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The authors discuss trends in literary criticism and publishing in the U.S. since 1945. They mention the focus of criticism through the philosophies of neoliberalism and mediation, the role of literary aesthetics, and present a history of the various stages of the publishing industry in the U.S. as well as an introduction to the articles in the issue.

In 20th and 21st century German and American literature there are two main approaches to the theme amok. One refers to the archaic type of amok as a culture-bound syndrome (culture-specific disorder) and the other to the modern manifestation in the form of school shootings. The aim of this paper is to identify a paradigm of the settings, perpetrators, their motives, and weapons of choice by analyzing the most representative fiction books dealing with amok without disregarding the medical aspect of this condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is provided of the 2010 American book "Zeitoun," and the 2014 novel "The Circle," by David Eggers. The books' depiction of U.S. national, or homeland, security, including after 2005 Hurricane Katrina, is discussed. The portrayal of politics in "Zeitoun," including biopolitics, is also discussed.

This article situates Ballantine’sLove and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowherein terms of its creative engagement with gothic history, where the domestic narrative of the “memoir” and the monstrosity of Steven Haataja’s death are closely complementary. Ballantine’s book has a keen conceptual interest in the issue of origins: Where does the (textual) “self” begin, and how can history be understood without proper knowledge of true origins? This article examines other forms of beginnings in American literature (Twain, Hawthorne, Rip van Winkle) to advocate the value of Ballantine’s work as a significant contribution to American gothic history, one founded not on secure origins but on the repudiation of history. Ballantine’s memoir is a metafictional examination of this problem, where the failure of enlightenment discourses of law and medicine is understood as an anxious expression of the potential futility of the errand into the wilderness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reveals the centrality of manipulation to David Foster Wallace’s fiction. After surveying a range of recent philosophical work on manipulation, it shows how this particular field of inquiry can be used to illuminate Wallace’s 1996 novelInfinite Jest. The article proceeds to outline four main expressions of what I label “literary manipulation” withinInfinite Jest, addressing strategic forms of manipulation concerning argumentation, thematic repetition, the anticipation of criticism, and metafictional directives. By analyzing such diverse manipulative strategies, I explore both the aesthetic and the ethical implications of Wallace’s fiction. Ultimately, the article shows how Wallace uses manipulation to dramatize the complex tension between sincerity and its antithesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks a long list of novels concerned directly or indirectly with these events have been published. Psychic trauma literature has been especially popular among them, a fiction accused of solipsism and depoliticized discourse by being mostly unconcerned with the attacks' global context and political consequences. This essay does not ignore the importance of the trauma paradigm but focuses on cultural rather than psychic trauma and on Amy Waldman's The Submission (2011) as an example of the possibilities raised by the cultural trauma novel. Although rooted in the domestic and the personal, Waldman's novel transcends the shortcomings of psychic trauma fiction by exposing the cultural and political consequences of trauma, thus opening up a new path for future 9/11 fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents invitations for readers to send research papers and other contributions for the special issues of the journal "American Literature" for 2016. Among the topics to be covered by the issues include comic's queerness across genres, time periods, audiences and production histories, and post-exceptionalist puritanism.

An essay is presented on the American multicultural literature. It offers information on the irony of "Hamlet," by Shakespeare and identifies the use of third person to describe cultural estrangement between Myanmar and the U.S. The author explore the difficulties of living between cultures after the introduction of works to Native Americans.

An essay is presented on the inclusive definition of American literature unconstrained by categories of gender, class and race in the 21st century.

Variously addressing the war on terror now waged in the "full-spectrum dominance" of network-centric battlespace, DeLillo's most recent four novels (published immediately before and since the 9/11 attacks) work to produce stillness as opposed to seductive, terroristic speed—to detach identities from everyday practices of time and elaborate transformative experiences for the reader. Each novel constitutes a complex hetero-chronograph, a textual apparatus that not only measures time but also produces altered temporal forms that slow down and multiply felt times and durations. Redeploying Bakhtin's notion of the text as an unrepeatable event co-produced by the author and reader, this article explores how De-Lillo's texts enable the reader to become an actor, to produce and experience modes of resistance to the totalizing forces of terror by the realization of a network of virtual narrative associations among economic, political, aesthetic, and ethical vectors. Such relations are mapped on a Greimassian semiotic square of "terror-time." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The face of American literature is changing in the era of digital technologies. This fact has been recognized by different generations of American scholars defining the scene today. For example, both J. Hillis Miller and Caroline F. Levander admit that the traditional understanding of literature as a selection of venerated texts is over as the internet both opens up new vistas and poses new challenges to the studying and teaching of literature, and especially national literature. It is time again to pose simple questions in an attempt to redefine the current discourse in literary research. Levander's book, read at the background of past and recent scholarship, serves as a starting point for discussions concerning American literature viewed as a dynamic field of collaborative production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay on the novel "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves" by Karen Joy Fowler is presented. It explores the transformation of the protagonist from being an ape to becoming a human being which represents shame at being a human, especially on human animality and the lives of other animals. It also suggests that the novel helps in rethinking human-animal relations.

A literary criticism of the book "Bird Lovers, Backyard" by Thalia Field is presented. It states that creating awareness of the nonhuman experience should focus on the nature and scope of animal's stories. It also suggests that the book mixes and reworks existing literary forms of narrative about human-animal interaction.

A literary criticism for the novel "The Crossing" by Cormac McCarthy is presented. It examines the representation of a gray wolf which shows how animals could remove its anthropocentric value systems in literary narratives. It also suggests that its behaviors that confuse human being are critical methods for the animal's agency.

A literary criticism is presented of the 2010 American book of realist fiction "Freedom," by Jonathan Franzen. The book's depiction of economic growth, including its relationship with population growth, is discussed. An overview of the book's portrayal of sustainability, including in regard to population growth, is provided.

Richard Rorty' s Achieving Our Country (1998) chastises a particular strain of contemporary American fiction. This literature, in the Rortyan schema, is more "knowing" than "inspirational"; its cynical complexity stymies related possibilities of moral improvement and patriotic hope. This article brings Rorty's theory to bear on Freedom, the 2010 novel by Jonathan Franzen. I argue that Freedom troubles the strict oppositions of Rorty's schema in two fundamental ways: (1) it offers a vision of America at once postmodernist and patriotically hopeful, and (2) it is aesthetically complex and morally compelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented for the novel "The Lost Books of the Odyssey" by Zachary Mason. It compares and contrasts both the 2007 first edition and the 2010 second edition. It considers how the ancient Greek epic of the "Odyssey" by Homer influenced the story. Topics explored include wit and humor, the use of fictional histories within the work, and the extended conceit of the author regarding the existence of unstudied fragments of the "Odyssey."

An introduction is presented to this special issue which focuses on the fiction writings of contemporary American author Percival Everett.

This paper endeavours to find a guiding thread through two very different novels by Percival Everett: Erasure and The Water Cure. In spite of obvious differences in plots and subjects, they both, in fact, deal with memory, loss, and fiction writing. Moreover, they stage narrators who feed on their depression over the death or physical degradation of loved ones to promote the readers' reflection on creativity and the power of language. Thus, while resorting to the expression of trauma-related predicaments that engage the reader's empathy, they both proceed to question the very nature of representation, and bring about a recognition of the creative power of mourning. Starting with Erasure and more radically in The Water Cure, the very possibility of circumscribing the gaping wound inflicted by language, possibly through the lure of illegibility, constitutes the suture that both texts seem to pronounce impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explores the ways that Rick Bragg memorializes poor white men's labor across his memoir trilogy, examining the tensions that arise as he attempts to bring poor whites into the center of the southern community. I consider the neo-Agrarian strains within his work, as well as Bragg's responses to the globalization of the region. The work addresses the absences within the South's memorial landscape, and questions the extent to which Bragg's work addresses those gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Toth argues that Danielewski's overtly metafictional novel redeploys distinctly postmodern devices to undermine the efficacy of postmodernism itself. This redeployment heralds (in turn) a still emergent wave of American cultural and aesthetic production intent on “renewing” the possibility (if not the reality) of all that postmodernism seemed intent on denying outright: mimesis, communion, closure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article compares a recent American fiction set in Amsterdam (David Liss's The Coffee Trader, 2003) with several other Anglophone fictions set in the same city to show how several centuries of literary heterostereotypes of Amsterdam have influenced American ideas on the city in literature. Foreign spaces in fiction almost inevitably draw American projections of the American self that cannot be recognized at home, yet Amsterdam's particular nexus of projection is perhaps one of the most striking and underexamined, with roots reaching back to the founding mythos of America as Pilgrims' last stop in Europe and extending to today's often negative projections of libertinism contrasted with traditional American-style Puritanism. How do the spaces of Amsterdam in a highly detailed work like Liss's allow a range of issues pertinent to contemporary American society to play themselves out on an "othered" stage? Contemporary questioning of capitalism, sexual and ethical mores, and Americans' relationship with death are highlighted in this space safely outside the American self, and which thus provides a more comfortable locus for their analysis and narrative development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Don Delillo's Falling Man (2007) has been one of the most influential 9/11 novels written to this day, it did not meet the expectations of reviewers when it was published. It is necessary to bear in mind that 9/11 can be understood both as a psychic/personal trauma and a cultural/collective one since it was a wound not only in the mind of those directly affected by the tragedy but also in the nation's sense of identity. Despite DeLillo's previous interest in cultural issues, he chose to write a 9/11 psychic --rather than cultural-- trauma novel. This paper analyses the literary techniques and means of representation used in the novel to reflect the effects of traumatic memory and ponders the advantages and shortcomings of psychic trauma novels in the representation of traumas that affect society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism on the novels "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy is presented. The author focuses on the role of storytelling in coping with traumatic experiences in the novels, focusing on the characters of Sheriff Bell and the man. Specific topics addressed include the link between violence and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), structural trauma and melancholia in the novels, and McCarthy's use of narrative.

This essay explores the suggestion that many American narratives are supplementary, correcting narratives—-alternatives to the main story on offer. The guiding thought is that of Henry James's "possible other case," and the chief example is Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," in which one story after another fails to cope with the ongoing mystery it faces. The novel may imply, then, that narrative itself, rather than any individual report or fiction, is in crisis or has come to the end of its road. A coda to the essay proposes the option of nonnarrative understandings of the world in those extreme situations where storytelling is no longer the sense-making activity we so often take it to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay presents discussion regarding the popular use of sensationalist subjects within 21st-century nonfiction. The author asserts that many books which are published in the contemporary memoir and broader popular nonfiction genres are not selected because of their literary quality but merely because the subject matter is highly controversial or interesting. Several instances of disaster survivors, mentally ill people, and members of political scandals are cited to reinforce the argument. Concluding remarks are offered criticizing the trend, asserting that the financial incentives for such works are unduly influencing the field.

A literary criticism of fiction by Don DeLillo's novels "Underworld" and "The Body Artist" is presented. The author discusses DeLillo's use of quantum theory and how it is revealed in the structure and style of his novels. Other topics include similarities between quantum theory and postmodernism, the themes of perception and time and space in DeLillo's work, and religious interpretation of DeLillo's work.

The question quoted in the title of this article expresses the bafflement of Chen Pan - the main character in Cristina Garcia's novel Monkey Hunting (2003), who migrates from China to Cuba in 1857 in search of riches - as he witnesses the systematic killing of Afro-Cuban rebels during the 1912 Race War. Contrary to Chen Pan's naive outlook on race relations during the formation of the Cuban nation, Garcia's novel, as the author of this article argues, offers detailed accounts of unequal access to civil rights and citizenship due to emerging patterns of racialization that overshadow the relationships among the novel's individual characters and their relationship to the various geopolitical locations they occupy. The author also seeks to explore in this article Garcia's treatment of transnational relations in global societies. It is proposed that Monkey Hunting illustrates the interconnectedness of American, Asian, African and European epistemologies, and their relevance to debates about civil rights and citizenship in a global context. This is the case for Chen Pan's migration to Cuba as a contract laborer; his love relationship with Lucrecia, an Afro-Cuban slave whom he buys and then frees; their son Lorenzo, who moves to China to study herbal medicine and, while there, has three children with his second wife in China; their grandson Pipo, a short-order cook at the American naval base in Guantanamo; and, finally, his great-grandson Domingo, who enlists in the US Army and fights in the Vietnam War. Exceeding the boundaries of teleological narratives by emphasizing the tension between diasporic identity and state citizenship, the individual migration stories in Garcia's novel raise issues about identity and belonging in a global, but nonetheless raced, world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the historical context of the 2004 American Indian novel "Hidden Roots," by Joseph Bruchac. The interpretation of the occurrence of homing in six classic American Indian novels in an article by William Bevis is discussed. The homing-in process of returning to the Abenaki society and identity experienced by the character of Howard started when he was taught about hunting by Uncle Louis. Also cited is the depiction of the legacy of racism in the eugenics movement in the book.

The article presents an interview with American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. The author discusses his interest in hard sciences, reading science fiction, apocalyptic fiction and the anti science trend in USA. Additionally, he discusses an anthology of science fiction "Hieroglyph", an online science fiction forum project initiated by the Arizona State University.

The article discusses various literary pieces that are published within this issue, including the cartoon "Chewski Goes Fishin'" by Matt Dye and the short stories "Just Here for Littering," by Erin Wisti, and "My Final Resting Place," by Karl S. Monroe.