Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America

David G. Cowart

Published by Cornell University Press 2006

Trailing Clouds

Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America

David G. Cowart

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501727054

Overview
Contents

About this book

"We stand to learn much about the durability of or changes in the American way of life from writers such as Bharati Mukherjee (born in India), Ursula Hegi (born in Germany), Jerzy Kosinski (born in Poland), Jamaica Kincaid (born in Antigua), Cristina...

Author / Editor information

David Cowart is Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of several books, including Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language and Literary Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth-Century Writing.

Reviews

Kathryn Hume, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University:

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.

This carefully researched, well-written book defies comparison to other recent criticism.

A. Robert Lee, Nihon University, Toronto Modern Language Review:

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'.

Werner Sollors, Harvard University:

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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction: The New Immigrant Writing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Slavs of New York: Being There, Mr. Sammler's Planet Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	14
2. Immigration and Primal Scene: Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
3. Survival on the Tangled Bank: Hegi's The Vision of Emma Blau and Mukherjee's Jasmine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
4. Language, Dreams, and Art in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
5. Korean Connection: Chang-rae Lee and Company Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
6. Haitian Persephone: Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	126
7. Assimilation and Adolescence: Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	138
8. Ethnicity as Pentimento: Mylène Dressler's The Deadwood Beetle Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	160
9. Immigration as Bardo: Wendy Law-Yone's The Coffin Tree Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	172
10. Closet and Mask: Junot Díaz's Drown Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
Conclusion: We, Them, Us Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 264
Illustrations
- Other: 1 table
Keywords: Literary Studies; American Studies; U.S. HISTORY

eBook

Published: July 5, 2018
ISBN: 9781501727054