Unhappy Beginnings
Narratives of Precarity, Failure, and Resistance in North American Texts
Edited by Isabel González-Díaz and Fabián Orán-Llarena
First published 2024 by Routledge
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Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: González-Díaz, Isabel, editor. | Orán-Llarena, Fabián, editor.
Title: Unhappy beginnings : narratives of precarity, failure, and resistance in North American texts edited by Isabel González-Díaz and Fabián Orán-Llarena.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2024. |
Series: Routledge research in American literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2023026226 (print) | LCCN 2023026227 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032526591 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032526607 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003407744 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Happiness in literature. | Social norms in literature. | Narration (Rhetoric)--Philosophy. | Closure (Rhetoric)--Philosophy.
Classification: LCC PN56.H27 U54 2024 (print) | LCC PN56.H27 (ebook) | DDC 809.93353--dc23/eng/20230724
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026226
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026227
ISBN: 978-1-032-52659-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-52660-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-40774-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003407744
Listofcontributors Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Approach to Unhappy Beginnings
ISABEL GONZÁLEZ-DÁAZ AND FABIÁN ORÁN-LLARENA
1 Nomadland: A Narrative of Class and Age Vulnerability in the 21st Century
AITOR IBARROLA-ARMENDARIZ
2 “They endured”: Precarity, Vulnerability, and Resistance in the Works of Jesmyn Ward
PAULA GRANDA
3 Happy Endings and Unhappy Beginnings: Representing Precarity and Vulnerability in Recessionary Comedies
ELENA OLIETE-ALDEA
4 The Road to Serfdom: The (Unhappy) Neoliberal Workplace in TheAssistant
FABIÁN ORÁN-LLARENA
5 Disaffected Archives: Jacqueline Woodson’s Cruel Attachments in RedattheBone
PAULA BARBA GUERRERO
6 The (Un)happiness of Urban Indigeneity in Tommy Orange’s ThereThere
MARTINA HORÁKOVÁ
7 Trans-forming Transness: The Failed Dissident Body as (Non)Human Political Possibility in Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce FemmesandNotoriousLiars
JUAN CARLOS HIDALGO-CIUDAD
8 Of Morrissey and Other Antisocial Icons: Unhappiness and Failure in Elliott DeLine’s Refuse
ISABEL GONZÁLEZ-DÁAZ
9 Stigma, Vulnerability, Unhappiness, and Abjection: How Angels inAmericaReconstructs AIDS Politics of Silence
J. JAVIER TORRES-FERNÁNDEZ
10 Powers of Failure: TheCatcherintheRyeAgainst Early Neoliberal Rationality JULIA
11 Reimagining Hope in the Age of Despair: The Films of Roberto Minervini
12 Affect Theory and Life Narratives
13 Run, Rabbits, Run: Post-Racialism, Modern Slavery, and Slow Violence in Jordan Peele’s GetOut
VÍCTOR JUNCO EZQUERRA
14
Cold Feelings: Apathy, Difference, and Withdrawal in Herman
Melville’s White-Jacket
ARTURO CORUJO
Index
Contributors
Paula Barba Guerrero is an Assistant Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Universidad de Salamanca. Her research focuses on contemporary African American literature, with particular interest in the representation of memory, US national spatial imaginaries, cultural affects, and what hospitality and homeness may entail for racialized groups. Paula has coedited American Borders:InclusionandExclusionin USCulture (Palgrave 2023) and contributed academic articles on the representation of hospitality and belonging in contemporary Black American Literature. She is Assistant Editor of the Brill series “Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature” and a member of the research project “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach VI” (PID2019–108754GB-I00) and the research group “Discursos y poética de la (post)modernidad.”
Silvia Caporale-Bizzini is Professor of English Studies at the University of Alicante in Spain where she teaches 19th-century British Literature and British Cultural History. She has edited and co-edited ReconstructingFoucault:EssaysintheWakeofthe80s (Rodopi, 1994), We, the “Other Victorians”. Considering the Heritage of 19th-Century Thought (Alicante, 2003), Narrating Motherhoods,BreakingtheSilence:OtherMothers,OtherVoices (Peter Lang, 2006), with Melita Richter, Teaching Subjectivity: Travelling Selves for Feminist Pedagogy (Stockholm University,
2009), and with Andrea O’Really, From the Personal to the Political: Toward a New Theory of Maternal Narrative (Susquehanna University Press, 2009). She has also published in Anglia, Critical Quarterly, Woman: A Cultural Review, English Studies, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, among other journals. Her research topics include the literary representation of disposability and neoliberal violence in British and Canadian fiction.
Arturo Corujo is Doctoral Researcher at Universitat de Barcelona. English graduate (Universidad de La Laguna, 2016) with an MA in “Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities” (Universitat de Barcelona, 2018), he received a Fulbright grant to do a research stay at the University of California, Berkeley, during the 2022–2023 academic year. Corujo is a member of the Research Project “(Un)Housing: Dwellings, Materiality and the Self in American Literature” (ref. PID2020–115172GB-I00), led by Rodrigo Andrés and Cristina Alsina Rísquez (2021–2025). He is interested in domestic studies, queer theory, and the literature of the American Renaissance, with a specific focus on Herman Melville. His work has been published in indexed journals such as the European Journal of American Studies and Miranda: Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone. Corujo’s PhD project aims to find hermeneutic keys that help us re-interpret WhiteJacket (1850) as a constitutive text in Melville’s political, philosophical, and literary work.
Isabel González-Díaz is a PhD lecturer at the University of La Laguna, where she teaches US literature. Her research interests include gender, literature, and cultural studies, with a special focus on life narratives. She has published various articles on life writing and gender, on feminism and cultural studies, and on transgender narratives. She is currently a member of the international research project “The Premise of Happiness: The Function of Feelings in North American Narratives,” as well as of the research Project funded by the University of La Laguna, “Narrations in Crisis: Contemporary American Cinemas after the
Great Recession.” She is a member of the research group “NARRA-Narrative Spaces: USA and Canada” and of the Women’s Studies Institute, both from the University of La Laguna. She was a member of the research projects “The City, Urban Cultures and Sustainable Literatures: Representations of the Anglo-Canadian Post-Metropolis” and “Justice, Citizenship and Vulnerability: Precarious Narratives and Intersectional Approaches.” She has co-directed five doctoral theses and is currently co-directing two. Her most recent publications include “Reassembling Components: Ivan Coyote Writes Down Difficult Things,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 56(3) (2021) and “Walking in the Queer City: Urban Life as Transformative Social Space in Ivan E. Coyote’s Loose End,” in TheUrbanCondition.LiteraryTrajectories throughCanada’sPostmetropolis(Vernon Press, 2018).
Paula Granda obtained her BA in English Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid where she wrote her BA final paper “Trying to Say”: Escapism in Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner’s Narratives. She also did a Master’s Degree in Literary Studies at the same institution. She wrote her MA Dissertation, Ghosts of the Other South and Faulknerian Poetics in Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward and this work informs her current research. She’s currently enrolled in a PhD program in Valladolid University which she combines with English teaching jobs. Her main interests focus on the poetics of obscurity and fragmentation in literature from the South of the USA, particularly William Faulkner, and the formal similarities present in Caribbean literature such as Wilson Harris’s work. She is particularly interested in the deferral of the message and the crux of the plot also present in the works of contemporary African American female writers such as Toni Morrison and Jesmyn Ward: how and why they make use of this aesthetic, with which end and consequences. She aims at exploring the common literary aesthetic shared by these regions: the South of the USA and the Caribbean.
Juan Carlos Hidalgo-Ciudad is Senior Lecturer at the University of Sevilla, where he teaches English Literature and Cultural Studies. His research interests are Queer and Gender Studies, Theater Studies, Film and Television Studies and Postmodernism. He has authored Tendencias alternativas en el teatro londinense en losaños80(Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 1994) and (co)edited Masculino plural: Construcciones de la masculinidad (Edicions de la Universitat de Lleida, 2001) and Espacios escénicos: ellugar de representación en la historia del teatro occidental (Consejería de Cultura, 2004). He has also published extensively on gay and lesbian identities, film adaptation and contemporary British women playwrights both in journals and collections of essays. His latest research focuses on the way queer/postmodern subjects involve themselves in new social units that make possible a new construction of both the individual (embodiment) and the community (interdependency). In particular, the concept of the (extended) queer family and the ethical commitment of such a notion is the recurrent motif of his research. His latest publication is “Trans* Vulnerability and Resistance in the Ballroom: The Case of Pose (Season 1)” in María Isabel Romero Ruiz and Pilar Cuder Domínguez (eds.), Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: Thinking Gender in Transnational Times (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Martina Horáková is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. In her teaching and research, she focuses on contemporary Australian and Canadian literatures, particularly on Indigenous cultural production and theories of settler colonialism. She authored Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and Canada (MUNI Press, 2017) and co-authored Alternatives in Biography: Writing Lives in Diverse English-language Contexts (MUNI Press, 2011). Among others, she published book chapters in Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (De Gruyter, 2019), A
Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (Camden House, 2013), PostcolonialIssuesinAustralianLiterature(Cambria Press, 2010), as well as articles in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Life Writing, Antipodes, Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA), and Zeitschrift für Australienstudien/Australian Studies Journal. She is currently working on a project related to memoirs of postcolonial settlers belonging to Australia. From 2016 to 2021 she was the general editor of JEASA.
Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz is Professor of American and Cultural Studies at the University of Deusto, Bilbao, where he teaches courses on Diversity Management, Academic Writing, and Film Adaptation. His main areas of research are minority issues and social justice in the US, as well as the study of migrant groups and the American West. His contributions have appeared in journals such as Atlantis,InternationalJournalofEnglishStudies, Miscelánea, Revista Chilena de Literatura, and Revista Alicantina deEstudiosIngleses, among others.
Víctor Junco Ezquerra has been teaching courses in Film, Cultural, American, and Chinese Studies at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria since 1997. His PhD focused on the interaction between film and politics in Cold War America. He served as a member of the Executive Board of the American Association for American Studies (SAAS) from 2009 to 2013. He has co-edited a volume on the tradition of dissent in US history. His research interests include film (especially US and Chinese cinema), cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. He has published articles in different journals, and is currently researching the relationship between the US and Chinese film industries. His latest publication is “Another Inconvenient Truth: Hollywood and the Myth of Green Capitalism,” in Eduardo Valls, Rebeca Gualberto, Noelia Malla, Maria Colom, and Rebeca Cordero (eds.), Avenging Nature: The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).
Elena Oliete-Aldea is Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies of the University of Zaragoza. Her research centers on film genre and cultural studies. She is currently analyzing filmic representations of the economic crisis in contemporary transnational cinema, with a special focus on the intersections of class, gender, and ethnicity. She is part of the research groups “Cinema, Culture and Society” (H23_20R) and “Crisis and Hope: Structures of Feelings and Their Representation in Contemporary Cinema” (PID2020–114338GB-I00). Some of her recent publications are: “Screening Recessions through a Gendered Lens: Nostalgic and Critical Revisions of the Past from the Post-2008 Crisis Perspective,” in H. Loyo and J. Tarancón, Screening the Crisis: US Cinema and SocialChange in the Wake of the 2008 Crash (Bloomsbury, 2022); “Transnational Representation of a Gendered Recession in Corporate Dramas,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(2): 514–529 (2021); “Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House (2017) and Other Evictions: Transnational Connections of Past and Present Crises in Cinema,” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 83: 173–187 (2021); “Global Financial Crisis in Local Filmic Scenarios: Transnational Cinema of the Great Recession,” in C. Parvulescu (ed.), Global Finance on Screen: From Wall Street to Side Street (Routledge, 2018).
Fabián Orán-Llarena is a PhD lecturer at the University of La Laguna. His research interests include cultural studies and film studies, with a special focus on contemporary US film and its representation of the politics and history of neoliberalism, the rise of right-wing populism, and the post-9/11 context. He is currently a member of the international research project “The Premise of Happiness: The Function of Feelings in North American Narratives” and is the IP of the research project “Narrations in Crisis: Contemporary American Cinemas after the Great Recession” funded by the University of La Laguna (2021–2022). He is also a member of the research group “NARRA-Narrative Spaces: USA and Canada.” In addition, he was a member of the
research project “Justice, Citizenship and Vulnerability: Precarious Narratives and Intersectional Approaches.” He is currently codirecting a doctoral thesis.
Julia Rojo de Castro is a postgraduate student and La Caixa Foundation Fellow at New York University (NYU), where she currently pursues an MA in English and American Literature with a focus on contemporary British literature and culture. Her research ponders questions of national identity, belated colonial attitudes in the aftermath of imperialism, and the redrafting of national imaginaries in the wake of neoliberalism, among others. These interests have also informed her study of post-1945 American literature during her first Master’s in North American Studies at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). There she served as Teaching Assistant (2020–2021) and, following the publication of her article “The Eternal Rewriting: Language, Existentialism, and Play in Barth’s ‘Night-Sea Journey’” in JACLR: Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research (June 2021), was invited to join the editorial board as Assistant Editor for the following academic year. Her work has also been featured at the 34th European Association for American Studies (EAAS) Conference (Madrid, April 2022), and accepted to the forthcoming MLA Annual Convention (Philadelphia, January 2024).
Juan A. Tarancón is Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. His research centers on cinema, cultural studies, and contemporary US culture. He has written on film genre theory, on representations of immigration and Mexican American culture, and on the work of filmmakers like John Sayles and Carlos Saura. His work has appeared in CineAction, Cultural Studies, TheQuarterly Review of Filmand Video, New Cinemas, and varied Spanish scholarly journals. He is co-editor of Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema(Bloomsbury, 2016) and ScreeningtheCrisis:USCinema and SocialChange in the Wake of the 2008 Crash (Bloomsbury, 2022).
J. Javier Torres-Fernández is currently registered for a PhD and working at the University of Almería (Spain) as a predoctoral researcher funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities (FPU21/01232) in the Department of Philology within the “Mujeres, Literatura y Sociedad” (HUM-874) research group and the “Comunicación y Sociedad” I+D Research Centre (CySOC). His fields of interest include women, gender, sexuality studies, popular culture, Irish literature, and North American literature. His thesis delves into the literary production that emerged from the HIV/AIDS crisis both in Ireland and the United States in a comparative study of the genre tackling stigma, sexuality, identity, trauma, and cultural politics. Most recently, he has completed a research stay at Technological University Dublin as a postgraduate research student with the NCFIS (National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies).
An Approach to Unhappy Beginnings
IsabelGonzález-Díaz andFabiánOrán-Llarena
DOI: 10.4324/9781003407744-1
In his book on happy endings in the Hollywood film, James MacDowell concludes that the happy ending is, by no means, the formulaic and inflexible narrative strategy critics have traditionally made it out to be. He claims that most scholarship on the issue emphasizes that happy endings are constitutively built on ambiguity and lack of clear-cut closure. This, he argues, demands an urgent revision of what a happy ending really looks like (MacDowell 2013, 191–192). To put it in slightly less scholarly terms: happy endings are not all that happy if we give it a second thought. Ultimately, MacDowell proves that the happy ending is riddled with fissures and ambivalence. We wish to engage with those fissures and ambivalence by looking at the various ways in which not happy endings but unhappy beginnings can reframe our understanding of concepts such as failure, resistance, or precarity. In fact, our aim in this collection is to answer Sara Ahmed’s challenging question: “Can we rewrite the history of happiness from the point of view of the wretched?” (2010, 17). Her query has persuaded us to explore the potential of the lives of the wretched and their unhappy circumstances so as to problematize the very underpinnings on which happiness is rooted. Indeed, in The Promise of Happiness (2010) Ahmed revisits the notion of happiness as an affective mandate, as a path-defining call
that frames certain modes of being, inclinations, and projects as worth-seeking, while others are cast as undesirable, unfruitful, or unprosperous. One of her most compelling arguments is the need to assemble unhappy archives, that is, texts that shed light on how unhappiness can be deployed to undo, unravel, and revolt against all forms of normativity and oppression. She claims that the discourse of happiness overshadows the potentiality of unhappiness, not as tantamount to defeatism, but as a form of productive, creative resistance. In this book, the Ahmedian rereading of happiness constitutes the methodological interface. Ahmed’s reflections provide the theoretical umbrella under which other deconstructions of normativity can be accommodated and interrelated. In so doing, we aim to put forward a theoretical apparatus that integrates a number of authors who have managed to resignify and reassess concepts traditionally associated with weakness, pain, or negativity. Relying on this sort of conceptual switch, the theoretical toolkit of this monograph is, in and of itself, an injunction to reconsider the ways in which we interrogate and approach texts.
A suitable companion to the Ahmedian rereading of happiness is certainly presented by Judith Butler in her reflection on vulnerability as purveyor of social empathy and resistance. Butler has famously argued that the social bond necessarily emerges out of the realization that vulnerability is a shared condition. As she writes, the fact that individuals and peoples are inherently vulnerable means that “one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other” (2009, 14). Butler wishes to emphasize that substantive communitybuilding, one built on empathy and a politics of care, only comes about if our “common human vulnerability” (2004, 31) is fully acknowledged. Vulnerability is thus refigured not as weakness but as a site for interrelationality and agency, which ultimately undermines the ontology of the individual in understanding and framing sociality and serves to counter neoliberal individualism—a key debate in many of the contributions. Butler relates the theoretical elaboration of vulnerability vis-à-vis the notion of precarious lives. She argues that precarious lives are those placed outside the realm of grievability, that is, lives that are cast as not entirely worthy of
recognition and belonging to social bodies. In this vein, Butler has sparked an array of readings of different narratives that denounce the unequal conditions suffered by those who do not fit in the normative scripts, while highlighting the pertinence of exposing their situation, as do many of our contributors in the following sections. Also connected with the disposability of precarious lives, Henry Giroux (2006) has drawn attention to the risks of rendering invisible precarious life experiences. Some of the chapters in this collection engage with these concerns thereby countering such processes of social occlusion.
Those dynamics of precarity and vulnerability are irremediably shaped by the rise and hegemony of neoliberal politics. The scholarly literature on neoliberalism is vast and heterogeneous and our authors draw on a variety of frameworks and histories to provide appropriate contexts for neoliberal politics and its effects. However, it is Wendy Brown’s insights (2016) that loom large more poignantly. Taking her cue from Foucaldian governmentality, Brown has persuasively theorized that neoliberalism has “economized” all domains of social life. Transactional logics and instrumental thinking have come to underwrite decision-making processes and behaviors that do not belong to economics. “The point,” Brown contends, “is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not an issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors” (2016, 31). This has resulted in forms of social fragmentation and alienating individualism which are at the core of some of the articles in this book. Under the same aegis, Jack Halberstam’s critique of success tries to highlight how failure might, indeed, undermine the logic of capitalism. The willful refusal of success, that is, the active pursuit of failure, is therefore to be considered an act of resistance to the neoliberal prescripts of productivity. He stresses the creative, cooperative ways of being in the world that can result from “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing” (2011, 2–3). Halberstam specifically addresses the “toxic positivity of contemporary life” (2011, 3), one that attaches individuals to promises of the good life while occluding the axes that certainly
shape their existence, such as race, class, or gender. Embracing failure becomes, then, a way to reject the idea that success depends upon hard work, and it may also imply a departure from the cruel attachments that regulate and encase individuals. Lauren Berlant actually showcased the workings of such attachments by contending that identity-building often reveals a complex paradox: potentially destructive behaviors simultaneously ground people’s identity while setting them on a path toward ultimate social alienation and dysfunctionality. “What’s cruel about these attachments,” writes Berlant, “is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being” (2011, 24). Berlant lent us a theoretical language to interrogate the problematic processes by which characters cling to identity traits, ideologies, or normative scripts that turn out to be both affirming and damaging, orientating and destructive.
In sum, all contributions in this volume foreground the manifold ways in which these theoretical lenses can be deployed to show how narratives engage in dismantling and resisting normative frames. This book contains stories which pivot on different unhappy beginnings: racial and economic precarity, challenging transgender and queer experiences, or narratives of alienation and stigmatization. As highlighted by the contributors, the coping strategies enacted in the texts encompass caring, empathy, community-building, and agency. Unhappiness, vulnerability, and failure are thus resignified, turned into conflicted, ambivalent sites of resistance and social bonding.
The first five articles probe stories about aging and poverty, accounts of black precarity, and the impacts of neoliberal rationality.
Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz looks at Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book Nomadland as a text that negotiates different resistance strategies deployed by the story’s aging nomads in a context of appalling economic destitution, institutional neglect, and increasing physical decay. Ibarrola-Armendariz explores how the erosion of the middle class, coupled with the delicate health conditions of most characters in the story, highlights the mismatch between the notions of
freedom and material stability associated with US middle class life, on the one hand, and the economic precarity these elderly communities have to face in the final years of their life, on the other. This conjuncture helps analyze the way the characters engage in practices of empathy and community-building that reframe issues like happiness, agency, or the meanings of failure.
Paula Granda’s chapter examines the works of contemporary US author Jesmyn Ward, with a focus on precarity, vulnerability, and inequality. The precarity of the Black characters in Ward’s works is read as one of the many legacies of slavery, now connected with neoliberalism and its dismissal of care. Granda explores how those characters who may fall into the categories of disposable, wasted humans whose lives are non-grievable, finally resist and showcase their humanity and dignity. And they do so through caring for one another and bypassing the hegemonic frameworks of success and happiness. Ward’s use of animal and waste imagery is interpreted by Granda as an act of resistance: one that reclaims the dignity of Black people and counters the intergenerational consequences of structural—and environmental—racism. She argues that telling the story of discriminated communities is a way of resisting the biopolitics that attempt to erase their existence.
In her chapter on (post)recessionary US comedies, Elena Oliete observes that the genre has not remained impervious to the many sociocultural fault-lines the neoliberal age has opened. In an environment marked by inequality, low social mobility, and reinvigorated discourses on meritocracy and individualism, comedies released after the Great Recession have recalibrated some genre motifs to address issues such as wealth disparity and individual agency. Oliete examines the ambivalent political and ideological disclosures that (post)recessionary comedies offer when their vulnerable protagonists become trapped in the paradoxes of neoliberal discourses on meritocracy. In her analysis, she notes that, although money and consumerism are framed in these films as happy objects, the portrait of the characters’ precarious economic lives counters the neoliberal discourses of individual resilience and agency. Similarly, Fabián Orán-Llarena offers a close textual analysis
of Kitty Green’s film TheAssistant(2019) as a representation of the neoliberal workplace. Paying attention to the constrained and observational visual style of the film, this chapter looks at the pervasive influence of neoliberal common sense and the extent to which it has reshaped notions such as individual effort, entrepreneurship, or work-life balance. Orán-Llarena argues that the alienation and individualization wrought by the neoliberal workplace also enables, on the one hand, a pattern of endless subjugation to corporate power and, on the other, a culture of sexual abuse and harassment toward women. The Assistant foregrounds how these dynamics prove the ability of neoliberal rationality to locate happy outcomes and prospects as future promises, legitimizing and normalizing workers’ exploitation in the process.
Sharing points of connection with Paula Granda’s chapter, Paula Barba Guerrero reads Jaqueline Woodson’s novel Red at the Bone (2019) as a disaffected archive that reorients the traditional Black mother/daughter plot and resignifies grief. She delves into the afterlives of slavery and its legacy of inherited dispossession in her discussion of the figure of the absent Black mother, highlighting the cruel attachments to failing promises that are presented nowadays in the form of systemic abuse and neoliberal exclusion. The protagonist’s reluctance to embrace the normative feelings of mothering and to sacrifice the “good life” is interpreted by Barba Guerrero in its potential for resistance, identity-building, and dissent, although the promise of happiness that she and other characters await is never fully materialized.
The four following chapters show how fiction and memoir writings can turn failure into a productive locus of contestation and solidarity for indigenous, queer, and transgender people.
Martina Horáková argues that Tommy Orange’s multi-character novel There There (2018) recasts the intersection between urban spaces and indigenous identities. After surveying how indigenous literatures have historically associated urban spaces with trauma and suffering for indigenous peoples, Horáková shows that more recent literary texts have problematized those negative associations. Novels like There There can be viewed as unhappy archives that work to
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“Unfortunately, Mr Marcosson has not the gift of revealing his personality in his writing, nor do any of the famous men whom he describes emerge from his pages bright and clear-limned. His book, indeed, is a pedestrian piece of work. But though its sole interest lies in the various subjects presented to the reader, that interest is substantial and well recompenses one for the momentary boredom produced by certain appallingly vapid statements.”
Sat R 129:589 Je 26 ’20 650w
“A bright, racy and interesting account of interviews with a host of notables. From start to finish the personal pronoun ‘I’ looms up with great frequency. This detracts much from the delightfulness of the book.”
+ − Springf’d Republican p10 Ja 23 ’20 260w
The Times [London] Lit Sup p305 My 13 ’20 150w
MARDEN, ORISON SWETT. You can, but will you? (Marden inspirational books) *1.75 (1c) Crowell 170
20–9415
A collection of the author’s essays on right living. Among the subjects are: The new philosophy of life; The new idea of God; Facing life the right way; Winning out in middle life; How to realize your ambition; The web of fate; The open door; Do you carry victory in your face?
MARKHAM, EDWIN. Gates of paradise, and other poems. *$1.75 Doubleday 811
20–7451
This is Edwin Markham’s fourth volume of verse. It is made up of short poems arranged in eight groups: Van-couriers; At my lady’s window; Wings for the spirit; Deeper chords; Finger-posts for the highway; Echoes from the world war; Memorable men; Songs to the supernal woman. There is a frontispiece portrait of the author.
Booklist 17:22 O ’20
“Is, at its best, rhymed moralizing: eloquent, sincere, restrained, but withal too absorbed in immediate domestic and sociological interests to touch the deepest mysteries of the heart of man. ” R. M. Weaver
Bookm 51:453 Je ’20 100w
“‘Gates of paradise’ is pleasant for its simple yet technically capable lines only. The thought contained therein is as old and hackneyed as ham and eggs for breakfast. If he is not careful the mantle of Ella Wheeler Wilcox will descend upon him.” H. S. Gorman N Y Times 25:18 Jl 25 ’20 150w
Reviewed by O. W. Firkins
Review 3:653 D 29 ’20 420w MARSHALL, ARCHIBALD. Many Junes. *$2 (2c) Dodd
Something stronger than himself had always dominated over Hugh Lelacheur even from infancy. First it was a strong-willed father that
interfered with his destiny at the death of his mother. Later a too well disciplined reasonableness always triumphed over his strongest desires to make him give up what he liked best for the second best. The best things came too late and kept his life a lonely one with few high lights and many shadows. The shadow’s turn into bitterness and a hardening of the heart when on a memorable June day, given over to memory and a reliving of his past life, it comes to him that he could offer his unloved wife a measure of spiritual companionship, as the only remaining second best thing that he had so far withheld.
Booklist 16:313 Je ’20
“Reaching us twelve years after its first appearance in England. ‘Many Junes’ reveals the constant quality of Mr Marshall’s genius. It might as well have been written yesterday, as far as internal evidence discloses. To ‘Many Junes,’ therefore, we may turn for the reading of a novel in its writer’s best and most characteristic manner. ” E. F. E.
Boston Transcript p4 Ap 21 ’20 1200w
“Archibald Marshall has told the story pleasantly and neatly enough to hold one ’ s interest; and yet he fortunately does not make one take the book seriously enough to object to some of the incredibilities in the plot.” J. C. L.
New Repub 22:428 My 26 ’20 220w
“Mr Marshall’s new novel is something of a departure from his customary type of fiction. This new book is in a different vein, one more serious and more sorrowful.”
Times 25:204 Ap 25 ’20 1100w
“The present novel has the same attractiveness with the exception that it lacks that pervading humor which made some of Mr Marshall’s earlier books so delightful.”
Outlook 125:280 Je 9 ’20 240w
“‘Many Junes’ is a rambling, disjointed series or sequence of episodes in the life of an extremely disagreeable Englishman. Hugh Lelacheur is a prig, a snob, and an egotist.” H. W. Boynton
Review 3:709 Jl 7 ’20 250w
“The characters all are vividly portrayed flesh-and-blood people. Altogether the story is admirably conceived and developed, and will afford agreeable entertainment to Mr Marshall’s readers.”
A story about a little English girl and her two favorite dolls, one of them made of wood, one a very handsome person known as Lady Grace. There is a teddy bear too, and one night in her dreams the
three of them conduct Peggy to Toyland where she has many strange adventures.
“The illustrations have the charm of the narrative; a child would like both story and pictures.”
Ind 104:376 D 11 ’20 50w
Springf’d Republican p10 D 17 ’20 80w The Times [London] Lit Sup p836 D 9 ’20 170w
MARSHALL, ARCHIBALD.
Spring walk in Provence. il *$3.50 (4½c) Dodd 914.4
20–17745
The original preface to this book is dated August, 1914, but events immediately following that date delayed its publication. In an added word the author says: “I have been over the manuscript again and made a few alterations here and there, but have altered nothing that shows it to have been written five years ago. ” Among the chapter titles are: Hills and olives; Flowers and scents; In old Provence; Aix; Les baux; Mistral; Saint-Remy; Avignon; The palace of the popes; Vaucluse; Villeneuve-sur-Avignon; Arles. There are illustrations and an index.
Booklist 17:111 D ’20
“A volume of finished excellence, written without affectation, but with due regard for the stateliness of English prose. ” Margaret Ashmun
Bookm 52:344 D ’20 80w
“Mr Marshall’s journeyings through Provence inspire us with a desire to follow his footsteps.” E. F. E.
Boston Transcript p6 O 2 ’20 1350w
“The accompanying photographs are good.”
N Y Evening Post p30 O 23 ’20 120w
“Mr Marshall has produced a book that is interesting and quietly entertaining, but it is not one that will add to his reputation as a writer of finished prose. The book bears the marks of hasty composition, of a haste that has resulted in an occasional slovenliness and a frequent awkwardness of expression.”
N Y Times p18 D 26 ’20 720w
Dan Failing, the grandson of a frontiersman, has spent all his life in cities. In his twenty-ninth year he finds that he is far gone with tuberculosis and is told that he has but six months to live. He feels a yearning toward the mountain country he has never known except through his grandfather’s stories and he goes out to the Cascades. An old mountaineer who remembers the elder Failing takes him into his home, altho he cannot conceal his disappointment in this weak descendant of a mighty man. But Dan wins his host’s respect almost at once, for he is a natural born woodsman. He regains his health and later wins the love of Lennox’s daughter, a girl called Snowbird. There is much of forest and animal lore in the story.
Booklist 16:245 Ap ’20
“Again and again Mr Marshall leaves his commonplace style to indulge in some really good writing, but as often he returns to the dull monotone.”
Boston Transcript p10 My 1 ’20 260w
“The story in the main is merely a woodsman’s idyl, rich in poetic fancy although stern in its fidelity to the truth as that woodsman sees it and throbbing with reverent love for nature.”
N Y Times 25:326 Je 20 ’20 700w
“Mr Marshall’s story runs close to nature’s heart. Thru a most engrossing and intimate presentation of forest life, develops a fine love drama.” Joseph Mosher
W 97:1288 Ap 17 ’20 220w
MARSHALL, F.
HENRY.
[2] Discovery in Greek lands. il *$3.40 Macmillan 913.38
“Mr Marshall has written an attractive sketch of the chief results attained by excavations in Greater Greece since 1870. He treats the subject historically, starting with the age of Knossos and Mycenae, and describing under each period the main sites examined. He gives special chapters to temples, to the famous centres like Delphi and Olympia, and to isolated discoveries like the Sidon sarcophagi or the fine statues dredged up near Cerigotto in 1900–1.” Spec
“Though so highly compressed as to be little more than a skeleton review, his narrative is not without interest. The illustrations that accompany the text add much to its value.”
N Y Evening Post p12 D 31 ’20 160w
“He provides a useful bibliography and a number of good photographs. As an introduction to a large and fascinating subject, the book is much to be commended.”
Spec 124:245 Ag 21 ’20 100w
MARSHALL, ROBERT. Enchanted golf clubs. il *$1 (3½c) Stokes
20–3577
At the war office he was “Major the Honourable John William Wentworth Gore, 1st Royal light hussars”; to his friends: “There goes good old Jacky Gore, the finest sportsman living!” But he despises golf. The beautiful American widow, Katherine Clendenin Gunter, with a fortune of £2,000,000 sterling, is an enthusiastic golfer. To win her he decides to play a match with a golf champion and enters into a compact with the ghost of a cardinal to use his enchanted clubs. With the ghost’s aid he wins the game, but not the lady.
“Of course what the author describes in his shallow plot could not take place, for the book is admittedly a burlesque. But as a burlesque it is too extravagant to be funny.”
Springf’d Republican p11a Mr 7 ’20 60w
MARTIN, EDWARD SANFORD. Life of Joseph Hodges Choate. 2v il *$10 Scribner
20–21406
“The reader will promptly discover that this life of Mr Choate is not so much a biography after the manner of Plutarch as a compilation. The chief contributor, by far, is Mr Choate himself, whose writings, public and private, make up four-fifths, or more, of the book.” (Introd.) The first volume opens with Mr Choate’s own story of his boyhood and youth, a fragment of autobiography dictated by him in 1914 while convalescing from an illness. The editor says further, “I have borrowed whenever it could be done to advantage from newspapers, commentators, and eulogists. A series of scrap-books, kept for forty odd years and covering more or less Mr Choate’s experiences as ambassador, supplemented the long series of letters which could be drawn upon. ” Volume 1 covers the period to the nineties. Volume 2 covers the years of ambassadorship to England and the period of the war, closing with a review of his life. There are interesting illustrations and an index.
“It is a difficult task to cover adequately the many-sidedness of such a man in a biography unless it is systematic and well rounded. The career of Mr Choate merits such a biography. It has not yet been written. When it is, Mr Martin’s interesting and richly filled volumes will be the biographer’s chief source book.” S. L. Cook
Boston Transcript p6 N 20 ’20 1450w
“The two volumes are a new thing in biography. They will constitute a classic in editing.”
N Y Times p6 N 14 ’20 1700w
“This is an ideal method of combining biography with autobiography.” R. R. Bowker
+
Pub W 98:1884 D 18 ’20 300w
MARTIN, EVERETT DEAN. Behavior of crowds; a psychological study.
*$2 Harper 301
20–20958
The book is somewhat of a critical enlargement on Le Bon’s “The crowd.” Its conclusions are based on the latest research in analytical psychology originated by Freud. The author holds that “ as a practical problem, the habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more serious menace to civilization. Events are making it more and more clear that, pressing as are certain economic questions, the forces which threaten society are really psychological.” (Foreword) As a remedy to this menace he suggests re-education along the lines of humanism expounded by such writers as James, Schiller, Dewey and others. Contents: The crowd and the social problem of today; How crowds are formed; The crowd and the unconscious; The egoism of the crowd-mind; The crowd a creature of hate; The absolutism of the crowd-mind; The psychology of revolutionary crowds; The fruits of revolution—new crowd-tyrannies for old; Freedom and government by crowds; Education as a possible cure for crowd-thinking; Index.
MARTIN, GEORGE (MADDEN) (MRS ATTWOOD R. MARTIN). Children in the mist.
*$1.75 (3c) Appleton
In a series of eight sketches the writer, who has lived with the negro in Mississippi, in Louisiana, in Florida, the Carolinas and Kentucky, shows him as he is, neither praising him as his overzealous advocate, nor indulging in race hatred. It is an arraignment of the white race for keeping this primitive people so long in confusion, discouragement and ignorance. The stories cover the period from the emancipation to the present and are arranged in chronological order. The stories are: The flight; The blue handkerchief; An Inskip niggah; Pom; The sleeping sickness; Fire from heaven; Malviney; Sixty years after.
“The stories are very readable.”
Booklist 17:72 N ’20
“The eight stories in this book are written with a commendable intention, but that intention does not after all extend beyond a limited field and a circumscribed aspect of the negro. ” W. S. B.
Boston Transcript p7 S 8 ’20 600w
“Unfortunately, while Mrs Martin writes with the authoritative manner of one who has known the black man intimately, she has, as she concedes, laid no emphasis in her tales upon negroes who have, to use her phrase, forged ahead. The result is an obvious struggle between the complacence which comes of having met coloured people as servants chiefly, and the feeling that it is inconsistent to deny them opportunity and to charge their race with the consequences.” H. J. S.
Freeman 2:190 N 3 ’20 210w
“Mrs Martin avoids both sentiment and indignation; her tone is warm but quiet; she lets the stern implications arise in their bare and tragic force.”
Nation 111:276 S 4 ’20 350w
“They are typical of the kind of studied work in short-story writing which carefully applies principles of preparation, suspense, contributing effect, and climax, and never achieves the dynamic impulsion and the artistic inevitability of a directly told unpremeditated tale.”
N Y Evening Post p20 O 23 ’20 360w
“This book will prove her to have advanced in her art. Mrs Martin is too good an artist to let the purpose obtrude itself. It is there, none the less, and it gives her book a permanent value aside from its quality as fiction.” Hildegarde Hawthorne
N Y Times p24 O 3 ’20 1550w
Outlook 125:647 Ag 11 ’20 60w
“A broad vein of humor runs through the tales, but invariably there is a serious note at the ending.”
Springf’d Republican p5a Ja 23 ’21 140w
Wis Lib Bul 16:195 N ’20 80w
MARTIN, HELEN REIMENSNYDER (MRS
FREDERIC C. MARTIN). Schoolmaster of
Hessville. *$1.90 (3c) Doubleday
20–16342
The schoolmaster of Hessville, a Pennsylvania Dutch village, was John Wimmer, fine and strong of character but with the cravings of youth in his young body. It was flesh calling to flesh that made him love Irene, the glowing beauty with the coarse instincts. She played cat and mouse with him and her wiles were finally responsible for John’s marriage to Minnie, Irene’s opposite. Minnie’s winsomeness never quite compensated John for Irene’s more sensuous charms and when a cruel accident deprives Minnie of her reason leaving John with two motherless children on his hands, the now, on her part, widowed Irene, offers her services as housekeeper and becomes John’s mistress. He has fallen an easy prey but in time his eyes are opened, and when a successful operation restores Minnie to him he blesses her breadth of view that can condone his lapse.
“Not alone are the main characters well drawn, even the most minor minion is unforgettably sketched. The author has studied children and has thoroughly expressed her understanding of them.”
N Y Times p27 S 12 ’20 240w
MARTIN, MABEL WOOD. Green god’s pavilion. *$1.90 (1½c) Stokes
20–14601
This novel of the Philippines shows in almost lurid colors the irreconcilable difference between the East and the West. It is symbolized in the figures of two women, one, Julie, an American of a fair and spiritual beauty who goes out to Manila as a teacher and with the spirit of a crusader. The other, a native woman, Isabel, the “Empress of the East,” with the fierce passion of life that stops not at evil. It is a tragic story of how the East breaks all who come to her with the best of intentions of uplift and improvement, except they miraculously rise from the dead for a second birth. It broke Julie and left her for dead among the plague stricken huts of the natives. It broke Barry McChord, the man with the “Excelsior” face, who fell a victim to the plague after his high hopes were gone. But something selfless in both finally triumphs over all self-deceptions, even over death. Much philosophizing and much gruesome realism are a part of the story.
“Smoothly written and vivid tale of love and faith and hardship.”
Bookm 52:174 O ’20 220w
“From its opening chapter, the reader’s interest is caught and held. Amy Lowell, herself, has done no more vivid color bits than this author has introduced in descriptions of Manila. Aside from the brilliancy of the local setting, she has woven a tale of exceeding interest and charm, and super-excellent quality in novels of today, its ‘third act’ is most engrossing.” C. K. H.
Boston Transcript p4 S 4 ’20 540w
“‘The green god’s pavilion’ may hardly be termed an extraordinary novel, for it is built too obviously for thrill purposes, but it displays an intimate knowledge of conditions in the Philippines and presents
+ with frequency pictures of native life that are vivid and finely written.”
N Y Times p10 O 10 ’20 600w
MARTYN, WYNDHAM. Secret of the silver car.
*$1.75 Moffat
20–5579
Another book of the adventures of Anthony Trent, master criminal. In an indiscreet moment while they were shut in a caved-in dugout in Flanders, expecting death at any moment, Trent had told the story of his life to his unknown and unseen companion. Both escape and with the war over, he sets himself to find this unknown “William Smith” who knows too much about him for his own safety. He meets “William Smith’s” sister, falls in love with her and for her sake resolves to give up his brilliant criminal career. In her service he goes out to the Balkans, becomes involved in international intrigue, has many hairbreadth escapes, but secures the papers that mean so much to Lady Daphne’s father and is rewarded with her hand.
Boston Transcript p6 Jl 3 ’20 300w
“Nor is this book mere swashbuckling. It is written always adroitly, sometimes humorously, and with the zest of the author’s own enjoyment.”
Reviewed by M. K. Reely
+ + N Y Evening Post p20 Ap 24 ’20 200w
Pub W 97:996 Mr 20 ’20 320w
Springf’d Republican p11a My 16 ’20 200w
MARVIN, FRANCIS SYDNEY
, ed. Recent developments in European thought. *$6.25 Oxford 901
20–17403
“This volume, which is a sequel to ‘The unity of western civilization’ (1915) and ‘Progress’ (1916), is, like them, the fruit of a course of lectures given at a summer school at Woodbrooke, Birmingham. The addresses composing it were given in August, 1919, and it traces the idea of progress in European history since 1870. Among the contributors, besides the editor, are Mr A. E. Taylor, who writes on ‘Philosophy,’ Dr F. B. Jevons, who writes on ‘Religion,’ Mr A. D. Lindsay, of Balliol, whose subject is ‘Political theory,’ and Mr A. Clutton Brock, who discusses ‘Art.’ Each article is followed by a bibliographical note as a guide to further reading.” The Times [London] Lit Sup N 11 ’20
Ath p509 Ap 16 ’20 1400w
