...Bradley J. Fest This interview with literary critic Jonathan Arac was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh on May 19, 2015. Arac, a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1979, speaks at length about his life and work. Addressing the impact of theory on his career, he discusses...

...Jonathan Arac William V. Spanos’s most recent book, Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” (2013), offers the occasion to reflect on the distinctive quality of his long, productive career. His work...

...Jonathan Arac Drawing on Edward Said's method of “contrapuntal” criticism relating culture and empire, and also on Frank Kermode's understanding of the “classic” in relation to empire, this essay addresses two major American works a century apart to suggest a pattern that joins important American...

...Jonathan Arac Duke University Press 2007 Babel and Vernacular in an Empire of Immigrants: Howells and the Languages of American Fiction Jonathan Arac Philological criticism is not just the same as close...

...Jonathan Arac Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995) demonstrates the work a novel can do in speaking (up) for the human in the current life of the United States, even though the novel as an institution has become residual, as print literature yields to other media forms. Through his epigraph from...

...Hortense J. Spillers; Jonathan Arac Abstract William Faulkner constructed Absalom, Absalom! with techniques that allowed him to reach beyond his time and place to a historical grasp of problems that arise from a long past and that continue to shape our world nearly a century after the novel's...

...Jonathan Arac Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man after Fifty Years Jonathan Arac 1 I start with a key moment late in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, pub- lished in 1952. The moment...

...Jonathan Arac To understand and evaluate Emily Dickinson's poetry forces criticism to reflect on issues of length, for which Aristotle and Edgar Allan Poe are two of the major theoretical resources, with further citation from Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert. Giuseppe Ungaretti's extraordinarily...

...Jonathan Arac With reference to the author’s experience with English and other languages, this essay reflects on the problem of American monolingualism and explores modes of learned critical attention to the work language does in society, examining writing by Kenneth Burke, Raymond Williams, Erich...

...Jonathan Arac Joseph Frank (1918–2013) achieved fame as a literary scholar first with his three-part essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945) and then with his five-volume critical biography Dostoevsky (1976–2002). This essay traces his career, emphasizing its divergence from the practices...

...Jonathan Arac Abstract In light of Oxford University Press issuing two volumes in The Critical Works of William Empson ( Some Versions of Pastoral [1935] and The Structure of Complex Words [1951]), this essay thinks over Empson's career and major works to consider what his value may be nearly...

... 2007 Contributors Jonathan Arac is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pitts- burgh. His publications include The Emergence of American Literary Narrative (2005), “Huckleberry Finn” as Idol and Target (1997), Critical Genealogies (1987), and Commissioned...

... brought their own interests and critical imaginations to the journal while acquiring experience and opportunities for their own work. The early groups of assistant editors included figures such as Heather McHugh and Jonathan Arac, both of whom went on to great and distinguished careers. When...

... brought their own interests and critical imaginations to the journal while acquiring experience and opportunities for their own work. The early groups of assistant editors included figures such as Heather McHugh and Jonathan Arac, both of whom went on to great and distinguished careers. When...

... © 2017 by Duke University Press 2017 Contributors Jonathan Arac, who has worked with boundary 2 since 1978, is Mellon Professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He serves on the steering committee of the Keywords Project, which...

... Copyright © 2020 Duke University Press 2020 boundary 2 47:2 (2020) DOI 10.1215/01903659-8260197 © 2020 by Duke University Press Contributors Jonathan Arac serves as Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he founded the Humanities Center in 2008 and directed...

... Copyright ©2024 by Duke University Press 2024 Jonathan Arac is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was founding director of the Humanities Center (2008–19). His most recent book, in collaboration with the Keywords Project, is Keywords...

... orthodoxy. But in his 1986 essay entitled ‘‘The Politics of The Scarlet Letter Jonathan Arac interpreted the novel’s artful indeterminacy as complicitous with a rhe- toric of governance regulative of the political field.10 Describing Hawthorne’s art of indeterminacy as structuring the containment...

... 2009 Contributors Jonathan Arac is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and founding director of the Center for Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh. He also serves on the bound- ary 2 editorial collective and chairs the Advisory Committee for the Successful Soci- eties Program...

... boundary 2 48:1 (2021) DOI 10.1215/01903659-8821522 © 2021 by Duke University Press Contributors Jonathan Arac is Mellon Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he founded the Humanities Center and directed it from 2008 to 2020. He has served on the boundary 2...