{"title":"Jada Ach, Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880-1925","authors":"Nicolas S. Witschi","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141136497","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}
Erasure is a popular form of appropriative poetry that refashions found material by partially effacing it. Made of salvaged fragments and deletion marks, erasure poetry puts processes of obliteration on display and provides a structural analogy for both the social erasure of marginalized groups and the critical rewriting of hegemonic discourses. This essay understands erasure as a constraint-based appropriative practice and differentiates it from other forms of conceptual and documentary poetry. It argues that erasures use the oscillation between presence (of the retained words, the redaction marks and elisions, and the newly created poem) and absence (of some of the words and material and medial features of the prior text) to destabilize the boundaries between the published and unpublished, between what is heard and what is silenced, between the sayable and what exceeds representation. Reading poems by Tracy Smith, Janet Holmes, and Jen Bervin that erase the Declaration of Independence and the poetry of Emily Dickinson respectively, the essay shows how erasures intervene in public conversations about social justice by repurposing and revising their intertexts, allowing new speakers, knowledges, and narratives to emerge. Erasures prompt a layered reading that directs the readers back to the source and its sociocultural contexts while drawing them deeper into the imaginative and discursive world of the erasure poem.“Erasure poetry allows us to read in recognition of what is absent or missing and to imagine new voices and perspectives emerging from the cleared and transformed spaces of the page.”
{"title":"Un/published: Presence and Absence in Contemporary Erasure Poetry","authors":"Heike Schaefer","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae039","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Erasure is a popular form of appropriative poetry that refashions found material by partially effacing it. Made of salvaged fragments and deletion marks, erasure poetry puts processes of obliteration on display and provides a structural analogy for both the social erasure of marginalized groups and the critical rewriting of hegemonic discourses. This essay understands erasure as a constraint-based appropriative practice and differentiates it from other forms of conceptual and documentary poetry. It argues that erasures use the oscillation between presence (of the retained words, the redaction marks and elisions, and the newly created poem) and absence (of some of the words and material and medial features of the prior text) to destabilize the boundaries between the published and unpublished, between what is heard and what is silenced, between the sayable and what exceeds representation. Reading poems by Tracy Smith, Janet Holmes, and Jen Bervin that erase the Declaration of Independence and the poetry of Emily Dickinson respectively, the essay shows how erasures intervene in public conversations about social justice by repurposing and revising their intertexts, allowing new speakers, knowledges, and narratives to emerge. Erasures prompt a layered reading that directs the readers back to the source and its sociocultural contexts while drawing them deeper into the imaginative and discursive world of the erasure poem.“Erasure poetry allows us to read in recognition of what is absent or missing and to imagine new voices and perspectives emerging from the cleared and transformed spaces of the page.”","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141027869","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}
{"title":"Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée, edited by Sandra M. Gustafson and Robert Levine","authors":"Tomos Hughes","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141046708","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 article reads Hernan Diaz’s Trust as a contemporary commentary on, and reimagining of, literature’s entanglements with capitalism, liberalism, finance, and law. Beginning with an outline of the history of legal and corporate trusts and connecting that history to the rise of the modern novel, the article spotlights the complex role played by the notion of trust in Diaz’s metafictional text. Trust tells the story of a Wall Street financier, his philanthropist wife, and the ghostwriter of his memoir through a four-part structure, moving from a realist novel called Bonds through two memoirs and ending with a diary titled Futures. This structure serves the aim, reaffirmed in Diaz’s interviews, of teaching his novel’s reader about the ideological implications of literary forms and about the kinds of power—financial and patriarchal—involved in turning reality into fiction. The article explores Trust’s revision of these forms and the ways in which its aesthetics forge an alignment among modernism, feminism, and financial expertise. Reflecting on the novel’s metacommentary on its own values and operations, the article concludes by asking whether Trust’s liberal pedagogy offers a persuasive alternative to the narrative forms it sets out to critique.With its carefully wrought aesthetic architecture . . . Trust confidently insists on its own autonomy from complicity, reaffirming the liberal idea that art symbolizes, and exists in, a realm outside the market.
{"title":"Trusts, Trust, and Trust: Hernan Diaz’s Liberal Pedagogy","authors":"Adam Kelly","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae033","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article reads Hernan Diaz’s Trust as a contemporary commentary on, and reimagining of, literature’s entanglements with capitalism, liberalism, finance, and law. Beginning with an outline of the history of legal and corporate trusts and connecting that history to the rise of the modern novel, the article spotlights the complex role played by the notion of trust in Diaz’s metafictional text. Trust tells the story of a Wall Street financier, his philanthropist wife, and the ghostwriter of his memoir through a four-part structure, moving from a realist novel called Bonds through two memoirs and ending with a diary titled Futures. This structure serves the aim, reaffirmed in Diaz’s interviews, of teaching his novel’s reader about the ideological implications of literary forms and about the kinds of power—financial and patriarchal—involved in turning reality into fiction. The article explores Trust’s revision of these forms and the ways in which its aesthetics forge an alignment among modernism, feminism, and financial expertise. Reflecting on the novel’s metacommentary on its own values and operations, the article concludes by asking whether Trust’s liberal pedagogy offers a persuasive alternative to the narrative forms it sets out to critique.With its carefully wrought aesthetic architecture . . . Trust confidently insists on its own autonomy from complicity, reaffirming the liberal idea that art symbolizes, and exists in, a realm outside the market.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141056557","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}
An examination of Dreiser’s Kansas City as Kansas City reveals an extended ironic commentary on postwar commemorative impulses that foregrounded unity, glory, and victory in the very midst of an era marked by unrest, grief, and violence.
{"title":"Commemorative Impulses in the “Heart of America”: Kansas City, the Great War, and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy","authors":"Trevor Dodman, Corey Campion","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae037","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 An examination of Dreiser’s Kansas City as Kansas City reveals an extended ironic commentary on postwar commemorative impulses that foregrounded unity, glory, and victory in the very midst of an era marked by unrest, grief, and violence.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141044195","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}
{"title":"Denise Gigante, Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America","authors":"Cynthia Johnston","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141052250","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}
{"title":"Jayna Brown, Black Utopia: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds","authors":"A. E. Weinbaum","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141027960","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}
{"title":"Jack Parlett, The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr","authors":"Martin Dines","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajae015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141030580","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}