more specific development of poetic personality. 'A Wave', then, is read as a reading of Wordsworth's Prelude. In this, the particular stylistic issue of Ashberyan metaphor is raised, as 'A Wave', for the first time within Ashbery's reading of romanticism, begins to position irony at the centre of romantic metaphor. Finally, I conclude that the result of Ashbery's wavering crisis poem is a positioning of style as the ultimate determinant of social self-identity.     

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Abstract

Although his obedience research will always remain Stanley Milgram's most important work, his involvement with the social psychology of the city occupied a much larger portion of his professional career. This article traces the evolution and intensification of Milgram's interest in cities, starting with his pre-professional years, through his early research at Harvard, culminating in his multifaceted engagement with urban psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. There, as head of the social psychology program, he was able to infuse it with an urban emphasis. He created and taught a variety of courses on urban psychology and got his students involved in a potpourri of experiments comparing behavior in cities and towns. Those experiments provided much of the substance for Milgram's seminal article in Science, “The experience of living in cities,” in which he also introduced the theoretical concept of stimulus overload to help account for the city-small town differences he and his students found. This article evaluates the overload concept and concludes with Milgram's overarching legacy for the study of city life.     

Mirrors and Metarealists: The Poetry of Oĺga Sedakova and Ivan Zhdanov

Abstract

My paper analyses the third volume of Gustav Shpet's Aesthetic Fragments with special regard to his quasi-mathematical formula allegedly expressing 'the aesthetic reception of the word' in a literary work that caps this text. The obviously unserious character of the algorithm proffered by Shpet raises the question of his intentions. The paper argues that this is a case of self-parody, of laughter that Samuel Beckett termed risus purus through which the Russian thinker reacted to the overall ambiguity of the socio-political situation in early 1922 when he wrote his essay.     

Internationalizing the US Ethnic Canon: Revisiting Carlos Bulosan

Abstract

The quasi-autobiographical writing of Carlos Bulosan, a migrant farmworker from the US colony of the Philippines from the 1930s to the 1950s, was discovered by ethnic activists during the US Civil Rights struggles. Once adopted as canonical texts in the US academy from the 1980s on, Bulosan's radical edge was blunted in critical readings of his work, his subversive tendencies sanitized to promote a conformist multiculturalism. We need to recover a submerged decolonizing strand in the history of Filipino deracination, sedimented in Bulosan's testimonies. This essay seeks to excavate those oppositional impulses in Bulosan's works by re-contextualizing them in the anti-colonial revolutionary movement of Filipinos dating back to the revolution of 1896; to the Filipino-American War together with the peasant insurgencies during the first three decades of US occupation (1899–1935); and in the popular-front mobilization during the US Great Depression up to the onset of the Cold War. Re-situated in their historical-biographical milieu and geopolitical provenance, Bulosan's oeuvre acquires immediacy and resonance.     

Moses and nation-building Zora Neale Hurston's Moses,Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European

Abstract

This article examines the significance of the representation of Moses as an Egyptian in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European. Pairing Hurston and Said continues Said's project of seeing authors 'contrapuntally', so exposing imperialism as a neglected, if submerged, context for Hurston's response to nationalism in Moses. I argue that Hurston's novel cannot be read as a straightforward critique of race-based nationalism. Although Moses is of a different ethnic group to the Hebrews he leads, Hurston's portrayal of his rule is haunted by imperialism, in which one ethnic group exploits another. In this sense, Moses, Man of the Mountain bears the signs and strains of her struggle against racialist thinking.     

Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

Time and mobility in the writing of Charles W. Chesnutt

Abstract

This article considers the elusiveness and ambivalence that characterize Chesnutt's writing in terms of the author's imaginative efforts to probe beyond the historical circumstances that condition and frame his authorship. Noting the focus on figures of absence and illegibility in recent criticism of Chesnutt, I examine the notion of a self in the process of uprooting itself that appears to preoccupy much of his fiction. In a close reading of Chesnutt's journals and his essay on 'Superstitions and Folklore of the South', I elaborate Chesnutt's conception of a literary voice as emerging from a context of commodification and contestation and oriented on a moment of posterior reception. I then discuss how this concept of a detachable voice informs Chesnutt's exploration of a transplantable self and an understanding of freedom in terms of a re-imagined social bond. This discussion focuses on the ways Chesnutt, in some of his short stories and in The House Behind the Cedars, evokes a passage from a condition of bondage to a capacity for multiple and variable attachments.     

Tarzan the German-Eater

Abstract

This article raises questions about methodology in the study of transnational popular writing by examining the international popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan novels. Critical anti-imperialist analyses have found in Burroughs's fiction a dangerous metaphorics supporting imperialistic US foreign policies. In Weimar Germany, resistance to the Tarzan novels emerged that all but eliminated the market for these otherwise internationally popular fictions. Yet the German reaction shows how the idea of 'empire', embodied in tropes of race and gender, could continue to function in debates about international popular literature. At the same time, Burroughs was forced to adapt to international markets by tempering his imperialistic fictions. Burroughs's work after the controversy shows a shift in the depiction of national 'others', yet it had little radical potential because Burroughs had turned his imperial gaze inward, towards the internally colonized: Native Americans.