Abstract:This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.
{"title":"Fiction as Counter Memory: Writing Armenia and Palestine in Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin","authors":"N. Fischer, K. Mitchell","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0044","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"738 - 767"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49157777","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 suggests that a lingering critical suspicion toward historical films that focus on the redemptive arc of individuals at the expense of historical context is indebted to a critique of the normative ideology of the literary Bildungsroman. It draws on studies of the literary genre that acknowledge its polyphony and regard its protagonist or Bildungsheld less as a site of guaranteed social mobility and more as a catalyst for a clash of perspectives and value systems. The essay transposes a less essentialist and more functional and performative conception of the genre to a highly successful if critically contested historical feature film, Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters, 2007). It argues that Sally Sorowitsch, the film’s closely observed Bildungsheld, stimulates viewer experience as a catalyst for an exploration of different phases of Jewish diasporic history. Sally’s indecisiveness and increasing moral maturity allow the viewer to reflect on various themes in recent Holocaust historiography, including the complexity of judging privileged prisoners and the contemporary pertinence of Hannah Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil.
{"title":"The Counterfeiters as Bildungsfilm: A Genre Study","authors":"Ned Curthoys","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0041","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay suggests that a lingering critical suspicion toward historical films that focus on the redemptive arc of individuals at the expense of historical context is indebted to a critique of the normative ideology of the literary Bildungsroman. It draws on studies of the literary genre that acknowledge its polyphony and regard its protagonist or Bildungsheld less as a site of guaranteed social mobility and more as a catalyst for a clash of perspectives and value systems. The essay transposes a less essentialist and more functional and performative conception of the genre to a highly successful if critically contested historical feature film, Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters, 2007). It argues that Sally Sorowitsch, the film’s closely observed Bildungsheld, stimulates viewer experience as a catalyst for an exploration of different phases of Jewish diasporic history. Sally’s indecisiveness and increasing moral maturity allow the viewer to reflect on various themes in recent Holocaust historiography, including the complexity of judging privileged prisoners and the contemporary pertinence of Hannah Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"653 - 676"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49527595","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:Informed by feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship, this article proposes an interpretative framework of hopeful reading to locate resistant forms of hope in South Korean writer Han Kang’s award-winning novel The Vegetarian, which is permeated with violence. Unlike mainstream positive thinking promoted by positive psychology that keeps the status quo intact, hopeful reading is rebellious, generative, and transformative in nature. Hopeful reading shifts the analytical focus from what disables one from acting in a hopeless situation to how one can be enabled to remain active in the very same situation. Applying this lens to analyze The Vegetarian, this article argues that hope is not ignited through suppressed women characters’ successful changes to continue what life used to be before violence. Instead, failing to properly resist or act turns out to facilitate the women characters to imagine and experiment with what their lives could have been or could become, which sparks the light of hope in the darkness of the novel.
{"title":"Hopeful Reading: Rethinking Resistance in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian","authors":"(. Tai","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0040","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Informed by feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship, this article proposes an interpretative framework of hopeful reading to locate resistant forms of hope in South Korean writer Han Kang’s award-winning novel The Vegetarian, which is permeated with violence. Unlike mainstream positive thinking promoted by positive psychology that keeps the status quo intact, hopeful reading is rebellious, generative, and transformative in nature. Hopeful reading shifts the analytical focus from what disables one from acting in a hopeless situation to how one can be enabled to remain active in the very same situation. Applying this lens to analyze The Vegetarian, this article argues that hope is not ignited through suppressed women characters’ successful changes to continue what life used to be before violence. Instead, failing to properly resist or act turns out to facilitate the women characters to imagine and experiment with what their lives could have been or could become, which sparks the light of hope in the darkness of the novel.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"627 - 652"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47089408","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":"Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction by Elizabeth Alsop (review)","authors":"G. Hankins","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0047","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"794 - 797"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47555966","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 Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight reveal how mundane, noninstitutionalized forms of gendered classism against poor white women constitute an indispensable part of imperialist white supremacy. Closer scrutiny of white supremacy’s indirect, inconspicuous manifestations is increasingly crucial as politically-correct, neoliberal multiculturalism suffuses our contemporary moment. This essay’s reading of Rhys poses two interventions in the field of critical whiteness studies: 1) greater attention to how white people manifest their racial identities through interactions that do not directly involve people of color and 2) heightened consideration of white supremacy’s unspectacular, noninstitutional forms. The essay makes these interventions, on the one hand, through reading Mackenzie and Midnight through the lens of scholarship in colonial discourse studies about the relationship between “Englishness” and bourgeois class standing and, on the other hand, through a reading of Rhys’s tone and style, specifically her use of sardonic humor and the second-person voice.
{"title":"Locating Race in Jean Rhys’s Non-Caribbean Fiction: Notes on Method in Whiteness Studies","authors":"M. D. Rosario","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0043","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight reveal how mundane, noninstitutionalized forms of gendered classism against poor white women constitute an indispensable part of imperialist white supremacy. Closer scrutiny of white supremacy’s indirect, inconspicuous manifestations is increasingly crucial as politically-correct, neoliberal multiculturalism suffuses our contemporary moment. This essay’s reading of Rhys poses two interventions in the field of critical whiteness studies: 1) greater attention to how white people manifest their racial identities through interactions that do not directly involve people of color and 2) heightened consideration of white supremacy’s unspectacular, noninstitutional forms. The essay makes these interventions, on the one hand, through reading Mackenzie and Midnight through the lens of scholarship in colonial discourse studies about the relationship between “Englishness” and bourgeois class standing and, on the other hand, through a reading of Rhys’s tone and style, specifically her use of sardonic humor and the second-person voice.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"708 - 737"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43856232","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":"The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale (review)","authors":"F. Feldman","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0046","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"790 - 793"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48148907","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 proliferation of twenty-first-century novels about African protagonists’ migration to Europe or the United States has sparked a debate about the status of African migrant fiction and Afropolitanism in the Western literary canon. While there are benefits to bringing African migrant fiction to a wider readership, there are also sacrifices the narratives must make in order to be appealing to those readers. Tope Folarin considers this sacrifice to be one of “accessibility”— African writers must make their narratives accessible to Western literary audiences by recycling an essentialized portrayal of African migrants. This paper argues that Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air (2010), thematizes this very notion of accessibility in order to resist the pressure of Western literary standards. While it adopts many of the tropes of accessible African migrant fiction, the novel engages such tropes in order to demonstrate its subversion of them. Through his use of a relentlessly dishonest protagonist-narrator, the son of first-generation immigrants to the US, Mengestu introduces some conventions of African migrant fiction and betrays them. In doing so, he instructs readers how to read How to Read the Air against the accessibility it might seem to offer.
摘要:21世纪关于非洲主人公移民欧美的小说大量涌现，引发了关于非洲移民小说和非洲政治主义在西方文学经典中的地位的争论。虽然将非洲移民小说带给更广泛的读者有好处，但为了吸引这些读者，叙事也必须做出牺牲。Tope Folarin认为这种牺牲是一种“可达性”——非洲作家必须通过对非洲移民的本质描述，使他们的叙事能够被西方文学读者所接受。本文认为，埃塞俄比亚裔美国作家Dinaw Mengestu的第二部小说《如何阅读空气》(How to Read the Air, 2010)将无障碍这一概念作为主题，以抵制西方文学标准的压力。虽然它采用了许多通俗易懂的非洲移民小说的比喻，但小说使用这些比喻是为了展示它对它们的颠覆。孟格斯图使用了一个极其不诚实的主人公——美国第一代移民的儿子——作为叙述者，他引入了一些非洲移民小说的传统，并背叛了它们。在这样做的过程中，他指导读者如何阅读《如何阅读空气》，而不是它似乎提供的可访问性。
{"title":"Thematizing Readerly Accessibility: How to Read Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air","authors":"M. Rabe","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The proliferation of twenty-first-century novels about African protagonists’ migration to Europe or the United States has sparked a debate about the status of African migrant fiction and Afropolitanism in the Western literary canon. While there are benefits to bringing African migrant fiction to a wider readership, there are also sacrifices the narratives must make in order to be appealing to those readers. Tope Folarin considers this sacrifice to be one of “accessibility”— African writers must make their narratives accessible to Western literary audiences by recycling an essentialized portrayal of African migrants. This paper argues that Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air (2010), thematizes this very notion of accessibility in order to resist the pressure of Western literary standards. While it adopts many of the tropes of accessible African migrant fiction, the novel engages such tropes in order to demonstrate its subversion of them. Through his use of a relentlessly dishonest protagonist-narrator, the son of first-generation immigrants to the US, Mengestu introduces some conventions of African migrant fiction and betrays them. In doing so, he instructs readers how to read How to Read the Air against the accessibility it might seem to offer.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"768 - 789"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47934589","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 surveys the career of Lionel Trilling to understand why he uses the phrase “modernism in the streets” to critique the 1960s counterculture. It focuses on his role as a teacher in relation to his writings on higher education, testimonies from his former students, the emergence of critical theory, and his understanding of the experience of literature. At stake in studying Trilling’s shift from an early champion of the modern imagination to his later defense of the rational intellect is his fear of the university’s commodification of art and the erosion of the liberal arts humanistic ideal. This essay ultimately argues that Trilling’s career reimagines the function of literature in the humanist tradition to account for the modernist and theoretical critique of humanism. In doing so, Trilling revitalizes the usefulness of irony as a mode of self-creation and exemplifies a new model of sincerity that teachers can adopt when faced with the task of helping students navigate the tension between the excess of modern literature and the decorum necessitated by social institutions.
{"title":"Modernism in the Classroom: Lionel Trilling and the Experience of Literature","authors":"Daniel Rosenberg Nutters","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0042","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay surveys the career of Lionel Trilling to understand why he uses the phrase “modernism in the streets” to critique the 1960s counterculture. It focuses on his role as a teacher in relation to his writings on higher education, testimonies from his former students, the emergence of critical theory, and his understanding of the experience of literature. At stake in studying Trilling’s shift from an early champion of the modern imagination to his later defense of the rational intellect is his fear of the university’s commodification of art and the erosion of the liberal arts humanistic ideal. This essay ultimately argues that Trilling’s career reimagines the function of literature in the humanist tradition to account for the modernist and theoretical critique of humanism. In doing so, Trilling revitalizes the usefulness of irony as a mode of self-creation and exemplifies a new model of sincerity that teachers can adopt when faced with the task of helping students navigate the tension between the excess of modern literature and the decorum necessitated by social institutions.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"677 - 707"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45111189","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:Wages for Housework! This demand on the part of radical feminists in the 1970s was underwritten by a critique of the role of reproductive labor for capitalist accumulation that challenged contemporary Marxist orthodoxy. Since then, this critique has advanced urgent and insightful contributions to contemporary Marxist and feminist theory. Here, I revisit its challenge to the question of value and accumulation. I argue that the call to wage reproductive labor seeks to exploit the dialectical and utopian movement of the value-form itself, and opens onto more fulsome utopian scenarios, such as the collectivization of social reproductive labor and the abolition of gender.
{"title":"Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value-form","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Wages for Housework! This demand on the part of radical feminists in the 1970s was underwritten by a critique of the role of reproductive labor for capitalist accumulation that challenged contemporary Marxist orthodoxy. Since then, this critique has advanced urgent and insightful contributions to contemporary Marxist and feminist theory. Here, I revisit its challenge to the question of value and accumulation. I argue that the call to wage reproductive labor seeks to exploit the dialectical and utopian movement of the value-form itself, and opens onto more fulsome utopian scenarios, such as the collectivization of social reproductive labor and the abolition of gender.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"896 - 921"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47591304","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 examines the animalization of Black human beings in the texts of Immanuel Kant and Frantz Fanon. The two thinkers are positioned as key markers in a broader stream of modern theorizing surrounding race, colonialism, and the manifestation of human animality at different poles of the racial-colonial spectrum. Approaching them side by side generates insight that consideration of either in isolation would not allow: Kant’s place in the history of racist and colonialist thought is further substantiated, while a new dimension of Fanon’s still-unfolding contribution to the exposure and dismantling of this enterprise is revealed.
{"title":"Black Animality from Kant to Fanon","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the animalization of Black human beings in the texts of Immanuel Kant and Frantz Fanon. The two thinkers are positioned as key markers in a broader stream of modern theorizing surrounding race, colonialism, and the manifestation of human animality at different poles of the racial-colonial spectrum. Approaching them side by side generates insight that consideration of either in isolation would not allow: Kant’s place in the history of racist and colonialist thought is further substantiated, while a new dimension of Fanon’s still-unfolding contribution to the exposure and dismantling of this enterprise is revealed.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"951 - 976"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49551856","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}
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