{"title":"Children, Too, Sing America: Ending Apartheid in and of Children's Literature","authors":"E. Donovan, Laura Dubek","doi":"10.1353/lit.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":",","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"49 1","pages":"349 - 372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45695210","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}
Abstract:This essay argues that Zora Neale Hurston's early short story "Drenched in Light" (1924) deploys the intertext of "Little Red Riding Hood" to frame the story of Isis. Casting the dilemma of the Black female artist and her desire to cross boundaries in the framework of Little Red, Hurston amalgamates European and African American folklore traditions, shifting the tale of Red Riding Hood to a trickster tale that empowers Isis. The Little Red framework is re-imagined in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, demonstrating the significance and accomplishment of "Drenched in Light" as a reflection of the Black artist courting white and Black patronage. This essay was written for the special collection titled "Children, Too, Sing America."
{"title":"Isis as Little Red Riding Hood: Illuminating Zora Neale Hurston's \"Drenched in Light\"","authors":"Holly Blackford Humes","doi":"10.1353/lit.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that Zora Neale Hurston's early short story \"Drenched in Light\" (1924) deploys the intertext of \"Little Red Riding Hood\" to frame the story of Isis. Casting the dilemma of the Black female artist and her desire to cross boundaries in the framework of Little Red, Hurston amalgamates European and African American folklore traditions, shifting the tale of Red Riding Hood to a trickster tale that empowers Isis. The Little Red framework is re-imagined in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, demonstrating the significance and accomplishment of \"Drenched in Light\" as a reflection of the Black artist courting white and Black patronage. This essay was written for the special collection titled \"Children, Too, Sing America.\"","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"403 ","pages":"400 - 420"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41276317","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}
Abstract:Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) illustrates that Irene's experience and perception of joy and pleasure are intertwined with her understanding of Black motherhood and childhood. During the early twentieth century, racial uplift leaders urged Black girls and women to embody the ideals of respectable motherhood as a means of both combating the infantilization of Black people and reclaiming the motherhood that slaveholders had denied to Black women. However, racial uplift leaders' insistence on the sacrificial and moral responsibilities of Black motherhood was often co-opted by a middle-class ideology, limiting Black women's ability to envision Black joy through their various forms of intimacy with Black children as well as their own childhoods. This essay contends such conservative aspects of respectable motherhood are exemplified by Irene, whose desire to maintain her family's middle-class status leads her to avoid complex questions about Black happiness. In addition to critiquing Irene's limitations, Larsen further explores Black women's erotic power by describing Irene's conflicted feelings about her childhood friend Clare's willful pursuit of pleasure. Informed by Audre Lorde's attentiveness to the Black inner girl child as a source of erotic power and Saidiya Hartman's Black feminist reading of love of pleasure, this essay argues that the manner in which Irene constructs her memory of Clare's girlhood and the ways the trope of childhood is deployed in the novel reveal Irene's fascination with Clare's yearning for a freer life and her willful refusal of self-abnegation.
{"title":"Joy or Vexation: Respectable Motherhood and the Trope of Childhood in Nella Larsen's Passing","authors":"Seohyun Kim","doi":"10.1353/lit.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) illustrates that Irene's experience and perception of joy and pleasure are intertwined with her understanding of Black motherhood and childhood. During the early twentieth century, racial uplift leaders urged Black girls and women to embody the ideals of respectable motherhood as a means of both combating the infantilization of Black people and reclaiming the motherhood that slaveholders had denied to Black women. However, racial uplift leaders' insistence on the sacrificial and moral responsibilities of Black motherhood was often co-opted by a middle-class ideology, limiting Black women's ability to envision Black joy through their various forms of intimacy with Black children as well as their own childhoods. This essay contends such conservative aspects of respectable motherhood are exemplified by Irene, whose desire to maintain her family's middle-class status leads her to avoid complex questions about Black happiness. In addition to critiquing Irene's limitations, Larsen further explores Black women's erotic power by describing Irene's conflicted feelings about her childhood friend Clare's willful pursuit of pleasure. Informed by Audre Lorde's attentiveness to the Black inner girl child as a source of erotic power and Saidiya Hartman's Black feminist reading of love of pleasure, this essay argues that the manner in which Irene constructs her memory of Clare's girlhood and the ways the trope of childhood is deployed in the novel reveal Irene's fascination with Clare's yearning for a freer life and her willful refusal of self-abnegation.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"49 1","pages":"373 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44412299","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}
Abstract:This essay introduces "Encounter," a literary device that juxtaposes the themes we tend to call "mature"—such as addiction, poverty, and police brutality—with maturity's apparent antithesis: childhood. As both a literary device and a methodology, Encounter is an aesthetic form that uses childhood to make ideology visible. Its hallmark attributes—didacticism, gothic echoes, paradoxical innocence, temporal elasticity, and hopeful futurity—marshal associations with childhood to emphasize and expose White supremacy's ideology at work. The lens of Encounter illuminates the centrality of childhood in twentieth-century texts for children and adults by major writers in the African American literary tradition, including W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Baldwin. The essay builds on current work in critical childhood studies, theories of racial identity development, and critical examination of the haunting persistence of slavery and its afterlives in the nation's racial consciousness.
{"title":"\"Mature Themes\": Childhood in the African American Literary Scene of Encounter","authors":"Maude Hines","doi":"10.1353/lit.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay introduces \"Encounter,\" a literary device that juxtaposes the themes we tend to call \"mature\"—such as addiction, poverty, and police brutality—with maturity's apparent antithesis: childhood. As both a literary device and a methodology, Encounter is an aesthetic form that uses childhood to make ideology visible. Its hallmark attributes—didacticism, gothic echoes, paradoxical innocence, temporal elasticity, and hopeful futurity—marshal associations with childhood to emphasize and expose White supremacy's ideology at work. The lens of Encounter illuminates the centrality of childhood in twentieth-century texts for children and adults by major writers in the African American literary tradition, including W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Baldwin. The essay builds on current work in critical childhood studies, theories of racial identity development, and critical examination of the haunting persistence of slavery and its afterlives in the nation's racial consciousness.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"49 1","pages":"421 - 447"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45354314","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}
Abstract:Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1939 assessment of The Sound and the Fury laid the groundwork for subsequent philosophical engagements with Faulkner’s work. Specifically, Sartre’s claim that Yoknapatawpha is suffused with “boredom” because the entire Faulknerian universe remains absorbed in “stories” of “the past,” devoid of any sense of futurity, has become a mainstay of Faulkner Studies. This essay challenges the Sartrean and Faulknerian orthodoxy of reading novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! as catastrophically backward-facing. By showing that Sartre’s dismissal of Faulkner’s “metaphysics” rests on Sartre’s own misappropriation of Heidegger, this essay argues that the Faulknerian “boredom” Sartre fastidiously rejects in fact constitutes the “engagement” and “action” Sartre privileges. Furthermore, Faulkner identifies Sartre’s “boredom” as a fundamental structure of narration. Against critics who seek a structure of timelessness in Faulkner, this essay defends a Faulknerian temporality of ruin, catastrophe, and boredom within narration and survival.
{"title":"On the Catastrophe of Sartre’s Faulknerian Boredom","authors":"T. Williams","doi":"10.1353/lit.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1939 assessment of The Sound and the Fury laid the groundwork for subsequent philosophical engagements with Faulkner’s work. Specifically, Sartre’s claim that Yoknapatawpha is suffused with “boredom” because the entire Faulknerian universe remains absorbed in “stories” of “the past,” devoid of any sense of futurity, has become a mainstay of Faulkner Studies. This essay challenges the Sartrean and Faulknerian orthodoxy of reading novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! as catastrophically backward-facing. By showing that Sartre’s dismissal of Faulkner’s “metaphysics” rests on Sartre’s own misappropriation of Heidegger, this essay argues that the Faulknerian “boredom” Sartre fastidiously rejects in fact constitutes the “engagement” and “action” Sartre privileges. Furthermore, Faulkner identifies Sartre’s “boredom” as a fundamental structure of narration. Against critics who seek a structure of timelessness in Faulkner, this essay defends a Faulknerian temporality of ruin, catastrophe, and boredom within narration and survival.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"49 1","pages":"257 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41694476","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}
Abstract:The US poet and psychiatrist Merrill Moore (1903–1957) wrote upwards of 100,000 sonnets in his lifetime. For literary scholars, the super prolific Moore is perhaps “interesting chiefly as a subject for statistics,” in an early reviewer’s phrase, but recourse to computational methods may actually obscure what is most instructive about Moore’s example for literary studies today. This articles uses the narrow occasion of Moore’s transatlantic reception to reframe the relationship between lyric form and the poetic archive. Reading for form at the scale of 100,000 sonnets requires a shift in analytical emphasis, from a sometimes-limiting focus on poems as textual objects, to a more robust theorization of poetic technique. Convening recent currents in literary and media studies, I demonstrate how the concept of poetic technique, by mediating between individual poems and massive archives, teaches us to read in the service of a more capacious history of lyric writing as social practice.
{"title":"Merrill Moore’s Sonnetorium: Reading Writing and the Scale of Poetic Technique","authors":"M. Kilbane","doi":"10.1353/lit.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The US poet and psychiatrist Merrill Moore (1903–1957) wrote upwards of 100,000 sonnets in his lifetime. For literary scholars, the super prolific Moore is perhaps “interesting chiefly as a subject for statistics,” in an early reviewer’s phrase, but recourse to computational methods may actually obscure what is most instructive about Moore’s example for literary studies today. This articles uses the narrow occasion of Moore’s transatlantic reception to reframe the relationship between lyric form and the poetic archive. Reading for form at the scale of 100,000 sonnets requires a shift in analytical emphasis, from a sometimes-limiting focus on poems as textual objects, to a more robust theorization of poetic technique. Convening recent currents in literary and media studies, I demonstrate how the concept of poetic technique, by mediating between individual poems and massive archives, teaches us to read in the service of a more capacious history of lyric writing as social practice.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"49 1","pages":"171 - 201"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41741564","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}
Abstract:A number of linguists have recently suggested that the distinction between the kinds of phrasings we regard as “nativelike,” or “natural,” and those that strike us as jarring, stilted or just plain wrong, has more to tell us about language than the time-honored opposition between grammar and vocabulary. In the light of these trends, my paper revisits Coleridge’s critical claim that “it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare [ . . . ] without making the author say something else, or something worse, that he does say.” The paper argues that the strange sense of naturalness Coleridge is evoking in this metaphor, and in the Biographia Literaria’s theorization of poetic diction more generally, can be clarified by that recent linguistic work, and discusses the writings of linguists Bybee, Goldberg, Hoey, Hopper, and Pawley and Syder to this end. The paper concludes by suggesting that the Biographia Literaria can contribute to those linguists’ discussions in turn, by illuminating the cognitive processes through which new language is coined.
{"title":"On Originality in Poetic Diction and the Linguistics of “Nativelike Speech”","authors":"Paul Magee","doi":"10.1353/lit.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A number of linguists have recently suggested that the distinction between the kinds of phrasings we regard as “nativelike,” or “natural,” and those that strike us as jarring, stilted or just plain wrong, has more to tell us about language than the time-honored opposition between grammar and vocabulary. In the light of these trends, my paper revisits Coleridge’s critical claim that “it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare [ . . . ] without making the author say something else, or something worse, that he does say.” The paper argues that the strange sense of naturalness Coleridge is evoking in this metaphor, and in the Biographia Literaria’s theorization of poetic diction more generally, can be clarified by that recent linguistic work, and discusses the writings of linguists Bybee, Goldberg, Hoey, Hopper, and Pawley and Syder to this end. The paper concludes by suggesting that the Biographia Literaria can contribute to those linguists’ discussions in turn, by illuminating the cognitive processes through which new language is coined.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"49 1","pages":"228 - 256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41745457","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}
Abstract:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, representing Ifemelu’s blogging in Americanah (2014), shows Black immigrant communities revising public discourse on intersections of race, culture, and nationality, effectively expanding conceptions of Blackness in America. Ifemelu’s blogs, Raceteenth, or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black and The Small Redemptions of Lagos are a dialogic digital literature functioning as a diasporic, communal textual space. This article focuses on Ifemelu’s blogging activity, both in the United States and upon her return to Nigeria, and explores how she creates and sustains a digital, dialogic construction of home space where “non-American Blacks” and “Nigerpolitans” can reorder their lives after transnational displacement. Americanah, a novel of migration, shows that diaspora is where constructions of identity and home are provisional and continuously constructed and Adichie represents Ifemelu’s blogs as diasporic spaces where Black migratory subjects (re)constitute identity and home. The blog platform is particularly well suited for the cultural work of the geographically dispersed diasporic community. Further, Black immigrants in dialogue with Ifemelu consider a consciousness of their racialized immigrant identities to be a prerequisite for negotiating their belonging in the United States. Ifemelu’s identity as a migratory subject and her ambivalence about her belonging in both the United States and Nigeria complicate a reading of her return to Lagos as a homegoing; her creation of a new blog, the revival of her digital diaspora, reveals her need to explore her continuously shifting identity and its relationship to the provisional nature of home.
{"title":"Blogging Race, Blogging Nation: Digital Diaspora as Home in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah","authors":"Maia L. Butler","doi":"10.1353/lit.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, representing Ifemelu’s blogging in Americanah (2014), shows Black immigrant communities revising public discourse on intersections of race, culture, and nationality, effectively expanding conceptions of Blackness in America. Ifemelu’s blogs, Raceteenth, or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black and The Small Redemptions of Lagos are a dialogic digital literature functioning as a diasporic, communal textual space. This article focuses on Ifemelu’s blogging activity, both in the United States and upon her return to Nigeria, and explores how she creates and sustains a digital, dialogic construction of home space where “non-American Blacks” and “Nigerpolitans” can reorder their lives after transnational displacement. Americanah, a novel of migration, shows that diaspora is where constructions of identity and home are provisional and continuously constructed and Adichie represents Ifemelu’s blogs as diasporic spaces where Black migratory subjects (re)constitute identity and home. The blog platform is particularly well suited for the cultural work of the geographically dispersed diasporic community. Further, Black immigrants in dialogue with Ifemelu consider a consciousness of their racialized immigrant identities to be a prerequisite for negotiating their belonging in the United States. Ifemelu’s identity as a migratory subject and her ambivalence about her belonging in both the United States and Nigeria complicate a reading of her return to Lagos as a homegoing; her creation of a new blog, the revival of her digital diaspora, reveals her need to explore her continuously shifting identity and its relationship to the provisional nature of home.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"49 1","pages":"287 - 315"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41492160","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：