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Overview
In Trailing Clouds, David Cowart offers fresh insights into contemporary American literature by exploring novels and short stories published since 1970 by immigrant writers. Balancing historical and social context with close readings of selected works, Cowart explores the major themes raised in immigrant writing: the acquisition of language, the dual identity of the immigrant, the place of the homeland, and the nature of citizenship.
Cowart suggests that the attention to first-generation writers (those whose parents immigrated) has not prepared us to read the fresher stories of those more recent arrivals whose immigrant experience has been more direct and unmediated. Highlighting the nuanced reflection in immigrant fiction of a nation that is ever more diverse and multicultural, Cowart argues that readers can learn much about the changes in the American way of life from writers who have come to this country, embraced its culture, and penned substantial literary work in English.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801472879 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 05/23/2006 |
Pages: | 264 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The New Immigrant Writing 1
Slavs of New York: Being There, Mr. Sammler's Planet 14
Immigration and Primal Scene: Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents 41
Survival on the Tangled Bank: Hegi's The Vision of Emma Blau and Mukherjee's Jasmine 55
Language, Dreams, and Art in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban 86
Korean Connection: Chang-rae Lee and Company 101
Haitian Persephone: Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory 126
Assimilation and Adolescence: Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge 138
Ethnicity as Pentimento: Mylene Dressler's The Deadwood Beetle 160
Immigration as Bardo: Wendy Law-Yone's The Coffin Tree 172
Closet and Mask: Junot Diaz's Drown 190
Conclusion: We, Them, Us 205
Notes 213
Works Cited 229
Index 239
What People are Saying About This
David Cowart's Trailing Clouds maps the most recent chapters in the literature of a country that has long been marked by a history of arrivals from remarkably heterogeneous origins. Cowart's readings of writers from Saul Bellow to Jamaica Kincaid, from Julia Alvarez to Chang-Rae Lee, from Cristina Garcia to Ursula Hegi, and from Bharati Mukherjee to Edwidge Danticat offer often provocative new interpretations of some of the most important contemporary immigrant literature and develop a general typology of shared features of these new books that complicate the dividing line between 'us' and 'them' and take part in helping readers imagine the changing face of America.
While some of the authors discussed in Trailing Clouds are well established, others are just making their presence felt: they are the classroom texts of the near future. David Cowart provides original and nuanced readings and enriches our understanding of immigrant fiction. He taught me things I had not seen. Cowart eschews an emphasis on victimization, balkanization, and the horrors of American imperialism. While not condoning a lot that is wrong with America, Cowart listens to his authors and to all that they are grateful for in their new lives.
In taking on contemporary immigrant as against second-generation authorship, David Cowart looks to the refractions of departure, journey, and arrival, for what in her 1926 narrative Gertrude Stein notably called 'the making of Americans.' The era in view, however, is not that of historic Ellis Island, the huddled masses, but rather Kennedy or other contemporary airports—a crossing of American borders in a time of Homeland Security and global migration. What rites of passage, what latest makings of American, then, are most to be met with in immigrant novels and stories since the 1970s? Trailing Clouds highlights eleven or so texts yet always within an allusive wider reach. Cowart works from two first bearings, Nabokov and Saul Bellow. This is an American read through memorial pasts, in Nabokov's case Sovietized Russia, in Bellow's Jewish Europe into his Quebec childhood. Each, brilliantly, reinvents the New World, their novels anthropologies as it were. In this Nabokov and Bellow share a similar old-new immigration syndrome, whether the haunted Polish-Jewish Jerzy Kosinski, the India-to-Canada-to-America Bharati Mukherjee, or the Dominican Julia Alvarez, each on Cowart's reckoning and in the double sense of the phrase 'spectacular border intellectuals'.