Pub Date : 2019-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-7501003
P. Joseph
The Showtime series Homeland (2011–) has typically been seen as a spy thriller, an instance of “terrorism TV,” or an example of prestige television. This article takes a long view of Homeland, treating its heroine, Carrie Mathison, as a female warrior-adventurer, a character with deep roots going back to eighteenth-century print culture. The essay proposes that Homeland resembles many popular print war narratives that define their female protagonists, whether cross-dressing soldiers or spies, as specially positioned for the discovery of a war’s secret, untold history. Marginalized by the military and denied a voice in official war narratives, women reenter the culture of war writing as intelligence heroes, in possession of a war narrative that has been hidden from public view. The article examines both the continuities between Homeland and earlier secret histories of war and the show’s adaptation to a contemporary media and historical environment. Contrary to earlier female warrior narratives, in which home threatens to confine the adventurer, Homeland treats the domestic realm as a space of adventure, where the rogue hero can investigate the wider world of war through binge watching and the forging of intimate relationships.
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Pub Date : 2019-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-7501016
J. Westover
In The Folding Cliffs, a narrative poem with a novelistic scope, W. S. Merwin reflects on poetic thinking by availing himself of the tools of narrative. He not only depicts historic injustice against indigenous Hawaiians but also tropes the form of his storytelling to assess the history it relates and its ethical implications. To promote this assessment, Merwin inculcates a judicious self-questioning in his readers by means of his narrative structure, which emphasizes the discrepancy between plot and story. By making readers keenly aware of the mechanics of his storytelling, Merwin offers a model of narrative ethics that respects the individual’s alterity.
{"title":"Story, Discourse, and the Voice of the Other in W. S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs","authors":"J. Westover","doi":"10.1215/00166928-7501016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-7501016","url":null,"abstract":"In The Folding Cliffs, a narrative poem with a novelistic scope, W. S. Merwin reflects on poetic thinking by availing himself of the tools of narrative. He not only depicts historic injustice against indigenous Hawaiians but also tropes the form of his storytelling to assess the history it relates and its ethical implications. To promote this assessment, Merwin inculcates a judicious self-questioning in his readers by means of his narrative structure, which emphasizes the discrepancy between plot and story. By making readers keenly aware of the mechanics of his storytelling, Merwin offers a model of narrative ethics that respects the individual’s alterity.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76710931","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 : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-7190506
Jeffrey R. Wilson
This essay theorizes a tradition in William Shakespeare’s drama involving some of his greatest and most captivating characters, including, among others, Richard III, Aaron the Moor, Shylock the Jew, Edmund the Bastard, Falstaff, Thersites, and Caliban. While they have been called “strangers,” “outsiders,” and “others,” the notion of stigma best describes how these characters fit into Shakespeare’s dramatic vision. As such this essay combines the sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma with the literary historian Erich Auerbach’s account of “figural realism” to establish a vocabulary to explain how Shakespeare applies, rearranges, avoids, and dismantles what the essay calls the “figure of stigma.” In the figure of stigma an abnormal body evoking both pity and fear splits into the opposed dramatic elements of villainy and irony, the former an element of tragedy and the latter of comedy. Then the figure is reconstituted at the end of the play in the hybrid plot of tragicomedy, in which the virtuous are rewarded and the vicious punished on a stage that mingles clowns and kings. Like Shakespeare’s problem plays, however, the resolution of the figure of stigma is riddled with lingering questions, resulting in an awkward or unstable aesthetic experience for audiences
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Pub Date : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-7190532
A. Gold
This article considers the Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley and the visual artist Robert Indiana’s 1968 collaboration Numbers. Featuring Indiana’s ten screen prints of the cardinal digits 0–9 and Creeley’s poetic meditations on the same theme, the book form provokes a unique reading and viewing experience in its audience, calling attention to the intimate relation between word and image. Though rarely examined in its original interdisciplinary form—in part because many of the twenty-five hundred first edition copies now reside in special or private collections where access to them is limited—Numbers is a remarkable visual-verbal collaboration. Not only is it a beautiful, sumptuously colored book, it is a deeply affective exploration in both verse and print of what might otherwise seem the most routine or mundane of figures. Throughout the collaboration Creeley and Indiana imbue each number with personal resonance, countering the depersonalization and “massification” of much late 1960s art and politics. Unearthing an essential, dialectical relation between the singular I and the community through their use of serial forms, Creeley and Indiana reimagine a lyric subjectivity that is always “more than one.” Together the artists probe the ways numbers pervade our individual and collective consciousnesses: how they become measures of our human lives.
{"title":"Forms of Accounting","authors":"A. Gold","doi":"10.1215/00166928-7190532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-7190532","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley and the visual artist Robert Indiana’s 1968 collaboration Numbers. Featuring Indiana’s ten screen prints of the cardinal digits 0–9 and Creeley’s poetic meditations on the same theme, the book form provokes a unique reading and viewing experience in its audience, calling attention to the intimate relation between word and image. Though rarely examined in its original interdisciplinary form—in part because many of the twenty-five hundred first edition copies now reside in special or private collections where access to them is limited—Numbers is a remarkable visual-verbal collaboration. Not only is it a beautiful, sumptuously colored book, it is a deeply affective exploration in both verse and print of what might otherwise seem the most routine or mundane of figures. Throughout the collaboration Creeley and Indiana imbue each number with personal resonance, countering the depersonalization and “massification” of much late 1960s art and politics. Unearthing an essential, dialectical relation between the singular I and the community through their use of serial forms, Creeley and Indiana reimagine a lyric subjectivity that is always “more than one.” Together the artists probe the ways numbers pervade our individual and collective consciousnesses: how they become measures of our human lives.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"172 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82943454","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 : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-7190493
Benjamin Mangrum
This essay reexamines the conventional opposition in genre criticism between modern realism and classical tragedy. By adapting Roland Barthes’s account of realist representation with J. L. Austin’s theory of speech-acts, the essay shows that epistemological skepticism animates the conventionality of certain literary techniques in modern realism. This account of the relation between realism and skepticism establishes grounds for further comparison with the seemingly antithetical generic tradition of tragedy. As a means of identifying previously unrecognized affinities between ancient tragedy and modern realism, this essay offers a model for how texts “perform” their genres. The essay describes these literary speech-acts as “genre performatives,” which are smaller-order gestures, devices, and formal techniques that at once present and execute a text’s status as part of any given genre. Formal expressions of epistemic contingency—skepticism’s appearances across a spectrum of literary conventions—function not as abstract philosophy but as mechanisms that shore up the conceptual integrity of a literary text’s wider generic tradition. Instead of imposing a sequence of ruptures in literary history or identifying rigid classes of characteristics that define any given genre, this essay demonstrates that “genre performatives” allow for comparisons across the longue duree (long term) of literary history and across ostensibly unrelated literary texts. The authors under consideration include Euripides, Sophocles, Miguel de Cervantes, William H. Gass, and Gustave Flaubert, among others.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-7190519
L. Klein
According to Rey Chow, the “inscrutable Chinese” is “the cross-ethnic stereotype par excellence.” How does this stereotype play out in modern and contemporary American poetry’s tradition of representing China and Chinese literature? For poet and Asian American studies professor Timothy Yu, whose One Hundred Chinese Silences (2016) comprises parodic rewritings of poems that try to engage with the Chinese aesthetic, the representation of China in American poetry amounts to an “orientalist tradition” that “sees China as a source of unchanging aesthetic traits fixed in a remote past,” offering stereotypes of Asians as “silent, reticent, passive, yet also exotic, mysterious, objects of aesthetic contemplation.” But is Yu’s project not at the same time reinscribing a kind of Chinese inscrutability, presenting China as perennially unknowable in its critique of so many efforts to make Chinese culture known? Understanding translation through Judith Butler’s “performativity,” the article looks critically both at Yu’s poems and the texts he parodies, in particular those by Gary Snyder and Ezra Pound, in the context of works by John Ashbery, the Language poets, Jonathan Stalling, and Eliot Weinberger, to argue that Yu’s work represents a translation anxiety and pleads for more translations into English, including into American poetry.
{"title":"Silences, Whispers, and the Figure of China","authors":"L. Klein","doi":"10.1215/00166928-7190519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-7190519","url":null,"abstract":"According to Rey Chow, the “inscrutable Chinese” is “the cross-ethnic stereotype par excellence.” How does this stereotype play out in modern and contemporary American poetry’s tradition of representing China and Chinese literature? For poet and Asian American studies professor Timothy Yu, whose One Hundred Chinese Silences (2016) comprises parodic rewritings of poems that try to engage with the Chinese aesthetic, the representation of China in American poetry amounts to an “orientalist tradition” that “sees China as a source of unchanging aesthetic traits fixed in a remote past,” offering stereotypes of Asians as “silent, reticent, passive, yet also exotic, mysterious, objects of aesthetic contemplation.” But is Yu’s project not at the same time reinscribing a kind of Chinese inscrutability, presenting China as perennially unknowable in its critique of so many efforts to make Chinese culture known? Understanding translation through Judith Butler’s “performativity,” the article looks critically both at Yu’s poems and the texts he parodies, in particular those by Gary Snyder and Ezra Pound, in the context of works by John Ashbery, the Language poets, Jonathan Stalling, and Eliot Weinberger, to argue that Yu’s work represents a translation anxiety and pleads for more translations into English, including into American poetry.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90100926","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 : 2018-11-06DOI: 10.1215/00166928-7500990
D. Sergeant
This essay explores Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction of the near future, New York 2140 (2017) and how its treatment of time and history relates to its generic identity. By imbricating present and future, New York 2140 resembles not so much science fiction, the genre commonly associated with the future, as the historical novel, inheriting from its nineteenth-century exemplars and moving beyond its postmodern incarnations. New York 2140 also proves innovative in its treatment of the relationship between individual and general, particular and universal, which has always been central to critical and creative treatments of the historical novel. Robinson’s text shows that this scalar challenge is of particular importance to the contemporary moment and reconfigures how some of its major coordinates — the economy, the environment, the body, and narrative itself — cross the gap between micro and macro. In doing so, however, it draws heavily on allegory, and this not only recalls the problems that allegory has posed to previous critical treatments of the historical novel but also suggests why New York 2140 is an outlier in near future fiction. Instead, the novel might be situated alongside cross-disciplinary texts by Naomi Klein, David Harvey, and Bill Mc Kibben that Robinson calls “utopian nonfiction.”
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Pub Date : 2018-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-6899280
W. Phillips
Aesthetic histories of the stag film tend to place it in a straightforward lineage of pornographic imagery such that the film genre emerges more or less fully formed. Discursive histories, however, have noted that the term does not concretize in relation to the film form until approximately 1930. Yet this marks only the beginning of generic stability and thus overlooks the mechanisms of genrification that played out in America in the previous decades and that propelled the terminological transformation of “films for smoking concerts,” “club films,” and “blue” movies into “stags.” Approaching the films as new media in their historical moment and focusing specifically on exhibition contexts, this article places stag films in a multifaceted rather than a singular ancestry of visual culture, broadens the intertextual field of cinema beyond explicit representations of sex to trace the broader composition of male-dominated viewing traditions, and finally, argues that the genre becomes ultimately concentrated into the familiar gendered, alternative viewing spaces of stags as a function of both the increasing moral restrictions and the industrial reorganization of Hollywood cinema. Studying the films and genres on the margins, such as stags, helps us more precisely assess the shape of the center and the forces responsible for determining the boundaries between the two. Finally, this investigation of stags demonstrates the importance of the dispositive, or reception context, as a critical piece of generic development, one that is given little attention in the study of most other film genres.
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Pub Date : 2018-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-6899306
F. Botting
Unrealism addresses the way unrealistic genres of writing like science fiction, horror, romance, and fantasy can display a capacity to reflect on and interrogate generic conventions. Unrealism describes a process that unsettles the literary hierarchies in which genre fiction is subordinated, undermining the privilege allotted realistic modes of fiction and extending its disturbance into the social and political frameworks in which distinctions of fiction and reality are maintained. Theorizing the significance of the prefix un by means of the political critique of democracy Jacques Ranciere offers and, in terms of subjectivity, through a reexamination of psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious and the uncanny, the article analyzes the impact of formal, generic, and social instances of unrealism in writings by M. John Harrison, J. G. Ballard, China Mieville, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
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Pub Date : 2018-07-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-6899293
Lauren Silber
This article examines the public essays of the immigrant activist Jose Antonio Vargas. It situates his 2011 New York Times Magazine essay “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” and his 2012 Time magazine essay “Not Legal, Not Leaving” in the larger historical context of the undocumented youth movement in the United States. More specifically, this article identifies how the national comprehensive immigration reform movement created a political genre known as the Dreamer narrative that undocumented youth were trained to produce. By examining the ways Vargas performs these genre expectations, with a particular interest in revising their affective dimensions, the article exposes Vargas’s approach to political engagement, one that derives from the emotional work undocumented migrants undertake to narrate themselves into hostile and vitriolic discourses of belonging.
{"title":"“I Saw the Shame on His Face”","authors":"Lauren Silber","doi":"10.1215/00166928-6899293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-6899293","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the public essays of the immigrant activist Jose Antonio Vargas. It situates his 2011 New York Times Magazine essay “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” and his 2012 Time magazine essay “Not Legal, Not Leaving” in the larger historical context of the undocumented youth movement in the United States. More specifically, this article identifies how the national comprehensive immigration reform movement created a political genre known as the Dreamer narrative that undocumented youth were trained to produce. By examining the ways Vargas performs these genre expectations, with a particular interest in revising their affective dimensions, the article exposes Vargas’s approach to political engagement, one that derives from the emotional work undocumented migrants undertake to narrate themselves into hostile and vitriolic discourses of belonging.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"94 8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75511774","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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