The Border and the Way We Live Now

In this essay-review, Paula Moya discusses three recent scholarly books by T. Jackie Cuevas, Marissa López, and Roberto Hernández that react to the negative racialization of Mexican origin people in the US by analyzing a variety of strategies employed by Chicanx writers and artists in literary and cultural artifacts produced from the 19th century to the present. Cuevas argues that Chicanx scholars need to better acknowledge the wide variety of types of Chicanx people living in the US, including those who are gender variant. López charts how some writers rebuff limiting ethnic stereotypes by engaging in a politics of performative, aggressive abjection as a way of refusing to perform institutionally recognized latinidad. And in his focus on two transnational sites along the US-Mexico border, Hernández seeks to analyze the historical causes and underlying logic of our modern/colonial world system by articulating the not always evident relationship of local eruptions of violence to the global flows of racial capitalism. Together, they unite in fighting the forces of dishistoricization by recovering the history of Chicanx people in the US and imagining for the community a decolonial future that can elude the violent constraints of racial subordination.

American Magazines and the Cultural Production of Blackness

Eurie Dahn’s Jim Crow Networks (2021) and E. James West’s Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. (2020) offer compelling examples of the two main literary historical approaches to periodical studies: A survey of several different types of magazines in relation to the social networks through which they were produced, distributed, and read, and a deep dive into the editorial orientation of a particular magazine, as shaped by a dominant individual presence. Both studies present detailed accounts of how these periodicals’ publics and counterpublics resisted (and sometimes reinforced) prevailing conceptions of racialized identity at important points in the twentieth century. But the material circumstances of those productions risk being misrepresented by the model of the network, so this review essay argues for the Bakhtinian chronotope as a more expressive metaphor for the temporal dimension of the magazine experience. This approach enables a more fully historicist understanding of how the various important literary figures represented here were perceived by their original periodical readers.

Jewish American Literature Against the World

By way of a brief genealogy of the Jewish American literary field and through the lens of recent attempts to imagine how comparative literature-based thinking about a concept of “world literature” can be critically productive for Jewish literary study, this article analyzes Jewish American literary studies’ prestige problem. Because it has persistently failed to theorize the intellectual and methodological assumptions underlying its practice, Jewish American literary study remains burdened by the essentialist implications of an ethnological historicism. This article ultimately argues that Jewish American literary study needs to take more seriously the possibilities offered by a materialist epistemology rather than the Jewish studies-based historicist ontology it has mostly taken for granted. “My hope is that a Jewish American epistemology can operate outside the penumbra of a tired and played-out concept of ethnicity—a term that unavoidably, if spectrally, posits a biologistic object at the heart of its historicist project—even as it might still claim the mantle of Jewish-y-ness.”

The Object of Jewish American Literary History

This essay explores assumptions underwriting literary categorization, focusing on Jewish American literary history in particular (mostly), and considers the scalar logic that allows us to link the singular text, with all of its luminous possibility, with the particular world of a given literary category. The essay’s first section critiques major claims about Jewish American literary history made over the last 20 years by observing the persistently underexamined use of a metaphorical and metaphysical concept of identity, and then lays out problems with scaling up between select texts and the larger category of a given field of literature. Problems of scale in Jewish American literary history are highlighted by comparison with recent critiques of African American literary history. Scale itself harbors problems of commensurability insofar as scaling between a single object and a set to which the object belongs requires acts of comparison which leap over differences of kind, a problem explored in the essay’s second section through analogies with problems of commensurability in the discipline of physics. The third section locates those problems of commensurability in Nicole Krauss’s novel Forest Dark (2017) and reads that novel’s direct confrontation with literary history as exemplifying how literary scholars can foreground multiplicity and possibility, precisely through the foregrounding of their own situated practice as interested agents. Rather than reproduce that figment by projecting a historically continuous and recognizable Jewishness across two centuries of literature, Jewish American literary studies should ally and coordinate itself with the field-questioning work occurring among Black and Latinx studies scholars who substantiate the salience of their field’s identity-based study, even as they depart from its historical formation.

You Can Never Be Sure

If you had to name the genre of The Selected Letters of John Berryman, how many different answers could you give? This essay considers a handful of approaches to reading poets’ correspondence and to the particularly disordered case of Berryman’s letters. After reading the letters the predominant way we approach modern poets’ correspondence today—as an assemblage of documentary evidence that stands alongside but not in place of a biography—this essay proposes a fruitful alternative: to focus less on their sender and more on their addressees. In that broader light, The Selected Letters is the best book ever assembled on what John Berryman needed from, and could provide for, anyone who wasn’t John Berryman. The remainder of the essay surveys what Berryman offered several generations of poets, from peers like Elizabeth Bishop, to near-contemporaries like Adrienne Rich, to poets working today. What many contemporary poets have found most useful—and most objectionable—in his work may be a permission-granting hostility, which they have wrested away and turned back on Berryman himself. After speculating about lessons we could take from Berryman’s example, this essay concludes on a central question raised by his tumultuous reception: how can you ever be sure?

Literary Agency

This essay is one part documentation and one part provocation, with a simple goal: to acknowledge the agency of the literary agent. There is no figure more significant to contemporary literary production and less studied by scholars than the agent. Drawing on ethnographic interviews conducted with 28 literary agents over the course of four years, I argue that agents shape the form and content of contemporary fiction by acting as administrators of the logic of the marketplace, conditioning their clients to write in and for the international multimedia conglomerates known as the Big Four. I take the agent’s list to be one of the central organizing heuristics of the contemporary literary field and read the list of one agent, Nicole Aragi, to examine what I call “corporate taste”: personal aesthetic judgments carefully calibrated to anticipate and respond to the demands of publishing conglomerates.Agents calibrate their aesthetic judgments to anticipate and respond to the demands of publishers and the market, becoming administrators of the logic of the corporation, thus shaping the form and content of contemporary fiction.

Literature’s Vexed Democratization

This article examines the contradictions of the contemporary literary field that appears both increasingly capacious and more exclusionary than in the past. Discussing the expansion of publishing enabled by digital and online technologies, we note that these changes did not reshape the demographics of most published works in the US, which remain overwhelmingly white authored. We then turn to literary prizes as an indicator of who writes prestige literature, narrating the twentieth-century formation of a racially segregated field and its slow changes against the backdrop of publishing overproduction. Combining a history of prestige literary culture with a demographic analysis of prizewinning writers (1918–2019), we discuss how a mostly white, New Critic-dominated field became the much more diverse and wide-ranging scene of the present. While this area has importantly opened up to writers of different backgrounds, our data show that the inequities of earlier prizegiving now take shape as drastic educational barriers to entry. Observing that a great deal of contemporary literature dramatizes the peculiarity of performing racial difference—often under the auspices of white audiences—we argue that the path to “excellence” has never been more narrow for writers who are not white, and Black writers in particular.

Stephen King, Incorporated: Genre Fiction and the Problem of Authorship

This essay examines Stephen King’s career in relation to the evolving literary status of genre fiction. Following the financialization of the publishing industry, genre fiction became one of its most profitable forms. As a result, agents and houses sought to invest in brand-name authors who could attract a mass-market readership based on reputation alone. While this development helped turn King into one of the most successful novelists of the late twentieth century, it also provided an opportunity to engage with questions about authorial autonomy, the demands of the market, and the mediating force of publishers in his own work. Novels like Misery (1984) and the “Dark Tower” series (1982–2004)—explicitly centered on the writing of genre fiction—articulate a model of authorial professionalism built upon the metaphor of the corporation. Understanding genre as a corporate form need not be grounds for critical dismissal, but can instead serve a critical purpose. Genre fiction, this essay argues, functions as a mechanism for confronting the economic conditions and expectations of the contemporary publishing industry and its impact on literary production.

Market Segmentation and Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Humor

Shirley Jackson’s essays in popular women’s magazines negotiate the gendered tensions and commercial contradictions of postwar print culture. This essay shows how the women in Jackson’s essays are figures of the fraught convergence of women’s public affiliation and the restrained politics of gender critique. These female figures are also representative of broader issues in US print culture after the Second World War. In particular, Jackson’s essays represent how a certain strain of feminist writing—sometimes known as “domestic humor”—was absorbed within the market forces of print capitalism. To explain this absorption, I draw on mid-century theories of market segmentation.