Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2024.a921516
Steven Nathaniel
Abstract: Scholars have turned their attention to digital technologies' role in surveilling Blackness, but the ideas of privacy, data, and exploitation that inform this emerging research cannot be understood apart from their interlocked histories. This article examines encounters with the telegraph in mid-nineteenth century Black biography, focusing on the technology's role as a surveillance network that reshaped freedom-seekers' concept of American location. This historical precedent to location tracking inflicted a severe form of psychic dislocation that calls into question conventional understandings of the data of slavery. The existential disorientation recorded in this genre challenges inherited notions of history, while also guiding our navigation of contemporary technoculture and the social disparities it sustains.
{"title":"Telegraphic Surveillance, Psychic Dislocation, and the Data of Black Biography","authors":"Steven Nathaniel","doi":"10.1353/arq.2024.a921516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2024.a921516","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Scholars have turned their attention to digital technologies' role in surveilling Blackness, but the ideas of privacy, data, and exploitation that inform this emerging research cannot be understood apart from their interlocked histories. This article examines encounters with the telegraph in mid-nineteenth century Black biography, focusing on the technology's role as a surveillance network that reshaped freedom-seekers' concept of American location. This historical precedent to location tracking inflicted a severe form of psychic dislocation that calls into question conventional understandings of the data of slavery. The existential disorientation recorded in this genre challenges inherited notions of history, while also guiding our navigation of contemporary technoculture and the social disparities it sustains.","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":"26 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140277778","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}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2024.a921515
Brook Thomas
Abstract: Albion W. Tourgée wrote best-selling novels based on his days fighting the Klan and trying to reconstruct North Carolina. Recently his fiction and his role as Homer Plessy's lead attorney have received renewed attention. But the work to which he devoted most energy remains forgotten. Speaking directly to today's world of ongoing racial injustice and income inequality, "89 (1888) is told by the Grand Master of the Order of the Southern Cross. He and a northern monopolist based on J.D. Rockefeller conspire to bring about peaceful secession of the South and suppression of northern workers. After summarizing the book's elaborate dystopian plot, the essay details how Tourgée forged the often-forgotten historical events on which it is based into a novel that, better than any work of the time, warned the nation of the threat posed by what W.E.B. Du Bois called the "bargain between Big Business and the South."
摘要：阿尔比恩-W-图尔基（Albion W. Tourgée）以他与三K党斗争和试图重建北卡罗来纳州的日子为背景创作了畅销小说。最近，他的小说和他作为霍默-普莱西的首席律师的角色再次受到关注。但是，他投入精力最多的作品仍被人们遗忘。89》（1888 年）直接描写了当今世界持续存在的种族不公正和收入不平等问题，故事的主人公是南十字星骑士团的大团长。他和一个以 J.D. 洛克菲勒为原型的北方垄断者密谋实现南方的和平分裂，镇压北方工人。在概述了该书精心设计的乌托邦式情节之后，文章详细介绍了图尔盖如何将其所依据的经常被遗忘的历史事件创作成一部小说，这部小说比当时的任何作品都能更好地警示全国，W.E.B. 杜波依斯称之为 "大企业与南方之间的交易 "所构成的威胁。
{"title":"Albion W. Tourgée's Forgotten Dystopia: How the South Conspired with Northern Monopolists to Win the Post-Civil-War Peace","authors":"Brook Thomas","doi":"10.1353/arq.2024.a921515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2024.a921515","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Albion W. Tourgée wrote best-selling novels based on his days fighting the Klan and trying to reconstruct North Carolina. Recently his fiction and his role as Homer Plessy's lead attorney have received renewed attention. But the work to which he devoted most energy remains forgotten. Speaking directly to today's world of ongoing racial injustice and income inequality, \"89 (1888) is told by the Grand Master of the Order of the Southern Cross. He and a northern monopolist based on J.D. Rockefeller conspire to bring about peaceful secession of the South and suppression of northern workers. After summarizing the book's elaborate dystopian plot, the essay details how Tourgée forged the often-forgotten historical events on which it is based into a novel that, better than any work of the time, warned the nation of the threat posed by what W.E.B. Du Bois called the \"bargain between Big Business and the South.\"","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":"57 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140271356","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}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2023.a914010
Valerie Rohy
Abstract:This essay argues that Willa Cather’s 1896 short story, “Tommy, the Unsentimental,” paradoxically complicates gender binaries by proliferating binary relations—between East and West, weak and strong, sentimental and unsentimental. In so doing, Cather creates a world in which almost everyone’s gender is non-binary to some extent. Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jay Prosser, Jack Halberstam, and Chris Coffman, I contend that Cather anticipates current debates in queer theory by showing how thinking about transgender subjects and sexuality together alters how we understand fundamental terms like “homosexuality.” Finally, I show where the text reaches its limit, unable to shed its rigid taxonomy of “kinds” of people. Instead, we would do well to promote a discourse of “unkindness,” in which changes in gender identity and presentation, like those in Cather’s own life, can be acknowledged.
摘要:本文认为，威拉·凯瑟1896年的短篇小说《冷漠的汤米》通过对东西方、弱与强、多愁善感与不多愁善感的二元关系的扩展，使性别二元对立矛盾地复杂化。在这样做的过程中，凯瑟创造了一个世界，在这个世界里，几乎每个人的性别在某种程度上都是非二元的。根据Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jay Prosser, Jack Halberstam和Chris Coffman的研究，我认为Cather通过展示如何将跨性别主体和性结合在一起来改变我们对“同性恋”等基本术语的理解，从而预测了当前酷儿理论的争论。最后，我展示了文本到达极限的地方，无法摆脱对人的“种类”的严格分类。相反，我们应该很好地促进一种“不友善”的话语，在这种话语中，性别认同和性别表现的变化，就像凯瑟自己生活中的变化一样，可以得到承认。
{"title":"On the Divide: Reading Cather Against the Binary","authors":"Valerie Rohy","doi":"10.1353/arq.2023.a914010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2023.a914010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that Willa Cather’s 1896 short story, “Tommy, the Unsentimental,” paradoxically complicates gender binaries by proliferating binary relations—between East and West, weak and strong, sentimental and unsentimental. In so doing, Cather creates a world in which almost everyone’s gender is non-binary to some extent. Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jay Prosser, Jack Halberstam, and Chris Coffman, I contend that Cather anticipates current debates in queer theory by showing how thinking about transgender subjects and sexuality together alters how we understand fundamental terms like “homosexuality.” Finally, I show where the text reaches its limit, unable to shed its rigid taxonomy of “kinds” of people. Instead, we would do well to promote a discourse of “unkindness,” in which changes in gender identity and presentation, like those in Cather’s own life, can be acknowledged.","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":" 34","pages":"1 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138614136","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}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2023.a914008
Hannah Wakefield
Abstract:In this essay, I analyze Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred to show how Stowe’s confrontation with Protestant religious institutions in the 1850s led her to deconstruct the sentimental techniques she had previously relied on in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Scrutinizing Presbyterian leaders’ response to slavery both at a public camp meeting and at a private gathering of Northern and Southern ministers, Stowe assigns the main responsibility for slavery to Protestant ministers fearful of losing cultural power amid the intense denominational competition of the nineteenth century. In particular, she shows how the clergy justified silence on the issue of slavery by assigning slavery to a secular, civil sphere and narrowly defining the Christian church’s realm as purely spiritual, even as those same clergy advanced a nationalist political agenda.
{"title":"Dismantling the Sentimental in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp","authors":"Hannah Wakefield","doi":"10.1353/arq.2023.a914008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2023.a914008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay, I analyze Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred to show how Stowe’s confrontation with Protestant religious institutions in the 1850s led her to deconstruct the sentimental techniques she had previously relied on in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Scrutinizing Presbyterian leaders’ response to slavery both at a public camp meeting and at a private gathering of Northern and Southern ministers, Stowe assigns the main responsibility for slavery to Protestant ministers fearful of losing cultural power amid the intense denominational competition of the nineteenth century. In particular, she shows how the clergy justified silence on the issue of slavery by assigning slavery to a secular, civil sphere and narrowly defining the Christian church’s realm as purely spiritual, even as those same clergy advanced a nationalist political agenda.","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":"30 46","pages":"128 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138623769","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}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2023.a914011
James Duban
Abstract:What is the importance of the children Mignon and Felix, in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, for the themes of sexuality and pedagogy in What Maisie Knew? Grounded in suggestive correspondences between geographically distant, but conceptually allied narratives, James’s novel appears to invert the moral compass of Goethe’s bildungsroman to craft Maisie’s misguidedness and perhaps that of her narrator. While distancing Maisie from the preconceptions of the narrator, I credit, as a foreshadowing of What Maisie Knew, James’s allusion—in his personal review of the Meister narratives—to “pernicious conclusions.” Features of both Mignon and Felix, as transposed by James, resurface in Maisie, while Wilhelm morphs into a predatory Sir Claude.
{"title":"Obscure Desire: Goethe and the Imbalanced Pedagogy of What Maisie Knew","authors":"James Duban","doi":"10.1353/arq.2023.a914011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2023.a914011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:What is the importance of the children Mignon and Felix, in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, for the themes of sexuality and pedagogy in What Maisie Knew? Grounded in suggestive correspondences between geographically distant, but conceptually allied narratives, James’s novel appears to invert the moral compass of Goethe’s bildungsroman to craft Maisie’s misguidedness and perhaps that of her narrator. While distancing Maisie from the preconceptions of the narrator, I credit, as a foreshadowing of What Maisie Knew, James’s allusion—in his personal review of the Meister narratives—to “pernicious conclusions.” Features of both Mignon and Felix, as transposed by James, resurface in Maisie, while Wilhelm morphs into a predatory Sir Claude.","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":"18 S27","pages":"23 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138623133","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}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2023.a914006
Stephen M. Park
Abstract:The first step toward winning asylum in the United States is the Credible Fear Interview (CFI), in which the applicant narrates their life in a way that conforms with legal expectations of “credibility.” This interview process appears in several recent literary works, most notably Valeria Luiselli’s nonfiction work, Tell Me How It Ends. However, the narrative situation of the CFI, this moment of high-stakes, transactional storytelling, also provides a way of interpreting recent migration literature and understanding how such works perform credibility for the reader. By analyzing the interplay of legal and literary narratives in Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, this article positions the CFI as the primal scene of narration for recent migration fiction.
{"title":"Credible Fears: The Asylum Narrative as Form in Lost Children Archive","authors":"Stephen M. Park","doi":"10.1353/arq.2023.a914006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2023.a914006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The first step toward winning asylum in the United States is the Credible Fear Interview (CFI), in which the applicant narrates their life in a way that conforms with legal expectations of “credibility.” This interview process appears in several recent literary works, most notably Valeria Luiselli’s nonfiction work, Tell Me How It Ends. However, the narrative situation of the CFI, this moment of high-stakes, transactional storytelling, also provides a way of interpreting recent migration literature and understanding how such works perform credibility for the reader. By analyzing the interplay of legal and literary narratives in Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, this article positions the CFI as the primal scene of narration for recent migration fiction.","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":"18 9","pages":"49 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138627168","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}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2023.a914007
F. Betul, Cihan Artun
Abstract:This article examines the ways in which the Sufi scholar-poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) is appropriated into a specific form of American religiosity through the intra-lingual “collaborative” translations of Coleman Barks. I argue that Barks’ attempt to reveal the universal message inherent in Rumi’s verses effectively de-Islamizes Rumi’s oeuvre and personality as his translation strategy entails elimination of particulars of Islamic culture and adaptation of the poems to the taste and sensitivities of the implied readers. In effect, Barks contributes to the Americanization of Rumi, which ultimately cast him as a “New Age guru” with romantic sensibilities.
{"title":"Americanization of Rumi: The Impact of Coleman Barks’s Appropriative Translations","authors":"F. Betul, Cihan Artun","doi":"10.1353/arq.2023.a914007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2023.a914007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the ways in which the Sufi scholar-poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) is appropriated into a specific form of American religiosity through the intra-lingual “collaborative” translations of Coleman Barks. I argue that Barks’ attempt to reveal the universal message inherent in Rumi’s verses effectively de-Islamizes Rumi’s oeuvre and personality as his translation strategy entails elimination of particulars of Islamic culture and adaptation of the poems to the taste and sensitivities of the implied readers. In effect, Barks contributes to the Americanization of Rumi, which ultimately cast him as a “New Age guru” with romantic sensibilities.","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":" 984","pages":"71 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138610687","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2023.a909147
Tony Papanikolas
Abstract: This article details how Frederick Douglass intervened on an extant catalogue of sonic imagery, descriptive reproductions of various sonic qualities of antislavery declamation that were deployed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison with the intention of soliciting an affective response in the reader. Analyzing the aural language that suffuses The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” and The Heroic Slave, and comparing and contrasting Douglass’s use of this language that of Garrison, this article contends that Douglass’ distinct sonic interventions made audible the limitations of a political affinity predicated on the cultivation of preexisting antislavery sentiments. Douglass’s revisions to, and embellishments upon, prevailing sonic antislavery rhetoric afforded him a sensuous, affecting language for conveying the need for the radical reorientation of moderate Northern sensibilities towards the disavowed interiority of the enslaved.
{"title":"Sounding the Slavery Debates: The Sonic Writing of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison","authors":"Tony Papanikolas","doi":"10.1353/arq.2023.a909147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2023.a909147","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article details how Frederick Douglass intervened on an extant catalogue of sonic imagery, descriptive reproductions of various sonic qualities of antislavery declamation that were deployed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison with the intention of soliciting an affective response in the reader. Analyzing the aural language that suffuses The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” and The Heroic Slave, and comparing and contrasting Douglass’s use of this language that of Garrison, this article contends that Douglass’ distinct sonic interventions made audible the limitations of a political affinity predicated on the cultivation of preexisting antislavery sentiments. Douglass’s revisions to, and embellishments upon, prevailing sonic antislavery rhetoric afforded him a sensuous, affecting language for conveying the need for the radical reorientation of moderate Northern sensibilities towards the disavowed interiority of the enslaved.","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640191","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2023.a909148
Kathleen Reeves
Abstract: Sheila Heti's 2018 novel, Motherhood, reorients the question of motherhood around possibility rather than choice. Misread by some critics as a memoir about the decision not to have a child, the novel instead emphasizes openness, chance, and change in order to articulate a form of freedom that is tied to indeterminacy rather than sovereignty. The novel points to the limitations of narratives of choice, suggesting instead that women’s experiences around reproduction await further description. Motherhood is thus engaged in the kind of project called for by the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray: to define motherhood from the perspective of women. As both Irigaray and Heti make clear, this project must be shared by all women, whether or not they can or will have children. Heti’s novel demonstrates that, over fifty years after feminism’s second wave, motherhood continues to be circumscribed by patriarchy, and it points toward a feminist motherhood
{"title":"From Choice to Possibility in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood","authors":"Kathleen Reeves","doi":"10.1353/arq.2023.a909148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2023.a909148","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Sheila Heti's 2018 novel, Motherhood, reorients the question of motherhood around possibility rather than choice. Misread by some critics as a memoir about the decision not to have a child, the novel instead emphasizes openness, chance, and change in order to articulate a form of freedom that is tied to indeterminacy rather than sovereignty. The novel points to the limitations of narratives of choice, suggesting instead that women’s experiences around reproduction await further description. Motherhood is thus engaged in the kind of project called for by the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray: to define motherhood from the perspective of women. As both Irigaray and Heti make clear, this project must be shared by all women, whether or not they can or will have children. Heti’s novel demonstrates that, over fifty years after feminism’s second wave, motherhood continues to be circumscribed by patriarchy, and it points toward a feminist motherhood","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135641145","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/arq.2023.a909145
Sheila Teahan
Abstract: This essay on John Williams’s neglected 1965 novel Stoner investigates its treatment of agency and its tension between realism and naturalism. The novel develops a sustained conversation with Faulkner’s Light in August, from which Williams draws a constellation of tropes linked to Stoner’s agency: his major life decisions are driven by misreadings of figure. The essay traces major formal features of the novel’s representation of agency: the rehearsal of images from Light in August and Shakespeare’s sonnet 73; repetition of key figures, including the mask and its related trope of prosopopoeia; the spatialization of time through the linear images of the circle and line; and the engagement of multiple elements of the uncanny, to include the interrogation of language itself. Derrida’s critique of the structure of the decision illuminates both the problem of Stoner’s agency and the novel’s dramatization of the connection between the decision, the secret, and the spectral.
{"title":"The Work of (Dis)figuration in John Williams’s Stoner","authors":"Sheila Teahan","doi":"10.1353/arq.2023.a909145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2023.a909145","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay on John Williams’s neglected 1965 novel Stoner investigates its treatment of agency and its tension between realism and naturalism. The novel develops a sustained conversation with Faulkner’s Light in August, from which Williams draws a constellation of tropes linked to Stoner’s agency: his major life decisions are driven by misreadings of figure. The essay traces major formal features of the novel’s representation of agency: the rehearsal of images from Light in August and Shakespeare’s sonnet 73; repetition of key figures, including the mask and its related trope of prosopopoeia; the spatialization of time through the linear images of the circle and line; and the engagement of multiple elements of the uncanny, to include the interrogation of language itself. Derrida’s critique of the structure of the decision illuminates both the problem of Stoner’s agency and the novel’s dramatization of the connection between the decision, the secret, and the spectral.","PeriodicalId":8384,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory","volume":"91 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135641325","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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