Pub Date : 2022-11-15DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10341706
Alan L. Ackerman
Catharine E. Beecher’s 1841 A Treatise on Domestic Economy laid the groundwork for the American environmental canon, including Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau and Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson. In conversation with other nineteenth-century American writers, Beecher promoted a way of thinking about nature as home and illuminated current usage of energy and economy as opposing, gendered metaphors. Situating daily life in a new energy regime, Beecher was an early theorizer of fossil fuels, positing domestic economy as a corrective to the political economy of industrial capitalism. Despite seemingly regressive views of women’s place in the home and society, Beecher’s writings on domesticity during the historic transition to fossil fuels speak to our own moment of climate and public health crises. To reassess Beecher in light of the environmental humanities is to discover in domestic economy a way of thinking about nature as something in which we live and, equally important, that lives in us.
{"title":"Apocalyptic Rumblings: Catharine E. Beecher’s Domestic Economy and Environmentalism","authors":"Alan L. Ackerman","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10341706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10341706","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Catharine E. Beecher’s 1841 A Treatise on Domestic Economy laid the groundwork for the American environmental canon, including Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau and Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson. In conversation with other nineteenth-century American writers, Beecher promoted a way of thinking about nature as home and illuminated current usage of energy and economy as opposing, gendered metaphors. Situating daily life in a new energy regime, Beecher was an early theorizer of fossil fuels, positing domestic economy as a corrective to the political economy of industrial capitalism. Despite seemingly regressive views of women’s place in the home and society, Beecher’s writings on domesticity during the historic transition to fossil fuels speak to our own moment of climate and public health crises. To reassess Beecher in light of the environmental humanities is to discover in domestic economy a way of thinking about nature as something in which we live and, equally important, that lives in us.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44779729","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-15DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10341691
A. Schwartz
This essay introduces the concept of imperative reading as one solution to the tension between implicitly suspicious historicist methods, on one hand, and, on the other, postcritical practices of reading that prioritize readerly pleasure over readerly paranoia. Imperative reading reveals the network of historically inflected obligations that can produce or intensify the expectation that reading should be pleasurable. This insight comes to view in the writing and reading practices of Samson Occom, late eighteenth-century Mohegan minister, theologian, and hymnodist, and cofounder of Brothertown, a political experiment in Indigenous survivance in the face of settler colonial incursion during the late colonial era and the early republic. For Occom and his fellow Algonquians, reading and writing, to say nothing of readerly pleasure, were not foregone conclusions. Reading and writing could be sources of pleasure, and they could also be sites of resistance to the era’s ascendant liberalism. Occom’s archive shows him exploiting these possibilities. This experience of alphabetic literacy, however, was not uniform nor always consensual. Imperative reading names the experience of literacy as Esther Poquiantup Fowler, Samson Occom’s sister-in-law, knew it. Sometimes, despite Occom’s best intentions, liberalism cunningly inflected his relations with his kinswoman, and it did so most forcefully in his expectation that she slowly, maybe even symptomatically, read his writing and that she take pleasure in it, too. Fowler understood that expectation; she felt it as an imperative. Yet she didn’t refuse it so much as defer it. Her delicate negotiation of reading as an imperative directs attention to the personal and political history of the expectation—for her, a burdensome one—that reading should be self-evidently fun. Fowler’s strategies for alleviating this burden renew our understanding of historicist methods and the symptomatic mood of critique. They are instruments for future repair even as they afford us practice in noticing and interpreting the particularities that liberal society encourages us to forget.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-15DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10341720
E. Brier
How should Toni Morrison’s work as a Random House editor be understood? How does it figure, that is, in the larger contexts of literary history, publishing history, and the history of African American expression? Positioning Morrison’s editorial work in relation to the corporate takeover of American publishers and the rise of Black studies programs, this article reconstructs a lost moment in both cultural history and business history. Starting with the story of The Black Book, a “scrapbook-history” of African American experience edited by Morrison and published by Random House in 1974, this article examines the fleeting institutional context that made not just The Black Book but a body of African American writing possible. In doing so, it makes a case for reconsidering how changes to the publishing business, late in the twentieth century, shaped American literary history.
{"title":"Unliterary History: Toni Morrison, The Black Book, and “Real Black Publishing”","authors":"E. Brier","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10341720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10341720","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 How should Toni Morrison’s work as a Random House editor be understood? How does it figure, that is, in the larger contexts of literary history, publishing history, and the history of African American expression? Positioning Morrison’s editorial work in relation to the corporate takeover of American publishers and the rise of Black studies programs, this article reconstructs a lost moment in both cultural history and business history. Starting with the story of The Black Book, a “scrapbook-history” of African American experience edited by Morrison and published by Random House in 1974, this article examines the fleeting institutional context that made not just The Black Book but a body of African American writing possible. In doing so, it makes a case for reconsidering how changes to the publishing business, late in the twentieth century, shaped American literary history.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44873895","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-15DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10341748
Ted Hamilton
This article describes how the law inflects the narration of environmental conflict in William T. Vollmann’s Dying Grass (2015) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). By focusing on the legal common sense of settler colonialism—its emphasis on private property in land and its subjugation of Indigenous peoples to the guardianship of the state—the article explores the ways in which Vollmann’s and Silko’s novels present counternarratives to the law’s story of justified conquest. Combining a law and literature approach with ecocriticism, this article highlights the importance of the legal imagination in defining human-land relations in the United States. It demonstrates how The Dying Grass and Almanac of the Dead critique this legal imagination while also using it as a model for changing environmental politics through discourse.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-18DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10084526
Cody C. St. Clair
Because evictions pervaded US working-class cityscapes during the Great Depression, newspapers actively covered their developments and aftermaths, trading in eviction as a commodifiable experience that could entertain readers at the expense of pathologizing evictees and naturalizing summary process. Against this eviction reportage, this essay identifies a disconnected coterie of authors and artists who represented evictions and anti-eviction protests in their works, mapping out an urban geography that attends to the sociospatial and historical politics of forced ejection. In the writings of H. T. Tsiang and Ralph Ellison in particular, eviction constitutes a spatial politics of violence and exclusion, revealing the state’s protection of private property and bourgeois class interests over the well-being of its working-class and unemployed residents. Illustrating the sociospatial politics of eviction, these authors exploited and contested popular genres of eviction reportage, which narrated dispossession as a pathology of the poor to legitimate the state’s violent protection of private property. Challenging this pathologization as well as the scapegoating of Communist agitation, this essay contends that these texts account for how the juridical architecture of eviction itself creates the space and social mechanisms for anti-eviction resistance to take place. In so doing, this article positions housing and homeless justice as a politics central to the aesthetic experimentations and legacy of 1930s proletarian modernisms.
{"title":"The Scene of Eviction: Reification and Resistance in Depression-Era Narratives of Dispossession","authors":"Cody C. St. Clair","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10084526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084526","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Because evictions pervaded US working-class cityscapes during the Great Depression, newspapers actively covered their developments and aftermaths, trading in eviction as a commodifiable experience that could entertain readers at the expense of pathologizing evictees and naturalizing summary process. Against this eviction reportage, this essay identifies a disconnected coterie of authors and artists who represented evictions and anti-eviction protests in their works, mapping out an urban geography that attends to the sociospatial and historical politics of forced ejection. In the writings of H. T. Tsiang and Ralph Ellison in particular, eviction constitutes a spatial politics of violence and exclusion, revealing the state’s protection of private property and bourgeois class interests over the well-being of its working-class and unemployed residents. Illustrating the sociospatial politics of eviction, these authors exploited and contested popular genres of eviction reportage, which narrated dispossession as a pathology of the poor to legitimate the state’s violent protection of private property. Challenging this pathologization as well as the scapegoating of Communist agitation, this essay contends that these texts account for how the juridical architecture of eviction itself creates the space and social mechanisms for anti-eviction resistance to take place. In so doing, this article positions housing and homeless justice as a politics central to the aesthetic experimentations and legacy of 1930s proletarian modernisms.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44933217","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}
Pub Date : 2022-08-18DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10084582
J. Allred
{"title":"Darkness on the Edge: Revisionary Black Radicalism in the Depression Era","authors":"J. Allred","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10084582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084582","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42679679","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}
Pub Date : 2022-08-18DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10084596
K. Welch
{"title":"How Literature Understands Poverty: A Genealogy of the Kitchen Table","authors":"K. Welch","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10084596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084596","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47559881","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}
Pub Date : 2022-08-18DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10084540
Crystal S. Rudds
This essay seeks to expand the genre of black literary urbanism by examining Frank London Brown’s Trumbull Park (1959) and Jasmon Drain’s Stateway’s Garden (2020) as literary bookends of public housing history in the United States. The essay argues that public housing fiction is an understudied subgenre of the black urban narrative that, when surveyed for its historical context, phenomenological perspectives, and diverse literary style, widens literary urbanism’s representation of the structure of feeling within and regarding the built environment of urban space. In addition, this piece works through Elizabeth Alexander’s construct of “the black interior” to explore the ways in which public housing residents might valorize their environs apart from sociological and racialized discourses. Thinking through public housing fiction as an extension of the black urban narrative helps to demystify the nuances of urban spatiality and the range of socioeconomics that propel modern cities.
本文试图通过研究弗兰克·伦敦·布朗(Frank London Brown)的《特朗布尔公园》(1959)和杰森·德雷恩(Jasmon Drain)的《州道花园》(2020)作为美国公共住房历史的文学书卷，来扩展黑人文学城市主义的类型。本文认为，公共住房小说是黑人城市叙事的一个未被充分研究的亚类型，当对其历史背景、现象学视角和多样化的文学风格进行调查时，它扩大了文学城市主义对城市空间建筑环境内部情感结构的表现。此外，该作品通过伊丽莎白·亚历山大的“黑人内部”结构来探索公共住房居民在社会学和种族化话语之外可能对其周围环境进行估价的方式。通过公共住房小说作为黑人城市叙事的延伸来思考，有助于揭开城市空间的细微差别和推动现代城市发展的社会经济学范围的神秘面纱。
{"title":"On Perspective and Value: Black Urbanism, Black Interiors, and Public Housing Fiction","authors":"Crystal S. Rudds","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10084540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084540","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay seeks to expand the genre of black literary urbanism by examining Frank London Brown’s Trumbull Park (1959) and Jasmon Drain’s Stateway’s Garden (2020) as literary bookends of public housing history in the United States. The essay argues that public housing fiction is an understudied subgenre of the black urban narrative that, when surveyed for its historical context, phenomenological perspectives, and diverse literary style, widens literary urbanism’s representation of the structure of feeling within and regarding the built environment of urban space. In addition, this piece works through Elizabeth Alexander’s construct of “the black interior” to explore the ways in which public housing residents might valorize their environs apart from sociological and racialized discourses. Thinking through public housing fiction as an extension of the black urban narrative helps to demystify the nuances of urban spatiality and the range of socioeconomics that propel modern cities.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43375914","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}
Pub Date : 2022-08-18DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10084484
Jean Franzino
This article considers texts written or sold by disabled Civil War veterans for their economic support as an understudied precursor to twentieth-century disability memoir and an instructive subgenre of the literature of poverty. These so-called mendicant texts challenged contemporary disability representations in both “empty sleeve” discourse and in US pension law, drawing attention to how economic structures shaped the experience of living with an impairment and to the social determinants of poverty. At the same time, mendicant texts stopped short of arguing for a wholesale reorganization of society; thus, they testify to the partial and uneven postbellum evolution in understandings of disability and poverty as social categories. If mendicant texts tell us about the historical circumstances of disability and its intersection with economic suffering, they also offer productive challenges to scholars studying life writing from the perspectives of US literary studies, disability studies, and poverty studies. While mendicant narratives’ ambiguous authorship and departures from the truth trouble expectations of authentic and resistant self-representation, these elements offer new insights into the rigid constraints upon acceptable disability presentation in this era, as well as the creative choices made by veterans who peddled literature in order to survive.
{"title":"Tales Told by Empty Sleeves: Disability, Mendicancy, and Civil War Life Writing","authors":"Jean Franzino","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10084484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084484","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article considers texts written or sold by disabled Civil War veterans for their economic support as an understudied precursor to twentieth-century disability memoir and an instructive subgenre of the literature of poverty. These so-called mendicant texts challenged contemporary disability representations in both “empty sleeve” discourse and in US pension law, drawing attention to how economic structures shaped the experience of living with an impairment and to the social determinants of poverty. At the same time, mendicant texts stopped short of arguing for a wholesale reorganization of society; thus, they testify to the partial and uneven postbellum evolution in understandings of disability and poverty as social categories. If mendicant texts tell us about the historical circumstances of disability and its intersection with economic suffering, they also offer productive challenges to scholars studying life writing from the perspectives of US literary studies, disability studies, and poverty studies. While mendicant narratives’ ambiguous authorship and departures from the truth trouble expectations of authentic and resistant self-representation, these elements offer new insights into the rigid constraints upon acceptable disability presentation in this era, as well as the creative choices made by veterans who peddled literature in order to survive.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42451302","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}
Pub Date : 2022-08-18DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10084554
Jason Molesky
{"title":"Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene","authors":"Jason Molesky","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10084554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084554","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48930017","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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