They Aren’t, Until I Call Them: Performing the Subject in American Literature by Enikö Bollobás (review)

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 238-239
Author(s):  
Donald Wesling
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
The Subject

American Literary Nationalism: The Process of Definition, 1825–1850

1959 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 224-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Frederick
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Actual Creation ◽  
The Subject

TheInk used by the signers of the Declaration of Independence barely had time to dry before Americans began talking about a national literature. Debate was initiated which went on actively for 75 years — and indeed is still occasionally revived. From the first, two aspects of the subject were considered, two steps were recognized as necessary. The first was the problem of definition: what should be the materials of an American literature and what should be the spirit and purpose of American writers. The second was, of course, the actual creation of a body of literary work which should be recognizably and worthily American.

scholarly journals The eye looks back: Seeing and being seen from William Bartram to H.P. Lovecraft

2018 ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Marek Wilczyński
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
Niagara Falls ◽  
Evil Eye ◽  
William Bartram ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Main Factor

The paper focuses on the sense of sight and seeing in the selected texts of American literature from the late 18th century to the 1930s, i.e. from William Bartram to H. P. Lovecraft. Adopting a perspective of changing “scopic regimes” – conventions of visual perception presented in a number of literary and non-literary works, the author analyzed a passage from Bartram’s Travels to reveal a combination of the discourse of science with that of the British aesthetics of gardening. In Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes (1843) the main factor is the work of imagination dissatisfied with the actual view of Niagara Falls, while in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature substantial subjectivity is reduced to pure seeing. In Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Ktaadn” the subject confronts nature that is no longer transparent and turns out meaningless. In American literature of horror from Charles Brockden Brown through Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the narrator’s eye encounters the inhuman gaze of a predator, a dehumanized victim of murder, or a sinister creature from the out-er space. To conclude, the human gaze was gradually losing its ability to frame or penetrate nature, bound to confront the annihilating evil eye from which there was usually no escape.

An Asian American Epistemology of Reading: Aiiieeeee! and Ekphrasis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elda E. Tsou
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The contested category of Asian American literature presents a rich opportunity to explore questions of epistemology. At the start of the 21st century, a formal turn in literary study further illuminates shifts in structures of knowledge and ways of knowing. Asian American literature emerged in the 1970s as a critical response to a history of exclusion and misrepresentation. As the field established itself, literary knowledge was defined quite narrowly: it is produced by Asian Americans and the subject of knowledge is Asian America itself. The reading practices that arise from this central paradigm have been called “instrumental” or “sociological,” insofar as they conceive of literary language, with varying degrees of formal interest, as an instrument or expression of Asian America. From the 2000s onward, scholarship on Asian American form and poetics has grown steadily, and what distinguishes this particular movement is its privileging of form as its primary object of investigation. Correspondingly the subject of knowledge also shifts from Asian America as the default referent to Asian American literature and the literary tradition. Critics note that one consequence of making form the prime objective is a potential tendency to drift away from the ambit of Asian America altogether. Those literary texts featuring conspicuous formal experimentation have garnered a lot of attention; less has been paid to the early texts, like the anthology Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), where formal concerns are not as explicit. Yet upon closer examination of Aiiieeeee! one discovers another type of figurative activity that can help redefine Asian American literary knowledge, offering us new ways of reading and looking at race.

scholarly journals Compulsory Community Treatment? I. Ontario Stakeholders' Responses to “Helping those Who Won't Help Themselves”

1993 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Françoise Boudreau ◽  
Philip Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Community Mental Health Services ◽  
Community Treatment ◽  
Compulsory Treatment ◽  
Specific Question ◽  
Discussion Paper ◽  
Mentally Disordered ◽  
Compulsory Community Treatment ◽  
The Subject

This paper explores the highly controversial issue of compulsory treatment of allegedly mentally disordered persons within the community. In light of American literature on the subject, we examine and contrast the positions and arguments of a variety of Ontario stakeholders. This is done through content analysis of 224 submissions to the Ontario Ministry of Health in response to its “Discussion Paper Towards Community Mental Health Services Legislation of January 1990” which addresses the specific question: “Should the legislation include provisions for out-patient commitment/compulsory community treatment?” Our purpose in this paper is not to determine the desirability or undesirability of compulsory community treatment (CCT) as such, but to examine Ontario positions as a first and necessary step in the process of acquiring perspective on the issue.

Narrative Threads

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy L. Rosenblum
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Moral Identity ◽  
Moral Imagination ◽  
Think Aloud ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Regulative Ideal ◽  
Good Neighbor

This chapter introduces accounts of good neighbor and the democracy of everyday life in American literature. Settler, immigrant, and suburban portrayals demonstrate the centrality of this regulative ideal in people's moral imagination and in Americans' self-representation. Good neighbor as a facet of moral identity and as a collective American self-representation are rich composites created from an unprecedented and ever-increasing wealth of fiction, poetry, and memoir. The significance of these narratives is that they make particular places and moments in time vivid; they endow the subject with dimension. Like “thick” cultural ethnography, these narratives document what, in this place, anyone would do. Neighbors in literature as in life are driven to think about the ethics of their situation, but in fiction they think aloud.

Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narratives and the “Map of the Infinite”

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Native Soil ◽  
The Subject

This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It argues that antebellum narratives situate native soil on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement. In itself, the idea of medieval American literature is hardly more peculiar than F. O. Matthiessen's conception of an “American Renaissance.” Matthiessen sought to justify his subject by aligning nineteenth-century American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne with seventeenth-century English forerunners such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The chapter considers resonances of medievalism within nineteenth-century American culture and how many antebellum writers consciously foreground within their texts the shifting, permeable boundaries of time and space, suggesting how fiction and cartography, the writing of history and the writing of geography, are commensurate with each other.

Antiquarian Entrepreneurs: Mounds and Meaning in the Jacksonian Era

Relic Hunters ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Snead
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Western Country ◽  
Indian Children ◽  
Jacksonian Era ◽  
Institutional Capital ◽  
Place Of Origin ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
William Cullen

In his 1838 Peter Pilgrim, or a Rambler’s Recollections, Robert Bird noted the abundant evidence for ancient human activity in the caverns of the western country, with the associated ironies of modern exploitation: . . . it is quite plain that the Mammoth Cave was once the dwelling-place of man—of a race of the Anakim, as some will have it, whose bones were disinterred in the vestibule . . . The tribe has vanished, and their bones (to what base uses we may return!) converted into gunpowder, have been employed to wing many a death against their warring descendants. . . . Although he included a garbled account of the Caney Branch mummies— “petrified ancients”—Bird did not mention the Kentucky Mummy herself. Thus her transformation over twenty-odd years into an archaeological icon, and then into institutional capital, also effectively obscured the intimate connection between those remains and their place of origin. Indeed, refractions of the discovery can be found in the broader American literature of the 1830s. William Cullen Bryant’s 1832 short story “The Skeleton in the Cave” adapts literary gothic imagery to a distinctively American setting, which features caverns and bones. Over time, however, the Kentucky Mummy reappeared in lore specific to Mammoth Cave itself. Visitors saw sites associated with the Mummy, variously along the “Gothic Avenue” or in the “Haunted Chamber.” A complex web of tales developed of bodies excavated, reburied, or lost, of Indian children long dead but perfectly preserved. Tours stopped at a niche associated with the Mummy and took “time for reverie. It cost me no coaxing to have mine,” wrote Nathaniel Parker Willis; “of all the ladies of past ages I doubt whether there is one who is the subject of a more perpetual series of unwritten poems.” The 1840s invention of traditions concerning the Kentucky Mummy reflects a deepening of the relationship between settlers and the western landscape, which with time and familiarity had evolved from a featureless wilderness into a place with history and meaning.

scholarly journals The Growing Influence of the Courts over the Fate of Refugees

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Soennecken
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
North American ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Domestic Courts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
Institutional Norms

A number of migration scholars suggest that domestic courts have become the key protective institution for refugees. How can we explain this claim? One prominent explanation identifies group litigation as the key source of the increasing influence of the courts. How well does this explanation travel empirically? The article evaluates this explanation by examining the puzzling behaviour of German refugee NGOs. They have not entered the legal arena directly (either as parties or as interveners), nor have they concentrated on developing extensive litigation campaigns. Still, they are remarkably ‘judicialized’: their frequent engagement with the law in other respects has heightened their legal consciousness. Why have German refugee NGOs made such different choices than their North American counterparts and what do these choices tell us about the expanding influence of the courts over the fate of refugees in Germany and North America? To make sense of the different choices that these organizations have made, we need to understand the role that institutional norms and procedures, in particular policy legacies, have played in directing the behaviour and identity of these groups. For a number of reasons, German refugee NGOs historically have been discouraged from directly accessing the courts in favour of indirect participation. Since Canadian and American refugee organizations follow a pattern closer to the expectations of the (largely North American) literature on the subject, we need to be more careful in thinking through ou

scholarly journals The Growing Influence of the Courts over the Fate of Refugees

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Soennecken
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
North American ◽  
Full Text ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Domestic Courts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
Institutional Norms

A number of migration scholars suggest that domestic courts have become the key protective institution for refugees. How can we explain this claim? One prominent explanation identifies group litigation as the key source of the increasing influence of the courts. How well does this explanation travel empirically? The article evaluates this explanation by examining the puzzling behaviour of German refugee NGOs. They have not entered the legal arena directly (either as parties or as interveners), nor have they concentrated on developing extensive litigation campaigns. Still, they are remarkably ‘judicialized’: their frequent engagement with the law in other respects has heightened their legal consciousness. Why have German refugee NGOs made such different choices than their North American counterparts and what do these choices tell us about the expanding influence of the courts over the fate of refugees in Germany and North America? To make sense of the different choices that these organizations have made, we need to understand the role that institutional norms and procedures, in particular policy legacies, have played in directing the behaviour and identity of these groups. For a number of reasons, German refugee NGOs historically have been discouraged from directly accessing the courts in favour of indirect participation. Since Canadian and American refugee organizations follow a pattern closer to the expectations of the (largely North American) literature on the subject, we need to be more careful in thinking through ou   Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v4i2.199

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document