{"title":"The Locked Door","authors":"Joel Allegretti","doi":"10.1001/jama.1911.02560130033017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1911.02560130033017","url":null,"abstract":"The door to the room next to my bedroom when I was grow - ing up was always locked. It was the only door in the house that locked from the outside. Not once did I see Mom or Dad-or anyone else-open it. I must have been six or seven when I first asked what was on the other side. \"A room\" was the flippant response. I persisted, and the answer was a parental cliche: \"We'll tell you when you're older.\"We lived in central New Jersey, a stone's throw from Cranbury, a town whose history dates back to colonial days. I was an only child, unusual for a family in the nineteen-fifties, especially one that was Italian-American. The window of my second-floor bedroom looked out onto our backyard and the woods behind it. The scenery was serene and destined for elegiac recollections a half century later. My attention, however, didn't fall on summer's luxuriant foliage or winter's quilts of snow, but on the mysterious room to the right of mine.I remember-maybe I was ten-trying to turn the doorknob and suddenly feeling Dad's Golden Glove-boxer grip on my left shoulder. Startled, I winced and spun around. How had I not heard his approach? Dad shook his head and with an extended arm pointed to my room. He seemed at that moment to have grown much taller. I returned to the security of my model airplanes and science-fiction magazines.After Mom's broiled swordfish steak and buttered rice one Friday night, Dad took me to see a new movie, Psycho. The outing was a reward for my latest report card: three As, two Bs, and three Cs, but for the first time the Cs weren't grades, but letters in our last name. Despite Dad's multiple inquiries, Mom decided to stay home and read Hawaii. James Michener's latest novel aside, she disliked suspense films and certainly didn't care to see one with that morbid title. Mom wasn't convinced it was appropriate for me, but Dad replied, \"Joey's thirteen,\" as if my age alone validated his decision. He later could assure her I wasn't the only boy in the theater.It takes little to function as a match against the striking surface of an adolescent's imagination. When my two real eyes saw the decomposed and skeletal Mrs. Bates, my mind's eye saw an imagined interior. A mummified body was roped to a chair, hollow eyed and emaciated, dressed in outdated clothes, and facing the window with the never-opened curtain. But whose body was it? Both sets of grandparents were alive and a happy part of my life. I had aunts and uncles and cousins-Mom's family was larger, so her side supplied the greater share-so my fevered, newly teenaged brain came to three conclusions in the two-dimensional presence of Anthony Perkins in deranged drag: There was a lost family member who died before I was born, the room I never saw was a mausoleum for that person, and every morning I awoke only a few feet from a corpse.At lunch the next day, I sat at the kitchen table dipping my grilled American cheese in a dollop of ketchup. As she poured me a glass of milk, I asked Mom if there","PeriodicalId":165661,"journal":{"name":"Pennsylvania Literary Journal","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130884134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fruits of Eden: David Fairchild and America's Plant Hunters","authors":"A. Faktorovich","doi":"10.1093/jahist/jav691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav691","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":165661,"journal":{"name":"Pennsylvania Literary Journal","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116705086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jack London: A Writer's Fight for a Better America","authors":"","doi":"10.5860/choice.194343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.194343","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":165661,"journal":{"name":"Pennsylvania Literary Journal","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121753847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark","authors":"A. Faktorovich","doi":"10.5860/choice.194426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.194426","url":null,"abstract":"Jo Ann Trogdon. The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. 469pp. ISBN: 978-0-8262-2049-3. 23 illustrations.Academics frequently fall into the trap of writing new books on subjects that have previously been explored by a large volume of earlier scholars. If there have been two hundred prior biographies of Mark Twain, surely there is a need for a new title in this string of repetitions. So, this study by Jo Ann Trogdon is refreshing because it goes beyond the repeated details of the Lewis and Clark famous exposition of America from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, and instead asks, who was William Clark before this point and why Meriwether Lewis chose him for this adventurous journey when he probably had the funding to attract almost any of the experienced explorers from the period. And instead of running through Clark's life, a feat that has already been attempted, Trogdon chose a little-explored voyage that holds intriguing mysteries. The events described are from 1798, over five years before the famous exploration, when William Clark took a flatboat from Louisville, Kentucky, loaded with tobacco and furs to sell \"downriver in Spanish New Orleans.\" This was not the last stop on his trip, and he made it all the way up north to Boston on his way back, so this was a grueling journey that taught him the navigational, managerial and other skills he used in the mile-wise similar later expedition. As Trogdon looks closely at Clark's journal from this trip and researches every minute detail hoping for clues to enrich her descriptions, she discovers that Clark's trading trip was far from angelic. Clark was \"helping smuggle a secret Spanish payoff to a corrupt American official, illegally transporting Spanish dollars from New Orleans to the U.S. border, and committing acts of espionage.\" In the \"Preface,\" Trogdon explains that while today or in the kingdom of Britain, this espionage might have been punishable by death or life-long imprisonment, in 1798, America had just come out of the American Revolution, and Clark's plot to potentially help Kentucky separate from the Union was just a normal part of post-colonial business and politics. If America could split from Britain, what was wrong with helping scheming Spaniards hoping to start a new insurrection?The book includes original illustrations taken out of Clark's journal, as well as transcripts of most of the passages that inspired this book from the same source. Every part of the journey is explained with specific historic references and everything from what Clark ate to where he pulled ashore is presented, so that somebody who wanted to imitate this journey would not need a second source book. …","PeriodicalId":165661,"journal":{"name":"Pennsylvania Literary Journal","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127537125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Born to Be Wild: The Rise of the American Motorcyclist","authors":"A. Faktorovich","doi":"10.5860/choice.193495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.193495","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":165661,"journal":{"name":"Pennsylvania Literary Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115954036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s","authors":"Dongho Cha","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-0145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-0145","url":null,"abstract":"Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s by Alex Houen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 282 pages.If the literary movement known as modernism was not simply a sort of literary fiction, why would it not be possible to renew, if not precisely to redeem, it today? Alex Houen's important book is committed to the effort of what he calls \"defending literary vanguardism,\" and blurring the subtle distinction between the terms modernist and avant-garde, he argues for the importance of \"formulatpng],\" in full postmodernity, \"something newly modern\" (13). Thus, unlike other recent critics, who like to say that postmodernism has made avant-gardism \"neither culturally nor stylistically viable,\" Houen strongly insists on its \"continuing possibility\" (13). His affirmation of \"the persis- tence of avant-gardism\" depends is that, in his view, the line, the so-called \"great divide,\" between modernism and postmodernism is more or less vague and \"porous\" (14-15). This is not to say that we begin to witness the return of modernism after its demise, but rather that we might be able to assure its uninterrupted (although somehow differentiated) continuity with what followed it (of which we have not until recently been aware). But before dealing with this question of periodization, it seems more appropriate at this point to consider why we should call, of all things, for avant-gardism.Houen's claims for a \"literary avant-garde movement\" rooted particularly in \"sixties American avant-gardism\" are primarily concerned with its \"powers of potentiality, both aesthetic and political\" (16). These powers are crucial for Houen because he defines around its attempts \"to turn new aesthetic possibilities into powers of social action\" (11). Emphasizing that the core debates about avant-gardism have always centered on whether literary forms can be \"politically affective,\" or can have \"the effect of political power on oneself\" (7), Houen argues that the most revolutionary aspect of avant-gardism consists of its \"affective potency,\" its ability to \"touch on sensibility, feeling, and experience,\" or, more precisely, to \"elicit thoughts, desires, and feelings that do take place in the real bodies and minds of readers\" (10). This affective energy or force plays a crucial role in the politics of \"potentialism\" since the affective charges \"shaped in and as literature\" are essential to \"personal liberation\" (47), that is, to the realization of \"individual capacities and potentials\" (4). (While Houen does not go into great detail about what he means by \"realizing individual potential\") He challenges the notion that these affective possibilities are diminished or lost (along with the notion of potentiality) under postmodern circumstances, in which aesthetic production itself has been fully integrated into commodity production and consumerism has become a dominant way of life.\"We can act,\" Houen (following Charles Bernstein) asserts, \"We are not trapped in the ","PeriodicalId":165661,"journal":{"name":"Pennsylvania Literary Journal","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122380242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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