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Migration Systems And Literary Production: The Global Routes of Abraham Cahan and Knut Hamsun

Nathaniel Cadle

in The Mediating Nation: Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State

This chapter examines the role played by literature in the movement of immigrants, one of the more prominent and controversial processes of globalization at the turn of the twentieth century. It ... More

This chapter examines the role played by literature in the movement of immigrants, one of the more prominent and controversial processes of globalization at the turn of the twentieth century. It looks at immigration as a process of circulation rather than absorption, involving not only one-way trips to the United States but also physical and cultural returns to the homeland. The chapter analyzes the transnational circulation of American money, products, and culture tackled by Abraham Cahan in The Rise of David Levinksy as well as Knut Hamsun's descriptions of U.S. society upon his return to Europe. It considers how migrant communities, through the routes of physical and material movement that they created and maintained, contributed to U.S. cultural hegemony while also acting as a medium for resisting and critiquing that same cultural imperialism.Less

The Modernist Art of Hunger

Alys Moody

in The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism

Chapter 1 reconstructs the canon that forms the basis of later writers’ deployment of the art of hunger. It sketches the aesthetic framework of the art of hunger through four of its exemplary ... More

Chapter 1 reconstructs the canon that forms the basis of later writers’ deployment of the art of hunger. It sketches the aesthetic framework of the art of hunger through four of its exemplary texts—Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and the poetry of Rimbaud—and locates these foundational writings in the context of their later redeployment by surrealist and “lost generation” writers. Reading these texts and authors both in their own moments and as they have been read by later writers and scholars, it seeks to derive the theory of art that later writers engage with when they redeploy the art of hunger in new contexts.Less

Transnational Circulation In The Age Of Realism And Progressivism

Nathaniel Cadle

in The Mediating Nation: Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State

This book examines conceptualizations of globalization that coalesced in American culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the intersection between late realism ... More

This book examines conceptualizations of globalization that coalesced in American culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the intersection between late realism and Progressivism. Citing Woodrow Wilson's concept of the United States as a mediating nation, which he articulated in his April 1915 speech, the book explores how some of the most articulate writers and intellectuals of the period—such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, Abraham Cahan, Knut Hamsun, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Louis Brandeis, and Randolph Bourne—explained and exploited America's growing global power. It demonstrates how realism emerged as a literary mode that represented the increasingly global currents of U.S. society and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how the modes of transnational circulation that preoccupy Wilson in his speech were exploited to help define or redefine the United States' role in the world.Less

Don’t Ask the French

Philippe Garnier

in John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views

This is a personal account by someone who witnessed firsthand, and himself had a hand in, John Fante's extraordinary popularity in France in the late 1980s. Before being rediscovered by Charles ... More

This is a personal account by someone who witnessed firsthand, and himself had a hand in, John Fante's extraordinary popularity in France in the late 1980s. Before being rediscovered by Charles Bukowski and Black Sparrow Press, Fante’s neglect in his own country for over forty years had a lot to do with French enthusiasm for his work. Identification with Fante's alter ego Bandini was instrumental as well, but a rather similar character (a struggling and starving young artist) in another, earlier, novel which had an undeniable influence on Ask the Dust—Knut Hamsun's Hunger—never stirred as big an emotional response with the French, possibly because Hamsun was extremely well-known not only in his own country but also everywhere else in Europe. The French never like success, but instead love to embrace artists they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as maudits—doomed to oblivion at home.Less

Writing in the Zone

Michael Jackson

in The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing

Considering the anguished lives of writers, one might be forgiven for concluding that writing is a compulsive-obsessive disorder that can only cause great misery and ruin.

Cultural Stereotypes and Negotiations in Sámi Cinema

Monica Kim Mecsei

in Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic

This chapter provides a history of representations of Sámi peoples in Norwegian cinema over the past century, from the various remakes of Laila to comedies in the 1960s and 1970s indigenous rights ... More

This chapter provides a history of representations of Sámi peoples in Norwegian cinema over the past century, from the various remakes of Laila to comedies in the 1960s and 1970s indigenous rights documentaries.  Mecsei  examines recent developments in film production and Sámi language policies through the opening of the International Sámi Film Center in Guovdageaidnu-Kautokeino, Norway. The chapter outlines the history of the emergence of Sami self-representational film narratives through an analysis of the fiction feature films of Nils Gaup, including his groundbreaking films Pathfinder (1987) and The Kautokeino Rebellion (2008). Mecsei traces the further development of the diversity of Sámi feature filmmaking in two very distinct films: Paul-Anders Simma’s Minister of State (1997) and Lars Göran Pettersson’s Bázo (2003).Less

I Had Bandini: Reading Ask the Dust in Prison

Joel Williams

in John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views

Williams recounts the true story of how he was well into his third decade of a 27-year-to-life prison sentence for murder when he discovered Ask the Dust. The gritty-poetic voice of the novel and its ... More

Williams recounts the true story of how he was well into his third decade of a 27-year-to-life prison sentence for murder when he discovered Ask the Dust. The gritty-poetic voice of the novel and its tragicomic treatment of the struggles of Arturo and Camila spoke so directly to him that his love of reading grew into a need to write, and he set to work crafting his own short stories. A serendipitous encounter with a visitor who put him in contact with Fante biographer Stephen Cooper turned into a long and transformative correspondence, mentorship, and friendship. The results: a book of short stories in French translation entitled Du sang dans les plumes, brought out in 2012 by the Paris publisher 13E Note Editions; and then, after 28 years behind bars, parole and freedom.Less