Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel Imitation of Life is ostensibly the story of Bea Pullman, an entrepreneurial, white, single mother who establishes a successful waffle-house restaurant chain with the help of her black maid and friend, Delilah. It is also a story of ‘passing,’ and Hurst’s only novel explicitly dealing with issues of race. The novel was later adapted into two films, with Douglas Sirk’s 1959 version the adaptation discussed here. While both Hurst’s and Sirk’s versions of Imitation of Life were met with widespread commercial success, each treatment illustrates the narratological challenges of working with the passing trope, particularly when attempting to represent the relationship between black and white characters and acts of gender and race passing. Hurst’s and Sirk’s depictions of passing, and more specifically their employment of the ‘white passing’ narrative, reveals the irresolvable paradox of all such acts. To pass is to both subvert notions of fixed identity categories and cement them, a reality elucidated by the complicated representation of gender and race passing in novel and film. Both literary and cinematic versions of Imitation of Life interrogate passing and its potential to destabilize existing social hierarchies. Although Sirk exercises significant artistic license in his adaptation, both
{"title":"“Black Wimmin Who Pass, Pass into Damnation”: Race, Gender, and the Passing Tradition in Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life and Douglas Sirk’s Film Adaptation","authors":"Lauren Kuryloski","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2019.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2019.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel Imitation of Life is ostensibly the story of Bea Pullman, an entrepreneurial, white, single mother who establishes a successful waffle-house restaurant chain with the help of her black maid and friend, Delilah. It is also a story of ‘passing,’ and Hurst’s only novel explicitly dealing with issues of race. The novel was later adapted into two films, with Douglas Sirk’s 1959 version the adaptation discussed here. While both Hurst’s and Sirk’s versions of Imitation of Life were met with widespread commercial success, each treatment illustrates the narratological challenges of working with the passing trope, particularly when attempting to represent the relationship between black and white characters and acts of gender and race passing. Hurst’s and Sirk’s depictions of passing, and more specifically their employment of the ‘white passing’ narrative, reveals the irresolvable paradox of all such acts. To pass is to both subvert notions of fixed identity categories and cement them, a reality elucidated by the complicated representation of gender and race passing in novel and film. Both literary and cinematic versions of Imitation of Life interrogate passing and its potential to destabilize existing social hierarchies. Although Sirk exercises significant artistic license in his adaptation, both","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"66 1","pages":"27 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87068373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Narratologies of Autodiegetic Undercover Reportage: Albert Deane Richardson’s The Secret Service","authors":"K. Quinn","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2019.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2019.0000","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"1 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88600127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) is, at one level, a horror story of bio-commerce: set in an alternate-universe England of the 1990s, clones are reared by “guardians” (5) at a boarding-school-like institution called “Hailsham” (4) for future live organ donation.1 Yet, at another level, it is also a story of Victorian literary trafficking. The narrator, who goes only by Kathy H., reveals that her final essay “topic was Victorian novels,” and confesses that she considers “going back and working on it [. . .]. But in the end [supposes she’s] not really serious about it” (115–16). Her statement is ironic, given that her entire narrative reworks the Victorian novel. Ishiguro’s experiment with speculative fiction pays homage to Victorian Gothic conventions, but also navigates the terrain between Bildungsroman and female school story. Kathy H. is a narrator every bit as private and withholding of information as Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe, and small wonder: her ‘school’ is a total institution in the tradition of Jane Eyre’s Lowood and Villette’s Pensionnat, its clones the haunted shades of Charlotte Brontë’s degraded surplus population of teachers and governesses. And like those Brontë characters, Ishiguro’s student clones produce artwork that is co-opted by their institutional masters as an index to their souls. Plots and characters of other familiar nineteenth-century novels are grafted on throughout, as are particularly Victorian questions of commu-
{"title":"Never Let Me Go: Cloning, Transplanting, and the Victorian Novel","authors":"M. C. Hillard","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2019.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2019.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) is, at one level, a horror story of bio-commerce: set in an alternate-universe England of the 1990s, clones are reared by “guardians” (5) at a boarding-school-like institution called “Hailsham” (4) for future live organ donation.1 Yet, at another level, it is also a story of Victorian literary trafficking. The narrator, who goes only by Kathy H., reveals that her final essay “topic was Victorian novels,” and confesses that she considers “going back and working on it [. . .]. But in the end [supposes she’s] not really serious about it” (115–16). Her statement is ironic, given that her entire narrative reworks the Victorian novel. Ishiguro’s experiment with speculative fiction pays homage to Victorian Gothic conventions, but also navigates the terrain between Bildungsroman and female school story. Kathy H. is a narrator every bit as private and withholding of information as Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe, and small wonder: her ‘school’ is a total institution in the tradition of Jane Eyre’s Lowood and Villette’s Pensionnat, its clones the haunted shades of Charlotte Brontë’s degraded surplus population of teachers and governesses. And like those Brontë characters, Ishiguro’s student clones produce artwork that is co-opted by their institutional masters as an index to their souls. Plots and characters of other familiar nineteenth-century novels are grafted on throughout, as are particularly Victorian questions of commu-","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"53 1","pages":"109 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84685346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While scholars like Lynn Keller and Evie Shockley have devoted significant work to women’s epics in English, no similar scholarship exists on Francophone women writers, for lack of a comparable corpus. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H.D. provide the beginnings of an Anglophone lineage that culminates in contemporary works such as Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette. By contrast, Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: Epic in Three Cantos (La Quête infinie de l’autre rive: épopée en trois chants), published by Gallimard in 2011, is practically alone as an epic in contemporary French and Francophone literature by both women and men. Kandé is a Franco-Senegalese scholar and poet who has lived in New York for more than twenty years. In the Neverending Quest, she recounts at least two stories: that of the early 14th-century Emperor of Mali, Bata Manden Bori, known as Abubakar II or Abu Bekri II, and that of the thousands of African migrants who attempt to reach Europe. According to Kandé’s foreword, Abubakar II launches a massive expedition to explore the ocean to the West of Africa, never to return (13–14).1 The first two cantos recount the misadventures of Abubakar’s expedition, which include an attempted mutiny. Kandé imagines several versions of their final fate, including arrival in the Americas. The migrants’ expedition to European shores occupies the third and final canto. The migrants travel on a dangerous boat referred to as a patera. Originally a kind of shallow, flat-botto-
{"title":"The Contemporary Hero in Sylvie Kandé’s Epic of Futurity, La Quête infinie de l’autre rive","authors":"A. Dickow","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0017","url":null,"abstract":"While scholars like Lynn Keller and Evie Shockley have devoted significant work to women’s epics in English, no similar scholarship exists on Francophone women writers, for lack of a comparable corpus. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H.D. provide the beginnings of an Anglophone lineage that culminates in contemporary works such as Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette. By contrast, Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: Epic in Three Cantos (La Quête infinie de l’autre rive: épopée en trois chants), published by Gallimard in 2011, is practically alone as an epic in contemporary French and Francophone literature by both women and men. Kandé is a Franco-Senegalese scholar and poet who has lived in New York for more than twenty years. In the Neverending Quest, she recounts at least two stories: that of the early 14th-century Emperor of Mali, Bata Manden Bori, known as Abubakar II or Abu Bekri II, and that of the thousands of African migrants who attempt to reach Europe. According to Kandé’s foreword, Abubakar II launches a massive expedition to explore the ocean to the West of Africa, never to return (13–14).1 The first two cantos recount the misadventures of Abubakar’s expedition, which include an attempted mutiny. Kandé imagines several versions of their final fate, including arrival in the Americas. The migrants’ expedition to European shores occupies the third and final canto. The migrants travel on a dangerous boat referred to as a patera. Originally a kind of shallow, flat-botto-","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"135 1","pages":"399 - 422"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89448745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Earlier in the poem she asserts the revolutionary “need to know laws of time & space / they never dream of ” (76) as alternative cosmologies that will “outflank” and “short circuit” repressive forces. Di Prima’s cosmology is constructed from the materiality of everyday life, including the temporary spaces of the body and the home; it is neither eternal nor outside the simultaneously entropic and fertile narratives of the material and natural world of living things and their spatial relationships. In di Prima’s world, the private locations, traditionally constructed as the preserve of the biological family, become increasingly public and reconstructed as “revolutionary spaces.” The poem’s ambitions are not, however, limited to the domestic. On a larger scale, Revolutionary Letters produces a sense of the American nation through the histories of land ownership and inhabitation. This narrative is further contextualized within a political world of revolution and activism, and the poem provides a counter history, as well as po-
{"title":"Times and Spaces Never Dreamed of in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters","authors":"I. Davidson","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Earlier in the poem she asserts the revolutionary “need to know laws of time & space / they never dream of ” (76) as alternative cosmologies that will “outflank” and “short circuit” repressive forces. Di Prima’s cosmology is constructed from the materiality of everyday life, including the temporary spaces of the body and the home; it is neither eternal nor outside the simultaneously entropic and fertile narratives of the material and natural world of living things and their spatial relationships. In di Prima’s world, the private locations, traditionally constructed as the preserve of the biological family, become increasingly public and reconstructed as “revolutionary spaces.” The poem’s ambitions are not, however, limited to the domestic. On a larger scale, Revolutionary Letters produces a sense of the American nation through the histories of land ownership and inhabitation. This narrative is further contextualized within a political world of revolution and activism, and the poem provides a counter history, as well as po-","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"517 1","pages":"314 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77138482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay takes up questions of the relation between political forms of solidarity and literary experiment as feminist homage as these materialize in the early writings of the late modernist experimental writer Kathy Acker. Many of Acker’s juvenilia, written in the 1970s, remain unpublished and have therefore not entered Acker scholarship until now. Acker, a self-consciously radical, political writer, uses experimental composition throughout her entire oeuvre to critique the narratives of late capitalism and American republican political discourse. This critique is, in part, explicit in the content of all of Acker’s works. Richard Nixon, for example, appears in Don Quixote (1986) as the revolutionary female knight’s rival, and George Bush’s political discourse is explicitly parodied in My Mother: Demonology (1993). In response to her political critique, critics such as Alex Houen have rigorously contextualized and analyzed Acker’s works through the prism of biopolitics and liberationary politics.1 Acker’s unpublished, handwritten notebooks, housed in the Kathy Acker Papers at Duke University, reveal a continuing engagement with revolutionary politics and the question of freedom. Acker kept handwritten notebooks throughout her career, in which she would write sections of prose and life writing, experiment with language, and write on politics and philosophy. In one early notebook, titled “On Freedom and Democracy,” Acker explores the issue of equality.2 She opens the notebook with a statement by the French philosopher Edgar Morin—“Communism is the major question and the
{"title":"Feminist Solidarity and Experiment in Kathy Acker’s Early Writings","authors":"G. Colby","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0013","url":null,"abstract":"This essay takes up questions of the relation between political forms of solidarity and literary experiment as feminist homage as these materialize in the early writings of the late modernist experimental writer Kathy Acker. Many of Acker’s juvenilia, written in the 1970s, remain unpublished and have therefore not entered Acker scholarship until now. Acker, a self-consciously radical, political writer, uses experimental composition throughout her entire oeuvre to critique the narratives of late capitalism and American republican political discourse. This critique is, in part, explicit in the content of all of Acker’s works. Richard Nixon, for example, appears in Don Quixote (1986) as the revolutionary female knight’s rival, and George Bush’s political discourse is explicitly parodied in My Mother: Demonology (1993). In response to her political critique, critics such as Alex Houen have rigorously contextualized and analyzed Acker’s works through the prism of biopolitics and liberationary politics.1 Acker’s unpublished, handwritten notebooks, housed in the Kathy Acker Papers at Duke University, reveal a continuing engagement with revolutionary politics and the question of freedom. Acker kept handwritten notebooks throughout her career, in which she would write sections of prose and life writing, experiment with language, and write on politics and philosophy. In one early notebook, titled “On Freedom and Democracy,” Acker explores the issue of equality.2 She opens the notebook with a statement by the French philosopher Edgar Morin—“Communism is the major question and the","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"113 1","pages":"290 - 313"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79787234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Let Us Combine","authors":"Rowena Kennedy-Epstein","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"140 1","pages":"281 - 289"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86609135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Few have read the novel central to this investigation of black women’s experimental writing. The imperative to feature this novel is motivated by the absence of black women’s creative and critical contributions to most conversations about experimental literatures, the avant-garde, and about the ways in which black women’s narrative innovations disrupt and challenge linear formulations of knowledge and history that shape the very notion of black humanity and black existence. Carlene Hatcher Polite’s novel Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play (1975) tells the story of Arista Prolo—Sister X—an African American woman, who, the novel’s narrator explains, is deceased and mostly unknown and unremembered:
{"title":"The Evidence of Things Unseen: Experimental Form as Black Feminist Praxis","authors":"Shelly J Eversley","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Few have read the novel central to this investigation of black women’s experimental writing. The imperative to feature this novel is motivated by the absence of black women’s creative and critical contributions to most conversations about experimental literatures, the avant-garde, and about the ways in which black women’s narrative innovations disrupt and challenge linear formulations of knowledge and history that shape the very notion of black humanity and black existence. Carlene Hatcher Polite’s novel Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play (1975) tells the story of Arista Prolo—Sister X—an African American woman, who, the novel’s narrator explains, is deceased and mostly unknown and unremembered:","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"165 1","pages":"378 - 398"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80427995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Internationally renowned visual artist Jenny Holzer has built a storied career appropriating, writing, moving, and projecting text toward both poetic and political ends. She has famously repurposed the advertiser’s text scroll, marquee, billboard, and building surface to engage mass forms of communication in the service of art. Working in and through ‘found’ art practices made famous by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Sherry Levine’s appropriations, Holzer re-invents the postmodern sign as adpoem or public aphorism through text grafts, ranging from the philosophical to the mundane. In her text scrolls, projections, and web works, Holzer dissects the language of the cultural mandate in midair, challenging the weighty dominance of word on page toward a surface of pixel and speed. She also interrogates site-specific locales by literally reshaping them in texts, layering official repositories of history under the contradictory stories of individuals. Holzer’s primary strategy of appropriation, both of form and of content, offers a feminist corrective for the marginal and the margin by recontextualizing and foregrounding noncanonical voices in public institutional spaces. This essay examines the lineage of Holzer as a hybrid producer of electronic literature, and investigates the morphology of her most enduring work, Truisms, in light of the electronic literature genre. While some of Holzer’s work falls outside the parameters of this “born-digital” oeuvre,1 I argue that versions of her Truisms series produce
{"title":"“Being Alone with Yourself is Increasingly Unpopular”: The Electronic Poetry of Jenny Holzer","authors":"Leisha Jones","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Internationally renowned visual artist Jenny Holzer has built a storied career appropriating, writing, moving, and projecting text toward both poetic and political ends. She has famously repurposed the advertiser’s text scroll, marquee, billboard, and building surface to engage mass forms of communication in the service of art. Working in and through ‘found’ art practices made famous by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Sherry Levine’s appropriations, Holzer re-invents the postmodern sign as adpoem or public aphorism through text grafts, ranging from the philosophical to the mundane. In her text scrolls, projections, and web works, Holzer dissects the language of the cultural mandate in midair, challenging the weighty dominance of word on page toward a surface of pixel and speed. She also interrogates site-specific locales by literally reshaping them in texts, layering official repositories of history under the contradictory stories of individuals. Holzer’s primary strategy of appropriation, both of form and of content, offers a feminist corrective for the marginal and the margin by recontextualizing and foregrounding noncanonical voices in public institutional spaces. This essay examines the lineage of Holzer as a hybrid producer of electronic literature, and investigates the morphology of her most enduring work, Truisms, in light of the electronic literature genre. While some of Holzer’s work falls outside the parameters of this “born-digital” oeuvre,1 I argue that versions of her Truisms series produce","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"423 - 451"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83220500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：