Abstract: In this essay, I consider the historical uses and limits of shame and shaming rhetoric in efforts to advocate for racial justice through a comparative reading of an unlikely pair of artifacts: a public speech by Frederick Douglass, offered in London in 1846, and, a photograph of student activists, demanding their right to public education during a 1963 protest in Farmville, Virginia. The obvious differences in these artifacts only make their commonalities even more striking: rather than deploying shame to identify moral failings and elicit self-reflection and self-correction, both threaten the exposure of American hypocrisy, racism, and injustice to international audiences. Through its comparative reading of these artifacts, the essay works through contradictory claims about shame's utility made by scholars in political philosophy, public policy, and psychology, and it identifies the historical limits of shame's value in the American discourse of racial justice.

Abstract: In 1847–48 Emerson journeyed to Great Britain, lecturing first in industrial cities in the north, then in London, during a time of socio-economic transformation and political unrest. In the next several years he would travel extensively through cities, towns, farmlands, and forests in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. My focus in this essay is on how Emerson’s experiences in England and the Midwest combined to shape his vision of Anglo-American civilization as expressed first in the lecture “The Anglo-American” (1852–1855; published 2001), then in English Traits (1856), and on how his judgment of Western democracy and its influence on American character comports with, and can be illuminated by, historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s career-long engagement with Western democracy in the studies collected in The Frontier in American History (1920).

Abstract: Since the turn of the twenty-first century, debates over varied concepts of secularization have proliferated in many fields. Melville's Pierre offers a particularly striking literary example of how secularization was evolving in the mid-nineteenth century United States. The present essay demonstrates the multiple signs of the process of secularization appearing in Pierre in three principal domains: first, in the calamitous career of Pierre Glendinning as he enacts a modern imitation of Christ that subsumes a probing moral critique of contemporary Protestant Christianity; second, in an examination of the Church of the Apostles and Plotinus Plinlimmon as satirical representatives of sociological, philosophical, and theological models of contemporary secularization; and third, in a comparison of Pierre with James Anthony Froude's The Nemesis of Faith , a narrative depicting a similar crisis of religious belief that outraged the Victorian public three years before the publication of Melville's equally controversial novel.

Abstract: The potential of radical narrative discontinuity in parodic Postmodern metafiction urges a rethinking of the value of literary meaningfulness and totality in this vein of experimental literature. The poetics of radical narrative discontinuity in Blue Pastoral (1983), induced by a multi-faceted fragmentariness, is discussed as indicative of Postmodern metafiction's experimental drive and its avant-gardist ethos. The focus will be on the play of narrative fissures, as well as on the technique of verbal montage/collage. The articulation of narrative laterality enhances the parodic perversion of the quest plot, in addition to the traditional forms of the pastoral. The ethical implications of the fragmentary in Blue Pastoral and their rootedness in the narrative's anti-representational quality are examined through readerly interpretation and judgment, with the value of literary meaning re-appraised in terms of surface, and the communicative impetus of the metafictional text articulated in terms of both complicity and a demystifying critical distance.

Abstract: The road trip narrative is a quintessentially American form of prose. Traditionally, road trip narratives not only exclude women, but female subjectivity more generally. There are, however, some notable early and midcentury contributions to the genre from a queer female perspective that have currently gone understudied. Novels like Patricia Highsmith's Price of Salt (1952), Lilyan Brock's Queer Patterns (1935), and Tiffany Thayer's Thirteen Women (1932) posit an alternative paradigm for the iconic American road trip story. This paper explores how the road trip allows for lesbian escape from the confines of hetero-patriarchal gender norms and domestic constraints through a new, queer definition of "home" on the road. In Highsmith, Brock, and Thayer's novels, the road trip functions as a radical act of queer self-preservation and invention.

Abstract: This essay balances universalist and historicist approaches to reading lyric through an analysis of the poetry of Mark Strand. The ordering consciousness behind a given poet’s body of work offers an avenue to understanding Strand’s work and lyric more generally. Textual rather than biographical, this “lyric self” manifests the twin functions of the lyric poem, to challenge death and to reach out to the reader. Developments in late modernity have occasioned a turn from a self-enclosed mimetic model of lyric to a rhetorical one conscious of audience. Strand’s awareness of this change and his position relative to it assigns him a paradoxical vision of lyric, one that inscribes a self and communicates with the reader but simultaneously questions the potential and value of doing so. A close reading of Strand’s work reveals how his poems balance motivations fundamental to lyric form against the philosophical commitments of secular modernity.

This essay examines how two recent Shakespeare novels exemplify a group of recent fiction that explores how women’s selves form in relation to Shakespeare. I argue that a “middlebrow feminism” emerges in Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008) and Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011) as their female protagonists both rely on and react against Shakespeare to shape their identities. Working in tandem with their paratextual promotional apparatus, the novels imply that women readers possess a similar ambivalence toward Shakespeare. I suggest that this fiction redefines for a new era an American middlebrow tradition that has long construed the reading of Shakespeare as a vehicle for self-education, improvement, and advancement. In the essay’s conclusion, I investigate the feminist possibilities and limitations of the identities, both individual and collective, that women’s Shakespeare novels cultivate.

In his last decade Henry David Thoreau devoted himself to the writing of his Journal, a project that entailed not just the composition of thousands of pages but also a rigorous practice of close daily observation of nature. This essay tries to explain the logic behind Thoreau’s surprising turn away from published writing, as well as to explore the text that resulted from it. It finds in the Journal a unique combination of poetic, philosophical, scientific, and spiritual impulses and practices, rather than the dedication to scientific aims which recent scholars claim characterized Thoreau’s late career. Instead of pursuing private goals or making public contributions to a particular field or discipline, Thoreau in the Journal immerses himself in purposes other than his own, namely, the myriad purposes of animals, plants, and natural phenomena. The result is a sui generis text without a plan, a narrative, or even a narrator.