Matt Kriz's List: To Read

A history of racialized sexuality in the US suggests that sexuality is saturated by race even in American literature written by white gay men. Reading Edmund White’s coming out novel, A Boy’s Own Story, in relation to a little-known work of gay pulp fiction, André Tellier’s Twilight Men, the essay provides a fictional example of the ways white gay identities might be seen simultaneously to collude with and undermine the history of whiteness. The essay also elaborates a strategy for queer reading of the incoherencies of sexual identities within multiple historical discourses.

Charles Hannon. Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2005. x + 195 pp.
Peter Lurie. Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004. xiii + 237 pp.

The past few years have seen the publication of a number of volumes that mine the multiple perspectives of William Faulkner’s writing. Ted Atkinson’s Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics (2006) explores the ways in which various characters in Faulkner’s novels written during the years of the Great Depression express conflicting ideologies regarding that economic crisis, and Margaret Donovan Bauer’s William Faulkner’s Legacy: “What Shadow, What Stain, What Mark” (2005) seeks to uncover previously hidden or silenced perspectives in Faulkner’s works by rereading his novels backward through the lenses of writing by other southerners since Faulkner.

Black Subjects Re-Forming the Past through the Neo-Slave Narrative Tradition
Venetria K. Patton
Arlene R. Keizer. Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. xiii + 200 pp.
A. Timothy Spaulding. Re-Forming the Past: History, the Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005. x + 148 pp.

Tracy Hargreaves. Androgyny in Modern Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ix +202 pp.

Tracy Hargreaves offers us a study of androgyny in modern literature, a fascinating topic because of its protean nature: androgyny is a classical figure of nostalgic wholeness, a justification for the naturalness of heterosexuality, a term used by sexologists at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the intermediate type, a second wave feminist trope for the reconsideration of desires, an embodied subject, a misrecognition, an opportunity to reconsider the debate between nature and nurture in gender studies, an alchemical union, and even a humanist dream of “Man.”

Leland de la Durantaye. Style as Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2007.

Leland de la Durantaye’s thesis is that Lolita is a moral book because its real subject matter is not the abuse of young girl but the [End Page 945] peculiarly detailed manner in which Nabokov constructed the words Humbert Humbert uses to describe his cruelty.

Dean J. Franco. Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2006. 219 pp.

Dean J. Franco’s Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing is well worth reading and, despite some conceptual problems, it provides the reader with significant insights gained by comparing Chicano and Jewish American literatures and by discussing Chicano and Jewish American literary theory smartly and suggestively.

Taking the Maggie:
Money, Sovereignty, and Masculinity in British Fiction of the Eighties

Andrew Hoberek. The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. 158 pp.

From the title alone one might expect The Twilight of the Middle Class, with its elegiac echo of Nietzsche, to be engaged in a vigorous poststructuralist revisionary Marxism. Andrew Hoberek, however, will have none of that. He uses instead a vigorous and unapologetic classic Marxist class analysis to contest the view that "postwar culture abandoned the economic for the psychological" (1).

Ted Atkinson. Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006. xi + 271 pp.

In the fall of 1938 Time associate editor and erstwhile proletarian novelist Robert Cantwell traveled from New York to Oxford, Mississippi to interview the "steadily more obscure" novelist William Faulkner for Time's mass market readership.

Jennifer Travis. Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005. x + 222 pp.

Cross-disciplinary studies like Jennifer Travis's Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture obtained a new cachet in the 1990s and early 2000s in many English departments. Leaving behind the notion of the literary as a world somehow apart, many new graduate students felt emboldened to roam between disciplinary [End Page 610] fields, using "the logic of discursive structures" to connect high and low, popular and recondite, all the while locating culture more in the world itself than in any aesthetic.

Peter J. Bailey. Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2006. 295 pp.

John Updike, we are told—and we are told it often, sometimes by Updike himself—is a Christian writer. In many ways, this assertion has become as calcified in critical circles as the argument that, say, John Barth is a postmodernist.

Gwen Bergner. Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. xxxii + 209 pp.

Gwen Bergner's Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis examines "how literature on race disrupts psychoanalysis's conventional models of gender identification, forcing a reconsideration and reconfiguration of many foundational psychoanalytic texts" (xix).

Catherian Friendship; or, How Not to Do the History of Homosexuality
Scott Herring

Imagine that Paul, the beleaguered protagonist of Willa Cather's 1905 short story "Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament," did not leap into what the narrator vaguely terms "the immense design of things" at the narrative's end (236). Can we possibly suppose another, less horrifying, and more historically definite "design" for this wayward adolescent?

Wilson, Matthew. Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2004. ix + 256 pp.

Few writers have been such a foster child of slow time as Charles Chesnutt. A moderately successful magazine writer of short stories and three published novels after the turn of the century, Chesnutt was forced to return in 1905 to more lucrative employment as a displaced Southern stenographer in Cleveland. By the 1920s he was already the Old Negro in the Harlem Renaissance, finally venerated as a forerunner, but little read, and his last two novels failed to find a publisher

Read this whole issue. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic