Western American Literature最新文献

{"title":"The Starlight Hotel Casino by William A. Douglass (review)","authors":"Richard W. Etulain emeritus","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937414","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Starlight Hotel Casino</em> by William A. Douglass <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Richard W. Etulain emeritus </li> </ul> William A. Douglass, <em>The Starlight Hotel Casino</em>. Hamilton, ON: Guernica Editions, 2023. 317 pp. Paper, $21.95; Kindle, $9.99. <p>In his long, fruitful career, William A. Douglass has climbed several high mountains of achievement. First and most important, he is the leading global authority on the Basques of the Old and New Worlds. He also established—and then led for thirty years—the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. In addition, Douglass is a prolific writer on the Basques, Italians, and a rich variety of other subjects. Plus, he has become a recognized leader of the gaming industry in Nevada. Now Douglass has jumped onto the literary scene with this first-rate novel on casino life and culture in Nevada and the United States.</p> <p>Douglass's novel provides parallel and overlapping stories of the Starlight Casino in Reno and the unfolding life stories of several key characters. These attractive narratives are linked, providing strength and continuity in this intriguing novel. The most important of these stories is the relationship between James Fitzsimmons, the owner and leader of the Starlight, and his son Jim, who becomes the owner and leader when his father, now ninety and crumbling, steps aside from the casino leadership. In the father-son connections and in their several conversations, sometimes at odds and occasionally smoothly linked, we learn much about the casino business.</p> <p>The next revealing relationship is that between Jerry Clinton, a manager at the Starlight, and Sue Johnson, a cocktail waitress at the casino. Both are coming off failed marriages (in fact, four terminated marriages for Jerry) but soon cling to one another. After a few months of romance and solidity, however, the relationship collapses. But, after a few second thoughts, Jerry and Sue are back together as the novel moves to a close.</p> <p>Jim Fitzsimmons had similar problems in his marriage—almost non-marriage—to Dot (Dorothy). Their varying interests, their unwillingness to blend with one another, and Jim's crushing load as the Starlight is failing all lead to separation. Yet they too, after months of nearly irrational behavior, find new connections and are back together at the end.</p> <p>For many readers the most attention-catching parts of the novel deal with the decline and fall of the Starlight casino. In these sections <strong>[End Page 187]</strong> we learn much about gambling in Nevada, the casino business in Reno, and the rising gambling competitors in Las Vegas, New Jersey, and among American Indian groups. These scenes, especially in Fitzsimmons and Jim–Jerry conversations, reveal large, valuable lessons about the essence and challenges o","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Frontier Fake News: Nevada's Sagebrush Humorists and Hoaxsters by Richard Moreno (review)","authors":"Jerome Tharaud","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937411","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Frontier Fake News: Nevada's Sagebrush Humorists and Hoaxsters</em> by Richard Moreno <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jerome Tharaud </li> </ul> Richard Moreno, <em>Frontier Fake News: Nevada's Sagebrush Humorists and Hoaxsters</em>. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2023. 174 pp. Paper, $21.95; e-book, $21.95. <p>In September 1862, just over a year after arriving in Nevada Territory, Samuel Langhorne Clemens joined the Virginia City <em>Territorial Enterprise</em> as a staff reporter, launching the meteoric ascent that would soon make \"Mark Twain\" a household name from San Francisco to New York. He joined a group of talented, funny, and prolific writers that literary historian Ella Sterling Cummins dubbed the \"Sagebrush school\": mostly young, white, Eastern-born men who had lit out for the territories during the Gold Rush only to realize that their richest prospects lay in chronicling the raw \"frontier\" society taking shape around them.</p> <p>But as Richard Moreno documents in <em>Frontier Fake News</em>, Twain and his fellow Sagebrushers were hardly objective, \"just the facts\" journalists: they were canny fabulists who exaggerated, embellished, and even outright invented the stories they told. Their best-known hoaxes include Twain's \"Petrified Man\" (about a corpse found mummified in limestone sediment, its hands frozen in a gesture suspiciously like thumbing its nose); Dan De Quille's \"Solar Armor\" (about an inventor who engineers an air-conditioned suit to protect the wearer from the desert heat, only to be found frozen to death in Death Valley, trapped in his own invention); and Sam Davis's \"The Typographical Howitzer,\" in which a fictionalized Twain and De Quille repel an Indian attack by firing movable type from a cannon. Moreno's book surveys this lively but now largely forgotten literary scene.</p> <p><em>Frontier Fake News</em> opens with a brief history of \"fake news\" in the United States and an overview of the Sagebrush school. Subsequent chapters profile eight Sagebrush writers: Twain, De Quille (William Wright), James \"Lying Jim\" Townsend, Fred H. Hart, Davis, Alfred \"Alf\" Doten, William J. Forbes, and Major John H. Dennis. The book concludes with chapters on the editors who bottled this literary lightning, the twentieth-century revival of the <em>Territorial Enterprise</em>, and a coda on the significance of the Sagebrush school. Moreno builds on the work of scholars including Cummins, Duncan Emrich, and most recently Lawrence I. Berkove, whose <em>Sagebrush Anthology:</em> <strong>[End Page 181]</strong> <em>Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West</em> (2006) contains dozens of sketches, short stories, memoirs, poems, and letters by Sagebrush writers. <em>Frontier Fake News</em> nicely complements the <em>Sagebrush Anthology</em>: readers tantalized by the brief bios in Berkove's introdu","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western by Mia Mask (review)","authors":"Abby M. Gibson","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937412","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western</em> by Mia Mask <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Abby M. Gibson </li> </ul> Mia Mask, <em>Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western</em>. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2023. 275 pp. Hardcover, $110; paper, $24.95; e-book, $14.95. <p>You might have noticed the recent rise of Black Western images on the silver screen in the three years since the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. From the outlaw drama of Jeymes Samuel's Netflix release <em>The Harder They Fall</em> (2021) to the Western flair of Jordan Peele's intergalactic <em>Nope</em> (2022), the African American West is currently cutting a sharp and powerful shape in American cinema. Samuel and Peele are not the first to deploy politically salient Black Western images onscreen; instead, they are stepping into a cinematic tradition that stretches back to the earliest days of filmmaking. Despite this long history, Black Western films have all but been erased from the history of the Western genre and American cinema writ large, writes professor and Mary Riepma Ross's 1932 endowed chair of film at Vassar College Mia Mask in her latest book, <em>Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western</em>. Calling for \"cinematic reparations\" (xv), Mask offers in this important book the first ever survey of Black Western films, centering her analysis on films made during the era of civil rights and Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s.</p> <p>Mask argues that Black Western films during this period drew from the politics and ideology of Black nationalism to offer a restorative, <strong>[End Page 183]</strong> if sometimes itself mythic, history of African Americans and the frontier experience that explicitly addressed themes of racial injustice, white supremacy, and Black empowerment. In doing so these films pushed the boundaries of the Western genre, created a new and oftentimes problematic image of Black masculinity onscreen, and highlighted, long before historians, the African American presence in the American West. Deftly interweaving the concepts of historical and cinematic reparations, Mask effectively emphasizes the value of film as a force of historical documentation in the face of historiographic silence. For example, in the final chapter of the book on \"neo-Black westerns\" (165) in the 1990s and 2000s, Mask offers a close reading of John Singleton's <em>Rosewood</em> (1993), a film about the often-forgotten 1923 race massacre in the all-Black town of Rosewood, Florida. She argues that the film functions as a form of cinematic reparations in that it \"corrects the historical record of the 1920s and resonates with the culture wars of the 1990s\" (182). In the absence of widespread historical documentation and knowledge concerning the Rosewood massacre, Singleton's film stepped in to fi","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas ed. by Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett (review)","authors":"Kelly McKisson","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937419","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas</em> ed. by Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kelly McKisson </li> </ul> Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett, eds., <em>More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas</em>. Austin: U of Texas P, 2022. 264 pp, 30 color illustrations, 19 maps. Hardcover, $39.95. <p>Before the 2021 Texas freeze, before the COVID-19 pandemic, my Houston experience was punctuated by Hurricane Harvey. In August 2017 I moved my partner and my cat and our belongings to Houston for graduate school. We could just afford a 500-something-square-foot, second-floor apartment in the Montrose neighborhood. <em>Great location</em> was a common refrain, and at the time it meant a thirty-minute walk from Rice University's campus. Harvey made landfall at the end of the first week of classes. <strong>[End Page 197]</strong> The cat cowered under the couch as we nervously tended a weeping ceiling crack. \"Great location\" meant that on Sunday, August 27, from the second-floor landing, we could take pictures of the flood water swelling through the small parking lot, through the courtyard and to the base of the building. The close, but not too close, proximity was evidence of both disaster and our relative safety.</p> <p>Storms do not discriminate, but human-made policy and infrastructure unevenly distribute vulnerability. As Lacy M. Johnson writes, \"though rain might fall without regard for social or economic disparities, flooding reinforces the inequalities that surround us every day\" (4). Wealthier Houston neighborhoods, such as Montrose, rarely flood, especially not with toxic surges from Houston's oil and chemical refineries. If \"Houston is designed to flood,\" Johnson declares that it is time to tell the difficult story of that design and its uneven impacts (6).</p> <p><em>More City than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas</em>, edited by Johnson, associate professor at Rice, and Cheryl Beckett, associate professor at University of Houston School of Art, takes up this challenge. The book is a project of the Houston Flood Museum (houstonfloodmuseum.org), which Johnson founded after Harvey and which collects stories to make connections between the city's flood history and human activities. The book's twenty-two entries offer histories, personal narratives, conversation, and poetry, and each is paired with artwork designed by senior graphic design students at the University of Houston. Selections might be taught in classes on environmental justice, histories of the Gulf South, sociologies of disaster, or climate change, and students will especially be rewarded by attending to the interplay of text and images.</p> <p><em>More City than Water</em> is a beautiful object, beautiful in the way that wrinkles and scars mark skin with truths of a life lived: the maps visualize dif","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Outlawed by Anna North (review)","authors":"Sarah Nolan-Brueck","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937409","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Outlawed</em> by Anna North <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sarah Nolan-Brueck </li> </ul> Anna North. <em>Outlawed</em>. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 272 pages. Hardcover, $26; paper, $17. <p>Anna North's <em>Outlawed</em> is a strong and much needed dose of fun in a time when gender reification and legislation grow ever more threatening. North, a senior reporter at <em>Vox</em>, writes regularly about reproductive health and politics, as well as the state's shifting position to the family. Her novel is set in the US West in 1894, but its landscape is not a familiar one. To tell this story of communal and individual freedom, North departs from factual reporting in more than one way; bending the Western to her purposes, she creates an alternative history in which a bygone plague becomes a powerful point of departure. In lieu of the American Civil War, slavery collapses for the simple fact that the plague decimates the population and destroys the already crumbling system. Descendants of this generation have re-narrated the plague as a divine judgment, so that now all sicknesses are suspected to have a contagious, immoral cause—especially where reproduction is concerned.</p> <p>In this reimagined time and space, North creates a new origin story for gynecology and reproductive care, a reinvention that posits both gendered entrapment and radical resistance as transhistorical phenomena. This alternate path leaves the inner workings of the body in shadow, allowing the protagonist, Ada, to step into a gap in medical knowledge. Ada is a young, white midwife-in-training. The midwife's daughter and de facto assistant, Ada is privy to a world of female terror, power, and material gore that few in her society care to see. After marrying early in the novel, Ada discovers that she can't get pregnant—and barrenness, in a society obsessed with pregnancy, marks her out for suspicion. Attempting to find her place in a world that despises her, Ada wields her small medical knowledge to great effect—to the benefit of both the reader and the characters in the novel. <strong>[End Page 177]</strong></p> <p>Rather than accept the cloistered life of a nun that should be her only recourse, Ada chooses a search for knowledge. She strikes out to find a reclusive midwife who is studying barrenness illegally. To reach her goal, Ada will need the help of a unique, utopian collective: the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, a talented crew of other barren women and gender nonconforming people. It is through the gang, and a self-reflexive use of Western tropes, that North crafts a narrative which feels both innovative and wholly classic. Out in a harsh landscape, the gang battles the cold, hunger, and the incursion of local law enforcement, who seek to either forcibly return the women to their communities and proper places or to use th","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"211 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Living Death in Latinx Narratives by Kristy L. Ulibarri (review)","authors":"David Lerner","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937416","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Living Death in Latinx Narratives</em> by Kristy L. Ulibarri <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> David Lerner </li> </ul> Kristy L. Ulibarri, <em>Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Living Death in Latinx Narratives</em>. Austin: U of Texas P, 2022. 260 pp. Paper, $34.95; e-book, $34.95. <p>The paradox of free trade is that the invisible, unrestricted flow of capital, labor, and goods is maintained by divisive anti-immigration rhetoric, increasingly militarized national borders, and the violent policing of undocumented migrants. In <em>Visible Borders, Invisible Economies</em> (2022), Kristy L. Ulibarri takes aim at neoliberalism's \"strategic interplay between a free-market economy and a hyper-fortified nation-state that orders the social world and makes some populations more disposable than others\" (3). Ulibarri convincingly argues that the spectacle of border security shores up a national identity rooted in the fantasy of racial homogeneity. Duly stripped <strong>[End Page 191]</strong> of citizenship's legal protections, the undocumented are reduced to mere economic actors. The book's subtitle, <em>Living Death in Latinx Narratives</em>, refers to the ways in which those \"caught between the institutions of citizenship and economy\" undergo various forms of death-in-life, ranging from violence and actual death to physical and mental depletion—what Lauren Berlant called \"slow death\" (7). To tease out this \"tension between biopolitics and necropolitics\" (3), Ulibarri draws on a diverse archive of Latinx literature, photography, and film; her case studies render visible the exploitative, dehumanizing practices that prop up neoliberalism's \"winners\"—primarily white residents of the global north. Indeed, as Ulibarri reminds us, it is no small irony that decades of US imperialism and political meddling in Latin America produced the current migrant \"crisis\" and its attending racist discourse of \"brown peril.\"</p> <p>Refreshingly, the broadly materialist analysis in <em>Visible Borders, Invisible Economies</em> departs from traditional, subject-centered approaches to Chicanx and Latinx criticism. Although Ulibarri acknowledges a debt to pathbreaking theorists like Gloria Anzaldúa, who did so much to spotlight mezcla identities and resistant collectivities, she notes that \"this recursive investment in subjectivity has generated some critical repetition where many of our conversations about borders, nations, and economics continually lead back to Latinx subject formation\" (18). Likewise, Ulibarri eschews Aníbal Quijano's relevant if overly familiar framework of coloniality, which traces the racialized hierarchy of labor control in the Americás to the birth of the modern-world economy and European conquest of the New World. Instead, the author provides a genealogy of the ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"199 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142268721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses by Peter Josyph (review)","authors":"Patrick Vincent","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937410","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses</em> by Peter Josyph <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Patrick Vincent </li> </ul> Peter Josyph, <em>The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses</em>. New York: Ivesian Arts Publishing, 2021. 267 pp. Paper, $39.95. <p>Peter Josyph loves Cormac McCarthy, and his book <em>The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses</em> is an interesting one, existing somewhere between a supplemental reading guide to <em>All the Pretty Horses</em>, a work of autoethnographic literary criticism, and a textual discussion between admirers and scholars of McCarthy. Josyph situates McCarthy's protagonist(s) in relation to his own life and experiences, using each to understand the other. As a premise, the text articulates an unusual goal: \"looking for <em>only</em> given circumstances in the first few pages of <em>All the Pretty Horses</em>\" (22). Josyph explains that given circumstances represent \"the hard empirical evidence that is … clear and distinct in the text,\" <em>not</em> perceptions, inventions, imaginings, or interpretations from outside the novel. He admits, however, that he \"failed in the task miserably,\" suggesting that it felt like a \"fresh approach to venturing into the novel\" (21). This admission of failure signifies the \"wrong\" in Josyph's title and emphasizes a valuable point about our approach to critical methodology: that there is no \"right\" way to approach a text, and that the so-called \"wrong\" way can still garner a generative discussion. Perhaps the most appropriate way to describe the book comes from Josyph himself, when he refers to <em>The Wrong Reader's Guide</em> as \"this little guide for the wayward wayfarer who doesn't mind waywarding farther off the path\" (200).</p> <p>The book is divided into three main sections, comprising a total of fifteen chapters. Part one, \"How Cormac McCarthy Saved Civilization,\" provides Josyph's autoethnographic foregrounding and centers analysis around Josyph's personal relationship to the text and its resonances within his own life. In this section he spends great amounts of time constructing grandiose statements about the importance of McCarthy as a writer, likening his work to other great texts, such as <em>Hamlet</em> and <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>. Josyph's argument in this section focuses on our ability to extend McCarthy backward and forward through time, where we can find meaning in older texts by way of McCarthy's more recent work. This of course runs against the notion of situating his reading in <em>only</em> the given circumstances <strong>[End Page 179]</strong> of John Grady Cole's time in San Angelo, Texas, but Josyph always seems to return to the opening of the novel. The second section, \"Garrano, Prince of Denmark,\" is comprised of ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"WLA Awards","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937422","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> WLA Awards <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><strong>Thomas J. Lyon Book Award</strong>: named after a former editor of <em>Western American Literature</em>, this award goes to an outstanding monograph in western literary or cultural studies</p> <p><strong>Don D. Walker Prize</strong>: given to the best journal essay or book chapter from an edited collection in Western North American literary and cultural studies, published during the previous year</p> <p><strong>J. Golden Taylor Award</strong>: named after the first editor of <em>Western American Literature</em>, this award goes to the graduate student who submitted the best paper to the annual conference</p> <p><strong>Dorys Crow Grover Award</strong>: given to a graduate student who submits an outstanding paper that meets the criteria of the current year's conference</p> <p><strong>Creative Writing Award</strong>: this award goes to the best creative writing submission at the annual conference</p> <p><strong>Susan J. Rosowski Award</strong>: named after a longtime WLA member, this award goes to a generous and caring mentor and teacher in the field of western American literary studies</p> <p><strong>Louis Owens Awards</strong>: provide financial support for diverse and international graduate students to attend the annual WLA conference</p> <p><strong>WLA/Charles Redd Center K–12 Teaching Award</strong>: provides teachers with the opportunity to attend and present at the WLA Conference; sponsored by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and the WLA</p> <p>Information on the application procedures and deadlines for these awards can be found on our website: https://westernlit.org/association-wla/awards/ <strong>[End Page 204]</strong></p> Copyright © 2024 Western Literature Association ... </p>","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"211 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds by Bryan Giemza (review)","authors":"William Brannon","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937417","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds&lt;/em&gt; by Bryan Giemza &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; William Brannon &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; Bryan Giemza, &lt;em&gt;Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 175 pp. Hardcover, $100; e-book, $90. &lt;p&gt;Bryan Giemza's &lt;em&gt;Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds&lt;/em&gt; examines how McCarthy's canon reflects his engagement with the sciences. Giemza suggests that a better understanding of McCarthy's involvement with disciplines outside the humanities offers insight into recurring ideas in McCarthy's texts and a glimpse into his process of composing. Giemza seeks to provide examples of how McCarthy's work may be placed \"within contemporary scientific discourse and literary criticism\" and asserts that his intention in this critical endeavor despite resting in \"contextual and translational work between humanities and conventionally understood STEM disciplines, has no theory of everything to offer readers, just case-specific insights from seeing McCarthy's work translationally\" (8–9). As Giemza notes, his book joins other recent McCarthy criticism seeking to examine the links between McCarthy's oeuvre and disciplines outside the humanities, and he mentions as an example Lydia Cooper's &lt;em&gt;Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature&lt;/em&gt; (2021).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Giemza devotes the first chapter to an overview of the history of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and draws upon conversations with Mc-Carthy's brother, Dennis, a Santa Fe resident, as well as scholars at SFI to present a portrayal of Cormac McCarthy's intellectual engagement at the institute that is opposite in many ways to the popular perception of McCarthy as an isolated author frequently shunning publicity in favor of solitude. Giemza suggests that among the other residents at SFI, the majority of whom are notable for work in the sciences, McCarthy often occupied the role of facilitator, helping bridge academic discussions between those working at the institute. For Giemza, McCarthy's overt engagement with the sciences at SFI manifests in his last two published novels, &lt;em&gt;The Passenger&lt;/em&gt; (2022) and &lt;em&gt;Stella Maris&lt;/em&gt; (2022), and represents \"not so much a new departure as reaching a long-sought waypoint, not for disembarkation, but for a life spent in continual wonder of expanding universes\" (28).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Subsequent chapters in Giemza's book focus on extended examples from McCarthy's canon, particularly &lt;em&gt;Suttree&lt;/em&gt;, to establish the &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 194]&lt;/strong&gt; connections between McCarthy's work and contemporary scientific discourse. Chapter two considers chirality and handedness in McCarthy's fictional universe, using as a case study the presence of twins and doubling in &lt;em&gt;Suttree. Suttree&lt;/em&gt; remains the primary","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"58th Western Literature Association Conference","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937421","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> 58th Western Literature Association Conference <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p><em>Hope in a Hogan</em> © Ryan Singer, 2022</p> <p></p> <h2>Speculative Territorializations of New West Literatures</h2> <h3>Tucson, Arizona | El Conquistador Hilton Resort</h3> <h4>October 2–5, 2024</h4> <p>As president of the Western Literature Association for 2024 I am thrilled to announce that the 2024 WLA Conference will take place from October 2–5 in Tucson, Arizona. Situated on ancestral Tohono O'odham lands known as Cuk-Ṣon and nicknamed \"the Old Pueblo\" by subsequent settlers, we were able to secure the Hilton El Conquistador Resort as our conference venue. Located in the Sonoran Desert in the foothills of the spectacular Santa Catalina Mountains, this site amplifies any perceptions inspired by these layered geographic and spatial significations. Such associations speak to the meaning and status of the American West and its dynamic (re)inscription through the storytelling processes of writing, art, filmmaking, performativity, and song. As a means of synthesizing such qualities and ideas, this conference will be focused on the theme of Speculative Territorializations of New Western Literatures. The theme is offered to stimulate thought provoking discussions and the exploration of new insights arising from the physical and mythic landscapes of the American West, including Pacific Island borderlands, reaching beyond Jean-François Lyotard's conception of the West Coast as \"Pacific wall.\" <strong>[End Page 202]</strong></p> <p>Organized around this inclusive and expansive subject, the 2024 conference aims to inspire fresh intellectual and artistic engagement with a range of relevant texts, while extending ongoing experimentations in western literature and transcending the boundaries of literary genres and temporal contexts. This theme also seeks to provide a fertile ground for playful intellectual inquiry, reflecting the vibrant enthusiasm for diverse and forward-thinking speculative futures and artistic forms, which are central to current discussions about the West and the direction of western literature, art, film, and popular culture.</p> <p>WLA 2024 President Billy J. Stratton</p> <p>For more information see: https://www.westernlit.org/wla-conference-2024 <strong>[End Page 203]</strong></p> Copyright © 2024 Western Literature Association ... </p>","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}