Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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“Sing[ing] of the Middle Way:” Michael McClure’s Venture for a New Mode of Thought Between Science and Mysticism
No full textThis article examines the epistemological concerns of Michael McClure’s poem “Double Moire for Francis Crick” (2010). Beyond showcasing McClure’s persistent interest in the natural sciences as well as in the Chinese and Japanese mystical traditions, this poem lyrically appropriates the physical phenomenon of the moiré effect and thereby exemplifies how a cooperation between these different modes of thought is profitable and necessary to reform established ways of knowledge production. Via a close reading of the poem’s borrowings from paleontology, microbiology, evolutionary biology, and its appropriations of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, this article discusses the dimensions and scope of McClure’s epistemological endeavor. Significantly, “Double Moire for Francis Crick” does not synthesize the two presented perspectives into one but overlays these to create a third combined structure which is ‘between’ the original structures of natural science and mysticism, allowing for a combination and alignment of insight produced in either mode of thought
The Vagaries of E Pluribus Unum: First-Person Plural Narration in Joshua Ferris\u27s Then We Came to the End and TaraShea Nesbit\u27s The Wives of Los Alamos
Get PDFThe ‘we’ narrator has been witnessing an apparent upswing in 21st-century U.S. fiction. Yet, still only a comparably small number of context-focused analyses have discussed this narrative voice so far. Further, inquiries into analyses of the ‘we’ narrator’s cultural and political implications have been repeatedly limited by an underlying association of narratives in the first-person plural with discursive acts of protest and resistance. Integrating text-centered and contextual approaches to the ‘we’ narrative voice, I draw on two examples, Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and TaraShea Nesbit’s The Wives of Los Alamos, to propose that, in a contemporary U.S. context, this narrative voice is intertwined with both, the representation of counter-voices to dominant discourses and the allegorical reaffirmation of fundamental American myths pertinent to U.S. society and culture
Dis-eased: Critical Approaches to Disability and Illness in American Studies
Get PDFIntroduction to the Thematic Issu
Artist\u27s Statement and Poems
No full textLaura Passin’s powerful artist’s statement offers signposts for our reading of her poetry in which clear-cut distinctions between health and illness dissolve and the speaker straddles the divides of Susan Sontag’s famous “kingdom of the sick and kingdom of the well” (3), as Passin locates herself “with one foot in both kingdoms, not certain in which one my center of gravity leans.” Her work is at once deeply subjective, personal and intimate, as well as political. It prompts us to reflect on the role of the poet as interpreter—of others unable to speak for themselves and of one’s own, at times fragile and utterly temporary, citizenship in Sontag’s kingdom of the well. In doing so, it raises pivotal questions of authority.(Tanja Reiffenrath and Gesine Wegner “Dis-eased: Critical Approaches to Disability and Illness in American Studies”
Scars for Life(s)
Get PDFThis essay explores the relationship between performance, disability, and the ephemera of traumatic experience by using the bodily scar as a focal point for multi-temporal and multi-spatial reflection
Luke Cage as Postpost-9/11 TV: Spatial Negotiations of Race in Contemporary U.S. Television
Get PDFReading Luke Cage “as a ‘postpost-9/11’ text with a focus on the body of the bulletproof Black male superhero, Luke, as well as the show’s setting, this paper examines the serial’s potential to negotiate social and cultural implications of American politics in response to the attacks on September 11, 2001, particularly with regard to the War on Terror’s embeddedness in long-standing histories of racism
On Doing American Studies Today: The 2017 Postgraduate Forum
Get PDFEditorial for COPAS 19.1 (2018), co-written by Helen Gibson, Anne Potjans, Simon Rienäcker, and Jiann-Chyng T
From Criminal to Rehabilitated Prison Reformer: Gradual Identity Transformation in Charles McGregor\u27s Prison Autobiography "Up from the Walking Dead"
Get PDFThis article examines how social roles are narratively constructed in Charles McGregor’s prison autobiography Up from the Walking Dead“ (1978) and investigates which significance the protagonist’s prison experiences have for this process. The construction of a criminal role which is reinforced by the prison experience is analyzed, and it is argued that the transformation process the protagonist undergoes is constructed as occurring despite the institution of prison
Revolution and Cure: Molyneux’s Problem, Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind, and Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive
Get PDFThis essay traces the influence of Enlightenment philosophy, specifically Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind, on Royall Tyler’s American novel The Algerine Captive. Focusing on the largely overlooked role of disability in the novel, I argue that The Algerine Captive reflects a medical and moral model of disability that draws on Diderot’s representation of blindness as a biological defect and a moral lack. Tyler explores American anxieties over whether the new nation would survive the political divisions pervading the country following the Revolutionary War. While sympathy was touted as a means of unity by both political leaders and authors, Diderot’s Letter and Tyler’s The Algerine Captive reflect the view of blindness as a disruption to sympathy. I interrogate this framework to show how it promotes the necessity of medical and moral intervention to enable both sight and sympathy. According to the novel, sympathy, like sight, can only be achieved through proper training, by learning to “see” others, and the supposed equality and freedoms of America, correctly
Artist\u27s Statement and Poems
No full textThe questions of who has the right and authority to write about disability—and what this writing could look like—echo in the works which poet and disability scholar Kenny Fries contributes to this thematic issue. His artist’s statement poignantly reminds us of the cultural cliché “where I am the only visibly disabled writer and if I don’t bring up the subject nobody else will.” His poems challenge us to move beyond the surface level and enter the very “microcosms” Fries discerned in Japanese Gardens. Purposefully, we included a wide array of poems, some specifically and explicitly about disability, others soliciting us to “excavate” and interrogate images and metaphors at work in both the representation and experience of disability.(Tanja Reiffenrath and Gesine Wegner “Dis-eased: Critical Approaches to Disability and Illness in American Studies”