Arizona Quarterly, The

'A True Picture of Facts': Cinematic Realism in Dreiser's an American Tragedy

[...] more importantly, it stresses that An American Tragedy should be understood as the product of phenomenological shifts in vision and visual description that date back to at least the "photographic realism" of American literature written in and after the final decades of the nineteenth century. According to Eisenstein, Dickens offers not simply an abundance of detail, but also a mastery of it, a skilled use of it to build character and to summarize events (see "Dickens"). [...] Alan Spi...

After Acknowledgement: Theodore Parker As Representative Man

(Autobiography 347-48) In his radical critique, Parker identifies America's crisis not as an ethical hesitation between positions but as a heretical inattention to the whispering still voice of history and instinct: "men and women," geniuses alike. [...] choosing freedom over slavery and choosing slavery over freedom are separate but equal choices leading down a single "road to ruin"; a road on which fetishized authors, those "great men" crying out "democracy" and "constitution," repeat the ...

On the Hollywood Chain Gang: The Screen Version of Robert E. Burns' I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang! And Penal Reform of the 1930s-1940s

Chain gangs have been reinstated in several states - Alabama, Arizona, Florida, and Ohio (Glazer 1195)· While legal scholars are debating "the propriety and constitutionality" of forced labor or giving prison authorities advice on how to avoid potential lawsuits from convicts' families (1223), literary and cultural scholars might want to examine the fate of the rehabilitative model of justice and of the high hopes for prison reform in the 1930s. Since today minorities are as overrepresented ...

Raising Eden in Death Comes for the Archbishop

No one in Cincinnati could tell him how to get to New Mexico - no one had ever been there. Since young Father Latour's arrival in America, a railroad had been built through from New York to Cincinnati, but there it ended ....

Some Assembly Required: The Embodied Politics of Infinite Jest

[...] in its textual assembly, Infinite Jest subverts traditional approaches to demand new reading practices. Stemming from the impossibility of constructing a comprehensive list of impairments - an acknowledgement which imbeds the failure of completion into the foundation of approaches to disability - the ADA offers three components to its definition, with membership in any part constituting legal disability: "The term 'disability' means, with respect to an individual: A a physical or menta...

The Mexican Revolution in the Eyes of Katherine Anne Porter and Nellie Campobello

In the prologue to Mis libros [M 31 Books], Campobello sets up her fictional portrayals of the Mexican Revolution as a battle between good and evil and claims that as a child she saw how those good men [wíistos] fought against the truly evil ones [carrancistas]. [...] I saw, learned, and knew that the evil rob the good and kill them; that for the good guys, justice does not exist not even in hundreds of years (9).\nS. citizen and U.S. southerner rather than a Mexican or a norteña, Porter has...

To 'Tell Again in Many Ways': Iteration and Translation in the Souls of Black Folk

Returning to this point years later (in characteristic iterative fashion) in his autobiographical work, Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois remarks that the cultural-historical arguments for white supremacy he encountered at Harvard and in Germany contained within them the grounds for their own invalidation: "The first thing which brought me to my senses in all this racial discussion was the continuous change in the proofs and arguments advanced" (626). With these words, Du Bois looks back on a revelation...