Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin

Transcription

1 AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow

2 The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut Edited by David Simmons Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech By Dianne L. Chambers The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero : Gender, Action, and Emotion By Denise Mary MacNeil Norman Mailer s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest Edited by John Whalen-Bridge Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction By Christopher Kocela Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities By Mary Jane Hurst Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature By Erin Mercer Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-Fashioning By Timothy W. Galow Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary By Georgina Colby Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction: Counterhistory By Marni Gauthier Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction By Alison Graham-Bertolini Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay and Lesbian Subcultures By Guy Davidson Reading Vietnam Amid the War on Terror By Ty Hawkins American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative: Mailer, Wideman, Eggers By Jonathan D Amore Readings of Trauma, Madness, and the Body By Sarah Wood Anderson Intuitions In Literature, Technology, and Politics: Parabilities By Alan Ramón Clinton

3 Intuitions in Literature, Technology, and Politics Parabilities Alan Ramón Clinton

4 INTUITIONS IN LITERATURE, TECHNOLOGY, AND POLITICS Copyright Alan Ramón Clinton, Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October

5 Other Books by Alan Ramón Clinton Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics (2004) Horatio Alger s Keys (2008) Curtain Call: A Metaphorical Memoir (2010) Necropsy in E Minor (2011)

6 Contents Permissions Acknowledgments ix xi 1 Intuitions In: Methodologies 1 2 Space, Spectrality, and Parability 15 3 Conspiracy of Commodities: Encyclopedic Narrative and Crowdedness 31 4 From Spectacle to Fascicle: Walter Benjamin, Carolyn Forché, and Messianic History 57 5 Spectral Conversions: James Merrill and Hannah Weiner 81 6 Sylvia Plath and Electracy: Spectral Poetics With(out) Specters The Wireless Spaces of Ashbery and Eigner Louis Zukofsky and Quantum Criticism (A/One Conclusion) 165 Notes 189 Bibliography 223 Index 235

7 Permissions Quotations from the work of Bruce Andrews courtesy of Bruce Andrews. John Ashbery, They Dream Only of America, excerpts from The Tennis Court Oath. Rain and Europe from The Tennis Court Oath 1962 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Quotations from Hannah Weiner s poetry courtesy of Charles Bernstein for Hannah Weiner in trust.

8 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Linda Wagner-Martin for the honor of appearing in her fascinating and prestigious series American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Also, Brigitte Schulz for first taking an interest in the work and seeing it through the review process even when it got rocky, for sticking with my vision of the work and presenting it in such a way to the editorial board at Palgrave that convinced them to take a chance on a hybrid work of criticism. To Joanna Roberts and Maia Woolner for their work with me in the production process. To Joel Breuklander and Deepa John for what looks like an arduous process of copyediting. To [anonymous reader] for recognizing that my strength lies in experimentation rather than traditional dialectics and for pushing me in the directions of both my interests and strengths as a writer. To those who encouraged me by looking at or discussing various portions of the book or related questions including the Science, Technology, and Society Research cluster at the National University of Singapore, Dina Smith, Marsha Bryant, R. B. Kershner, Paolo Javier, Walter K. Lew, Angela Flury, Susan Cersosimo, Mark Hostetter, Robert B. Ray and his reading group at the University of Florida, Mike Chasar, and Heidi Bean. To journals that published earlier incarnations of portions of the book while allowing me to retain copyright including IJCS, LIT, Reconstruction, and Rhizomes. To Alexander Tarampi, for working with me to produce the cover image Eschaton ( To the collection agency in graduate school who introduced me to the world of schizophrenia and capitalism, which made me search for other writers who had expressed resistance to property in avant-garde forms. To Northeastern University for showing me the difference between empty theory and ethical praxis; also to Phil Savarese for being smart, reading good books. To my current colleagues, Diane Dreher, Eileen Elrod, and John Hawley, for their understanding and slack-cutting during the stressful time of producing the final version of the manuscript. To Ray, Ulmer, Kershner, and Bryant for contributing their

9 xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS talents to helping me be the best writer I can be, being open enough to send me in the direction of historicism and experimentation. To Santa Clara University, for their support with cover art and permissions fees. Most importantly of all, to the most supportive and understanding parents in the world, James and Donna Clinton.