Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction
Jennifer Case
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Although much contemporary environmental nonfiction about place advocates for place-attachment as a means to create healthier, more sustainable relationships between humans and their environments—whether urban or rural— other critics problematize this desire for rootedness and argue for a more global “sense of planet.” In the context of nonfiction studies, this conversation—from its origins, to its trends, shifts, and tensions—deserves discussion for what it reveals about human thinking about place and global environmental change. Indeed, while we can question how much to celebrate place attachment in an era of globalization and climate change, and although we can complicate experiences of place through gender, race, class, and sexuality, we seem to keep coming back to it, indicating the ways in which place attachment remains integral not only to environmental nonfiction, but also the human experience. Click here to continue reading.
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Soldiers, Home:
Genre & the American Postwar Story from Hemingway to O'Brien & then Wolff
Bob Cowser, Jr.
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My claim is that such a Hemingway war memoir—intimate, confessional—does not exist simply because it could not. The literary culture of the time, could not have supported it, nor could the culture at large. Consider Hemingway’s own reaction (despicable whining in public, Hem called it) to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” now considered by a classic of the 20th century personal essay (Donaldson 174). And we can only assume many in publishing and the wider culture shared his disdain— Max Perkins called the Fitzgerald book “an indecent invasion of [Fitzgerald’s] own privacy” (Donaldson 175). Dos Passos suggested it was unseemly to worry publicly about such things in the middle of the Depression. And yet by looking closely at subsequent postwar stories that seem clear homages to “Soldier’s Home,” like Tim O’Brien’s “Speaking of Courage” from The Things They Carried and Tobias Wolff’s own chapter “Civilian” from In Pharaoh’s Army, we can perhaps get a sense of what that “real” Hemingway memoir might have read like. By paying some attention to formal features of each narrative, we can mark changes in literary culture in the last century in the bargain. Click here to continue reading.
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Audience as Participant:
The Role of Personal Perspective in Contemporary Nature Writing
Sam Chiarelli
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Nature writers aim to transform their readers into enlightened and active participants in conservation efforts. To enhance their calls to conservation, they select an appropriate level of narrative distance which allows their audience to become a participant in their work. The depth to which authors reveal their thoughts and emotional responses to their topic suggest not only their objectives, but also their field of study—with career scientists approaching subjects and situations in a way that professional writers often embellish in a more dramatic manner. Through the use of in-text questioning, directly addressing their audience, and revealing their personal experience, contemporary nature writers create a journey for their readers, from Colin Tudge in The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter to Brian Switek in My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs to David Quammen in The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. This personal engagement is established through historical and autobiographical details that make calls for conservation action effective. By analyzing the methods that contemporary nature writers use to connect with their audience, it’s possible to determine whether an author’s pleas for conservation will be heeded and to what extent readers will be moved to act. Click here to continue reading.
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Reconstructing Blank Spots and Smudges:
How Postmodern Moves Imitate Memory in Mary Karr's The Liars' Club
Kate Dusto
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Invoking the dichotomy of truth and falsehood, though, does not do justice to the complexities of Karr’s work. What makes The Liars’ Club compelling, even twenty years on, is Karr’s use of postmodern discursive strategies. Despite being written after the putative death of postmodernism in the early 1990s, The Liars’ Club marks itself as postmodern through its emphasis on fragmentation and indeterminacy. Although “postmodernism” is rarely considered a compliment now, removed as we are from the heyday of the cultural movement, postmodern techniques continue to shape how we tell stories about ourselves. I argue that postmodern moves, such as those made by Karr in The Liars’ Club, resonate with us because they approximate the psychological processes of remembering our experiences and constructing our identities. Click here to continue reading.
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Is Genre Ever New?
Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context
Joanna Eleftheriou
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Thus, this article is able to take for granted that work such as the Harper’s and Atlantic review essays have satisfied the need to expose dangers posed by spurious claims in The Seneca Review, The Next American Essay (2003), Lost Origins of the Essay (2009), and The Making of the American Essay (2016). Aiming to progress beyond the above-noted necessary correctives, I’ll demonstrate the importance of theories of the lyric and theories of the fragment to advancing our understanding the lyric essay itself. I’ll also show that advancing a theoretical analysis of the lyric essay as a genre with a unique history allows that history’s implications about genre as a force within literary culture to emerge. I’ll argue that the naming of the lyric essay as a genre ultimately mattered to readers and writers alike—at the juncture in history when the term emerged, readers and writers needed the name lyric essay to facilitate communication between them. Click here to continue reading.
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"The Only Survival, The Only Meaning":
The Structural Integrity of Thornton Wilder's Bridge in John Hersey's Hiroshima
Harriet Hustis
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In his 1986 interview for “The Art of Fiction” series in The Paris Review, journalist John Hersey acknowledged that the textual model for his famous non-fiction essay, Hiroshima (1946) was both literary and—perhaps more surprisingly—fictional. While en route to Japan, Hersey contracted a case of the flu; during his recovery, he read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927). According to Hersey, Wilder’s novel immediately presented him with “the possibility of a form for the Hiroshima piece” (226); he saw in The Bridge of San Luis Rey “a possible way of dealing with this very complex story of Hiroshima; to take a number of people—half a dozen, as it turned out in the end—whose paths crossed each other and came to this moment of shared disaster” (226-227). Upon his arrival in Japan, with his reading of Wilder’s novel fresh in his mind, Hersey “began right away looking for the kinds of people who would fit into [the] pattern” he had chosen for his proposed essay about the United States’ use of the atomic bomb against Japan at the end of World War II (227). Click here to continue reading.
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