Description
Book SynopsisPredicated upon the principles of political freedom, cultural openness, religious tolerance, individual self-reliance, and ethnic diversity, the United States of America has been tempted recurrently by the lures of the secret. American Secrets explores this political, historical, and cultural phenomenon from many, often surprisingly, overlapping angles in these analyses of the literary and cultural uses and abuses of secrecy within a democratic culture. Through analyses of diverse literary works and cultural manifestations-from Mark Twain's anti-imperialist prophecies to 9/11 conspiracy theories, from the traumas of the Vietnam war to the homophobia of the American military establishment, from the unresolved dilemmas of nuclear politics to the secret ecologies shunted aside by the exploitation of the environment, from the questionings of national identity on the ethnic and (trans)sexual margins to the confessional modes of poetry and the poetics of the unspeakable and unrepresentable-these essays reveal the politics within the poetics and, indissociably, the poetics fueling the politics of secrecy in its ambivalent deployment. Secrecy often seems to be a question without an answer or an answer that either seems to beg the question or to be a question itself. These essays address this paradox with their own questioning explorations. In answering such questions, the volume as a whole provides an illuminating overview of the pervasiveness of the secret and its modalities in American culture while also dealing specifically with the poetics of the secret in its various, historically recurrent literary manifestations.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: America the Secret Secret Nation / Nation of Secrets Shelley Fisher Fishkin - “None but the Dead Are Permitted to Tell the Truth”: Mark Twain’s Missives to the Future Carmen Méndez García - The Ultimate Secrecy: Feminist Readings of Masculine Trauma in Vietnam War Literature Esther Pérez Villalba - (Don’t) Trust the U.S. Government: Paul Greengrass’ United 93 and the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories David Río - The Desert as a National Sacrifice Zone: The Nuclear Controversy in Nevada Fiction Boris Vejdovsky - Hidden Truths and Open Lies: The Performance of U.S. History and Mythography in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and its Film Adaptation Robert Vorlicky - Dirty Laundry on the Line: Staging the Nation in Contemporary U.S. Drama and Performance Secret Selves Marie C. Bouchet - Lolita, the Secret of/in Lolita: “Poerotics” of Secrecy Carmen Induráin Eraso - American Secrets on the Road towards the West Inmaculada Lara Bonilla - Family Secrets: Carving Identity out of Silence in Borderlands/La Frontera. Steve Schessler - The Black Sheep I Am: Anne Sexton, Madness, and the Performance of Confession Paul Scott Derrick - Dickinson, Doubt, and the Skeptical Argument: Notes for a Defense of the Unspoken Jefferey Simons - Enabling Secrecy: Hermeneutics, the Lyric, and Dickinson’s Poem 340 (The) Other(´s) Secrets Carmen Flys Junquera - Whispers in the Wind, Visions in the Fog: Nature’s Secrets in Linda Hogan’s Novels Christian Hummelsund Voie - Blood on the Tire Iron: Battle on Secret Ideological Frontiers in Brokeback Mountain Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz - Secret Links in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker: Reflections on Another Composite Novel by an Ethnic Writer María Frías - AIDS—The Disease With No Name?: Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother (1997) Notes Bibliography
