8602Parent.indd


Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770–
1860. By Ian Frederick Finseth. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. xi, 348 pp. 2009. 
$39.95.

Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. By Glenda R. Carpio. 
New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2008. xi, 287 pp. Paper, $19.95.

The two books under review offer new avenues into the understanding of 
racial formation in the United States. Shades of Green focuses on nature’s role 
in defining race during the early national and antebellum periods, and Laugh-
ing Fit to Kill examines black humor’s critique of racial stereotypes in the late 
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Both books are excellent additions 
to the critical field of U.S. literary race studies.
 Ian Finseth’s Shades of Green investigates the complex entanglements of 
race, nature, and culture. Revealing how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century 
understandings of race spring from natural science and philosophy and are 
embedded in depictions of the natural world, Finseth argues for the founda-
tional role of nature in the development of racial ideology. Through a wide-
ranging analysis of cultural discourses (natural science, natural philosophy, 
geography, phenomenology, aesthetics, religion, politics, and economics), 
he convincingly demonstrates how understandings of nature animated and 
delineated discussions of racial identity and, by extension, slavery. Although 
Finseth shows how extensively this issue permeated U.S. literature and cul-
ture, he focuses most specifically on how representations of nature influenced 
antislavery thought. In deploying images of the natural world to mobilize 
public opinion for sociopolitical change, antislavery writers often conveyed 
a contradictory message that naturalized racial difference even as it accused 
slavery of violating natural liberty. Finseth’s focus on antislavery discourse 
underscores the difficulty of translating cultural ideas into political action.
 This study is as remarkable for its depth as for its breadth. The book is 

Book Reviews

American Literature, Volume 82, Number 2, June 2010
© 2010 by Duke University Press



422 American Literature

organized around paired chapters: the first offers an overview of the cultural 
discourses of the period, and the second provides a close reading of literary 
or visual texts in relation to those discourses. This structure allows Finseth 
to give equal focus to cultural and literary discourses and the intersections 
between them. He is as interested in the aesthetic traditions (the pastoral, the 
georgic, the picturesque) that inform representations of nature as he is in the 
scientific. His serious attention to visual images of race and the landscape tra-
dition is especially useful. Finseth’s insistence on reading European American 
and African American texts side by side (Olaudah Equiano and J. Hector St. 
John de Crèvecoeur; David Walker, Martin Delany, and Ralph Waldo Emer-
son; Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe) also provides important 
insights into how racial position informed differing approaches to represen-
tations of nature and race. Most important, Shades of Green places the racial 
subject at the center of environmental literary study.
 In Laughing Fit to Kill, Glenda Carpio documents the practices and pur-
poses of African American cultural humor by tracing its long tradition from 
slavery to the post–Civil Rights era. Pairing violence with humor, Carpio’s 
study argues that black humor articulates the tragic legacy of slavery and 
racial injustice. By laughing in the face of this history, African Americans per-
form a ritual of redress. Black humor serves both as a recognition of dispos-
session and as a critique of racism; it speaks of grief as well as grievance. As 
Carpio shows, black humor is more than a coping mechanism: it is a powerful 
form of social and political critique as well as a rich expression of creativity 
and pleasure.
 By looking at a wide range of literary (Charles Chesnutt, William Wells 
Brown, Ishmael Reed, Suzan-Lori Parks), visual (Robert Colescott and Kara 
Walker), and performative (Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle) representa-
tions of black humor, Carpio documents multiple strategies and varieties of 
black humor that have persisted over two centuries and in multiple artistic 
settings. Through nuanced close readings, she examines an array of comedic 
conjure from boasting and burlesque to satire and signifying. The book’s cen-
tral focus, however, is the ways in which black humor animates and defetish-
izes racial stereotypes. Again and again, as Carpio proves, black artists use 
laughter as a way to reveal the chilling absurdity of these stereotypes. By 
deftly negotiating the ethical and political implications of such signifying writ-
ten in and through the body, she articulates black humor’s risks and rewards. 
While she understands black humor to play in two different registers—one 
of catharsis and the other of tragedy—the book’s success at delineating the 
tenacity of racial typecasting leaves the reader not with release but with a 
painful understanding of just how difficult it is to change the laugh track.

Teresa A. Goddu, Vanderbilt University

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-007



Book Reviews 423

Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860–1940. By Dale M. Bauer. 
Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 2009. xi, 277 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, 
$21.95.

Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. 
Women’s Writing. By Laura Laffrado. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. 2009. 
viii, 187 pp. $39.95.

These days, one reason for studying literature is to grapple with the tex-
tures of normativity: its sturdiest, most closely woven central stretches and 
its tangled edges. The old idea that some dominant order was undermined 
whenever its precepts were not fully endorsed by a literary work has mainly 
given way to a sense that what looks from one perspective like disruption 
appears from another perspective to be part of the ordinary dynamism of nor-
mativity as a modern, adaptive form of power. It’s not that changes in norms 
are illusory—not that we are taken in by the ruses of power if we believe we 
see improvements—but that many changes renew and extend the power of 
normativity in the course of adapting it. As a result, many critics are working 
out new ways to describe and assess literary texts’ share in transforming the 
fabric of normativity. These two new studies contribute to this project, ana-
lyzing ways in which women authors and their characters navigate gendered 
expectations.
 Dale Bauer’s Sex Expression and American Women Writers makes a major 
contribution to the cultural history of sexuality, properly understood as part 
of the history of selfhood. Bauer’s central question is broad but magnificently 
precise: “[H]ow did self-expression become fixated on sexuality as the pre-
vailing, even defining quality of the self, the trait with the most potential for 
cultural change from the 1860s to the 1940s?” (29). This period she charac-
terizes as “postsentimental” because the forms of public and private experi-
ence previously configured within sentimentalism came to be reconfigured in 
relation to sexuality, a newly privileged domain of intimacy and authenticity. 
Bauer focuses on women writers, perhaps in part because their writings par-
ticipated so vividly in this reworking of sentimentalism. Women writers also 
had a special investment in the opportunities for social transformation asso-
ciated with sexuality once it became imaginatively independent of reproduc-
tion. Bauer unfolds this new “sexual imaginary” developed between the Civil 
War and World War II, tracing relays between works of fiction and political, 
sociological, and psychological theories about sexuality (102). In this way, 
she defines and explores a profound change in the terms of normativity: an 
important transformation of the possibilities for human action, knowledge, 
and self-understanding.
 “Sex expression” (Mary Austin’s term from 1914) was both “material and 
rhetorical” (1), involving sexual feelings, capacities, practices, and meanings: 
public as well as private ways in which sexual norms operated. Bauer’s his-
tory of sex expression is episodic and loosely chronological, taking up instruc-



424 American Literature

tive fictional trends such as highly sexualized “ugly girls” in post–Civil War 
fiction and the changing representations of middle-aged women’s sexuality 
at the turn of the century, when sexuality was becoming a property of youth. 
Along the way, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, 
Jessie Fauset, Fannie Hurst, and a host of other women writers ( plus some 
men) came into prominence for inventing terms and narrative strategies to 
capture the new promises, dangers, and burdens of sexuality.
 Laura Laffrado’s Uncommon Women focuses on a set of nonfiction writ-
ings by middle-class white women. Drawing on Leigh Gilmore’s understand-
ing of “autobiographics”—autobiographical portions or dimensions of writ-
ings in other genres—Laffrado analyzes “self-writing” in travel narratives 
and sketches as well as in more conventionally autobiographical texts (14, 
3). Uncommon Women concentrates on women who had adventures—overt 
or covert—and wrote intriguing accounts of them. This study therefore 
assembles an unexpected array of women’s writings and brings them into new 
significance. Sarah Kemble Knight’s travels by herself in eighteenth-century 
North America and S. Emma E. Edmonds’s cross-dressing espionage during 
the Civil War were obviously dangerous exploits, challenging normative femi-
ninity in ways that had to be soft-pedaled for publication. Laffrado also demon-
strates that Fanny Fern’s periodical writings and Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital 
Sketches offer more controversial materials than most readers have recog-
nized, such as young female nurses’ experiences of being left alone in rooms 
full of men in beds. Laffrado rightly insists that gendered expectations suffuse 
these texts, emphasizing factors such as the risks faced by women traveling 
alone and the forms of public censure triggered by even minor acts of female 
insubordination. Especially interesting is the chapter on Civil War writings, 
which proposes that public awareness of women’s wartime gender-bending 
contributed to the postwar sense that “prevailing assumptions regarding 
statehood, gender, and race appeared open to revision” (132).
 Although Uncommon Women demonstrates that texts could engage pre-
scriptions for female propriety in contradictory and uneven ways, Laffrado’s 
treatment of normativity is somewhat simplistic. Her analysis mainly pits ges-
tures of compliance (understood as the precondition for these narratives’ pub-
lic acceptance) against materials and analyses in these writings that disrupt 
or unsettle gender norms, which are in turn grounded in the ideology of “true 
womanhood.” Laffrado initially proposes that a variety of “U.S. middle-class 
scripts of female behavior” were at work in the nineteenth century (6), but in 
practice there is not much variety encountered or much historical specificity 
to the norms identified: the implications of true womanhood seem static and 
isolated from other workings of power and privilege. The final chapter turns to 
Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in order to “test” the gen-
eralizations made about the study’s focal texts by white, middle-class women 
(133). Jacobs’s history certainly casts white privilege into relief. However, 
race and class could have been at work in the analysis from the beginning (as 



Book Reviews 425

they only intermittently were), calling attention to the ideological sleights of 
hand at work in the slippery categories of “white” and “middle-class” as they 
collaborated with the workings of gender.

Nancy Glazener, University of Pittsburgh

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-008

Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death. By Laura E. Tanner. Ithaca, 
N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. 2006. xiii, 264 pp. Cloth, $57.50; paper, $19.95.

Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century 
America. By Jennifer Putzi. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 2006. xi, 195 pp. 
$36.95.

Both Laura Tanner’s Lost Bodies and Jennifer Putzi’s Identifying Marks explore 
the sociocultural implications of the human body once it is marked by disease, 
disability, illness, or death via the tattoo, the scar, or the brand. Each project 
is a major contribution to the field of cultural studies, theories of grief and 
mourning, AIDS scholarship, and popular culture.
 In Lost Bodies, Tanner investigates spectators’ attempts to renegotiate their 
sociocultural relationship to the disabled or “lost” body once it is displayed in 
the public sphere. She evaluates this phenomenon and concludes that “cul-
tural distinctions [that] force bodies into simple binaries including youth and 
age, ability and disability, the healthy and the dying . . . erect cultural bound-
aries that enforce the illusion of stability by disrupting our identification with 
our own bodies as well as the bodies of others” (6). In the presence of death, 
spectators strain to imagine a “living” body to ease the grieving process. The 
sympathy card industry, Tanner observes, composes short lines of text that 
refuse “acknowledgment of the immediacy of grief and the irrecuperable 
dimensions of loss” (213).
 Tanner utilizes photographs of AIDS patients, literature and poetry, space 
(the waiting room), and autobiography to interrogate the ways in which people 
understand and respond to bodily processes. She writes, “I chart the impact of 
social and representational forces that pull us out of our bodies to insist—even 
in the face of mortality—upon the subject’s status as healthy, autonomous and 
whole” (2). Grief, loss, and confrontation with mortality through the lost body, 
according to Tanner, set off the observer’s struggle for inoculation from the 
inevitable. The book is divided into two parts: The Dying Body and The Body of 
Grief. In part 1, Tanner looks at works such as Sharon Olds’s The Father and 
photographer Nicholas Nixon’s book People with AIDS. Here she challenges 
discourses on the gaze made popular by Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Plea-
sure and Narrative Cinema” (1978) and advances a revision of the scholarship 
of the act of seeing. She writes, “When the object of the gaze changes from an 



426 American Literature

attractive female form that the viewer objectifies or a screen protagonist with 
whom the viewer identifies to the wasting body of a terminally ill patient, the 
structures of looking that Mulvey locates within a dynamic of visual pleasure 
demand to be revised” (19–20).
 Part 2 assesses the culture of grief. Tanner discovers that theories of 
mourning have failed to aid her in coming to terms with her feelings after the 
death of her father. To manage grief and mourning, she argues for a “corporeal 
theory of grief,” which addresses the way “loss . . . shapes the feeling of loss.” 
Psychoanalytic and cultural theories, she notes, “often marginalize or ignore 
the way in which feeling is both an emotional and a physical phenomenon” (84). 
Part 2 includes discussions of works such as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeep-
ing, Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; the 
postscript identifies episodes in popular culture such as the HBO series Six 
Feet Under and explores the manner of grieving the lost body post-9/11.
 In a similar vein, Putzi interrogates nineteenth-century representations of 
and responses to the healthy tattooed or scarred body and the sociocultural 
and political consequences of its appearance in the public sphere in Identify-
ing Marks. The study illustrates that “the tattooed or scarred body marks the 
precise location at which the cultural status quo (or the classical body) can be 
called into question.” Putzi explains, “Physically and ideologically, the tattoo 
and the scar both sustain and disrupt the ‘conquering gaze’ of the classical 
male body” (2). As she probes this subject across literary genres and lines of 
race, Putzi discovers that these marks destabilize subject positions but allow 
for a reinscription of subjectivity and agency within sociocultural boundaries. 
She begins with a historical overview of the marked body and the degree to 
which it “always inspired a strange mixture of fascination and anxiety” (15), 
then proceeds with brilliant close readings of texts in subsequent chapters, 
including Herman Melville’s Typee and Royal Stratton’s Captivity of the Oat-
man Girls; Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter and Harriett Prescott 
Spofford’s “The Strathsays”; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”; and 
Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life 
North and South. Each narrative “consider[s] the specifics of race, gender, 
and identity as well as the larger desire to mark and unmark as well as the 
commonalities between them” (19).
 In her epilogue, “Tattooed Ladies,” Putzi concludes that the book’s focus on 
the nineteenth-century body can shed light on women and the body in today’s 
world. She claims that “tattoo narratives” also “operate on the understanding 
that women’s bodies are always already marked by the cultures in which they 
live, and that tattooing can allow women to assert their own agency and sense 
of ownership of their own bodies” (158). What is puzzling, though, is Putzi’s 
omission of Carol Henderson’s Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representa-
tion in African American Literature (2002), which is in intense conversation 
with Putzi’s chapters on the “signifying power” of the scar in the nineteenth 
century as mapped onto the African American body (100). An inclusion of 



Book Reviews 427

Henderson’s work would have augmented the spectrum of Putzi’s otherwise 
broad scholarship, and apprised the reader of the rigorous discourses on this 
subject.
 The most fascinating elements of both books, nevertheless, are the meticu-
lous close readings. Each generates vivid insights that magnify the reader’s 
own perceptions and fears of the human body. The research is ambitious, 
especially regarding the historical turns contextualizing the subject matter. 
Lost Bodies and Identifying Marks provide valuable historical and methodologi-
cal foundations for a (re)consideration of the body as it operates within and 
without sociocultural and political prescriptions to maintain, if not encourage, 
a sense of what is normal.

Kwakiutl L. Dreher, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-009

Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. By John Rieder. Middletown, 
Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press. 2008. xii, 183 pp. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $24.95.

Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor. By Elizabeth Young. 
New York: New York Univ. Press. 2008. xii, 307 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $23.00.

Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America. By 
Matthew J. Costello. New York: Continuum. 2009. viii, 293 pp. Cloth, $95.00; 
paper, $24.95.

John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction arises out of 
a lacuna in standard theories of science fiction. Where Darko Suvin privi-
leges “cognitive estrangement” as the genre’s essential feature—the de- and 
refamiliarizing power of imagined alterities—and where Fredric Jameson 
privileges the radical retemporalization of our disordered present into the 
settled historical past of some possible future, Rieder refocuses our attention 
on the colonial gaze. He argues that because science fiction emerges along-
side (and out of ) imperialist expansion, as a genre it not only “exposes what 
colonialism imposes” but is also produced and bound by the horizon of colo-
nialist ideology (15).
 Following, but importantly altering, the approaches of Suvin and Jameson 
(as well as film theorist Laura Mulvey), Rieder centers his narrativization 
of the history of science fiction on the colonial catastrophe. First, he argues 
that the psychic fuel for sci-fi encounters with time travelers, aliens, robots, 
mutants, and other parahuman subjectivities can be found in the social anxi-
eties of a humbled Europe, one which could no longer imagine itself at the 
center of history after having been dethroned by the Copernican denial of a 
geocentric cosmos and by colonial encounters with nonwhite, non-Christian, 



428 American Literature

noncapitalist Others. (Rieder’s description of Europe suffering from identity 
crisis seems not unlike the epistemic panic surrounding postmodernism and 
cultural relativism today.) Second, science fiction is a key location for what 
Rieder calls “the reading public’s vicarious enjoyment of colonial spoils” (27), 
important for the social reinforcement of imperialist ideology throughout the 
nineteenth century. Here Rieder discusses the ideological factors motivat-
ing “lost race” and “El Dorado” fantasies such as H. Rider Haggard’s King 
Solomon’s Mines or James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Cop-
per Cylinder, as well as the assumptions about race and economic accumula-
tion that are employed to justify the appropriation of wealth through colonial 
violence. Third, and perhaps most crucially, he demonstrates that colonial-
ism’s discourse of superior and inferior races—the colonial gaze—is a highly 
unstable positionality that is under constant threat of polar inversion, an 
instance of Hegelian master-slave dialectic whose fundamental precarious-
ness is enacted and reenacted throughout the history of science fiction. In an 
alternate history, or in future days, the colonizer knows he could well be the 
colonized. In this way the genre sharply critiques the violence at the heart 
of European imperialist expansion by replicating it, over and over, in barely 
sublimated forms both for and against the colonizer. The exemplary science 
fiction novel becomes for Rieder not Thomas More’s Utopia or H. G. Wells’s 
The Time Machine but Wells’s inverted vision of an imperialized England in 
flames, War of the Worlds, which explicitly equates the Martian colonization 
of Earth with the British extermination of the native population of Tasmania. 
“Are we such apostles of mercy,” Wells pointedly asks, “as to complain if the 
Martians warred in the same spirit?” (1898; reprint, [New York: Bantam 
Books, 1988], 5).
 Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein stands as an exemplary model for a 
study of science fiction infused with postcolonial awareness. Young traces the 
myth of Frankenstein’s monster as a figure for both white panic and black 
resistance from Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831—the same year a revised edi-
tion of Frankenstein, the first credited to Mary Shelley, was published in Brit-
ain—through early film adaptations to the stand-up comedy of Dick Gregory 
and beyond. Although concerned primarily with U.S. literature and culture, 
the centrality of Shelley’s original work marks Black Frankenstein as a dis-
tinctly transatlantic study; Young intriguingly finds an echo of the “Africanist 
presence” of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992) lurking in the British 
literary tradition as well. Young’s study likewise enriches and complicates our 
understanding of what Paul Gilroy calls “the black Atlantic” by focusing on the 
black Atlantic’s various uses of a novel from “the white Atlantic,” one written 
by an abolitionist who grew up near an important seaport for the British slave 
trade and who drew on contemporaneous racial stereotypes about African 
physicality and miscegenary amalgamation to create her tragic-heroic “Mon-
ster”—demonstrating the complex appropriations and counterappropriations 
at work in this hybridized cultural space.



Book Reviews 429

 Naturally, the myth of Frankenstein’s monster does not speak to us across 
the centuries with a single voice. For Fredrick Douglass, it is the institution of 
slavery that is “the pet monster of the American people” (19); for Gregory, it 
is the self-oppressing subjectivity of the colonized that becomes “the monster 
inside me” (217). The Boris Karloff–like shuffling of the zombies in George 
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead—the rebelling spiritual descendents of the 
enslaved Haitian zombi—becomes in Young’s reading a reconceptualization of 
whiteness itself as self-created and self-reinforcing monstrousness, ultimately 
and needlessly destroying the film’s black hero. Nor does this study, thorough 
though it is, exhaust the possibilities for rereadings of Frankenstein informed 
by cultural theory; Young’s generous introduction is outright apologetic in its 
delimiting of the project to a specifically African American political context 
and the necessary bracketing of both Orientalist Frankensteins and Brides of 
Frankenstein for the purposes of this work.
 Something like Rieder’s colonial gaze is the theoretical lens at the heart of 
Matthew Costello’s Secret Identity Crisis, transformed here to reflect the new 
valences of the colonial order during and after the Cold War. Costello’s nar-
rative history of Marvel Comics characters, especially Jack Kirby’s Captain 
America and Stan Lee’s Iron Man, is a worthy contribution to both American 
studies and the burgeoning field of comics theory. He ably charts the turn-
ing sour of America’s self-aggrandizing fantasies of superheroism, starting 
in the 1970s as the nation’s perception of its own cultural superiority began 
to invert. The nationalistic fervor of the so-called Golden Age of Comics—
witness our eponymous superhero punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover 
of Captain America #1—and the contended postwar utopia of the Silver Age 
give way in the Bronze Age to hopeless political ambiguities and a fractured 
sense of national identity, organized around a chastened and corrupted nation 
whose rotten core is always at risk (as Costello’s subtitle suggests) of public 
exposure. Captain America discovers a fascist conspiracy operating out of the 
Nixon White House and renounces the nation altogether, becoming Nomad, 
the man without a country. Iron Man—originally a symbol of U.S. techno-
logical and military superiority—turns his back on the business of war in the 
face of the Vietnam disaster and disbands the multinational defense contrac-
tor operated by his secret identity, billionaire industrialist Tony Stark, before 
descending into alcoholism and ultimately living on the streets. In the Bush 
years these two archetypically American Cold Warriors even find themselves 
battling not supervillains but each other, squabbling over a Patriot Act–style 
“Superhero Registration Act”; at the story’s climax, Captain America is shot 
dead, and any last vestige of superheroic U.S. exceptionalism along with him. 
(But take heart, true believers! No one in comics stays dead for very long.)

Gerry Canavan, Duke University

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-010



430 American Literature

Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class, and Reification. By Marcial 
González. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 2009. viii, 270 pp. Paper, $29.95.

Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Moderni-
ties. By Laura Lomas. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 2008. xvii, 379 pp. Cloth, 
$89.95; paper, $24.95.

With few exceptions, the question of form within Latina/o studies has been 
a vexed one. For the most part, scholars in this field have been fixated on 
thematic analysis, and specifically on how texts reveal the unequal operations 
of power at the level of expressed content. While certainly necessary, this 
approach neglects how the formal parameters of a text negotiate that very ter-
rain of power in ways that both complement and complicate its manifest con-
tent. Redressing this issue, Marcial González and Laura Lomas offer vastly 
different corrective strategies.
 For González, the question of form serves as a critique of the reified opera-
tions of identity politics, which facilitates oppositional solidarity at the expense 
of any figuration of social totality. In Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form, 
González uses a discussion of form to advocate for the continued relevance 
of Marxian ideological analysis for the study of Chicano literature in an era 
when other modes of analysis, particularly feminism, queer studies, and dias-
poric transnationalism, have become prominent. Largely referencing the tra-
dition of Western Marxism as theorized by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, 
and Fredric Jameson, González does not engage potential intersectionalities 
as this is not his purpose. Focusing on form enables him to analyze the textual 
contradictions that reveal the class processes structuring those experiences.
 Hence, political liberalism becomes the central locus of textual contradic-
tion for María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s 1885 novel The Squatter and the Don, 
whereas Chicano nationalism is identified as that site for Oscar Zeta Acosta’s 
The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). Although the discussions of these 
texts are informative, González’s greatest contribution perhaps comes in the 
two chapters about novels rarely discussed within Chicano literary studies: 
Danny Santiago’s Famous All over Town (1983) and Cecilia Pineda’s Face 
(1985) and Frieze (1986). González scrutinizes the contradictions of cultural 
authenticity as they informed discussions of these texts during the 1980s. 
Famous All over Town became famously controversial when Santiago was 
revealed to be the pseudonym of Daniel James, a leftist Anglo-American and 
longtime resident of East Los Angeles. For González, the controversy over 
the authenticity of the author’s background obscures the novel’s deep engage-
ment with the material conditions of Chicano communities; he claims that the 
novel “contributes to the broadening of our understanding of the specificity of 
Chicano novels” by critiquing the reification of identity itself under the sign of 
cultural authenticity (150). He then contrasts the marginalization of Famous 
All over Town with the neglect paid to the novels of Pineda, an “authentic” 



Book Reviews 431

Chicana. Neither Face nor Frieze depicts a “Chicano experience” as such, but 
both nonetheless encode that experience formally through the trials of a face-
less Brazilian and the exploitation of a ninth-century sculptor, respectively. 
González persuasively argues that the way these novels critique the reification 
of cultural authenticity provides a useful lesson for literary criticism as well.
 Lomas’s Translating Empire also engages the politics of form but with a 
much different aim. For Lomas, the study of José Martí’s extensive body of 
work beyond the now-obligatory essay “Nuestra América” (1891) enables 
a critique of his appropriation within a neoliberal Latin American intellec-
tual tradition and a hemispheric-minded American studies. To the former’s 
depiction of an exilic Martí enamored with the elite ideologies of the late-
nineteenth-century United States, Lomas counters with an account of Martí’s 
deep suspicion of a burgeoning U.S. imperialism in Latin America. To the 
latter’s celebration of the writer as the epitome of Latin American anticolo-
nialism, Lomas emphasizes Martí as a Latino migrant who also criticized the 
linguistic provincialism and racial hierarchies of the United States. Lomas’s 
Martí is not the cosmopolitan exile posited by both conservative Latin Ameri-
can studies and anti-imperialist American studies but rather the migrant intel-
lectual who developed a broad transnational critique of state practices after 
experiencing firsthand the violence of the modern state through imprison-
ment and deportation.
 To this end, Lomas usefully reexamines Martí’s relationship to Ralph Waldo 
Emerson and Walt Whitman, vital figures of nineteenth-century U.S. intel-
lectual and literary discourses often held to be major influences on Martí’s 
thought. In two central chapters, Lomas instead argues that Martí, far from 
being the Latin American echo of U.S. originals, engaged these writers’ works 
only to critique their core assumptions. In the case of Emerson, Martí refused 
transcendentalism’s abstracted subject of knowledge (the “transparent eye-
ball” ) for a standpoint epistemology rooted in a migrant Latino working-class 
experience. In the case of Whitman, Martí admired the poet’s kinetic origi-
nality but questioned his expansionist impulse, one that that would engulf 
Latin America in the name of spreading democratic freedom.
 But Lomas’s most valuable contribution in Translating Empire is the fore-
grounding of Martí’s lesser-known works. Examining Marti’s career as a jour-
nalist and translator during his fifteen-year stay in the United States, Lomas 
adds greatly to our understanding of a migrant Latino consciousness with 
roots deep in the nineteenth century. The process of translation—understood 
here as not simply a linguistic but also a geographical and cultural transcul-
turation—becomes the key heuristic by which to comprehend Martí’s trajec-
tory. Hence, Lomas focuses on Martí’s critical practices as editor of Spanish-
language periodicals such as La América: Revista de Agrícultura, Industria y 
Comercio as well as his reportage. For Lomas, the Cuban writer’s commen-
taries and translations fostered the creation of an alternative modernity that, 
in formal as well as thematic terms, contested the imperial contours of U.S. 



432 American Literature

modernity. She underscores the theoretical proposition that there is not a 
singular experience of modernity; rather, there are plural modernities that 
reveal the unequal distribution of social power across the nation and across 
the Americas.
 While the specific emphasis of each study occasionally precludes the elabo-
ration of theoretical intersectionalities ( particularly sexuality), both are valu-
able correctives to the fetishization of thematic content in Latina/o studies.

John Morán González, University of Texas at Austin

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-011

Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era. By 
Charlotte J. Rich. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press. 2009. viii, 230 pp. $39.95.

Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poet-
ics of Culture. By María Eugenia Cotera. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 2008. xi, 
286 pp. $60.00.

The formative role of women of color in the production of literature and cul-
ture in the early twentieth century is the subject of two smart new studies. 
First, Charlotte Rich shatters any lingering critical complacency about the 
politics of the New Woman in America in Transcending the New Woman. Schol-
arly attention to the New Woman long ago moved beyond celebratory accounts 
of feminist concerns in the fiction of such canonical women writers as Edith 
Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin; and the New Woman’s 
status—and privilege—as a white, middle-class woman have been thoroughly 
parsed. Rich further deconstructs the “iconoclastic” New Woman by assessing 
the writings of multiethnic women writers who invoke this figure and elabo-
rating on the celebration and critique of the New Woman contained therein. 
While not the first to interject race into the discussion of the New Woman, 
Rich persuasively argues that the writings of these multiethnic American 
women expose the New Woman and contemporary progressive feminist dis-
course as inherently underscoring hegemonic constructions of U.S. culture. 
Such authors as Native Americans S. Alice Callahan and Mourning Dove, 
African American Pauline Hopkins, Chinese American Sui Sin Far, Mexican 
American María Cristina Mena, and Jewish American Anzia Yezierska expose 
the fallacy of “the iconic New Woman’s stereotypical preoccupation with 
empowering a universalized notion of ‘woman’ ” that is blind to the limitations 
posed by race and socioeconomic status (22); and ultimately, these women 
offer empowering feminist alternatives that either eschew white, middle-class 
norms or move freely between white and ethnic traditions.
 Rich’s lucid and engaging prose results in a swift, satisfying read. Her intro-
duction offers an admirably thorough account of the New Woman as a cultural 



Book Reviews 433

and historical figure with troubling ties to the darker elements of Progressive-
Era ideology, such as the eugenics and nativist movements. The subsequent 
five chapters combine biographical information and close readings to offer 
compelling conclusions about the political motivations and rhetorical strate-
gies of these authors. Rich’s first chapter on Callahan and Mourning Dove 
clearly demonstrates how the familiar rhetoric of women’s rights is insuffi-
cient in addressing the myriad limitations suffered by women of color, a 
point underscored in all subsequent chapters. A story by Mena leads to the 
book’s most scathing critique of the New Woman as an ignorant and rapa-
cious consumer of Mexican culture. The chapters on the more familiar figures 
of Hopkins, Far, and Yezierka position these women as astute critics of the 
New Woman and her Progressive ideologies, in addition to pursuing their own 
multiple political and aesthetic aspirations. Rich cogently argues that these 
multiethnic women must be read in order to fully understand the complicated 
figure of the New Woman in the United States.
 The complex position of women of color in the academy in the early decades 
of the twentieth century is the focus of María Cotera’s Native Speakers. Cotera 
strives to create a “multicultural feminist imaginary” by critically compar-
ing these three anthropologists and fiction writers whose work demonstrates 
remarkable commonalities (2). Like Rich, Cotera finds fruitful the crossing of 
ethnic lines to demonstrate the shared gender, class, colonial, and imperial 
concerns expressed within the writings of these women of Native American, 
African American, and Tejana descent. In a bold move, she implements Paula 
Gunn Allen’s metaphor of “las disappearadas” to describe Deloria, Hurston, 
and González as “mobile, border crossing subjects” who have been invisible 
“in anthropological, ethnic nationalist, and feminist literary canons” (14). 
Because their writings avoid strict categorization according to discipline, 
form, and audience, their work was marginalized during their lifetimes and 
recuperated decades later. Yet Cotera’s examination demonstrates the simi-
larities of these women to contemporary feminists of color regarding the 
merging of ideologies of nationalism and feminism, which she calls the “stra-
tegic political mobility” of U.S.–third world feminism (18). Ultimately, Cotera 
argues that U.S.–third world feminism may have its roots not in the post-1960s 
movements but in “the continuous historical contradictions of life at the cross-
roads between gender, race, and nation” in the early twentieth century (19).
 Following the provocative introduction, Cotera’s book is divided into two 
parts, the first delving into the anthropological writings of Deloria, Hurston, 
and González and the second engaging with their fiction. Part 1 adeptly illus-
trates the difficulties each experienced in her role of “informed native” anthro-
pologist (28). While these writers implemented groundbreaking methodolo-
gies and were allowed greater access to critical ethnographic information 
because of their insider status, they also faced skepticism from their academic 
mentors about their presumed biases and reticence from the communities 
with whom they attempted to engage. Indeed, a particularly amusing anec-



434 American Literature

dote has Hurston on an early research trip asking the townspeople of Eaton-
ville, Florida, “Pardon me, but do you know of any folk-tales or folk-songs?” 
(80). Part 2, aptly titled “Re-Writing Culture: Storytelling and the Decolonial 
Imagination,” explores the turn to fiction writing taken by the three as a revo-
lutionary tool for creating new “decolonizing” narratives. Cotera argues that 
the novels by Deloria, Hurston, and González, which make central the experi-
ences of women (in strict contrast to many contemporary ethnographies and 
novels), “simultaneously employ and subvert ethnographic discourse in an 
effort to call its descriptive power into question” (135). In juxtaposing these 
anthropological writings and fictions and demonstrating the limitations of the 
former for these three writers, Cotera’s study challenges theories of history 
and culture that occlude women of color. Both Transcending the New Woman 
and Native Speakers are engaging and satisfying interventions in our under-
standing of early-twentieth-century American literature and culture.

Robin E. Field, King’s College

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-012

Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. By Judith 
Brown. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. 2009. xiv, 199 pp. $39.95.

Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age. By Marsha Orgeron. Middletown, 
Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press. 2008. x, 260 pp. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $24.95.

In “Churchgoing and the Modern Novel,” Pericles Lewis contends that 
although modernism “turn[ed] away from institutional religion,” it was also 
a period of “seek[ing] new forms of sacredness and possibilities of ritual in 
the profane world.” Secular experiences “that would traditionally have been 
called ‘religious’ ” emerged, thus “blurring the lines between the sacred and 
the profane” (Modernism/modernity 11 [November 2004]: 671). Neither of 
the books under review is about religion, but the extent to which both employ 
the rhetoric of religion to describe cosmopolitan culture is striking within the 
context of Lewis’s claims. Certainly these texts can be construed to suggest 
that glamour and celebrity are profane translations of religious experiences. 
In Judith Brown’s book, glamour repackages the sensation, usually associated 
with gods and saints, of transcending materiality through otherworldliness. In 
Marsha Orgeron’s book, celebrity offers a godless form of salvation from the 
circumstances of biography and the limits of personality to anyone irradiated 
by the public gaze. In the secular mythology of the twentieth century, Holly-
wood replaces heaven as the arbiter of redemption, offering celebrity as a new 
context for spiritual rebirth.
 In Glamour in Six Dimensions, Brown argues that glamour was the perva-
sive aesthetic of the early twentieth century, shaping high modernist experi-



Book Reviews 435

ments as much as the entertainment industry and popular culture. She thus 
explains what “Chanel [and] champagne cocktails . . . have to do with the likes 
of Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf ” (1). In each of six chapters, Brown 
identifies a particular characteristic of glamour that is emblematized in both 
an article of popular culture and high modernism. For instance, her first 
chapter shows how Chanel No. 5 popularized the discourse of scent, which 
permitted fluid “movement between material object and ethereal effect”—a 
transition with which Stevens’s poetry was also concerned (23). In another 
chapter, the photograph is shown to have offered Woolf a grammar for explor-
ing the enchantment of arrested moments. The properties of each object from 
popular culture help explicate the various dimensions of glamour, such as its 
valorization of deeply meaningful moments over the impermeability of histori-
cal reality.
 For Brown, glamour is yet another form of modernism’s assault against the 
tyranny of realism, a way of “dematerializing and rematerializing” the body 
(137), rejecting “the pressing realities of the flesh” in favor of a state of fasci-
nation by materiality’s excess (12). Modernist “fantas[ies] of uplift without . . . 
politics” reflect a longing for apolitical modes of self- and social transfiguration 
(142). Insofar as religious desire can be understood as yearning for something 
more than what merely exists, as an acknowledgment of the limits of ratio-
nal materialism, religious desire pervades the aesthetics of glamour, which 
“becomes a twentieth-century response to the loss of . . . spiritual belief,” 
a way of “[maintaining] the qualities of ecstatic illumination” once institu-
tionalized religion is dismantled (105). Glamour, etymologically linked to 
witchcraft, designates a perceived “mystical experience” (106), an “enchant-
ment” (110), or a “refiguration of the world . . . from filth to resplendence” 
(10). Brown’s diction denotes the pervasiveness in modernism of what would 
be called religious experiences were she describing features of a society less 
saturated in secularity than modernity is perceived to be. Even technology, the 
feature of the twentieth century perhaps most associated with its departure 
from pre-Enlightenment modes of thought and experience, is the vehicle not 
for grounding the modernists in rational experience but for delivering them 
beyond it. Glamour, that is, is transfiguration through technology; perfume or 
cameras are used to “[take] us to the edges of subjectivity,” “[lift] us . . . out 
of ourselves” (43). Technology, like an encounter with God, is what “produces 
distance, an inhuman sheen” (23).
 In Hollywood Ambitions, Orgeron too describes celebrity in the movie age 
as reflecting “belief ” and “faith” in “the redemptive powers” of cinema and 
Hollywood mythmaking (34). She considers celebrity a secular means of 
“transformation” (30), a modern-day conversion narrative reflecting less the 
adoption of a new ideology than a moment of illumination by a combination of 
the projector’s light and popular attention. Orgeron’s chapters examine vari-
ous figures who actively tried to mobilize Hollywood in order to achieve celeb-
rity status. Each case study offers “insight into the ways that the very concept 



436 American Literature

of success—of, quite literally, ‘making it’—was being altered in the new cen-
tury” by an industry that “promised to ‘make them’ in ways that they simply 
could not ‘make themselves’ ” (2). The quests for fame of Wyatt Earp, Jack 
London, Clara Bow, Gertrude Stein, and Ida Lupino take on epic proportions 
when we consider their striving for success as a pursuit of deliverance from 
the limits of flesh and circumstance as only Hollywood could bestow.
 As Stein is the single recurring character (and “Four Saints in Three Acts” 
the only recurring text) in Glamour in Six Dimensions and Hollywood Ambi-
tions, she emerges as the high priestess of cosmopolitan religious secularity. 
Orgeron attends to Stein’s peculiar status, in her own time, as “an author 
famous for writing that which went largely unread” (164). She argues that 
Stein designed the popular rejection of her texts as works that were meant to 
be read; in fact, Stein can be seen as the originator of the new and increasingly 
popular genre of “optioned” texts: novels and screenplays written to be pur-
chased by film studios and not read by the public. Stein’s discipleship of Holly-
wood in the 1930s signified her understanding that it was not only arbitrating 
transcendence in her era but also redefining the terms of it. “[M]oney, leisure, 
[and] mass recognition” were all things that would circumvent actual texts 
in signifying literary genius, displacing genius to such effects as fame and 
wealth (141). Perhaps what Stein’s case illustrates is the redistribution of reli-
gious experience within capitalism, which still manufactures transcendence 
under the moniker of “success.” The ideological pervasiveness of capitalism 
would not then signify cosmopolitanism’s triumph over but its saturation in 
religious experiences.

Colbey Emmerson Reid, York College of Pennsylvania

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-013

William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape. By Charles S. Aiken. Athens: Univ. 
of Georgia Press. 2009. xiii, 283 pp. $34.95.

Global Faulkner. Ed. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: Univ. Press of 
Mississippi. 2009. xvi, 194 pp. $55.00.

While they share little else, both of these books remind me of Darl’s rumi-
nations early in As I Lay Dying: “Everything . . . hangs on too long. Like our 
rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man 
in its implacable and brooding image” (1930; reprint, [New York: Vintage, 
1990], 45). William Faulkner’s place—the inescapable positionality of Yokna-
patawpha—continues to captivate his readers and critics. In even the most 
abstruse new projects in Faulkner studies, his imaginative place persists in 
the fascination and provocation it inspires, whether his readers’ concerns are 
geographical or geopolitical.



Book Reviews 437

 If Faulkner imagined his cosmos as a postage stamp of native soil, Charles 
Aiken is interested chiefly in the dirt itself—the nitty-gritty geography of 
Yoknapatawpha. In William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape, Aiken (an 
academic geographer) takes up four main questions about the geography of 
northwest Mississippi and its relationship to the writer’s imaginative county. 
Two of these questions have long occupied Faulkner scholarship: “How did 
Faulkner convert the local geography into a fictional one?” and “Did Faulkner 
create Yoknapatawpha as a microcosm of the American South?” Aiken seems 
only slightly aware of or interested in the history of these questions. Neverthe-
less, with regard to his remaining questions—“In what ways do the historical 
geographies of Oxford and Lafayette County emulate those of Jefferson and 
Yoknapatawpha County?” and “What is Faulkner’s geographical legacy?”—he 
has made a significant contribution to the field.
 That this book is a product of many years’ labor and reflection is obvious, 
chiefly in Aiken’s forthright fondness for the landscape and literature at hand. 
The most fruitful parts of his study grow out of his keen eye for the geographi-
cal features of Yoknapatawpha mythology and its historical Lafayette County 
origins. The book is rich in original graphs, charts, maps, and photography 
that catalog and explain features of Lafayette County with new clarity. Aiken 
is at his best when he encounters and interprets northern Mississippi as a 
geographer. He explains clearly notable features of the landscape, the human 
forces that altered it, and Faulkner’s faithfulness in presenting both in his 
stories. The picture that emerges of Faulkner is that of a Mississippi native 
who understood and largely grieved the geographical changes he witnessed 
in his time.
 Aiken’s failure to recognize his own best strengths in his approach to this 
material dilutes the force of his study, as does his scant attention to impor-
tant work by literary critics and historians concerned with many of his same 
questions. The geographical and historical origins of Faulkner’s work, as well 
as the symbolic significance of Yoknapatawpha as a reflection of the South at 
large, have been ably (if inconclusively) argued for decades. Recent important 
works by Don Doyle and Joel Williamson, for example, could have enriched 
Aiken’s approach; instead, Aiken wades into this long-running conversation 
with very little sense of its history.
 The published proceedings of the 2006 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Con-
ference, Global Faulkner continues the annual gathering’s practice of approach-
ing the writer’s “implacable and brooding” world thematically. What emerges 
in the volume is not only a number of essays (of varying strength) about the 
global dimensions of Faulkner’s work but also a fascinating snapshot of the 
global give and take in Faulkner studies. Indeed, Global Faulkner is perhaps 
most remarkable for the divide it reveals between U.S. scholars steeped in 
postcolonial theory and international scholars whose interest in theoretical 
approaches to Faulkner is markedly less pronounced.
 Nearly all of the U.S. scholarship is animated by the language and ques-



438 American Literature

tions that have occupied postcolonial studies in recent decades. John Mat-
thews ably headlines this section of the book in an essay that reads the Snopes 
trilogy as a Cold War political fable. Matthews is prophetic and even apoca-
lyptic in his indictment of American “global plutocracy” (18). A number of 
critics take up the connections in Faulkner’s work between the U.S. South and 
the Caribbean. Most often beginning with Thomas Sutpen’s errand to Haiti, 
these essays explore the Southern slavocracy and its postbellum aftermath 
as both emblem and harbinger of U.S. colonial forays into the Caribbean and 
elsewhere throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps the most insightful and 
lucid essay from a U.S. contributor is Elizabeth Steeby’s treatment of Charles 
Bon as a “transnational queer figure” (151), in which she helpfully explicates 
this mythical cosmopolitan whom Faulkner has so provocatively imbued with 
an unsolvable alterity.
 In stark contrast to their American colleagues, the international contribu-
tors to the collection pursue more seemingly straightforward questions. Ital-
ian critic and frequent translator of Faulkner, Mario Materassi, revives the 
1926 novel Mosquitoes, arguing that this neglected work provides an impor-
tant means of understanding Faulkner himself as a reader of global literature. 
Spaniard Manuel Broncano’s essay is downright old-fashioned in its consider-
ation of Faulkner’s long-standing enthrallment with Miguel de Cervantes and 
other matters Spanish. Recalling Faulkner’s claim that he made a habit of 
rereading Cervantes’s Don Quixote every year (“like other people read the 
Bible” [100]), Broncano maps the quixotic motif in a number of Faulkner’s 
novels as well his Republican sympathies in the Spanish Civil War. African 
novelist Tierno Monénembo approaches panegyric in his archetypal medita-
tion on Faulkner. In Faulkner’s novels, Monénembo claims, “people are not 
really born: they come into the world to atone for their sin” (182). Address-
ing the riddle of Faulkner’s appeal to writers like himself, be they African or 
Caribbean, Monénembo incisively suggests that “it is because he tackles the 
two primordial questions of the literature of young nations: language and the 
relationship with history” (183).
 Thus Faulkner’s apocryphal landscape sustains the elemental queries of 
“young” international readers (not to mention those of a geographer from 
Tennessee) while providing substantial inducement for the earnest excava-
tions of wizened U.S. theorists. Clearly, we have not yet depleted the opaque, 
slow, and violent soil of Yoknapatawpha.

H. Collin Messer, Grove City College

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-014



Book Reviews 439

Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel. By 
Sean Kicummah Teuton. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 2008. xvii, 294 pp. 
Cloth, $84.95; paper, $23.95.

Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians. By Cari M. Carpenter. 
Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. 2008. xiv, 177 pp. $39.95.

In Red Land, Red Power, Sean Teuton moves deftly among theories of knowl-
edge production, literary analysis, and recollections of personal experiences 
as a university professor, prison volunteer, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation 
to enact a method of literary interpretation based in what he calls “tribal 
realism.” His first three chapters offer rich reinterpretations of three texts 
canonical in American Indian literature, including N. Scott Momaday’s House 
Made of Dawn, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s 
Ceremony. Teuton has a keen ability to convey how tribal relationships that are 
based in kinship and that have endured long histories of colonial confronta-
tions with the United States are essential to understanding these novels’ char-
acters and dramatic tensions. A fourth chapter poignantly broadens his schol-
arly insights by appreciating the political implications of poetry composed 
by imprisoned Native men with whom Teuton worked in New York State’s 
Auburn Correctional Facility. A short conclusion adumbrates future studies in 
contemporary fiction that “explore neglected communities in Indian America” 
(198).
 Inspired in part by the work of Satya Mohanty, Teuton’s “tribal realism” 
embraces a “postpositivist realism” that evaluates socially constructed identi-
ties “according to their comparative ability to interpret our experiences” and 
to produce “reliable knowledge of the world” (31). Asserting a “tribal episte-
mology” as the basis for developing tribal realism, Teuton reads literature to 
appreciate “the political emergence of a new tribal national consciousness in 
Red Power” (33). He at times simplifies the many tribal epistemologies into a 
general tribal identity that is implicitly synonymous with Red Power and the 
American Indian Movement (AIM), movements which themselves changed 
significantly over the decades. In treating the work of Gerald Vizenor (Chip-
pewa), he overlooks Vizenor’s specific objections to some of the confrontational 
tactics and egos of AIM during the late 1960s. Instead, he portrays Vizenor’s 
“trickster theories” as unproductively mired in language games that frustrate 
a tribally grounded process of protecting Native identity (171). At one point 
he characterizes Vizenor’s novel Bearheart as “ahistorical” (172, 174). But, 
one might ask, why not read Vizenor’s work against the federal government’s 
imposition of blood quantum terminologies as a means of attempting to define 
and regulate Indian identity? For example, in The Columbia Guide to American 
Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945 (2006), Eric Cheyfitz reads 
Bearheart in the context of federal Indian law so that Vizenor’s term crossblood 
retains a historical and political significance that would seem to complement 



440 American Literature

Teuton’s goal of “creating the social conditions for tribal cultures to flourish” 
(174).
 In Seeing Red, Cari Carpenter takes a different tack in her readings of 
Sophia Alice Callahan (Creek), E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), and Sarah Win-
nemucca Hopkins (Northern Paiute), writers who are “playing angry” and 
playing Indian to audiences that include philanthropically minded upper-class 
white women (for example, members of the Women’s National Indian Associa-
tion [WNIA]) who were the powerbrokers of dominant American philanthropy 
during the Allotment Era (30). Callahan’s, Johnson’s, and Hopkins’s autho-
rial tactics of “play” represent anger to affect the political landscape while 
manipulating stereotypes about Native identity in fictions that challenge the 
racially and culturally inflected gender conventions that govern the putatively 
proper feminine responses to injustice.
 Carpenter does a fine job of opening up the discursive potential of anger and 
outrage to theories of sentiment. She convinces me that anger is indeed a tool 
with which Native women writers powerfully negotiate for more authority 
while manipulating their audiences’ expectations. Whereas Harriet Beecher 
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin figures as a central reference for Carpenter’s elu-
cidation of sentimental theory, one imagines a companion to this volume that 
would engage more centrally Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 
and Helen Hunt Jackson or that would develop the genre of captivity narrative 
or autobiography through Mary Jemison to chart an alternative constellation 
of sentimental anger.
 Overall, the chapters’ reworkings of sentimental theories tend to homoge-
nize Native peoples in Carpenter’s “quest to make this anger matter in indige-
nous terms” (11). In her introduction, Carpenter herself notes the risk of 
projecting anger on various cultural systems and she admonishes that the 
definition, significance, and implication of anger ought to be carefully weighed 
in particular historical contexts (8–9). Teuton’s paradigm of tribal realism 
would help extend Carpenter’s analysis to be more specific with varying cul-
tural constructions of anger and to define more clearly what she means by 
“nation”—a term that becomes vague. At one point, for instance, Carpenter 
gauges Johnson’s potential “nationalist” affect and effect by noting that Mar-
garet Atwood included the poem “Ojistoh” in an anthology of Canadian litera-
ture (71–72).
 In her fascinating chapter on Winnemucca, Carpenter brings the ambiguity 
between Native authorship and tribal communal identity into a rich contempo-
rary tension. Reading Winnemucca as someone who “affirm[s] her nationhood 
through sentimental anger,” she acknowledges the irony that Winnemucca’s 
“toughest audience” was (and is) “her own people” (86). Carpenter explains 
that many in the Northern Paiute community distrusted Winnemucca’s role 
as an “interpreter for the military and the white agents who ran the reserva-
tions” and considered treasonous her advocacy of land reforms in the 1887 
General Allotment Act, which sought to assimilate Indians into a mold of 



Book Reviews 441

Western property-based identity that devastated communal land holdings 
(88). She counters this view by reading Winnemucca’s Life among the Piutes: 
Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) as “a sustained sentimental critique of colo-
nialism” (105). In claiming that Winnemucca uses “sentimentality to assert 
her indigenous nation” (16), Carpenter raises a host of provocative questions, 
including: To what extent is this “indigenous nation” synonymous with North-
ern Paiute understandings of land and kinship? In any case, Carpenter lays 
out a compelling dilemma for Winnemucca’s task of translating the property-
centered ideology of the Allotment Era through a form of sentimental protest 
that potentially sustained Native identity at a time when many philanthropists 
considered communal systems of Native kinship pathetically uncivilized.

Kendall Johnson, Swarthmore College

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-015

Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492–2002. By Thomas O. Beebee. Oxford, 
Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press. 2009. xi, 248 pp. $65.00.

Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction. By David J. Leigh. Notre Dame, 
Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press. 2008. xvi, 256 pp. Paper, $28.00.

Eschatological narratives had existed in the Americas long before Christo-
pher Columbus arrived equipped with a Christian repertoire of millennial 
tropes—and they have been thriving there ever since. At certain historical 
moments, fantasies of the end of time arose with particular urgency. So it 
was in the late nineteenth century, when millennial dreams sparked violent 
incidents across the Americas, from the Red River Resistance in Manitoba to 
the War of Canudos in Bahia. So it was, most recently, in reaction to the turn 
of the millennium and the 9/11 attacks. But, even at calmer times, the stream 
of apocalyptic narratives seems never to subside. (As I am writing this, movie 
previews are featuring the apocalyptic extravaganza 2012, an adaptation of 
Cormac McCarthy’s postcatastrophe novel The Road, and, for a younger audi-
ence, the wasteland-ish animation film 9.) Questions surrounding these narra-
tives persist as well: Is there anything particularly American about this obses-
sion with the end of time? How do apocalyptical narratives function within 
existing structures of power? Why is it that secular modernity, rather than 
weakening millennialist thinking, seems to fuel it? And what characterizes the 
relation of culture—particularly of literature—to apocalyptic worldviews?
 An impressive achievement of Millennial Literatures of the Americas is 
that it suggests answers to all these questions, and several others. Thomas 
Beebee’s ambitious study spans five centuries and two continents, covering 
writers as diverse as Ernesto Cardenal, Herman Melville, Mario Vargas Llosa, 
Margaret Atwood, and Bob Dylan. This wide archive is linked by three main 
arguments. First, the book claims that a certain form of apocalyptic imagina-



442 American Literature

tion is particular to the Americas. Because European colonialists relied on 
the erasure of indigenous societies and histories, they turned to narratives 
of the end time to fill the absence. “Americans in particular,” writes Beebee, 
“tend to understand their origins by narrating their end” (4). Shaped by the 
colonial encounter, American eschatologies gradually gained a hybrid form, 
for instance when the missionaries’ Christian trope of “The New Jerusalem” 
blended with native myths of “The Land without Evil.” An interesting chap-
ter is devoted to the “hybrid Messiah”—Beebee’s term for such figures as 
Captain Ahab, Nat Turner, Wovoka, Louis Riel, and Jim Jones, who translate 
knowledge from the dominant culture to the language of the native in order 
to deliver their apocalyptic messages. The hybrid messiah’s position is pre-
carious: his followers see him as savior while the mainstream regards him as 
antichrist. As the book shows, this multivalence of American millennialism 
renders it an auspicious tool in the hands of both dominant sectors and oppo-
sition groups.
 The heyday of “oppositional” millennialism was during the second half of 
the nineteenth century, when, in reaction to the destructiveness of capital-
ism, expansionism, and industrialization, indigenous movements such as the 
Ghost Dancers in the United States, the Canudos settlement in Brazil, and 
Louis Riel’s Métis movement in Canada adopted eschatological narratives for 
self-preservation and renewal. A second main argument of the book is that 
capitalism and scientific rationalism do not typically replace eschatological 
worldviews but nourish them in several paradoxical ways. Beebee terms this 
phenomenon “eschatechnology”—the blend of the scientific and the spiritual, 
of God and technology, so prevalent in the cultures of America, from the let-
ters of Columbus to Cold War–era UFOlogy.
 Beebee’s third argument is that literature holds a complex relation to mil-
lennialism, and he suggests that literary works can be located on a continuum 
that runs from the “prophetic” to the “reflectively dissonant” (8). Some works 
of literature, that is, are full participants in eschatechnological ideologies and 
movements (novels such as Andrew MacDonald’s The Turner Diaries or Tim 
LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind series); others treat them with criti-
cism (Melville’s Moby-Dick) or outright parody (Atwood’s The Handmaid’s 
Tale). Millennial Literatures thus layers its account of missionaries, messiahs, 
and utopian communities with analyses of dozens of radically diverse literary 
works to form a rich and valuable cultural history.
 David Leigh’s Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction is less 
interested in the interface of history and culture than Millennial Literatures. 
Leigh’s rather traditional literary study analyzes the presence of eschatologi-
cal themes, plots, and symbols in the works of seventeen twentieth-century 
authors (mostly British and American) in order to display the range of liter-
ary methods and philosophical questions raised by modern rewritings of the 
apocalypse. Leigh relies on two theoretical frameworks to shape his readings: 
literary critics such as Frank Kermode and Northrop Frye, who theorized 



Book Reviews 443

the crucial function of narrative endings in conferring meaning and value to 
the whole, and, more importantly, theologians and philosophers such as John 
Davenport, Zachary Hayes, and Jürgen Moltmann, who developed taxono-
mies of eschatological traditions and concerns.
 Leigh divides the study into several themes, such as “the quest for tran-
scendence,” “the cosmic battle,” “the ultimate union,” and “death and transi-
tion.” Under these headings, he explores both “critical” and “participatory” 
literary works (to return to Beebee’s distinction), a method that produces 
interesting juxtapositions: Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, for instance, 
are grouped with the Catholic-inspired Walker Percy, and John Updike is read 
alongside supernaturalist writer Charles Williams. While Leigh’s sympathies 
often seem to lean toward the affirmative Christian sensibilities of Percy, Wil-
liams, and C. S. Lewis, some of his most interesting insights emerge from the 
analyses of secular writers and genres. Behind the irony of postmodernist 
classics such as Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and DeLillo’s White Noise, he 
finds “signs of transcendence in a late twentieth-century world of indetermi-
nacy and pessimism” (226); he discovers in secular works of science fiction 
“insights into Incarnation and Resurrection that are quite compatible with . . . 
theological speculation” (150). Perhaps this is one point where the two books 
under review meet: both expose the deep and abiding influence of the ancient 
language of ultimacy and revelation undergirding even the most avant-garde 
of cultural expressions.

Milette Shamir, Tel Aviv University

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-016

Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery. By Helen 
Vendler. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2005. 95 pp. Cloth, $32.95; paper, 
$14.95.

The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After. By Charles 
Altieri. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. 2006. xi, 245 pp. Cloth, $89.95; paper, 
$39.95.

From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth 
Century. By Jennifer Ashton. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2006. x, 
201 pp. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $30.99.

A Transnational Poetics. By Jahan Ramazani. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 
2009. xvii, 221 pp. $29.00.

Contemporary American poetry is a field so broad it defies definition or clas-
sification, and these recent volumes demonstrate how various the academic 



444 American Literature

study of that poetry has become, juxtaposing old-fashioned close reading of 
individual poems with a closer attention to historical context, more subtle 
considerations of periodization, and a heightened awareness of the interna-
tional context in which post-1900 poetry has been produced.
 Helen Vendler’s Invisible Listeners, based on a Princeton University lecture 
series, examines poems in which poets address “someone they do not know 
and cannot set eyes on, their invisible listener” (1). For George Herbert, this 
addressee is a deity rendered distant by conventional theology and liturgy; for 
Walt Whitman, a “comrade-reader in futurity” who can become the object of 
the homoerotic empathy nineteenth-century mores will not allow Whitman 
to extend to his actual contemporaries (4); for John Ashbery, the Mannerist 
painter Francesco Parmigianino, whose Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror fur-
nishes the title of Ashbery’s 1972 poem.
 Vendler would defend the single-voiced lyric from “socially oriented critics” 
concerned only with “the clash of classes, the domestic and political media-
tions of sexuality, the fabric of community,” for whom “nothing of social value 
can be articulated” in the solitary lyric (5–6). (Such monsters of politically 
correct insensitivity are probably a good deal rarer than Vendler implies.) On 
the contrary, she asserts, “lyrics of hypothetical colloquy are an ideal staging-
place for ethical questions”; in such poems “we find a kind of lyric Utopia, in 
which possible models of human relations are produced, revised, and consoli-
dated” (79–80).
 Vendler’s close readings are always deft; she is especially good on Herbert’s 
manipulations of traditional meters and forms. But her overall “ethical” frame 
is unlikely to move readers interested in how these three very disparate poets 
construct their “invisible” addressees within radically different social contexts 
and from radically different positions within poetic tradition, which Vendler 
tends to reduce to a more or less unitary “law of art” (69). She is most persua-
sive in reading Ashbery’s colloquy with Parmigianino as an event in the dis-
course of mid-twentieth-century art history. Her readings of Whitman, which 
assume his homosexuality without considering precisely what that would 
have implied for a nineteenth-century American, are rather familiar. And her 
interpretations of Herbert surprisingly elide the fact that most of the poems 
she discusses under the rubric of “direct address” are either short narratives 
or outright dramatic dialogues. In the end, the brevity of Invisible Listeners 
constrains Vendler from persuasively unfolding her rather large argument.
 Charles Altieri’s The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry is one of 
Blackwell’s “Introductions to Literature,” and the volume fits strangely into a 
series intended for “general readers” and “non-specialists” (ii). Nodding to the 
comprehensiveness of Christopher MacGowan’s Twentieth-Century American 
Poetry (2004), Altieri disclaims coverage, aiming rather to describe some of 
the most important issues of subjectivity with which the modernists grappled 
and the subsequent fortunes of the techniques they elaborated. The Art of 
Twentieth-Century American Poetry feels like an elaboration and extension 



Book Reviews 445

of Altieri’s Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (1989), which 
similarly delineates how the modernists, in dialogue with postimpressionist 
painting, elaborated new models of subjective agency by which to deal with 
the crisis of modernity.
 Altieri’s first chapters show how Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, 
responding to the innovations of contemporary science, Henri Bergson, and 
Paul Cézanne, elaborated “new realisms” of consciousness and sensation, and 
how T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore pursued a poetics of “imper-
sonality” in reaction to the rhetorical expectations of late-nineteenth-century 
culture. In the political and cultural crises of the 1930s, George Oppen and 
Langston Hughes attempted to write poems that addressed social problems 
without recourse to public rhetorics, rhetorics which Wallace Stevens and 
W. H. Auden would revive, though in significantly altered forms. Finally, 
Altieri surveys a diverse quartet of poets—Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, 
Robert Creeley, and Ashbery—who “in different ways developed the possi-
bility that modernist attitudes toward sensation could be extended to include 
how we appear to ourselves” (163).
 Altieri’s interpretations, which aside from an injection of Lacanian theory 
remain essentially congruent with those of Painterly Abstraction, are of almost 
Jamesian subtlety. He writes about poets on whom he has meditated for 
decades, striving once again to untangle the most precise shades of subjective 
stance and address. At times, as in his readings of Hughes and Rich, the poem 
itself seems to crumble under his imposing hermeneutic machinery. Altieri’s 
readings can be very illuminating, once one has patiently teased out the den-
sities of his overwhelmingly conceptual prose, but whether they are of much 
use to the “general reader”—or indeed to any reader beneath the advanced 
graduate school level—is questionable.
 Jennifer Ashton’s From Modernism to Postmodernism is at least superficially 
a response to Marjorie Perloff’s Twenty-First-Century Modernism: The “New” 
Poetics (2002). Perloff argues that the poetic revolution of modernism was not 
superseded by postmodernism so much as it was arrested by the First World 
War, the Great Depression, and World War II; only in the past few decades 
have the projects of the high modernists been reinvented and brought to 
maturity by such avant-gardists as the Language poets, whose work might 
more accurately be named “late modernist” than “postmodernist.”
 Ashton argues precisely the opposite: that postmodernist American poetry, 
characterized by indeterminacy and a Barthesian invitation to the reader to 
participate in constructing the text’s meaning, is indeed very different from 
modernist poetry; and furthermore, that postmodernist poets, in citing 
Gertrude Stein and Laura (Riding) Jackson as precursors, have flatly mis-
understood those modernists’ projects. Stein and (Riding) Jackson have no 
truck with the Language poets’ celebration of indeterminacy and the materi-
ality of the signifier but are instead committed to models of poetic meaning 
precisely dependent on authorial intention. The true precursors of postmod-



446 American Literature

ernism in poetry, argues Ashton, are the New Critics, whose “doctrines of 
the heresy of paraphrase and the fallacy of intention” are the practical equiva-
lent of “language poetry’s commitments to the material form of the text and 
readerly participation in it” (27).
 Ashton’s argument revolves around a distinction between the text’s mean-
ing (dependent on authorial intention) and its effect on a reader, a distinction 
which, Ashton shows, gets repeatedly confused over the history of twentieth-
century poetic theory. There is a sorting-out in her final chapter, where cog-
nitive theory (along with the poetry of Jorie Graham) demonstrates that 
“meaning and effect, intention and attention, logic and phenomenology, are 
simultaneous and not only not indistinguishable, but categorically distinct” 
(176). Her thesis is provocative and counterintuitive in the best sense, though 
her book ultimately says less about twentieth-century poetry than about its 
theorizations; more close and careful examinations of the poems of (Riding) 
Jackson and the Language writers might have made Ashton’s clear-cut divide 
between modernism and postmodernism rather less distinct.
 Having edited the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern 
and Contemporary Poetry, Jahan Ramazani brings an encyclopedic knowledge 
of the field to the task of retheorizing the relationship of poetry to nationality 
and ethnicity in the age of globalization. The fundamental thesis of A Trans-
national Poetics is rather simple: categorizing poets by nationality, a principle 
still largely unchallenged in the American academy, is woefully inadequate for 
addressing twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry. English, 
rather than the language of the British or U.S. imperiums, is “a world language 
for poets, or at least a semiglobal conduit through which poets encounter, 
advance, and redirect cross-cultural flows of tropes and words, ideas and 
images” (20).
 “American” poetry as such plays a supporting role in Ramazani’s study, 
which ranges through travel poetry, elegy, and the relationship of “high” 
modernist forms to postcolonial hybridity, decolonization, and contemporary 
Afro-British poetry. Ramazani emphasizes the transnationality of the Ameri-
cans he does address: the expatriate Pound, deriving his modernist poetics 
from Renaissance Italian and Chinese models; Eliot, the St. Louis–born New 
Englander who would refashion himself as more English than the English, 
peppering The Waste Land with evidences of his own classical and Sanskrit 
education; the English-born New Yorker Auden, elegizing the Anglo-Irish 
W. B. Yeats and “putting the Irishman’s poetry in the service of cosmopolitan-
ism” (82).
 Ramazani’s is a rich book, full of methodological insights and dazzlingly 
eclectic in the range of poets it presents, from all quarters of the Anglophone 
world. Indeed, it covers so much territory that it resembles a critical mani-
festo more than a work of criticism, a Baedeker to Anglophone poetries rather 
than a more focused Rough Guide. Ramazani triumphantly demonstrates how 
poetries from Kashmir to Chicago, Lagos to London, and Barbados to Brixton 



Book Reviews 447

fit into various transnational models. One wishes, however, that his treatments 
of individual poets and poems were not so often fleeting and illustrative.

Mark Scroggins, Florida Atlantic University

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-017

Machine-Age Comedy. By Michael North. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2009. viii, 
222 pp. Paper, $27.95.

Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path. By Terry Harpold. Minne-
apolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 2009. 351 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $25.00.

Perhaps as a corrective to the utopian optimism that characterized the mid-
1990s, current scholarship in media studies tends to offer a more tempered 
critical engagement. Rather than making heady projections about posthuman 
futures enabled via digitization, many scholars are now instead taking stock, 
looking back, and attempting to provide historical context for the field in its 
current form. Two recent books follow this trend.
 Michael North’s Machine-Age Comedy reconsiders the comedic mode in 
relation to the technology of modernity. While dominant interpretations of 
mechanization in relation to comedy view comedic works as critical of tech-
nology, North offers a convincing counterthesis: What if in works of comedy 
technology functioned not as a mere object of scorn but as a source of creative 
inspiration? North provides a lucid survey of theoretical accounts of comedy 
in his introduction—touching on Aristophanes, Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, and 
Thomas Hobbes—in order to create a vector for his own approach, which is to 
analyze machine-age comedy against the grain. Specifically, he contrasts his 
analysis to that of Henri Bergson, for whom “laugher is an expression of the 
natural hostility of organic life to the machine” (4).
 Across six chapters, North tests his thesis against a variety of sources, includ-
ing Rube Goldberg’s fiendish machines, the paintings of Wyndham Lewis, the 
films of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the art of Marcel Duchamp, and 
the writing of David Foster Wallace. His discussion of early Disney animations 
in chapter 2, “Mickey’s Mechanical Man,” is particularly illustrative. Under-
stood to be prime examples of the culture industry run rampant, Disney films 
in general and Mickey Mouse in particular were initially endorsed by Walter 
Benjamin and Sergei Eisenstein. North calls the reader’s attention to an early 
draft of Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, which describes how Disney films 
offer a “therapeutic release of unconscious energies” (58). Although this sec-
tion was redacted after input from Theodor Adorno, it reveals an early sym-
pathy that was not uncommon among left-leaning critics. It was only after the 
studio’s decision to favor an organic aesthetic in its films—meant to obscure 
the very technology that produced them—that Disney fell out of critical favor. 



448 American Literature

The tightly coupled relation North traces between early Disney cartoons and 
their reception makes for a successful analysis, and his overall attention to 
critical and historical context is a major strength of the study.
 Along these lines, North’s discussion of Wallace’s Infinite Jest in the final 
chapter is slightly less convincing than the other sections. North offers a 
careful reading of this novel in light of the features he has spent the previous 
chapters developing, but he does not situate Wallace’s novel within its own 
historical milieu. Published in 1996, at the height of the dot-com era, Infinite 
Jest seems discontinuous with the other examples North provides, which are 
informed by predigital technologies. Although this section would have bene-
fitted from the historical contextualization that undergirds the rest the study, 
this is a minor criticism. Machine-Age Comedy is an excellent book, one that 
lends fresh insight to historical assumptions about modern comedy.
 Terry Harpold’s Ex-foliations similarly considers technology in a historical 
context. All seven chapters of this detailed study explore reading technologies 
that have both anticipated and been made obsolete by contemporary inter-
faces. By tracing the emergence of digitally born narratives from these prior 
forms, Harpold points to shifting expectations about what such works should 
express and how they should operate. Central to his study are the concepts of 
obsolescence, “historiation,” which he defines as “a form of recollection acti-
vated by visible traits of the reading surface” (8), and “ex-foliation, meaning 
a loosely grouped set of procedures for provisionally separating the layers of 
the text’s surfaces . . . with the aim of understanding their expressive concur-
rencies” (10).
 In the first two chapters, Harpold describes how two pioneering examples 
in the history of reading technologies—Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted 
Nelson’s “Xanadu”—complicate distinctions between interior and exterior 
spaces of memory and writing. Chapter 3, “Revenge of the Word,” reviews 
early claims about hypertext fiction’s privileging of the word over the image 
and offers several instances of works that enact this “revenge.” One of the 
most compelling examples he provides is digital artist Giselle Beiguelman’s 
//**Code_UP (2004), a “web-based re-envisioning” of Michelangelo Anto-
nioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up (107). In this work, Beiguelman digitizes moments 
from the film and expresses them in waving patterns of code, such that filmic 
images yield to numbers, letters, and other written signs. The fourth chapter 
offers examples of experimental book technologies and the problem of obso-
lescence, including, most notably, William Gibson’s Agrippa (A Book of the 
Dead).
 A more problematic moment occurs in chapter 5, when Harpold disapproves 
of the word “lexia” to describe chunks of text in hypertext fiction because it 
has been appropriated from Roland Barthes without maintaining Barthes’s 
emphasis on the reader’s participation in constructing the “unit of meaning.” 
While Harpold’s objections are clearly articulated, his urging that the term “be 
dropped from the vocabulary of new media studies or else redefined in keep-



Book Reviews 449

ing with Barthes’ original use” seems excessively prescriptive (144). A more 
subtle insight comes in the next chapter, when Harpold counters N. Katherine 
Hayles’s characterization of early electronic literature’s “brave beginning” 
and Robert Coover’s criticisms about the “disorderly sprawl” of the net and 
its fictions by saying that such attention to quality “obscure[s] intractable 
but basic problems of the historical currency of much about the new media” 
(177, 176, 178). The final chapter, “Reading Machines,” provides a fascinating 
history of reading technologies—from Agostino Ramelli’s book wheel to the 
command-line interface (CLI)—and suggests how each new technology both 
emerges and departs from previous innovations.
 Ex-foliations is a rich compendium that situates current reading practices 
within a long historical continuum. It reveals how expectations about emerg-
ing technologies are informed by prior forms, as well as how new technology 
has the ability to subvert such expectations.

Lisa Swanstrom, Brandeis University

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2010-018