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• Wonder vs. Sublime in Romantic and Postmodern Literature

  Iyad Mukahal

  Views:

  81

  Book review:

  Economides, Louise. The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. vii + 214 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-47750-7. E-book. $84.99.

• The Lucky Leaf Casino: A Retroscape in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox

  Huseyin Altindis

  Views:

  66

  Representations of the American South and the southern sense of space have been changing rapidly due to transnational effects of colonialism, globalization, and the rise of technologies. Due to such factors, unprecedented numbers of people now travel to more distant and less visited places. One consequence of such changes is that place and spatiality represent multicultural and global perceptions and experiences rather than being uniquely and distinctively local. Market economies exploit the space and create retroscapes to serve the economic aims of various industries. Within this context, drawing on the aesthetics of space, memory, and nostalgia, the paper focuses on the Lucky Leaf Casino in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox to discuss how the text challenges and problematizes plantation nostalgia and labor exploitation through which power structures continue to restrict, disrupt, and exploit space, people, and history. (HA)

• Dissolving Boundaries in the Anthropocene

  Zsolt Tóth

  Views:

  84

  Book review:

  Kérchy, Anna, ed. Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies, special issue of AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 13.2 (2017)

  Kérchy, Anna, ed. Posthumanism in Fantastic Fiction. AMERICANA eBooks, 2018. 237 pages. ISBN 978-615-5423-46-8. EPUB. Open Access.

• Chronotopes of the City: Spatial Injustice and Narrative Form in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them

  Babett Rubóczki

  Views:

  326

  Combining Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and Sarah Dillon’s notion of the palimpsest, the essay highlights the dialogic relationship between narrative time and space in Chicana author Helena María Viramontes’s novel, Their Dogs Came with Them (2007). Set in East Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s—the heyday of urban renewal projects and the rapid spread of freeways—the novel registers the geographical displacement and constrained socio-economic mobility of Mexican Americans whose homes are demolished by the freeway building bulldozers. The spatial form of intersectionality characterizing the architectural structure of the freeways also describes the narrative form of the novel. The non-linear narrative is structured upon multiple intersecting plotlines, each of which portrays the social struggles of a young Chicana woman inhabiting the city. Focusing on the interplay of environmental theme and narrative form, the paper explores the narrative representation of East Los Angeles as a spatially and temporally multilayered landscape that palimpsestously overlays and interconnects the personal memory of the characters and the collective history of Mexican Americans’ socio-political oppression in North America. (BR)

• Memorials of the Irish West: John McHugh, Paul Durcan, and Harry Clifton

  Joanna Kruczkowska

  Views:

  71

  The article examines John McHugh’s sculpture (1950s Boat, 2009), Paul Durcan’s poem which it inspired “1950’s Boat (after John McHugh)” (2009)—both focusing on the Achill island—and another poem referring to the Blaskets, Harry Clifton’s “The Year of the Yellow Meal” (2012), trying to answer the question in what respect they stay close to realism and in what they approach experimentation. McHugh’s sculpture takes on an experimental form made of fragments of real stories, Durcan’s poem begins with this experimental sculpture and drifts towards realistic details but triggers experimental speculations, while Clifton’s poem mediates the Blasket biography through a style akin to magical realism in prose. All three palimpsestic works investigate issues of parochialism and marginalization faced with migration and cosmopolitanism, touch on the ethics (or rather, the lack) of gender policy and globalization, and by doing so, enquire about the Irish West’s disappearing culture.

• Squirrels, Timber, and the ‘Ecological Self’ in Faulkner’s The Bear

  Kenneth E. Hada

  Views:

  176

  Reading William Faulkner’s “The Bear” with a literary ecologist perspective could shift readers from abstraction to ethical responsibility. Deep ecology, ecopsychology, and constructionist views of human development align with ethical criticism and ecocriticism to establish the basis for what Freya Mathews refers to as the “Ecological Self.” Mathews joins others in noting that human development must become ecologically self-aware—a state engendering emotional, ethical responses, confirming wholeness and sustainability rather than mere intellectual, theoretical acknowledgment, or worse, pathological denial. Literary ecology joins textual analysis and meta-textual information to affirm the story’s implied stewardship, despite Faulkner’s sometimes unclear, tragic view of his landscape. An optimistic ecocritical reading affirms, or surpasses, various critical approaches often used with the story—in particular, the paradise myth. Reading ecocritically affirms individual health and sustainability with human culture and nonhuman nature. (KH)

• Migrants and Disaster Subcultures in the Late Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels

  Éva Federmayer

  Views:

  335

  Affected by a shocking concatenation of ecological, economic, and political disasters, black, white, and multiracial characters in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) seek to cope with apparently insurmountable difficulties. These Afrofuturist Parable novels render a disintegrating US society in the 2020s-2090s, which is torn by internal and external chaos: it shows visible signs of pandemonium involving the crisis of individual, communal, and ecological survival. This ecocritical reading seeks to explore how Butler’s novels make up the fictional tapestry of an evolving human risk narrative whose anthropogenic effects on the planet might threaten an “ecological holocaust” (Charles Brown) unless fundamental green changes spur radically alternative modes of thinking and living. Throughout this paper, I am interested in how Butler’s texts address and construct the interaction of the human and the non-human world to create a storyworld in which distinct characters operate not only according to the logic of the narrative in their local places and (semi)private/communal spaces, but also as distinct configurations of the Anthropocene, that is, as agents of a larger story of humans. (EF)

• Can Female Resistance Emerge from Vulnerability?

  Babett Rubóczki

  Views:

  68

  Book review:

  Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. x + 336. ISBN 978-0-8223-6290-6. Pbk. $26.95.