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Shock and awe: American exceptionalism and the imperatives of the spectacle in Mark Twain's: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Abstract
Inspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, William V. Spanos offers a dramatic interpretation of Twain's classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, offering a heretofore unexplored assessment of American exceptionalism and the place of a global America in the American imaginary. Spanos insists that Twain identifies with his protagonist, particularly in his defining use of the spectacle, and thus with an American exceptionalism that uncannily anticipates the George W. Bush administration's normalization of the state of exception and the imperial policy of "preemptive war," unilateral "regime change," and "shock and awe" tactics. Equally stimulating is Spanos's thoroughly original ontology of American exceptionalism and imperialism and his tracing of these forces through a chronological examination of Twain studies and criticism over the past century. As an examination of an overlooked text and a critical history of American studies from its origins in the nation-oriented "Myth and Symbol" school of the Cold War era into its present globalizing or transnationalizing perspective, Shock and Awe will appeal to a broad audience of American literature scholars and beyond.
The colonized subjects of an exceptionalist state, Native Americans recognize their condition “after the wreck.” In LaRose, Erdrich represents the theft of Native children, placed in government-run Indian schools designed to estrange them from a kinship culture based on collective sharing. The kinship collective appears in an extended family linked across generations; it demonstrates power when the fifth and latest LaRose, a shared child, averts both suicide and murder and heals two families. The chapter analyzes Erdrich’s use of historical sources to represent the Ojibwa clan and boarding school trauma. It explores the powerful practices of the novel’s kinship collective and argues that Erdrich’s perspective, a multiple inward-looking omniscience, places characters in relationship and represents a collective rather than an individual.
Many critics writing on Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee claim that the novel eludes easy interpretation because of its complex ironic twists, its juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy, and its penchant for pointing the sword of satire both at the pre-industrial Arthurian world and at Hank's own industrialized America. This confusion has led some critics to throw up their hands and write off the novel as one of Twain's artistic "failures." However, exploring the novel's use of language and the role of story-telling, in particular, may shed light on its seeming ambiguity. A Connecticut Yankee explores the human capacity for both malice and mercy through the artifice and art of story-telling. From the first pages, the novel draws attention to the power of language to perpetrate violence and to mask it. This paper examines the novel's linguistic and narrative devices, especially the novel's juxtapositions of external differences-a Yankee in medieval England, different dialects, machinery in a pre-industrial age, and so forth-in order to argue that this time-travel tale ultimately reveals more crushing similarities than differences. The novel does not, then, present a linear story-line but rather uses narrative form to explore the overarching theme of human nature, which, regardless of time or of the structure of story, is consistent.
In The Question of Palestine and elsewhere, Edward Said locates the “justificatory regime” that Zionism has developed to interpose between its Palestinian victims and itself in the discourse of nineteenth-century British imperialism, by which he means the representation of the land occupied by empire as “terra nullius.” This essay retrieves Said's “Canaanite” reading of Michael Waltzer's Exodus and Revolution, in which the latter invokes, above all, the English Puritan revolution to demonstrate the emancipatory politics of the Old Testament story and reconstellates it into the American context, in which, according to Sacvan Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad, the Puritan founders' figural reenactment of the Exodus story is, in fact, one of conquest and occupation rather than emancipation. Such a retrieval and reconstellation will show that Said's genealogy of the Zionist justificatory regime undergoes a significant modification when, in the 1950s, the United States takes over the sponsorship of the Israeli state from the Old World empires. It will show, specifically, the imperial ideology of the Old World that was the original model of the Zionist justificatory regime vis-à-vis Palestine was displaced by the far more politically “effective” exceptionalist jeremiadic ideology of the “pioneering” New World.