In the article I discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ecological imagination as problematized in his lesser-known short story “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle” (1849). Although Hawthorne wrote the story for children, it carries a darker gothic undertone, illustrating the problematic aspect of the Romantic nature/culture division. The focus of my inquiry are the potential ecological implications. The analytical framework is taken from Andrew Smith and William Hughes’ edited collection Ecogothic (2013), in which several scholars work towards a definition of an environmentally conscious variety of the gothic genre. Using some of their findings and concepts along with selected ecocritical and New Materialist theories, I interrogate Hawthorne’s highly ambiguous and shifting tropes of nature which reveal the correlation between the crisis of the imagination and that of the environment. I argue that the central trope of the snow-child and the trajectory of the narrative conceal a Frankensteinesque subplot employed to critically rethink nature as a transcendental experience.
{"title":"“Only a Light Wreath of The New-Fallen Snow”?: Ecogothic Tropes and the Diffractive Gaze in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Snow-Image”","authors":"Paulina Ambroży","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20603","url":null,"abstract":"In the article I discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ecological imagination as problematized in his lesser-known short story “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle” (1849). Although Hawthorne wrote the story for children, it carries a darker gothic undertone, illustrating the problematic aspect of the Romantic nature/culture division. The focus of my inquiry are the potential ecological implications. The analytical framework is taken from Andrew Smith and William Hughes’ edited collection Ecogothic (2013), in which several scholars work towards a definition of an environmentally conscious variety of the gothic genre. Using some of their findings and concepts along with selected ecocritical and New Materialist theories, I interrogate Hawthorne’s highly ambiguous and shifting tropes of nature which reveal the correlation between the crisis of the imagination and that of the environment. I argue that the central trope of the snow-child and the trajectory of the narrative conceal a Frankensteinesque subplot employed to critically rethink nature as a transcendental experience.","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135886494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article I apply the theme of obsession, and its psychological aspects in particular, to Hawthorne’s preoccupation with drink and intoxication. I aim to unpack the often-messy entanglements between alcohol, toxicity, and subjectivity in Hawthorne’s fiction. Using The House of the Seven Gables as a case study, I argue that Hawthorne’s link between intoxication and toxic materials is less a means of critiquing the political and institutional systems at work in his moment, than a way to interrogate a particular narrative of American history. Hawthorne’s depictions of toxic and intoxicating bodies are bound up in the ongoing discourse of “civilizing” processes unfolding in a relatively new nation—processes that determine which lives are productive, valuable, and essential, and which are “extraneous,” as Colin Dayan puts it. From Matthew Maule’s execution to Clifford Pyncheon’s incarceration, Hawthorne deploys the language of intoxication and toxicity to suggest that persons or bodies who do not neatly fit into America’s sense of teleological progress are viewed as infectious, poisonous, noxious, and otherwise threatening.
{"title":"[In]toxic[ating] Bodies: Spirits and Spectral Biopolitics in The House of the Seven Gables","authors":"Emelia Abbé Robertson","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20558","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I apply the theme of obsession, and its psychological aspects in particular, to Hawthorne’s preoccupation with drink and intoxication. I aim to unpack the often-messy entanglements between alcohol, toxicity, and subjectivity in Hawthorne’s fiction. Using The House of the Seven Gables as a case study, I argue that Hawthorne’s link between intoxication and toxic materials is less a means of critiquing the political and institutional systems at work in his moment, than a way to interrogate a particular narrative of American history. Hawthorne’s depictions of toxic and intoxicating bodies are bound up in the ongoing discourse of “civilizing” processes unfolding in a relatively new nation—processes that determine which lives are productive, valuable, and essential, and which are “extraneous,” as Colin Dayan puts it. From Matthew Maule’s execution to Clifford Pyncheon’s incarceration, Hawthorne deploys the language of intoxication and toxicity to suggest that persons or bodies who do not neatly fit into America’s sense of teleological progress are viewed as infectious, poisonous, noxious, and otherwise threatening.","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135886498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rather than focusing on Ahab’s or Ishmael’s obsession with the White Whale, in my essay I wish to explore the reasons why critics have become obsessed with Ishmael. This critical obsession began to emerge in the 1940s, after the Melville Revival, when, as Clare Spark has shown, critics were mostly “Ahab-obsessed.” The emergence of Ishmael-centric readings of Moby-Dick is usually connected to the rise of the Cold War, but I intend to suggest that—important as the search for a cultural consensus engendered by the aftermath of the war undoubtedly was—other factors help explain the critics’ understanding of Moby-Dick as, primarily, “Ishmael’s mighty book.” In particular, the concurrent rediscovery of Henry James’s aesthetics of the novel explains why critical attention shifted to the narrator’s perspective, ideologically constructed as a space of “freedom.” But while, for the most part, I employ the term ‘obsession’ in its commonsensical meaning of being intensely preoccupied with someone or something, in the last part of my essay the etymology of the term also comes into play. The word derives from the Latin obsessio, the past-participle stem of obsidere, “to besiege.” So, obsession can also be understood as a siege, a blockade. Indeed, of late, for some critics Ishmael has become a sort of obstacle to the proper understanding of the text. The “discovery” of Ishmael in the 1940s and especially the 1950s seems to have solved a number of both formal and ideological problems. Yet nowadays not only have some readers (usually identified as the New Americanists) themselves “besieged” Ishmael both as character and narrator, but others have actually sought, if not to get rid of him altogether, then to demote him to a figure of secondary importance. The story I wish to tell reveals that the recently much debated dichotomy between “ideological” and more “personal” reading may ultimately be untenable.
{"title":"“The Key to it All”: Why Are We Obsessed with Ishmael, and Are Likely to Continue to Be Obsessed with Him?","authors":"Giorgio Mariani","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20738","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20738","url":null,"abstract":"Rather than focusing on Ahab’s or Ishmael’s obsession with the White Whale, in my essay I wish to explore the reasons why critics have become obsessed with Ishmael. This critical obsession began to emerge in the 1940s, after the Melville Revival, when, as Clare Spark has shown, critics were mostly “Ahab-obsessed.” The emergence of Ishmael-centric readings of Moby-Dick is usually connected to the rise of the Cold War, but I intend to suggest that—important as the search for a cultural consensus engendered by the aftermath of the war undoubtedly was—other factors help explain the critics’ understanding of Moby-Dick as, primarily, “Ishmael’s mighty book.” In particular, the concurrent rediscovery of Henry James’s aesthetics of the novel explains why critical attention shifted to the narrator’s perspective, ideologically constructed as a space of “freedom.” But while, for the most part, I employ the term ‘obsession’ in its commonsensical meaning of being intensely preoccupied with someone or something, in the last part of my essay the etymology of the term also comes into play. The word derives from the Latin obsessio, the past-participle stem of obsidere, “to besiege.” So, obsession can also be understood as a siege, a blockade. Indeed, of late, for some critics Ishmael has become a sort of obstacle to the proper understanding of the text. The “discovery” of Ishmael in the 1940s and especially the 1950s seems to have solved a number of both formal and ideological problems. Yet nowadays not only have some readers (usually identified as the New Americanists) themselves “besieged” Ishmael both as character and narrator, but others have actually sought, if not to get rid of him altogether, then to demote him to a figure of secondary importance. The story I wish to tell reveals that the recently much debated dichotomy between “ideological” and more “personal” reading may ultimately be untenable.","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135886496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville writes that “it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite” (1170). Both Melville and Hawthorne take on subjects of infinitude and read them through elements essential to both spiritual and physical realms: water and fire. When John the Baptist speaks of baptisms of water and fire in the Gospel of Matthew (3:11), he prefigures the mortal and metaphysical obsessions in which Melville and Hawthorne find themselves immersed. The better part of Melville’s oeuvre—Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd, Sailor—is baptized in water. Like Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Melville wishes to “sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts” (Moby-Dick 8). As Mary Bryden asserts, “the sea is the fluid medium, the agency, the culture” (107) through which Melville explores the philosophical depths and searches for elusive truth. He is astonished at the capacity of water to both save and destroy—Ishmael floats on a buoyant trunk after the Pequod is dismantled by the greatest creature of the sea—even as it binds all elements on earth together. Melville’s obsession with water is matched in Hawthorne by what Gaston Bachelard calls a “poetics of fire” (Smith 127). From Young Goodman Brown to Oberon, Dimmesdale, and Ethan Brand, characters in his fiction pass through baptisms of fire, and find themselves changed by its “creative-destructive or euphoric-ominous energy” (Bidney 58-9). Through fire in texts from “Main Street” to The House of the Seven Gables to Septimius Felton, Hawthorne finds the energy for an imaginative human life, for poetic genius and emotional purity, and for intimations of immortality, even as he engages this element as “Earth’s Holocaust” to burn whatever will not rise. These obsessive elemental engagements—whether the white-hot heat of Hawthorne or the watery melancholia of Melville—prove prophetic, not just as literary fulfillments of spiritual symbols, but as precursors to the apocalyptic end times of the Anthropocene, when life on earth is threatened by immersion in water and fire. Where Melville and Hawthorne can imagine and breathe life into the metaphysical possibilities of flooding and burning, those who read their work now must apprehend their oeuvre in the face of a world drowning in flames.
在《霍桑和他的苔藓》(Hawthorne and His moss)中，梅尔维尔写道:“在一个无限的主题上很难限定，而所有的主题都是无限的”(1170)。梅尔维尔和霍桑都以无限为主题，并通过精神和物质领域的基本元素来解读它们:水和火。当施洗约翰在马太福音(3:11)中谈到水和火的洗礼时，他预示着梅尔维尔和霍桑发现自己沉浸在凡人和形而上学的痴迷中。梅尔维尔的大部分作品——typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, mobydick, Billy Budd, sailor——都是在水中受洗的。就像《白鲸》中的以实梅尔一样，梅尔维尔希望“航行在被禁止的海洋，在野蛮的海岸登陆”(《白鲸》第8章)。正如玛丽·布莱登所断言的那样，“海洋是流动的媒介，是媒介，是文化”(第107章)，梅尔维尔通过它探索哲学的深度，寻找难以捉摸的真理。他对水既能救人又能毁灭的能力感到惊讶——在"裴廓德号"被大海上最伟大的生物摧毁后，以实玛利浮在一个浮力的树干上——就像水把地球上的所有元素结合在一起一样。梅尔维尔对水的痴迷与加斯顿·巴舍拉所说的“火的诗学”(史密斯127)相匹配。从年轻的古德曼·布朗到奥伯伦、丁梅斯代尔和伊桑·布兰德，他小说中的人物经历了火的洗礼，并发现自己被“创造性-破坏性或愉悦-不祥的能量”改变了(Bidney 58-9)。从《大街》(Main Street)到《七山墙之家》(House of The Seven Gables)，再到塞普蒂米乌斯·费尔顿(Septimius Felton)，霍桑在这些文本中找到了充满想象力的人类生活、诗意的天才和情感的纯洁，以及对不朽的暗示的能量，即使他在“地球的大屠杀”(Earth’s Holocaust)中加入了这种元素，烧毁任何不会升起的东西。无论是霍桑的白热还是梅尔维尔的忧郁，这些令人着迷的元素的参与都被证明是预言性的，不仅是精神象征的文学实现，而且是人类世末日的前兆，当地球上的生命受到水和火的威胁时。梅尔维尔和霍桑可以想象并为洪水和燃烧的形而上学可能性注入生命，那些现在阅读他们作品的人必须面对淹没在火焰中的世界来理解他们的全部作品。
{"title":"“Great Flood-Gates of the Wonder World”: Baptisms of Water and Fire in Melville and Hawthorne","authors":"Ariel Clark Silver","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20704","url":null,"abstract":"In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville writes that “it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite” (1170). Both Melville and Hawthorne take on subjects of infinitude and read them through elements essential to both spiritual and physical realms: water and fire. When John the Baptist speaks of baptisms of water and fire in the Gospel of Matthew (3:11), he prefigures the mortal and metaphysical obsessions in which Melville and Hawthorne find themselves immersed. The better part of Melville’s oeuvre—Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd, Sailor—is baptized in water. Like Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Melville wishes to “sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts” (Moby-Dick 8). As Mary Bryden asserts, “the sea is the fluid medium, the agency, the culture” (107) through which Melville explores the philosophical depths and searches for elusive truth. He is astonished at the capacity of water to both save and destroy—Ishmael floats on a buoyant trunk after the Pequod is dismantled by the greatest creature of the sea—even as it binds all elements on earth together. Melville’s obsession with water is matched in Hawthorne by what Gaston Bachelard calls a “poetics of fire” (Smith 127). From Young Goodman Brown to Oberon, Dimmesdale, and Ethan Brand, characters in his fiction pass through baptisms of fire, and find themselves changed by its “creative-destructive or euphoric-ominous energy” (Bidney 58-9). Through fire in texts from “Main Street” to The House of the Seven Gables to Septimius Felton, Hawthorne finds the energy for an imaginative human life, for poetic genius and emotional purity, and for intimations of immortality, even as he engages this element as “Earth’s Holocaust” to burn whatever will not rise. These obsessive elemental engagements—whether the white-hot heat of Hawthorne or the watery melancholia of Melville—prove prophetic, not just as literary fulfillments of spiritual symbols, but as precursors to the apocalyptic end times of the Anthropocene, when life on earth is threatened by immersion in water and fire. Where Melville and Hawthorne can imagine and breathe life into the metaphysical possibilities of flooding and burning, those who read their work now must apprehend their oeuvre in the face of a world drowning in flames.","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135886499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article centers on The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea, a series of Page-Barbour Lectures delivered by W. H. Auden at the University of Virginia in 1949, in which he analyzed the Romantic and late nineteenth-century images of the sea, contrasted with images of the desert, giving a partisan interpretation of Melville’s selected prose (Moby-Dick in particular). As his reconsideration of the iconography is underpinned by a political agenda, in this article I comment on Auden’s lectures as exemplifications of a particular, pivotal moment in the development of Melville studies after the 1920s revival.
{"title":"“Revolutionary Changes in Sensibility”: References to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in W. H. Auden’s 1949 Page-Barbour Lectures","authors":"Jacek Partyka","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20835","url":null,"abstract":"The article centers on The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea, a series of Page-Barbour Lectures delivered by W. H. Auden at the University of Virginia in 1949, in which he analyzed the Romantic and late nineteenth-century images of the sea, contrasted with images of the desert, giving a partisan interpretation of Melville’s selected prose (Moby-Dick in particular). As his reconsideration of the iconography is underpinned by a political agenda, in this article I comment on Auden’s lectures as exemplifications of a particular, pivotal moment in the development of Melville studies after the 1920s revival.","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135886491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“Benito Cereno” offers an exemplary text to consider obsession in relation to narrative form. Melville’s tale operates on at least two levels: the first part, a third-person narration that exhausts itself when “Melville’s ultimate dupe” (Ngai 61), Captain Delano, finally realizes there has been a slave revolt on Cereno’s ship, and the second part, transcripts from legal depositions in the court case that makes a sovereign judgment on Babo and the events of the preceding narrative. Yet this judgment does little to resolve the narrative’s tensions. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, I argue for obsession as the governing formal principle of Melville’s narrative. The necessary and yet impossible coincidence of multiple levels of narration that characterizes obsession offers a compelling way to reread Melville’s representation and critique of the anti-Black fantasies that organize the society displayed in the story. The perpetual turning motion constitutive of obsessional form thus helps redescribe the competing narrative styles of “Benito Cereno,” as well as the aesthetic and political implications of Babo’s resistance to the anti-Black structures of Delano and Cereno’s world. Reading “Benito Cereno” in terms of obsessional form reveals its profound critique of anti-Blackness and the anti-Black fantasies sustaining it.
{"title":"Melville’s Obsessional Form: Disjunction and Refusal in “Benito Cereno”","authors":"Matthew Scully","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20794","url":null,"abstract":"“Benito Cereno” offers an exemplary text to consider obsession in relation to narrative form. Melville’s tale operates on at least two levels: the first part, a third-person narration that exhausts itself when “Melville’s ultimate dupe” (Ngai 61), Captain Delano, finally realizes there has been a slave revolt on Cereno’s ship, and the second part, transcripts from legal depositions in the court case that makes a sovereign judgment on Babo and the events of the preceding narrative. Yet this judgment does little to resolve the narrative’s tensions. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, I argue for obsession as the governing formal principle of Melville’s narrative. The necessary and yet impossible coincidence of multiple levels of narration that characterizes obsession offers a compelling way to reread Melville’s representation and critique of the anti-Black fantasies that organize the society displayed in the story. The perpetual turning motion constitutive of obsessional form thus helps redescribe the competing narrative styles of “Benito Cereno,” as well as the aesthetic and political implications of Babo’s resistance to the anti-Black structures of Delano and Cereno’s world. Reading “Benito Cereno” in terms of obsessional form reveals its profound critique of anti-Blackness and the anti-Black fantasies sustaining it.","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135886492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jeffrey Sconce defined paracinema (“a most elastic textual category”) as a term that houses nearly every conceivable (non-pornographic) film subgenre of ill-repute. For Sconce, paracinema was “less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol.” In many ways, paracinema’s elasticity and approach to critique mirrors that of Susan Sontag’s articulation of Camp (“A sensibility”). What both concepts reveal, however, is a perspective into the history of taste as a critical feature of culture in the United States—something taking root in the highbrow/lowbrow debates in America catalyzed around the nineteenth century’s theater and publishing industries. Firmly in the center of it all was Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville; their literature and their legacies. Therefore, by tracing how matters of taste transformed American culture in ways that directly impacted how we conceived of and adapted the literature of Hawthorne and Melville, I bring paracinema (and its Camp tendrils) into focus to analyze two specific adaptations of their works: Twice-Told Tales (1963), starring Vincent Price, and Asylum Pictures’ (of Sharknado fame) 2010: Moby Dick (2010, naturally). The result is a critical insight into two otherwise unremarkable films that helps provide a backward glance at taste and its transformations over the past few centuries in the United States.
{"title":"“It Was a Scene of Life in the Rough”: Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Paracinema","authors":"Michael Petitti","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20660","url":null,"abstract":"Jeffrey Sconce defined paracinema (“a most elastic textual category”) as a term that houses nearly every conceivable (non-pornographic) film subgenre of ill-repute. For Sconce, paracinema was “less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol.” In many ways, paracinema’s elasticity and approach to critique mirrors that of Susan Sontag’s articulation of Camp (“A sensibility”). What both concepts reveal, however, is a perspective into the history of taste as a critical feature of culture in the United States—something taking root in the highbrow/lowbrow debates in America catalyzed around the nineteenth century’s theater and publishing industries. Firmly in the center of it all was Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville; their literature and their legacies. Therefore, by tracing how matters of taste transformed American culture in ways that directly impacted how we conceived of and adapted the literature of Hawthorne and Melville, I bring paracinema (and its Camp tendrils) into focus to analyze two specific adaptations of their works: Twice-Told Tales (1963), starring Vincent Price, and Asylum Pictures’ (of Sharknado fame) 2010: Moby Dick (2010, naturally). The result is a critical insight into two otherwise unremarkable films that helps provide a backward glance at taste and its transformations over the past few centuries in the United States.","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135886489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The main argument of the essay is that New England women writers of the late 19th century, such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown, Rose Terry Cooke, Annie Trumbull Slosson, and Sarah Orne Jewett, known as post-bellum regional realists, were actually continuing certain elements of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s poetics of fiction. Describing in their short stories and novels New England’s demographic, economic, and cultural decadence, they often used allegory and introduced fantastic elements, which arguably allows to read their works in a way proposed by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
{"title":"The School of Hawthorne: New England Women Writers after the Civil War","authors":"Marek Wilczyński","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20638","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20638","url":null,"abstract":"The main argument of the essay is that New England women writers of the late 19th century, such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown, Rose Terry Cooke, Annie Trumbull Slosson, and Sarah Orne Jewett, known as post-bellum regional realists, were actually continuing certain elements of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s poetics of fiction. Describing in their short stories and novels New England’s demographic, economic, and cultural decadence, they often used allegory and introduced fantastic elements, which arguably allows to read their works in a way proposed by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135886490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables is a text about haunting on many levels: Hawthorne himself is haunted by his family history and by the literary influence of British gothic; the house is haunted by literal ghosts, signaling the unresolved nature of past events; the novel’s characters are haunted by the family history and their own unfulfilled futures. The book is also haunted by the Pyncheon nostalgia for the old aristocratic order, as well as by capitalist exploitation of racial and class others. This paper uses Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to explore those different facets of the ghostly. As a result, the reading of Gables’ ghosts reveals a tension at the heart of the novel between a pessimistic and an optimistic reading of human life and how much it is determined by the past.
{"title":"Breaking the Spell of Past Misdeeds: A Hauntological Reading of The House of the Seven Gables","authors":"Justyna Fruzińska","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20585","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20585","url":null,"abstract":"Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables is a text about haunting on many levels: Hawthorne himself is haunted by his family history and by the literary influence of British gothic; the house is haunted by literal ghosts, signaling the unresolved nature of past events; the novel’s characters are haunted by the family history and their own unfulfilled futures. The book is also haunted by the Pyncheon nostalgia for the old aristocratic order, as well as by capitalist exploitation of racial and class others. This paper uses Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to explore those different facets of the ghostly. As a result, the reading of Gables’ ghosts reveals a tension at the heart of the novel between a pessimistic and an optimistic reading of human life and how much it is determined by the past.","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135886493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Damien B. Schlarb, Melville’s Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America","authors":"Aaron Pride","doi":"10.4000/ejas.20494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20494","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54031,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Studies","volume":"2011 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135097890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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