Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James
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Ulla Haselstein
Ulla Haselstein is Professor of American Literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. She was a visiting scholar at the Center of Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz in 1993 – 94, a visiting professor of American Literature at UC Irvine in 2001, an Aby Warburg Visiting Professor at the University of Hamburg in 2009, and a Harris Professor at Dartmouth College in 2024. In 2014, she was awarded an “Opus Magnum” grant by the VolkswagenStiftung. Her work has appeared inComparative Literature ,New Literary History , andPoetica. She has published widely on psychoanalysis, modernist and postmodernist literature, Native American Studies, and literary theory. Her most recent book publications areThe Cultural Career of Coolness (co-ed., Lanham MD: Rowman, 2013),Allegorie (ed., Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016) andGertrude Steins Literarische Porträts (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2019).
Abstract
The article analyzes Percival Everett’s James (2024) as a compendium of different narrative and intertextual modes of continuation, with adventure as the main (overdetermined) trajectory. Responding to African American critiques and academic readings of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Jamesis a re-writing of Twain’s classic and an adaptation of the genre of the slave narrative that echoes Twain’s parody of adventure in various ways and takes it to new horizons. With rewriting/adaptation/parody illuminating each other and providing an analytical frame for each other, Twain’s canonical status, Twain criticism, constructions of the African American literary tradition, and narrative dynamics of contemporary popular adventure are put to the test.
Abstract
The article analyzes Percival Everett’s James (2024) as a compendium of different narrative and intertextual modes of continuation, with adventure as the main (overdetermined) trajectory. Responding to African American critiques and academic readings of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Jamesis a re-writing of Twain’s classic and an adaptation of the genre of the slave narrative that echoes Twain’s parody of adventure in various ways and takes it to new horizons. With rewriting/adaptation/parody illuminating each other and providing an analytical frame for each other, Twain’s canonical status, Twain criticism, constructions of the African American literary tradition, and narrative dynamics of contemporary popular adventure are put to the test.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
