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Journal articles on the topic 'American literature History and criticism Theory'

Author: Grafiati

Published: 4 June 2021

Last updated: 29 January 2023

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1

Bucco, Martin, and Rene Wellek. "A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950. Volume 6: American Criticism 1900-1950." American Literature 59, no. 1 (March 1987): 126. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2926495.

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2

Židová, Diana. "Ethnic Literature and Slovak American Research." Ars Aeterna 6, no. 1 (June 1, 2014): 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/aa-2014-0001.

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Abstract The article outlines the beginnings of ethnic literature research in the United States of America with regards to its reception from the 1960s to the 1980s. Aesthetic merit as a leading consideration in the evaluation of literary works, in view of the opinions of numerous critics, is quite problematic to apply in the case of Czech and Polish literature. Considering the output of Slovak-American research in the field of literary criticism and literary history, the results are not satisfactory either. There are a few works that provide valuable insight into the literature of the Slovak diaspora.

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3

Dawidoff, Robert. "Criticism and American Cultural Repair." American Literary History 1, no. 3 (1989): 665–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/1.3.665.

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4

Constantinesco, Thomas. "American Literary Criticism in a Time of Pandemic." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 67–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab099.

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Abstract This essay reflects, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, on the relevance of literary studies in critical times, as well as on the notion of relevance as a measure of literary history and literary criticism. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Wendy Brown, it argues for a model of relevance as untimeliness, where the function of criticism is to derive from literary texts a critical politics that eventually speaks both to these texts’ complex historical context and to their readers’ present and ever-changing circumstances. It then turns to the nineteenth-century archive to illustrate the untimely relevance of American literary history at the present time. While Dickinson might seem to suggest that “To suspend the breath/Is the most we can” (F1067) in a time of crisis, intimating that literature is essentially the record of our helplessness in the unraveling of the world, the example of Emerson’s antislavery lectures, where both the blight of slavery and the cause of abolition are metaphorized as airborne contamination, offer a template for thinking about the dangers as well as the potentialities of viral contagion. American literature . . . captures the “air” or the atmosphere of history and equips us with models to take it in . . . Such is . . . [its] (un)timely relevance . . . at the present time.

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5

Giles, Paul. "Forms of Opposition in American Literary Criticism." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 158–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab077.

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Abstract Starting from Matthew Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865), this essay traces the importance of reading US literature and culture in comparative terms. Paying special attention to the work of Stuart Hall, Annette Kolodny, and F. O. Matthiessen, it argues that forms of structural opposition should be seen as embedded within American literature. Rather than understanding the subject itself in merely oppositional terms, it advocates antipodal and planetary critical perspectives that serve effectively to reposition the field within a wider context, one framed in various ways by biogenetic and environmental issues that exceed national boundaries. It concludes that while there are acute dangers for political leaders in a narrowness of vision, the same thing is true for literary criticism, where an undue narrowness of scope can be intellectually debilitating.

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6

Roberts, R. "American Science Fiction and Contemporary Criticism." American Literary History 22, no. 1 (November 20, 2009): 207–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajp048.

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7

Murray, L. J. "Escaping from the Pirates: History, Literary Criticism, and American Copyright." American Literary History 16, no. 4 (December 1, 2004): 719–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajh040.

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8

Bentley, Nancy. "Slow Criticism: American Literary Studies as a World." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 387–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab096.

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Abstract The authority of art in US society has declined even as cultural criticism has expanded and diversified, spreading to many sectors of society. While these conditions have affected American literary studies, scholars in the field produce criticism that can be distinguished from the criticism in other sectors by its commitment to historicist thought and by disciplinary standards for what it means to produce a “new reading.”

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9

Nemoianu, Virgil, and Rene Wellek. "A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950. Vol. 5: English Criticism, 1900-1950; Vol. 6: American Criticism, 1900-1950." MLN 101, no. 5 (December 1986): 1245. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2905719.

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10

Overton, Bill. "Review: Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism 1750–1990." Literature & History 2, no. 1 (March 1993): 96–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030619739300200107.

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11

Cruz, Denise. "On Dissonance and Its Functions in Asian American Criticism." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 91–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab101.

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Abstract Building upon recent work in Asian and Asian American studies, this essay explores dissonance, rather than disinterestedness, and its function and form for literary studies in our present time. It is inspired not only by my rereading of Matthew Arnold’s essay but also the convergence of key events over the course of the last few years, ranging from recent attention to Asian and Asian American cultural production to anti-Asian hate crimes. As an Asian Americanist, I research and teach in a field whose very emergence was tied to activist claims for institutional and disciplinary space. I therefore find it profoundly difficult to imagine our endeavors in American literary studies as “disinterested.” I am less invested in making the case whether or not the study of Asian American literature “matters”; rather, here I explore why Asian American literary studies—a method that seeks out and dwells in dissonance and urgency rather than disinterestedness and patience—might be a model worth continuing.

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12

Marotti, Maria. "The Italian Perspective: Italian Criticism of American Autobiography." a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 5, no. 2 (January 1990): 152–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08989575.1990.10815460.

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13

Oyarzún, Kemy. "Latin American Literary Criticism: Myth, History, Ideology." Latin American Research Review 23, no. 2 (1988): 258–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002387910002238x.

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14

Segovia, Miguel A., and W. Lawrence Hogue. "The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History." African American Review 38, no. 4 (2004): 737. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4134437.

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15

Tatsumi, Takayuki. "Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 119, no. 1 (January 2004): 92–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/003081204x23557.

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Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

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16

Roudeau, Cécile. "Toward Critical State Studies: Bringing the Democratic State Back into American Literary Criticism." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 315–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab074.

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Abstract This essay starts from the apparent disconnect between democracy and the State in American literary studies. Taking the case of antebellum US literature (James Fenimore Cooper and Lydia Maria Child), it contends that literature is one place of elaboration of a democratic statecraft. Nineteenth-century US literature has been read as both complicit with and resisting to reigning models of statecraft endorsing racial domination, bureaucratization, and the monopoly of violence. However, we remain indifferent at our own peril to the potential forces of State as a democratic public authority and of state regulation as a non-arbitrary public provision. Putting American literature to the test of statecraft and statecraft to the test of literature, critical State studies proposes to revisit literary practices as a mode of critique in nineteenth-century state building. Nineteenth-century literature, I argue, both facilitated and performed this critique. Reading nineteenth-century US literature from the perspective of critical State studies—here, reading The American Frugal Housewife as a manual of democratic regulatory practice, or The Pioneers as an attempt at democratic environmental governance—allows us to investigate how literature, as a mode of representation and a political practice, gives shape and voice to alternative modes of statecraft. Turning the State into a methodological problem, a pressure point of generative possibilities, critical State Studies requires that we attend to an alternative genealogy of the State and recover a past that has not yet been present in our reading of American literature.

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17

Lewis, Bart L. "Recent Criticism of Nineteenth-Century Latin American Literature." Latin American Research Review 20, no. 2 (1985): 182–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0023879100034579.

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18

Albin, María C., and Raúl Marrero-Fente. "Celebrating the Millennium: Latin American Literature and Criticism." Latin American Research Review 34, no. 3 (1999): 252–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0023879100039479.

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19

Ueda, Reed. "IMMIGRATION AND THE MORAL CRITICISM OF AMERICAN HISTORY: THE VISION OF OSCAR HANDLIN." Canadian Review of American Studies 21, no. 2 (September 1990): 183–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cras-021-02-04.

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20

Price, Kenneth M. "Hamlin Garland's "The Evolution of American Thought": A Missing Link in the History of Whitman Criticism." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 3, no. 2 (October 1, 1985): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1107.

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21

Sanders, Leslie. "THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: SOME RECENT AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM." Canadian Review of American Studies 21, no. 2 (September 1990): 247–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cras-021-02-10.

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22

Redl, Carolyn. "Ten Year Checkup: Feminist Criticism and the American Literary Canon." Canadian Review of American Studies 22, Supplement 2 (January 1992): 193–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cras-022s-02-03.

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23

Avallone, Charlene. "What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 112, no. 5 (October 1997): 1102–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/463486.

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Since “American renaissance” criticism emerged in 1876, it has derogated women's writings while idealizing men's, despite its shifting definitions of period, canon, and literary standards. My genealogy of the critical discourse of renaissance details ways that this criticism has denied literary value to women writers, especially at historical moments of women's increased publicity and apparent gains of power, thereby helping to maintain larger gender and racial hierarchies. Because of this tradition, I argue, the renaissance discourse is inadequate to current efforts to reenvision United States literary history and to a democratic culture.

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24

Saldívar, Ramón. "Criticism on the Border and the Decolonization of Knowledge." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 327–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab078.

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Abstract Structures of hierarchy and domination are never represented in transborder literature as singular effects of social conditions. Instead, they arise from multiple historical factors. Unlike writings that assume a racial binary, literature on the border does not posit one kind of domination and hierarchy as barriers to creating a just, democratic society. In recent literary works from the transborder regions, the yearning for justice within the layered social systems on the border is central, even while its attainment through social transformation remains an attenuated hope. This essay outlines a paradigm for studying the relations between global and local areas of study, such as those in the transborder regions of the Americas. Invoking models for literary critical work in a globally bordered form, it posits the need for a larger view based on how knowledge is generated and human resources used, while acknowledging the reservoir of knowledge that exists beyond Europe and the US in the Global South. The function of the rebordered criticism described here is to respond to issues raised by African philosopher Achille Mbembe, Latin American sociologist Enrique Dussel and other decolonial thinkers concerning different ways of conceiving the achievement of an antiracist and socially just future. In the face of [the] compromised hopefulness [for justice on the border], what kind of criticism could best [respond to and] … help enact projects of social change?

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25

Lisboa, Maria Manuel. "Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks & Strategies of Post-Structuralist Criticism by Bernard McGuirk." Portuguese Studies 19, no. 1 (2003): 228–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/port.2003.0002.

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26

Mariani, Giorgio. "A View from the Heart of Europe." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 267–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab093.

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Abstract There are at least three ways of understanding “criticism”: 1) as literary scholarship; 2) as teaching; 3) as a way of engaging the general reading public regarding the significance of literary and cultural matters. Every country has developed its own traditions in each of these three areas. This brief essay focuses on the Italian case, arguing that teachers of American literature need to make the most of their role as cultural mediators and translators, as in the formative years of Italian American Studies. The influence of the corporate model on the Italian public university, along with other factors, has made relations between literary scholars’ and the nonacademic public sphere tenuous. Unless the democratic political ethos that presided over the birth of the discipline is rediscovered, the future for Italian “American literary criticism”—in all the three articulations mentioned above—will be rather bleak.

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27

Seybold, Matt. "Economics and American Literary Studies in the New Gilded Age, or Why Study the History of Bad Predictions and Worse Rationalizations?" American Literary History 31, no. 4 (2019): 587–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz041.

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Abstract This introduction to the special issue on Economics and American Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age traces an underexplored history of dissent within the discipline of economics through presidential addresses to the American Economic Association and writings by John Maynard Keynes. It acknowledges the “vexed history” of interdisciplinary engagement between economists and literature scholars, including a recent, halfhearted call for “narrative economics” from 2013 Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller. Seybold suggests that new brands of econo-literary criticism have risen to promise in the last decade and that contributors to this special issue demonstrate the importance of historicism to this subfield, despite its apparent presentist tendencies.

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28

Warren, Kenneth W. "Back to Black: African American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 369–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab082.

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Abstract For more than a century, scholars of Black literature have sought to align a critical project focused on identifying and celebrating Black distinctiveness with a social project aimed at redressing racial inequality. This commitment to Black distinctiveness announces itself as a project on behalf of “the race” as a whole, but has always been, and remains, a project and politics guided in the first instance by the needs and outlook of the Black professional classes. Over the first half of the twentieth century, this cultural project achieved some real successes: politically, it helped discredit the moral and intellectual legitimacy of the Jim Crow order that in various ways affected all Black Americans; culturally, it placed Black writers in the vanguard of a modernist project predicated on multicultural pluralism. Since the 1970s the limitations of this project, culturally and politically, have become increasingly evident. Blind to the class dimension of their efforts, literary scholars continue to misrepresent the historical/political nature of the project of Black distinction as a property of cultural texts themselves. Overestimating the efficacy of race-specific social policies, these scholars disparage the universalist social policies that would most effectively benefit a majority of Black Americans.

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29

Burzyński, Tomasz. "Pandemic Automobility. Patterns of Crisis and Opportunity in the American Motor Culture." Review of International American Studies 14, no. 2 (December 19, 2021): 143–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.31261/rias.11810.

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This article traces the recursive character of automobility from a perspective of cultural crises and traumas that accompany motor culture development in the USA. The American automobility system has been caught in the treadmill of ideological criticism that defined the current role of motor vehicles in forms of political activism and cultural criticism. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is different as it seems to bring restoration to the original character of motor culture with its defining features of individualism, freedom, and opportunity achieved through mobility.

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30

Lansky, Ellen. "All Aboard." English Language Notes 60, no. 1 (April 1, 2022): 139–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9560265.

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Abstract This essay situates Ernest Hemingway’s iconic “Hills Like White Elephants” as a short story about drinking. From this perspective, Hemingway’s story enables readers to experience a personal and deeply felt emotional engagement with the characters, the scene, and the situation. Moreover, his technique enlists readers as “drinking buddies” and provides an entrée into the culture of alcohol. Despite the macho image that Hemingway himself helped construct and deploy, his work invites women into the scene and, indeed, centralizes a key figure often overlooked in the history of modern American fiction criticism: the drinking woman.

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31

Lye, Colleen. "Asian American Cultural Critique at the End of US Empire." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 237–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab100.

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Abstract Sharpening contradictions in US–China economic interdependency has created a crisis and an opportunity for Asian American cultural critique. A crisis in that it is plainer than ever before that antiracism and anti-imperialism do not necessarily align; an opportunity in that US and China’s financial entanglements have fueled a boom in the Asian American novel as a lively genre of the transPacific credit economy. At the very least, this makes for the new social relevance of Asian American novel criticism.

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32

Voelz, Johannes. "The Postliberal Aesthetic; or, How Can Literary Criticism Help Unsettle America’s Polarization?" American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 354–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab080.

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Abstract This essay interprets the present moment as marked by democratic crisis and assigns to American literary criticism the task of responding to it. While American democracy faces multiple crises, the essay contends that current levels of polarization make it impossible to effectively address any of them. In this situation, literary studies confronts a dual challenge: it must, first, come to terms with its own contribution to the dynamics of polarization and, second, consider whether it can help undo it. Adopting a cultural–sociological perspective, the essay identifies literary studies as an institution that consolidates the politico-cultural identity of the “new middle class” and contributes to the culturalization of politics underlying contemporary polarization. However, the essay contends, American literary studies has the capacity to help revive democratic culture if it nurtures reading practices that unsettle fixed identities. To that end, the essay singles out various recent theories of reading whose democratic potential is grounded in their shared premise that literature is a communicative act. In interpreting these models of criticism as a potential way out of the malaise of polarization, the essay makes a call to revisit, reevaluate, and reformulate the tradition of liberalism.

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33

Dillon, John Noël. "CONJECTURES AND CRITICISM IN BOOK 1 OF THECODEX JUSTINIANUS." Classical Quarterly 65, no. 1 (April 2, 2015): 321–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838814000640.

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Since 2007, a team of American and British ancient historians has been preparing a new translation of theCodex Justinianus. The ‘Codex Project’ was launched by chief editor Bruce W. Frier; the goal of the project is to create the first reliable English translation of theCodex Justinianuson the basis of the standard edition by Paul Krüger. Since 1932, the notoriously unreliable translation by Scott has remained the only one in English. The new translation by the Codex Project should appear soon.

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34

Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Alternatives to Periodization: Literary History, Modernism, and the “New” Temporalities." Modern Language Quarterly 80, no. 4 (December 1, 2019): 379–402. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7777780.

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Abstract Can literary history be done without the conventional reliance on linear periodization? What might a literary history of modernism look like without the usual periodization of roughly 1890–1940? This essay reviews the arguments for and against periodization and then argues that the new time studies—based in nonlinear concepts of time for the study of the contemporary—offers alternatives to the Eurocentric periodization of modernism. These new temporalities were anticipated by early twentieth-century Euro-American modernism, presented in the essay with an account of the dramatic debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson in 1922 and a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s experiments with the relationality of space and time in her fiction. Multidimensional, layered, and disjunctive concepts of time are better suited for the study of planetary modernisms that incorporate the colonial and postcolonial modernities. Kabe Wilson’s multimedia installation based on a remix of A Room of One’s Own and selected criticism on modernism are used to illustrate alternatives to linear periodization.

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35

LeMenager, Stephanie. "The Functions of American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment: A Literary Historical Memoir." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 212–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab092.

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Abstract The author traces her development as a scholar of the environmental humanities at the intersection of US/American, postcolonial, and decolonial studies in order to pursue the question of the function of American literary criticism in the present moment. This critical memoir presumes that any contemplation of disciplinary methods or futures reflects a politics of location, and it attempts to craft a site-specific reflection on methods.

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36

Piechucka, Alicja. "Art (and) Criticism: Hart Crane and David Siqueiros." Text Matters, no. 8 (October 24, 2018): 229–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2018-0014.

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The article focuses on an analysis of Hart Crane’s essay “Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros.” One of Crane’s few art-historical texts, the critical piece in question is first of all a tribute to the American poet’s friend, the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. The author of a portrait of Crane, Siqueiros is a major artist, one of the leading figures that marked the history of Mexican painting in the first half of the twentieth century. While it is interesting to delve into the way Crane approaches painting in general and Siqueiros’ oeuvre in particular, an analysis of the essay with which the present article is concerned is also worthwhile for another reason. Like many examples of art criticism—and literary criticism, for that matter—“Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros” reveals a lot not only about the artist it revolves around, but also about its author, an artist in his own right. In a text written in the last year of his life, Hart Crane therefore voices concerns which have preoccupied him as a poet and which, more importantly, are central to modernist art and literature.

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So, Richard Jean, and Edwin Roland. "Race and Distant Reading." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 135, no. 1 (January 2020): 59–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.1.59.

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This essay brings together two methods of cultural‐literary analysis that have yet to be fully integrated: distant reading and the critique of race and racial difference. It constructs a reflexive and critical version of distant reading—one attuned to the arguments and methods of critical race studies—while still providing data‐driven insights useful to the writing of literary history and criticism, especially to the history and criticism of postwar African American fiction, in particular James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Because race is socially constructed, it poses unique challenges for a computational analysis of race and writing. Any version of distant reading that addresses race will require a dialectical approach. (RJS and ER)

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38

Pérez-Torres, Rafael. "Gatekeeping Stories of Dissent and Mobility." American Literary History 31, no. 2 (2019): 312–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz012.

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AbstractThree new studies consider the significance of storytelling in a Latinx and hemispheric American context around the turn of the millennium. Where neoliberal policies seem to position ethnoracial subjectivities in realms of social abjection or racial containment, these studies contribute to interdisciplinary conversations about racial affiliation, economic aspiration, and political dissent in literature. Each considers writers either engaging complex negotiations between racial and class affiliations, challenging social expectations for cultural products in an ethnic marketplace, or speaking against repressive governmental regimes. Each weighs a hope for transformative social change against the efficient, impersonal, even brutal management of modern ethnoracial otherness. Elda Román analyzes stories about upward mobility for racially or ethnically identified characters who strive to maintain a critical sense of racial affiliation while seeking greater social and class mobility. Since forms like magical realism often mark the ethnic identification of an author, Christopher González considers how unexpected or challenging narrations break down restrictive perceptions of what Latinx literature can be. Theresa Longo, deliberating over a radical Latin American literature of dissent distributed to US audiences by small publishing houses, sketches an intellectual history of radical thought in the Americas that has informed a dominant strain of US Latinx criticism.

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Dewalt, Robert. "Tom's Investigation: The Development of the Surveillance Theme in the Composition of The Great Gatsby." F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 14, no. 1 (November 1, 2016): 110–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.14.1.110.

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Abstract This article traces the composition history of The Great Gatsby from manuscript through galley proofs to the published novel, indicating how Fitzgerald intensified conflict between Gatsby and Tom by making Tom the investigator of a bootlegger rumored to have been a German spy during World War I. It shows the conflict to be a displaced reprise of American anti-German sentiment during the war, which provides a gloss on the billboard of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and the tale of the brewer who built Gatsby's mansion. It cites Nick Carraway's rhetorical tendencies as evidence of the war's persistent effects and contrasts them with Fitzgerald's social criticism.

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40

Gillman, Susan. "The Political, the Personal, and “The Function of American Literary Criticism at the Present Time,” 1983–2021." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 174–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab085.

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Abstract Focused on the work of Amy Kaplan and Edward Said, two critics known for their engagements with that longtime hot-button slogan, “the personal = the political,” this essay updates Mathew Arnold’s formula of the function of criticism at the present time. In her 2003 ASA presidential address, Kaplan posed the question, what should be the role of American studies scholars today, in the face of American empire today?—and together with Said, she answered it in a series of experiments with form. The essay, the address, and the book, all three reoriented toward making the personal = the political, become their routes to thinking empire as an ongoing historical subject, anarchic and incoherent rather than monolithic. The work on US empire in the 1980s, when Kaplan’s denial thesis on the absence of empire in American studies took hold and inspired so many scholars, is still present but with new terminology in new disciplinary locations. The larger function of criticism appears when we superimpose the timeline of earlier empire work onto other, current confluences of dates (the centenaries 1992/1998, 9/11, BLM, and COVID-19, 2019–2020) and speculate on the why of these still-open-ended key contexts, textual clusters of empire.

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POSNOCK, ROSS. "“LIKE BUT UNALIKE”: ERIC SUNDQUIST AND LITERARY HISTORICISM." Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 3 (October 4, 2007): 629–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s147924430700145x.

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Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)As measured by that deadly but inescapable phrase “quantity and quality,” Eric Sundquist is perhaps the most productive American literature scholar of his generation. Since 1979, when he was still in his twenties, he has authored half a dozen books while editing another half-dozen. All have made an impact and many of these have been highly influential—his first book, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, was among the very first to read canonical American works through the lens of contemporary literary and psychoanalytic theory; his edited collection American Realism: New Essays (1982) proved pivotal in reviving the critical energy in a major but long-dormant literary and historical period. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993) was by implicit design and to powerful effect nothing less than a rewriting of the foundational work of American literary history and criticism—F. O. Matthiessen's monumental American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). I will spend some time describing To Wake the Nations not only because of the book's exceptional importance but because its eloquent introduction provides the closest thing to a critical credo that Sundquist has written. His description there of his critical ideals—particularly of “justice,” boundary-crossing and “verification”—will help orient our approach to Strangers in the Land, which remains loyal to these ideals as it extends his interest in race and ethnicity, black and white, to the tormented subject of blacks and Jews, united by a “bond of alienation.” (52).

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Dickerman, Leah. "Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life." October 174 (December 2020): 126–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00411.

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In 1934, Aaron Douglas created an epic four-panel mural series, Aspects of Negro Life (1934), for the branch library on 135th Street in Manhattan, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The panels answered a call, issued by the first major program for federal support of the arts in the United States, to represent “an American scene.” In them, Douglas traced the trajectory of African American history in four stages and across two mass migrations: from Africa into enslavement in America; through Emancipation and Reconstruction; into the modern Jim Crow South; and then northward with the Great Migration to Harlem itself. The narrative Douglas constructed was remarkable in both its historical sweep and as a story of America seen through Black eyes. This essay explores how Douglas's approach to the trenchant and understudied Aspects of Negro Life panels was shaped by rich conversations across a decade-about what it meant to be Black in America, how the “African” in “African-American” was to be understood, and what a distinctly African-American modernism might be-with an interdisciplinary nexus of thinkers, activists, and artists that included W. E. B. Du Bois; a co-founder of the NAACP and co-editor of the Crisis, sociologist Charles S. Johnson; poet-activist James Weldon Johnson; bibliophile Arturo Schomburg; and philosopher-critic Alain Locke. Looking at Douglas's visual narrative in this context offers insight into how parallel practices of archive-building, art making, history writing, and criticism came together not only to shape a vision of America but also to champion a model of Black modernism framed through diaspora.

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Li, D. L. "The State and Subject of Asian American Criticism: Psychoanalysis, Transnational Discourse, and Democratic Ideals." American Literary History 15, no. 3 (September 1, 2003): 603–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajg033.

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de Souza, Leonardo Cruz, Antônio Lúcio Teixeira, Guilherme Nogueira M. de Oliveira, Paulo Caramelli, and Francisco Cardoso. "A critique of phrenology in Moby-Dick." Neurology 89, no. 10 (September 4, 2017): 1087–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1212/wnl.0000000000004335.

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Phrenology has a fascinating, although controversial, place in the history of localizationism of brain and mental functions. The 2 main proponents of phrenology were 2 German-speaking doctors, Joseph Gall (1758–1828) and Johann Spurzheim (1776–1832). According to their theory, a careful examination of skull morphology could disclose personality characters. Phrenology was initially restricted to medical circles and then diffused outside scientific societies, reaching nonscientific audiences in Europe and North America. Phrenology deeply penetrated popular culture in the 19th century and its tenets can be observed in British and American literature. Here we analyze the presence of phrenologic concepts in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, by Herman Melville (1819–1891), one of the most prominent American writers. In his masterpiece, he demonstrates that he was familiarized with Gall and Spurzheim's writings, but referred to their theory as “semi-science” and “a passing fable.” Of note, Melville's fine irony against phrenology is present in his attempt to perform a phrenologic and physiognomic examination of The Whale. Thus, Moby-Dick illustrates the diffusion of phrenology in Western culture, but may also reflect Melville's skepticism and criticism toward its main precepts.

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Novoseltseva, A. V. "A novel study: history and modernity." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Humanitarian Series 64, no. 2 (May 18, 2019): 200–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.29235/2524-2369-2019-64-2-200-208.

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There is the necessity in the contemporary science of literature for development of the intra-genre novel typology to systematize the knowledge of certain novel texts and determine the aesthetic possibilities of the modern novel. Traditionally the genre novel typology is considered in social-historical way and based on its content characteristics. Representatives of formalistic approach suppose the genre as a system of methods; they emphasize the artistic uniqueness of new novel form, which determines the specificity of the plot development and theme disclosure in a novel. G. N. Pospelov associates the interpretation of characters with the plot-composition peculiarities, M. M. Bakhtin formulates the idea of dialogue, defines the monologic and polyphonic novels. Bakhtin’s novel theory is developed by N. A. Verderevskaya, focusing on the image structure of protagonist. A. Ya. Esalnek considers the genre of a novel in close interconnection between the method and style of the author. N. S. Leites carries on the tradition of formalistic approach, and according to the type of plot formation, singles out a novel of direct and indirect reflection. N. D. Tamarchenko retraces the novel evolution through its aesthetic potential in the works of famous authors. The classifications developed in Western European literary criticism (the Anglo-American school of “neo criticism”, the German school of “interpretation”) are distinguished with dualism or variability. They focus on the structural organization, the artistic relationship between the author and narrator, author and character.

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Walhout, M. D. "F. O. Matthiessen and the Future of American Studies." Prospects 22 (October 1997): 1–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s036123330000003x.

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Now that the Soviet empire has collapsed, it is time for a fresh look at the victims of the oppositional “Cold War criticism” that came to dominate American Studies in the 1980s. Hoping to stem the tide of the Reagan Revolution, the “New Americanists,” as Frederick Crews dubbed the academic heirs of the New Left, instigated a sweeping critique of their own discipline, charging the founders of American Studies with complicity in imperialism abroad and McCarthyism at home. Of all the founders, none was interrogated more thoroughly than F. O. Matthiessen, long regarded as the very model of a critic for whom radical politics and academic criticism were not mutually exclusive commitments. As late as the early 1980s, critics were still hailing Matthiessen as a pioneer in the development of American Marxist criticism. Frederick Stern, for example, asserted that Matthiessen's “methodology as a critic, though not in any pure sense Marxist…, comes closer to some of the distinguished efforts of the Marxist critics of Europe than does the work of just about any other major American critic of Matthiessen's time” (44). Similarly, Leo Marx argued that “in his subtle treatment of the interplay between literature and society, Matthiessen in a sense anticipated the development of a more supple Marxist cultural and literary theory since its liberation from the rigid doctrinal cast of the Stalin era” (256). Yet it was also in the early 1980s that the first blow to Matthiessen's reputation was struck in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, a collection of papers from the English Institute whose title, echoing that of Matthiessen's magnum opus, announced the beginning of an ambitious campaign to revise the history of American Studies – a campaign that proved to be quicker and easier than anyone could have expected.

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Girard, Melissa. "J. Saunders Redding and the “Surrender” of African American Women's Poetry." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 132, no. 2 (March 2017): 281–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2017.132.2.281.

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J. Saunders Redding's To Make a Poet Black (1939) changed the way African American poetry would be read and valued. In an effort to articulate an African American modernism, Redding rewrote the recent history of the New Negro Renaissance, validating and skewing its literary production. The standards and values that Redding used helped to advance the reputations of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer but also led to discrimination against femininity and its associated poetic forms. By incorporating the gendered matrix of the New Criticism into African American literary studies, he helped to create a new formal consensus, which cut across the black and the white academies and united critics on the left and the right of the ideological spectrum, in opposition to women's poetry.

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Wuntu, Ceisy Nita. "JAMES FENIMORE COOPER AND THE IDEA OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION IN THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES (1823-1841)." Rubikon : Journal of Transnational American Studies 1, no. 2 (September 1, 2014): 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.22146/rubikon.v1i2.34218.

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The spirit to respect the rights of all living environment in literature that was found in the 1970s in William Rueckert’s works was considered as the emergence of the new criticism in literature, ecocriticism, which brought the efforts to trace the spirit in works of literature. Works arose after the 1840s written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margareth Fuller, the American transcendentalists, are considered to be the first works presenting the respect for the living environment as claimed by Peter Barry. James Fenimore Cooper’s reputation in American literary history appeared because of his role in leading American literature into its identity. Among his works, The Leatherstocking Tales mostly attracted European readers’ attention when he successfully applied American issues. The major issue in the work is the spirit of the immigrants to dominate flora, fauna and human beings as was experienced by the indigenous people. Applying ecocriticism theory in doing the analysis, it has been found that Cooper’s works particularly his The Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841) present Cooper’s great concern for the sustainable life. He shows that compassion, respect, wisdom, and justice are the essential aspects in preserving nature that meet the main concern of ecocriticism and hence the works that preceded the transcendentalists’ work places themselves as the embryo of ecocriticism in America.Keywords: Ecocriticism, James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales, living environment, sustainable life

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Cadieu, Morgane. "Afterword: The Littoral Museum of the Twenty-First Century." Comparative Literature 73, no. 2 (June 1, 2021): 237–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00104124-8874117.

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Abstract The museum, the mausoleum, and the memorial are key concepts for theorizing beaches and ports in twenty-first-century literature and cinema. On the littoral, these constructions suggest the very opposite of a sealed off monumentality to become living museums of women’s labor in modern and contemporary France (Sciamma, Varda), bodily mausolea of migration on the Senegalese shoreline (Diop), and shapeshifting war memorials in Atlantic and Pacific tidelands (Darrieussecq, Rolin, Virilio). Examples of anamorphic seascapes, especially in photography, underscore the reversibility of sand and cement in Japan (Narahashi, Ono), as well as the dereliction of Cuban beach architecture and American industrial harbors (Morales, Sekula). In art as in criticism, the waterfront stages gender and class crossings (Dumont) and tangles fields. The afterword thereby weaves the major threads of the special issue: textures, labor, and ruins; social mobility and migration; marine life, geological time, and the history of sensation.

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Neira Palacio, Edison. "Gutiérrez Girardot y Mito: el contexto universal y las fuentes como escenario de la crítica." Estudios de Literatura Colombiana, no. 17 (November 2, 2013): 83–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.17533/udea.elc.17371.

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El presente artículo analiza la función social e intelectual de la revista Mito en las letras y cultura colombianas, y en particular, el papel del ensayista y filósofo colombiano Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot (1928-2005) quien fue miembro del grupo fundacional y colaborador permanente de la revista.Descriptores: Literatura colombiana; Gutiérrez Girardot, Rafael; revista Mito; revistas literarias; literatura latinoamericana; ensayo; crítica literaria; estudios culturales; sociología de la literatura; historiografía literaria.Abstract: The present article analyzes the social and intellectual role of the journal Mito in the Colombian letters and culture, specially the role of the essayist and Colombian philosopher Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot (1928-2005) who was member of the initial journal's group and its permanent collaborator. Key words: Colombian literature; Gutiérrez Girardot, Rafael; journal Mito; literary journals; Latin American literature; essay; literary criticism; cultural studies; sociology of literature; literary historiography.

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