This essay examines the turn to a discourse of sustainable development through two novels by Ng & utilde;g & itilde; wa Thiong'o: Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2004). Looking at the specific characters, images, and plotlines from Devil on the Cross that are reworked in Wizard of the Crow, the essay traces the shifts in Ng & utilde;g & itilde;'s thinking on development and the environment across the roughly twenty years separating the two novels. Mapping these moments of rewriting onto the history of sustainable development, which emerged in the same period as a kind of rewriting of prior development paradigms, the essay shows how Ng & utilde;g & itilde;'s literary response to environmental crisis exposes the fantastical modes of thinking at the heart of sustainable development; it also provides a vision of sustainability that challenges mainstream conceptions of what solutions are considered to be-in the words of the mandate given to the World Commission on Environment and Development-"realistic."
This study reveals the paragraph's complexity but limited aesthetic contribution. The general question of the ornament's part in the work of art (through which Jacques Derrida challenges Immanuel Kant) frames the subject and extends previous inquiry on punctuation. Through Charles Peirce I discover three kinds of relations that paragraph divisions emphasize for the reader: autonomy, contrast, and pattern. Two passages from Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and P & eacute;cuchet demonstrate the normal order and wayward play of these relations. The novel's opening passage mixes genres to create a multilayered pastiche of Genesis and naturalism, while the third chapter satirizes a chemistry textbook and reflects on the molecular structure of narration. My formal reading indicates how paragraph indentations ornament a beautifully ironic play of relations that ultimately springs from language and not from the material page.
This essay reexamines the Caribbean mother trope in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean poetry and demonstrates how poets' metapoetic practices in their maternal figurations cultivate a located literariness. Specifically, I investigate Kamau Brathwaite's and Lorna Goodison's revisionary poems, showing how they capitalize on and nurture mother-island symbolism through a foregrounded textuality or artistic reflection. Brathwaite reinvents his mother poems to enact a recursive textuality of locatedness. Goodison reconfigures mothers to magnify their art-cultivating roles, thereby affirming the brilliance of local arts that will in turn confer recognition on the Caribbean locale. Departing from a gender-focused approach that highlights Caribbean women poets' subversion of postcolonial patriarchal archetypes, my reading illuminates the two poets' kinship and continuity in nourishing a local Caribbean tradition through an ecology of revision. Ultimately, I demonstrate the significance of revision as a self-reflexive dimension of a Caribbean poetics of place and contemplate how postcolonial literature fosters a located literariness.
John Ashbery's long poem "The Skaters" can be understood as an exploration of entropy, a multivalent concept that originated in nineteenth-century thermodynamics and had recently gained widespread cultural currency when Ashbery wrote the poem, first in the emergent postwar discourse of information theory and then in its application to a wide array of social and artistic phenomena. This article positions Ashbery's poem as a reflection of the postwar period, when energy and information overlapped, with entropy linking the two. The poem's thematics of entropy becomes a structural metaphor for the poem itself as its production of meaning becomes subjected to steady decay; in the entropic poetics prominently on display in "The Skaters," unassimilable excess and semantic drift are precisely the point as the poem itself becomes an exercise in entropy, a nonproductive form of transfer that privileges waste, scattering, and dissipation over coherence.
This article examines the twentieth-century Macau-based poet Camilo Pessanha's contribution to the Portuguese tradition of maritime literature, an inheritance that writers increasingly mobilized in service of the nationalist project in turn-of-the-century Portugal. Pessanha seized on fluid citational practices that were already latent in iconic lusophone maritime works like Lu & iacute;s de Cam & otilde;es's Os Lus & iacute;adas to awaken the tradition from its late-imperial slumber and recover its sensory primacy. Pessanha's creative metabolization of works by authors such as St & eacute;phane Mallarm & eacute; and Charles Baudelaire overlaid French notions of ennui and ship image onto his nautical lyric, opening up a proverbial sea route for later Portuguese modernists, including Fernando Pessoa. From Pessanha's Franco-Portuguese literary confluence emerges a blue poetics of citation-a poetics that affirms, in a postcolonial key, the fluid and transnational intertextualities inherent to literary seafaring.
Hidden in plain sight in the Beinecke Library’s James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University lies the typescript of “God Sends Sunday,” a hitherto unknown three-act play by the Harlem Renaissance enfant terrible, Wallace Thurman. The 149-page play was only recently added to the collection’s “manuscript miscellany,” and, perhaps also accounting for its status as unknown, it shares the title of the poet Arna Bontemps’s first novel, written as Thurman was writing his God Sends Sunday , sometime between 1929 and 1931. 1 After publishing his novel, Bontemps collaborated with the poet Countee Cullen on a “straight play” of it (Bontemps), which eventually became the Broadway musical St. Louis Woman and then a Federal Theater production for which Langston Hughes was brought on board. 2
This essay draws on a range of theoretical, sociological, and creative texts-including two books by John Rechy and a film by Frank Ripploh-to theorize the perceptual phenomenology of cruising, or the practice of seeking out and engaging in semipublic sex with strangers. I argue that cruising involves a haptic mode of looking, one that facilitates a kind of erotic contact at a distance. This understanding of cruising helps to explain certain aspects of the phenomenon that are often overlooked in scholarly work on cruising, such as its connection to the erotics of the gaze, its association with compulsivity, and its potential to foster selfish forms of sexual experience. I suggest that an attention to the optical mechanics of cruising might not only help to cultivate a clearer understanding of the phenomenon itself but also push back against the prescriptivist tendencies of much cruising scholarship.
This article troubles the racial foundations of our mediated age by tracking the relocation of the patent form from US intellectual property law to nineteenth-century African American literature. According to an Enlightenment racial schema, people of African descent were considered fit only to be the means for the propagation of European life. This racist ideologeme was enforced by the legal exclusion of free and enslaved African Americans from patenting their inventions. In this article, I examine the Creole inventor Norbert Rillieux's patented sugar-refining apparatus for how it encapsulates key characteristics of the concept of mediation. I then turn to Solomon Northup's reworking of the patent form into literary form. In the description of his invention, Northup problematizes notions of intellectual foresight implied in the patent form, ultimately revealing how the power of mediation is tied up with a racial capitalist system that claims to secure property rights while simultaneously undermining them.
The long 1960s saw a broad awakening of interest in the breath. Paying attention to this pneumatic turn reveals new channels of inspiration; this essay considers one such. It listens for a resonance between two artists in separate fields and cultures who knew little if anything of each other: the poet Paul Celan and the musician John Coltrane. Despite their differences, a radical pneumaticism connects them, and it begins around the year 1960. In a series of influential performances, Coltrane and Celan expressed an exhaustion with and of musicality. This exhaustion enabled the development of a new kind of expression, an expression of tightly compacted sound and meaning without conventional development. The aspiration of this expression was toward the other, even the wholly other, and its representation and performance was the breath.
This essay examines novels by Tao Lin and Caroline Kepnes alongside data companies' managerial literature to account for the relation between consumer surveillance and contemporary fiction. First, it identifies the creep as a character type who appears in novels about digital life. Second, it shows that the creep, usually in the guise of an online stalker, shares a key concern with the platforms that structure the commercial space of the Internet: both must conceal the extent of their surveillance for fear of scaring away their object or customer. This essay draws out the literary genealogy of the creep by revisiting canonical theories of the novel and disciplinary surveillance.
Narratives about the rise of English prose fiction will remain incomplete if not incoherent without recognition of a historical breakthrough: first-person prose narration represents a deliberate innovation of Tudor prose fiction. One cannot simply run the I voice together with accounts about the eighteenth-century rise of individualism. When William Baldwin's Beware the Cat (ca. 1553)-a text well known among Shakespeare's contemporaries-introduces three first-person narrators into Tudor fiction, it does so as a marked turn away from third-person conventions. Baldwin's work effectively contends for first-person structures in the face of a succession crisis and broader ethicopolitical uncertainty. Formal inventiveness thus meets a set of pressing historical needs: first-person narration functions, in Baldwin's novel as elsewhere, as a formal device-an aperture and filter-fitted to minoritized and marginalized points of view.
This essay examines early modern commercial drama's capacity to make people public-that is, to introduce to large crowds of people vividly embodied representations of individuals both real and fictional, actual and virtual. My focus is on Falstaff, who occupies a peculiar place in early modern mediascapes and, crucially, in theories of character from the eighteenth century on. Falstaff is, like all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic characters, an intermedial creature fashioned out of written and printed texts and embodied performance. But he is also exceptional in his multiplicity. Even his name is doubled (Falstaff and Oldcastle). I ask, What happens to persons when they are "characterized" onstage? What are the limits, and possibilities, of being made into (as the playwright-turned-antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson puts it) "a by worde"? How might such work help scholars rethink associations between "roundness" and "liveness" in their assumptions about how character is produced and felt to matter?
This essay follows the translation history of the Anglo-Jewish author Grace Aguilar's novel The Vale of Cedars (1850) from London through central and eastern Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Conjoining world literature, translation studies, diaspora studies, and Jewish literary studies, it argues for two interventions: a rethinking of world literature vis-& agrave;-vis diaspora, and a global, multilingual, and translational approach to the literature of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). Aguilar's novel, a work of minor literature about crypto-Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, was originally intended as a refutation of English conversionists. By the end of the century the novel had inspired multiple free translations into Hebrew, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic, refashioned to instill readers with pride in historical Jewish nobility and martyrdom. Mapping the book's multilingual, transcontinental journey and elucidating the linguistic and cultural markers of its rewritings, the essay shows how diaspora connected such diverse translations and offers a new perspective on world literature.
Scholars of Black studies have long noted the impossibility of repairing the harm of racial slavery: not only is the injury unquantifiable, but certain versions of reparation risk affirming rather than contesting the existing structure of racial capitalism. This essay places the writing of Phillis Wheatley within this history by reading her poems and letters in relation to two seemingly disparate but interrelated notions of repair: reparative reading and the reparations movement. I argue that Wheatley turns to the neoclassical forms of theodicy and georgic-modes often taken to exemplify social resignation-to register a critique of images of a universe that depends on structural inequalities and to demand redistribution and transformative change. She invokes the odd temporality of repair, caught between recursiveness and possibility, to imagine and advocate for a better world, even if it is made up of the broken pieces of her current one.
