Abstract: Facing racist depictions of rapacious African American men from writers such as Thomas Dixon, Black authors refuted such stereotypes by taking them head on. However, during this period in which such stereotypes were most explicit, literature was still influenced by Victorian-era mores that flowed from romanticism into realism and naturalism. Close readings of Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900) and Sutton Griggs’s The Hindered Hand (1905) reveal that literary market demands often constrained African Americans from developing fully fleshed characters that could capture the true depth of Black male desire and thus offer effectively convincing counters to Dixon’s flat, stock brutes.
Abstract: In the context of ongoing abortion bans after Dobbs (2022), this essay argues that identifying abortion as a metaphor for refusal in American novels can alter methods for reading female subjectivity. While narratives about women who have died under abortion bans are proliferated by pro-choice and anti-abortion politicians alike, they also trouble our expectations for different embodiments of race, class, and gender in the American cultural imagination. This essay demonstrates how Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997), a novel replete with “failed” and terminated pregnancies, typifies what I call the novel of termination. Counter to the bildungsroman or anti-bildungsroman, the novel of termination revives but then “aborts” canonical genres of racialized femininity, refusing to deliver fully formed female protagonists as icons of any progressive national future. Amid the late-90s criminalizing of abortion and of non-white maternity, Paradise takes the shape of a failed pregnancy to complicate and expand definitions for literary reproduction.
Abstract: Criticism of Julia Alvarez’s novels has been hermeneutic but divided on the question whether her literary protagonists embody or dissimulate some hybridized ethnic identity as an alternative to the hegemonic American culture they seem to oppose. By contrast, a deconstructive approach, which questions unitary identity from the outset, can explain how the multiple characters and narrators of Garcia Girls and ¡Yo! invent themselves and others in the spirit of Derrida’s Beckett-like neologism destinerrance—of repeated, disappointed, aporetic quests for understanding. Her characters’ detours and postponements prepare readers of Afterlife for a turning against literature as dys-functional: its necessity but inability to guide has the effect of reducing Western and Zen traditions to the banal self-mockery of a fridge magnet.
Abstract: This paper explores Emily Dickinson’s divergence from the nineteenth-century American sentimental literary tradition, which often sought to reify happiness and its causes. Contrary to prevailing narratives, Dickinson’s work frequently highlights the illusory nature of such reifications. By embracing life’s stimuli and appreciating human frailty, some of Dickinson’s speakers reject the devaluation of their present existence inherent in theological and sentimental views of happiness. Drawing on Vivasvan Soni’s Mourning Happiness , this paper demonstrates how the trial narrative form shifted the focus from an all-encompassing concept of happiness to a more private, emotional realm. Influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Emily Brontë, Dickinson’s critique extended to popular novels of her time and actively defied the reification of happiness prevalent in sentimental literature.
Abstract: Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X (2023) dramatizes the relationship between selfhood and narrativity central to both existentialism and philosophy of mind. I read the Biography as formally underscoring how one’s selfhood is indelibly contoured by and borrowed from others. This formalized sense of subjectivity- through-relationality also amplifies the novel’s greatest thematic tension: the collision between two distinct conceptions of selfhood. On the one hand, X claims a discontinuous, iterative, and nonlinear understanding of the self. On the other hand, Biography of X relays this antinarrativity through C. M.’s avowedly narrativist biography, which attempts to corral the different scenes, moments, and selves of X’s life within a coherent, sense-making story. These contrapuntal impulses provoke a crisis between aesthetics and relationality that stylizes the queer possibilities of becoming even as it underscores the ethical risks of refusing to apprehend others on the same terms as they understand themselves.
