Myra Jehlen - Böcker

Myra Jehlen's aim in these essays is to read for what she calls the edge of literature: the point at which writing seems unable to say more, which is also, for Jehlen, the threshold of the real. It is here, she argues, that the central paradoxes of the American project become clear - self-reliance and responsibility, universal equality and the pursuit of empire, writing from the heart and representing shared values and ideas. Developing these paradoxes to their utmost tension, American writers often produce penetrating critiques of American society without puncturing its basic myths. For instance, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson begins as a slashing satire of racism, only to conclude by demonstrating that even an invisible portion of black blood can make a man a murderer. Throughout these essays Jehlen demonstrates the crucial role that the process of writing itself plays in unfolding these paradoxes, whether in the form of novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Virginia Woolf; the histories of Captain John Smith; or even a work of architecture, such as the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.

Myra Jehlen's aim in these essays is to read for what she calls the edge of literature: the point at which writing seems unable to say more, which is also, for Jehlen, the threshold of the real. It is here, she argues, that the central paradoxes of the American project become clear - self-reliance and responsibility, universal equality and the pursuit of empire, writing from the heart and representing shared values and ideas. Developing these paradoxes to their utmost tension, American writers often produce penetrating critiques of American society without puncturing its basic myths. For instance, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson begins as a slashing satire of racism, only to conclude by demonstrating that even an invisible portion of black blood can make a man a murderer. Throughout these essays Jehlen demonstrates the crucial role that the process of writing itself plays in unfolding these paradoxes, whether in the form of novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Virginia Woolf; the histories of Captain John Smith; or even a work of architecture, such as the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.

The English Literatures of America redefines colonial American literatures, sweeping from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to the West Indies and Guiana. The book begins with the first colonization of the Americas and stretches beyond the Revolution to the early national period. Many texts are collected here for the first time; others are recognized masterpieces of the canon--both British and American--that can now be read in their Atlantic context. By emphasizing the culture of empire and by representing a transatlantic dialogue, The English Literatures ofAmerica allows a new way to understand colonial literature both in the United States and abroad.

The English Literatures of America redefines colonial American literatures, sweeping from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to the West Indies and Guiana. The book begins with the first colonization of the Americas and stretches beyond the Revolution to the early national period. Many texts are collected here for the first time; others are recognized masterpieces of the canon--both British and American--that can now be read in their Atlantic context. By emphasizing the culture of empire and by representing a transatlantic dialogue, The English Literatures ofAmerica allows a new way to understand colonial literature both in the United States and abroad.

This volume of essays brings together some of the best work by Americanists concerned with the problem of ideology and its bearing upon American literature and culture. It projects neither a particular ideological view nor a particular view of ideology. On the contrary: these essays highlight the many uses of ideology as a critical term, and, in doing so, they open fresh avenues of inquiry and forums for discussion. They also demonstrate that, far from being parochial or reductive, ideological analysis is integral to considerations of formal structure and crucial to an understanding of the relations between literature and culture. Their essays deal variously with theoretical issues, with questions of theme, genre, and perspective, and with interpretations of particular authors and texts. The editors of the volume provide a general introduction to the nature and development of ideological critique, and an afterword that discusses the coherence of the volume as a whole and its implications for further study.

In exploring the origins and character of the American liberal tradition, Myra Jehlen begins with the proposition that the decisive factor that shaped the European settlers’ idea of “America” or the “American” was material rather than conceptual—it was the physical fact of the land. European settlers came to a continent on which they had no history, bringing the ideology of liberal individualism, which they projected onto the land itself. They believed the continent proclaimed that individuals were born in nature and freely made their own society. An insurgent ideology in Europe, this idea worked in America paradoxically to empower the individual and to restrict social change.Jehlen sketches the evolution of the concept of incarnation through comparisons of American and European eighteenth-century naturalist writings, particularly Emerson’s Nature. She then explores the way incarnation functions ideologically—to both enable and curtail action—in the writing of fiction. Her examination of Hawthorne and Melville shows how the myth of the New World both licensed and limited American writers who set out to create their own worlds in fiction. She examines conflicts between the exigencies of narrative form and the imperatives of ideology in the writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, and others. Jehlen concludes with a speculation on the implication of this original construction of “America” for the United States today, when such imperial concepts have been called into question.

Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively as possible. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert, James, and Nabokov. She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memory as the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever its materials, for a true knowledge. In Salammbo, Flaubert digs up Carthage; in The Ambassadors, James plumbs the examined life and touches at its limits; while in Lolita, Nabokov traces a search for truth that becomes a trespass. In these readings, form and style emerge as fiction's means for taking hold of reality, which is to say that they are as epistemological as they are aesthetic, each one emerging by way of the other. The aesthetic aspects of a literary work are just so many instruments for exploring a subject, and the beauty and pleasure of a work confirm the validity of its account of the world. For Flaubert, famously, a beautiful sentence was proven true by its beauty.James and Nabokov wrote on the same assumption--that form and style were at once the origin and the confirmation of a work's truth. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Jehlen shows, moreover, that fiction's findings are not only about the world but immanent within it. Literature works concretely, through this form, that style, this image, that word, seeking a truth that is equally concrete. Writers write--and readers read--to discover an incarnate, secular knowledge, and in doing so they enact a basic concurrence between literature and science.