STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION最新文献

Tired Gestures and Exhausted Forms: Nathanael West and the California "Dream Dump" 疲惫的姿态和枯竭的形式：纳塔奈尔-韦斯特与加州 "梦幻垃圾场"

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-07-23 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2024.a932800

Rochelle Rives

{"title":"Tired Gestures and Exhausted Forms: Nathanael West and the California \"Dream Dump\"","authors":"Rochelle Rives","doi":"10.1353/saf.2024.a932800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2024.a932800","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> Tired Gestures and Exhausted Forms:Nathanael West and the California \"Dream Dump\" </li> <li> Rochelle Rives (bio) </li> </ul> Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust is a veritable catalog of the health quackery and messianic lifestyle fads of 1930s Los Angeles. Nonetheless, the novel reminds us, those enlisted in the \"Search for Health\" had actually \"come to California to die.\"1 Literally and figuratively aging, these Californians become ideal aesthetic models for the work of the novel's artist/protagonist, Tod Hackett. Yet the body in decline is a body Tod cannot paint. Struggling to bring his work to completion, Tod is unable to claim his authority as a painter because of his attraction to these bodies. As it explores Tod's modern attempt to produce and paint exhaustion, the 1939 novel—with its aesthetic vision centered on artistic failure and incompletion—engages the histories of both theater and painting as models for tired affective and aesthetic forms. Indeed, certain well-known modernist preoccupations with order, personality, and aesthetic mastery are satirized in Tod Hackett's vision of an exhausted Hollywood landscape. Through the tradition of grotesque art and early twentieth-century physiological performance styles based on the formalization of hysterical gesture, debility and decline, West creates an alternative \"historical sense,\" drawing incisive parallels between the emptiness of Hollywood culture and modernist aesthetic anxiety.2 I highlight this concept of \"historical sense\"—from T.S. Eliot's 1919 essay \"Tradition and the Individual Talent\"—not to promote Eliot as a master spokesperson for modernist aesthetic ideology, but to underline one explicitly articulated term in modernist discourse that may act as a measure or lens through which to gauge West's own interest in the \"perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.\"3 In the essay, Eliot promotes a rescaling of tradition, the product of which is a new proportional \"order\" that demonstrates a \"conformity between the old and the new,\" a temporal synthesis that [End Page 55] is further linked to aesthetic mastery.4 In contrast, The Day of the Locust, with its emphasis on temporal disjunction, failure, and incompletion, comments satirically on the \"sterility and social impotence of the masterwork.\"5 At the same time, the novel performs its debt to the masterwork. Indeed, Tod must situate his own work in relation to art historical tradition and aesthetic prototypes in order to claim his authority as a mostly unsuccessful painter, but this relationship to authority is often indeterminate and ambiguous, as is the ultimate political work we can understand West's fiction as doing. Humorously, and, as I ","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141754073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Innovating the Early Modern: Pastoral Cycle and Epiphany in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs 现代早期的创新：萨拉-奥恩-朱维特《尖枞树之乡》中的牧歌循环与主显节

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-07-23 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2024.a932799

Kristen L. Olson

{"title":"Innovating the Early Modern: Pastoral Cycle and Epiphany in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs","authors":"Kristen L. Olson","doi":"10.1353/saf.2024.a932799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2024.a932799","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> Innovating the Early Modern:Pastoral Cycle and Epiphany in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs </li> <li> Kristen L. Olson (bio) </li> </ul> In its sixtieth anniversary year, the Guggenheim Museum ran a retrospective on Hilma af Klint (1842–1944) that became the most-attended exhibition in its history. Art historians called her style groundbreaking, \"resonant with the long-celebrated styles of more famous male artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian,\"1 a \"body of work that invites a reevaluation of modernism and its development.\"2 Though Sarah Orne Jewett is more established than af Klint, her fiction tests similar boundaries. Her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), has found a comfortable niche in the American literary canon, admired for its naturalistic acuity and its nuanced revelation of late-nineteenth-century class division. Yet Jewett has still more to show us about the literary imagination of her time. As Marjorie Pryse observes in her introduction to the 1981 Norton edition, \"we have allowed Pointed Firs to fall into an abyss between nineteenth-century themes and twentieth-century technique.\"3 Jewett's writing has felt modern to us, but we have not clearly understood why. I want to suggest here that a closer examination of Jewett's use of literary pastoral in her experiment with the story cycle form reveals innovation that not only reinforces her place as a formative voice in the tradition of local color regionalism but also situates her work on the vanguard of Modernist fiction.4 To follow Pryse's inclination, reassessing Pointed Firs' technique means examining the key element defining the modern in the Modernist story cycle: the emergence of the protagonist's experience in a series of epiphanic moments, \"the revelatory instant in which characters' perception of themselves or their position in the world is transformed.\"5 For the cycle's protagonist, these revelations occur as moments of connection with an [End Page 25] individual or idea in each story, linking together across the collection of episodes to build the protagonist's growing self-awareness. My assertion is that Jewett uses the story cycle form to ground her narrator's epiphanic experience in the framework of transformation typical of sixteenth-century pastoral drama. While it may seem archaic from a twenty-first-century perspective, pastoral is a richly varied genre, and Jewett's adaptation of literary pastoral is progressive, anticipating the development of twentieth-century story cycles using epiphanic moments as an organizing principle.6 Jewett draws particularly on Shakespearean pastoral, the hallmark of which is the transfiguring experi","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141754075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Notes on Contributors 撰稿人说明

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-07-23 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2024.a932803

{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/saf.2024.a932803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2024.a932803","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> Notes on Contributors </li> </ul> Kristen L. Olson is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University's Beaver Campus. Her recent book, The Patterns That Make Poetry, will be published by Routledge in 2024, and she is currently developing a monograph showing how visually informed patterns found in emblem books and devotional poetry influenced Milton's poetic design. She has published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetics, as well as on works that share commonalities across temporal boundaries. Dale Pattison is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. His current book project, The Politics of Progress, argues that neoliberalism's reconfiguring of human subjectivity demands new approaches for understanding Western narrative traditions valorizing liberal individualism, personal freedom, and human agency. His most recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, American Studies, and JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Rochelle Rives is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She is the author of two books, Modernist Impersonalities: Affect, Authority and the Subject (2012) and more recently, The New Physiognomy: Face, Form, and Modern Expression (2024). Jay Shelat is Assistant Professor of English at Ursinus College, where he teaches courses in contemporary culture. His work can be found or is forthcoming in MELUS, Studies in American Fiction, TSLL, Avidly, and elsewhere. He is currently writing his first monograph, which explores how post-9/11 legal and social policy affect families of color. Gale Temple is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he specializes in early American literature and culture. His work has appeared in such venues as Studies in American Fiction, Arizona Quarterly, Textual Practice, J19, Leviathan, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, and ESQ. He is currently working on two book projects: a critical companion to life and writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a monograph about early American literary and cultural portrayals of addiction. Copyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press ... ","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141754074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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The Walking Dead in a Dead New York: Family and the Specter of 9/11 in Zone One 死寂纽约中的行尸走肉：第一区的家庭与 9/11 阴影

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-07-23 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2024.a932802

Jay N. Shelat

{"title":"The Walking Dead in a Dead New York: Family and the Specter of 9/11 in Zone One","authors":"Jay N. Shelat","doi":"10.1353/saf.2024.a932802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2024.a932802","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> The Walking Dead in a Dead New York:Family and the Specter of 9/11 in Zone One </li> <li> Jay N. Shelat (bio) </li> </ul> She is known as the Dust Lady. Marcy Borders walked out of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, coated from head to toe in the cinders of catastrophe, and was immortalized in Stan Honda's haunting photograph. Borders's shocked face reflects the horror and tragedy of the day, and the photo is a dystopian signifier of how 9/11 \"usher[ed] in an era of new seriousness.\"1 Authors have always thematized the apocalyptic nature of the attacks. Don DeLillo, for instance, uses ash and dust as charnel confetti to welcome this new epoch in his 2007 novel Falling Man: \"It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.\"2 The raining powder transforms the micro street into the macro world and inaugurates a living nightmare. This new age of terror, moreover, would go on to see the decimation of more than the New York City skyline: the Forever War decimates nations, homes, and families, and the conflict underscores how imperial, militaristic response goes hand in hand with the end of the world, or the end of a world. A popular theme in post-9/11 literature, apocalypse is an imminent menace of catastrophe that characterizes the present age. Take Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (2009), in which Hiroko survives the utter destruction of Nagasaki and watches her father transform into a hellish creature. And in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), protagonists Nadia and Saeed witness the razing of their home city, inaugurating their refugee, dystopian subjectivities. Extensive destruction doesn't only necessitate apocalypse, however. What we could term individualized apocalypse signals the end of the world for a person, an affective position that shouts, \"For me this is the end of the world.\" The world continues to turn, yet a character remains suspended in the inertia of trauma. This is how Oskar feels when his father Thomas dies in the attacks in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud [End Page 105] and Incredibly Close (2005); he is in never-ending suspended animation, where constant reminders of his earth-shattering loss reside in the objects that surround him. In this article, I not only treat apocalypse as a material event that has distinct physical attributes (gray ash, desolation, etc.), but I also consider it a subjective condition that limns the collapse of social and personal infrastructures.3 As Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin argue, \"apocalypse mediates the unevenly distributed risks of the contemporary, social, political, and geophysical world. Race, gender, sexuality, disability, indigeneity, citizenship,","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"93 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141754184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Intemperate Women: Female Inebriates, Temperance Fiction, and Nineteenth-Century Medicine 无节制的女人女性醉酒者、节制小说和十九世纪医学

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-07-23 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2024.a932798

Gale Temple

{"title":"Intemperate Women: Female Inebriates, Temperance Fiction, and Nineteenth-Century Medicine","authors":"Gale Temple","doi":"10.1353/saf.2024.a932798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2024.a932798","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> Intemperate Women:Female Inebriates, Temperance Fiction, and Nineteenth-Century Medicine </li> <li> Gale Temple (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>I. Introduction</h2> Some of the most influential scholarship on nineteenth-century American temperance fiction has focused on the ambivalent complicity of temperance plots with the repressive norms of a burgeoning middle-class social order. In other words, if it's true that the middle class \"forged itself\" through the \"collective repression of alcohol,\" then we might view the fictional drunkard's relentless thirst as a potentially redemptive expression of desire for the repressed or as-yet-unrealized intimacies and associations that middle-class normalcy only ever imperfectly foreclosed.1 Michael Warner, for example, reads Whitman's Franklin Evans (1842) as a tentative map for a gay urban subculture that could not \"be openly avowed\" but that was \"nevertheless coming to expression.\"2 Similarly, Christopher Castiglia connects the allure of the barroom in temperance fiction to the promise of \"intemperate sociality,\" or the unsanctioned pleasure of intimate communion with other men, free from the systematized humiliation, pressure, and competition of the corporatized public sphere.3 Although Glenn Hendler focuses on the figure of the \"reformed and transformed drunkard\" rather than the symbolic allure of the tavern, he nevertheless connects the Washingtonian temperance movement's emotionally overwrought public bonding rituals to \"new social formations only then being preliminarily experienced by the white working-class men and artisans who largely made up the movement.\"4 For Hendler, male homosociality and drink were symbolically interchangeable, and the Washingtonians promoted sobriety and class solidarity by fulfilling the former desire while demonizing the latter. [End Page 1] In readings such as these, temperance fiction invites the critic to trace the imposition of repressive middle-class norms, but more pertinently to interpret the drunkard's misguided impulses and predilections as powerful symbols for what would ultimately evolve into recognizable (and more self-affirming) countercultural, sexually transgressive, or class-affiliated male associations. In what follows, I'll argue that this formula for reading temperance fiction—in which the drunkard's desire serves either as a foil for the norms of proper citizenship or an encrypted expression of forbidden longing—applies imperfectly when the central character is not a man, but rather a respectable woman who falls victim to drink. I'll focus primarily on Mary Spring Walker's The Family Doctor: Or, Mrs. Barry and Her Bourbon (1868), a rare temperance novel that dramatizes the alcoholic demise of a formerly genteel and exemp","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141754166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Making the Modern City: Architecture and the Literary Imagination in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler 打造现代城市：史蒂文-米尔豪泽的《马丁-德雷斯勒》中的建筑与文学想象

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-07-23 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2024.a932801

Dale Pattison

{"title":"Making the Modern City: Architecture and the Literary Imagination in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler","authors":"Dale Pattison","doi":"10.1353/saf.2024.a932801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2024.a932801","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> Making the Modern City:Architecture and the Literary Imagination in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler </li> <li> Dale Pattison (bio) </li> </ul> In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas's beloved architectural history of turn-of-thecentury Manhattan, the architect-theorist argues that fantasy and eroticism reside at the heart of the twentieth-century American metropolis. For Koolhaas, the emerging technologies and architectures of modernity enabled new forms of social life that would define our relationship to cities throughout the twentieth century. Part of the appeal of Koolhaas's book is its playful framing of modernist traditions of architecture and urban planning as grounded in the erotic imagination. Cities, Koolhaas argues, are intrinsically sites of imaginative possibility, and no city embodies this quality more completely than the modern American metropolis. Published in 1978, Delirious New York emerged at a particular historical moment when architectural theory began to account for the erotic potential of built environments. In essays published between 1975 and 1983, for instance, the Swiss-French architect Bernard Tschumi writes extensively on transgression as a principle fundamentally embedded in built space; the pleasure of architecture, according to Tschumi, resides in the individual's ability to subvert an architectural program—the set of behaviors ascribed to a built space—by creatively inhabiting that space and transgressing the architect's \"rules\" of space.1 The intensely regimented and programmatic spaces that make possible these erotic transgressions are, not coincidentally, the architectures of modernity; indeed, the utopian belief that architecture could discipline individuals into \"radiant life,\" to use Le Corbusier's term, was foundational to architecture of the period. Largely unaccounted for in these conceptions of modern architecture, however, are the social dimensions of built space. Even as these architectures of modernity—the skyscraper, the avenue, and the elevator shaft, for instance—thrust city dwellers into new [End Page 79] erotic and transgressive postures, they also served to connect people in ways that would contribute to an emergent modern public. Kate Marshall's recent work on the medial networks of modernity, embodied most visibly in modernist literature through the spatial locus of the corridor, describes how the architectures of modernity—built on a logic of communication—helped to produce new forms of social life. While Marshall focuses explicitly on American literature written during the modern period, in this essay I am interested in exploring how contemporary literary imaginaries of the modern city frame the emergence of the modern public. Perhaps more than any other time in urban histo","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141754071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic 后记：关于早期美国生态哥特式的挖掘

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-03-27 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2023.a923104

Tom J. Hillard

{"title":"Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic","authors":"Tom J. Hillard","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923104","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic </li> <li> Tom J. Hillard (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> “Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape.” —D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)1 </blockquote> In the early 2000s, back when I was a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, tinkering with ideas that I then thought of as “dark nature” or “gothic nature,” I could scarcely have imagined, twenty years later, the publication of this special issue of Studies in American Fiction. The thought of such a range of scholars, from around the world, contributing their ideas to the flourishing field of the “ecogothic” was beyond anything that I could have dreamed. Back then, ecocriticism itself was still something of an emerging field, and one by no means yet widely embraced by the academy—so in those early explorations of the shadowy corners of ecocriticism and gothic literature, which itself had long been a marginalized area of study, my work then often felt fairly far afield. I relate all this because, as one of the earliest proponents of the mutually entwined study of ecocriticism and the gothic, I’ve observed the field develop with a watchful eye, and thus it is with particular excitement that I greet this current issue, rich as it is with its varied approaches to the ecogothic. The essays herein collectively demonstrate the range and versatility of what ecogothic studies has become, and they show its applicability to a broad swath of literary texts. In Matthew Sivils’s apt words from the introduction to this volume, “Once we start looking, the ecogothic seems to sprout up everywhere.”2 Indeed, in the past half-decade or so in particular, ecogothic scholarship has proliferated, and the [End Page 275] ecogothic itself seems to be found everywhere among us. Moreover, nothing suggests that any of this will slow anytime soon. From an academic point of view, I see this as a very good thing. (Though from the point of view of a human being living on this planet, it’s perhaps less comforting to realize one may be living in a gothic tale!) As the field of ecogothic studies has grown—matured, even—the once amorphous definition of “ecogothic” has become clearer and, I think, more refined. As waves of critics continue to fine tune their usage of the term, it seems to be being applied in two primary ways: as a critical approach or way of studying a text, and as a quality of a literary work itself. That is, one can bring an “ecogothic lens” to a text, and at the same time, that text itself can","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"234 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Vanishing South: Race and the Ecogothic in Ambrose Bierce and Charles Chesnutt 消失的南方安布罗斯-比尔斯和查尔斯-切斯纳特笔下的种族与生态哥特

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-03-27 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2023.a923094

Kevin Corstorphine

{"title":"The Vanishing South: Race and the Ecogothic in Ambrose Bierce and Charles Chesnutt","authors":"Kevin Corstorphine","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923094","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> The Vanishing South: Race and the Ecogothic in Ambrose Bierce and Charles Chesnutt </li> <li> Kevin Corstorphine (bio) </li> </ul> Ambrose Bierce (1842–c.1914), known in his lifetime as an acerbic journalist and author of short stories, can easily be seen as a singular figure. His work is sometimes read for its vivid and brutal portrayal of the Civil War (in which he fought for the Union army) and sometimes through its deserved place in the canon of American “weird” fiction. It bridges the gap between Poe and Lovecraft in its blend of the gothic, the supernatural, and science fiction. Bierce’s disappearance, seemingly after traveling into Mexico at the age of 71, is prefigured in his fiction by strange tales of mysterious vanishings. Similarly, the story of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) is overshadowed by his crucial place in African American literary history as a writer who offered both fantastical and realist portrayals of Black life in the Reconstruction era. Here, I argue that both authors, specifically in Bierce’s “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field” (1888) and Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899), engage in their fiction with an ecological perspective that simultaneously decenters and reasserts the specificity of racial experience in their time. I contend that the racial truths within gothic fiction have been neglected due to their narrative displacement onto the environment, highlighting the crucial need for further attention to race within ecocriticism. Social constructions of race are irrelevant in the context of the natural world, but manage to produce separate spheres of experience that might seem fantastical were their consequences not so real. Despite their overlapping careers, the authors are not usually considered in terms of their shared concerns. In doing so, I argue that they provide an important insight into the relationship between “nature” and racial categorization at the crucial juncture in American social and political life at which they wrote. It is appropriate, given the fantastical nature of how we have divided humans into races and how we have constructed the notion of a definable nature, that [End Page 55] supernatural fiction is the means by which this insight is achieved. Here, I examine the intersection of ‘nature’ and race through a comparative analysis of Bierce’s short story and several of Chesnutt’s, focusing on “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” “Po’ Sandy,” and “The Goophered Grapevine.” <h2>Race, the Supernatural, and the Gothic</h2> Bierce’s “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888, consists of fewer than eight hundred words and recounts one bizarre incident, without explanation and with barely any context. A plantation owner called Williamson gets up","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"234 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

(De)composing Gothicism: Disturbing the (eco-) Gothic in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle (De)composing Gothicism：雪莉-杰克逊《我们一直住在城堡里》中的（生态）哥特式扰乱

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-03-27 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2023.a923097

Amy LeBlanc, Leah Van Dyk

{"title":"(De)composing Gothicism: Disturbing the (eco-) Gothic in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle","authors":"Amy LeBlanc, Leah Van Dyk","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923097","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> (De)composing Gothicism: Disturbing the (eco-) Gothic in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle </li> <li> Amy LeBlanc (bio) and Leah Van Dyk (bio) </li> </ul> While Shirley Jackson’s novels often use gothic elements (including omens, large and stately houses, a supernatural presence, and horror), We Have Always Lived in the Castle differs from other texts in Jackson’s body of work: the last completed novel before her death in 1965, it is one of few works with a first-person protagonist, Merricat Blackwood, who subverts gothic tropes by being less victim than victimizer.1 From Merricat’s first appearance, we learn of her fondness for the death-cap mushroom,2 a highly toxic fungus that is responsible for the majority of fatal mushroom poisonings each year: she explains, “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, . . . I like my sister Constance . . . and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”3 From the very beginning, Merricat embodies the intersections of gothic and natural imagination, equating her sinister love of poisonous mushrooms to the maintenance of her quiet, sheltered life with Constance. In Castle, the ecogothic arises through spectral environments, eco-sickness, vengeful natures (both human and more-than-human), and uncanny bodies and spaces. Using ecocritical theorists such as Helen Houser and Sarah Jaquette Ray alongside gothic criticism of Jackson, we seek to explore the interconnections and importance of the ecogothic in Castle, examining how eco-sickness narratives “carry us from the micro-scale of the individual to the macro-scale of institutions, nations, and the planet” and paying close attention to the use of fungus in the novel as a metaphor for—and simultaneous agent against—these places, structures, and bodies.4 While the role of the gothic in Jackson’s work is frequently examined, it is Castle’s grounding in the environmental as gothic that makes it a unique study in Jackson’s oeuvre. Jackson’s environmental influences allow [End Page 121] for new frameworks through which to read places, structures, and bodies as being gothic in and of themselves. The liminal space of Merricat and Constance’s isolated home and garden, and the transgressions and interconnections of this natural space in their lives, insist on an ecogothic reading of this short yet complex text. In using fungi as the focal point of our discussion, supported by considerations of plants and nature more generally, we seek to make explicit the importance of the environment to the Blackwood sisters’ usurpation of the gothic space and transgression of gothic literary expectations.","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Pulped and Reduced, Dried Out and Flattened: the Horrors of Aborted Agency in "The Yellow Wallpaper" 被榨干、被还原、被晾干、被压扁："黄壁纸 "中流产机构的恐怖

4区文学

STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION Pub Date : 2024-03-27 DOI: 10.1353/saf.2023.a923095

Simon C. Estok

{"title":"Pulped and Reduced, Dried Out and Flattened: the Horrors of Aborted Agency in \"The Yellow Wallpaper\"","authors":"Simon C. Estok","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923095","url":null,"abstract":"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:\u0000 <ul> <li> Pulped and Reduced, Dried Out and Flattened: the Horrors of Aborted Agency in “The Yellow Wallpaper” </li> <li> Simon C. Estok (bio) </li> </ul> Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” pushes its readers to see beyond what is visible, both metaphorically and literally, at the same time calling into question what it means to see the unseen and what it means not to see it. Haunted by pasts that refuse to remain in the past, the ecogothic dimensions of the story become more pronounced the deeper the reader peers in. At the center of the story is paper, and obviously it is the visions the narrator has from the paper that generate the plot. These visions and the plot they generate in turn reveal to the reader things that might otherwise be unseen—including, most obviously, the subjugation of the narrator under patriarchal authority. They reveal far more than this, however. Like the images in a 3D movie or a stereogram, there are things in this story that are in front of but not easily visible to the reader, at least not the way that the narrator’s suffering is—experiences that bob and float in the long stream of sexism that returns and haunts the narrative. Indeed, the story exposes more than simply human relationships and histories, relationships and histories that reside in the very paper itself. This essay builds on the foundational work of scholars such as Dawn Keetley, Matthew Wynn Sivils, Elizabeth Parker, and Michelle Poland1 on vegetal agency while exploring the explicitly entangled complexities of the truncated agencies of nature and women in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” I argue that this story pushes the reader to think beyond the convenient anthropocentric and ecophobic notions of a vengeful nature toward a more balanced understanding of vegetal agency, an understanding of plants on their own terms. It is in our continuing failure to do so and through our thwarting of the agency of the vegetal world that the magnitude of ecogothic horror takes form in this story. [End Page 75] Defining the ecogothic is a relatively new endeavor. Arguably, the first volume to explore the ecogothic was the 2013 collection Ecogothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. This impressive collection does indeed provide “a starting point for future discussions,”2 as the editors hope it will, and it does so as much by what it omits as by what it covers. The most notable and surprising omission is any serious discussion of ecophobia. It is one thing to follow Timothy Clark in “tracing different conceptions of nature and their effects throughout the history and cultures of the world,”3 but it is quite another to misperceive (or, worse yet, ignore) the roots of the ecogothic. To be perfectly clear: no ecophobia, no ecog","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0