LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory最新文献

{"title":"“Entering Life:” Literary De-Extinction and the Archives of Life in Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha","authors":"D. O’Key","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2020.1709715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2020.1709715","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, critics and novelists alike have questioned literature’s potential to represent, register, and challenge environmental disaster. Perhaps the most-discussed interventions into this debate are Amitav Ghosh’s lectures on literature and climate change, published as The Great Derangement in 2016, in which Ghosh posits that contemporary novels are failing to come to terms with the “unthinkable” phenomena of climate change, the Anthropocene, and extinction. In this essay, I wish to deepen and complicate Ghosh’s arguments by turning to another Indian writer, Mahasweta Devi (1926– 2016), whose works not only represent the increasing anthropogenic extinctions of human and nonhuman life, but who in doing so calls into question the very archival drives of literature which Ghosh’s lectures implicitly privilege. In her short novel Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha (1989; hereafter Pterodactyl), originally written in Bengali but translated into the Anglophone postcolonial canon via Gayatri Spivak’s 1995 publication of Imaginary Maps, Mahasweta narrates a story in which a dispassionate journalist, Puran Sahay, travels to a famine-stricken tribal village in central India. There, he encounters two kinds of vulnerability which confound his narrow idea of life: an impoverished adivasi (literally, original inhabitant) community who faces continual dispossession by national development projects, and a prehistoric pterodactyl, suffering from a broken wing. Pterodactyl stages Puran’s encounter with the incommensurable figure of the pterodactyl, an encounter which reveals how his humanitarianism is complicit with the slow anthropogenic violence of adivasi genocide and nonhuman ecocide. Pterodactyl thus opens out onto a plurality of human and nonhuman temporalities which trouble Puran’s narrow anthropocentrism. What often goes unexplored in the criticism on Pterodactyl is how its plot hinges on a creative engagement with extinction, what I will call here literary de-extinction. If de-extinction names a bio-technical regeneration of previously extinct species – think of charismatic megafauna such as woolly mammoths and thylacines, brought back from the dead via frozen DNA samples – then I introduce the term literary de-extinction in order to outline","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"31 1","pages":"75 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2020.1709715","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44599392","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 Undetermined Future: Temporality and Collective Memory in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time","authors":"Carter F. Hanson","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2019.1672617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2019.1672617","url":null,"abstract":"In his conclusion to Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Fredric Jameson observes that after fully-globalized capitalism and postmodernity ensued in the 1980s, the traditional literary utopia as a narrative form came to an abrupt end. Jameson argues that Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) “marks a fundamental break” in the utopian genre, echoing Perry Anderson, who notes that Piercy’s novel was the last utopia of “wide resonance.” Both critics point out that after Piercy, traditional utopias offering blueprints for social change are no longer written because global capitalism’s apparent permanence makes the possibility of radical change seem almost inconceivable. The future feels determined. The so-called end of history declared by Francis Fukuyama in 1989, meaning no stage of social development exists beyond liberal-democratic capitalism, famously presaged the enduring socio-political stasis and suspension of utopian imagery diagnosed by numerous critics. Indeed, American sociologist Erik Olin Wright observes that talking of socialism as a systemic, utopian alternative to capitalism often lacks credibility. 2 Anderson explains utopianism’s devaluation in the UK as the result of “three decades of nearly unbroken political defeats for every force that once fought against the established order.” Thatcherism hadmeant that “it was no longer even necessary to proclaim that capitalism was superior to socialism ... it was the only conceivable social system” (71). Boaventura de Sousa Santos encapsulates both Wright and Anderson by maintaining that we inhabit a neo-liberal “conservative utopia” based on the criteria ofmarket efficiency and the total denial of possible alternatives to the present reality (10–11). And Jameson, of course, has frequently noted our inability to imagine any alternative to world capitalism, sometimes casting the problem in the register of history (or historicity) itself: “But I think it would be better to characterize all this [the end of the world] in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here.” One could argue, then, that the particular twenty-first century relevance of Woman on the Edge of Time is its postulation that the future is not determined. To be sure, one principal way that Piercy’s novel, as a “critical utopia,” differs from and challenges the classical genre is in its conviction that historical time","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"30 1","pages":"283 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2019.1672617","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47198437","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":"Aspects of Abjection in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis","authors":"Edith H. Krause","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2019.1673022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2019.1673022","url":null,"abstract":"At the turn of the 20th century, Franz Kafka’s literary productions provide a keen illustration of unraveling times, lives, and identities in the face of a hostile world full of riddles, uncertaint...","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"30 1","pages":"303 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2019.1673022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49010750","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":"“Logoclasm in the Name of Beauty”: Bersani and Beckett’s Enigmatic Sociability","authors":"C. Clements","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2019.1673610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2019.1673610","url":null,"abstract":"In a 1937 letter to his friend Axel Kaun Samuel Beckett vents his frustration with language. He claims that “more and more language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it” (Beckett, “German Letter” 171). In this context, language is at best a disturbance, a barrier between the speaker and thing (or nothing). In this same letter, Beckett expresses his wish to “leave nothing undone [in language] thatmight contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing, begins to seep through” (“German Letter” 172). He claims that there is, in fact, no “higher goal for a writer today” (“German Letter” 172). For Beckett, language not only fails to represent but functions to obscure the “something or nothing” of the world outside the speaking subject. The task of the writer is, then, not more accurate or encompassing mimesis through a new use of language, but the willed destruction of the very customs and habits of language that create an unclear relation between the world and mind. Though Beckett later disavowed this letter as a piece of juvenilia, or “German bilge” (“German Letter” 170), it provides a glimpse into how the young writer had already begun to grapple with the problem of language’s mediating role between the individual and the material world. Beckett claims that he wishes to use language against itself, in fact, to use language to create a “literature of the unword” through an “assault against words in the name of beauty” (Beckett, German Letter173). Here, Beckett puts a name to the activity that he would pursue until this death in 1989: “Wörtenstürmerei.”This word, translated occasionally as both “assault against words” and “word-storming,” is, according to Leland de la Durantaye, better translated as “logoclasm” (14). This logoclasm aims at the destruction of words as icons, stable stand-ins, or representatives of a supposedly “real.” The logoclastic impulse can be seen throughout Beckett’s work, though it appears most forcefully in 1949’s Three Dialogues. Nominally written with art critic George Duthuit 12 years after the “German Letter,” (Beckett, Three Dialogues 138) is an explicit statement, rare in his oeuvre, of the author’s own esthetic theory. In the Dialogues Beckett claims allegiance to a non-relational art, one not based on a gap between thought and reality, art and object, but on an intermingling of the two. Though Beckett uses them to","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"30 1","pages":"247 - 264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2019.1673610","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42015992","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":"Suspended Seriality and the Recovery of Bridget Jones","authors":"Kelly A. Marsh","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2019.1673608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2019.1673608","url":null,"abstract":"When Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2013) appeared fourteen years after Helen Fielding’s second Bridget Jones novel, even Fielding’s most loyal readers likely had mixed feelings: excitement to recover a beloved character and her engaging comic voice tempered by trepidation that the recovery would be incomplete, that this third novel would not meet expectations created by Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), as some already felt Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) had not. When readers learned, many through advance press coverage, that the Bridget of this third novel is a widow and that her great love, Mark Darcy, is dead, trepidation perhaps threatened to overcome excitement: a novel about a devastated Bridget Jones was hard to imagine. However, readers’ fears that Bridgetmay have been rendered unrecognizable by what she has gone through are quickly dispelled: Fielding reassures her audience that we are encountering a familiar protagonist in a still familiar fictional world, and she does this especially through her deployment of what I call suspended seriality. A suspended sequel is a novel in a series that appears after considerable real time and story time have elapsed. Such a sequel depends on many of our expectations for seriality even as it disrupts others, especially regarding time. With seriality studies focusing strongly on nineteenth-century periodicals and also on comics, television, and digital narratives, the timing of installments – often very fast in contemporary works – is increasingly under consideration. This essay turns to the novel series to analyze the effects of extended timebetween installments on thehandling of narrative time. In the case of Fielding’s third Bridget Jones novel and others like it, the suspended sequel creates a focus on the present, rather than directing the reader’s attention toward the possibilities for a future resolution. This focus on the present also counters the orientation toward the past characteristic of the kind of trauma narrative Fielding’s readers may have expected, proving the suspended serial especially hospitable not to a narrative of trauma but to a narrative of recovery. That Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a narrative of recovery is evident in manyways, including that readers are well into the novel before being able to piece together the story of the loss Bridget has suffered. Sometime after we lastmet her in The Edge of Reason, she and Mark were married and had a son and a daughter. Only months after the birth of their daughter, Mark was killed by an exploding landmine on amission to free twoBritish aidworkers being held hostage inDarfur.","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"30 1","pages":"265 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2019.1673608","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43366393","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":"Are There Gender Differences Among Leaders of Regional Orthopaedic Societies of the United States?","authors":"Chukwuweike U Gwam, Samuel Rosas, Ted Xiao, Artina Dawkins, Rashad J Sullivan, Cynthia L Emory","doi":"10.1097/CORR.0000000000000956","DOIUrl":"10.1097/CORR.0000000000000956","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Great efforts are currently being made toward improving gender and racial equity in orthopaedic surgery in the United States. Nonetheless, no research has reported on whether these efforts have increased representation of women and underrepresented minorities in leadership roles in orthopaedic surgery societies.</p><p><strong>Questions/purposes: </strong>Are women proportionally represented in the leadership of regional orthopaedic societies in the United States?</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>The latest version of the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons census data was evaluated to determine the numbers (and percentages) of women and men practicing orthopaedic surgery in the United States. We also queried data for regional orthopaedic societies members who held a position of leadership (four societies; n = 53) between 2012 and 2017. Collected data included gender, years of experience, and practice setting. A chi-square analysis was conducted to compare the percentage of women in leadership with the percentage of women in practice in each of four geographic regions (Western Orthopaedic Association [WOA]; Southern Orthopaedic Association [SOA]; Eastern Orthopaedic Association [EOA]; Mid-America Orthopaedic Association [MAOA]) to see if the representation of women was proportional to that of men.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>With the numbers available, there was no difference in the observed-to-expected proportions between men and women in leadership in any of the regional societies we studied For the eastern region, there were 6% (392 of 6514) versus 0% (0 of 12; p = 0.591) of practicing women orthopaedic surgeons versus women orthopaedic surgeons holding positions in EOA leadership. For the Western region, there were 5% (304 of 5744) versus 7% (1 of 14; p = 0.836) practicing women orthopaedic surgeons versus women orthopaedic surgeons holding positions in WOA leadership. For the Midwest United States region, there were 6% (443 of 6937) versus 0% (0 of 15; p = 0.509) of practicing women orthopaedic surgeons versus women orthopaedic surgeons holding positions in MAOA leadership. For the Southern United States region, there were 4% (443 of 9601) versus 0% (0 of 13; p = 0.662) of practicing women orthopaedic surgeons versus women orthopaedic surgeons holding positions in SOA leadership.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>We found that women were represented in leadership roles in the regional societies in the United States in proportion to their overall numbers. However, that overall number was small, and so the percentages of regional society leaders who were women were correspondingly small.</p><p><strong>Clinical relevance: </strong>The low number of women orthopaedic surgeons holding leadership positions in regional societies are most likely a function of the low overall number of women orthopaedic surgeons, but focused efforts to change the status quo may increase the diversity of leadership in these","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81661333","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":"Anthropocene Storytelling: Extinction, D/Evolution, and Posthuman Ethics in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan","authors":"Hope Jennings","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2019.1631634","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2019.1631634","url":null,"abstract":"The eco-apocalyptic novel is arguably one of the most popular contemporary genres, evidenced by the quantity of literary publications preoccupied with climate change and the viability of species and planetary survival in the age of the Anthropocene (LeMenager 221–22). Literary critic James Berger observes that apocalypse primarily speaks to fears concerning human survival, typically represented by “biological-cultural forms” of human sterility directly linked to environmental collapse; in other words, the “end of [human] procreation” is equated with the end of the “natural” world (132–34). Ecoapocalyptic fictions thus often expose anthropocentric assumptions manifested by Anthropocene narratives that are invested in “perpetuating a human/nature binary” (DeLoughrey 353). Feminist new materialisms and queer ecologies generally resist the dominant Anthropocene narrative in its premise “that the era of nature is over,” or, that there has ever been “a coherent concept” of what is considered “natural” (Hannah 199). Rather, from a posthuman perspective, the concept of the Anthropocene should provoke an understanding that the “human” has in fact never been outside “nature” and that there is no origin point of return, where “nature” is pure or untouched by anthropogenic manipulations (199–200). In a broad summation of their corresponding arguments, feminist new materialists demand a radical shift in perspective that operates from the premise that humans are not separate from but entangled with multiple human and nonhuman “others,” which would in turn disrupt the centrality of humans within Anthropocene discourses (Barad 178–79, 396; Bennett 13, 107; Frost 3). Furthermore, many critics point out that the “anthropo” of the Anthropocene needs to be untangled from its presumption of a universalized","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"30 1","pages":"191 - 210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2019.1631634","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42296385","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":"Consuming China: Imperial Trade and Global Exchange in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park","authors":"Pamela Buck","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2019.1619129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2019.1619129","url":null,"abstract":"According to postcolonial critics, Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park is an imperial text. In Culture and Imperialism; Edward Said contends that it is complicit with Britain’s colonial enterprise, and through its references to the slave trade in the West Indies and similar exploitation at home, it reflects what he calls a “domestic imperial culture” (93). While feminist scholars, such as Susan Fraiman and Ruth Perry, claim the novel condemns imperialism more than Said acknowledges, recent critics continue to read it in this fashion; for instance, Jon Mee claims that it embraces a nationalistic vision of England, while Saree Makdisi aligns it with Britain’s expanding imperial ventures abroad. However, the current critical conversation does not adequately address Austen’s allusions to China, a colonial context that is as important as the Caribbean trade for understanding the novel. British diplomacy and commerce with China in the early nineteenth century constituted an informal empire, yet one that allowed for and encouraged exchange (Chang 9). As Peter Kitson explains in Forging Romantic China, relations between the two countries were “governed by global flows of trade and existing networks of collaboration” (2). He contends that this interplay of trade and exchange necessarily complicates “any simple and straightforward binaries between colonial self and colonized others” (Kitson 16). China’s cultural prestige had long grounded a strong consumer demand for Asian products in the West, which in turn challenged Britain’s imperial views of the country and compelled it to recognize China’s economic and political strength (Kitson 17). As Britain constructed its national identity through its encounters with the East, it came to see itself as part of a larger global network (Kitson 2–3). Building on Kitson’s model, I argue that Austen employs the China trade to provide critical commentary on a British class system rooted in imperialism. In Mansfield Park, she presents a domestic story of trade and cultural exchange that serves as an allegory of Britain’s relations with the East. Adopted as a child into the household of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up an outsider amongst her upper-class relatives at their country estate of Mansfield Park. Austen satirizes the Bertrams’","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"30 1","pages":"211 - 229"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2019.1619129","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43310207","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":"Language of Poetry and Language of Nature in Maurice Riordan and Seán Lysaght","authors":"Wit Píetrzak","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2019.1631635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2019.1631635","url":null,"abstract":"The prevalence of the pastoral tradition in modern Irish poetry may be among the most enduring influences of the Irish Revival. W. B. Yeats, a spectre of influence as polarizing as he is inescapable, continuously championed the peasant and peasant life over the budding early twentieth century Irish petit bourgeoisie, asserting in a valedictory poem “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” that “John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said and sang/Must come from the contact with the soil” (Yeats 321). Although revisionist in their approach to peasant life and culture, Lady Gregory and particularly J. M. Synge set their plays in the rural areas rather than the city. For Synge, “the natural world serves [...] as a site for reflection, a site of longing, and, in the case of his characters, of displacement” so that “nature and landscape [...] come to be much more complex in their signification, elements of an Irish past that contain both ideals and their opposites” (Frawley 103). On a general note, in her analysis of the use of the pastoral mode in Irish literature, Oona Frawley claims:","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"30 1","pages":"230 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2019.1631635","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45592405","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":"“When Liberation Coincides with Total Destruction”: Biopolitics, Disability, and Utopia in Walt Whitman’s Afterlife","authors":"C. Haines","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2019.1631631","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2019.1631631","url":null,"abstract":"In 2009, Levi’s Jeans launched the “Go Forth” campaign, a series of commercials and print advertisements drawing on the poetry of Walt Whitman. As Wieden + Kennedy, the marketing firm that designed the campaign explains, “The campaign is inspired by the passion Walt Whitman felt for the potential of America and promise of the future. Films were created to demonstrate Levi’s awareness and relevance in the world through ‘America’ and ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers’ accompanied by readings of Whitman’s poems of the same name. Outdoor and printed material evoked the spirit of the new pioneer – today’s progressive – by featuring such optimistic statements as ‘Will work for better times,’ ‘All I need is all I got,’ and ‘Tough as your spirit’” (Campaign). Situated in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, these sentences suggest that Whitman performs a reparative function: Whitman rescues America’s faith in its own futurity; he salvages the conflation of the United States and futurity by revising Manifest Destiny as the “spirit of the new pioneer.” The campaign’s optimism consists in coding futurity in terms of American exceptionalism and capitalism. America’s potential entails putting people back to work (“Will work for better times”) and cultivating endurance for austerity measures (“All I need is all I got”). The commodity form becomes the vehicle for a renewal of America, so that the symbolic value of the Whitmanian future does not simply presuppose the material conditions of capitalism but also contributes to sustaining them. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the campaign’s manifesto-like prose poem, printed on posters plastering the walls of the New York City Subway system, reads like a call to reinvest in neoliberalism: “I am the new American pioneer, looking forward, never back./No longer content to wait for better times ... /I will work for better times. ... All I need is all I got./Bruises heal. Stink is good. And apathy is death,/so I strike up for the new world!” (Campaign). It is tempting to read Wieden + Kennedy’s campaign as little more than the abduction of poetry for the service of capitalism. At the same time, however, the “Go Forth” campaign also calls attention to Whitman’s role","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"30 1","pages":"171 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2019.1631631","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41579272","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}