Modern Literature: Staging the City in
Modern Literature, Session A
Session Chair: Aaron Krall
Dept. of English,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Curtin Hall 439, PO Box 413, Milwaukee,
WI 53201
arkrall@uwm.edu
“‘Step High, Stoop
Low, Leave Your Dignity Outside’: The Importance of Chicago's Dil Pickle Club to Modern Literature”
Writers like Sherwood Anderson, Djuna
Barnes, Ring Lardner, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel
Lindsay, Jean Toomer and Carl Sandburg were all
influenced by their experiences at the Dil Pickle
Club, one of the most important stages in the life of Chicago’s modern fiction. Founded around 1915
by Jack Jones, a Wobbly, union activist, and sometime writer/artist in a
transitional neighborhood just west of the Chicago Watertower,
the purpose of the Dil Pickle was to provide a
playground for people who think about things. Not surprisingly, many of the
club’s habitués were writers. These people, who attempted to capture the real
life of the city and its inhabitants in their work, found the Dil Pickle a particularly inspiring locale. It was a forum
to share ideas, experiment with new styles and forms, a safe place to air any
controversial theory (controversy was not only admired, but encouraged), and
most of all an arena to debate pressing issues in art, culture, and society.
And not only was the club a stage for ideas, but it also became a literal
stage, putting on performances of Ibsen, O’Neill, and Ben Hecht, himself a Pickler. In a place where, as Anderson says, you could find “the street car
conductor sit[ting] on a bench beside the college professor, the literary
critic, the earnest young wife who hungers for culture, and the hobo,” the
experience of the city became visceral, intertwined with, inspiring, and
reflecting the work of these modern writers.
Sarah Jayne Kaufmann
University
of Denver
skaufman@du.edu
“‘Here is a Scene for
You’: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Urban Theater”
My paper examines Gwendolyn Brooks’s
investigation of the limits of theater as a mode of urban relations in her
writing about Chicago’s
South Side. In a set of poems written in the 1950’s, Brooks represents
encounters between wealthy whites and poor and working-class blacks as
carefully staged to position the whites as an audience and the blacks as
performers. Works such as “I Love Those Little Booths at Benvenuto’s,”
and “The Lovers of the Poor” show whites approaching black restaurants and
neighborhoods as theatrical spaces in which the white audience anticipates
performances that will define ‘blackness’ and ‘poverty.’ The whites, driving in
from ‘Lake Forest
or Glencoe,’ ‘stab their stares in’ to ‘observe tropical truths about this
dusky folk.’ Theater has a cognitive component here: the audience seeks, in
observing a performance, to establish ‘truths’ about blackness and
poverty. In each case, however, the
performance collapses. In some poems, ‘the colored people will not clown,’ and
no ‘truth’ gets disclosed. In others, such as ‘Lovers of the Poor,’ the
intensity of the visual impact of poverty (“Newspaper rugs!”) overwhelms the
theatrical frame, delivering a ‘shocking’ sensual immediacy that the audience
is unable to process. Black bodies refuse to come into focus in these
theatrical spaces, and I conclude by connecting the failure of theater here
with Brooks’s emphasis on those features of embodied experience that resist
display.
Michael Clune
University
of Michigan
mclune@umich.edu
“The Modern Blues in Langston Hughes's Not
Without Laughter”
The years of the Great Migration (1915-1950) produced a contradiction in the
literature of African Americans. On the
one hand, the urban center, the destination of so many rural black migrants,
represented opportunity and potential; the modern promise of the city was a
shining beacon for poor blacks escaping the poverty and isolation of Southern
life. On the other hand, as Toni
Morrison argues in “City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood
in Black Fiction,” the city also came to represent a space hostile to the sense
of community and continuity provided by mythic ancestor figures. My essay takes this ambivalent response to
the urban setting as a starting point.
I then argue that within African American literature, images of the
theater, the stage, performance, and spectatorship became primary means of
expressing African American concerns with urbanity and modernity. Using models of the performative theorized by
Judith butler and others, I look to Langston Hughes’s 1934 novel Not Without Laughter as a primary
example of the ways with which literary representations of black stage
performances establish the discursive context within which modern black
identities are both formed and reflected.
As Hughes’s protagonist, the adolescent boy Sandy, moves with his mother
from rural Kansas to Chicago,
he is carried along by performances of the Blues on front porches, in
juke-joints, and in the finest theaters on Chicago’s South Side. These blues performances show Sandy what it means to be
modern and black.
Dennis Chester
Cal State University,
East Bay
dennis.chester@csueastbay.edu
“‘Tall and sprawling centers of steel and
stone’: Richard Wright’s Cityscapes”
Richard Wright sustained a strong interest in cities and their effects on
people throughout his career. From his
work in Native Son
(1940) to Twelve Million Black
Voices (1941) and White Man, Listen! Wright was always a studious observer
of the geography of urban spaces and the sociology of urban environments. This
is also seen in his autobiographies, Black
Boy (1945) and American
Hunger (1977). Critics have
traditionally focused on young Richard’s move out of the South to the
Midwestern metropolis of Chicago,
Illinois as the major turning
point in his development as a writer and cultural critic. While Chicago
is undoubtedly of great importance, I argue that the turning point in his
intellectual development happens earlier, in another city: Memphis, Tennessee. This is the autobiographical protagonist’s
first real introduction to urban living, and Wright carefully sets the city up
for the reader, as he later does in Chicago. In both cities we initially get young
Richard’s first physical experiences of the city, sensory images that remain
with him throughout his time there and shape his experience in profound, yet
different ways. In this paper, through
photographs, excerpts from his writing, and Wright’s recollections in
interviews, I will analyze the spaces that Richard enters in Memphis
and Chicago and
offer commentary on how they contribute to his growth as an author and
activist. I am interested in Wright’s
navigation of the physical and cultural landscapes of these cities; how he
“stages” them for the reader in his fiction and nonfiction works; and how the
city functions as set and character in his work.
Kristina Bobo
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
kdbobo@email.unc.edu
Modern Literature: Staging the City in
Modern Literature, Session B
Session Chair: Aaron
Krall
Dept. of English,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Curtin Hall 439,
PO Box 413, Milwaukee,
WI 53201
arkrall@uwm.edu
“‘Only as Simulacrum’:
Landmarks & Location in Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain”
This March’s revival of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain may be marketed
around Julia Roberts, but the play’s subject remains New York City. The story of the Janeway
family (Walker in 1995; Ned in 1960) revolves around two urban locales. The first is Janeway
House, the building designed by Ned years before that has all the qualities
of Frank Gehry design.
The second is the Manhattan
apartment where the play, during the past and the present, takes place. Three
Days of Rain unfolds, though without recognizable denouement
thanks to its renunciation of chronology (in favor of the simultaneity of
postmodern geography) from act one through act two, as exploration of the
interplay of geography and epistemology.
Put simply, it considers the increasingly flawed ways characters
locate and orient themselves in the widening gyre of postmodern urbanism. Walker’s
obsession with exegesis of the apartment and Janeway
House, after finding his father’s journal, during the first act engages
with Frederic Jameson’s argument about the “mutations” of hyperspace that
follows from contemporary architecture.
The second act with Ned (the architect) further complicates Walker’s exegesis for audiences by confounding
whatever conclusions were tentatively reached. The play invites audiences toward postmodern
indeterminacy, Walker’s
inability to locate himself, through its rejection
of simple antecedency.
This paper will consider Three
Days of Rain’s staging of the postmodern urban landscape
of New York City
as well as how the attendant commentary on geography, architecture, and
urbanism is inhibited by commercialized marketing and reception of star-driven
theater.
Chris Westgate
Skagit
Valley College
westgatejc@yahoo.com
“Stumbling onto a Stage: The Situationist Dérive and the Chicago Pub Crawl”
Recent scholarship has utilized the social theories and
practices of the Situationist International movement
to analyze and critique how urban drama and cinema (and their protagonists)
engage and interact with the city. A consideration of how one experiences
the city in these terms, according to Deron Albright,
“represents a shift in the standard epistemology of experience. No longer
does one learn about the city.
Instead, one enters into communion with it.” The city, thus, becomes “an
active surface,” a space for immense interactive potential, a stage. Following
the founding member of the Situationist movement
Guy Debord’s theory and technique of the “dérive,”
which he defines as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences”
with a “primarily urban character,” this paper examines how the “primarily
urban” ritual of the pub crawl compares and even serves as a working model
of the dérive. The paper goes on to question what
Debord means by the “awakening of consciousness” that dérivistes experience and/or collectively reach, as well as
analyze how intoxication affects the dérivistes’
ability to geographically and psychogeographically
“map” the “articulations,” discover the “unities of ambiance,” and perceive
the “principal axes of passage” of the modern city. The conclusion of the
paper will pay particular attention to Chicago
pub crawl activity as well as, potentially, discuss the Palmer House Hilton
as a possible stage for the dérive.
Erik Chandler
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
edc2@uwm.edu
“Staging Female
Identity in the Fractured City”
In María Novaro’s
first feature, Lola (1989), the main character, Lola, exists in a
marginalized female space, surrounded by the ruins of Mexico City post-1985 earthquake. In my presentation,
I will discuss the ways in which Novaro integrates
her representation of a working class woman with a portrait of a recovering
Mexico City.
I assert that through Novaro’s camera lens, Mexico City is transformed
into an artistic object presented as a ruined and wounded space. This
setting and the disquieting mood established underscore that in Lola,
female identity seems to be as fragmented as the damaged buildings and the
city that are exhibited throughout. Novaro’s Lola
uses post-earthquake Mexico City’s
fractured cityscape to create a an exposed atmosphere, palpable in the streets and permeating
the private sphere, in which competing discourses are constantly in dialogue. The
sense of disillusionment present in Lola because of this difference
throws into the light a questioning of an individual’s place within a collapsed
physical environment, and the artificial division between public and private
spaces falls away like one of the many walls that fell from a building during
the earthquake. Novaro’s film captures one individual’s
search for symbolic meaning—collective, cultural and social—in dire need
of reconstruction as much as the city needs it. The domestic sphere is no
less uncertain as the camera lens exposes hairline cracks, broken windows
and cramped quarters of Lola’s apartment. This space, where fantasy and
reality overlap, is not a ‘protected space,’ but a conflicted feminized
terrain in which alternative visions of motherhood, sexuality, parental
roles and child rearing play themselves out.
María Luisa Ruiz
Saint Mary’s College
of California
mlruiz@stmarys-ca.edu
“Central Cities,
Peripheral Matters: Uneven Geographical Development in Frank Norris’s The
Pit and Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt”
Superseding rural regions and the Old
World, the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century American
city was often assumed to be a kind of final frontier, the terminal historical
and geographical stage for the articulation, development, and refinement
of the modern. From one perspective, then, much of the American naturalistic
and realist canon, as well as the criticism of it, rightfully and importantly
engages with what Philip Fisher terms one of America’s “hard facts,” the
developing urban scale of meaning and experience. As literary critic Thomas
Peyser and cultural geographer Neil Smith have shown, however,
the American geographical imagination (and ambition) was also global in
scale during this period, exemplified in both the novel and in an expansionist
imperial policy. The acknowledgement and analysis of the boundaries and
transactions between multiple geographic scales is important in theorizing
representations of urban space during this period and how those representations
have been subsequently received. Writers often characterized as urban novelists
for the centrality of New York or Chicago to their novels,
I argue, do not just inscribe the texture of urban space and the experience
of it but also map the often anxious social, economic, and geographical
relations within and between the city and its peripheral communities, the
nation, and the world. Through readings of Frank Norris’s The Pit—specifically, the failure to stage the play within
the novel—and Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie
Gerhardt, I hope to show how both novels address the historical
exigencies of an uneven geographical development that prioritizes the large-scale
over the narrow, the city over country, and developed places over underdeveloped
spaces.
Mark Vega
Stanford
University
mvega@stanford.edu