Interview with Ji Eun Lee about Kazuo Ishiguro

Interview with Ji Eun Lee, author of “Norfolk and the Sense of Loss: The Bildungsroman and Colonial Subjectivity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,” TSLL: Texas Studies in Literature and Language 61.3 (2019): 270-90. Interview conducted by Corey Brooks.

Kazuo Ishiguro, December 2017

Could you describe your first encounter with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go? What do

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you remember of the experience, and how has your appreciation of the novel evolved since that time?

I first read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go for a graduate seminar in my first year at UCLA and eventually wrote a final paper on this novel for another class, which was taught by my adviser Jonathan Grossman. He allowed me to write on any novel, and recollecting my first encounter with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day at a used bookstore I visited impromptu and my attachment to it, I decided to write my final paper on Never Let Me Go. On my first read, I automatically saw the link between the clones and Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry, as I was deeply immersed in postcolonial studies then, and saw the revision of the traditional trajectory of the bildungsroman in the clones’ frustrated dreams ending with total emptiness. Two years later, I presented the paper at a graduate conference themed “excess,” which happened to appear in the Bhabha quote I had. I got excellent feedback, especially from Melanie Jones, who suggested that I should see the sense of loss not as an end point of stunted development but as a creative force opening up alternative possibilities. That inspired me to see the loss as a constituent void producing another form of existence outside the binary between colonizer-colonized. My students who read Never Let Me Go together in my class also boosted my admiration for the novel. Anne Bardet was one of them. I was so proud of her when her final paper “Breaking Free from Systemized Collective Individuality” critiquing the shared echo chambers of today’s SNS-based social interactions won the 2018 Teague Melville Elliott Undergraduate Essay Award honoring the best humanities writing in lower- and upper- division undergraduate classes at UCLA.

Ishiguro display, Stockholm 2017

What advice would you give to a first-time reader of Ishiguro?

Please don’t expect to discover anything Japanese in his works just because he is Japanese-British. Except in his first and second novels The Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), Ishiguro has consistently refrained from adding a reflective touch as a Japanese immigrant and rather tried to write on diverse issues not limited to his ethnic heritage. I would recommend starting with The Remains of the Day (1989), When We Were Orphans (2000), and Never Let Me Go (2005)–which I consider Ishiguro’s classics—paying close attention to the language and settings that parallel the narrator-protagonist’s awakening. In many of his novels and especially in these three, the reader’s expectation for the narrator’s reliability is gradually betrayed by the revelation of the hidden meaning behind the narrator-protagonists’ naïve yet deceptive writing style. The narrators’ submissive yet subversive developments often happen along their experiences of spaces, as shown in Stevens’s road trip from aristocratic country estates of Oxfordshire and Salisbury to untamed  landscapes in Weymouth, Christopher Banks’ journey from London to Shanghai, and Kathy H.’s lifelong entrapment in and departure from Hailsham, the Cottages, and donation centers. Ishiguro’s most recent novel Klara and the Sun is a wonderful sequel to Never Let Me Go. It insightfully continues the question of what constitutes humanity through the perspective of a non-human first-person narrator—this time, an AF (Artificial Friend)—whose personalized consciousness and development contest the human monopoly on individuality, with uncertain yet resilient hopes for the future.

Never Let Me Go was published in 2005. How does it fit into or modify the genre of the bildungsroman?

The bildungsroman, the etymology of which derives from the German word Bildung meaning education or formation, features a young individual who matures to adulthood harmoniously incorporated into society. Karl Morgenstern and Wilhelm Dilthey, who first introduced this term for the genre, both emphasize the teleology of individual development, as Dilthey writes that in a bildungsroman, “[a] regular development is observed in the life of the individual: each of the stages has its own intrinsic value and is at the same time the basis for a higher stage.” M. M. Bakhtin claims that individual development in this type of the novel happens on the convergence between private time and history, arguing that “He [the man] emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself.” Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, on the surface level, fits into this taxonomy of the genre, as it starts with the clones’ childhood and follows their journey as adults after leaving Hailsham. The teleological progress implied in the bildungsroman, however, can no longer work, given the absence of the future in the clones’ destiny ending with donation. The novel’s narrative disconnects the clones from historical time promising self-integration into society, and in this unsettled bildungsroman, the development, or un-development, of the clones unfolds between spaces that impose institutional norms. Unlike the traditional bildungsroman characters who triumphantly age into individuals accepting societal values, the clones face the loss of their organs and of their autonomy, embracing subjectivity devoid of agency.

• Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, edited and translated by. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985, p. 390.
• Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; translated by VernW. McGee, Austin: U of Texas Press, 1986, p. 23.

The Grand Pier, Weston-super-Mare

Ishiguro protests being called a postcolonial writer. Why do you suppose this is?

In the interview with Groes I cited in my article, Ishiguro is very skeptical about the word, saying, “I’ve never understood the categorization of postcolonial writing. [. . . ] Does ‘postcolonial’ mean writing that came out in the postcolonial era? [. . .] Or does it mean writing by people who don’t have white skins?” suggesting that the term delimits expectations about the topics that non-white writers are supposed to write about. Surely, the term “postcolonial” began as a theoretical concept formed around the concept of the nation and national consciousness (Frantz Fanon), the Subaltern’s unspeakability (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), Orientalism (Edward Said), and a clear sense of writing back to the center as shown in exemplary novels such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986). At some point, however, it attained a restrictive function categorizing writers not based on their literary styles but on their biographical, racial backgrounds. This tendency underlying the term may discomfit the younger generation of writers in the twenty-first century, whose focus has shifted away from the national context to conflicts between general concepts born out of Western modernity such as humanity or individuality. Also, their literary styles are so diverse and cannot be defined in homogenizing terms. As Ishiguro notes clearly in the other interview I cited, he is “interested in the way words hide meaning,” whereas Salman Rushdie, in his view, “seems to be reaching out—to express meaning that can’t usually be expressed through normal language.” Ishiguro wants to be free from any constraints pre-determining the thematic and literary scopes imposed by the early definition of the term.

• Ishiguro, "The New Seriousness: Kazuo Ishiguro in Conversation with Sebastian Groes," 2009, Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, edited by Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 263
• Ishiguro. “An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro,” interview conducted by Allan Vorda and Kim Herzinger. Mississippi Review, vol. 20, 1990, pp. 135.

Ishiguro in Stockholm, December 2017

You’ve suggested we understand the “postcolonial” to involve “the epistemological reshaping of subjectivity that reverses the progressive, linear, teleological frame of individual development.” What are some works published since Never Let Me Go that you would categorize as new “postcolonial” literature?

I will confidently nominate Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2009) for the title of “new ‘postcolonial’ literature.” Based on the real historical tragedy of the massive toxic gas leakage at the American company Union Carbide that killed thousands of people in Bhopal in 1984, the novel tells a story of the twenty-year old narrator-protagonist named “Animal,” who can only walk on fours as he was born with a disorder stemming from the disaster. The political, economic irresponsibility of the “Kampani,” which caused the event, is visible in environmental injustice haunting the people living in the fictional city of Khaufpur and Animal’s unfulfilled desire to be like any other human walking on two feet. Animal’s development, however, moves beyond the purposive singular trajectory of humanity. Instead of defining himself as nonhuman or not-yet-human, Animal confirms his unique subjectivity as “the one and only Animal.”  The narrative that flips back and forth in time and the paratextual elements consisting of an accompanying website, translations, and glossaries joyfully depart from the center-bound critique of colonial capitalism and the stabilizing framework of identity-formation. Also, Amitav Ghosh’s non-fiction essays in The Great Derangement: The Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), together with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal essay “The Climate of History: The Four Theses” (2009) and Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s recent book Allegories of the Anthropocene (2019) invite us to consider a postcolonial literature that shifts its focus from the twentieth-century nationalistic struggle for agency to environmental discourses concerning the status of the human in the geological, planetary scale of climate change in open-ended, indefinite narrative forms.

• DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke UP, 2019.

Holkham beach, photograph by Edward G. Jones

Could this new definition of postcolonial narrative be applied successfully to older works of literature? If so, could you name a book or author that might especially benefit?

Yes, of course. I highly recommend Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984) and its sequel No Telephone to Heaven (1987). Both novels feature the coming-of-age story of the light-skinned heroine Clare Savage, whose unstable racial identity belonging to neither black nor white parallels the novels’ quest for an alternative history of Jamaica opposing the institutional doctrine of British colonialism. The yearning for teleology still persists, but her development, especially in the second novel, is fissured by narratives oscillating between micro- and macro- histories and even fragmented perspectives crossing temporal and spatial boundaries.

Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry plays an important role in your essay. Would you define it for us?

Bhabha writes that “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, "as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” and affirms the lingering trope of dissimilation opposing the complete identification with the allegedly superior colonizer by emphasizing the “ambivalence” shaping mimicry through “its slippage, its excess, its difference.” According to Bhabha, mimicry is a state of ambivalence between assimilation and dissimilation that begets a subversive power of critique. My take on mimicry, however, is that it engenders a sense of loss, which obstructs the capacity for criticism and can instead articulate subjectivity outside the binary between the colonizer and the colonized.

• Bhabha, Homi K., “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994, p. 122.

Homi K. Bhabha, 2010

Bhabha can be a difficult writer to follow. What challenges does literary theory face today in an era of more straightforward prose?

Bhabha’s language can be very dense, complicated, and yes, difficult to follow. In my view, however, literary theory does not have to be written in complex prose. Contemporary theories have adopted clear simple language echoing scientific organization and defining key concepts in less metaphoric and more common yet correspondingly exact language. When I read contemporary theory in posthumanisms, animal studies, ecocriticisms, etc., I feel that literary scholars today are taking a more direct, approachable outlook on language. 

How do you wrestle with this tension in your own critical practice?

I try to keep revising, re-reading a draft as if I have never read it. I also try to identify keywords of my arguments and see whether I can redefine them in more clear language by avoiding jargons that only I can understand. Meta-reading scholarly articles also helps. From time to time, I meta-read some articles by highlighting key phrases and sentences that I particularly like and add them to my corpus of lucid academic language.

Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day was filmed in 1993, and Never Let Me Go in 2010. What are some of the specific challenges involved in transposing his novels to the big screen?

The biggest challenge I see in the task of filming his novels, especially these two novels, is the presence of the first-person retrospective narrators who filter and unpack the stories through their own subjective positions in time, because films can only show scenes unfolding in the moment. I am not sure whether Mark Romanek’s film Never Let Me Go did justice to Kathy’s narration, which the novel presented as complex narrative texture gradually stripped off of her reflective musings. I admire, however, how James Ivory’s film The Remains of the Day embraces this challenge and creatively uses camera angles and voice-overs reading letters to reshape the narrative points of view into the twofold structure vacillating between Miss Kenton’s and Stevens’s perspectives. The film starts with Miss Kenton’s letter, positing the past and the present perspectives in one frame. It also adds another layer of perspective in resemblance to the third-person omniscient viewpoint at the end, when the camera zooms out from Darlington Hall to follow a bird that alights from the house and soars over the grass of the surrounding estate. This cinematic omniscient perspective implied in the bird’s-eye view of the ending scene suggests that both Stevens and Darlington Hall are set free from Stevens’s retrospective gaze that has hitherto confined them to the past. 

What are you working on now?

Currently, I am working on a couple of exciting research and pedagogy projects. My first book-in-progress, Walking London: Urban Gaits of the British Novel, examines the novel’s development alongside the city through the perspective of a city-walker, whose gaits differ depending on the shape of the urban environment. I analyze how the characters walk—jostling and jostled in dense traffic, prowling across cross-species encounters, wooshing alongside accelerating vehicles, and cruising through racially-gentrified urban districts—in novels by Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, and Sam Selvon. My book translates the unintentional, collective, instinctive, absent, or disjointed agency inherent in these urban gaits into narrative movements engineering an environmental reading and thus counters a long-held view (currently under much pressure) of the novel as dominated by agential individuals. Another important work I am doing is Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom. It is a digital humanities project that incorporates a race-conscious standpoint into interdisciplinary teaching practices, initiated by some Victorian scholars last year at the call of “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy Wong, who bravely proposed to disrupt the assumed whiteness in Victorian readership and pedagogy. I joined the team and have been developing study materials and guidelines, especially about nineteenth-century Africa and the British Empire. Last but not least, as a BK21 postdoctoral fellow in “Interaction English Studies in the Era of AI (Artificial Intelligence)” at SKKU, I am working to make sure that my engagement with environmental humanities, medical humanities, and anti-racist Victorian pedagogy aligns with the BK21 team’s goals of shaping new forms of interaction between human and nonhuman intelligence in 21st-century technologies and environments. If you want to learn more, please check the programs’ websites and come see me at the MLA panel “Victorians in Location” next year! 

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Q&A with Peruvian Novelist Alonso Cueto

As the latest work in our Latin American Literature in Translation series, The Wind Traveler showcases the mesmerizing storytelling of Alonso Cueto at the top of his career. At the heart of his latest work is a seemingly ordinary man named Ángel, who sells kitchenware at a store in Lima. In the early 1990s, he had served as an army soldier, engaging in brutal acts whose aftermath still reverberates. He is forced to reckon with his past when a woman he was instructed to kill enters the store and buys a few items. How can she still be alive? What's more, how can she not recognize Ángel? Remarkably, she asks him to deliver her purchases to her

house. From this moment, Ángel feels compelled to make amends through any means necessary, even if it requires sacrificing his life of quiet retirement. Publishers Weekly gave the translation a starred review, writing:

“Staggering . . . Cueto imbues every page and character with the brutal consequences of war in his compulsively readable story of a man’s reckoning with a history of violence. Wynne and Mendez’s splendid translation brings readers an essential work of Peruvian literature.”

We asked Alonso Cueto a few questions about the English translation of The Wind Traveler. The book publishes on October 13, 2020. 

The Wind Traveler is set in Peru in the aftermath of guerrilla warfare and the insurgent violence of the Shining Path. Please describe the historical context.

The Shining Path war started in the context of the deep inequality of Peruvian society and the abandonment of the state in rural areas. In the area of Ayacucho, in the Peruvian southern Andes, a professor of philosophy—Abimael Guzmán, by then in his late forties—declared the insurgence of the group. Its first act was to burn the ballot boxes the day of the presidential elections in April 1980. Soon afterwards, inspired by the hard line of the Communist Party of China, members of the group demonstrated their disagreement with Deng Xiaoping’s government by hanging dogs from posts in downtown Lima. The dogs symbolized the new members of the Chinese Communist Party and the hanging of the animals was meant to meant to represent their symbolic execution as traitors. During the eighties and early nineties, Shining Path conducted a violent campaign in the southern Andes and then in the rest of the country. The execution of mayors in towns in the Andes, the massacre of villagers, and the explosion of buildings and banks were very frequent in those years. The government sent the army to Ayacucho and other areas. Soon the methods of the army became as violent and heartless as the ones implemented by the Shining Path. Many soldiers were forced to commit terrible crimes and the memories haunted them for the rest of their lives. The Wind Traveler tells the story of a man who was in the army and recognizes a prisoner of war whom he thought he had killed.

There is an element of haunting in The Wind Traveler, but this is neither science fiction nor magical realism. How would you describe this in formal terms and what makes it especially appropriate for writing about violent histories?

I agree. The memory of the main character has always haunted him and he is very aware of the power of its images and voices. The story is told from his point of view. The character deals with his past and I think it reflects everybody’s experience. Somehow we all have a permanent, conflicted relationship with our own past. The same can be said of societies and communities and their relationship with common memories. My first book of stories was called The Battle of the Past. Talking about this title, a friend once told me that we can still win the battle of the past; in other words, we can try to be at harmony with our own memories.

In one of the very first pages of The Wind Traveler, the character sees this woman, whom he thought he had killed, enter the store where he works. She doesn’t seem to recognize him and acts as any other customer would. This the way the past works sometimes, just surprising us when we least expect it to. I think of the quote by L. P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” But it is also true that the past is our own country always and that we have it whispering its words and showing its images to us all the time. In The Wind Traveler, this past takes the shape of a woman who enters the daily life of the main character.

The narrative perspective is unique: oscillating between past and present, shifting from what initially seems like third-person omniscient to include first-person interjections. What can you tell us about the narrator?

I always try to change the narrator because I think all of us see our lives from different perspectives. We also have in our lives times with an omniscient narrator and times with a very intimate connection with ourselves. The way we talk to ourselves at different times of the day is an indicator of the changing of our own narrators. It is difficult to make these changes in a novel but it is also the best way to reflect our own life narration. I try to adapt the type of narrator to the moment of the story, depending on how the character sees himself in relation to his surroundings.

A character uses the Quechua word ñawpa, which feels central to this novel and your writing broadly. Please define this word for us.

The word ñawpa is an expression of the way the Quechua world imagines time as a whole. It means both future and past. Furthermore, it can also be said that the idea of the future for the Quechuas has to do with what is behind you, whereas the idea of the past is what is in front of you. In other words, we all face the past since we know what happened but we have our back toward the future because we don't know what will happen. In another sense, ñawpa means both in front of and behind. The word expresses a sense of time as a unity and excludes the Western division of time as divided by terms such as past, present, and future. Time is a whole and the same can be said about space in the Quechua sense of reality. This idea of the past as something that is always in front of us although it is also behind us fascinated me from the beginning, and this is why I included it in the novel.

A number of your works have been translated many times over. Is the translation process different for every book?

The translator is a creator, a second writer, who adapts the instrument of the original words of the writer to new sounds, meanings, and nuances. I can only say that the translators of this novel have done a wonderful job.

Alonso Cueto is an award-winning novelist, playwright, journalist, professor of journalism, and author of more than thirty books whose works have been translated into sixteen languages.

Frank Wynne is a literary translator from Ireland, the author of I Was Vermeer, and the translator of Cueto's The Blue Hour.

Jessie Mendez Sayer is a literary translator, editor, and former literary scout. She studied history and Spanish at the University of Edinburgh.

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Wes Anderson Issue from Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Please enjoy this interview about the work and study of director Wes Anderson and his films. The interview was conducted with Donna Kornhaber, guest editor, special issue: Wes Anderson TSLL 60.2 (2018): 1-227. 

Contents: Donna Kornhaber, “Wes Anderson, Austin Auteur”; Tom Hertweck, “The Great Frame-Up: Wes Anderson and Twee Narrative Contrivance”; Kim Wilkins, “Assembled Worlds: Intertextuality and Sincerity in the Films of Wes Anderson”; Kevin Henderson, “Failed Comportment and Fits of Discomposure in the Films of Wes Anderson”; Rachel McLennan, “‘That’s not enough’: Aging in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and Rushmore"; Rachel Joseph, “Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums: Writing and Forgiveness”; Alissa Burger, “Beyond the Sea: Echoes of Jules Verne in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”; Peter Sloane, “Kinetic Iconography: Wes Anderson, Sergei Parajanov, and the Illusion of Motion” 

Set from the film Isle of Dogs. Source: Isle of Dogs. Author: Paul Hudson

Could you share with us a ranking of Anderson’s films, starting with your favorite?

This is very hard, but here’s an attempt:

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel 
2. Moonrise Kingdom 
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox 
4. The Royal Tenenbaums 
5. Rushmore 
6. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou 
7. The Darjeeling Limited 
8. Bottle Rocket 

You’ll notice I haven’t included Isle of Dogs in the list; I’m still thinking it through.

What aspects of The Grand Budapest Hotel lead you to place it at the top of this list?

I think it’s the film where Anderson’s stylistics and thematics finally reach scale, so to speak—where he is able to build what is arguably his most complete and complex universe (his own country, quite literally) and tell one of his most narratively complicated stories, all without losing the thread of stylistic idiosyncrasy or repeated thematic concerns that mark all of his works. It is an epic Wes Anderson film, which for years seemed like an obvious contradiction in terms; though still invested in the fate of individuals, it operates on a world-historical plane. It is also the first film, I would argue, where Anderson gets serious about politics (something he continues in Isle of Dogs), which likewise seemed an impossibility from a certain view of his earlier works. Grand Budapest shows him taking his manner of filmmaking in directions that previously seemed unfeasible. 

Call for Papers - Texas Studies in Literature and Language Special Issue

Download the call for papers here.

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Editor's Introduction to the Modernist Native American Literature Special Issue

Modernism and Native America

James H. Cox

The fall edition of Texas Studies in Literature and Language is a special issue on the topic of Modernism and Native America. The journal’s co-editor James Cox wrote an introduction, which we are excited to share in advance of this issue’s September publication.

In 1967, the same year in which excerpts of Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn first appeared in issues of The Reporter and New Mexico Quarterly,

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Irving Howe published a retrospective on modernism, The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts. In the introduction, which shares a title with the volume, Howe observes, “I will be discussing a literary movement or period that I call ‘Modernism,’ while knowing full well that the term is elusive and protean, and its definition hopelessly complicated” (12). After wringing his hands over the daunting task of defining the term, he concludes his opening gambit: “Since modernism is a matter close to us in time, perhaps still alive in our own time, the important thing is not to be ‘definitive,’ which by the very nature of things is unlikely, but to keep ideas in motion, the subject alive” (12). After Harper & Row published Momaday’s novel, it won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and helped inaugurate the Native American renaissance. From our early twenty-first century vantage point, the coincident publication of Howe’s book and the excerpts from Momaday’s novel comprises a literary historical moment rich with uncertainty and possibility. A specialist in modernism expresses apprehension that the literature under his consideration “seems to be coming to an end” (13), and, though by the late 1960s many Native American writers had earned some acclaim and the recognition of scholars, Native American literary studies did not yet exist as an academic field of critical inquiry. Momaday, according to the nearly axiomatic narrative of Native American literary history, had not launched but was on the verge of setting in motion a renaissance and contributing more broadly to the institutionalization of ethnic American literary studies in the academy.

As Native American literature scholar Louis Owens suggests, Momaday’s novel works as a hinge between these two literary traditions, one ostensibly taking its final breaths, the other, again ostensibly, about to take its first breath or at least its most dramatic. Owens, who opened his 1985 study of John Steinbeck with an objection to the conventional scholarly judgment that he was insufficiently modernist, attributes the celebration of House Made of Dawn in part to the novel’s modernist components. In House Made of Dawn, he observes, “critics discovered . . . a novel that displayed the craft and ambitious complexity expected of the major writers of modernism” (23). It was a novel, too, Owens claims, “that lent itself rather nicely to the conventional tools of modernist critique—never mind the subtle complexities of Pueblo and Navajo elements in the novel” (23). Indeed, it “is even at first glance recognizably modernist” and seems “to contain the requisite elements of a work assimilable into the modernist canon” (91). Modernism, Owens contends, was still alive in the late 1960s in the pages of House Made of Dawn, yet he does not fully commit to calling the novel modernist. As his subsequent reading of the novel demonstrates, it challenges and exceeds modernism too much to bear the label.

The editor of and contributors to this special issue share Howe’s and Owens’s cautious approach to defining modernism and labeling texts modernist, though we do not object to Mark McGurl calling House Made of Dawn a “modernist novel” and have sympathy for McGurl’s claim that the novel incorporates rather than experiences contamination by modernism (240). We embrace, too, the proliferation of modernisms, especially those, such as Christopher Schedler’s border modernism, that account for Indigenous literary production and indigeneity beyond primitivist representations. This special issue also participates in the “two significant enterprises” of the New Modernist Studies: “one that reconsiders the definitions, locations, and producers of ‘modernism’ and another that applies new approaches and methodologies to ‘modernist’ works” (Mao and Walkowitz 1). Yet we chose not to call this special issue “Native American Modernism” or “Indigenous Modernism.” Instead, “Modernism and Native America” leaves these terms in productive tension and resists the implication that designating Native American literary productions as modernist amplifies their literary value. Kirby Brown, who has spent the better part of the last ten years studying mid-twentieth-century Native American writing, opens the article portion of the special issue with a call for New Modernist literary studies to recognize and fully engage the Native presence in modernity and modernism. Todd Downing, who makes a brief appearance in Brown’s article, occupies Charles Rzepka’s full attention in the next. Rzepka demonstrates that Downing, the closeted gay Choctaw author of nine detective novels and a history of Mexico, “raises many more questions than the New Modernism can answer.” Indeed, he asserts, “By certain lights he seems, if anything, irredeemably pre-Modernist.” Eric Gary Anderson and Melanie Benson Taylor, both scholars of the Native South, consider how Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter “understand indigeneity as both place and people” and explore “why Hemingway and Porter turn South precisely as they also try to figure out their intensely ambivalent, sometimes post-traumatic, sometimes impossibly contradictory relationship to Native America.” Michael Tavel Clarke brings the special issue full circle back to Momaday by arguing that The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), the book that followed House Made of Dawn and shares content with it, “satisfies formal definitions of modernism,” and, therefore, helps to restore more robust formal analysis to New Modernist Studies.

This special issue also includes, as an invitation to enter the conversation occurring within these pages, an example of one of the modernists’ favorite genres, a manifesto authored by Lynn Riggs with the help of Mary Hunter, Andrius Jilinsky, and his professional and romantic partner Enrique Gasque-Molina/Ramon Naya, and published here for the first time with the permission of the Paul Green and Lynn Riggs estates. Riggs, born in Indian Territory in 1899 about six weeks after Ernest Hemingway, sent this revolutionary vision for the theatre as a letter to his friend, Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist Paul Green. Riggs’s letter, conveying “the will to immediate and radical change” (11), to use Mao and Walkowitz’s definition of the key feature of manifestos in the introduction to Bad Modernisms, burns with energy and outrage. At once rejecting idealism and articulating an idealistic vision for the stage, the Vine Theatre manifesto pits imagination and poetry, or art, versus entertainment, a “racket” driven by Hollywood and Broadway, and attempts to reclaim theatre for the avant-garde. In alliance with other forces working “in opposition to the triumphant, arrogant state,” it also contains a strong social justice component while simultaneously denying a political enterprise: “we have no worldly battle to fight.” Riggs announces, too, that the Vine Theatre will embrace what became, in retrospect, pace Michael North, the motivating force of much modernist art and literature: “Our theatre, by its very nature, will produce new forms.” Had he known about Riggs’s manifesto, Howe, the modernism scholar and progressive public intellectual, likely would have celebrated it.

The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas
WORKS CITED

Howe, Irving, editor. The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts. Horizon Press, 1967.

Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, editors. Bad Modernisms. Duke UP, 2006.

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard UP, 2009.

North, Michael. Novelty: A History of the New. U of Chicago P, 2013.

Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. U of Georgia P, 1985.

Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. U of Oklahoma P, 1992.

Schedler, Christopher. Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism. Routledge, 2002.

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Entry Interview with the New Editors of Texas Studies in Literature and Language

The summer of 2016 saw Douglas Bruster and James Cox step in as the new editorial team of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. In the following interview, we speak with them about their scholarly backgrounds and the plans they have for TSLL, a journal of literary criticism published quarterly by the University of Texas Press. 

To learn about previous issues, submission guidelines, subscriptions, and other matters relating to TSLL, visit University of Texas Press online at utpress.utexas.edu/journals/texas-studies-in-literature-and-language.

James Cox

James, you have a strong research interest in contemporary Native America novels and ethnic American literature, and you co-edited Studies in American Indian Literatures for five years. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself and your academic background?

James: While my first book was on late-twentieth century novels by Native writers, my research covers Native American writing from 1920 to the present. Most recently, I’ve become interested in recovering Native writers from the middle decades of the twentieth century and thinking about the formal, critical, and political reasons that they remained overlooked or neglected despite, in some cases, having strong national or even international reputations during their lives. My second book, The Red Land to the South, followed some of these writers into Mexico, where they encountered indigenous groups that inspired them to think about how to help their home communities upon their return. The trans-indigenous critical approach of this second book influenced my work as co-editor, with my long-time friend Daniel Justice of the University of British Columbia, on The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature.

Douglas Bruster

Douglas, your expertise lies in Shakespeare. You have written and edited numerous books on his plays, and earned international attention for helping prove his contribution to another playwright’s work.

Douglas: I've been lucky enough to find work doing something I love, which is to read, study, and teach some of the best writing in our language. People sometimes have a hard time believing that there are still mysteries about Shakespeare and his works after all this time, but we really know very little about this great writer. Some of my current research involves dating his plays and poems, with an emphasis on determining the earliest part of the canon—what he wrote in the late 1580s and early 1590s. With desktop computing, we're able to perform increasingly sophisticated analyses of his words. In time, we're likely to gain a clearer picture of his working life than we have now.

Why were you drawn to take on the editorship of Texas Studies in Literature and Language?

James and Douglas: The journal is a very important piece of department and university history as well as one of the only non-specialist journals that publishes across historical eras, critical and theoretical divides, and national boundaries. We wanted to take up the challenge of editing such a journal.

What do you have in store for TSLL? How do you anticipate the journal changing?

More info

We’ve redesigned the journal’s exterior and interior to give it a new, fresh look. Readers will see this rather dramatic change upon first picking up—or clicking on—the journal.

We intend to publish a rich and diverse selection of articles across eras and fields, and we have recruited some new editorial board members—Alexander Dick, University of British Columbia; Devoney Looser, Arizona State; Rafael Pérez-Torres, University of California, Los Angeles; Randy Schiff, University at Buffalo; Bart van Es, Oxford—to join us, our editorial assistant (currently Megan Snell), and the board members who are continuing their service.

We have also initiated a publishing internship program for undergraduate English majors. The students in that position (Hannah Blaisdell and Emily Varnell this year) will help us develop a more robust social media presence.

Will the focus of TSLL shift to any previously unexplored areas of literature? 

Here two special issues bear mention. Our Modernism and Native America special issue will bring into the pages of the journal some new material, as will a special issue on filmmaker Wes Anderson.

In recent years, TSLL published special issues on Samuel Beckett (51:1), James Joyce's Ulysses (51:4), and the author J. M. Coetzee, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 (58:4). A 100th anniversary volume (54:1–4) devoted issues to conference papers from the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies, a posthumous work of ecocriticism by a colleague in the UT English department, and Turkish letters. Could you say more about your upcoming special issues?

We mentioned the special issue on Modernism and Native America forthcoming in 59.3. In addition to provocative essays from Eric Gary Anderson (George Mason), Kirby Brown (Oregon), Michael Tavel Clarke (Calgary), Charles Rzepka (Boston University), and Melanie Benson Taylor (Dartmouth), the issue will include an oft-cited but not closely read letter-cum-drama manifesto from Cherokee author Lynn Riggs to his friend, the Pulitzer Prize winning dramatist Paul Green. We’re excited and grateful to have received permission to publish it from both the Riggs and Green estates. In the next two volumes, we’ll have special issues on Wes Anderson and Victorian Environments, edited by our department’s Donna Kornhaber and Allen MacDuffie, respectively.

For the latest information on Texas Studies in Literature and Language, follow the journal on Facebook and University of Texas Press Journals on Facebook and Twitter.

www.utexaspress.com

Your Freedom to Read: 13 Links for Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week (Sept. 21-27) is the book world’s annual celebration of our right to choose and have access to the books that we want to read. Libraries, bookstores, and the online book community will use this week to host events, highlight banned books, and spotlight the conversation about the real and pressing issue of book censorship in communities across the nation. 

This year the Banned Books Week National Committee has chosen to emphasize the censorship, banning, and challenging of comics and graphic novels because “Despite their serious literary merit and popularity as a genre, they are often subject to censorship,” Judith Platt, chair of the Banned Books Week National Committee, said in a statement about this year’s effort.

UT Press wants to be a part of this effort. We hope you’ll think about not only the impact that banned books have had on you, but the consequences for communities that deny access to certain books. We hope you’ll show your support to those who stand up year-round to protect your freedom to choose the books that you want to read. This year we present to you a list of 13 things you can read, watch, check out, or do, to get engaged with Banned Books Week 2014. 

This article details a case this summer in which the College of Charleston in South Carolina was threatened with budget cuts for featuring a graphic novel, Fun Home, on an optional summer reading list

 

21 stories about comics that have been banned in the US

Dallas Morning News :: West of 98 & Best of the West 2011

West of 98
Edited by Lynn Stegner and
Russell Rowland
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Book review: West of 98 and Best of the West 2011
By Jenny Shank

“Westerners have been reminded … that we are interesting in some of the same ways that cavemen or headhunters are interesting,” writes Montana novelist Russell Rowland in West of 98, one of two new anthologies published by the University of Texas Press. But what’s clear from these collections, one of fiction and the other of essays, is that Westerners are curiosities to ourselves as much as we are to outsiders.

The 20 stories in the fiction collection, Best of the West 2011, display a wide range of styles and structures, with a few common themes recurring — the primacy of characters’ interaction with gorgeous, yet treacherous, Western landscapes; their penchant for road trips; and their frequent bouts of criminal behavior.

Best of the West 2011
Edited by James Thomas and
D. Seth Horton
Buy It Now

K.L. Cook vividly imagines a boy’s encounter with legendary outlaws in Depression-era Texas in the moving “Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard.” Meth addicts steal the identities of unsuspecting Nebraskans in Judy Doenges’ “Melinda.” A bereaved couple unknowingly enjoys a moment of respite amid the ongoing drug war in Nuevo Laredo in Peter LaSalle’s elegant “Lunch Across the Bridge,” while an Oklahoma couple reignites old sparks when they play chicken with oncoming traffic in Aaron Gwyn’s startling “Drive.”

In Ron Carlson’s “Escape from Prison,” an embezzling banker retreats to his Colorado cabin after his malfeasance is discovered. The narrator of Claire Vaye Watkins’ clever, epistolary “The Last Thing We Need” reveals a shooting that has haunted him his entire life. In Shawn Vestal’s innovative “Opposition In All Things,” Rulon Warren returns from World War I to the Idaho Mormon community where he grew up and is possessed by the spirit of a gun-toting pioneer forebear, who urges him to go down with his gun blasting.

The essayists featured in West of 98, which the novelist Rowland edited with Lynn Stegner, are of a more law-abiding sort than the characters in Best of the West. Fans of contemporary Western American literature will recognize most of the authors — the editors gathered contributions from many of the most eloquent writers in the region.

Read the reviews in their entirety at dallasnews.com »

Billings Gazette :: West of 98

Best of the West 2011

Edited by James Thomas
and D. Seth Horton
Buy It Now

Ambitious anthology tries to corral West's essence

By David Abrams For The Gazette

What is the West? Where does it begin and end? How does one even get there?

According to the “West of 98” editors and contributors, the answer to all three questions is: it depends. The West is less terra firma than it is terra incognita, a landscape of the imagination that is still being mapped by politicians and poets.

Lynn Stegner, who co-edited the anthology with Billings author Russell Rowland, writes in the introduction that the original goal was to find “a kind of Greek chorus that might define, remark upon, and otherwise characterize the West as each of us grew to know it, and, equally important, the West that is still becoming. A declaration not of our independence this time, but of our interdependence.”

What Stegner and Rowland got were 67 writers — most of them all-stars in contemporary west-of-the-Mississippi literature and each with a distinct and often contradictory perspective on what it means to live “west of the 98th meridian.” Taking a wide-angle view of “West of 98,” we find a crazy-quilt definition of the Western landscape and its people; some of the individual essays are exquisite, a few are flat as a Nebraska wheat field, but all form a pattern of what eventually looks like a singular landscape that generations have both tamed and succumbed to in the quest for more open spaces. The West is, as David Mas Masumoto claims, “dirt worth fighting for.”

In this thick, rich volume, we’re treated to essays and poems by, among others, Rick Bass, Larry McMurtry, Judy Blunt, Walter Kirn, Gary Snyder and Gretel Ehrlich. Some of the contributors merely define their own postage-stamp-sized corner of the West, others conclude by admitting they’re baffled by the physical and imaginative boundaries of the region. The true West is such an enigma to Ron Hansen, for instance, that his entire essay “Why the West?” is nothing but a series of questions (“Why do movie characters on the run almost always head west?” etc.).

Read more at billingsgazette.com »

Publisher's Weekly :: West of 98

West of 98

Edited by Lynn Stegner
and Russell Rowland

Buy It Now

Editors Stegner (Because a Fire Was in My Head) and Rowland (Open Spaces), and the writers they've gathered, ask what it means to be a Westerner. Many of the stories, poems, and essays in this enjoyable collection touch on widely recognized images--cowboys, cattle, the Great Plains--while others present frank, forthright arguments about race and politics specific to the states west of the 98th meridian, which runs from Texas to North Dakota. Understanding the beauty and aridity of this inhospitable land proves as essential as understanding its people. While pastoral reminiscences by Louise Erdrich and Larry McMurtry are memorable, the book's strongest voices take a critical stance. In Stephen Graham Jones's terrifying "Two Illustrations of the West," he explores the dark sub-culture of road-side violence. In "A Dark Light in the West: Racism and Reconciliation," Barry Lopez tackles the history of racism in Oregon and "the deep wounds engendered by Manifest Destiny." This comprehensive and sometimes contradictory collection offers as much pleasure as scholarly merit.

Read More »

Houston Chronicle :: Trillin on Texas

Trillin on Texas

by Calvin Trillin

Buy It Now

Bookish

A book blog with Maggie Galehouse

"Texas Titles: Lone Star reads…
Trillin on Texas, by Calvin Trillin. Although he grew up in the Midwest, master essayist Calvin Trillin has plenty to say about the Lone Star State. These 18 previously published essays address everything from food to crime to politics. (University of Texas Press)"

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Columbus Dispatch :: Trillin on Texas

Trillin on Texas

by Calvin Trillin

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Book Review
Trillin on Texas: Lone Star State gets pointed look by opinionated observer
Sunday, May 29, 2011
By Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times

Calvin Trillin is a man of principle.

He can't stand, for instance, people who talk about themselves in the third person, which made things difficult back in the days of Dole and Dukakis.

He once declared that people caught trying to sell macrame should be "dyed a natural color."

And of writers, he once said: "There is no progress" - no corporate world to fall back on, no middle management. Writers are as good as the last thing they wrote, and sometimes not even that.

Atop that bedrock of curious dogma, Trillin, 75, has built an itinerant and confounding career.

He is viewed as a consummate New York writer, although he grew up in the sturdy Midwest. He was a big wheel in the Ivy League, although he relishes kicking the pedestals beneath those who were big wheels in the Ivy League. He became an early and influential guru of regional cuisine, although he professed to know next to nothing about the subject.  Read More »

CultureMap Houston :: Trillin on Texas

Trillin on Texas

by Calvin Trillin

Buy It Now

10 books you have to read this summer: From Moonwalking memory to art world felonies

BY Elizabeth Bennett | 05.10.11

excerpt
" ... Trillin on Texas is by the wonderfully amusing Calvin Trillin, a writer for The New Yorker who has, surprisingly, a Texas connection. His family immigrated to the United States through the port of Galveston, and he seems to love writing about Texas. Included in this collection are previously published articles and poems in various publications about everything from Houston’s colorful immigration lawyers and scouting for books with Larry McMurtry to his sardonic take on the Bush dynasty and their tendency toward fractured syntax."

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