Scandinavian Contributions

A continuing theme in Scandinavian scholarship is the preoccupation with short forms of literature. This year sees the publication of a collection of essays on the short story form as well as a number of articles focused on short stories, poetry, and novellas. Although in some parts of Scandinavia there is a troubling dearth of academic publications in the field of American literature, the ample harvest in Norway makes up for shortfalls elsewhere.

a. 17th-Century Prose

Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, has a well-established place in discussions about the meeting of cultures and the construction of identity. In "Mary Rowlandson and the Removes of Writing" (AmStScan 36, ii: 1–16) Alan Shima uses Mary Louise Pratt's concepts of "contact zones" and "transculturation" to analyze what he calls the "rhetorical alterity" in Rowlandson's text. This alterity produces a "text that speaks in multiple tongues," since the writing ultimately cannot depend on the Puritan framework to contain the removes within this contact zone. By means of a number of close readings Shima demonstrates how the strategies of containment that were available to Rowlandson repeatedly failed. For example, the delay of narrative momentum in the 19th remove, an account marked by a series of relatively unmotivated digressions, is for Shima a symptom of "cultural tensions in the mind of Rowlandson" as the hour of her release comes nearer and she finds herself making a reckoning of what she has gained in terms of cultural adaptation and thus lost in terms of cultural purity.

b. 19th-Century Poetry and Prose

The old American preoccupation with blankness is rendered in a fascinating way as Anna Hellén brings together a "blank" character and sculpture in "Saving the White Captive: Herman Melville's Mardi and Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave," pp. 165–73 in Notions of America. Hellén reads the character of the white maiden Yillah in Mardi as a "literary rejoinder" to Powers's famous sculpture. More than allusion or literary appropriation of a popular motif established in another art form, Melville's and Powers's works are both seen to operate according to a larger imperialist logic of representation. The female captive is a parallel to the cultural spoils moved to museums in the metropolitan West, such as the Elgin Marbles, in both cases following a logic of "appropriation and reinscription," as Eric Gidal has noted regarding museums and orientalism. In Mardi Yillah's whiteness and the blankness of her memory connote the kind of "cultural bareness" that Powers and captivated audiences found so attractive in The Greek Slave. The striking thing in Melville's rendition, Hellén convincingly argues, is that he "reproduced the sculpture as sculpture or at least as a sculpture-like character while at the same time letting the dynamic of appropriation and exhibition that constitutes the space of the gallery become the fuelling force of his narrative." As Hellén hints, Yillah's next incarnation would turn out to be a more prodigious whiteness, now more potent in resisting the master's reinscription.

While the ambiguities of Melville's Pierre tempt the reader to try to resolve them, Hans Löfgren suggests that it is more rewarding to look for the conditions of that ambiguity. In "Double Origin in Melville's Pierre," pp. 147–63 in Notions of America, however, Löfgren begins from the recognition that even those conditions are ambiguous, since the text thematizes ambiguity in terms that are "indeterminately psychosexual and politico-historical." Löfgren demonstrates this thematic indeterminacy and shows how the paternal figure functions as a marker for both Pierre's maternal origin and his relation to the aristocratic legacy of the landed estate. However, the aim of this essay is to show that the ambiguities in Pierre extend beyond such a thematic intertwining of psychology and political economy to being "symptomatically present in the writing of its author." This symptomatic reading amounts to arguing that Melville's critique of origins is limited (at least as compared with a present-day poststructuralist critique), but the question...