Project MUSE®: Pacific Coast Philology - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Pacific Coast Philology.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 49 (2014) through current issueLatest Articles: Pacific Coast PhilologyTWOProject MUSE®Pacific Coast Philology2326-067X0078-7469Latest articles in Pacific Coast Philology. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editors' Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989616
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"On Clarence Major" is the simple title of this issue of Pacific Coast Philology, 59.2. It is devoted to one of the most versatile and protean contemporary American writers, who has produced award-winning fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and paintings since the late 1960s and continues to do so.An introduction following this note will elaborate further, as will the essays contained here. "On Clarence Major" was edited by Martin Japtok, with helpful editorial assistance from Richard Hishmeh and Craig Svonkin. Craig, PAMLA's executive director, has also been instrumental in bringing Clarence Major to the 2025 conference in San Francisco, and he contributed to the interview with Major appearing in this issue. The issue
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635/image/coversmallEditors' Note2026-05-12text/htmlen-USEditors' Note2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®26282026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12An Introduction Plus: Come by Here—Clarence and Inez Major's Passing Narrative That Isn't One
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989617
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In a racialized world, people and things have to fit. They must belong to racially defined categories. Many of us maintain, patrol, guard, and contribute to this world of racial boundaries, often unknowingly, but sometimes eagerly or defensively, and more of us than we'd like to admit do so more often than we'd like to admit, no matter what sides of racial boundaries we are on. Blurring of those boundaries makes many uncomfortable as it would require renegotiating the world we think we know. Thus, to go back to the recent past, Barack Obama could not be both black and white, never mind that neither one of these categories is clearly definable. Thus, Rodney King's famous 1994 plea "Can't we all get along?" became
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635/image/coversmallAn Introduction Plus: Come by Here—Clarence and Inez Major's Passing Narrative That Isn't One2026-05-12text/htmlen-USAn Introduction Plus: Come by Here—Clarence and Inez Major's Passing Narrative That Isn't One2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®614762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12An Interview with Clarence Major
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989618
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Bernard W. Bell has called Clarence Major "one of our most compelling, challenging, prolific and multitalented contemporary artists of African descent" (1), and it is easy to see why: since 1969, when he published his first novel, All-Night Visitors, he has produced an astonishing array of work in several genres and art forms: thirteen novels, three short story collections, seventeen books of poetry, four anthologies of poetry, prose, or both, two dictionaries of African American slang (one in 1970 and a another in 1994), two exhibition catalogues of his paintings (2010 and 2011) and The Paintings and Drawings of Clarence Major in 2019, two books of essays and criticism, and a genre-bending autobiography-biography
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635/image/coversmallAn Interview with Clarence Major2026-05-12text/htmlen-USAn Interview with Clarence Major2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®464322026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Writing Interfaces in Emergency Exit
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989619
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Emergency Exit occupies an unusual position not just in Clarence Major's oeuvre but in twentieth-century experimental fiction as a whole. Larry McCaffery and Jerzy Kutnik have called it "perhaps his most successful novel" (Bunge 72) but Major has described it as the end of an era for him, remarking that he couldn't go on with the experimentalism that characterized this novel and the earlier Reflex and Bone Structure (Bunge 135–36). In The Art and Life of Clarence Major, Keith Byerman describes the novel as "a dead end for the creation of fiction" (134), based both on the way that Major's subsequent writing changed, and on how little attention the novel received.Despite this, Major's novel is very much in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635/image/coversmallWriting Interfaces in Emergency Exit2026-05-12text/htmlen-USWriting Interfaces in Emergency Exit2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®451572026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Pushing the Limits of Reality in Clarence Major's Fun & Games
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989620
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In the introduction to Calling the Wind, his anthology of twentieth-century African American short stories, Clarence Major argues that the American short story has adapted from its nineteenth-century preoccupation with unity to a more open-ended interplay between form and theme. As the short story changed, so too did the agendas of African American writers. Before the 1960s, Major observes, "African American writers of fiction more often than not chose race as their theme and racial conflict as their subject matter … but by the mid-1970s that was no longer the case" (Calling the Wind xxv). In Major's history of the short story, then, it would seem that as the genre became more formally experimental it also became
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635/image/coversmallPushing the Limits of Reality in Clarence Major's Fun & Games2026-05-12text/htmlen-USPushing the Limits of Reality in Clarence Major's Fun & Games2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®781712026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Every Minute of Every Day: The Banal as Memoir in Clarence Major's Novel Such Was the Season
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989621
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What or how is life post-protest when activists have sung the last note of Uzee Brown Jr.'s "We Shall Overcome"? When the placards have been retired and protest is only a tremor? In his 1987 novel, Such Was the Season, Clarence Major contends post-protest ushers in banal phases of day-to-day maintenance in conjunction with reflections on past progress made. Via his septuagenarian Annie Eliza Sommers Hicks, Major explores the twilight zone of post-protest daily living. Annie Eliza invites readers to bear witness to her memories that make plain her survival through searing eras in US history, including tenant farming, segregation, civil rights, and now full-blown integration. Once the invitation is accepted, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635/image/coversmallEvery Minute of Every Day: The Banal as Memoir in Clarence Major's Novel Such Was the Season2026-05-12text/htmlen-USEvery Minute of Every Day: The Banal as Memoir in Clarence Major's Novel Such Was the Season2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®785242026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12One Flesh and the Insignificance of Interracial Intimacy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989622
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A discussion of Clarence Major's One Flesh (2003) might begin with the novel's form, since it differs significantly from Major's early experimental novels (e.g., All-Night Visitors [1969], NO [1973], Reflex and Bone Structure [1975], Emergency Exit [1979], and My Amputations [1986]). In a 2004 interview, Major stated that his early works, in retrospect, were attempts to "bridge poetry, prose, and painting" (Fleming 56). In the process of creating that bridge, according to scholars, Major's early works offer an aesthetic sensibility that seeks to transcend racial specificity. As Bernard Bell put it, Major's early works move "beyond black sites of cultural production and consumption, as well as beyond thematic and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635/image/coversmallOne Flesh and the Insignificance of Interracial Intimacy2026-05-12text/htmlen-USOne Flesh and the Insignificance of Interracial Intimacy2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®704902026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Narrating and Constructing the Beach: An Interdisciplinary Approach ed. by Carina Breidenbach et al. (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989623
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The anthology Narrating and Constructing the Beach: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Carina Breidenbach et al., is a comparative study comprising five sections that include a collection of twenty scholarly essays and poems. The book is the result of scholarly presentations that took place at the interdisciplinary conference "Narrating and Constructing the Beach" in June of 2018 at the Amerika-Haus in Munich, Germany. The interest in the notions and meanings of the beach is not new, however. Since the 2015 surge of migration and the subsequent refugee crisis in Europe, many scholars have engaged in studying the beach not as a place of leisure but of a constant and changing sociocultural struggle due to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635/image/coversmallNarrating and Constructing the Beach: An Interdisciplinary Approach ed. by Carina Breidenbach et al. (review)2026-05-12text/htmlen-USNarrating and Constructing the Beach: An Interdisciplinary Approach ed. by Carina Breidenbach et al. (review)2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®99442026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Fake News in Contemporary Science and Politics: A Requiem for the Real? by Keith Moser (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989624
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Keith Moser's book Fake News in Contemporary Science and Politics configures a transdisciplinary rhetoric of how deceptive content circulated by media channels has catastrophically created a pervasive "hyperreality" that not only sanctions itself stealthily but also obfuscates all truth claims. Moser understands this "hyperreality" as a false epistemic truth that attacks humanity in the form of a tide of "infodemic crises" in today's digital era. Moser also emphasizes the alarming nature of this hyperreality, which manufactures a counterfeit reality capable of generating counter-facts that deny the very existence of objective truth.This book is of indispensable interest not only to those who subconsciously
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/635/image/coversmallFake News in Contemporary Science and Politics: A Requiem for the Real? by Keith Moser (review)2026-05-12text/htmlen-USFake News in Contemporary Science and Politics: A Requiem for the Real? by Keith Moser (review)2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®170322026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12