Papers by Taylor Johnston-Levy
Education, Citizenship and Social Justice , 2024
This essay explores how the social world intrudes on the Israeli classroom, where open discussion... more This essay explores how the social world intrudes on the Israeli classroom, where open discussion of relations between Palestinians and Jews can feel nearly impossible. I will consider the strategy of confronting societal conflicts with students through what I call spacious analogies—that is, by studying social and historical sites removed from the local context but analogous to it in provocative ways. My objects of analysis will be two ‘teaching stories’: my narratives of discussing Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice through the lens of Orientalism and Richard Wright’s Native Son in dialogue with Whiteness Studies scholarship. In both stories, social hegemony akin to racial whiteness manifested itself, in the way students identified with characters and in their classroom affect. Through the relative safety of literary texts from different social worlds, however, the students were invited to confront the hegemony of their own context and build resilience to the discomforts of doing so. I will propose that teaching by analogy can allow educators to scaffold the discomfort of students from the hegemonic group without recentering their needs over those of marginalized students or resorting to analytical models that sanitize histories of oppression.
Twentieth-Century Literature, 2023
This article explores how antiracism cultivates happiness among white subjects and how that emoti... more This article explores how antiracism cultivates happiness among white subjects and how that emotion alienates people of color. It argues that a cohort of twentieth-century African American writers critiqued this happy antiracism in their fiction, examining Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) as two representative examples. Both novels portray what Sara Ahmed calls an “affective economy,” specifically the unequal affective economy produced by antiracism’s circulation as a cultural object. Wright considers how antiracism occasions happiness in white subjects by bolstering their sense of their own virtue, and how this happiness alienates African Americans, for whom antiracism is embedded in the experience of ongoing racial violence. Writing in the heyday of second-wave feminism, Walker examines how, even as antiracism shores up happy feeling, it can also compromise the agency of white women, whose activism is mediated by the persistence of nineteenth-century ideals of sentimentalism and domesticity.
The Raymond Carver Review, 2017
This essay examines Carver's minimalist style as a response to postmodern culture. Taylor Johnsto... more This essay examines Carver's minimalist style as a response to postmodern culture. Taylor Johnston suggests that Carver's spare prose has the effect of stripping away as many consumer artifacts as possible without jettisoning referentiality entirely. In this way, Carver's stories clear the overpopulated, decorative space of both consumer culture and more canonical postmodern literatures. "Cathedral" exemplifies this operation in that it not only prunes brand names, but also allegorizes the utopian possibility of experience removed from commodification. The essay performs a close reading of this story in which blindness becomes a figure for the evacuation of consumer culture from lower-middle-class space.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
Though critics have called Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle the novelistic equivalent of self-ob... more Though critics have called Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle the novelistic equivalent of self-obsessed digital media, I argue that his copious use of autobiographical detail actually decenters the subject and, in doing so, reworks Proustian memory for the contemporary age. The novel’s details are, in fact, too excessive to be the account of a remembering, sense-making subject. Unlike Roland Barthes’ realist objects, which are only there to signify “we are the real,” Knausgaard’s particular variety claims to be “real” subjective experience without the remembering subject—the anti-Proust and anti-memory. His realism does not depend on involuntary recollection of the past, but rather implies its irreversible loss to all but the unfailing smartphone camera. The Recherche also distorts subjective experience; as Adorno argues, the shadow of a divine rather than human subject directs Proust’s form. But in My Struggle, realist description points to neither. It is the logic of the corpse—devoid of the purpose for which it was constructed—rather than subjectivity or divinity that governs Knausgaard’s aesthetics.
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
Housekeeping reconfigures white, rural, lower-middle-class Protestantism as a critical epistemolo... more Housekeeping reconfigures white, rural, lower-middle-class Protestantism as a critical epistemology of inventive social potential. Through the narrator-protagonist Ruth, the novel stages a critique of her town’s religious and aspiring middle-class attitudes, and the ideologies that underpin them: neoliberalism, individualism, and conservative Christian thought. On the one hand, she provides ethnographic accounts of the town, through which it becomes metonymic of rural, white, lower-middle-class life. But much of her narrative transpires in a different mode: portrayals of nature that relocate American Transcendentalism in a Protestant lineage. This revision of Transcendentalism is not merely philosophical; rather, it reveals that a critical approach to rationality, and to the conservative Christianity conjured by Ruth’s ethnography, is available via Protestantism. The novel’s depiction of her identity as universal casts whiteness and middle-class-ness as neutral categories. But in doing so, it also blurs the social real enough to reimagine the political contours of its subjects.
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Papers by Taylor Johnston-Levy