Progress of Stories

The Critical Flame

2017

This paper discusses 'Street Life', 'Days in the Branch' and 'A Place of Pasts', excerpts fragments from The New Yorker reporter Joseph Mitchell' s unfinished memoir book he started writing during his famous period of silence from 1964 to 1994. Within the scope of Mitchell' s writings, this group of texts may be considered as part of his fourth period of writing, one that was gradually established between the mid-1940s and early 1960s. They also constitute a unique genre of journalism which is referred to here as his memorial essay. Keywords: Literary Journalism. Essay. Memoir writing. Joseph Mitchell. The New Yorker.

This dissertation explores The New Yorker magazine's role in shaping the Canadian short story, the contributions of Canadian authors to the magazine, and the aesthetic and ideological implications of transnational literary production. Using archival evidence, it explicates the publication histories of stories by Morley Callaghan, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro, as well as these authors' relationships with their editors at The New Yorker, in order to demonstrate some of the ways that Canadian literature emerged out of, as well as contributed to, North American transnational contexts. This project uses the work of textual studies scholars, and applies theories of literary collaboration to conceptualize the power dynamic between each author and his or her editors and its relationship to the material history of The New Yorker as a for profit endeavor. In the process, it attempts to negotiate the competing discourses of North American studies and Canadian literary nationalism, positing a correlation between the ways that these authors negotiate their relationships to place and nationalism in their work and the ways in which they react to the idea of giving up authorial control in their dealings with The New Yorker. Despite scholars' recognition that Canadian writing has long been in conversation with the literatures of other nations, until now no studies have attempted to delineate the nature and significance of transnational exchange in the development of the contemporary short story—a form often considered the premier genre of Canadian fiction. The study of these three authors together, each of which represents a discrete moment in the history of The New Yorker, offers a preliminary history of the impact of the intersection of transnationalism and collaboration on the Canadian short story, and the ways that these individual authors' conceptions of place and national identity inflect, or are reflected in, their approaches to collaborative writing practices.

The Educational Forum, 1943

Los Angeles Review of Books

The dedication and attentiveness of Li and Qiu’s writings and French’s photographs show their understanding of and passion for different worlds: the world that they currently live in, and the world that they remember and yearn for. This perhaps is the transformation of the meaning of “home”: not just a clan or a building, and not just the microcosmic polity of hierarchies of gender, generation, and rank inherent to the Chinese social order, but also what individuals as travelers and drifters who are often caught between different places make on their own. As the old Chinese idiom tells us, “wherever your heart settles, wherever is home,” which is echoed by the English-language writer par excellence, William Shakespeare: “All places that the eyes of heaven visits, Are to the wise man ports and happy havens.”

Los Angeles Review of Books February 2018 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-strangers-here/

Part of a collection of essays on The New Yorker. I argue that the mid-century critic Dwight Macdonald’s prose emblematizes a mid-century middlebrow literary mode to which I give the name blustering. Blusterers, who appear all over middlebrow US prose of the early Cold War, aim to talk with the appearance of forthrightness, but they get so bogged down that they end up muddled and mired in self-contradiction. Furthermore, I argue that blustering might itself be seen as an example of the modernism seemingly conspicuous by its absence from the mid-century New Yorker. I want to claim blustering as a variety of what Miriam Hansen calls “vernacular modernism,” an example from the expanded repertoire of modernist cultural productions that has been assembled in the new modernist studies over the last fifteen years or so. Hansen suggests that vernacular modernism comprises “cultural practices” outside the traditional modernist canon “that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity.” Macdonald's blustering in The New Yorker is an exemplary instance of such a practice – a modernist and middlebrow mode mediated by modernism's self-contradictory and competing ideologies that at the same time attempts to articulate those ideologies.