Not even past

Name: Not even past
Author: Dorothy Stringer
ISBN: 9780823231478

by Dorothy Stringer (2009)

Read Free Sample Buy on Amazon Audible Free Trial

About this book

"Not Even Past highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is "not even past," narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail.^ Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century. Yet even in their very failure, three U.S.^ modernists tell us that it is not enough simply to exercise critical acuity on the marks of past violence. Reading, however masterly, cannot interrupt a history in the midst of repeating itself; it can only itself reiterate the disaster." --Publisher description.

Setting / LocationDeep Space

Story Era1920s Jazz Age

Protagonist / CoreNot even past Lead Character

Themes & Moods

History American fiction Subjectivity in literature Criticism and interpretation Racism in literature History and criticism 1920s Jazz Age Contemporary / Future

Readers who enjoyed this also loved

Tales of the working girl

Laura Hapke

Record numbers of women began entering the American labor force in the late 1800s, their experiences composed largely of the drudgery of the factory or the monotony of the sales floor. This feminine mass entry into the workplace sparked thirty-five years of debate, with proponents protesting employers' "moral corruption" of women and detractors arguing for a return to woman's "proper" sphere, the home - evidence of the late-Victorian desire to regulate female sexuality. Authors of fiction were quick to respond: Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, Anzia Yezierska - these and others portrayed working girls in forms as diverse as tenement tales, labor romances, and novels of upward mobility. By joining the period debate about the working girl, her literary imaginers helped shape it. While modern treatments of labor fiction, including those by feminist scholars, have largely ignored these portrayals, Tales of the. Working' Girl does not. Reevaluating both well-known and forgotten texts, this new study by Laura Hapke examines the myriad ways in which the working girl was envisioned by considering the artistic goals and strategies of those who depicted her. Hapke explores to what extent writers acknowledged women's own responses to the controversy, scrutinizes differences in male and female authors' portrayals, and traces the evolution of the working girl as fictional heroine from. The slum melodramas of the 1890s to the strike fiction of the 1910s to the economic ascension novels of the 1920s. Marked by lucid prose and graced by historical photographs and illustrations, Tales of the Working Girl is an important contribution to women's studies, American studies, and labor history.

When our eyes no longer see

Gregory Golley

"As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of "objective observation," modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s. The displacement in science of "positivist" notions of observation by a "realist" model of knowledge provided endless inspiration for Japanese writers. Gregory Golley turns a critical eye to the ideological and ecological incarnations of scientific realism in several modernist works: the photographic obsessions of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Naomi, the disjunctive portraits of the imperial economy in Yokomitsu Riichi's Shanghai, the tender depictions of astrophysical phenomena and human-wildlife relations in the children's stories of Miyazawa Kenji. Attending closely to the political and ethical consequences of this realist turn, this study focuses on the common struggle of science and art to reclaim the invisible as an object of representation and belief." -- Publisher's description.

John Reed & the writing of revolution

Daniel W, Lehman

"John Reed and the Writing of Revolution examines Reed's writing from a different critical perspective - one informed by a theoretical and practical understanding of literary nonfiction. In both politics and writing, John Reed defied fashion. In his short career, Reed transcended the traditional creative arts of fiction, poetry, and drama in favor of deeply researched histories composed with the cadence of fiction and the power of fact. Reed thereby alienated literary critics who had idealized timeless artistry against the rough-and-tumble world of historical details and political implications.". "Working from a close investigation of rare articles, manuscripts, and the Reed papers at Harvard as well as from Reed's published work, Daniel W. Lehman offers the first detailed literary study of the man who followed Pancho Villa into battle; wrote literary profiles of such characters as Henry Ford, William Jennings Bryan, and Billy Sunday; explicated the Byzantine factionalism of Eastern Europe; and witnessed the storming of the Winter Palace and the birth of Soviet Russia."--BOOK JACKET.

Reconstructing the family in contemporary American fiction

Desmond F. McCarthy

The prevalence of alternative families in contemporary American fiction is significant given the concern and confusion precipitated by the decline in traditional nuclear families in recent decades. John Irving's The World According to Garp, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime contain compelling utopian depictions of alternative families that are more egalitarian than traditional nuclear families. John Updike's Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux are interesting counterpoints to the optimistic novels of Irving, Walker, and Doctorow. Although Updike depicts the traditional nuclear family as the site of considerable ennui and unhappiness, attempts to flee or reconstruct the family in his novels are staggeringly destructive.