Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10581145
N. T. Booth
Over the course of his long career, Gore Vidal produced works in multiple genres: the essay, the screenplay, the novel. His fictional output is most often associated with his massive chronicle of American history, Narratives of Empire. Vidal claimed a pedagogical purpose, seeking to remedy American ignorance of the past. However, Vidal's practice suggests a deep awareness of the limitations of the genre. His late-career novel Live from Golgotha (1992) faces the limitations of historical fiction directly. Reading this novel alongside Linda Hutcheon's concept of “historiographical metafiction,” this article analyzes Vidal's own grappling with the ironies latent in his own project. Golgotha delights in sudden narrative shifts and tonal dissonance. And yet, the novel demonstrates a deep awareness of its setting and attempts to make that setting legible to readers. Live from Golgotha is, thus, a late-career synthesis in which Vidal parodies his own work as a historical novelist, thereby exposing the limitations of the form and its relationship to history.
{"title":"Gore Vidal's Live from Golgotha and the Limits of Historical Fiction","authors":"N. T. Booth","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10581145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10581145","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Over the course of his long career, Gore Vidal produced works in multiple genres: the essay, the screenplay, the novel. His fictional output is most often associated with his massive chronicle of American history, Narratives of Empire. Vidal claimed a pedagogical purpose, seeking to remedy American ignorance of the past. However, Vidal's practice suggests a deep awareness of the limitations of the genre. His late-career novel Live from Golgotha (1992) faces the limitations of historical fiction directly. Reading this novel alongside Linda Hutcheon's concept of “historiographical metafiction,” this article analyzes Vidal's own grappling with the ironies latent in his own project. Golgotha delights in sudden narrative shifts and tonal dissonance. And yet, the novel demonstrates a deep awareness of its setting and attempts to make that setting legible to readers. Live from Golgotha is, thus, a late-career synthesis in which Vidal parodies his own work as a historical novelist, thereby exposing the limitations of the form and its relationship to history.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72462482","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10581158
J. O'Dell
Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her, about a letter writer's romance with his operating system, is often read as a posthuman meditation on universal concerns about intimacy. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter's work on genres of the human, this article argues that the protagonist, Theodore, and the film he inhabits ambivalently cling to the fantasy that the generic experience of white male alienation can remain unmarked and universal. The film's central relationship rests on Theodore misreading Samantha's genre of being through the codes of his own liberal humanist subjecthood. Consequently, Theodore produces Samantha discursively as a sexed being through a language of affect. This language, which is central to Theodore's letters and to our understanding of Samantha's humanity, encodes the racial and class hierarchies that the film would otherwise seem to transcend. In making visible the generic features of Theodore's universal subjecthood, this article illuminates how the absent presence of whiteness that anxiously drives Her becomes legible through its gendered language of affect and its concerns about ownership.
{"title":"“I Can't Live in Your Book Anymore”: The Limits of Genre in Spike Jonze's Her","authors":"J. O'Dell","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10581158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10581158","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her, about a letter writer's romance with his operating system, is often read as a posthuman meditation on universal concerns about intimacy. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter's work on genres of the human, this article argues that the protagonist, Theodore, and the film he inhabits ambivalently cling to the fantasy that the generic experience of white male alienation can remain unmarked and universal. The film's central relationship rests on Theodore misreading Samantha's genre of being through the codes of his own liberal humanist subjecthood. Consequently, Theodore produces Samantha discursively as a sexed being through a language of affect. This language, which is central to Theodore's letters and to our understanding of Samantha's humanity, encodes the racial and class hierarchies that the film would otherwise seem to transcend. In making visible the generic features of Theodore's universal subjecthood, this article illuminates how the absent presence of whiteness that anxiously drives Her becomes legible through its gendered language of affect and its concerns about ownership.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"79 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76954657","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10581132
Lizzy LeRud
Uses of “poetry” and “prose” as literary categories have shifted dramatically over the last two or three centuries: a dichotomy emerged between these two that had not existed before, at least not in quite the same way. Attention to this shift has focused primarily on the rise of prose fiction, especially the novel, leading many to overemphasize the role prose genres played in this paradigm shift. In fact, an emergent poetry-prose dichotomy enabled and was enabled by a wide range of discourses about art, culture, politics, and ethics as well as sciences. Exploring a range of such discourses, this essay argues that the modern poetry-prose dichotomy facilitated several key debates focused less on prose and more on poetry's cultural value, ultimately enabling some of poetry's defenders to project their anxieties about Western cultural decline on the perceived deteriorating status of what's classed as “poetry.”
{"title":"Against Prose: Poetry's Defense, Definition, and Dichotomization","authors":"Lizzy LeRud","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10581132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10581132","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Uses of “poetry” and “prose” as literary categories have shifted dramatically over the last two or three centuries: a dichotomy emerged between these two that had not existed before, at least not in quite the same way. Attention to this shift has focused primarily on the rise of prose fiction, especially the novel, leading many to overemphasize the role prose genres played in this paradigm shift. In fact, an emergent poetry-prose dichotomy enabled and was enabled by a wide range of discourses about art, culture, politics, and ethics as well as sciences. Exploring a range of such discourses, this essay argues that the modern poetry-prose dichotomy facilitated several key debates focused less on prose and more on poetry's cultural value, ultimately enabling some of poetry's defenders to project their anxieties about Western cultural decline on the perceived deteriorating status of what's classed as “poetry.”","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87365062","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10581171
Michael H. Lucey
{"title":"Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age","authors":"Michael H. Lucey","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10581171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10581171","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74481247","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10581119
Gretchen Braun
The interim between Darwin's first publication of the theory of natural selection (The Origin of Species, 1859) and his extended application of it to human development (The Descent of Man, 1871) corresponds with the reign of sensation fiction, a genre built upon older gothic tropes but imbricated with cultural and scientific modernization. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, a novel that straddles generic and national literature categories, typifies the sensation era's uneasy awareness of not only similarity but interdependence across boundaries. While eschewing typical sensation engagement with technology such as trains and telegrams, Uncle Silas reflects theories of species transmutation and particularly Darwin's Origin, which posited a malleability of seemingly distinct categories through species interaction and environmental influence. The plot of Uncle Silas centers on dislocation and efforts to fortify self-identity and reestablish security. Le Fanu's narrator-protagonist, the orphaned English or Anglo-Irish heiress Maud Ruthyn, practices bodily self-regulation and careful discernment to shore up boundaries of nationality and class that sustain her hereditary privilege. She stabilizes her class, national, and gender identity through rational revulsion from her French governess and implicitly Irish cousin. Narrator-protagonist Maud resolutely positions Englishness against foreignness and humanity against animality, but these categorical divisions, which she enforces as a character in the novel's imagined world, are exposed as false by her narration. Uncle Silas presents unregulated animal appetites as threatening to rational community governance, but it also implies that our bestial shared capacity for pain, which crosses boundaries of nationality, class, and even species, enables ethical response.
{"title":"Creatures of Empire in Le Fanu's Uncle Silas","authors":"Gretchen Braun","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10581119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10581119","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The interim between Darwin's first publication of the theory of natural selection (The Origin of Species, 1859) and his extended application of it to human development (The Descent of Man, 1871) corresponds with the reign of sensation fiction, a genre built upon older gothic tropes but imbricated with cultural and scientific modernization. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, a novel that straddles generic and national literature categories, typifies the sensation era's uneasy awareness of not only similarity but interdependence across boundaries. While eschewing typical sensation engagement with technology such as trains and telegrams, Uncle Silas reflects theories of species transmutation and particularly Darwin's Origin, which posited a malleability of seemingly distinct categories through species interaction and environmental influence. The plot of Uncle Silas centers on dislocation and efforts to fortify self-identity and reestablish security. Le Fanu's narrator-protagonist, the orphaned English or Anglo-Irish heiress Maud Ruthyn, practices bodily self-regulation and careful discernment to shore up boundaries of nationality and class that sustain her hereditary privilege. She stabilizes her class, national, and gender identity through rational revulsion from her French governess and implicitly Irish cousin. Narrator-protagonist Maud resolutely positions Englishness against foreignness and humanity against animality, but these categorical divisions, which she enforces as a character in the novel's imagined world, are exposed as false by her narration. Uncle Silas presents unregulated animal appetites as threatening to rational community governance, but it also implies that our bestial shared capacity for pain, which crosses boundaries of nationality, class, and even species, enables ethical response.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89481558","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346860
M. Mcgurl
The term “cultural capital” has entered the general lexicon of cultural criticism as a description of social prestige won through the acquisition of knowledge rather than monetary wealth. And, yet, for all its utility in delineating the form of value acquired by students in the study of literature in school, cultural capital has proven limited in its ability to explain the dynamics of the contemporary literary field at large. Addressing this limitation, this essay reintroduces a lesser-known term from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, “social capital,” exploring how it becomes strikingly visible in one of the dominant popular genres of our time, epic fantasy.
{"title":"Social Capital: Epic Fantasy and the Magical School","authors":"M. Mcgurl","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10346860","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10346860","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The term “cultural capital” has entered the general lexicon of cultural criticism as a description of social prestige won through the acquisition of knowledge rather than monetary wealth. And, yet, for all its utility in delineating the form of value acquired by students in the study of literature in school, cultural capital has proven limited in its ability to explain the dynamics of the contemporary literary field at large. Addressing this limitation, this essay reintroduces a lesser-known term from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, “social capital,” exploring how it becomes strikingly visible in one of the dominant popular genres of our time, epic fantasy.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75084579","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346886
Nadia Nurhussein
{"title":"The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930","authors":"Nadia Nurhussein","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10346886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10346886","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"123 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83157425","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346899
Edgar Garcia
{"title":"Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts","authors":"Edgar Garcia","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10346899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10346899","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84840834","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346782
Simon During
This article considers the legacy and value of John Guillory's literary sociology in providing a rationale for literary studies today. Bringing the work of Pierre Bourdieu to bear on the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Guillory laid bare the mechanisms of canon formation within the institution of the school. While the influence of his argument is still perceptible in scholarly treatments of literary institutions, though, his more affirmative case for the general extension of literary appreciation and aesthetic judgment has gone unheeded. This is because Cultural Capital is not really interested in literature itself but in literature and literary education's functions and effects. Turning to Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” this essay offers a literary and historical interpretation that contests Guillory's reading of the poem as an allegory of canon formation. It then finds in Stendhal's The Red and the Black an alternative allegory of the fate of the canon in a democratic society and argues finally for the continued value in teaching the canon to those engaged by it.
本文考察了约翰·吉罗伊文学社会学的遗产和价值，为今天的文学研究提供了理论基础。吉洛里将皮埃尔·布迪厄(Pierre Bourdieu)的作品带入了20世纪80年代和90年代的教规之战，揭示了学校机构内教规形成的机制。虽然他的论点的影响在文学机构的学术研究中仍然可以感受到，但是，他对文学欣赏和审美判断的普遍扩展的更肯定的案例却被忽视了。这是因为，文化资本真正关心的不是文学本身，而是文学和文学教育的功能和效果。谈到托马斯·格雷(Thomas Gray)的《乡间教堂墓地里的挽歌》(Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard)，这篇文章从文学和历史的角度对吉洛里将这首诗解读为正典形成的寓言提出了质疑。然后，它在司汤达的《红与黑》中发现了另一种关于民主社会中正典命运的寓言，并最终论证了将正典传授给那些与之相关的人的持续价值。
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Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346808
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
{"title":"Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist","authors":"Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10346808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10346808","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80734665","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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