American Literature

Between the publication of The Bostonians and its eventual exclusion from the New York Edition, a vexed sense of the novel's worth preponderates through James's letters. This article relates James's ambivalence toward The Bostonians to the accusations of irresponsible representation leveled at the author during the book's serialization. While seeking to illuminate the ways in which The Bostonians does provocatively contest a contemporary sense for the responsibility that fiction has towards its milieu, I propose that James's vacillation between avowing or forsaking his novel signifies a continuing fretfulness regarding this contestation.

A special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre offering a range of new critical perspectives on Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, including:

“Is It Like a Beat Without a Melody?”: Rap and Revolution in Hamilton | Jeffrey
Severs

Rise Up: Nuyorican Resistance and Transcultural Aesthetics in Hamilton | Gabriel
Mayora

Hamilton’s Women | Stacy Wolf

Blackout on Broadway: Affiliation and Audience in In the Heights and Hamilton |
Elena Machado Sáez

Staging a Revolution: The Cultural Tipping Points of John Gay and Lin-Manual
Miranda | Tiffany Yecke Brooks

Miranda’s Les Miz | Jeffrey Magee

Hamilton Meets Hip-Hop Pedagogy | Alison Dobrick

“Hey Yo, I’m Just Like My Country”: Teaching Miranda’s Hamilton as an
American Chronicle | Timothy J. Viator

Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Metamyth of a Nation’s Founding | Helen M. Whall

“What If This Bullet Is My Legacy?”: The Guns of Hamilton | Meredith Conti

Hamilton and Class | Matthew Clinton Sekellick

A Conversation Rewound: Queer and Racialized Temporalities in Hamilton |
Shereen Inayatulla and Andie Silva

US Central Americans are destabilizing, reconceiving, and revitalizing the US Latina/o canon, and in doing so, they are forcing us to reconsider hegemonic ideas about Latinidad. The cultural production of Latinos/as of Central American descent has engaged in a critical denunciation of the violence that characterizes not only the history, but also the current situation, of the Central American isthmus. This essay examines the strategies used by US Central American poet William Archila and visual artist Alma Leiva to (re)construct the past and memorialize the victims of violence across Central America. I argue that Archila’s poetry collection The Art of Exile and Alma Leiva’s installation-photography series Celdas are examples of the “art of witness.” As such, their works play a key role in the reconstruction of Central American collective memory from the diaspora.

In recent years, Black poets and other poets of color have increasingly won many of the most prestigious prizes and awards within the majority and historically white field of US poetry. This article traces the interventions (writing, activism, and institution building) that have resulted in this "change." Rather than understanding the racial politics of poetry as an endlessly revolving door of scandals, or simply as a contest over prizes and economies of prestige, this article attends to the relationship between the world of poetry and the history of social movements, an exchange often mediated through the work of writers’ collectives. In particular, this article delineates how the interventions of Black poets and other poets of color (both individually and collectively) have shifted the world of poetry, while at the same time mirroring, connecting with, and speaking back to broader movements that seek to transform the world writ large.

Our time is characterized by a crisis of representational
practice, fuelled by unprecedented technological and economic changes on a global level. Narrative, therefore, takes a wide variety of forms. This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of film and literature from around the world, and analyses the masters of each art form. Through short stories and plays, we will study different ways a story can be told and the many exciting ways embedded "narratives" (or discourses) can be framed. Similarly, through films and film adaptations of great literary masterpieces, we will study how visual elements challenge the reader's imagination.


Specifically, we examine the relationship between meaning
and narrative structure. The course considers the tensions
between claims for originality and poetic license, between
producers and audiences, between fiction and reality, narrative and history, memory and representation. We will study representative theorists of narratology, such as J. Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser and Hayden White. Cutting-edge scholarship on film and the new media will also be introduced, such as Seymour Chatman, Rey Chow, as well as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation. In addition to becoming familiar with major issues in film studies and East-West comparative studies, students will acquire a working knowledge of narrative theory.

Abstract: This essay proffers that African American literature, especially that of the contemporary moment, seeks a non-canonical canon, that is, unlawful laws, unruly rules, reading lists that morph and shake serial listedness. Furthermore, African American literature as theorized here is concerned with three constitutive nodes: first, a certain kind of memory, one that is not simply revisionist or a Morrisonian “rememory” but what I call “memoricity,” that which carries the historicity of moments, the very subjectivity of things not past but deeply contemporary. It denotes the historicity of the contemporary, and simultaneously the contemporaneity of history. Second, the underground, snugly fitting within familiar notions of the underground in African American literature, but here proffered as more than a site of secrecy or dormancy; it is, rather, a liminal, mezzanine space of generative disruption and, too, vibrant, volatile epistemic radicality. Thirdly, seeing: not to be reduced to ocular perception, it is a seeing that encapsulates a more capaciously embodied practice that engages more than simply the eyes, a seeing that is a matter of full corporeality. These three nodes are, in African American literature, characterized under the helm of a Black synesthetic practice—seeing-without-light, knowledges “muzzled to those shores,” a lexicon in the dark, unintelligible to the logic of the light, underground epistemologies. To be examined are six texts: Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (2016), Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines (2016), Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (2012), Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval (2009), and Joshua Bennett’s The Sobbing School (2016).

Copyright: This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 18.1, winter 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.

The Lisbon sisters, Camille, and the "Arminuta" are the daughters and the protagonists of three novels set in three different geographical-linguistic areas: the United States, France, and Italy. "The Virgin Suicides" (1993) by Jeffrey Eugenides, "Hunting and Gathering" ("Ensemble, c’est tout", 2004) by Anna Gavalda, and "A Girl Returned" ("L’Arminuta", 2017) by Donatella Di Pietrantonio are the selected novels covering the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century. The theoretical background of the mother-daughter relationship provides an introduction to the textual analysis of the novels, which unveils the condition of outsiders of the protagonists. Their characterization develops within their social marginality: imprisonment (the Lisbon sisters), "emotional autarky" (Camille), and abandonment (the "Arminuta"); while their marginal status is the product of their particular relationship with the controversial personality of their mothers. Mrs. Lisbon is a control-obsessed, authoritarian mother; Catherine is a narcissistic woman; while both the biological and the adoptive mothers of the "Arminuta" abandon her. The outsider theme, particularly its literary-philosophical theorization by Colin Wilson, is the key point of our analytical method. In our literary selection, each storyline identifies one of the three existential steps of the outsider, originally conceived as a male figure. By analyzing the fictional development of the Lisbon sisters, Camille, and the "Arminuta", we retrace backwards the existential journey of the outsider as theorized by Wilson: the mystic detachment from reality as the final stage of a route which started with the pursuit of Truth, and went through the process of accepting personal alienation. Retracing the outsider's experience allows us to show that being an outsider in literary terms is not a male prerogative: it is a condition of marginality embodied by female characters as well. In addition to this, precisely as outsiders the protagonists can express their agency.

Pearl S Buck though not Chinese, remained to be the only original source of China, for Americans and other world. Her fiction shows various aspects of China and Chinese life. They portray rural china, a revolutionary China, a changing China and also China at war. They depicts the Chinese migrant story his emotional psychological trauma. Her fiction made aware of the Chinese as human being to the other world who was just to be heathen for the western world. This paper in particular deals with the Chinese farmer which she has portrayed in novel The Good Earth. Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, she wrote over seventy books in her lifetime, and she published several award-winning novels, including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Good Earth. This novel had the first literary representation of Chinese farmers not only for America but China also. Her work changed the image of the Chinese people in the American mind. China was a mysterious culture to many Americans, but to Pearl S Buck, it was the culture she had known so closely and intimately. Spending almost forty years of her life in China she had the firsthand experience of its culture, society and history. The image of China that she depicted in her works is much more real and valid than the exotic and strange images that were created on the basis of China town that prevailed during those days in America or those enacted by actress like Anna May Wong in Hollywood films. The Good Earth is a novel in the form of biography. The story follows Wang Lung's journey of life from his young man hood to old age. The narrator explains aspects of Chinese life revolving around Wang Lung, who barely manages to buy a very ordinary looking slave for his wife, bears three sons and a daughter, rises to the status of wealthy land owner through wrong means of theft, wants his children to keep his land forever but dies at a very ripe age with this desire unfulfilled as his children distribute the same land then and there while he is still on death bed. All along the novel, in the very fiber of the story she describes the Chinese tradition and culture, condition of farmers and women in society, religious practices, morality, necessity etc. Pearl Buck uses the inferior status of women in traditional China with great emotional impact. She has also focused on importance of family and showed it as the central unit of Chinese society

This study analyzes the language used in the construction of the personal identity of Dr. Heidegger through the labels attached to him, both given by self and by others, and his stance-taking. The researcher applies Discourse Analysis to analyze the main character's utterances. The researcher also uses Indexicality Principle by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) as a mechanism to analyze identity. The qualitative content analysis is used to analyze thoroughly and interpret text data to draw inference towards the utterances on the short story. The result of the study shows that Dr. Heidegger is labeled mostly with negative words by others, however, he responded to combat these labels by using re-appropriation or by revaluing the existing labels. Moreover, the stances taken by Dr. Heidegger are found to position himself among others. Together with the labels given by self and others, and his interlocutor(s) in his talk-in-interactions the findings reveal that he is a strange old man, who is very curious and knowledgeable. Lastly, the conclusion can also be drawn that language and discourse are central to the construction of identities that are not always determined by a person himself, but also bound up with how others perceive him.

Wendell Berry's decades of reflections on agriculture, sustainability, and poetry have been rooted in weekly sabbaths spent in the woods of his Kentucky farm. Graeme Sharrock's analysis shows how this practice of sacred time in rural sacred spaces has shaped his poetic rhythms and imagery,

Philip Roth dealing with anti-Semitism, alienation and identity in especially Jewish society is one of the distinguish American-Jewish writers in the twentieth century. Zuckerman Bound recounts the famous Jewish author Nathan Zuckerman who has marginal novels which are not popular among Jews. In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman challenging with his family, relatives and milieu intends to be a novelist like Lonoff. The protagonist becomes a famous novelist in his other novel, Zuckerman Unbound. However, he is in the middle of a war against the society. In The Anatomy Lesson he is subverted by his mentality and brother who thinks that Zuckerman is responsible for their parents’ death. The protagonist intensifies on Jewish society and culture rather than himself in his last novel Prague Orgy. Not only does Zuckerman discuss with people in other religion but also he is a controversial person in Jewish society. In fact, Roth depicts himself by penning a protagonist Zuckerman. The feeling of disorientation and statelessness rise in Zuckerman/Roth mind in four novels. For example in Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman becomes "a helpless patient who is compelled to ask himself whether or not he can even become someone different" (Wilson, 2005: 104). Also Greenberg depicts the same novel as "Zuckerman's involvement with transgression as a man and a writer" (1997). In each novel, the reader can find the attempts of adaptation, isolation and how the protagonist alters in both Jewish and American society. Even though the themes dealt with differ from each novel, by and large, the plot is predicated on the protagonist’s psychology. In this study, Roth / Zuckerman' s identity and the social constraints shaping them will be argued.

• This essay explores the literature/digital nexus from a narratological perspective and asks: how does the digital enter the traditional printed novel? The concept of the paratext – with the new categories of material peritexts and digital epitexts – serves as a theoretical frame to be discussed along with Paul Dawson's proposal for a discursive narratology and James Phelan's rhetorical approach to narrative in the attempt to fruitfully combine the two for a contextualized and cultural-aware narrative analysis.

Teaching in the shadow of the colonial relations in Israel/Palestine, there is, I believe, no more pressing pedagogical issue than exposing the ways in which hierarchies of “being” are produced through essentialist ethno-nationalist forms of identification, where privilege is very unevenly distributed. I focus my discussion on Giovanni’s Room, since, after teaching this text for several years, I have only recently come to realize that James Baldwin’s second novel can provide us with some crucial insights into how privilege operates. Originally I placed this Baldwin novel in my course—”20th-century African-American Novel”—in order to provoke discussions about canonicity, normative assumptions about US “ethnic” literature, the relationship between the author’s racial identity and the text as well as to stimulate students to think more critically about race and heteronormativity. After all, Giovanni’s Room, written during the hyper-heteronormative period of the 1950s, is about a tragic love affair between two white men, but it is also a novel written by a
queer African American. Over the years, however, I have become more and more convinced that it is important to move away from a focus on any particular category of identity, such as homosexuality, masculinity, and/or race, and to highlight, instead, the broader notion of stratified privilege as it manifests itself in the novel.

"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.

This study analyzes the language used in the construction of the personal identity of Dr. Heidegger through the labels attached to him, both given by self and by others, and his stancetaking. The researcher applies Discourse Analysis to analyze the main character’s utterances. In addition, the researcher also uses Indexicality Principle by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) as a mechanism to analyze identity. Qualitative content analysis is used to analyze thoroughly and interpret text data to draw inference towards the utterances on the short story.  The result of the study show that Dr. Heidegger is labeled mostly with negative words by others, however, he responded to combat these labels by using re-appropriation or by revaluing the existing labels. Moreover, the stances taken by Dr. Heidegger are found to position himself among others. Together with the labels given by self and others, and his interlocutor(s) in his talk-in-interactions the findings reveal that the he is a strange old man...

In both the claustrophobic text of Giovanni’s Room and the tiny room itself,
David reckons with his alienating terror of the flesh. This terror, in Baldwin’s
words, is “really a terror of being able to be touched” (Goldstein 70). From
whence did David’s terror spring? And what are the implications, in James
Baldwin’s criticism of the “American dream of love,” of David’s succumbing to
this terror? I hope to explore these questions and also the ways in which David
wields his fear and hatred against those who love, or try to love him as
punishment for their failure to adhere to the impossible demands of his white
American masculinity and the imagined white familial construction. Against a
backdrop of postwar alienation and detritus in the streets of Paris and of his
psyche, David’s transplanted national and personal turmoil has physically and
ontologically deadly implications. But only in the stifling air and excess
romanticism of Paris can we see that it is ultimately the fleshy embodiment of his
father, women, and queer, immigrant others that condemns them to abjection
and ontological displacement. Their excess is a mere symptom of their inherent
incapacity and thus, failure, to realize the American dream of love—in David’s
eyes, the most grievous sin.

M isterio y Maneras" es la última obra traducida al castellano de la escritora ame-ricana Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Se trata de una recopilación de textos de distinto origen: unos, artículos y ensayos que la autora publicó en vida, y, los otros, escritos que nunca revisó para publicar pero que han sido editados ahora en este volumen. Cómo ascender de las Maneras al Misterio.

... Lyman Glenny, Howard Bowen, Duncan Mellichamp, Calvin Moore, Richard Jensen, and my colleagues at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (University of California—Berkeley), in particular Arnie Leiman, and also Marian Gade, Diane Harley, Carroll Brentano, and ...

Langston's Salvation offers a fascinating exploration into the religious thought of Langston Hughes.  Known for his poetry, plays, and social activism, the importance of religion in Hughes’ work has historically been ignored or dismissed. This book puts this aspect of Hughes work front and center, placing it into the wider context of twentieth-century American and African American religious cultures.

A Marxist read of the (fairly) newly discovered "Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict", the earliest extant African-American prison narrative. Focuses on the early part of the book and Austin Reed's transition from home to apprenticeship to prison, as well as the utility of knowledge under capitalism.

This outline of the theoretical and historical parameters of my recently published Famine Irish and the American Racial State synthesizes the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and David Theo Goldberg, among others. In so doing, it advances a model of the nineteenth-century US state-in-formation that demonstrates how the legal status of the transatlantic Famine Irish took on greater significance than any cultural differences with White Anglo Saxon Protestant America. Key concepts are explored, such as citizenship, nationality, race, ethnicity, the fractional state, the racial state, and the Black and Green Atlantic. Introduced, moreover, is one of the most important yet most overlooked American patriots of the nineteenth century, Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes of New York, whose efforts helped to mold the corporate Catholic Church into a major ideological apparatus of the US state.

... Wideman, John Edgar. ... As Cynthia Selfe (2004: 54) contends, composition studies risks becoming “increasingly irrelevant” if we are unwilling to envision “composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic.” However, this movement beyond the conventional requires a ...

This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that bookend the writing of Native Son, this essay also reveals how the novel's restructuring further elaborates Wright's globalism – highlighting his desire to produce work that transcended both national and racial categories. Finally, it considers Native Son as a work of “world literature” and a model for global minoritarian discourse. By examining “translations” of the novel into postcolonial contexts, it argues that the global afterlife of Native Son is no departure from the localized vision of the novel, but rather the recapitulation of its explicit globalism. This article thereby challenges critical convention dividing Wright's c...

12th Annual Green Economics Institute Conference  10-12th June 2017
3 Days St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, Keeping Social and Environmental Justice Alive in an age of Tyranny..
Reforming Economics.
Green Finance, Green Investment & Green Economics
Reclaiming The Economy from Privatisers, Fossil Fuellers, Xenophobes and Divide and Rulers.
Keeping social and environmental justice alive in this new age of Barbarism- Post Truth and Post Science

A radio interview panel I participated in with Professor Stacey Peebles, introducing the work of Cormac McCarthy to a nationwide audience on Newstalk FM's literary discussion show, "Talking Books" (2016).

http://www.newstalk.com/podcasts/Talking_Books/Talking_Books/126749/Chapter_111_The_master_of_the_modern_western