Browse

This article examines the concept of cognitive environment in relation to ecocriticism. It discusses Gaston Bachelard’s analysis, in his The Poetics of Space, of historian Jules Michelet’s work depicting the building of a bird’s nest. It suggests that the corporeal act of nest-building may then be argued to imply the continuity of an organism and its environment and that the notion of enclosure is built into any ecology or Thoreavian economy.

This article examines the relationship between literary critical practice and human rights, and describes the present uses of literary criticism. It analyzes an example of abolitionism and activism as it was conceived and practiced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and William Lloyd Garrison. The article evaluates how our understanding of texts and issues today can be informed by our analysis and understanding of the myths and metaphors of who we are that we have inherited from earlier literatures and movements.

This article examines what can be learned from nineteenth-century American literature regarding twenty-first-century citizenship. It investigates how the intellectual project of reading and interpreting American literature can prepare us for the deliberative work of democracy and what American literature tells us about this difficult relationship. The article explores how literature can be read politically, and describes the relevant works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown.

This chapter focuses on various ways in which the rhetoric and visual iconography of the space age and the world of science fiction was explored in the styling and promotion of consumer products from the 1920s to the 1960s, with particular focus on the United States. Such advertising, whether three-dimensional displays, films, posters, or other printed ephemera, was embraced in the futuristic displays of major corporations at hugely popular exhibitions such as the Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition of 1933–34 and the New York World’s Fair (“Building the World of Tomorrow”) of 1939–1940. Also considered are projections of automobiles and appliances of the future, as seen in the dynamic displays of General Motors’ Motoramas and “Kitchens of Tomorrow” exhibitions, the science fiction–inflected language of advertising copy, and the allure of the future for the general public.

For centuries, literary critics have made a division between poetry and prose, believing that poetry focuses on complex interactions between sound and sense, while prose centers on lucid significance. However, this article states that the major Transcendentalists believed that no clear distinction existed between poetry and prose. Supposing that the poetic is at one with the organic, they concluded that prose, if it approached the powers of nature, could qualify as poetry. Hence, the general aesthetics of American Transcendentalism are not confined to poetry but rather include poetry and prose alike. The aesthetic theories of Transcendentalists were vast and deep. They touched all the natural elements and resources and they were defined beautifully elucidating the aesthetic concepts of the Transcendentalists. Emerson tried to write about the world in his earliest book, Nature. Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, too, persistently worked to transform creatures into conceits and tropes into flora and fauna.

This chapter argues that the prescriptive turn in literary aesthetics over the last two centuries has marginalized science fiction, placing it in the category of the “Sublime” rather than the “Beautiful.” However, this is a position that recent advances in cognitive poetics are in the process of reversing. Stockwell explores the science-fictional beauty of expression, beauty of structure, and beauty of world to propose that the key to the immersive experience of science fiction is that it is a genre of compulsion. Close consideration is given to the work of Ray Bradbury, China Miéville, and Roger Zelazny.

The study of African American folklore has been grounded from its beginnings in the colonial period in discourses and power dynamics of race. This chapter posits that these beginnings have given rise to two folkloristic traditions, with differing agendas, methodologies, aesthetics, relationships to black communities, and investments in race. The mainstream tradition has been aligned with scholarly trends within academe and has seldom focused explicitly on the most pressing concerns of black people, or on the most obvious influence on the creation and expression of black folklore, namely race. The other tradition has been more aligned with the political interests, racial histories, and day-to-day needs of African American communities. This chapter critically examines these two tributaries, relative to issues of race, arguing for an African American folklore and folklife studies that embraces an African American–centered political focus while encompassing the unique intellectual contributions of both.

Can we imagine a future in which the African diaspora is seen as central to the flow of events? This chapter seeks to answer that question through a history of Afrofuturism as a critical term and a critique of the concept as deployed by black and white science fiction writers. The word is presented as a heuristic that makes visible black artistic production of futures that seek escape from dystopian erasures that seem real. The idea captures stories about science, technology, and culture other than those that limit future history to Eurocentric extrapolations. Kilgore argues that the term has allowed both a reconsideration of canonical African-American literature as well as an extension of science fiction’s ability to see prophetically across racial and cultural divides.

This chapter challenges the long-standing exclusion of single-panel comics from being seen as comics because they do not contain what is commonly regarded as a core feature of the genre: images arranged in a sequence. Accordingly, it offers not merely a defense of but what might even be called a manifesto for single-panel comics as comics. Titles belonging to this category have played an important role in the origins, evolution, and popularization of the genre in the United States. They have embodied some of the most successful and acclaimed works in the history of the medium. In many respects, sequential art as we know it would not be the same without comics that consist of only one panel. Accordingly, this chapter moves single-panel comics back into the genre where they belong. Single-panel comics are not simply comics; they are often examples of the medium at its most concentrated, controlled, and efficient.

This chapter provides an analysis of Gene Luen Yang’s two-volume set Boxers and Saints, which offers historical fiction about the Boxer Uprising in the visual medium of comics. Embedded with numerous historical references, these graphic narratives unfold around two fictional characters who represent the complexity of a particularly contested period in Chinese history. Little Bao (a Boxer who is inspired by nationalism) and Four-Girl (a Christian convert who seeks belonging through faith) are on opposite sides of the conflict at the time, thus presenting parallel stories that prompt the reader to contemplate the nuances in the historical past. Both characters come to terms with who they are and what they believe in while being spiritually guided by the first Chinese emperor Ch’in Shih-huang and Joan of Arc, respectively. This chapter discusses how Yang’s work visualizes the intersectional images of the “thousand palms with eyes” of Guan Yin (the Buddhist goddess of compassion) and of Jesus Christ and how they present what Paul A. Cohen has called a “historically reconstructed past” in which the Boxers and the Chinese Christians’ encounters are visualized as “event, experience and myth” at the end of the nineteenth century.

Folk dramas and festivals are encapsulated units of culture that distill, concretize, and make manifest through enactment important cultural values and ideas. Bounded in time and space, they offer scholars an isolatable prism through which to examine culture, making them appealing objects of study. They are marked off in time and space and amalgamate other genres such as song, dance, art, costume, food, and narrative to produce synergistic events that are greater than the sum of their parts. They also happen in public arenas, rely on active audience participation, and invoke frameworks of play. Both festivals and folk dramas create alternative worlds in order to transform reality. Festivals in particular are characterized by license, inversion, and a high degree of ambiguity. Which ideas, values, or social arrangements are proposed, whose values they represent, and how these ideas are contested or contradicted in festival and folk drama arenas remain important fields of investigation.

Metropolitan folklore and folklife studies often focus on ethnic, religious, and occupation-centered neighborhoods and their distinctive festive events. The material culture of streets and lots has also led to documentation of folk arts, vernacular structures, and customs that have been adapted to this environment. Examples include sidewalk altars in New York City, painted screens in Baltimore, and storefront churches in Los Angeles. In addition, beginning in the late twentieth century, both urban and suburban folklife studies took on the tinge of consumer culture as tradition and mass media mixed freely in commercial centers. Furthermore, the longstanding critique of suburbia as a homogenizing force has itself become embedded in American legend and belief, but suburbs have developed their own traditions of cookouts, malls, yard art, lawn care, car culture, and other modes of “hanging out.”

This article investigates why nineteenth-century views of human subjectivity repeatedly cross into the terrain of the nonhuman and animals, and examines the formation of liberal subjectivity. It offers subtle readings of John Locke, Emily Dickinson, and other theorists of what has become known as animal studies. The article traces the links between the ontological questions posed by current affect theory to Lockean origins and subsequent intellectual receptions of liberal subject formation.

Animal representation in graphic narrative has figured in many of the medium’s important developments and anchored one of its most popular genres, funny-animal comics. Since the modern emergence of the form sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, major figures such a Richard Outcault, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Edwina Dumm, Carl Barks, Robert Crumb, and Jim Woodring have made extensive use of the animal figure, in both highly and minimally anthropomorphized forms. As argued by John Berger, David Herman, and other scholars, the animal’s lack of human speech renders it vulnerable to a brand of representational colonialism whereby its in-itself existence is emptied in favor of other symbolic, metaphorical, or ideological functions. Many works since the 1980s by Grant Morrison, Steven Murphy and Michael Zulli, and Nicole Georges have striven for less anthropomorphized depictions, in a bid to address the ethics involved in representing the animal subject.

This article examines the history of antipodean modernisms in Australia and New Zealand. It suggests that antipodean modernisms are determined first and foremost by historical and geographic factors, because, in both countries, indigenous peoples were colonized and dispossessed of their lands and the settler colonists formed the societies which provide the institutions that persist to the present day. The article investigates whether the European strains of the modernist virus led to the development of local strains, indigenous versions of modernism.

Folklore and folklife research is applied to a range of institutional settings that can be categorized in five different spheres of representation. These spheres overlap, but they include academic folklore, applied folklore, public sector folklore, public folklore, and private sector presentations of folk culture. This range of work revises the common dichotomy made between academic and public folklore. In addition to the overarching idea of heritage in applications of folklore and folklife research, key concepts such as preservation, interpretation, presentation, and representation that pervade the five modes of folkloristic work are discussed in relation to each sphere. The different situations within which folklorists work implicitly and overtly influence how they will preserve, interpret, and present folklore and folklife.

As the title suggests, this article takes on the architectural significances of the Transcendentalist movement. The Transcendentalists had considered several different aspects for constructing a shelter. Thoreau's Transcendentalist house at Walden was not merely physical but intellectual as well and, as the article states, it must be understood in the context of contemporary architectural thought. This period also witnessed new publications called “villa books”, which were different from the old architectural “pattern book”. Pattern books were aimed primarily at carpenters and offered only a dry text while villa books, with a rich store of pictures and prose, evoked a bright new lifestyle, intending to establish proper “taste” among the middle class. Through that, the readers were told, in a quasi-religious language, that the way they embellished their homes spoke volumes about their moral proclivities and had a potentially powerful impact on their families and communities.

The usual practice when discussing science fiction and architecture is to look at the architecture “in” science fiction, particularly in science fiction films. This chapter starts by mapping out a definition of science fiction with respect to Darko Suvin’s “novum” and Adam Roberts’s “technology fiction,” arguing that some of the most significant utopian or speculative architectures, from early-twentieth-century avant-gardes, International Style modernism, postwar pop architecture to more recent cyberarchitectures, should be considered as full blown works of science fiction. The chapter also develops the idea that in architecture and science fiction, it is “representations” of technology that both tend to deal with, and concludes that architecture, by actively engaging with the speculative possibilities of science fiction, could find a critical alternative to the banalities of late-capitalist corporate architecture.

Communist governments in Europe believed that the state should enable the provision of material goods to its people—food, clothing, and shelter among the most critical of these needs. A long-term strategy for how to achieve this goal was left unresolved in the iconic texts and statements of the international communist movement. Architects, planners, and economists had to develop their own solutions to the vexing question of housing for the masses. As part of their work, they had to respond to the new planning regimens of the command economy and institutional structures such as the Five-Year Plan. While the perils of mass production have received much scholarly attention, this essay argues that an alternative base of knowledge about architectural modernism can be mobilized from the history of communist mass housing programs. This model of architecture—referred to here as “serial architecture”—embodied both an aesthetic approach and an ethical stance that remains relevant to enduring questions of the built environment’s agency in creating and sustaining social progress.