Foes

This chapter examines the work of South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, drawing throughout from his archive at the Harry Ransom Center (housed at the University of Texas at Austin). The chapter begins by tracing Coetzee’s long-standing scepticism about whether literary criticism can access the significant knowledge of literature. The author voices his scepticism through different critical idioms. The chapter then continues to examine three of Coetzee’s books in particular—Dusklands, Foe, and Elizabeth Costello. Whereas Coetzee in his earliest fiction sought to integrate critical debates as he understood them, his later work seeks to disorient schematic literary critical discourse. The chapter demonstrates how in these later works Coetzee’s writing intervenes in specific ways into the literary culture in which he was enmeshed, and how these fictions think through the demands made on writers to contribute to political struggles and forms of flourishing. The chapter concludes with an account of how the self-reflexivity of Coetzee’s literary archive itself may be read, asking whether it may be considered another incursion into the author’s reception and the procedures of contemporary criticism more generally.

Ghosts

This chapter examines how Philip Roth responds to Jewish American readers and contexts in his fiction. Roth exploits the tensions and transitions in Jewish American political aspirations in the period, setting heated political debates about assimilation and particularism against different measurements of value in the novel. By using live cultural debates from the period, Roth courts ethnic categorization, while ultimately relativizing such categories in his attempt to pursue alternative understandings of literary value. In Roth’s earlier ‘Nathan Zuckerman’ fictions, the comedy and intelligence emerge through his practice of contrasting the ‘humble needs’ of a desiring body with the rush either to pass political judgement or to withdraw the novel from the complications of embodied life. The second half of the chapter demonstrates how Roth engages both directly and indirectly with the work of Hannah Arendt and the 1950s context for thinking about the Holocaust. This section of the chapter focuses in particular on an unpublished screenplay housed in Roth’s literary archive.

Caribbean Literary Historiography and the Jamaican Literary 1950s

This essay utilizes an alternative politics of directionality as a way of reentering the mid-twentieth-century Caribbean literary archive. Rather than focusing on Windrush as the main orienting point, this discussion examines and regrounds what events and institutions in Jamaica might tell us about the literary 1950s. Beginning by rethinking the historiographical gaze toward London, the author then raises key questions about what the narrative of the founding of the English department at the University College of the West Indies and the work of Focus magazine in Jamaica might tell us about the development of literary culture in the Caribbean. The author ends by thinking about how a focus on returns might also help us to rethink the decade. The essay examines instances of migrant returns, through which people recrossed the waters, and explores literary remittances that saw the role and function of the London scene being debated and contested within the region.

Between Aura and Access: Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival

This article analyses narratives inspired by the institutional emergence of the literary archive. It focuses in particular on what historian Arlette Farge has described as the “allure of the archives”: the elusive immediacy of encounters with artefactual remnants of the past. Key to this experience is what has often been described as the ability of archival objects to conjure up the presence of their creators – a process that at the same time paradoxically depends on the uniqueness and fundamental ‘unapproachability’ of the artefact. Through regulating and restricting access to documents, the archive thus maintains their distance and simultaneously makes them available for acts of reverential consumption. Focusing on such forms of gatekeeping and consecration, the article reads Henry James’s novella “The Aspern Papers” (1888) and Martha Cooley’s novel The Archivist (1998) to enquire how the literary archive – both as an idea and as an institution – has shaped ways of thinking about the relationship between physical absence and auratic presence.

Latina and Chicana Butch/Femme in Literature and Culture

Latina butch/femme literatures and cultural productions are essential components of the lesbian, gender, queer, and ethnic literary canons of the late 20th century. While butch/femme—a term that references particular lesbian sexual cultures and queer female gender practices—emerged within working-class and lesbian-of-color communities roughly in the 1940s, Latina lesbians in the 1980s and 1990s began to use the anthology form to pronounce boldly how their lesbian sexualities, erotic desires, and alternative gender expressions mutually informed their racial, ethnic, and class-based identities. While anthologies created the space to engage butch/femme and its racialized class meanings of butch/femme, the growth in women of color feminist theories further catalyzed writers to contextualize their earlier provisional embrace of Latina butch/femme, which feminist, lesbian, and ethnic nationalist ideologues variously derided. Still, while Latina lesbian cultural production and literary output increased, engagements with butch/femme were veiled, with some accounts paralleling the larger social unease with what many believed enforced the reproduction of oppressive heterosexual dynamics. While photographic images indelibly document the ubiquity of butch/femme lived practice, the literary archive of explicitly imagined and referenced Latina butch/femme is limited, and its overall force lies in its suggestive discursive qualities and a late 20th century iconic set of authors with which it is associated. Key writers of the period tended to meditate extensively on Latina butch gender and sexuality concerns, while it was not until the turn of the 21st century that the Latina femme garnered the same in-depth critical treatment. The decoupling of butch/femme also enables an expansion of discrete critical and creative femme and butch offerings, while writers settle into unequivocally evoking the erotic grammars of butch/femme gender and sexuality in forms of poetry, novel, and film.

Diasporic South Vietnam

As Vietnam was caught in wartime narrative austerity from the 1950s to the 1970s, followed by the communist state’s intolerance of dissent, Vietnamese writers in the French and American diaspora have offered literary texts that challenge both Vietnamese discursive stricture and dominant perspectives in France and the United States. This essay studies two novel sequences from the diasporic Vietnamese literary archive: Vietnamese French author Ly Thu Ho’s trilogy and Vietnamese American writer Lan Cao’s pair of historical novels. Taking a historicist approach, the essay reveals complex nationalist expressions, aspirations, challenges, and desires in Ly Thu Ho’s and Lan Cao’s works of fiction.

Cartas de Graciliano Ramos: diálogos entre o AEM e outros arquivos / Letters from Graciliano Ramos: Dialogues Between the AEM and Other Archives

Resumo: Nesta edição comemorativa de trinta anos do Acervo de Escritores Mineiros (AEM), da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), escolheu-se pensar a questão do arquivo literário a partir da leitura de algumas cartas de/para Graciliano Ramos que, apesar de não ter nascido na terra de Carlos Drummond de Andrade, tem seu espaço nas “Coleções especiais” do referido acervo. Em virtude deste número festivo de O eixo e a roda, portanto, são colocadas em diálogo duas cartas de Graciliano Ramos domiciliadas no AEM – uma escrita a Octavio Dias Leite e outra, a Getúlio Vargas –, juntamente com correspondências adicionais residentes em outros arquivos, a fim de perscrutar o universo literário do autor por meio de sua escrita epistolar. Com este trabalho, verificou-se que as cartas são um espaço privilegiado de reflexão literária do autor de Vidas Secas e que o Arquivo Graciliano Ramos está cada vez mais vivo, à espera de novas leituras, consignações, reciclagem.Palavras-chave: Graciliano Ramos; cartas; arquivo.Abstract: In this thirty-year commemorative edition of the Acervo de Escritores Mineiros (AEM), from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), we chose to think about the issue of the literary archive from the reading of some letters from/to Graciliano Ramos who, although not born in the land of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, has his space in the “Coleções especiais” of that collection. Due to this festive number of O eixo e a roda, therefore, two letters from Graciliano Ramos domiciled in AEM – one written to Octavio Dias Leite and other to Getúlio Vargas –, are put in dialogue, along with additional correspondence residing in other archives, in order to scrutinize the literary universe of the author through his epistolary writing. With this work, it was verified that the letters are a privileged space for literary reflection of the author of Vidas Secas and that the Graciliano Ramos Archive is increasingly alive, waiting for new readings, consignations, recycling.Keywords: Graciliano Ramos; letters; archive.