Vol. 9, No. 1 (2004): Full Issue

Journal X Volume 9 Number 1 Autumn 2004 Article 7 2004 Vol. 9, No. 1 (2004): Full issue Journal Editors Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx Recommended Citation Editors, Journal (2004) "Vol. 9, No. 1 (2004): Full issue," Journal X: Vol. 9 : No. 1 , Article 7. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx/vol9/iss1/7 This Complete Issue is brought to you for free and open access by the English at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal X by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PR Editors: Vol. 9, No. 1 (2004): Full issue 1 a journal . J68 v.9:1 (2004) in culture & criticism Journal X • Volume 9 • Number 1 Autumn 2004 Bordering the Subjunctive in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon Adam LiFshey The Novelist and the Critics: Frances Burney's Manuscript Corrections and Additions to The Wanderer, or, Female Difficulties Robert L. Mack The Last Iron Gate: Negotiating the Incarceral Spaces of John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers Michael P. Moreno Frederick Douglass's Lost Cause: Lynching and the Body Politic in "The Lessons of the Hour" Randy Prus Reading for Pleasure: Up In Smoke: Trouble and Tobacco in Yoknapatawpha County Sharon Desmond Paradiso Published by eGrove, 2004 1 Journal X, Vol. 9 [2004], No. 1, Art. 7 Volume 9 • Number 1 • Autumn 2004 CONTENTS Bordering the Subjunctive in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon Adam LiFshey 1 The Novelist and the Critics: Frances Burney's Manuscript Corrections and Additions to The Wanderer, or, Female Difficulties Robert L. Mack 17 The Last Iron Gate: Negotiating the Incarceral Spaces of John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers Michael P. Moreno 53 Frederick Douglass's Lost Cause: Lynching and the Body Politic in "The Lessons of the Hour" Randy Prus 71 Reading for Pleasure: Up In Smoke: Trouble and Tobacco in Yoknapatawpha County Sharon Desmond Paradiso 87 https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx/vol9/iss1/7 2 Editors: Vol. 9, No. 1 (2004): Full issue Published by eGrove, 2004 3 Journal X, Vol. 9 [2004], No. 1, Art. 7 J our nal x A Journal in Culture & Criticism Karen Raber and Annette Trefzer, editors Ivo Kamps, advisory editor Advisory Board Sharon Achinstein, Oxford U Tom Lutz, U of Iowa Eric Gary Anderson, Oklahoma State U Robert Mack, U of Exeter John Archer, U of New Hampshire John T. 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ISSN: 0278-310X https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx/vol9/iss1/7 4 Editors: Vol. 9, No. 1 (2004): Full issue Published by eGrove, 2004 5 Journal X, Vol. 9 [2004], No. 1, Art. 7 Bordering the Subjunctive in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon Adam Lifshey Adam Lifshey is Any attempt to situate border studies at the cen Assistant Professor ter of American Studies is bound to transgress. in the Department of Whether the tropologies in question concern the Languages, Litera sundry presences of people of Spanish-speaking tures and Cultures heritages within the United States or, converse at SUNY-Albany. He specializes in ly, the assorted interventions of the United comparative Latin States in hispanophone regions outside its own American and North geographical limits, any project of positioning American literary borders in the heartland of the American nation studies within a al imaginary necessarily entails re-envisioning global context. He what is conventionally deemed as peripheral (a is currently working language, a geographic space, a population) as on a book titled metropolitan. The marginal, in short, is to be “Specters of Ameri (re)viewed as central. Within modern American ca: Hauntings of a fiction, this can be done by canonizing any num Common Continen ber of texts that challenge the very border-ness tal Literature." of borders, that is, the idea that a periphery is necessarily peripheral. For example, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, perhaps the most widely read and taught such text, challenges the marginality of the ostensible margin by envisioning the South western border zone as a hybrid, plural and cre ative space and therefore a central one, contesta- tory of American culture from any number of borders (gender and economic as well as lin guistic and geographic) that are at once produc tive loci of new culture. Yet for all the borders crossed by Anzaldúa and most other border the orists since, there is one that seems to remain firmly in place: the invisible line in sand and water that geographically separates the United https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx/vol9/iss1/7 6 Editors: Vol. 9, No. 1 (2004): Full issue 2 Journal x States from Mexico. However many times crossed in however many ways, that border and its unbordering - its demarginalizing - almost inevitably demarcates any project envisioning the American center from its periphery. And the hegemony of this particular border tends to limit, ironically, the more general potential for borders to be recognized as unbordered. Yet there is another border already at the center of the United States, one so foundational to the national imaginary that it existed before the nation itself did, and it even already has an epic nov elist in Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon's Mason & Dixon is easily the most ambitious work of border fiction never to be mentioned in border stud ies, yet its depiction of border writing as an imposition of the metropol itan declarative over the multipolar subjunctive constitutes a valuable contribution to any discussion of how to envision key border discours es at the center of the United States itself. At first glance, Pynchon seems entirely marginal to any discussion of margins. Known principally as the postmodernist author of Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, he is far more likely to be taught along side a contemporary like Don DeLillo rather than Gloria Anzaldúa. Evaluations of his work tend to emphasize his predilections for word play and arcane symbolism, his engagement with the alienated and the esoteric rather than the social and quotidian.1 His family's ethnic ori gins seem far removed from the sort of immigrant story or minority experience that gives birth to so many border writers and theorists; indeed, his family has been in America so long that one forebear arrived in New England soon after the Pilgrims, while others appear as the fic tionalized protagonists (the Pyncheon family) of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. Given this background, it is easy to see why his texts rarely if ever appear in ethnic studies departments or in border studies discussions. And yet Mason & Dixon is nothing less than a vast attempt to reimagine all of America through a border and a bor der zone that lies at its heart. Including Pynchon alongside other nov elists and poets of borders can only widen and deepen the space within which those discourses emergent from border studies can redefine American literature and culture. As Russ Castronovo has suggested in an essay in Border Theory, an anthology otherwise emphasizing the bor der zones of the Southwest, An inquiry into the cultural history of the Mason-Dixon line, however, can be useful for reframing the critical narratives that describe the outcome of contact in the border zones.

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