Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture

Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture
Author: Tara Stubbs
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317446437

This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture

Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture
Author: Tara Stubbs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 507
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317446429

This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

Richard Wright and Transnationalism

Richard Wright and Transnationalism
Author: Mamoun Alzoubi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018-09-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429799888

Richard Wright and Transnationalism sees Dr. Mamoun Alzoubi argue that renowned American Author, Richard Wright, transformed the way that we approach comparative literature by beginning to look at matters of American racism and Civil Rights in transnational contexts, formed by the new nations surfacing from colonial rule. Richard Wright and Transnationalism demonstrates how Wright, beginning with his work in the 1950s, began to hypothesize the shared history of suffering that linked the experience of slavery, Jim Crow and racism in African American life with the impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on the large communities of Africa, Asia and Europe.

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature
Author: Silvia Schultermandl
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2021-06-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000390985

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists’ complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects. The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies.

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism
Author: Donald R. Wehrs
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 892
Release: 2017-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319633031

This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts—in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.

Remade in America

Remade in America
Author: Joanna Pawlik
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2021-09-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520309049

Re-viewing surrealism in Charles Henri Ford's Poem posters (1964-5) -- Encountering surrealism : Nadja (1928) and autobiographical beat writing -- Blackening surrealism : Ted Joans' ethnographic surrealist historiography -- Turning on surrealism : queer psychedelia -- Hystericising surrealism : the marvelous in popular culture.

The Fictions of American Capitalism

The Fictions of American Capitalism
Author: Jacques-Henri Coste
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030365646

The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel introduces a new way of thinking about fiction in connection with capitalism, especially American capitalism. These essays demonstrate how fiction fulfills a major function of the American capitalist engine, presenting various formulations of American capitalism from the perspective of economists, social scientists, and literary critics. Focusing on three narratives—fictitious capital, working fictions, and the economic novel—the volume questions whether these three types of fiction can be linked under the sign of capitalism. This collection seeks to illustrate the American economy’s dependence on fictitiousness, America’s ideological fictions, and the nation’s creative literary fiction. In relation to what the credit and banking crisis of 2007–2008 exposed about the “unreal” base of the economy, the volume concludes with a call to recognize the economic humanities, arguing that American fiction and American literary studies can provide a useful mirror for economists.

Transatlantic Footholds

Transatlantic Footholds
Author: Stephanie Palmer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2019-07-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429537018

Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as "women" was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of "America." "America," their responses prove, is a transnational construct.

Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender

Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender
Author: Ali Chetwynd
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0820354015

Thomas Pynchon's fiction has been considered masculinist, misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether Pynchon's representations of women are sexist, feminist, or reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether queer identities are celebrated or mocked, and whether his departures from realist convention express masculinist elitism or critique the gendering of genre. Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender reframes these debates. As the first book-length investigation of Pynchon's writing to put the topics of sex and gender at its core, it moves beyond binary debates about whether to see Pynchon as liberatory or conservative, instead examining how his preoccupation with sex and gender conditions his fiction's whole worldview. The essays it contains, which cumulatively address all of Pynchon's novels from V. (1963) to Bleeding Edge (2013), investigate such topics as the imbrication of gender and power, sexual abuse and the writing of sex, the gendering of violence, and the shifting representation of the family. Providing a wealth of new approaches to the centrality of sex and gender in Pynchon's work, the collection opens up new avenues for Pynchon studies as a whole.