American Literature Commons^™

De La Mujer Invisible Al Feminismo Ineludible: Política Y Antropología En La Historiografía De La Mujer, Robert H. Holden

History Faculty Publications

La historiografía de la mujer, desde el comienzo de su etapa contemporánea en los años setenta del siglo pasado, es analizada en dos vertientes relacionadas: Una, su politización al servicio del movimiento social que aboga por la extensión de los derechos de la mujer y que dió luz a dicha historiografía; dos, el papel central que ha jugado la pregunta antropológica, ‘¿Qué es la mujer’?, y la variedad de respuestas que esta pregunta ha generado. El autor sostiene que tanto la intensa politización como el desarrollo de una antropología cada vez más materialista, como tendencias interdependientes, han llegado a caracterizar …

Review Of Fledgling, By Octavia Butler, Michael Dean Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Oy Science Fiction: On Genre, Criticism, And Alien Love: An Interview With Marleen S. Barr, Marlene S. Barr, Ximena Gallardo C., C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

Marleen S. Barr is a pioneer of feminist science fiction criticism and a leader in the fight against the ghettoizing influences of genre-labeling in literary criticism. While the noteworthy Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (University of Iowa Press, 1992) has been praised as Barr's seminal work in feminist science fiction criticism and theory, it is in Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies (U of Iowa P, 2000) where she takes on literary critics' discriminatory practices against genre fiction in general and fantasy and science fiction in particular.

Review Of Mizora: A Prophecy, By Mary E. Bradley Lane, Melissa Purdue

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

On Bill Brown's A Sense Of Things And Things, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

If he were not already well-established within the academic world (George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, co-editor of Critical Inquiry), Bill Brown’s 2003 and 2004 might begin to look like Jacques Derrida’s 1967. A Sense of Things comes equipped with jacket praise from Simon During of Johns Hopkins, Alan Trachtenberg of Yale University, Julia Stern of Northwestern University, and Michael Taussig of Columbia University. Not surprisingly, two of these individuals (in addition to Bill) appear in the edited volume Things, based on a Critical Inquiry special issue devoted to the topic. …

On Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'S Player Piano, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

I always get suspicious when a book I'm looking for is hard to find. If I'm feeling paranoid in a post-Patriot Act sort of way, I imagine vast memory holes being stuffed with the writings of people like George Orwell and Philip K. Dick by legions of aspiring yuppies-- fit, good-looking, and totally uninterested in anything that requires reading. A gaggle of Cheneyesque men do a walkthrough, to make sure that they are destroying our intellectual heritage efficiently, and to remind them all that if they destroy enough knowledge, they might get promoted (even as the suits make …

But Who Is Any Longer Interested In The Possible?: Kathy Acker In Hell Failing Fuck You, Jake Kennedy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In 'But who is any longer interested in the possible?': Kathy Acker in Hell Failing Fuck You I explore and celebrate Acker's use of a tropics of failure (plagiarism, pain, terror, gender-play, bad jokes, dumbness) as an inimitable strategy for achieving counter-cultural art and community. The prose style and scholarly apparatus of my article reflect not only my position as a poet/academic but also attempt to model an ethical, non-authoritative, Acker-informed critical language.

The Graveyard Of Genre: David Markson's Postmodern Epitaphs, Camelia Elias

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

David Markson is a writer who in a series of novels entitled Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), Reader's Block (1996), and This is not a Novel (2001) explores some of our basic conceptions of genre. Can we call a book of fragments a novel? Is a novel still a novel when the characters are given names such as Author, Protagonist, Reader? What are we left with, when critics resort to labels such as novel of intellectual reference and allusion . . . minus the novel, or seminonfictional semifiction to categorise his texts? Through an apparently endless list of anecdotes and facts regarding …

One-Way Street In A Global City: Don Delillo And The Lugubrious Boredom Of The New Economy, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

few of the things we have fought against in cultural studies include the erroneous perceptions that the forces associated with globalization are 1) benefiting the world's peoples and 2) producing a homogeneous global culture. Against this, we have proffered endless texts documenting the sufferings of the world's peoples and critiquing the underlying assumptions regarding U.S. and Western hegemony as well as more hopeful tracts charting a more equitable future as an alternative to crushing regimes of neo-liberalism. In this, we have been joined by countless activists as well as others in women's studies, Latino/a studies, international relations and …

"Fictual" Reportage And (Virtual) Reality: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood And Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, Rania M. Mahmoud

English Theses & Dissertations

This study discusses Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. using Jean Baudrillard's theory of the four stages of the image and John Hellmann's notion of the transforming power of consciousness. Examining two landmarks of what is widely referred to as the nonfiction novel, or creative nonfiction, the study suggests that any attempt to record reality ends up as fabulation, whereby the writer produces his/her own version of reality. Thus, we have multiple realities or, in other words, fables woven out of the interpretive consciousness of individual writers. Taking this a step further, since all our …

Cyborg Bodies And Digitized Desires: Posthumanity And Phillip K. Dick, Jennifer Attaway

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The interaction between human beings and intelligent machines has challenged the traditional understanding of what it means to be human. In his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, phillip k. dick rethinks human identity through the positioning of human beings within a technologically mediated reality that displaces the biological body and the spontaneity of human sensation. Written in 1968, dick's novel anticipates the effect of a technologically mediated culture on the formation of a posthuman identity. dick's fictional juxtaposition of the human being and the organically anthropomorphic android complicates conventional implications of embodiment. Androids are physically …

Probing The Posthuman: Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 And The Mind-Body Problem, Miranda Campbell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In this paper, Miranda Campbell discusses Richard Powers' novel Galatea 2.2 and argues that this work is situated at the intersection of the posthumanist and humanist discourses. Campbell examines Powers' approach to the mind-body problem, his interrogation of the limits and limitations of posthumanism, and its dissolution of the importance of the body, difference, and agency. In the posthuman setting of the Center for Advanced Science of this novel, scientists integrate the mind into the body through its designation as a mechanically functioning brain. At the Center, the binary of human and machine begins to erode with the …

The Infinite Plasticity Of The Digital: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment And Technology In William Gibson's Interstitial Trilogy, Tama Leaver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Ever since William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson's second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties), focusing on the way digital technologies and identity intersect and interact, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment. Using the work of Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and N. Katherine Hayles, it is argued that while William Gibson's second trilogy is infused with posthuman possibilities, the role of embodiment is …

On Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Andrew Miles Jacobsen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

No book since American Psycho has created as much of a scandal. And few books have been as misunderstood. In 1990, months before it was set to be released, certain violent passages were leaked to the press that, taken out of context, made the book seem like a depth-less celebration of sexual violence. Right after Simon & Schuster canceled the book, an employee of the publishing house said, The most unfortunate thing about this whole controversy is that the book is a piece of shit. It's hard when something like this becomes an issue of censorship, because you …

The Night Gwen Stacy Died:' The End Of Innocence And The Birth Of The Bronze Age, Arnold T. Blumberg

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The time was 1973, and superheroes had some growing up to do.

The signs were already there as the genre eased into its fifth decade as the dominant force in American comic books. 1968 had seen the introduction of Robert Crumb's Zap Comics [1], an underground comic more concerned with counterculture trends and bucking the establishment than chronicling the exploits of spandex-wearing conservatives. The medium was testing its boundaries, finding flexibility where once there had been rigidity, and soon superheroes began to look like a timelost collection of crusaders who spoke to a generation long since past.

Review Of Writing Back: Sylvia Plath And Cold War Politics, By Alan Clinton, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Imperialism & Globalization: Lessons From Frank Herbert's Dune, Kevin Williams

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

These are the words of The Preacher (a character in Frank Herbert's Children of Dune who is simultaneously the metaphorical reincarnation of the fallen prophet, Muad'Dib, and the self-exiled Emperor, Paul Atreides) as he addresses the masses enslaved by their devotion to his messianic Empire. These words, culled from the pages of science fiction, are more than mere exposition from Herbert's narrative, they point toward several important conditions facing the political world today. These conditions concern certain failures of democracy and effects of globalization spawned, in part, by an intensification of imperialist expansion in the name of democracy.

Paratextuality And Economic Disavowal In Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, Sarah Brouillette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Dave Eggers' recent novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), concerns two friends who suddenly stumble upon a lot of money, feel guilty about it, and travel around the world trying to give it away. Like almost all of what Eggers is involved in producing, Velocity is profoundly self-justifying. In fact, if we follow Gerard Genette's model and understand a work's paratexts to be all the physical and social texts that attend its existence, controlling its dissemination and reception, then Velocity thematizes paratextuality and practices it, as a text about Eggers' career and his overriding concern with the …

Innovating Superheroes, Alvise Mattozzi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Introduction]

Superhero comics have changed. They have passed through a Golden Age and Silver Age, they have been transformed, cancelled, revived, killed, deconstructed, reconstructed, revisited, etc. My aim is to account for part of these changes and show how superhero comics have been innovated. In order to track these changes I chose to compare different versions of a few DC Comics series, such as Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Shade, that had been cancelled and then revived and are known to have introduced relevant changes between the earliest and the subsequent versions.

Before tackling the series mentioned, I …

Review Of Nine Horses, By Billy Collins, Arthur Mcmaster

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of Ruthless Democracy, By Timothy B. Powell, Matthew Wolf-Myer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Holy Fools, Secular Saints, And Illiterate Saviors In American Literature And Popular Culture, Dana Heller

English Faculty Publications

In her article, "Holy Fools, Secular Saints, and Illiterate Saviors in American Literature and Popular Culture," Dana Heller identifies and analyzes characteristics of the holy fool figure in American literature and culture. Heller defines the holy fool, or divine idiot, as a figure central to U.S. myths of nation. One encounters such figures in American literature as well as in American folklore, popular culture, and mass media. In American culture, the Divine Idiot is a hybrid form which grows out of the crossings of numerous literary and historical currents, both secular and non-secular. This unwieldy hybridity -- the fact that …

Bakhtin And The Rhetoric Of The Modern Western Novel, Douglas J. Massey

English Theses & Dissertations

This thesis uses examples of temporal and spatial intersections (chronotope) provided by noted rhetorician, Mikhail Bakhtin, applying them to a modem Western novel. Bakhtin identifies three primary types of historical chronotope: Ancient Greek Romance, Chivalric Romance, and Rabelasian. The Ancient Greek Romance has three basic types: the adventure novel of ordeal, the adventure novel of everyday life, and ancient biography and autobiography. Certain elements of these three basic types are distinct characteristics that are readily identifiable and, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, "have a direct and unmediated relationship to time,'* (86) which is the dominant principle in the chronotope.

The Chivalric …

Mechanical Angel: Carolyn Forché And The Material Projection Of Messianic History, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The work of Carolyn Forché has always retained a political edge, with works such as the exploration of her Czech background in Gathering the Tribes (1976) and her account of visits to El Salvador in The Country Between Us (1981). Forché has been one of the leading poets who, in her own words, has combatted the self-censorship operative among American poets and writers that seemed to preclude writing about...historical events when those events were still unsafe (qtd. in Stein 147). Her third book of poems The Angel of History (published 13 years later), however, represents a new turn …

Spectral Riders: Multiple Heritage And The (De-)Construction Of History In Ken Kesey's Last Go Round, Alexandra Ganser

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Ken Kesey's novel Last Go Round (1994) expands on the tradition of the tall-tale; the protagonist and first-person narrator Johnathan E. Lee Spain looks back on his life at the sickbed of a comatose black rodeo champion, re-membering his days of glory (as the winner of the first Pendleton Round-Up) and his manifold experiences during this weekend.

Supposing A Space: The Detecting Subject In Paul Auster’S City Of Glass, Richard Swope

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

To Blend In The Place You're In, But With A Mind To Do Something: The Practice Of Merging In James Dickey's To The White Sea, Casey Clabough

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In a final sortie the day before the great fire-bombing raid on Tokyo in the last months of World War II, Muldrow (his first name is purposefully never given), an American tail gunner, parachutes from his burning B-29 into the city. Protected at first by the smoke-blackened anarchy on the ground, he journeys north, away from the chaos and ruin of Tokyo, instinctively drawn toward Japan's sparsely-populated northern island of Hokkaido, a frozen, desolate sanctuary he is certain will assure his survival. With little more than a knife and a small map of Japan he makes his way …

Processes Of Embodiment And Spatialization In The Writings Of Paul Auster, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Processes of embodiment and the spatialization of interior categories such as thought and memory are defining characteristics of Paul Auster's novels, essays, and poetry, and a brief survey of these aspects can offer a new perspective on Auster's oeuvre as an organic whole. It is the underlying assumption of this paper that the transformation of interior into exterior constitutes a specific instance of the transpositional processes discussed therein. Within the theoretical framework of cultural studies -- as opposed to the more narrowly defined literary studies -- such transformations can be regarded as processes of embodiment, that is to …

Good Grief: Representations Of The Death Of Children In Early American Writings, Lisa M. Murray

English Theses & Dissertations

From the spare journals of John Winthrop and William Bradford to the Day of Doom exhortation of Michael Wigglesworth, one can see the basis for a commonly held image of the early Puritan colonists as being a stern, humorless community. This is not inconsistent with the theological underpinnings of the Puritans' faith. Further, some research, such as that by John Demos and Karin Calvert, has concluded that the children of these colonists were not accorded the status of individuals; rather they were variously held at an emotional distance or otherwise marginalized, in part because of the very real threat of …

American Indian-White Miscegenation In Early Nineteenth Century American Literature, Elisabeth Michaelis Simmons

English Theses & Dissertations

The mixing of races has been a controversial issue ever since the first European settlers came to North America. This paper focuses on Native Americans and whites and examines how these two races are represented in early nineteenth century American literature. Specifically, it seeks to trace American authors' motivations and goals in their use of Indian-white miscegenation.

This thesis discusses novels, short stories, and plays by James Nelson Barker, Charlotte Barnes, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Ann Sophia Stephens. All analyzed texts were published between 1808 and 1844 and were written by white authors for …