The “Nature” of American Literature: Race, Place, and Textuality in John Crowe Ransom and Elizabeth Madox Roberts

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-268
Author(s):  
Sharon Kunde
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Elizabeth Madox Roberts ◽  
John Crowe Ransom

“The ‘Nature’ of American Literature” explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom’s bid, in “Criticism, Inc.,” for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms “natural reading” and “natural writing,” Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom’s understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies.

Southern Enclosure as American Literature

Black Market ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 138-183
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
New Deal ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Paper Money ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Racial History

Set against the backdrop of Southern land grabs in the 1830s and again in the 1930s that were meant to sustain the cotton economy, this chapter studies the literary representation of the poor whites who were side-lined by the slave plantation’s expansion and modernization, and who were then remade into a national folk by literary elites. Facilitated by these Southern enclosures, the ambivalent canonization of poor whites as the nation’s folk would have a decisive and determining influence on the constitution—and the racial covenant—of American literature, and not only on its Americaness but also on its literariness. Slavery was the condition of possibility for this literature, but its role, along with that of the enslaved, was silenced. From frontier humor to the New Criticism, this chapter reveals a submerged racial history beneath the canonization of U.S. national literature, which was undertaken in the early twentieth century in U.S. literary criticism, explainingthe roleof New Deal photography, of paper money and paperwork, and modernism in literary style in the constitution of American literature as both discipline and object.

Reconstructing American Literature: Curricular Issues

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lauter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Male ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
John Crowe Ransom

Next to where I type, I have tacked up the syllabi for two American literature courses taught in the 1980s at well-known, indeed prestigious, institutions in the United States—one in California, the other in Ohio. Both are survey courses, one called “The American Literary Imagination,” the other “Life and Thought in American Literature.” One covers, in a single semester, thirty-two writers, including Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Crowe Ransom, and Ezra Pound; all are white and male, except for one assignment on Emily Dickinson and one poem by Marianne Moore. The other, a two-term course, includes twenty-three white male writers and Emily Dickinson. I do not want to argue that today such courses have no right to exist, for that kind of statement would engage the significant issue of academic freedom. But such courses are simply not truthful, nor professionally current. The pictures they present to students of the American literary imagination or of American life and thought are woefully incomplete and inaccurate. In the profession of literary study they represent what, in Psychology, was represented by generalizations about moral development based on interviews with a sample of white, male, college sophomores and juniors; or in History, was represented by conclusions about the “expansion” of opportunity under Jacksonian democracy when, in fact, white women's opportunities and those of black people were largely contracting. Were such courses titled “American Literature from the Perspective of ‘'Diner’” (a film set in 1958), they might have accurately represented themselves. But now, over a quarter of a century later, a large new body of scholarship has transformed the intellectual base of our profession. To be responsive to this scholarship and to present an accurate picture of the development of the literary cultures of the United States, teaching has begun to change. A number of recent volumes record such change and offer means for encouraging its systematic development. The changes in our profession I am describing are rooted in the movements for racial justice and sex equity.

Warren, Robert Penn (1905–1989)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Master's Degree ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Allen Tate ◽  
John Crowe Ransom ◽  
The University ◽  
Vanderbilt University

Robert Penn Warren was a renowned poet, novelist, critic and educator. He matriculated to Vanderbilt University in 1921, where, with Allen Tate (1899–1979) and John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), he became part of The Fugitives, a group of poets named for the journal they published. Warren earned a master’s degree at the University of California and accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to study at New College, Oxford University. Here, he began to pursue the close readings of literary texts that eventually became associated with New Criticism: a focus on the text itself without reference to the biography of the writer or the historical circumstances of the text’s composition or reception.

Building Asian Canadian Literary Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Ty
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
American Literature ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Statistics Canada

Asian Canadian Literary Studies is a relatively new field of study which began in the mid to late 1990s. Even though literature written by Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian Canadians had been published in literary magazines and anthologies since the 1970s, the identification of a distinct body of works called “Asian Canadian literature,” as Donald Goellnicht has noted (in “A Long Labour”), began only when there was a sociopolitical movement focused on identity politics. The literature includes early experiences of Chinese in Gum San or “gold mountain”; Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War; South Asian Canadians diasporic writing from former British colonies like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Trinidad, Guyana, Tanzania, and Kenya; feminist experimental and genre writing; and writing from the post-1975 wave of first- and 1.5-generation immigrants and refugees. Early 21st-century works have moved from mainly autoethnographic stories to those that include larger sociocultural concerns, such as poverty, domestic violence, the environment, lesbian, queer, and transgender issues, and other intersectional systems of oppression that face Asian Canadians and other marginalized groups. Genres include memoirs, films, short stories, autobiographies, realist novels, science fiction, graphic novels, poetry, plays, and historical novels. In the past, without naming the field “Asian Canadians,” many critics have engaged with Asian Canadian literary texts. For example, articles and chapters about Joy Kogawa’s Obasan can be found in journals and books on Canadian, postcolonial, ethnic, and Asian American literature. South Asian Canadian literature also has strong links with postcolonial studies and institutions, such as the book publisher TSAR Publications, which began as the literary journal, The Toronto South Asian Review. In Canadian English usage, Asian usually refers to people from East and Southeast Asian while the term South Asian Canadian is a subgroup of Asian Canadian, according to Statistics Canada. In literary studies, it has only been in the past ten or fifteen years that the term “Asian Canadian” is used as a pan-ethnic term for all peoples who are originally from or have roots in Asia.

The Posthuman Subject in/of Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle N. Huang
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century

Is the posthuman postracial? Posthumanism, an interpretive paradigm that unseats the human individual as the de facto unit of literary analysis, can be a powerful tool for Asian American literary studies when deployed with attention to critical race theory and literary form. Throughout American literature, Asian Americans have frequently been figured as inhuman—alien, inscrutable, and inassimilable. Representations of Asian Americans as either sub- or superhuman populate many genres, including adventure literature, domestic realism, comics, and science fiction. This trope, which combines yellow peril and model minority stereotypes, forms a through line that runs from depictions of Asian Americans as nerveless 19th-century coolies to 21st-century robotic office workers. Manifesting both threat and promise for America, posthuman representations of Asian Americans refract national and racial anxieties about the fading of the United States’ global influence as Asian nations, especially China, become political and economic superpowers. Rather than directly refuting these characterizations, Asian American writers have creatively engaged these same thematics to contemplate how developments in science and technology produce different ways of understanding the human and, concomitantly, engender changes in racial formation. Novelists, dramatists, poets, and artists have all deployed posthumanism in order to conduct imaginative experiments that challenge expectations regarding the typical purview of Asian American literature. Several nodes of inquiry that demonstrate the importance of posthumanist critique for Asian American literary studies include race as an index of humanity, the mutability of race through biotechnology, the amplification of racial inequality through infrastructure, and the reproduction of race through algorithmic culture. In the wake of early 21st-century ecological disaster and biotechnological fragmentation, examining the evolving relationship between Asian American racialization and posthumanism continues to provide important insights into how race is structured by the changing boundaries of the human and, in turn, demonstrates that the posthuman subject is never “beyond” race. In addition to offering an overview, this article provides a case study regarding the stereotyping of Asian Americans as robotic.

scholarly journals The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kucich
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Fault Line ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Potential Integration

Historicism remains relatively robust in Victorian Studies, but it has developed rather quietly in two contrary directions – synchronic and diachronic – that have long constituted an important theoretical fault line. The first half of this essay surveys these two ongoing types of Victorian historicism and urges the importance of integrating them; the second defends historicism from a recent theoretical movement that deflects attention from that potential integration: the critique of ‘suspicious reading’. The essay focuses on general methodological issues that affect how we defend humanistic scholarship, since historicism's continued development remains vital not only to Victorianists but to the discipline as a whole. While historicism has been both enormously reinvigorating and much contested, by friend and foe alike, the tectonic shift in our critical practice that it represents has never crystallized a simple, coherent set of principles that might define the mission of literary studies within the humanities. Although there are many ways to justify literary criticism, historicism will always be centrally entwined with them. Affirming the role suspicious reading plays in historical contextualization and clarifying the methodologies and objectives of historicism are thus tasks that still lie urgently before us.

The sound and the fury of Southern American literature

1982 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Ana Lúcia Almeida Gazolla
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eudora Welty ◽  
Carson Mccullers ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
John Crowe Ransom

The South of the United States presents, in the twentieth century, a remarkable flowering in the area of Literature. It has produced, especially in the first half of the century, more good writers than any other region in the country. Writers of the stature of Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Carson McCullers, to name just a few, together with William Faulkner, the greatest of all, have been responsible for a period of such creativity that it has come to be known as "the Southern Renaissance."

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