European Journal of American Culture - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2004

Later this year the United States will enter a period of self-reflection and remembrance – one of those periodic moments when the nation examines itself and its past in the light of some marker. Prompted by the 60th anniversary of D-Day and the Presidential election in November, it will be a time for re-asserting and questioning American values. The questions will be wide-ranging and awkward.

Immediately after September 11, Washington and US culture more generally created the framework within which it responded to those crimes. Various symbols, devices, rhetorical strategies and images were employed that soon obscured the broader meanings of September 11 and framed the US response within the benign narratives, the constructs of nationhood, and the images that would link that date to the road to war. The semiotic struggle of mid-September 2001 saw Bush’s rhetoric and the use of the flag and photography privilege a certain interpretation over others. To this end a series of conflations took place that facilitated the military response, ultimately encompassing Iraq. Within days the ‘power to persuade’ had been used effectively to define the events, and in so doing to limit the scope of critical discussion, alternative explanations and understanding. At issue was the centrality of the US identity. It was imperative to place the events in the framework of the benign narratives rather than to consider US support for authoritarian regimes across the Middle East for five decades.

This article examines the ways in which desire operates as a discursive site throughout Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (1987) and Rosmarie Waldrop’s ‘Inserting the Mirror’ (1987), and it argues that the articulation of desire in these prosepoems rests in the abjection of the bodily to the textual. What these texts seek to locate, or the locus of their desire, is the means by which the erotic is inserted into the space of the domestic and the poetic. Central to the paper’s analysis of the desire which operates in these texts is Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection. The paper argues that in their attempts to reconstitute discourses of gender and sexuality, My Life, ‘Inserting the Mirror’ (and ‘language poetry’ more generally), confront the ways in which late-twentieth- century American ideology is articulated through the assertion of an imaginary (in Kristeva’s sense) unified subjectivity. Such an assertion is precisely the desire that haunts contemporary America, such is the space that its sexual politics traverse.

This paper analyses Donald Barthelme’s and Robert Coover’s postmodern novels Snow White and Briar Rose and the way both authors, especially through the use of parody and irony, undermine traditional genres of popular literature and, at the same time, give both an intramural critique of traditional narrative techniques (and the vision of the world they produce) and the extramural critique of consumerism and popular culture. In addition to this, with the analysis of Coover’s novel the emphasis is on the imagery of dreams and dreaming understood as the manifestation of undermining of some aspects of Freudian theories.

Herman Melville appropriated the confidence man, a uniquely American figure, for his 1857 novel The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. Eschewing established conventions of realism, Melville wrote a seemingly impenetrable novel which both enacts and subverts the rapidly intensifying commodification of experience in mid-nineteenth-century America. Published while Karl Marx was beginning to develop his theory of the fetishism of commodities in his private notebooks, The Confidence Man uncannily embodies and critiques the magical nature of the commodity, as well as the often deceptive (though necessary) trait upon which commodity exchange is so dependent: confidence.

The Writing of America: Literature and Cultural Identity from the Puritans to the Present, Geoff Ward (2002) Oxford: Polity, 248 pp., ISBN 074562622X (pbk), £14.99.

Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha, Dr Ben Reitman (2002) Edinburgh: AK Press/Nabat, 205 pp., ISBN 1902593030 (pbk), £9.99 (original work published 1937).

Culture Agonistes: Debating Culture, Rereading Texts, Theodora Tsimpouki and Angeliki Spiropoulou (eds.) (2002) Bern; Berlin; Bruxelles; Frankfurt-am-Main; New York; Oxford; Wien: Peter Lang, 230 pp., ISBN 3-906768-24-4, £27.

Discussing Hitler: Advisers of US Diplomacy in Central Europe 1934–1941, Tibor Frank (2003) Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 360 pp., ISBN 9639241563 (hbk), £38.

John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek (2003) London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 838 pp., ISBN 0-7139-9737-0 (hbk), £25.

UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin (eds.), (2002) Newark: University of Delaware Press, 219 pp., ISBN 0874137853 (hbk), $39.50.

American Literature Before 1880, Robert Lawson-Peebles (2003) London: Longman, 352 pp., ISBN 0582495229 (pbk), £19.99.