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"Captivity Fiction."
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Whale in a fishbowl
Wednesday, a whale living in captivity, is inspired by a little girl named Piper to try to reach the sea.
Book
Attempted Indigenous Erasure and Frontier Gothic in Arrival (2016)
In the process of adapting a written narrative for the silver screen, there is much that can be lost (or gained) in translation. Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s adaption of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, is no exception. Often analyzed as a work of science fiction, this article argues that understanding Arrival as a work of the frontier gothic renders the attempted erasure of Indigenous presence in the film visible. The frontier gothic elements of Arrival, most prominently the transformation of Chiang’s protagonist, Louise, into a frontier hero(ine), and the looming Montana setting, both evoke and attempt to erase the Indigenous presence in this “frontier”. As a frontier hero, Louise ultimately supersedes the aliens of Arrival, absorbing and appropriating their knowledge and language to save the world (and the superiority of the United States).
Journal Article
The natural way of things
\"Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of a desert. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are, or how they came to be there with eight other girls. In each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. The Natural Way of Things is a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. Most of all, it is the story of two friends, their sisterly love and courage\"--from author's website.
Book
Reading Rape
Reading Rapeexamines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations.
Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and \"realist\" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels toDeliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues.
Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism,Reading Rapealso challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts.
This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity.
eBook
The birthday party
\"Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family's farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife's fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet's quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events. Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier's The Birthday Party is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
An Interview with Nancy Armstrong, Coauthor of The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life
[...]it wasn’t long before I spotted what I was looking for in the recurrent form of the American captivity narrative—the very principle at work in such British novels as Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa and Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. [...]American seduction stories (vs. their British counterparts) anticipated a heroine who, like Jemison and Hester Prynne, earns her status as heroine by “going native.” [...]Hillary was a “facilitator” of her husband’s peccadillos, a “crooked” business woman in league with foreign powers, a careless custodian of national security, a policy wonk, and a “low energy” individual to boot. [...]my question: if neither the economically powerful male predator nor his professional female prey is in any real sense the victim of a captivity narrative that each claims to be, then who plays the captive now?
Journal Article
Crafting Factual Narratives: A Genealogy of Miguel de Cervantes's Información de Argel
Despite the advances made in the study of the Información there remain notable gaps in the understanding of the nature of the written document that chronicles Cervantes’s five-year captivity (1575-1580) in Ottoman-protected Algiers. Scholars have made overtures toward understanding the legal-bureaucratic properties of Cervantes’s Información. In what follows I seek to trace the genealogy of Cervantes’ Información with the aim of understanding how such written forms are related to the crafting of “factual” narratives. I argue that a fuller appreciation of the legal-bureaucratic underpinnings of the Información will not only sharpen our reading and understanding of the document but will bring into clearer focus the fact-fiction dialogue it proposes. In referring to the Información as a “factual” document, I use inverted commas not to suggest that it is an outright fictional text, but rather to emphasize the crafting and shaping of narrative—be it rooted in fact or in fiction; and, relatedly, to underscore the fact-fiction interplay the Información poses for readers.
Journal Article
The importance of feeling english
American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850?
InThe Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American \"re-writings\" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation.
The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style,The Importance of Feeling Englishreveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.
eBook
Challenge and Change in Appalachia
The first and most successful rural social settlement school in the United States lies at the forks of Troublesome Creek in Knott County, Kentucky. Since its founding in 1902 by May Stone and Katherine Pettit, the Hindman Settlement School has received accolades for the quality of its education, health, and community services that have measurably improved the lives of people in the region. Challenge and Change in Appalachia is the story of a groundbreaking center for education that transformed a community. The School's farms and extension work brought modern methods to the area. At the same time, the School encouraged preservation of the region's crafts and music. Today, unique programs for dyslexic children, work in adult education, and cultural heritage activities make the School a model for rural redevelopment.
eBook
Caught between Worlds
The captivity narrative has always been a literary genre associated with America. Joe Snader argues, however, that captivity narratives emerged much earlier in Britain, coinciding with European colonial expansion, the development of anthropology, and the rise of liberal political thought. Stories of Europeans held captive in the Middle East, America, Africa, and Southeast Asia appeared in the British press from the late sixteenth through the late eighteenth centuries, and captivity narratives were frequently featured during the early development of the novel. Until the mid-eighteenth century, British examples of the genre outpaced their American cousins in length, frequency of publication, attention to anthropological detail, and subjective complexity. Using both new and canonical texts, Snader shows that foreign captivity was a favorite topic in eighteenth-century Britain. An adaptable and expansive genre, these narratives used set plots and stereotypes originating in Mediterranean power struggles and relocated in a variety of settings, particularly eastern lands. The narratives' rhetorical strategies and cultural assumptions often grew out of centuries of religious strife and coincided with Europe's early modern military ascendancy.Caught Between Worldspresents a broad, rich, and flexible definition of the captivity narrative, placing the American strain in its proper place within the tradition as a whole. Snader, having assembled the first bibliography of British captivity narratives, analyzes both factual texts and a large body of fictional works, revealing the ways they helped define British identity and challenged Britons to rethink the place of their nation in the larger world.
eBook