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The Narrative of a Fragile and Private American: Betrayal and
Double Traumatization in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland
-- Marlene De La Cruz-Guzman
While the critical body of literature on Wieland is focused primarily on the political circumstances of
the day and the novel's allegiance to criticism of a political standpoint, this article strives to open spaces
for a reading of the Wieland siblings as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) survivors, while also
placing this reading within a continuum of political readings of the novel.
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Richard Yates and Hollywood
-- Kate Charlton-Jones
With the film version of Richard Yates's first
novel Revolutionary Road released in December
2008 in the US, and in January 2009 throughout the rest of the world, we have been given a
much-needed incentive to look at this author's work in more
detail. This article argues that Yates had an
ambivalent relationship with Hollywood, a relationship that mirrored in many ways
F Scott Fitzgerald's relationship to the machinery of Hollywood, to its power, to what it offered for the writer and, in
the end, to its false promises. Largely basing his views on his early experience with cinema in
the 1930s, Yates examines the effect of Hollywood in the 1950s on the ordinary lives of
American citizens, and shows how it affected not just
their material concerns, but also the way they
behaved. Revolutionary Road is now, at last, receiving something like the attention it has always
deserved. However, in addition to looking at Yates's first novel, this paper also looks at The Easter Parade and his short story
"Saying Goodbye to Sally," suggesting that they too deserve our attention
and critical acclaim.
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Performance as a Postmodernist Art: Don DeLillo's Falling Man
-- Adrene Freeda D'cruz
Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man (2007) offers a postmodernist discussion
of the different modes of representation that recount the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
Using the non-realistic art form of performance, DeLillo frames postmodernist aesthetics around a critique of
the traditional `realistic' representation, which claims exact correspondence with events or reality.
In such a performance, the strategic use of `iterability' or repetition of the same event in variation
assumes a crucial role in critiquing homogeneity and advancing heterogeneous versions of the same event
from different angles. Moreover, in postmodernism, performance often stands as a metaphor for
intertextuality, since it is constituted through a web of associations involving the performer, the spectacle, and
the spectator. Such a labyrinthine structure frequently questions the self-sufficiency of the text and
forcefully advocates the notion that every text is a product of culture. This paper examines the performance art
in Don DeLillo's Falling Man as a postmodernist, non-realistic mode of narration, which
problematizes claims of truthful representation of events.
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
John Updike:Dynamics of Cultural Universals
-- GRK Murty
John Updike, the cartographer of American suburban life, has, in an enduringly eloquent prose that
is "always fresh, nubile, and unwitherable," expounded extensively the `cultural universals' and
the dynamics thereof in his novels. This article attempts at analyzing one such cultural universal—`man
and his relationship with his land'—that Updike articulated with élan in his novel Of the Farm, and compares it with the treatment given to the same by a noted Telugu novelist of
repute, Tripuraneni Gopichand, in one of his short stories, "Mamakaram," for a better appreciation of
how national traits ultimately influence the practice of `cultural universals' and bring about subtle changes
in their dynamics across nations.
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
INTERVIEW
Writing, the Great Obsession,
Is What Nourishes Us:Conversation With Colleen McElroy
-- Nibir K Ghosh
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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