MELUS最新文献

{"title":"Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel by Mazen Naous (review)","authors":"Nadine Sinno","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab037","url":null,"abstract":"In Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel, Mazen Naous persuasively argues that the contemporary Arab American novel creates an empowering space for reimagining the lived realities of Arab Americans along “transcultural and transpoetic lines,” thereby countering stereotypical, orientalist, and homogenizing discourses about Arab Americans, particularly in a post-9/11 United States. Engaging the aesthetic and the political, and the aesthetic-as-political, Naous provides insightful textual analyses of prominent Arab American novels that take place in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United States. He excavates the innovative aesthetic interventions in each novel, showing how the novels’ poetics, thematic and political content, and narrative techniques are deeply intertwined and cogenerative. For Naous, these novels contribute to developing what he calls a “polyphonic multiplex of Arab American selfexpression and art” (191). The novels seek to recuperate Arab American identities and experiences from both invisibility and “hyper-in-visibility,” by casting characters, settings, and plots that demonstrate the complexity and diversity of Arab Americans and that elucidate their interconnectedness with other communities within and beyond the United States. In the first chapter, Naous provides a close reading of Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) by Lebanese American author Rabih Alameddine. He argues that by incorporating the poetics of AIDS dementia and repetition, the novel unsettles mainstream myths about the United States’ legendary capacity to provide a safe haven for immigrants who have fled the violence of war and discrimination in their countries of origin. Here, Naous deftly shows the ways in which the author employs AIDS dementia as a means of queering religious texts by revealing their mutability and instability. Providing an analysis of Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Arabian Jazz (1993), the second chapter interrogates the role of jazz, particularly improvisation and the blue note, in advancing a “dialogic” Arab American experience that shares much in common with the struggles and resistances of other minoritized populations, particularly African Americans and Native Americans. Naous exquisitely deconstructs the names of the Arab American characters,","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"40 3 1","pages":"222 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73098636","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":"Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Robin E. Field","authors":"Goutam Karmakar","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab036","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87281900","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":"\"Necessarily Hidden Truth(s)\": Documenting Queer Migrant Experience in Rigoberto González's Crossing Vines","authors":"José A. de la Garza Valenzuela","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab030","url":null,"abstract":"Published in 2003, Rigoberto Gonz (cid:2) alez’s novel Crossing Vines depicts a California migrant worker community in ways structurally reminiscent of the Chicanx classic . . . Y no se lo trag (cid:2) o la tierra [ . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him ] (1971) by Tom (cid:2) as Rivera. 1 Unlike Rivera’s, Gonz (cid:2) alez’s novel presents vignettes of a day in the life of migrants employed in a vineyard that Leonardo, one of the novel’s many characters, asks his mother to record for a class assignment at a university in Los Angeles. In this sense, the text also reminds readers of The Rain God (1984), the gay Chicanx classic by Arturo Islas, whose narrator in part observes how Miguel Chico, one of the prominent gay characters in the text, understands his relationship to community and family while enrolled in a university in California in the aftermath of his uncle’s death. In her early analysis of Islas, Marta E. S (cid:2) anchez describes this mode of gay Chicanx writing as deploying “narrative strategies that highlight the ‘minority’ writer’s role of mediator be-tween cultures” (285). Unique to Gonz (cid:2) alez’s narrative intervention is his trans-parency in the observation of the community, which follows an ethnographic structure that the novel, as a piece of fiction, necessarily betrays. Rather than field notes, the novel presents vignettes of labor at the vineyard, providing the primary material for Leonardo’s project and details about characters that lie well beyond the scope of what his recording devices can capture. The narrative foregrounds memories of gay Mexican migrants that ethnographers and their research subjects both elide in the novel. Gonz (cid:2) alez places documents, such as Permanent Resident Cards (or green cards) and Leonardo’s","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"40 1","pages":"22 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86282977","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":"Textuality in a Jazz Aesthetic: Textual Rituals for Transformation in Sharon Bridgforth's love conjure/blues","authors":"L. Smith","doi":"10.1093/MELUS/MLAB024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MELUS/MLAB024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"1 1","pages":"172 - 195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82792517","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":"Journal Information","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab028","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span style=\"font-style:italic;\">MELUS</span> welcomes essays and interviews of interest to those concerned with the multi-ethnic scope of literature in the United States. As the publication of a society of writers, researchers, and teachers, the journal is open to all scholarly methods and theoretical approaches. <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">MELUS</span> seeks, above all, to publish essays that advance ongoing critical conversations about the theoretical, historical, literary, and cultural contexts of multi-ethnic literature, film, and other kinds of texts.</span>","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138536309","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":"Journal Information","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab027","url":null,"abstract":"<span><strong>SCOPE:</strong> First published in 1974, <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">MELUS</span> is a quarterly journal featuring articles, interviews, and reviews encompassing the multi-ethnic scope of American literature, past and present. Most issues are thematically organized for greater understanding of topics. For more information on submissions, see the Submission Information on the final page of this issue.</span>","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138536306","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 Law's Business: Peculiar Profits in Edward Jones'sThe Known World","authors":"Elizabeth Yukins","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab041","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines Edward Jones’s radical historiography in The Known World (2003), specifically how he represents law as a mercurial, illogical, and generative force in the workings of American slavery. Centrally, Jones highlights the viability and profitability of the American nineteenth-century legal system’s absurdities. The essay extends current scholarship to reckon with a central tension in Jones’s novel: his linking of the quotidian with the bizarre. Jones’s understated realism is, paradoxically, rife with freakish phenomenon, from two-headed chickens to cannibalistic lawmen, and his juxtaposition of the commonplace and the freakish compels readers to recognize the absurd and potent powers of American slave law. Beginning with Jones’s anachronistic reference to a historian and a local story of two-headed chickens, the essay shows how conjoined entities and other anomalous phenomenon in Jones’s novel enable three key historiographic interventions. First, the symbol of conjoined entities connects with the dual and dysfunctional status of slaves before the law—namely, a slave’s legal identity as coexistent person and property. Second, “two-headedness” serves as means to interrogate the mental acrobatics necessitated by antebellum law. Specifically, Jones creates an intensely ambivalent officer of the law—a sheriff of two minds, I argue—to explore the psychological exertions needed to administer a nonsensical legal paradigm. Finally, and most importantly, Jones’s metaphors of conjoined entities illuminate the interconnected, interdependent workings of law and economics in fictional Manchester County, Virginia. Two-headed chickens link with a far more profitable conjoining in American history—namely, what Jones calls “the law’s business” in slavery.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"9 1","pages":"65 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90338381","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":"Intoxicating Blackness: Addiction and Ambivalent Sounds of Fugitive Life in James Baldwin's \"Sonny's Blues\"","authors":"Patrick F. Walter","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab025","url":null,"abstract":"This article responds to a persistent request I hear in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). When reading, teaching, or even casually contemplating this story, I am preoccupied with an insistence, articulated by the titular Sonny, that intoxication and addiction might open a space-time of black life even as the experience of being high and hooked might also take us to the precipice of social and biological death. To conceive of drug addiction and intoxication in this way, the story tells us, we must listen to the junkie and particularly the black junkie. A number of critics have noted the paramount importance of listening in “Sonny’s Blues,” but this scholarship and most criticism written on the story tends to dwell on musical aesthetics while largely ignoring the equally prominent theme of drug use. In a notable exception to this trend, Sandy Norton’s study has compared the various scenes of conversation in the story to the interlocutional dynamics of Alcoholics Anonymous, suggesting that Baldwin’s narrative “describes the process of recovery for both the narrator and his brother as realized through listening and the dialogue that results” (180–81). Norton’s reading of addiction in “Sonny’s Blues” as an ongoing struggle grounded in dialogue between characters resonates with my own take on the story, but I suggest that Baldwin’s formulation of addiction as part of a black aesthetic of dialogue and listening vexes any notion of recovery. That is to say, insofar as addiction in the story facilitates a “recovery” of traumatic memories of white supremacy, “recovery,” in the sense of getting clean, would amount to foreclosure on this knowledge; insofar as it opens the listener to the gratuitous violence of white supremacy, listening to the addict, in Baldwin’s story, points not toward a horizon of sobriety but instead toward what I am calling an intoxicating Blackness—an ambivalent aesthetic for persisting as fugitive black life. The plot of “Sonny’s Blues” consists of the unnamed narrator, an algebra teacher in Harlem, reluctantly reconnecting with his estranged brother Sonny, a heroin-addicted jazz musician, through a series of dialogues, flashbacks, and musical performances in which the capacity to listen is crucial but also dangerous.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"49 1","pages":"44 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79109534","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":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab026","url":null,"abstract":"<span><strong>Claudia Alonso-Recarte</strong> (claudia.alonso@uv.es) is associate professor in English at the Universitat de València, Spain. Her research mainly revolves around the field of (critical) Animal studies, with a particular interest in ethical representations of nonhuman otherness in literature and the performing arts. Her research has often intersected with ethnic studies and themes related to racial and national identity. Her most recent work in this line can be found in the journal <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Men and Masculinities</span>, in her contribution to the edited collection <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Spanish Thinking About Animals </span>(Michigan State UP, 2020), and in the <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Journal for Critical Animal Studies</span>, among others.</span>","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138543388","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":"Phoenix Rising: The Book of Phoenix and Black Feminist Resistance","authors":"D. Mafe","doi":"10.1093/MELUS/MLAB021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MELUS/MLAB021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"30 1","pages":"43 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82655906","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}