American, 20th Century Literature

This book is a study of prominent and less‐familiar works of U.S. literary modernism that reveals a long history of English‐only Americanism: the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a nationally distinctive form of English. This perspective presents U.S. literary works written between the 1890s and the 1940s as playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics, thereby rewiring both narrative form and national identity. This consideration of the continuing presence of fierce public debates over U.S. English and domestic multilingual cultures demonstrates their symbolic and material implications in naturalization and citizenship law, presidential rhetoric, academic language studies, and the artistic renderings of novelists. Against the backdrop of the period's massive demographic changes, this book brings into conversation a broadly multiethnic set of writers, including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Américo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. These authors shared an acute sense of linguistic standardization during the interwar era and the defamiliarizing sway of radical experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Mixing languages, these authors spurned expectations for phonological exactitude to develop multilingual literary aesthetics. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism—that those who speak alike are ethically and politically like minded—multilingual modernists composed interwar novels as characteristically U.S. American because, not in spite, of their synthetic syntaxes and enduring strangeness.

The purpose of this book is to examine the nature of democratic thought and expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman in the mid-nineteenth century to George Oppen and Frank O'Hara in the mid‐late twentieth. Its origins lie in Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of ‘Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies’ in the second volume of his Democracy in America. It begins with a chapter on Tocqueville and Whitman, followed by a re‐evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. The other main poets considered are Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. The book argues against the narrowly ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary literary studies, an attitude that can be traced back to the legacies of Marx and Freud, and conceives of ideology in deterministic terms as unconscious political alignment. To that extent it echoes Tocqueville's concern to underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. The book draws upon a wide range of thinkers, including Madison, Tocqueville, Kant, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Riesman, Arendt, Benhabib and Cavell, as it seeks to expand and develop Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central. The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called thinkers.

This book traces an American literary history of transpacific alliances which spans the 20th century. Increasing material and economic ties between the U.S. and East Asia at the end of the 19th century facilitated an imagined spiritual and aesthetic accord that bridged the Pacific, and this study reads the expression and repercussions of these links in American Orientalist and Asian American poetry. After considering both the transcendence and constraints of a structure of alliance between East and West in the introductory chapter, the first half of the study examines two key American instigators of Orientalist poetics, Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, who imagined an identity between Eastern philosophy and idealized notions of America. Their literary alliances imposed a singular burden on Asian American poets, and the second half of the study considers a range of formal negotiations with this legacy in the poetry of Lawson Fusao Inada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Myung Mi Kim. In examining avant‐garde Asian American poetry against an American Orientalist past, this book reads the intersection of modernist and minority poetics.

Exemplifying a new methodology identified as “animality studies,” which focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book explores animality at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. At that moment, shifts in what it meant to be both “human” and “animal” became crucial in terms of producing new ways of thinking about a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of black men. The discourse of “the jungle” was born at the confluence of Darwin and Freud; once human behavior could be explained, supposedly, by animal instincts that were naturally violent in the name of survival and heterosexual in the name of reproduction. Literary and cultural texts at the turn of the twentieth century addressed the “beast within,” shifting away from a Protestant Christian formulation of a devilish inner beast that was sinful and violent. This book’s central argument is that Darwinist-Freudian formulations of the human animal were often contested rather than reinforced by writers such as Jack London, Henry James and Frank Norris and cultural events such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island and the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” This book reveals how the figure of the animal evolved in U.S. literature and culture at the turn of the century, particularly through the birth of the jungle: a discourse that continues to enable enduring justifications of homophobia, economic exploitation, and racism in the United States and beyond.

Digression is widely considered a mark of disordered or evasive discourse. Modern legal, philosophical, and political writing largely disavows this trope, regarding it as a departure from the model of rational exposition institutionalized under the Enlightenment. And yet, as the rhetorical figure of digression has grown increasingly marginalized within the decorum of public discourse, it has come to occupy a central position in the private discursive world of poetry. This book outlines an anatomy of “the excursus” within twentieth-Century American poetics; moving from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to theories of identity, this study considers the various spheres in which American writers of the period revise prior models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in the modern poem. The opening section considers the manner in which Wallace Stevens employs digression within the ars poetica genre to deconstruct aesthetic theory under High Modernism; the second chapter examines Marianne Moore’s use of the excursus to organize archival knowledge in the Progressive poetry of instruction; the third section turns to Lyn Hejinian’s construction of a digressive narratology intended to unsettle master-narratives of the Cold War era; the fourth chapter treats digression as a strategy for fashioning the self in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara; and the book concludes with a survey of “Elliptical” strategies employed by a new generation of poets, writing in the wake of John Ashbery’s aleatory craft, who seek to extend the digressive project of American poetry into the 21st Century.

This book undertakes linguistically informed analyses to examine the various transpacific signifying strategies by which different poets of Chinese descent in the United States have sought to employ or represent elements of a particular cultural tradition in their articulations of an ethnic subjectivity, including writings entirely in Chinese. The study maps a new methodology and an expanded textual arena for Asian American literary studies that can be used and further explored by scholars possessing knowledge of other traditions and different linguistic competencies. In assessing both the dynamics and the politics of poetic expression by writers engaging with a specific cultural tradition or heritage, this study develops a general theory of ethnic literary production that clarifies the significance of “Asian American” literature in relation to both other forms of U.S. “minority discourse,” as well as canonical “American” literature more generally. The book discusses a range of works, including Ezra Pound’s Cathay and the Angel Island poems. Additionally, it examines the careers of four contemporary Chinese/American poets: Ha Jin, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau, each of whom bears a distinctive relationship to the linguistic and cultural tradition he or she seeks to represent. Specifically, the book analyzes the range of rhetorical and formal strategies by which these writers have sought to incorporate Chinese culture and especially language in constructing a cultural or ethnic subjectivity.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American authors pioneered a mode of musical writing that quite literally resounded beyond the printed page. Novels gained soundtracks, poetry compelled its audiences to sing, and the ostensibly silent act of reading became anything but. The Great American Songbooks is the story of this literature, at once an overview of musical and authorial practice at the century's turn, an investigation into the sensory dimensions of reading, and a meditation on the effects that the popular arts have had on literary modernism. The writings of John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Walt Whitman are heard in a new key; the performers and tunesmiths who inspired them have their stories told; and the music of the past, long out of print and fashion, is recapitulated and made available in digital form. A work of criticism situated at the crossroads of literary analysis, musicology, and cultural history, The Great American Songbooks demonstrates the importance of studying fiction and poetics from interdisciplinary perspectives, and it suggests new avenues for research in the dawning age of the digital humanities.

This book demonstrates that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner were motivated, in their famous postwar books, not by their experiences of the horrors of the war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These “quintessential” male American novelists of the 1920s were all deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command and the result was that they felt themselves “emasculated”: not, as the usual story goes, because of their encounters with trench warfare in a mechanized army, but because either they got nowhere near the trenches or because they got to them in “trivial,” noncombat roles. By bringing to light previously unexamined archival records of the Army, the book shows that the frustration of these authors' military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of a whole new set of methods employed in the mobilization for World War I, unprecedented procedures that had as their aim the transformation of the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not black-white difference). So, for these writers, the humiliating failure to get into or to be promoted in the Army was also a failure to compete successfully in a rising social order and against a new set of people. And it is that social order and those people — these effects of mobilization, and not other effects supposedly produced by mass war and a mass army — that The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury register and re-imagine.

This book examines anti-colonial discourse during the understudied but critical period before World War II, with a specific focus on writers and activists based in the United States. The book contributes to the fields of American Studies, utopian studies, and postcolonial theory by situating this growing anti-colonial literature as part of an American utopian tradition. In the key early decades of the 20th century, the intellectuals of the colonized world carried out the heady work of imagining independent states, often from a position of exile. Faced with that daunting task, many of them composed literary texts—novels, poems, contemplative essays—in order to conceptualize the new societies they sought. Beginning by exploring some of the conventions of American utopian fiction at the turn of the century, this book goes on to show the surprising ways in which writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Rabindranath Tagore, and Punjabi nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai appropriated and adapted those utopian conventions toward their own end of global emancipation of peoples of color.

A study of male friendship in America in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Mark Twain and Male Friendship examines the relationships between Mark Twain and Joseph Twichell (his pastor), William Dean Howells (author, cultural commentator, and critic) and Henry H. Rogers (the Standard Oil magnate), to illustrate and explore the workings of their friendships. Starting with the biographical, it uses existing work on male friendship and on gender role as a springboard to examine changing conceptions of masculinity and of men's roles both in marriage and in the larger social networks of their times. The friendships are sited, too, in terms of status, race, and social privilege, and how such factors conditioned the form of these relationships and the way they functioned. The book also explores the friendships in terms of the representative cultural roles of those involved—and the interactions between the respective fields of literature, religion, and business. The friendships thus allow extraordinary insight both into these four lives, and into the larger American culture that surrounded and formed them. This is an original and important work that adds a great deal to our understanding of these men and their period.