Uneasy Alliance: Twentieth-Century American Literature, Culture and Biography (Costerus NS 150)

368 Pages·2004·2.5 MB·English

by  Hans Bak

Uneasy
Alliance
Twentieth-Century
American Literature,
Culture and Biography
COSTURES NEW SERIES 150
Series Editors:
C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen
and Erik Kooper
This page intentionally left blank
Uneasy
Alliance
Twentieth-Century
American Literature,
Culture and Biography
Edited by
Hans Bak
Amsterdam-New York, NY 2004
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 90-420-1611-6
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004
Printed in the Netherlands
For

G.A.M. Janssens

Teacher, mentor, friend
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS

Preface 9

Gert Buelens 15
Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ethics in The Portrait of a Lady

Peter Rietbergen 31
A Variety of Ambersons: Re-reading Booth Tarkington’s
and Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons

Gonny van Beek-van Overbeek 59
Stepping Through a Looking-Glass:
The Worlds of Julia Peterkin (1880-1961)

C.C. Barfoot 81
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnets:
Putting “Chaos into Fourteen Lines”

Edward Margolies 101
Portraits of Gotham: Twentieth-Century American Culture
and the Writers of New York City

Mathilde Roza 109
American Literary Modernism, Popular Culture and
Metropolitan Mass Life: The Early Fiction of Robert M. Coates

Richard S. Kennedy 143
E.E. Cummings and Marion Morehouse: The Later Years

Inez Hollander-Lake 155
Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998): Femme Fatale of American Letters

Susan Castillo 173
Reading Signs: Epistemological Uncertainty and
the Southern Grotesque in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

Diederik Oostdijk 185
“How Rough Can Editors Be?”: Conrad Aiken,
Edward Dahlberg, and Karl Shapiro in a Literary Row
Marian Janssen 199
Postillion for Pegasus: Isabella Gardner and Poetry

Jaap van der Bent 215
Nabokov’s Unwanted Children:
Lolita and the Writers of the Olympia Press

René Verwaaijen 229
The Almighty’s Own Purposes:
Alfred Kazin’s God and the American Writer

Jan Bakker 243
Saul Bellow and the Actual

Derek Rubin 255
Between Prominence and Obscurity: Jewish-American Writers
at the Center of a Decentralized Literature

Kathleen M. Ashley 269
Toni Morrison’s Tricksters

Hans Bak 285
Site of Passage: The City as a Place of Exile
in Contemporary North-American Multicultural Literature

Mary A. McCay 305
Sandra Cisneros: Crossing Borders

Loes Nas 323
Border Crossings in Latina Narrative:
Julia Alvarez’ How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Theo D’haen 335
Stalking Multiculturalism: Historical Sleuths
at the End of the Twentieth Century

Hans Bertens 345
The English Tradition in Contemporary American Crime Fiction

Notes on Contributors 363
PREFACE

Writing in 1961, in opposition to the formalist excesses of the New
Criticism, critic Malcolm Cowley observed:

Literature is not a pure art like music, or a relatively pure art like
painting and sculpture. Its medium is not abstract like tones and
colors, not inorganic like metal and stone. Instead it uses language
which is a social creation, changing over the years with the society
that created it. The study of any author’s language carries us straight
into history, institutions, moral questions, personal stratagems, and all
the other aesthetic impurities which the New Critics are trying to
expunge.1

Cowley evinced a complex understanding of the paradoxical
relationship between personal morality and aesthetics, writer and
public, literary merit and cultural context. At the time, he was writing
against the grain of a dominant mode of text-oriented literary
criticism, strongly ensconced in the Cold War-governed U.S. academe
of the late 1940s and 1950s. His pluralistic and open approach to
writing would gain wider currency after the aesthetic principles and
underlying assumptions of the New Criticism had come to be
discredited in the debunking and demythologizing 1960s and 1970s,
and the canon of established American writers had been opened up to
allow for inclusion of new voices formerly not represented or heard.
This recanonization of American literature – perhaps the most striking
development in American writing of the 1980s and 1990s – was
predicated on a redefinition of the role and function of literary
criticism, a revaluation of ideology and cultural politics, and (a
hallmark of what was sometimes referred to as “the postmodernist
breakthrough”) a blurring of boundaries: between high and low forms
of art, between center and margin, between literature and other
disciplines. In the process, the approach to literature as an art (easily
associated with a presumably exclusionist formalist approach) was

1 Malcolm Cowley, “Criticism: A Many-Windowed House,” in A Many-Windowed
House: Collected Essays on American Writers and American Writing, ed. Henry Dan
Piper (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 246.