Nordic Contributions

This section provides an overview of American literary scholarship published this year in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Nordic contributions comprise a wide spectrum of topical research interests and areas at the center of ongoing conversations on American literature. Finnish scholarship engages the fields of drama, narrative, and ethnic U.S. writing, including several essays by Finnish scholars on Native North America; Norwegian publications deal with national narratives, masculinity, and the dual identities of immigrants in an American context; and Swedish articles focus on such topics as Hawthorne scholarship, aspects of serialization and series fiction in the 20th century, and recent literary engagements with neoliberalism and satire.

a. Finland

This year's contributions include a major anthology on representations of international adoption in ethnic American literatures and a good number of essays on narrative aspects of literature.

20th- and 21st-Century Drama

Mehdi Ghasemi studies the plays of the contemporary African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks in two essays. "A Study of Intersectionality in Suzan-Lori Parks's Fucking A" (Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships 3, iv: 61–75) explores the play from a perspective that takes into account the multiple oppressions regulating the life of the characters. While the key concept of intersectionality could have been discussed more thoroughly, the article underlines the play's critique of hypocritical society and structures of power. In "A Study of Womanism in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World" (International Journal of Gender and Women's Studies 5, ii: 114–21) Ghasemi reads the 1990 play in the context of womanism to suggest that the play coheres with Alice Walker's definition of the term and its understanding of African American gender roles and relationships.

20th- and 21st-Century Prose

The volume Mielikuvituksen maailmat: Tieteidenvälisiä tutkimuksia kirjallisuudesta [Worlds of Imagination: Explorations in Interdisciplinary Literary Research], ed. Merja Polvinen, Maria Salenius, and Howard Sklar (Turku: Eetos), contains several articles on American literature with a focus on narratology and narrative more generally. In "Carving Out Other Narratives: Textual Treat in Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes" (pp. 87–105) Mikko Keskinen discusses Safran Foer's experimental book that reconstructs the English version of Street of Crocodiles by the Polish author Bruno Schulz. After producing pen-marked versions of the original, Safran Foer then deleted letters, words, phrases, and sections he found unnecessary for his own book. The end result is a sculpture-like textual object in which pages have holes where the original text was and that can be read in different ways. In Keskinen's view, the significance of the experiment is that it generates several narratives in the same container, including Foer's own narrative—that is readable contrary to some expectations—and "the holey text" that can be approached by touching, feeling, and examining its structure. In "The Sensational World of The Running Man" (pp. 182–201) Mari Hatavara and Jarkko Toikkanen examine the narrative strategies and the storyworld of the 1982 novel by Richard Bachman (a.k.a. Stephen King) on the basis of contemporary narrative theories and the notion of expositional manipulation in particular. What is shown is that the protagonist's sensations and experiences are clearly conveyed to the reader, but the narrator's reliability remains questionable. In "John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers and Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I Am Dying as Family Memoirs and Narratives of Black Captivity" (pp. 249–67) Tuire Valkeakari focuses on two texts—one African American, one Haitian American—in which family is examined in the contexts of incarceration and detention. The essay makes several important points concerning these autobiographical texts that have both activist and artistic aims. First, it confirms that Wideman's narrative of his brother jailed for life contributes to his systematic project of discussing African American identity and community facing dehumanization, and second, it shows how Danticat's memoir addressing her uncle's death while being held in detention in Miami uses the strategies of the testimony to counter current practices. Finally, it suggests that the trope of breaking the...