Literary Impersonations

This book explores the role of wax as an important conceptual material used to work out the nature and limits of the early modern human. By surveying the use of wax in early modern cultural spaces such as the stage and the artist’s studio and in literary and philosophical texts, including those by William Shakespeare, John Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, and Edmund Spenser, this book shows that wax is a flexible material employed to define, explore, and problematize a wide variety of early modern relations including the relationship of man and God, man and woman, mind and the world, and man and machine.

Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, "good" readers--attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use the author's tongue-in-cheek term, "bad" readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. The author of this book argues that we should think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary--thriving outside the institutions we take as central to the literary world. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature's diminished role in the public sphere, she suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy.

In this groundbreaking study, the author examines the gradual opening of literary academe to Jewish faculty and analyzes the critical work Jewish scholars undertook to achieve their integration into an exclusive WASP domain. Beginning her story at Harvard University, Klingenstein describes the unique intellectual paths taken by scholars such as Harry Levin, Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, Leo Marx, and Sacvan Bercovitch. At Columbia University, Klingenstein argues that the singular Jewish presence of Lionel Trilling shaped the minds and inspired the careers of Jewish intellectuals as different as Cynthia Ozick, Norman Podhoretz, Steven Marcus, and Carolyn Heilbrun. Once Jewish scholars had attained a strong foothold in literary academe, pioneering spirits such as Robert Alter and Ruth R. Wisse turned their attention from English and American to Jewish literature in Hebrew and Yiddish. Written as an interconnected series of twelve lucid and compelling portraits of major figures in the history of American literary criticism, this book illuminates the element of serendipity in culture-formation and exposes the social and intellectual forces at work in cultural change.

In Double Agency, Tina Chen proposes impersonation as a paradigm for teasing out the performative dimensions of Asian American literature and culture. Asian American acts of impersonation, she argues, foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist on the undeniable importance of subjecthood. By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen shows how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book—impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority—thus becomes a site for reconsidering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as "im-personations"—dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics—through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.

This handbook of Classical Chinese literature from 1000 bce through 900 ce aims to provide a solid introduction to the field, inspire scholars in Chinese Studies to explore innovative conceptual frameworks and pedagogical approaches in the studying and teaching of classical Chinese literature, and facilitate a comparative dialogue with scholars of premodern East Asia and other classical and medieval literary traditions around the world. The handbook integrates issue-oriented, thematic, topical, and cross-cultural approaches to the classical Chinese literary heritage with historical perspectives. It introduces both literature and institutions of literary culture, in particular court culture and manuscript culture, which shaped early and medieval Chinese literary production.

In this entertaining and provocative new work, Joel Schechter selectively surveys political satire covering a wide range of periods and events from Aristophanes to the present. His absorbing essays focus on the satires of Jonathan Swift, Charlie Chaplin, Will Rogers, Dario Fo, and the Guerrilla Girls, among others. Schechter furthermore examines how the histrionic behavior of some politicians and world leaders has prompted them to become unwitting contributors to political satire. He argues that these politicians are as theatrical, if not as comic, as the plays, pamphlets, and films in which they are satirically impersonated. As examples, he cites Hitler, Stalin, and Reagan as performers whose "acts" rival anything a satirist could invent and any impersonation a comedian could stage. In Schechter's view, satiric impersonation is not only an art form through which one living person appears to be another, it is also an act that reveals that the person imitated is an imposter. For example, he comments that "while Hitler conquered Europe, Chaplin [in his film The Great Dictator] in his own way conquered Hitler; adding him to a repertoire that included the Little Tramp and (later) Bluebeard." Schechter approaches satire with candor and humor, personalizing his text by concluding with a memoir of his own brief career as an actor-politician.

Henry James criticized the impressionism movement, yet time and again used the word 'impressio' to represent his characters's consciousness, as well as the work of the literary artist. This book explores this anomaly, placing James's work within the wider cultural history of impressionism.