Revista de estudios norteamericanos - 2019 - Nº 23

URI permanente para esta colecciónhttps://hdl.handle.net/11441/93939

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The other 1960s: Re-assessing the enduring influence of neoconservatism in the United States
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Sarias Rodríguez, David; Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (MECD). España
The 1960s bequeathed to incoming generations of Americans a world in which neoconservatism became the intellectual spearhead of rightwing political thought and action. To this day, politics and policy making retain a potent neoconservative flair, which must be added to the considerable vigor of neoconservative principles in the enduring cultural wars still coloring American public life. This article reassesses the origins of neoconservatism and examines the key elements and subsequent influence of this group of American rightwing thinkers and policy makers.
A new intervention in the national imaginaty: The portrayal of the southwest in the novels of Paul Auster
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Studniarz, Slawomir
The article focuses on two novels by Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions (2002), Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), in which the Southwest emerges as a mythical territory, providing a rich ground in which the American grand narratives can be explored and revised. It is the contention of the article that the choice of this particular locale affords an excellent opportunity for a critical engagement with the national imaginary, the powerful myths shaping the American imagination. Travels in the Scriptorium reinvents the Southwest as the bloody arena on which the American imperialist mission is reenacted. In the novel, the Alien Territories, representing the American Southwest in the historical expansion of the United States, figure as a site of vicious struggle and ruthless conquest. By contrast, The Book of Illusions, presents the Southwest, specifically New Mexico, as the last mainstay of the American Dream. The creation of the Blue Stone Ranch in the “wilderness” of New Mexico and its transformation encapsulate the history of the American nation in its essential stages. But more importantly, the Southwest is envisioned as a region invested with a restorative, almost sacred quality. The Book of Illusion is the story of trauma. And the recovery from trauma is a process that either originates or takes place in New Mexico.
A vulnerable sense of place: readapting post-apocalyptic dystopia in octavia butler's parable of the sower and Colson Whitehead's zone one
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Barba Guerrero, Paula; Junta de Castilla-León; European Commission. Fondo Social Europeo (FSO); Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO). España
Drawing on a number of theoretical works by space, trauma and dystopian studies scholars, this paper reconsiders the postapocalyptic novels of Octavia E. Butler and Colson Whitehead, Parable of the Sower and Zone One respectively, as instances of “narrative vulnerability” that reformulate dystopian conventions to denounce precariousness and social chaos in twenty-first century America. It is argued that these novels re-adapt dystopia (understood in terms of genre and space: dys-topos) to denounce the futurelessness and fragility of corporate (bio)political systems, which can easily turn into posthuman regimes that cannibalize and impinge on the rights of those deemed Other. My aim with this paper is to trace the authors’ depictions of time and space as reconsidered genre components that problematize narrative resolution, adhering to narrative closure and spatial vulnerability in an attempt to critically portray the victimhood and hopelessness of those for whom nation and home will always be inaccessible, merely dystopian land.
Things that happend in the dark: Readings of intimate partner violence in Stanley and Stella kowalski's relationship
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Regalado Delgado, Margarita Remedios
This paper discusses the presence of intimate partner violence in the relationship established between the characters of Stanley and Stella Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ 1947-premiered A Streetcar Named Desire. To support this critical view, the relationship will be analyzed under the light of notable research on intimate partner violence. The present paper will be framed within others, of the same and of a contrary opinion. Some possible factors motivating the view expressed in the latter will be explored, as well as the possible reasons behind the scarcity of criticism on the Kowalskis’ relationship. The persistence of intimate partner violence in the real world, especially of that resembling what Stella Kowalski suffers, and the scarcity of similar works motivate the existence of pieces of criticism like this.
Shakespeare's dramatic pattern of social change in Saroyan's the time of your life
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Al-Abdullah, Mufeed
Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life (1939) employs a similar dramatic pattern of social change used in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). In Shakespeare, the pattern includes the isolation of a group of characters by washing them up onto the reformer’s island by a magical tempest arranged by the reformer Prospero. He thus severs the characters from their community, and separates them on the island to undergo different healing experiences before going back to their society. Saroyan adopts a comparable, though highly modified, pattern in his play. He mainly focuses on the efforts of a reformer, who tries to help a group of depressed characters who gather in a bar, which is similar to Prospero’s island, in order to escape the difficulties of the outside world. The bar is a haven of peace surrounded by the atrocities of the urban world. In both cases there is a devoted reformer, who dedicates himself to helping his subjects. The paper aims to study the similarities of the dramatic pattern, and shows that underlying these similarities, there are major differences that reflect the cultural divergence of the twentieth century culture from that of the Renaissance. The study means to illustrate that the alterations Saroyan rendered on Shakespeare’s model helps the reader understand the meaning and the age of the modern play and, simultaneously, sheds further light on the Shakespearean play and the Renaissance in general.
I have lived in my own book: Patti Smith and the reconstruction of her public persona in life writing
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Hernández Hellín, Silvia
In 2010, Patti Smith published her first memoir, Just Kids, winning the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The book recounts Smith’s relationship with avant-garde photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as her involvement in New York City’s burgeoning bohemian downtown scene. Five years later, she published a second memoir, M Train, a much more experimental narrative that goes back and forth in time and mixes dream and reality in an attempt to convey her nostalgic recollection of the past. This paper examines Patti Smith’s memoirs as a space where different genres of life writing converge, thus enabling the development of a multilayered, richly constructed narrative self whose identity is intimately connected with loss, self-discovery and the making of art. The analysis of her autobiographical prose works allows us to regard life writing as a way for women to devise a public image of their own.
Redemption and home in the African American city upon a hill Hannah Crafts's the bondwoman's narrative
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Cucurella-Ramon, Vicent
The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1857) is a novel in which the black female slave Hannah Crafts aims at the remodeling of her society and to gain self–assertion through a deeply Christian commitment and a total and honest respect to the values it impinges drawing broadly on the Bible and reshaping biblical imagery to convey her message and to submit her subjectivity and her Americanness. By using the national continuum of jeremiad rhetoric and her attachment to the values of the Christian creed, the novel partakes and yet takes a different direction from slave narratives by cagily forerunning Du Bois’s praised theory of the double consciousness. In so doing, it positions its protagonist as the first black female that absorbs and displays an identity that eventually becomes successful for it installs herself within the realm of home premised on the longed Puritan myth of the (African) American City upon a Hill which allows her to be a proper (African) American citizen.
Philanthropic classism: Americanization as a controversial rite of passage in Anzia Yezirska's fiction
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Campos, Rebeca E.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, eastern European Jewish families migrated to America aspiring to fulfil the discourses of upward mobility and religious tolerance widely spread throughout their Russian villages. The Polish-born American writer Anzia Yezierska offers unique sketches of what became one of the most controversial experiences of such a journey: the cultural clash between the already Americanized German Jewish elite and the newly-arrived Russian Jewish women. To gain access to the public space, Yezierska’s characters seek social acknowledgement by going through a rite of passage surveilled by German Jewish ladies, who had formerly arrived in the United States. Although the process of Americanization becomes apparently attainable through American philanthropic programs and charity institutions, Yezierska shows how their Americanizing strategies and the models of America n femininity advertised in the period eventually failed to succeed. By developing a hybrid identity, Russian Jewish characters manage to legitimate their cultural differences inside the urban public spaces and beyond the Lower East Side context.
Disabled masculinity as a metaphor of national conflict in the cold war era: Orson Welles' the lady from Shangai, 1947
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Acosta Bustamante, Leonor
Resisting censorship and American optimism in the postwar era, film noir emerged with some specific particularities which made the genre a countercultural phenomenon in the late 1940s. The possibilities offered by these films captured the attention of Orson Welles for their display of sexual dramas as metaphors of social anxieties of the times. The renovation of the noir canon is accomplished in Welles’ first noir, The Lady from Shanghai (1947), with the intention of exploring deficient masculinities surrounding the totemic power of the femme fatale. The analysis of these masculinities points out the historic and cultural context of the Cold War, an era characterized by fear and paranoia, whose effect on masculinity ends with the decomposition of any heroic stand and the loss of any kind of patriotic faith.
Two legged wombs: surrogacy and margaret atwood's the handmaid's tale
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Muñoz González, Esther; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO). España
Published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale is Margaret Atwood’s most famous work and her first dystopian novel, since all her previous fiction had adjusted to the conventions of realism. In general the plot of any dystopia should be based on factuality, or in other words, it has to be a plausible representation of the future of a concrete society. However, either when the novel was published or now that more than thirty years have passed, there is no such thing as “handmaids.” Nothing of the sort exist in any democratic country (Kay n.p.). However, as Chaterjee points out, there are many “disturbing” overlaps between Atwood’s handmaids’ struggle and the real experience and events that take place in contemporary surrogacy agreements. (n.p.). This paper examines Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale from a 21stcentury posthumanist perspective, which discusses the economic and ethical implications and no insignificant shocking similarities between the handmaids in the novel and our present-day surrogate mothers.
Urban indians in the short fiction of Sherman Alexie
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Ibarrola-Armendariz, Aitor; Gobierno Vasco; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MICINN). España
Although we still think of American Indians as riding horses, paddling canoes or hunting buffalo, the fact is that three out of four Native Americans now live in cities. The migration from the backwoods and reservations to the big metropolises began late in the 19th century, but only gained great momentum after World War II. While Sherman Alexie’s early fiction focused on the tribulations faced by American Indians on reservations, by the turn of the new millennium he was portraying the experiences of the Native diaspora in urban areas. In the two collections of short stories The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) and Ten Little Indians (2003), Alexie captures the more complex and unpredictable relationships that Native Americans build in diverse and fluid urban spaces. These new relationships are often marked by feelings of loss (of tribal bonds), alienation (from other human groups), nostalgia, ambition, and other psycho-social diseases. Helped by the ideas of experts such as James Clifford, Donald Fixico, Susan Lobo, and David Rice, this article explores the significant transformations and identity crises experienced by American Indians in urban contexts.
Grotesque violence and humor in Gerald Vizenor's bearheart: the heirship chronicle
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Hanif, Mohsen; Sheiki, Zahra
Gerald Vizenor seeks to challenge static definitions of Native American identity in his early novel Bearheart. To this end, he fills the novel with grotesquely violent and humorous scenes which give the work a seemingly perverse appearance. The normalized violence and the grotesque humor throughout the novel, however, disrupt socially normalized concepts and thwart the reader’s notion of normality which is a reminiscent of “realism” as a traditional mode of narrativization. Violence theories of scholars like Schinkel, Arendt, and Benjamin together with humor theories of Morreall, Cohen, and Carroll are drawn upon in order to clarify the interconnected mechanism of humor, grotesquery, and violence in producing tribulations in the narrative line of Bearheart. This aesthetic strategy, which is aligned with a dexterous manipulation of focalization, is used throughout the novel to break the unquestioned authority of masternarratives and also to help the already marginalized Native Americans’ voices produce their own narratives of identity.
Strange women teaching stranger things: mediumship and femane agency in nineteenth-century american spiritualist poetry
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Contreras-Ameduri, Clara
This article explores the paradoxes posed by American spiritualist poetry in relation to the female voice within nineteenth-century culture. Due to the associations between the passive and sensitive feminine ideal, as well as women’s supposedly innate moral and spiritual superiority, the ideology embraced by the spiritualist community granted its female followers a central role in the emerging movement while remaining compliant with the values of the period. As an example, spiritualist authors Lizzie Doten and Achsa Sprague made use of trance poetry to challenge the stereotypes which were meant to prevent women from participating in public life. By tracing the connections between mediumship and the act of writing it is possible to disclose the diverse strategies that such poets borrowed from spiritualist discourse in order to adapt their work to a readership that would rather believe in ghosts than in self-sufficient female authorship.
Piercing together: body control, mutability and entertainment technology in infinite jest
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2019) Chapman, Ana
The aim of this essay is to explore body representation and its significance in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest (1996). By doing so, it will correlate (ab)use and domination of entertainment to the description of the particular corporeality present in the novel, which is portrayed as being malleable, disconnected, machine-like and monstrous. Although published in the late 90s, the novel anticipated most accurately how entertainment would be consumed in contemporary times and its possible effects on individuals. Thereby, this essay analyzes how the body is shaped in Infinite Jest through the use of a current neuropsychological perspective and contemporary theories of the self as an attempt to reflect upon Wallace’s description of the body and its relation to the world of entertainment.

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