Andrew McCormick
ENGL 701: Graduate Methodology
Prof. Richter
20 Sept. 2010
Journal Assignment 1: Analysis of American Literature
In sifting through selected works from the 1950’s through the present decade of this preeminent, peer-reviewed journal, one might be struck by its fidelity to the Canon right through a mere decade or so ago. In my own topical analysis[1], it seems safe to speculate that what had long been primarily an interest in canonized writers and traditional, literary themes began to open up to new areas only in the 1990’s or so: by the late part of the last decade, American Literature boasted such cutting-edge works as “Chicano Ethnicity: Cultural Hybridity and the Mestizo Voice” and “Perverse Nature: Edgar Huntly and the Novel’s Reproductive Disorders.”[2] Comparing these contemporary, pluralistic pieces of scholarship to the equivalent issue a mere decade earlier, one is bound to be struck by the journal’s shift in content: the March 1988 edition, by contrast, seems to limit itself to more traditional terrain, featuring articles on “Willa Cather and Domestic Ritual,” “The Development of Dickinson’s Style,” “Frost and Modernism,” and similarly traditional, Canon-upholding material. Absent are any articles in January 1988 by or about minorities or issues of race and related issues.[3]
A brief discussion of the winter/early spring editions of 1958, ’68 and ’78 will, I hope, illustrate that these editions of American Literature were—in terms of content—much more fundamentally like the March 1988 edition discussed above than those issues that came after it (referring, of course, only to those that I examined, but working with the assumption that they are representative). This suggests to me that some kind of turning point came circa the late 1980’s or early 1990’s, one characterized by a more inclusive, multi-cultural, post-colonial, and post-structuralism-influenced tone which has, it would seem, persisted.[4]
January 1958 features some engaging pieces of scholarship focused primarily on either biographical and/or historical modes of criticism. Oscar Cargill’s article on the alleged influence, particularly concerning moral preoccupations and self-censorship, that William Dean Howells exerted on friend and at times protégé Henry James, seems based perhaps a bit more on historical and biographical information than on presumably needed analysis of the relevant texts themselves, and may strike modern readers of the journal as a bit dry (this being just my take on it, of course). George Roth’s very historicist discussion of the cultural and ideological functions of satire in early, Revolutionary-War era America is similar in this regard, as is George Stewart’s and Joseph Backus’s occasionally biographical, but above all, technical and formal attempt to offer a re-assembling of the “puzzle” that is Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which they explain is to be taken as having, albeit not obvious, a blueprint in which “Each [is] in Its Ordered Place” (the article’s title).
Moving ahead a decade to January of 1968, most of the primary articles seem similarly interested in the author’s lives, the historical factors shaping their work, and often, on what I would understand to be formalist-/New Critic-influenced close readings often intertwined to varying degrees with the historical and/or biographical. Some variety of formalism/New Criticism seems to be the primary modus operandi of Edward Clay’s “The ‘Dominating’ Symbol in Hawthorne’s Last Phase,” which offers an engaging, also rather technical explanation for the inferiority of Hawthorne’s later romances. Another article, Thomas Gullason’s almost purely biographical discussion of Stephen Crane’s childhood and early adolescent years of schooling at Pennington Seminary in New Jersey and this time’s supposed influence on his career trajectory and writing, also seems to lack in relevant connections to the author’s literature itself and come off as a rather bland, at best anecdotal history lesson (which, I suspect, would not fare well in today’s academic market).
Of the many articles I read or skimmed which might appropriately be considered biographical to some extent, one in particular which seemed more nuanced and enduring when thought of in relation to today’s scholarship, owing, I might argue, to a nicely balanced blend of thoughtful analysis of the author’s pertinent texts themselves and the underlying biographical thesis, was Milton A. Mays’s “Henry James, or, The Beast in the Palace of Art.” This is an engaging read which smoothly integrates well-researched biographical information with what one might call close reading of several of James’s popular works, notably the short stories “The Jolly Corner” and “The Beast in the Jungle.”
In James stories like these, the protagonists, whom Mays describes as “Jamesian surrogates,” “are haunted by” a “fear of personal failure [like that which James was apparently afflicted with]” (467). Mays connects his biographical argument about James to the “ambivalence” of the businessman figure in James’s work (his fiction as well as essays) (471-72), whom he describes as scarred by life but having not allowed life to pass him by (as protagonists like Brydon of “The Jolly Corner,” Mays contends, sadly come to realize they’ve done); and, in Mays’s argument, as James himself often feared he had done, given his odd-man-out status as a writer and intellectual in a time and place when the businessman was the default, respectable figure (474). It would seem obvious to say that more recent, speculative questions about James’s sexual preference in the context of a highly intolerant, late nineteenth century America, and how this would have shaped his life experience—including the supposed sense of alienation owing to a lack of active masculinity which Mays speaks of—is not a theme for discussion in this article. This makes one wonder if mainstream academe (and society at large) had apparently not quite yet, in the 1960’s, become adequately liberal for a discussion of homosexuality.
As briefly noted earlier in a footnote, the prize of the January 1968 edition, in my estimation, is Ross Labrie’s groundbreaking “Henry James’s Idea of Consciousness.” Labrie defines Jamesian consciousness as “the power which allows a subject to assimilate his environment—the taking of the macrocosm into the microcosm” (521). In addition to analyzing how James played off of one another characters whose “vessels” of consciousness were larger and more developed and characters whose were smaller and/or less developed; and in addition to considering to what extent James’s fiction examined the idiosyncratic and unique ways that a given person’s consciousness gave rise to particular interests or preoccupations, Labrie also presents biographical evidence of the author’s notion that consciousness is a complex, dynamic and evolving phenomena. Connections are also made to the author’s brother William, whose ideas and interests as a psychologist and philosopher were clearly of influence. In examining how consciousness, for a leading writer and thinker of his time, was a phenomenon that is subtle, amorphous and hard to measure or characterize, Labrie seems to craft a reading which, unlike some of the others in this edition, could, I think, still fare well in today’s post-structuralist climate in which the common consensus seems to be that the unstable, unfixed and frequently shifting thing that is identity is never reducible to one essence or bottom line, never easily pigeonholed. In this sense, it seems an enduring piece of scholarship (particularly when contrasted with some of the straightforward, narrowly historical/biographical readings earlier mentioned).
Another post-structuralist-leaning article in the January 1978 edition, “Evolving the Inscrutable: The Grotesque in Melville’s Fiction,” by Richard M. Cook, contends that Melville’s use of the grotesque serves to question those constructed categories and concepts people use “to make final sense of the world” (549-50). Ultimately, Cook returns to the metaphysical question of the human essence: “The grotesque quality of many of Melville’s characters derives from the fact that, whatever they look like, they behave as though they were not fully human—even as they raise the question of what it means to behave like a human being” (550). In both cases, explains Cook, the “physical[ly] grotesque” and the “behavior[ally] grotesque,” there is a manifest question as to just what we think the human essence is, and if such a thing can really be defined (552-53).
What would seem to strike modern readers of this article, some three plus decades later, is the absence of any discussion of that quintessential Other not discussed: the racial/ethnic Other. For in the midst of a nuanced, complex analysis of the way that that which seems “grotesque” is in fact indicative of an implicit questioning of those simplified constructs said to account for, or perhaps stand in for the human essence, an otherwise enduring argument that would fare well today, Cook does not delve into racial or ethnic territory, considering how the typically European male characters in Melville’s relevant works project an apparently constructed sense of alien grotesqueness onto non-whites in the service of an old Northern hemisphere/Southern hemisphere-civilized/uncivilized binary.[5] Modern readers, in other words, might be struck at how awkward it would be today to compose such a discussion without an at least partly post-colonial spin (see footnote). This article, then, might be held up as a good example of the ease with which one could discuss identity in depth three decades ago without race and colonialism being central or even peripheral concerns; and, accordingly, of how much more these valuable lenses have rightfully taken center stage since, say, the 1970’s.
Having already briefly discussed the March 1988 edition, which I have said seems a bit behind its times in terms of pluralism/multiculturalism, I move now into the edition of a decade later, which, as mentioned, reveals in its front matter alone that the content of the journal has shifted to accommodate more multicultural themes, particularly as they interact with an increasingly post-structural backdrop in which the stability of identity is constantly suspect. Probably the best example of what I am assuming to be a 1990’s shift toward a more multicultural and post-structural/post-modern body of content in American Literature is Rafael Perez-Torres’s article (March 1998) on “Chicano Ethnicity.” Perez-Torres analyzes, explicitly presenting in light of post-structural developments, the concept and nature of a “Mestizo voice” and identity. He conducts this analysis through examinations of a classic, 1950’s American film, Giant, starring Rock Hudson and Liz Taylor; through Tino Villanueva’s ekphrastic, post-colonial, Chicano-identity reaffirming poem “Scene from the Movie Giant”; and through semi-autobiographical novels by Chicano writer Oscar Acosta. Weighing similar and differing elements of these varied texts of different mediums, Perez-Torres posits that the Mestizo’s “voice,” a multifaceted one evidently employed strategically in different contexts, is indeed “a language in creation,” “articulat[ing] the formation of a culture in transition,” thus slowly but surely serving to “subvert dominant paradigms” (173, 156).
Also concerned with issues of racial identity and Otherness in America—both in and out of literature—is Lawrence Oliver’s “Writing from the Right during the ‘Red Decade,’” which sheds light on racist, sexist and conservative Southern writer Thomas Dixon’s (of Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation’s influence The Klansman fame) attacks on the left, notably W.E.B. DuBois. In short, Oliver discusses a couple of important factors ripe for analysis in Dixon’s novel The Flaming Sword: that it was “instrumental in shaping what Toni Morrison has termed ‘American Africanism’”, in which Africans and African Americans are “demon[ized]…in order to promote white hegemony” (133).
With these two March 1998 articles being focused on race/ethnicity and class tensions in twentieth century America, compared with none of the articles sharing these kinds of concerns in the edition from a decade earlier[6], one might, as I suggested earlier, argue that this indicates a shift in the journal’s interests.
As mentioned, my analysis of three editions from the current decade—March 2003, 2005 and 2008—seems to show a continuance in the journal’s growing interest in pieces of scholarship that shed light on alienated or disenfranchised groups, particularly owing to issues of race/ethnicity, gender, language, and other aspects of identity.
Examining the contents of the March 2003 edition certainly suggests an increasingly diverse content that perhaps reflects a shifting canon; of the seven primary articles, five are what we might classify as concerned with underrepresented or marginalized peoples and related themes: two are concerned with female identity, two with African American identity, and one with Jewish identity. One article concerns Melville’s book of poems Battle-Pieces, which reflected on the recent Civil War and, according to Deak Nabers, echoed concerns shared by others at the time and since with the paradoxical position the South was in during the reconstruction years given the way in which it was on the one hand legally and ideologically expected to be reincorporated into the Union, but on the other, subordinate to it (Nabers 2). Susan Edmunds considers “The Race Question” and “The Lynching Plot” in Toomer’s Cane, and Namoi Sofer’s discussion of “the complex, conflicted, and often internally contradictory visions of female authorship that abound in postbellum fiction” (22) also clearly concerns itself with a group that has often been overlooked: women writers. Stephanie Foote presents an argument about now abstruse and virtually unknown late nineteenth century New York writer Henry Harland, who wrote novels ostensibly about Jewish life and identity under a Jewish pseudonym. Foote explains, “One way to make sense of Harlands’s fraudulent marketing of identity is to think of him as one of the first people to see and act on the idea that identity is not a social category or an interior experience but a commodity valued and exchanged in the marketplace” (137). Finally, even Marsha Orgeron’s discussion of “Jack London and the Motion Picture Industry” in early twentieth century New York seems to have a post-colonial spin, discussing how a film based on the author’s trips to the “exotic” South Sea islands depicted “the unfamiliar rituals of the ‘noncivilized’ world” (91). In short, by the early 2000’s, the content and focus of this journal seems to have become much more post-structuralist and post-colonial.
Moving ahead to the March 2005 edition, almost every article now seems focused, either partly or primarily, around groups who would once have hardly or never been published on in this journal. Margo Crawford’s “Erasing the Commas: RaceGenderClassSexualityReligion [sic]”, Riche Richardson’s discussion of “The Geography of Black Masculinity,” Victoria Olwell’s analysis of “Women’s Genius and Eccentric Politics,” as well as articles touching upon issues including “Narrative Authority [and] Rape Rhetoric,” “Sentiment and Slavery,” and “The Labors of Femininity.”[7] The same pretty much holds true for the March 2008 edition, whose topics and themes include the argument that in one of her novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe “criticizes the value of emotion” to generate “moral change,” instead “focus[ing] on the more socially active elements of political participation” (from the abstract); Mike Chasar’s “The Sounds of Black Laughter and the Harlem Renaissance” including Claude McKay and Langston Hughes; Alissa Karl’s “Modernism’s Risky Business [as it relates to] American Consumer Capitalism”; and other articles touching upon “Hybridity [and] Identity among gay Mexican-American men as well as “Early American Women Critics.”[8] Evident in these recent editions is clearly a more multi-cultural interest that seeks to re-examine those who have been marginalized in America’s history—literary and otherwise.
Works Cited
Cargill, Oscar. “Henry James’s ‘Moral Policeman’: William Dean Howells.” American Literature. 29.4 (Jan. 1958): 371-398. JSTOR. Web. 10 Sept. 2010.
Clay, Edward M. “The ‘Dominating’ Symbol in Hawthorne’s Last Phase.” American Literature. 39.4 (Jan. 1968): 506-516. JSTOR. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.
Cook, Richard M. “Evolving the Inscrutable: The Grotesque in Melville’s Fiction.” American Literature. 49.4 (Jan. 1978): 544-559. JSTOR. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.
Crawford, Margo. “Erasing the Commas: Race, Gender, Class, Sexuality, Religion.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar. 2005): 1-5. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.
Dean, Janet. “Nameless Outrages: Narrative Authority, Rape Rhetoric, and the Dakota Conflict of 1862.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar 2005): 93-122. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.
Edmunds, Susan. “The Race Question and the ‘Question of the Home’: Revisiting the Lynching Plot in Jean Toomer’s Cane.” American Literature. 75.1 (Mar. 2003): 141-169. JSTOR. Web. 18 Sept. 2010.
Foote, Stephanie. “Ethnic Plotting: Henry Harland and the Jewish Writer.” American Literature. 75.1 (Mar. 2003): 119-141. JSTOR. Web. 18 Sept. 2010.
Gullason, Thomas A. “The Cranes at Pennington Seminary.” American Literature. 39.4 (Jan. 1968): 530-541. JSTOR. 17 Sept. 2010.
Karl, Alissa. “Modernism’s Risky Business: Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and American Consumer Capitalism.” American Literature. 80.1 (Mar 2008): 83-109. JSTOR. Web. 19 Sept. 2010.
Kern, Robert. “Frost and Modernism.” American Literature. 60.1 (Mar. 1988): 1-16. JSTOR. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.
Labrie, Ross. “Henry James’s Idea of Consciousness.” American Literature. 39.4 (Jan. 1968): 517-529. JSTOR. 17 Sept. 2010.
Luciano, Dana. “’Perverse Nature’: Edgar Huntly and the Novel’s Reproductive Disorders.” American Literature. 70.1 (Mar. 1998): 1-28. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2010.
Mays, Milton A. “Henry James, or, The Beast in the Palace of Art.” American Literature. 39.4 (Jan. 1968): 467-487. JSTOR. 18 Sept. 2010.
Morris, Timothy. “The Development of Dickinson’s Style.” American Literature. 60.1 (Mar. 1988): 26-41. JSTOR. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.
Nabers, Deak. “Victory of ‘Law’: Melville and Reconstruction.” American Literature. 75.1 (Mar. 2003): 1-30. JSTOR. Web. 19 Sept. 2010.
Oliver, Lawrence J. “Writing from the Right during the ‘Red Decade’: Thomas Dixon’s Attack
on W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson in The Flaming Sword.” American Literature. 70.1 (Mar. 1998): 131-152. JSTOR. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.
Olwell, Victoria. “’It Spoke Itself’: Women’s Genius and Eccentric Politics.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar 2005): 33-63. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.
Orgeron, Marsha. “Jack London and the Motion Picture Industry.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar 2005): 93-122. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.
Perez-Torres, Rafael. “Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice.” American Literature. 70.1 (Mar. 1998): 153-176. JSTOR. Web. 18 Sept. 2010.
Richardson, Riche. “Charles Fuller’s Southern Specter and Geography of Black Masculinity.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar 2005): 7-32. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.
Romines, Ann. “After the Christmas Tree: Willa Cather and Domestic Ritual.” American Literature. 60.1 (Mar. 1988): 61-82. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2010.
Roth, George G. “American Theory of Satire: 1790-1820.” American Literature. 29.4 (Jan. 1958): 399-407. JSTOR. Web. 09 Sept. 2010.
Sofer, Naomi Z. “’Carry[ing] a Yankee Girl to Glory’: Redefining Female Authorship in the Postbellum United States.” American Literature. 75.1 (Mar. 2003): 31-60. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.
Stewart, George M. and Backus, Joseph M. “’Each in Its Ordered Place’: Structure and Narrative in ‘Benjy’s Section’ of The Sound and the Fury.” American Literature. 29.4 (Jan. 1958): 440-456. JSTOR. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.
[1] I read select articles and perused the others from Jan. or March 1958, ‘68, ‘78, ’88 and ’98 as well as Jan. or March 2003, 2005 and 2008.
[2] Respectively, by Perez-Torres, Rafael; and Luciano, Dana. Amer. Lit. Mar. 1998 (70.1). Full MLA citations are available on my Works Cited page.
[3] The Cather article, as later footnote acknowledges, is in some sense concerned with gender, though not in the radical spirit that later articles will be; the Dickinson article seems highly formalist and not particularly interested in the author’s gender. As such, I feel comfortable calling the ’88 edition rather traditional for its time.
[4] I say this, I realize, at the risk of seeming to impose a false dichotomy, a constructed “before” and “after” in which Amer. Lit. has a clearly definable turning point with characterizable content in the two time periods. This might be an oversimplification that casts previous decades of scholarship in too shallow or primitive a light. As such, let me offer the disclaimer that earlier, pre-80’s and 90’s editions sometimes boasted scholarship that, in this student’s opinion at least, would hold up very well even in today’s (largely) theory-driven, post-structuralist and post-modernist climate of literary scholarship. A particularly good example of this, on which more to come, is Ross Labrie’s article on “Henry James’s Idea of Consciousness,” from the Jan. ’68 edition.
[5] Full disclosure: I had suspected this to be a notable anachronism of the article, but sought the backing of this interpretation by someone more familiar with Melville, who verified for me that the article would come off as suspiciously apolitical and un-racial if published today. Being not familiar with much of Melville’s work (I’ve only read some of his short stories), I consulted a colleague who did her MA thesis on Melville; she offered, after skimming the article under discussion here, some of the ideas that I present above. She referred to the article’s non-mention of race/ethnicity and the European/non-European binary as an “elephant in the room” by modern standards; she asserted that, from the vast amount of contemporary Melville criticism she has read, this article would not work nowadays without significantly altering its content to adopt a post-colonial angle. She, for one, finds it obvious that many “grotesque” Others in Melville’s work are racialized and echo rather Conradian (Conrad-esque?) themes.
[6] Though it might be worth mentioning that Anne Romines’s article from the 1988 edition, on “Willa Cather and Domestic Ritual,” does have a gender focus, not only in that it obviously concerns a woman writer, but also in that it explores how domestic rituals normally performed or facilitated by women function in significant ways in the writer’s work.
[7] See Works Cited page.
[8] See WC.
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