scholarly journals Dressing up the author: Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace branding their masculine authorial identities through fashion

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Russell Greene
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
David Foster Wallace ◽  
Authorial Identity ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Printed Word ◽  
Literary Output ◽  
Gendered Stereotypes

This article explores the use of clothes and other accessories as markers of masculine authorial identity. Fashion and literature are contentious partners, with literature attempting to keep a firm distance from the popular trappings of the fashion world. However, writers have historically used fashion to create their identities beyond the printed word. This can be seen in examples such as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain and the ways clothing items have become associated with their personae as men of letters. Contemporary writers are no different, yet many continue to exude ambivalence towards clothing having any effect on their images in the literary sphere. Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace are two examples of writers who downplay fashion’s role in their public images. Franzen and Wallace establish their positions at the forefront of American literature not only with their fiction and non-fiction works but also in the ways they adorn their bodies and present them within visual media. Nevertheless, both Franzen and Wallace perform as specific types of masculine authors through their fashion choices. Ultimately, they use fashion to brand their authorial identities in accordance with their literary output. Franzen’s and Wallace’s willing participation in the stylization of their images to meet the masculine standards of authorial identity reveals the prevalence of gendered stereotypes regarding how authors should be represented within popular culture.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Ishmael Reed ◽  
American Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter establishes the definition of comic rage and traces the history of humor and militancy in African American literature and history. It distinguishes between comic rage and satire, culminating in an examination of George Schuyler’s Black No More. It details how comic rage acts as an abjection (from Julia Kristeva) that breaks down simplistic ideas about race and representations that appear in literature and popular culture. While identifying Richard Pryor as the most recognizable employer of comic rage, this chapter also points to figures like Sutton Griggs, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X; who embody the multiple combinations of anger and comedy that appear in the chapters of the book. It outlines the contents of the chapters that trace the development of comic rage in relation to the various political and literary moments in American and African American life.

Introduction

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African Descent ◽  
American Art ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Court Records ◽  
White American ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Popular Subject

Samson is a popular subject in biblical scholarship on the use of the Bible in art, literature, and popular culture, although this scholarship tends to focus on Samson in White European and White American art and literature. The introduction explains how Samson becomes identified with people of African descent in American literature. It discusses the biblical story of Samson and the lack of physical descriptions of Samson in the Bible. It provides examples of the racialized uses of Samson in poetry, sermons, speeches, narratives by enslaved persons, court records, and newspapers. It offers some possible reasons why the biblical story of Samson may have become associated with African Americans.

Writing American Literary History Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994–2005, £495.00). Volume One: 1590–1820 (1994, £70.00). Pp. xiii+829. ISBN 0 521 30105 [squf ]. Volume Two: Prose Writing, 1820–1865 (1995, £75.00). Pp. xviii+887. ISBN 0 521 30106 8. Volume Three: Prose Writing, 1860–1920 (2005, £80.00). Pp. xi+813. ISBN 0 521 30107 6. Volume Four: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800–1910 (2004, £75.00). Pp. x+562. ISBN 0 521 30108 4. Volume Five: Poetry and Criticism, 1900–1950 (2003, £75.00). Pp. xi+624. ISBN 0 521 30109 2. Volume Six: Prose Writing, 1910–1950 (2002, £70.00). Pp. xx+620. ISBN 0 521 49731 0. Volume Seven: Prose Writing, 1940–1990 (1999, £75.00). Pp. xxiii+795. ISBN 0 521 49732 9. Volume Eight: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995 (1996, £75.00). Pp. viii+545. ISBN 0 521 49733 7.

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-411
Author(s):  
RICHARD GRAY
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

Each generation needs to rewrite literary history. And it may be that this generation needs to do it more than most, if only because the proliferation of schools and theories has turned what was once common critical ground into a battlefield. American books, among others, have become a site of struggle, and American writers have been among those caught in the criss-crossing searchlights of ethnic and gender studies, interdisciplinary investigations and studies of popular culture, language and communication. Just how far things have gone can be measured by the fact that every term in the phrase “history of American literature,” is now open to debate. The textuality of history and the historicity of the text have become the most contentious issues in contemporary criticism, while the question of nationhood, in particular, is under scrutiny. In a famous phrase, Walt Whitman described his work as a language experiment, an attempt to summon a nation into being through words. The slippery, plural nature of American identity and the bewildering contingencies of American history that drove Whitman to say this feed into the more challenging of the recent accounts of American writing.

scholarly journals Eco-Criticism and Nature Writing .the Trails of the American Approaches

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 266
Author(s):  
Tidita Abdurrahmani
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Nature Writing ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Textual Study ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Governmental Institutions ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Women’S Writing

Ecocritical attention has primarily focused on nineteenth– and twentieth-century British and American texts, predominantly non-fiction nature writing, and also nature-conscious fiction and poetry. The paper attempts to shed light to a series of puzzling but response-inciting questions regarding the American gendered approaches to nature, and the niche that Ecocriticism occupies in mainstream American Literature. The study is conceived as a merging of theoretical arguments and textual study. The theoretical part attempts to shed light on such issues as: Ecocritical traits and approaches; European vs. American approaches to nature; and Nature and Women's writing .The focus of the textual study are 10 American Nature Writing non-fiction classics and illustrated considerations of the main topics handled in these works. The study seeks to show that though ecocriticism is attempting to break new trails by going through the untrammeled nature-centered works, humans are failing to go within the unchartered depths of their spirit and consciousness. In terms of distinguishing in between the male gendered nature narrative and the female gendered nature narrative, the paper comes to the conclusion that there is a close connection between the systematic undervaluing of women's writing and the exploitation and abuse of the earth. While male nature writers mostly develop themes such as: the austerity of nature and the wish to explore and alter landscapes to suit the "human design"; the idea of hunting for a "trophy"; grandfather wisdom; wilderness and governmental institutions; earth as a religion, female-centered approaches to nature are marked by the occurrence of such themes as: moral –considerability of non-human beings; disapproval of economism; the bond to the land; anthropogenic destructive tendencies; nature/self consciousness. Nevertheless, although male writers fall into the snares of economism and exploring as a way of controlling, they still implicitly share women's consideration of the unbreakable bond to the earth and their awareness of the impactive immediacy to humankind.

Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-179
Author(s):  
Edvige Giunta (book editor) ◽  
Kathleen Zamboni McCormik (book editor) ◽  
Alberto Zambenedetti (review author)
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Italian American

North America

2021 ◽  
pp. 462-478
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Academic Study

This chapter assesses the main strands of Edwards’s reception in North America from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Most Americans did not know much, if anything, about Edwards until decades after his death, when various—often conflicting—views of Edwards appeared. New Divinity ministers expanded his theological vison while revivalists, including Charles G. Finney, enlisted Edwards’s legacy for their purposes, and thousands of evangelicals embraced Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd. Edwards intrigued (and offended) writers like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his condemnation of sin caught the interest of antislavery advocates in the Civil War. His legacy helped to shape the rise of American literature as a discipline, leading to the widespread academic study of Edwards that exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with over 5000 books, dissertations, articles, and theses published on Edwards.

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