The concept of the “transpacific” has inherent asymmetries that must be explored in order to generate a more nuanced interpretive logic of transpacific possibility. Such epistemic asymmetry should be considered not simply as a description of the massive inequalities undergirding the geopolitical arrangements of the transpacific world, but also as a catalyst through which transpacific knowledge and critical orientations of the transpacific are produced. Scholarship evidences three key turns—through militarization, the ecological, and indigeneity—that collectively work to map the uneven terrain of the transpacific. The poet Lawson Inada’s wry observation about the epistemic, economic, and aesthetic challenges posed by the transpacific—that “the problem . . . is water”—provides a starting point from which to trace a fluid genealogy of transpacific literary and cultural production. This fluid genealogy traces alternative versions of the transpacific as “imaginable ageographies” to counterbalance the existing architectural ideas about security, economics, and militarization that have delimited this arena. Analysis of a wide range of texts demonstrates that transpacific asymmetry and transpacific interconnection can both be usefully leveraged to disrupt hierarchies of knowledge and practice.
861-880 of 933 Results
Article
(The) Transpacific Turns
Tina Chen
Article
Trauma and Memory Studies
Karyn Ball
A focus on trauma’s institutional trajectory in literary and cultural theory serves to narrow the transnational and multidirectional scope of memory studies. While Sigmund Freud’s attempt in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to define trauma in order to account for World War I veterans’ symptoms might serve as a provisional departure point, the psychological afflictions that haunted American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War reinforced the explanatory value of what came to be called “posttraumatic stress disorder,” which the American Psychiatric Association added to the DSM-III (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980. Multiple dramatic films released in the 1980s about Vietnam conveyed images of the American soldier’s two-fold traumatization by the violence he not only witnessed but also perpetrated along with the ambivalent treatment he received upon his return to a protest-riven nation waking up to the demoralizing realization that US military prowess was neither absolute nor inherently just. Proliferating research and writing about trauma in the late 1980s reflected this juncture as well as the transformative impact of the new social movements whose consciousness-raising efforts inspired a generation of academics to revise secondary and post-secondary literary canons.
The publication in 1992 of both Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery as well as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing; In Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, along with Cathy Caruth’s editorial compilation entitled Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and collected essays in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), crystallized a moment when trauma was manifestly coming into vogue as an object of inquiry. This trend was reinforced by simultaneous developments in Holocaust studies that included critical acclaim for Claude Lanzmann’s ten-hour documentary Shoah (released in 1985), the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC in 1993, and, that same year, the international success of Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Other key events that propelled the popularity of trauma studies in the 1990s included the fall of the Berlin wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and South African apartheid governments, and Toni Morrison receiving the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for Beloved. The latter additionally bolstered specialization in African American studies as a platform for investigating representations of slavery and its violent afterlives.
While some critics fault the 1990s confluence of Holocaust and trauma studies for its Eurocentrism, the research pursued by feminist, multiculturalist, and postcolonial scholars in the same period laid the foundation for increasingly diverse lines of inquiry. Postcolonial criticism in particular has inspired scholarship about the intergenerational aftereffects of civil war, partition, forced migration, and genocide as well as the damage that accrues as settler states continue to marginalize and constrain the indigenous groups they displaced. More recent trauma research has also moved beyond a focus on finite events to examine the compounding strain of the everyday denigrations and aggressions faced by subordinated groups in tandem with long-term persecution and systemically induced precarity. Ultimately, then, the scale of trauma and memory studies has become not only global but also planetary in response to intensifying public anxiety about extinction events and climate change.
Article
Travel Writing in the Age of Globalization
Rune Graulund
Globalization and global travel have existed for centuries. It is over the past century in particular, however, that travel has become truly global, in the sense that most and not just some travel can in some way or other be said to globalized. Indeed, with the invention and spread of new technologies of mobility (like jet travel), and new technologies of information (like the internet), as with the increasingly invasive impact of human activity on the planet at large (like global warming), it is difficult to conceive of travel in the 21st century that is purely “local.” Travel in the age of globalization, then, is at one and the same time both more widespread yet also more irrelevant than ever. As humans, goods, and information move around in ever-increasing quantities, and at ever-greater speed, it seems that mobility is at an all-time high in human history. On the other hand, as a rising number of people and places are interlinked through ever-faster travel and various forms of communication technologies, the local and the global are becoming harder and harder to distinguish.
In this, travel writing has faced a range of challenges that are both old and new. With contemporary travel writers facing a global reality that is very different from the colonial legacy of a traditionally Eurocentric genre, travel writers in the age of globalization have been forced to radically reconsider the itineraries, the destinations, the purpose, and the identity of the traveling subject. Traditionally defined as a white (European) male, the global traveler of the 21st century can take on many forms in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. At the same time, however, a large number of contemporary travel writers have found it hard to break with the mold of old, desperately continuing to pursue the exotic adventure and the untouched “otherness” of the blank spaces of a map that, in the age of Google Earth, satellite navigation, jet and space travel, global warming, and an explosive growth in human population, are no more.
Article
Trilling, Lionel
Sanford Pinsker
In an autobiographical lecture originally delivered at Purdue University in 1965 and later published in The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews 1965–75 (1979), Lionel Trilling recalled that the “great word in the College [Columbia] was INTELLIGENCE” and that he had early adopted the motto THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT from his teacher there, John Erskine. For Trilling, moral values coupled with an acute intelligence were at the center of what he did as a literary critic, cultural commentator, and educator. One could see these preoccupations as early as his dissertation on Matthew Arnold, which became a great success when it was published as a book in 1939. Trilling's study revealed much about Arnold's writing, and also about his thoughts as they related to the society in which he lived. As Trilling put it in the volume's preface: “I have undertaken in his book to show the thought of Matthew Arnold in its complex unity and to relate it to the historical and intellectual events of his time.” The result, Trilling concludes, “may be thought of as a biography of Arnold's mind.”
Article
The Turkish Novel as Transnational
Ayşe Özge Koçak Hemmat
The novel in the Turkish tradition has been a transnational genre, both in terms of its inception and production during the late Ottoman era, and by virtue of the novelists’ transnational experiences and the reflection of these experiences in their novels. Imperial transnationalism—intra- and inter-imperial exchanges and relations that predate the modern nation-state—is an essential lens through which to study the Ottoman novel, with its multiple sources and cross-cultural engagement and output that expand the scope of the “Ottoman novel” to the non-Turkish-speaking and non-Muslim subjects of the empire.
Following the split of the former Ottoman territories into nation-states that began in the 19th century and culminated after World War I, the Republic of Turkey attempted to forge a unique Turkish identity, an effort that involved cultivating a national literary tradition distinct from that of its imperial predecessor. The Republican-era novelists nonetheless continued to reflect on their transnational and cross-cultural experiences in their work. Some of these authors wrote while residing abroad for reasons ranging from exile to diplomatic service, illustrating the complexities of the concept and the reality of nation, imagined or otherwise. As the form and the substance of the Turkish novel evolved and flourished, culminating in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Orhan Pamuk in 2006, Turkish novelists enjoyed wider and more international audiences. Some recurrent themes in transnational Turkish novels are identity and language, belonging at home and abroad, and reconciling the past with the present.
While Turkish novelists now enjoy increased mobility and the ability to reach an international audience, with more of their work being translated and published abroad, and read and studied across the globe, the scope of international scholarship on the Turkish novel is still confined to the work of a small group of authors. This highly selective reception not only limits the range of works to which international audiences are exposed, but also suppresses the genre’s entanglement in the Turkish literary tradition with the crossing of boundaries—temporal and traditional, as well as physical. A transnational approach to studying the Turkish novel thus provides insight into the genre’s origins, evolution, circulation, and reception, but it also highlights its transgressive nature in a wide network of world literary and social developments through its evolution via travel, translation, and adaptation in different regions, and its negotiations with other literary forms.
Article
Twain, Mark
Ron Powers
Mark Twain is the fountainhead to the great winding waterway of America's native-born literature, a literature that finds profundity in the personal experience and everyday speaking habits of its people; in their typically wry humor in response to pretense, oppression, and sorrow; and in their founding democratic ideal that rebukes all forms of tainted privilege and power, including the deep American strain of racism. No other single author is as closely identified with shaping a voice that propelled the young nation toward its final break from the rigid dictates of European literary forms. No other nineteenth-century writer remains as readable at the dawn of the twenty-first, nor as strikingly prophetic of contemporary themes and concerns. And no figure ever did more to romanticize the experience of American boyhood.
Article
Twenty-First-Century Realism
Ulka Anjaria
Realism has a bad reputation in contemporary times. Generally thought to be an outdated mode that had its heyday in Victorian fiction, the French bourgeois novel, and pre-revolutionary Russian literature, literary histories tend to locate realism’s timely end in the ferment of interwar modernism and the rise of the avant-garde. Outside of the West, realism might be said to have met an even worse fate, as it was a mode explicitly presented to colonized societies as a vehicle of modernity, in opposition to what were deemed the poetic excesses, irrational temporalities, and/or oral-storytelling influences of indigenous literature. Yet despite this sense of realism’s outdatedness and political conservatism, the first decade-and-a-half of the 21st century has witnessed, across a wide range of literature and cultural production, what might be seen as a return to realism, not simply as a resistance to today’s new culture of heterogeneity and digitization but as a new way of imagining literary and political futures in a world increasingly lacking the clear-cut lines along which politics, history, and capitalism can be imagined. The arc of 21st-century realism can be seen through contemporary debates around the term, suggesting that considering 21st-century realism not as a residual mode or grouping of texts but as a particular perspective on literary futures—as the coming together, for instance, of unresolved and newer conflicts over relations of power and the politics of knowledge—offers a different story of global form making.
Article
Twenty-First-Century West Indian Fiction
Sheri-Marie Harrison
West Indian fiction in the 21st century continues a tradition begun in the late 1990s as the fourth generation of Anglophone Caribbean writing. Though West Indian writing dates back to the early 19th century, West Indian literature began coalescing into a discrete field of study in the 1930s, motivated in large part by the political imperatives of anti-colonialism, political independence, and decolonization. Much of the fiction published in the late 90s to the present continues to adhere to the realist mode of representing Caribbean life—both in the region and in diaspora—as well as thematic engagements with decolonization, cultural nationalism, migration, diaspora, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Historical novels, modernist narratives, coming-of-age stories, and neoslave narratives remain significant features of West Indian fiction, in ways that are geared toward negotiating sovereign realties for individuals and communities that share a history of colonial domination, slavery, indentureship, and more recently, depleted cultural nationalisms.
In the last decade, scholars in the field have begun the work of theorizing the recent fictional output as constituting its own discrete moment in literary development. What is distinct about contemporary writing is the way in which some authors have begun to ironically rework now-familiar forms, themes, and politics of West Indian writing. Some recent West Indian fiction produces atypical, often incomprehensible, and ultimately dissonant conclusions designed to complicate the political priorities of previous generations. This ironic approach typifies 21st-century West Indian fiction’s skepticism about the nation building and identity politics developed in previous waves—in particular, the conflation of identity with sovereignty. At the same time, this fiction doesn’t simply reject earlier modes: one of its defining aesthetic features is a re-inhabitation of the central forms and politics of preceding waves, in order to complicate them.
The central feature of the fourth generation of West Indian fiction, then, is a continued engagement with the region’s history of colonization, slavery, and decolonization that is also marked by critical and self-reflexive engagements with the Caribbean literary tradition.
Article
UFOs, UAPs, Aliens, and Extraterrestrials
Diana Walsh Pasulka
Unexplained phenomena seen in the sky are a source of impressions that range from fear, awe, inspiration, and wonder. They’ve inspired interpretations as varied as lost souls from purgatory, armor-like flying shields, to contemporary belief in extraterrestrials (aliens) and their spaceships (Unidentified Flying Objects [UFOs]). It has been argued that the belief in UFOs corresponds to the Cold War and Space Race era of US history (1945–1991), but a review of sources indicates that beliefs that other planets are populated by nonhuman intelligent beings are found in written sources of the Western tradition since ancient Greece and earlier as attested to by the oral traditions of many indigenous cultures. Beliefs that nonhuman intelligences populate other dimensions and establish communication with human beings is also found in ancient and contemporary religious and esoteric traditions. These testimonies form core tenets of various cosmologies that range from those found within Hopi culture, esoteric movements like Rosicrucianism, and modern religious movements such as The Nation of Islam. The contemporary belief in UFOs and aliens in the United States has taken on uniquely distinct characteristics. Mass media in the 20th century circulated tropes of the alien invasion to a global audience, while the beginning of the Space Race resulted in manufactured aerial objects in the skies like satellites and spacecraft debris. The UFO hoax emerged as an interpretive lens through which UFOs were staged as simultaneously objects of belief and disbelief, one consequence of which was to destabilize conventional systematic methods of research into the phenomena. These developments, combined with the revelation that the US Air Force actively managed the public perception of UFOs through programs like Project Blue Book, contributed to a modern narrative that UFOs exist and that some governments know this and are keeping this information from the public. Although most of the UFOs analyzed were found to be of terrestrial origin, some remain legitimately unknown. In June 2021, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an unclassified report of its findings. The group charged with compiling the report changed the name of the phenomena from UFOs to UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) to account for vehicular presence through transmedia phenomena such as water, air, space, or other mediums. Revelations about classified studies provoked the modern Disclosure movement, the goal of which is to prompt the US government to release information about its research programs. With the US government declaring that it studies UFOs, academics have also begun the public study without fear of stigma, augmenting the already advanced study of the topic by a parallel research tradition that consists of researchers who have had to use clandestine means to study and publish their research due to the stigma and classification associated with the topic.
Article
Updike, John
Patricia B. Heaman
John Updike is perhaps America's most versatile, prolific, and distinguished man of letters of the second half of the twentieth century, having created a literary oeuvre that includes fiction, poetry, essays, criticism, a play, children's books, memoirs, and other prose. His first published short story and poem appeared in The New Yorker in 1954; he joined the staff in 1955 and has continued to publish in that magazine throughout his career. Since his first book in 1958, few years have gone by in which he has not published at least one volume, as well as an impressive number of book reviews, short stories, poems, art reviews, and topical and personal essays. His reputation rests largely on his fiction, for which he has won numerous prestigious awards, prizes, and recognitions. His subject matter is closely linked to his personal experience of small-town, middle-class life in America from the time of World War II through the beginning of the twenty-first century. Much of his early work is based on memories of people, places, and events associated with his childhood and youth in southeastern Pennsylvania, and works of his mature period focus largely on the themes of marriage, adultery, religious faith, and family life. Despite occasional forays into non-American settings and past and future time frames, Updike's fiction for the most part reflects the culture, conflicts, and concerns of his readers' American time and place. His recent work often deals with a return to or reflection on the personal, historical, or literary past as it has created the present and is interpreted and transformed by a contemporary consciousness.
Article
Upton Sinclair and the Muckrakers
Erik Kongshaug
The forerunners of modern investigative journalism emerged during the US Progressive Era Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and became known as the muckrakers, a badge of shame they often wore with honor. Finding venues in the popular mass magazines of the early 20th century—such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and McClure’s—and in more overtly populist, socialist publications, such as the Appeal to Reason, that also had considerable readerships, these writers railed against corporate greed, political corruption, and to a lesser degree race discrimination (their race investigations seldom challenged Jim Crow or Mexican- and Chinese-Exclusion). Muckrakers’ value-driven investigations often clashed with the purported professional objectivity of the day’s more politically beholden mainstream journalists. Ironically, Upton Sinclair—who began as a romantic-minded novelist and never quite worked as a journalist, properly speaking—became the most famous among them. Sinclair’s investigation into the meatpacking industry, which brought him to fame as their exemplar, began as an assignment for the Appeal, before it developed into a novel, The Jungle. He had narrated it to move readers to socialism. Instead, it provoked Roosevelt to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act. Ignoring the disdain of high literary circles, Sinclair went on to self-publish a staggering number of reform-driven novels, book-length essays, and pamphlets grounded in evidence-based critiques of every conceivable injustice. He sold them directly, democratically, and cheaply to huge and growing audiences throughout his lifetime and became, arguably, the world’s first mass-market author. Sinclair also remains representative of the white, culturally Protestant narrative privilege that historical muckrakers tended to assume. He would rise to world prominence and would carry the muckrakers’ historical moment and movement beyond their own times, into its final connection with the more racially inclusive New Left that arose at the time of his death.
Article
US Central Americans in Art and Visual Culture
Kency Cornejo
After a long void in scholarship, literature on US/Central American art began to emerge in the decade of the 2010s. As this new body of literature emerges it is important to consider the politics of visuality and visibility as it informs production and reception of contemporary art by US Central Americans. During the years of US intervention that fueled Central American conflicts (1970s–1990s), the United States produced a visual discourse on Central Americans for US audiences, especially evident in photography, political posters, and Hollywood films. This visual discourse relied on a what I call a “solidarity aesthetics” for Central America, in which images and representations of Central Americans were made, selected, disseminated, and framed to produce empathy and encourage action with the region across the globe. Yet, this solidarity aesthetics entailed optical codes—imagery on poverty, violence, and tropical landscapes—that subsequently established a reductive visual trope about Central America still used today. This visual discourse not only objectifies a Central American subject, but further enables the erasure of US/Central American creative practices as it implies the region produces violence and not art. In the context of such visual discourse, art by Alma Leiva, Muriel Hasbun, Beatriz Cortez, Jessica Lagunas, and Óscar Moisés Díaz exemplifies a disruption of dominant visual discourse by US Central Americans artists. They create art and images that counter historical erasure and the visual tropes that propagate violence while offering alternative visual narratives that reflect on the legacies of war, US intervention, and the consequential displacement and mass migration of thousands of Central Americans.
Article
US–Japan Literary Interactions in the Transpacific Cultural History
Takayuki Tatsumi
In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry opened not only the doors of a “double-bolted land” as Herman Melville called Japan in Moby-Dick (1851) but also the possibilities of modern literature. While it is a half-Chinook, half-Scot American called Ranald McDonald who smuggled himself into Japan in 1848 and became the first teacher of English in the country, Gerald Vizenor, a distinguished Native American novelist, completed a postmodern novel Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), remixing Moby-Dick with Matsuo Basho’s haiku travelogue Narrow Road to the Far North, Lafcadio Hearn a.k.a. Koizumi Yakumo’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, and Ranald MacDonald’s Japan: Story of Adventure. After the opening of Japan, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901), one of the founding fathers of modern Japan, visited Europe and the United States of America, and decided to Westernize his own country. Being the first translator of Thomas Jefferson’s composed “The Declaration of Independence,” Fukuzawa published a million-selling An Encouragement of Learning (a series of seventeen pamphlets published from 1872 to 1876), in which the author emphasized the significance of sciences and the spirit of independence in the way comparable to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” (1837) and “The American Scholar” (1841).
While Professor Thomas Sergeant Perry, a great nephew of Commodore Perry, started teaching American literature in 1898 at Keio University, which Fukuzawa established, Yone Noguchi (Noguchi Yonejiro, 1875–1947), a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and Matsuo Basho, became famous as a cosmopolitan poet in the United States, receiving good reviews for the first collection of poems all written in English, Seen and Unseen (1896). It is highly plausible that his correspondence with Ezra Pound provided the latter with a key to promoting the poetics of imagism. Following the example of Noguchi, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894–1982), another cosmopolitan poet famous for the translation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, studied English literature and philology at Oxford University and published in 1925 the first volume of poetry Spectrum in London. Thus, Ezra Pound, who once admired Yone Noguchi in the 1910s, came to recommend Nishiwaki as the finalist for the Nobel Literary Prize in 1957.
The year 1955 saw the first postwar climax of transpacific literary history. William Faulkner, a major American modernist and recent laureate of Nobel Prize in Literature, paid his first visit to Japan in the summer of 1955, giving a series of seminars in Nagano. Speculating on Japanese culture, he gave an insight into the literary affinity between Japan and the American South in an open letter entitled “To the Youth of Japan.” American as he is, Faulkner shares the memory of lost war with the postwar Japanese, for he came from Mississippi, part of the Deep South, the very defeated nation in the Civil War. Without this memory of lost war, Faulkner could not have developed his apocryphal imagination. Therefore, it is very natural that Faulkner’s visit to Japan invited quite a few major Japanese authors to develop their own apocryphal imagination, ending up with major works published in 1973, the year of Oil Shock, all inspired by Faulkner’s double novel The Wild Palms (1939): Endo Shusaku’s Catholic novel Upon the Dead Sea, Oe Kenzaburo’s nuclear novel The Flood Invades My Soul, and Komatsu Sakyo’s science fiction novel Japan Sinks. Noting that the year of 1973 also saw the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, we could well locate here the genesis of transpacific postmodern literature in the 21st century.
Article
US Latina/os and the White Imagination
Lee Bebout
There is no singular manifestation of Latina/os in the white imagination. Rather, Latina/os occupy various, competing, and interdependent forms of representation. Latina/os are depicted as perpetually foreign and as the future of conservative American values. They are cast as lazy drains on society and as people who outwork Americans and take their jobs. Latinas are rendered as sexy señoritas who desire US white men and as hyper-fertile producers of “anchor babies” in the United States. And these are just a few of the ways in which US whiteness imagines Latina/os. These representations find expression in stereotypes, discursive tropes, and racial scripts—beliefs that explicitly or implicitly take narrative form. As a product of the white imagination, these depictions of Latina/os find expression in a wide array of discursive locations, from film and literature to journalism and political speech, to name a few.
These manifestations of Latinas/os in the white imagination stretch across US history from the late 18th century to the 21st century. These representations have been shaped by and met the exigencies of US whites’ national and racial projects. As such, depictions of Latina/os reveal crucial aspects of US whiteness within a given historical moment and across time. While there are numerous, often contradictory elements of these depictions, they are also interdependent and work together to meet the needs of whiteness. Critically, however, Latinas/os have not been imagined by whiteness without response. Rather, throughout this history, Latinas/os have actively negotiated these dominant racial scripts—from claiming whiteness and citizenship to asserting indigenous heritage or pride in ethnic heritage—in order to meet their own needs.
Article
The US–Mexico War and American Literary History
Jaime Javier Rodríguez
The US–Mexico War produced a wide range of literature in the United States that exposed the provisional and contingent qualities of US nationalism, even while it also asserted the anti-Mexican racism and xenophobia that continues to shape cultural and political discourse in the early 21st century. Much of the popular literature produced in mass-market novelette form, for example, deployed a range of Mexican enemies that ran through a sequence from noble, chivalrous opponents, to fiendish enemies and terrorist bandits. This instability in how writers saw Mexico and Mexicans suggests that the war could paradoxically generate critical self-reflections that countered essentialist notions of manifest destiny. The eventual projection of the bandit figure as the prototypical Mexican villain reinforced Anglo-American national self-definitions of moral, cultural, and racial superiority as a response to the destabilizing energies resulting from the invasion of a neighboring American republic. For Mexican American writers, the war, although a major feature of Mexican American literature, nonetheless became an environment in which to explore conditions of non-national, liminal border identities, which became strikingly relevant as the 20th century turned into the 21st. In Mexico, the agonized response to the nation’s failure to stop the “Yankee” invader led instead to a confrontation with its own lack of a unifying national identity and forced writers and political intellectuals to ask hard questions about Mexico’s destiny.
Article
Literary and Economic Value
Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon
“Value” is a concept structured by confusing relations between its social-ethical and its economic meanings (“I agree with your values”; “the sweater is a great value at that price”). The two meanings cannot be kept separate, but the negotiation of their relation has vexed theories of artistic and literary value since at least the rise of the discourse of aesthetics in the 18th century. Early attempts to separate aesthetic value from its economic counterpart involved analogies between what were understood to be different cognitive faculties (reason and emotion, say), and relations among competing claims to political standing (between the bourgeoisie and the sovereign, most of all). Liberal American conversations about literary and economic value after World War II worried over part-whole relations in terms of debates about the value of individual literary works in what seemed to be an ever-expanding multicultural canon. Postwar literary theories of economic and aesthetic value in a more Marxist vein turned to various narratives of the “subsumption” of social life by economic values: sometimes imagining that subsumption as a fatal error on the part of capitalism, since sociability is too unruly finally to organize according to economic principles, or as a terrible victory for a capitalism that had now transformed into something qualitatively different and more sinister, like a “bio-power.” But even these Marxist literary theories tended to ignore contemporary work in history, historical sociology, and critical theory that identified changes in the relation between what had once seemed to be at least notionally separate aesthetic and economic “spheres” not with subsumption per se, but with a crisis in capital’s ways of producing profitable surplus value, and exchangeable use values. Seen from the vantage of this scholarship, it becomes clear that not only do most discourses on the specific value of the aesthetic tend to lean too heavily on spatialized domain models of art and economics (which conceive of them as occupying, in reality or potential, different regions), but also this persistently demanded separation of art and economics rests in turn on a false distinction between politics and economics. Rethinking the specificity of art and literature without thinking of it as a separate sphere, or as necessarily resistant to capital, is a research project for the coming decades.
Article
Vernacular Arabic Literature in Tunisia in the 19th through 21st Centuries
Benjamin Koerber
Although vernacular varieties of Arabic—the so-called dialects—have been used in oral performance genres for centuries, they have held a much more restricted presence in written literature, which has traditionally been regarded as the exclusive domain of classical or standard Arabic (al-ʿarabīyah al-fuṣḥá). In contrast with the vernacular Arabic literatures of Egypt, Morocco, and the Levant, those of Tunisia have been scantly regarded by scholars. The first significant corpus of written texts in the vernacular Arabic of Tunisia emerged in the late-19th century, in Hebrew characters. This “Judeo-Arabic” literature was born of the intersecting currents of the Haskalah or Jewish “Enlightenment,” the Arab Nahḍah or “Renaissance,” and French literary culture, as well as trans-Mediterranean networks of trade and print technology. Although a significant portion of Tunisian Judeo-Arabic literature consisted of translations and adaptations from Hebrew, classical Arabic, and French, it also included many original works, especially in journalism and poetry. This vernacular literature, however, would decline under the impact of French colonialism and Zionism, before ceasing entirely by the 1960s. Meanwhile, a separate, but not entirely disconnected, series of vernacular literary experiments began to take shape in Arabic script at the beginning of the 20th century. From 1908, the satirical press emerged as the most significant medium for the publication of vernacular texts, which proliferated in response to the cultural, linguistic, and political changes brought by French colonialism. Printed folklore collections would constitute a second major venture in the writing down of vernacular Arabic, and became a means by which both French colonial administrators and Tunisian intellectuals “imagined” the Tunisian “nation.” The vernacular written in Arabic script would eventually find its way into short stories, novels, comics, cultural and political journalism, and internet writing. The expansion of vernacular writings in the 21st century corresponds to increasing economic and political liberalization, the foundation of organizations for the promotion of the vernacular, and new opportunities for publishing both in print and online.
Article
The Vernacular in American Literature
J. Peter Moore
At its most basic level the term “vernacular” denotes the nonliterary or common language of a given region. While the idea of a literature of the vernacular suggests a contradiction, this contradiction is useful in considering the study of American literature, if for no other reason than the notion of an American literature, up until the 20th century, also seemed like a contradiction. There is ample basis then for arguing not for the existence of a vernacular tradition in American writing, but that American writing itself is, if not a collection of vernacular traditions, a body of writing defined in relation to vernacularity. While the term provisionally acknowledges a range of meanings from the lowly and indigenous to the amateur and popular, all of these meanings are discursive and thus contingent upon context. The act of applying the term to a text tells us as much about the classificatory values of a moment as it does about the text itself. Abstracted then, the category of the vernacular serves two primary functions. It introduces difference, and it suggests hierarchy. This dual framework has historically allowed for the identification of neglected forms, which stand in contradiction to reigning models. The vernacular provides a means of celebrating marginalized modes of expression as well as the identity formations they index, while at the same time running the risk of pandering to stereotypes. Literary scholars of the vernacular tend to focus on questions of diction, and yet the category is not strictly linguistic; it includes a range of intuitive, improvisatory, and contextual practices. This leaves the perennial question, what is the literary vernacular—a style of language, a philosophy of form, a function of technological capture and dissemination, or a model of reception? In pursuing this question, readers are primed to see the ways in which the category opens onto several critical issues, from the representation of cultural difference to the identification of transnational bonds and contingent universals.
Article
A Very Brief Survey of Twentieth-Century Latin-American Literature
Jorge Fornet
The 20th century in Latin America began, in literary terms, with the emergence of Modernism, which exerted enormous influence over both sides of the Atlantic. From then on, the literature of the region—at least the literature written in Spanish and Portuguese—has been on a long process of assimilation in favor of the best features of the universal tradition enriched with the specificities of Latin American culture and history. Impacted both by competing aesthetic trends and social and political upheaval, the literature of Latin America provides a unique place from which to observe the contradictions of the region, as well as to attempt to answer the major questions that the region poses. Some basic certitudes do not prevent one recurring question from coming up: Does a Latin American literature exist? The answer is more complex than it appears on the surface, but the truth is that the most significant and ambitious moments of that literature—Modernism, the Vanguards, and the celebrated boom of the novel in the 1960s—have been those in which Latin American writers have been recognized as belonging to a common literary space. A journey through fictional narrative, poetry, essays, and even a relatively new genre such as testimony can attest to the way in which Latin Americans see themselves and think of themselves, with their own national and regional specificities and, in contrast with the others, beyond the space of the region. In the last decade of the 20th century, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Latin America was no longer what it had been for thirty years. By then, revolutionary dreams, guerrillas, the long nights of dictatorships, and the recovery of democracy—just to mention a few of its most recognizable aspects—felt like a distant past. In this context, a new generation emerged in order to close out the 20th century, and beyond that, to begin the 21st. To read, even if it is from a bird’s eye view, the interval between the Modernists to the 21st-century generation is the aim of these pages.
Article
Very, Jones
Gerry Cambridge
Jones Very's claim on literary posterity comes mainly from a brief period between September 1838 and the spring of 1840 when, in a burst of unprecedented creativity, he wrote the three hundred poems, mainly sonnets, that constitute that claim. During that period, Very believed, spectacularly so, that he had “seen the light” in religious terms. Whatever else it achieved—which wasn't much—this spell of religious exaltation was good for his poetry. Most of the rest of the roughly eight hundred seventy poems he composed, from the early 1830s, when he was in his early twenties, to 1880, the year of his death, was tepid stuff by comparison, mainly of interest these days to scholars wishing to see what “the proud full sail” of his best work had developed from and would molder into. Very was for a time associated with the transcendentalist movement headed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which emphasized personal intuition as a major source of spiritual truth. The Very scholar Helen R. Deese has argued convincingly, however, that the Very of the so-called “ecstatic” period, at least in his best work, was “essentially a mystic” outside classification.
