Poet Lewis MacAdams is widely regarded as a founder of the movement to restore the Los Angeles River, a 51-mile concrete drainage channel that once served as the region’s primary water source. His nonprofit organization Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) began as a one-off performance art piece in 1985. Scholars in urban planning and geography have addressed FoLAR as a case study for grassroots environmentalism, but little attention has been paid to the interplay between poetry and politics in MacAdams’s work. Given that MacAdams described FoLAR as a “forty-year artwork to bring the Los Angeles River back to life,” it is worth entertaining the quixotic premise that a nonprofit could double as a conceptual artwork or performance poem. If we consider his literary efforts in conversation with his activism, the premise seems less far-fetched. In this essay, I trace MacAdams’s path from the New York School to the poets’ enclave of Bolinas, California, in the 1970s to the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River. I argue that he devised political-poetic strategies to intervene in planning bureaucracies and that FoLAR should be understood as a durational utopian experiment, pursuing transformative possibilities from within dispiriting everyday conditions.
{"title":"Nonprofit Poetry: Lewis MacAdams and the Art of Environmental Bureaucracy","authors":"Nick Earhart","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae070","url":null,"abstract":"Poet Lewis MacAdams is widely regarded as a founder of the movement to restore the Los Angeles River, a 51-mile concrete drainage channel that once served as the region’s primary water source. His nonprofit organization Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) began as a one-off performance art piece in 1985. Scholars in urban planning and geography have addressed FoLAR as a case study for grassroots environmentalism, but little attention has been paid to the interplay between poetry and politics in MacAdams’s work. Given that MacAdams described FoLAR as a “forty-year artwork to bring the Los Angeles River back to life,” it is worth entertaining the quixotic premise that a nonprofit could double as a conceptual artwork or performance poem. If we consider his literary efforts in conversation with his activism, the premise seems less far-fetched. In this essay, I trace MacAdams’s path from the New York School to the poets’ enclave of Bolinas, California, in the 1970s to the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River. I argue that he devised political-poetic strategies to intervene in planning bureaucracies and that FoLAR should be understood as a durational utopian experiment, pursuing transformative possibilities from within dispiriting everyday conditions.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142225619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay reviews four recent works examining the cultural politics of consumption. It explores the methodological and theoretical distinctions and commonalities between three works which share an historical focus. It notes the different emphases suggested by historians, sociologists, and literary critics but emphasises their shared concern with understanding the complex agency of consumption as it is can be found specifically in cultural representations. The essay also notes the persistence of the theoretical divide between these historical studies, which identify consumption as a site of ambivalent possibility and even resistance, and contemporary accounts that regard it as a site of commodification and expropriation of the self.
{"title":"Consuming Consumption","authors":"Nicky Marsh","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae077","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reviews four recent works examining the cultural politics of consumption. It explores the methodological and theoretical distinctions and commonalities between three works which share an historical focus. It notes the different emphases suggested by historians, sociologists, and literary critics but emphasises their shared concern with understanding the complex agency of consumption as it is can be found specifically in cultural representations. The essay also notes the persistence of the theoretical divide between these historical studies, which identify consumption as a site of ambivalent possibility and even resistance, and contemporary accounts that regard it as a site of commodification and expropriation of the self.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142198879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“Losing the West, Finding Western Worlds” explores how recent critical work in Western American studies breaks apart the region’s foundational myths and invites readers and reviewers to revise understandings of this popular, enduring, and protean genre. Reflecting on four studies that interrogate Western American fiction, film, and comic books (two monographs by British scholars Mark Asquith and Neil Campbell; a study of the Black Western by film historian Mia Mask; and a collection of essays edited by Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol on varieties of comic book westerns produced around the world), the essay considers how this diverse cohort of scholars pursues a common imperative to unlearn “the West” and sets new directions for literary and cultural studies of the region. Through rereadings of the work of writers and actors who fracture and reassemble the heroic settler narrative from the perspective of outsiders, these critics contend, the West can emerge as a place whose stories offer more complete understandings of the past, whose heroes illuminate the political challenges of the present, and whose writers provide the right words for imagining a better future.
{"title":"Losing the West, Finding Western Worlds","authors":"Audrey Goodman","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae075","url":null,"abstract":"“Losing the West, Finding Western Worlds” explores how recent critical work in Western American studies breaks apart the region’s foundational myths and invites readers and reviewers to revise understandings of this popular, enduring, and protean genre. Reflecting on four studies that interrogate Western American fiction, film, and comic books (two monographs by British scholars Mark Asquith and Neil Campbell; a study of the Black Western by film historian Mia Mask; and a collection of essays edited by Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol on varieties of comic book westerns produced around the world), the essay considers how this diverse cohort of scholars pursues a common imperative to unlearn “the West” and sets new directions for literary and cultural studies of the region. Through rereadings of the work of writers and actors who fracture and reassemble the heroic settler narrative from the perspective of outsiders, these critics contend, the West can emerge as a place whose stories offer more complete understandings of the past, whose heroes illuminate the political challenges of the present, and whose writers provide the right words for imagining a better future.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142225624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay reviews three recent books grappling with the history and meaning of US constitutional democracy, written in a time when an originalist, conservative Supreme Court serves as the Constitution’s final arbiter. Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today, edited by D. Berton Emerson and Gregory Laski, and The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, by Kermit Roosevelt III, strive to appropriate originalist methods toward progressive ends. By contrast, Cass R. Sunstein’s How to Interpret the Constitution evinces a pragmatic skepticism of any such historically bound modes of interpretation. The tension between these approaches, I suggest, has shaped US constitutional discourse since the nineteenth century.
这篇文章回顾了最近出版的三本书，它们探讨了美国宪政民主的历史和意义，这三本书写于一个原教旨主义、保守的最高法院充当宪法最终仲裁者的时代。美国的民主：D. Berton Emerson 和 Gregory Laski 编辑的《美国的民主：十九世纪和今天的关键词》和《从未有过的国家》：克米特-罗斯福三世（Kermit Roosevelt III）所著的《从未有过的国家：重构美国的故事》（The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story）一书努力将原典主义方法用于进步目的。相比之下，卡斯-R-孙斯坦（Cass R. Sunstein）的《如何解释宪法》（How to Interpret the Constitution）则对任何此类受历史约束的解释模式持务实的怀疑态度。我认为，自 19 世纪以来，这些方法之间的紧张关系一直影响着美国的宪法论述。
{"title":"What’s Past is Prologue: Democracy in the Age of Originalism","authors":"Geoffrey R Kirsch","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae071","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reviews three recent books grappling with the history and meaning of US constitutional democracy, written in a time when an originalist, conservative Supreme Court serves as the Constitution’s final arbiter. Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today, edited by D. Berton Emerson and Gregory Laski, and The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, by Kermit Roosevelt III, strive to appropriate originalist methods toward progressive ends. By contrast, Cass R. Sunstein’s How to Interpret the Constitution evinces a pragmatic skepticism of any such historically bound modes of interpretation. The tension between these approaches, I suggest, has shaped US constitutional discourse since the nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142198881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay intercedes in our understanding of the temporal formations that characterized New England’s Great Awakening (1730s-1740s). It takes as its case study the Connecticut farmer Nathan Cole, whose spiritual new birth scholarship has been seen as prototypical of both the instantaneity and the affect of evangelical conversion. This essay contests the predominance of these figurations of the awakenings. Offering literary criticism’s first full engagement with Cole’s archive, rather than keeping to well-known short extracts from his “Spiritual Travels,” it posits the interval as the temporal and literary form that structures Cole’s writing. The essay thus reads Cole’s narrative as something more than a lay account that testifies to evangelical feeling, arguing that his writing instead exhibits continuities with seventeenth-century habits of thought. Particularly, it traces how Cole’s writing carries into the eighteenth century Puritan labors to apprehend doctrines (such as predestination) that were, fundamentally, matters of time. In treating Cole’s text as a document of theological heft and temporal consciousness, as well as spiritual encounter, this essay also asks scholars to consider how turning toward cognitive aspects of devotion provokes our field’s understanding of genre, time, and evangelical experience.
{"title":"Evangelical Time, Separatism, and the “Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole”","authors":"Rachel Trocchio","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae078","url":null,"abstract":"This essay intercedes in our understanding of the temporal formations that characterized New England’s Great Awakening (1730s-1740s). It takes as its case study the Connecticut farmer Nathan Cole, whose spiritual new birth scholarship has been seen as prototypical of both the instantaneity and the affect of evangelical conversion. This essay contests the predominance of these figurations of the awakenings. Offering literary criticism’s first full engagement with Cole’s archive, rather than keeping to well-known short extracts from his “Spiritual Travels,” it posits the interval as the temporal and literary form that structures Cole’s writing. The essay thus reads Cole’s narrative as something more than a lay account that testifies to evangelical feeling, arguing that his writing instead exhibits continuities with seventeenth-century habits of thought. Particularly, it traces how Cole’s writing carries into the eighteenth century Puritan labors to apprehend doctrines (such as predestination) that were, fundamentally, matters of time. In treating Cole’s text as a document of theological heft and temporal consciousness, as well as spiritual encounter, this essay also asks scholars to consider how turning toward cognitive aspects of devotion provokes our field’s understanding of genre, time, and evangelical experience.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142225617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This review article assesses three new books on the “Golden Age” of caricature in Britain and the United States: Tim Clayton’s James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire (2022), Amanda Lahikainen’s Money and Materiality in the Golden Age of Graphic Satire (2022), and Alison M. Stagg’s Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789-1828 (2023). The article considers how satirical cartoons simultaneously educated and entertained the public about important issues, such as political corruption, nation building, and the perils of a credit economy based on paper money.
这篇评论文章评估了三本关于英国和美国漫画 "黄金时代 "的新书：蒂姆-克莱顿（Tim Clayton）的《詹姆斯-吉尔雷》（James Gillray：A Revolution in Satire》（2022 年）、Amanda Lahikainen 的《Money and Materiality in the Golden Age of Graphic Satire》（2022 年）和 Alison M. Stagg 的《Prints of a New Kind：美国的政治漫画，1789-1828 年》（2023 年）。文章探讨了讽刺漫画如何同时就政治腐败、国家建设和以纸币为基础的信用经济的危害等重要问题对公众进行教育和娱乐。
{"title":"The Power of Caricature, Caricatures of Power","authors":"Ian Haywood","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae073","url":null,"abstract":"This review article assesses three new books on the “Golden Age” of caricature in Britain and the United States: Tim Clayton’s James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire (2022), Amanda Lahikainen’s Money and Materiality in the Golden Age of Graphic Satire (2022), and Alison M. Stagg’s Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789-1828 (2023). The article considers how satirical cartoons simultaneously educated and entertained the public about important issues, such as political corruption, nation building, and the perils of a credit economy based on paper money.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142225616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay responds to Geoffrey Kirsch’s review essay “What’s Past is Prologue: Democracy in the Age of Originalism” by evaluating how the three texts Kirsch reviews—Kermit Roosevelt, III’s The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (2022), Cass R. Sunstein’s How to Interpret the Constitution (2023), and D. Berton Emerson and Gregory Laski’s edited collection Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today (2023)—engage with progressive originalism. Drawing inspiration from civil rights activists including Frederick Douglass, progressive originalists seek to recast an ostensibly conservative method of constitutional interpretation grounded in what the “founding fathers” or a historical public thought or intended. Roosevelt’s and Sunstein’s books reveal the potential and limits of both progressive originalism and insular disciplinary conversations about constitutional interpretation. Contrastingly, the multidisciplinary Democracies in America has a more expansive conception of whose voices should matter when interpreting the Constitution through a progressive originalist lens. A comparative analysis of the three books also demonstrates the value of literature and literary historians in an age characterized by the ascendancy of historical approaches to constitutional interpretation and a revival of the “canon wars.”
本文对 Geoffrey Kirsch 的评论文章 "What's Past is Prologue：通过评估 Kirsch 评论的三本著作--Kermit Roosevelt, III 的《从未有过的国家》（The Nation That Never Was：重构美国的故事》（2022 年）、Cass R. Sunstein 的《如何解释宪法》（2023 年）以及 D. Berton Emerson 和 Gregory Laski 编辑的文集《美国的民主》：十九世纪和今天的关键词》（2023 年）--与进步的原创主义进行了互动。进步原创论者从弗雷德里克-道格拉斯（Frederick Douglass）等民权活动家那里汲取灵感，试图以 "开国元勋 "或历史公众的想法或意图为基础，重塑一种表面上保守的宪法解释方法。罗斯福和孙斯坦的著作揭示了进步原创主义和关于宪法解释的孤立学科对话的潜力和局限性。与此形成鲜明对比的是，多学科的《美国的民主》一书对通过进步原创主义视角解释宪法时谁的声音更重要有了更广阔的概念。对这三本书的比较分析还表明了文学和文学史学者在以历史方法解释宪法和 "法典战争 "复兴为特点的时代的价值。
{"title":"Progressive Originalism and the New Canon Wars","authors":"Almas Khan","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae074","url":null,"abstract":"This essay responds to Geoffrey Kirsch’s review essay “What’s Past is Prologue: Democracy in the Age of Originalism” by evaluating how the three texts Kirsch reviews—Kermit Roosevelt, III’s The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (2022), Cass R. Sunstein’s How to Interpret the Constitution (2023), and D. Berton Emerson and Gregory Laski’s edited collection Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today (2023)—engage with progressive originalism. Drawing inspiration from civil rights activists including Frederick Douglass, progressive originalists seek to recast an ostensibly conservative method of constitutional interpretation grounded in what the “founding fathers” or a historical public thought or intended. Roosevelt’s and Sunstein’s books reveal the potential and limits of both progressive originalism and insular disciplinary conversations about constitutional interpretation. Contrastingly, the multidisciplinary Democracies in America has a more expansive conception of whose voices should matter when interpreting the Constitution through a progressive originalist lens. A comparative analysis of the three books also demonstrates the value of literature and literary historians in an age characterized by the ascendancy of historical approaches to constitutional interpretation and a revival of the “canon wars.”","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142225618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The marketing claims of the Library of America (LOA) reveal that this institution functions within the tradition of such middlebrow publishing ventures as The Harvard Classics and the Modern Library. All such ventures assure consumers that cultural cache can be theirs through brand loyalty. LOA’s brand identity, however, is fraught with contradictions. While claiming to continue the legacy of highbrow literary critic Edmund Wilson, LOA increasingly publishes volumes devoted to pulp genres that would have been anathema to Wilson. While English departments have been questioning notions of the canon throughout LOA’s history, the publisher, founded in 1980, insists that its books define the canon of US literature. The professoriate, however, has largely ignored LOA’s claims regarding great literature because the publisher also claims to uphold the standards of great scholarship. These brand contradictions serve as a context for assessing a recent addition to LOA’s core collection, William Faulkner: Stories, edited by Theresa M. Towner. I contrast Towner’s editorial methods with those of Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk, who edited LOA’s five volumes of Faulkner’s novels between 1985 and 2003, in order to address what we mean when we say a text is authoritative and corrected.
{"title":"The Fruits of the LOA","authors":"John N Duvall","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae076","url":null,"abstract":"The marketing claims of the Library of America (LOA) reveal that this institution functions within the tradition of such middlebrow publishing ventures as The Harvard Classics and the Modern Library. All such ventures assure consumers that cultural cache can be theirs through brand loyalty. LOA’s brand identity, however, is fraught with contradictions. While claiming to continue the legacy of highbrow literary critic Edmund Wilson, LOA increasingly publishes volumes devoted to pulp genres that would have been anathema to Wilson. While English departments have been questioning notions of the canon throughout LOA’s history, the publisher, founded in 1980, insists that its books define the canon of US literature. The professoriate, however, has largely ignored LOA’s claims regarding great literature because the publisher also claims to uphold the standards of great scholarship. These brand contradictions serve as a context for assessing a recent addition to LOA’s core collection, William Faulkner: Stories, edited by Theresa M. Towner. I contrast Towner’s editorial methods with those of Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk, who edited LOA’s five volumes of Faulkner’s novels between 1985 and 2003, in order to address what we mean when we say a text is authoritative and corrected.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142198880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines two recent books that each take up the vexed topic bodies of data in relation to literature and race in the US: Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction and Elizabeth Rodrigues’s Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures. Each book, in its own way, asks literary scholars to take the data corpus seriously as both an object and a method of study. While acknowledging that the collection of bodies of data has long been used to efface, dehumanize, and racialize, So and Rodrigues ask readers not to dismiss reactively the data corpus’s potential to also be an unexpected tool for refuting those same naturalized and totalizing narratives. Contemplating, as they do, the unique temporality and spatiality of the accretion of singular points into a collective data, the books explore what a data corpus looks, feels, and sounds like and what it might tell us about the relationship between bodies, books in twentieth-century US literature, and the stories that have and could be told about both.Thinking in different ways about the vexed relationship between bodies of data, literature, and race in the US, Rodrigues and So each demonstrate that, while data cannot speak for itself, there are some stories we can neither hear, see, nor tell without its help.
这篇文章探讨了最近出版的两本书，这两本书分别探讨了与美国文学和种族有关的数据体这一棘手问题：Richard Jean So 的《Redlining Culture：和伊丽莎白-罗德里格斯（Elizabeth Rodrigues）的《收集生命》：二十世纪早期美国文学中作为现代主义美学的批判性数据叙事》。每本书都以自己的方式要求文学学者认真对待作为研究对象和研究方法的数据语料库。在承认数据体的收集长期以来一直被用来抹杀、非人化和种族化的同时，苏晓明和罗德里格斯要求读者不要被动地否定数据体的潜力，数据体也有可能成为一种意想不到的工具，用来驳斥那些同样的归化和全面化的叙述。这两本书思考了将单个点累积成集体数据的独特时间性和空间性，探讨了数据语料库的外观、感觉和声音，以及它可能告诉我们的关于身体、二十世纪美国文学中的书籍以及关于两者的故事之间的关系。罗德里格斯（Rodrigues）和索（So）以不同的方式思考了数据体、文学和美国种族之间的复杂关系，他们分别证明了，虽然数据不能为自己说话，但如果没有数据的帮助，有些故事我们既听不到、看不到，也说不出来。
{"title":"Data Bodies","authors":"Rebecca B Clark","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad234","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines two recent books that each take up the vexed topic bodies of data in relation to literature and race in the US: Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction and Elizabeth Rodrigues’s Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures. Each book, in its own way, asks literary scholars to take the data corpus seriously as both an object and a method of study. While acknowledging that the collection of bodies of data has long been used to efface, dehumanize, and racialize, So and Rodrigues ask readers not to dismiss reactively the data corpus’s potential to also be an unexpected tool for refuting those same naturalized and totalizing narratives. Contemplating, as they do, the unique temporality and spatiality of the accretion of singular points into a collective data, the books explore what a data corpus looks, feels, and sounds like and what it might tell us about the relationship between bodies, books in twentieth-century US literature, and the stories that have and could be told about both.Thinking in different ways about the vexed relationship between bodies of data, literature, and race in the US, Rodrigues and So each demonstrate that, while data cannot speak for itself, there are some stories we can neither hear, see, nor tell without its help.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"283 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines two peculiar examples of the unpublished from two eccentric authors: Joe Gould’s fragmentary Oral History (probably commenced in the 1910s) and Arthur Inman’s Diary (the 17 million words of which run from the 1920s to Inman’s death in 1963). Neither of these works can be fully published in any conventional way, and the essay examines the reasons why, looking at the history and myths surrounding Gould’s supposedly multimillion-word narrative, the paucity of extant parts of it, and how its nature and nonappearance have been interpreted by Joseph Mitchell and Jill Lepore, amongst others. This contrasts with the all-too-abundant size of the Diary of Inman, a wealthy valetudinarian whose voluminous writings describe in minute detail his prejudices and absurdities, as well as the stories of the many people he paid to be part of his dysfunctional household and to entertain him. The difficulties raised by trying to publish this strange, vast document are discussed through the example of the substantial selection of it, edited by Daniel Aaron (1985). Concluding considerations include the wider questions raised by these sui generis works, particularly the ways in which they resist traditional critical and editorial categorization.Both texts are impossible to publish in full . . . and possess an odd, fragmentary, but delusive allure as a result: the larger idea of their unpublished works is more interesting than the reality of reading them.
{"title":"Missing and All Too Present: The Limits of the Unpublished","authors":"Adam Rounce","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad228","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines two peculiar examples of the unpublished from two eccentric authors: Joe Gould’s fragmentary Oral History (probably commenced in the 1910s) and Arthur Inman’s Diary (the 17 million words of which run from the 1920s to Inman’s death in 1963). Neither of these works can be fully published in any conventional way, and the essay examines the reasons why, looking at the history and myths surrounding Gould’s supposedly multimillion-word narrative, the paucity of extant parts of it, and how its nature and nonappearance have been interpreted by Joseph Mitchell and Jill Lepore, amongst others. This contrasts with the all-too-abundant size of the Diary of Inman, a wealthy valetudinarian whose voluminous writings describe in minute detail his prejudices and absurdities, as well as the stories of the many people he paid to be part of his dysfunctional household and to entertain him. The difficulties raised by trying to publish this strange, vast document are discussed through the example of the substantial selection of it, edited by Daniel Aaron (1985). Concluding considerations include the wider questions raised by these sui generis works, particularly the ways in which they resist traditional critical and editorial categorization.Both texts are impossible to publish in full . . . and possess an odd, fragmentary, but delusive allure as a result: the larger idea of their unpublished works is more interesting than the reality of reading them.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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：