Periodically Queer: Sexology and Non-Normative Sexualities in the Little Magazine The Masses

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 442-463
Author(s):  
Ruth Mayer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sexual Liberation ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Periodical Publishing

This paper will be concerned with the special affordances of periodical writing, taking the modernist little magazine The Masses as its example. This magazine was instrumentally involved in promoting sexual liberation and ‘sex radicalism’ in the United States of the 1910s, and I argue that the – contracted, serial, and contingent – structure of periodical publishing had an incisive impact on the ways in which the magazine responded to and transfigured the contemporary rhetoric of sexology. Focusing on the enactment of non-normative sexualities in the little magazine, I aim to show that the iterative and kaleidoscopic form of presentation yields effects that are different from the aesthetics of queer modernism as manifest in the ‘closed’ literary forms of the episodic novel or the short story collection. I will cast a close look at Floyd Dell's writing in the magazine to argue my case, and end with a reflection on (the publication history of) Sherwood Anderson's ‘Hands’.

Histoire du mot «démocratie» au Canada et au Québec. Analyse politique des stratégies rhétoriques

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Le Canada

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.

Troubling the Cold War Logic of Annihilation: Apocalyptic Temporalities in Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-614
Author(s):  
Gordon Fraser
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Cold War

Sherman Alexie's widely taught short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistight in Heaven (1993) ofers a largely unrecognized critique of the apocalyptic temporalities of United States militarism. War planners in the United States have frequently looked to the unrealized, potential holocausts of the future for a justiication of violence in the present. Alexie's collection—like much contemporary literature by Indian writers—unsettles this military logic by revealing how First Nations in North America and peoples around the world live with the consequences of a militarism that continually envisages impending antiAmerican violence as a means of justifying violence by the state. Alexie's writing provides a way of replacing the violent, futureoriented temporality of United States militarism with a “slow” temporality that acknowledges the un folding consequences of the past. Ultimately, this essay suggests a method for rereading “ethnic studies” literature with a view toward the interventions these texts make in mainstream United States culture.

Fighting the Fear: Everyday Terror in the American Short Story Collection after 9/11 A Study of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rae-Lee Kruger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Public Response ◽  
Story Collection

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge represent the emphatic force that can be created within a short story collection and each contain at their core what has become a fundamental aspect of American literature since September 2001: terror. In A Visit from the Goon Squad and Olive Kitteridge, characters feel and attempt to cope with terror in their everyday lives. Both Egan and Strout contextualize individual terror against the broader national and cultural form felt by the United States after the events of 9/11. The presence of the void left by the Twin Towers is a potent symbol of terror within each collection, paralleling the characters’ experiences with that of post-9/11 America while highlighting the existence of everyday terror and providing a lens for character self-reflection. This essay focusses on two categories of terror that figure into both collections, terror of the unknown and terror of being alone, and how strategies employed by Egan’s and Strout’s characters to cope with this terror correspond to the American public response to the wider terror instilled by 9/11.

Conclusion—Where Did We Go Wrong?

2021 ◽  
pp. 527-560
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses

Having finished our history of prohibitionism, Chapter 18 asks: Where did our historical understandings go wrong? The chapter begins with the autumn years of Pussyfoot Johnson during the Great Depression, when prohibitionists had been thoroughly discredited. With the rise of Hayekian neoliberalism after World War II in the United States, any infringement on individual economic rights became understood as a necessary infringement on political rights too—which has made it difficult for contemporary historians to understand prohibitionism. In the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Hofstadter and Joseph Gusfield cast prohibition as solely a moral, religious issue, rather than a political or economic one, motivated by equal parts of “Marx, Jefferson and Jesus.” Ultimately, prohibitionism was a transnational normative shift about the inappropriateness of benefiting from addiction and misery of the masses, and an attempt to put the welfare of society ahead of the needs of the state.

scholarly journals Le Mulâtre: A Call to Connection through Narrative Technique

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1,2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Longard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Being ◽  
American Writer ◽  
History Of

The short story Le Mulâtre (1837) recounts the tragic history of a slave during Haiti’s turbulent 1790s. The first published work of Victor Séjour, it is the first known work of fiction by an African-American writer. At first glance a typical melodramatic tale of brigands, betrayal and revenge, the work is anything but typical in its stark depiction of Caribbean slavery and in its sophisticated use of narration and voice. Written when slavery was still being practiced by both France and the United States, this overt yet sensitive critique is a triumph of the narrative art.This article highlights a modern Structuralist analysis of narration. Séjour not only moves subtly through levels of narration but also through shifts of point of view within discourse and even within speech acts which form an almost unconscious commentary on the action. Moreover, the apparently standard tragic trope is undermined by a complex weaving of life histories in which the triumph of humanity overturns the notion of tragic loss. Thus a story of oppression and inevitability is structured within a voice of commentary, insight, and agency: Séjour succeeds in connecting the humanity on both sides of an inhuman war and in underscoring what is at stake for both master and slave in the continued exploitation of human being by human being.

Here/There, Now/Then, Both/And

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Publication ◽  
Publication History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Reading Edith Wharton’s Old New York through the genre of regionalism reveals the complexity of her cosmopolitanism, and strengthens the case for reading the volume as a unified work. The chapter discusses relevant aspects of the cultural history of the decades in which the four stories are set (such as the associations of tuberculosis in “False Dawn” and the ormolu clock in “The Old Maid”) and reviews the early publication history of each story and the collection. Close readings trace how Wharton connects and contrasts the United States and Europe (especially New York City and Italy) and puts their correspondences with historical eras into play—challenging received notions of progress and the assumption that cultivated taste correlates with integrity. The chapter argues that the way Old New York maps time onto place enables the projection of alternative values within a work that remains publishable and legible in its own moment.

The Organizational Interpretation of American History: A New Synthesis

Prospects ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 611-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Berkhofer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Action ◽  
American History ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Masses

The overall interpretation of American history has fallen upon hard times. Once upon a time, so the story of American historywriting goes, there existed a complete model of the United States' past that explained as it described the dynamics of American history over the centuries. Not only did the progressive or conflict school of historians assent to a paradigm of moral and methodological assumptions, but its practitioners also possessed a model of American society that was applicable to the whole of the United States' past as well as to its parts. The succeeding counterprogressive or consensus historians, by transmuting the realities of their predecessors into the realm of myth and paradox, questioned their easy correlation of class position and ideation, but they failed to develop an explicit model of the workings of American society that would describe let alone explain the dynamics of its history. New Left historians challenged the static nature as well as the moral judgments of consensus history by stressing, once again, the relationship of power and interests to cultural hegemony and the possibilities of social action from the masses, but the dynamics of conflict they reintroduced into American history too often failed to meet the new standards of rigorous explanation considered so important by the practitioners of the so-called new histories. The new economic, political, and social historians' insistence upon explicit methodology and the statistical analysis of correlation and variability destroys old models more than it advances new ones to explain parts of American history, let alone all of it. Thus, at this point in the history of American historiography, we have lost any overall approach to the framework of American history as we have gained sharper tools to achieve its testing and verification.

Review of A brief history of the United States.

1919 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 414-414
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of
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