Family Secrets and Narrative Structure in Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You (2014) has been said to combine some stock ingredients of literary thrillers with other less customary features that complicate its classification in that genre. Although we learn from page one that the protagonist of the novel, sixteen-year-old Lydia Lee, is dead, discovering who is behind the possible murder of this Chinese American girl proves to be one of the lesser mysteries in the story. While the reader remains intrigued by the forces/people that may have driven Lydia to her demise, other enigmas—related to the other members of the Lee family—keep cropping up and turn out to be closely linked to the protagonist’s fate. This article explores the secret-saturated structure of the novel, which moves back and forth between the Lees’ speculations about Lydia’s death, the impact that the event has on their lives and the protagonist’s own version of the story. Ng delves deep into the issues of gender, race and other types of otherness that spawn most of the secrets driving the story. Assisted by theories expounded by Frank Kermode, Derek Attridge and other scholars, the article highlights the centrality of family secrets as a structuring principle in Ng’s novel.

Oceanic Spaces in American Girl Historical and Contemporary Literary Discourse

The American Girl series is a constantly evolving book series for children featuring the lives of girls living in different historical periods of the US, starting from the colonial era up to nowadays. The aim of this paper is to study the verbal and nonverbal portrayal of the oceanic spaces of the past in the books about the historical characters and their rediscovery in the books about the contemporary characters. An attempt is made to analyse the different roles of oceanic images in stories of migration and mobility of the American Girls, their families, friends, acquaintances both in the past and in the present. The images of the oceans in the books about the historical characters and in those about the contemporary characters are analysed separately and the results are compared and contrasted. It is assumed that the oceans which are depicted both verbally and nonverbally in the American Girl series have become not only territorial borders for some of the characters but also metaphoric ones.

Winning Spelling Bee Competition: The Representation of Black Girl in Akeelah and The Bee (2006) Movie

<p class="AbstractText">This research examines the representations of African-American stereotype and the struggle of Black American girl in National Spelling Bee contest in Hollywood movie entitled Akeelah and the Bee (2006). The use of African-American English (AAVE) is one of the stereotype often depicted in Hollywood movie. Race theories are used to examine the relationship between race, racism and power. Meanwhile, Roland Barthes’s theory and semiotic film theory are used to examine the meaning portrayed in the movie. Findings show that the representation of Akeelah as a successful participant in the spelling bee competition challenges the stereotype of African American as academic underclass, and as associated with crime, failure and frustration. Akeelah is represented as a successful African American girl as she assimilates (adopts) American values of change/mobility, time and its importance, action and work orientation. The assimilation is achieved through a mentoring process and support from African American community.</p><p class="AbstractText"> </p><p class="AbstractText"><em>Keywords</em>: African-American, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Stereotype, Spelling Bee</p>

An “Entirely Personal” Success: Intertextuality and Self-Reflexive Ironies in Henry James’s “Pandora”

Henry James’s self-allusions in “Pandora” have been read as a rewriting of his former treatment of the “American Girl abroad” in the comic mode. The hints at “a Tauchnitz novel by an American author” (90) establish an ironical reversal of the failures of understanding which had led to tragedy in “Daisy Miller.” Yet the ironies in “Pandora” are multi-layered, often self-reflexive, and can be further interpreted in the light of James’s controversial adaptation of his famous novella for the stage. In this framework, well-known Jamesian topoi appear both as a (self-)parody and a metaliterary dialogue James engages with his readers and critics. The author’s personal implication in this “American” story is further testified by his Notebooks, in which James states his intention to write about his friends Henry and “Clover” Adams. Indeed, “Pandora”’s multi-layered intertextuality includes undeclared references to Adams’s anonymously published novel, Democracy, a semi-satirical account of U.S. political life. My article focuses on the web of intertextual relations woven in this short story with a view to reflecting on James’s ideas concerning the politics of authorship, readership, literary success, and the fate of the American Girl.

T. S. Eliot

Poet, dramatist, and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot (b. 1888–d. 1965) won fame for such poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and “The Hollow Men” (1925), which ushered in and helped define the modernist era of literature. His critical writings also shaped literary taste and study in the 20th century. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, by a Unitarian family with deep roots in American history, he was educated at Harvard and wrote his first significant poems during his year abroad in Paris, 1910–1911. After completing most of the work for a PhD in philosophy, he found himself abroad again during the outbreak of World War I, and he decided to marry an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and put down roots in London. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), surprised readers with its modern vocabulary, free-verse rhythms, and compelling dramatic voices. While working as a teacher and then a banker, Eliot established himself as an authoritative new voice in literary criticism with essays including “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “Hamlet” (1919), and “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). He introduced terms that shaped literary study throughout the 20th century: “impersonality,” “the objective correlative,” and “dissociation of sensibility.” In 1920 he collected his early essays in The Sacred Wood and published another volume of poems, including “Gerontion.” His personal life was not happy; he regretted having married a woman he did not love instead of the American girl he left behind in Massachusetts, Emily Hale (during his lifetime he wrote over one thousand letters to her). Considered his greatest work and probably the most significant poem of the 20th century, The Waste Land (1922) expresses his personal emotional conflict in terms of the larger historical currents of the immediate postwar period: the aftershocks of war, a crisis of faith, changing gender roles, urbanization, and a sense of deracination from the past. Erudite, multilingual, and difficult to read, but also highly charged with feeling, this poem captured the spirit of the interwar era, received more sustained attention than any other literary work in the 20th century, and is known and quoted across the globe. Eliot further distinguished himself by converting to the Anglican church in 1927 and becoming its leading poet and dramatist with his conversion poem Ash-Wednesday (1930), the play Murder in the Cathedral (first performed 1935), and the long lyric sequence Four Quartets (1936–1941). He also became a British citizen, so he can be considered both an American and an English writer. In the 1930s and 1940s he turned more toward drama and engaged with cultural and social debates in his criticism from a Christian perspective. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948.

American Girls

Since Pleasant Rowland launched the American Girl brand in 1986, the popular dolls and books have inspired generations of young people. The American Girls Podcast, developed and produced by two historians, re-examines the world of American Girl, applying historical analysis and social commentary to understand how formative the brand was for their own and others’ lives. The podcast has also cultivated a community of listeners who continue to engage with the dolls and stories in innovative ways; in this way, the show serves as a forum for ongoing conversations about the meaning of American Girl.