Naomi Nakane, the narrator of Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan (1981), looks at the box of journals, letters, and government documents that she has received from her Aunt Emily and thinks to herself, “Crimes of history … can stay in history. What we need is to concern ourselves with the injustices of today” Naomi calls her activist aunt “a world warrior” and “a crusader,” and the papers chronicle the shocking treatment of Japanese Canadians by the Canadian government during and after World War II. Aunt Emily is a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese North American (the term Nisei being a combination of the Japanese character sei meaning “generation” and a prefix signifying “second”), and she sees herself as a Canadian betrayed by Canada. But Emily is not the aunt — the obasan — to whom the novel’s title refers. Naomi’s obasan is her Aunt Aya, whose husband Isamu has just died, bringing about the reunion of the surviving members of Naomi’s extended family with which the novel will conclude.

Obasan is an Issei, a first-generation Japanese immigrant, and she has none of Emily’s brash outspokenness. “How different my two aunts are” Naomi thinks to herself: “One lives in sound, the other in stone.” Obasan’s stoicism keeps her from expressing, perhaps even from feeling, the outrage that engulfs Emily: “Obasan was not taking part in the conversation. When pressed, finally she said that she was grateful for life. ‘Arigatai. Gratitude only.’”

There is no question that Parmenides' poem was a watershed in the history of early Greek philosophy. No serious thinker could ignore his work. And yet it seems to pose insuperable problems for cosmology and scientific inquiry. The first generation to follow Parmenides includes thinkers who wished to continue the tradition of Ionian speculation. But how would they confront Parmenides? What would they make of him and what effect would his arguments have on their work? The first neo-Ionians, as they have been called, were Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Despite some salient differences, the two philosophers have much in common in their approach. They are near contemporaries, and as we shall see, they make similar moves in their approach to scientific speculation. Let us first examine the systems of Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and then discuss their responses to Parmenides.

EMPEDOCLES AND ANAXAGORAS

After warning us to seek a balance in our evaluation of sensory evidence (DK 31 B3), Empedocles goes on to identify the basic constituents of the universe and to develop a cosmology based on those constituents. There are four “roots,” (rizômata): earth, water, air, and fire (B6), which combine in whole-number ratios to form compounds.

In the 1960s, change was an imperative. Signaled politically by a generational shift, it was reflected socially in an economically empowered youth movement whose spending power began to shape popular culture. The civil rights movement, kick-started in the late 1950s, now became the principal domestic issue, while the Vietnam War provoked a resistance that politicized a generation. Authority was challenged; formal structures were questioned. Politics became street theater, a series of publicly enacted gestures. Individuals underlined the integrity of their beliefs by physical presence and dramatized their faith by offering to levitate the Pentagon or place their bodies in front of munition trains as a symbol of the body’s vulnerability to the military machine as well as a pragmatic strategy of resistance. The body, indeed, became an expressive force, sexually liberated by the birth control pill, publicly deployed as a provocation to a society presumed to be simultaneously puritanical, materialistic, and aggressively technological. This was life lived metaphorically, and, perhaps logically, the theater, which deploys the body as a primary instrument of signification and works through metaphor, became a focus and means of revolt.

For those committed to transformation – personal, social, political – where more natural to turn than to a form in which transformation was of the essence? In an age of performed gestures and specially staged events, the theater had a persuasive symbolic force. In a period in which the slave was shown transmuting into the rebel, the self being reborn, and history being restaged as paranoid vision, the theater seemed to offer itself as paradigm.

Soul, sensation, and thought: a separate chapter could be devoted to each of these items. But, beyond considerations of space, there is a rationale for broaching them together, for these three notions are in some sense correlated. It is on certain aspects of this correlation that I shall focus. The first part of this chapter concentrates on the soul, and its relationship to the two other terms. The second part specifically will be devoted to the relationship between thought and the senses. Since an important aspect of the latter question bears on epistemology, some overlap with J. Lesher's contribution to this volume (Chapter 11) is unavoidable. However, I have tried to draw attention to “physiological” rather than epistemological problems. As it turns out, this emphasis may not be too artificial because, as we shall see, there is a question as to whether the early Greek philosophers' interests in the relationship between thought and the senses was not primarily physiological rather than epistemological, in a sense of the term “physiological” that remains to be spelled out.

There is a huge diversity of bowed stringed instruments throughout the world. Their acoustical principles, however, are common. A bow is drawn across a taut string. Friction between the bow and the string excites the string into vibration. The string has particular vibrational properties which make it an ‘ideal’ musical signal source, but unfortunately its small size renders it practically inaudible. The string is therefore connected to some form of resonator, which is traditionally a wooden box (as in the case of the cello), a stretched animal skin or a gourd. The function of the resonator box is to vibrate in sympathy with the strings. The larger surface area of the box interacts readily with the surrounding air, creating sizeable pressure fluctuations which we hear as sounds.

This chapter aims to provide a brief introduction to cello acoustics and to add sufficient detail to the above simple model to explain various features of practical importance to players. The last thirty years have witnessed intense activity in the study of the acoustics of stringed musical instruments. In the case of bowed stringed instruments, work has concentrated almost exclusively on the violin, and readers interested in pursuing the subject further are directed to several standard works on the subject. In many respects, the differences between violins and cellos are simply a matter of scale, the acoustical principles being the same in both cases. However, the increased body size and heavier strings and structure bring particular problems associated with starting transients and wolf-notes, both of which will be discussed later.

There were other war novels besides those set in the armed forces or at the front, novels that dealt with World War II more obliquely or were set on what was then called the home front. A number of these books anticipated the direction of postwar fiction more acutely than did the combat novels. Though ambitious young writers like Norman Mailer and James Jones dreamed that the war could provide material for the Great American Novel, the naturalist methods of the early war novels were discarded when American society, without reverting to isolationism, turned in upon itself during the Truman and Eisenhower years. The new writers were influenced less by the war than by rapid onset of the Cold War and of nuclear weapons so soon after the shooting war, which fostered anxieties that America’s victories abroad might otherwise have laid to rest, and by the new therapeutic culture of psychoanalysis, which gradually replaced the social consciousness that had driven much of American literature and visual art during the Depression. As American power and prestige expanded outward across the world, at home artists and writers looked inward, sometimes boastfully, often fearfully, to explore the existential dilemmas of selfhood. Europe had been broken as a dominant political and economic force, but strands of European culture, from modernism and surrealism to existentialism, had migrated to America. As America entered an era of prosperity and international dominance, American artists and writers grew pessimistic and introspective, like troubled prophets brooding darkly at the banquet of national celebration.

The united states emerged from the Second World War with a powerful economy, a restored faith in capitalism, and a society rededicated to national myths of material advancement and moral and ideological purity. It also emerged with three major dramatists, in Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, who appeared to dissent from this consensus.

There was a confidence about prewar theater that, for the most part, did not survive the conflict. The social dramas of Clifford Odets were predicated on the possibility of change; the comedies of Philip Barry and William Saroyan, largely on a contentment with the given. Thornton Wilder celebrated familiar pieties in Our Town, and although The Skin of Our Teeth suggested a more radical revisioning at the level of style, the ironies were never allowed to disturb a fundamental equanimity. Lillian Hellman’s plays relied on a disruption of the moral world finally contained by the structure of melodrama, and if Robert Sherwood, equally drawn to melodrama, offered a lament for the collapse of democratic and Christian values that brought him to the edge of an affecting paradox, he then turned with apparent relief to the banalities of plot for a reassurance that had no place in the logic of his drama. Indeed, his case became, in a sense, paradigmatic. Aware of the dislocations of social and moral purpose, he offered faith and a kind of desperate belief in human goodness that he could never adequately dramatize but only assert.

Early American dramatists worked within a set of dramatic forms and theatrical traditions inherited from England. The most important comedic forms were sentimental comedy, social comedy, comic opera, and satire. Among theatrical traditions transmitted from England was the acceptance of women as playwrights: comedies by English women writers were among the most popular works in the theatres of early America. Early in the history of the new nation, American writers began using and reshaping drama to represent specifically American identities, experiences, and perspectives. While the American context offered new opportunities, however, it also presented unique obstacles. Strong antitheatrical attitudes, based on religious opposition to acting and cultural opposition to elite art forms, combined with thinly populated cities and scarcity of resources to make establishment of theatre difficult in the United States. To counter antitheatricalism, or perhaps merely to address unsophisticated audiences, writers of early American comedies assume a highly didactic tone and focus closely on issues of national identity. They present incidents in American history, demonstrate the dimensions of American citizenship, and exhort the audience to feelings of patriotism.

As a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, and later in New York, Wendy Wasserstein experienced the conspicuous double standards between boys and girls that ignited her feminist instincts. While her brother received Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels - a travel guide to spectacular places around the world - for his Bar Mitzvah, she was reading Eloise and Madeline. And, to instill a sense of feminine etiquette in her daughter, her mother sent her to the Helena Rubinstein Charm School. Moreover, to make her well rounded, she enrolled her in the June Taylor School of Dance. If that were not bad enough, when Wendy showed up everyday in the same work shirt at the Calhoun School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the headmistress would call her mother to tell her that she should get dressed up and wear pink (Bennetts, “An Uncommon Dramatist,”). Indeed, she has always felt angry about the importance placed on women’s appearance.

The marginalization of women also became apparent to her in the television shows she was watching as a girl in the fifties. Her favorite television show, Bachelor Father, depicting a debonair, suave small screen “Cary Grant,”convinced her that she would “rather wear a dinner jacket than perform the routine housewife duties of Mrs. Danny Thomas, Mrs. Father Know Best, or especially June Cleaver.”She felt compelled to find a female counterpart for the bachelor father, “a woman who possessed all the vitality of a Broadway musical, whose charms would beguile even Helena Rubinstein, and who never closed herself off from the possibility of adventure”(Wasserstein, Bachelor Girls, 6). Consequently, she became fascinated by Doris Day films, films about bright, self-motivated, charming, willful women, who approached life with guts and gusto.

Much of our little information on Zeno's life comes from the prologue of Plato's Parmenides. Most scholars accept Plato's statement that when Socrates was “very young” (though old enough to engage in philosophical debate) Zeno was forty and Parmenides was sixty-five (Parm. 127a-b). The setting of the Parmenides is the quadrennial Great Athenaia, and the best guesses for its dramatic date are 454 B.C. when Socrates was 15 and 450 B.C. when he was 19. Also, Plato's statement that “Zeno was of a good height and handsome to see; the story goes that he had been Parmenides' young lover” (127b) is perfectly possible, though not otherwise attested. Even if the setting of the Parmenides is historically plausible, the notorious unreliability of Plato's reports on earlier philosophers makes it unwise to take much else of what he says on trust. The conversation in the Parmenides certainly did not take place, and we may fairly doubt that Socrates met the philosophers from Elea. Further, Plato indicates that Zeno's treatise was unknown in Athens prior to the dramatic date of the Parmenides (127c), but he also implies that it was written many years earlier, and he says it had been circulated (apparently soon after its writing) without Zeno's authorization (I28d) – claims that although not actually contradictory are hard to reconcile.

In 1970, The writing disease had been diagnosed as exhaustion, and practitioners were busily at work to find a cure. One approach was to analyze the condition itself, to explore the various symptoms and subtleties of the postmodern state. The “High Postmodernism” usually identified with Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut was the result, and the investigations of these writers in many respects coincided. What was wrong with the novel, they concluded, was its rootedness in modernism, an ideology that fetishizes the work of art. A revitalized novel would be a novel written and received not as a neurotic fetish à la Freud or a commodified fetish à la Marx but as an opening, a doorway to communication.

The use of fetish here is prompted by postmodern novelists themselves, several of whom refer specifically to the formulations of the term in Freud or, less directly, in Marx. Marx took the term fetish from religion, where it refers to a statue or other cult object to which believers attribute the same powers as those of the spirits that the fetish object represents. Accordingly, Marx characterized the commodity fetish as a bourgeois attempt to make a religion out of mere material objects, noting the peculiar fact that we speak and act as if commodities “had” value. In the commodity, “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour.”

In N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, the Native American protagonist, Abel, is brutally beaten without provocation by a Chicano policeman named Martinez. Richard Rubbio, the Chicano protagonist of José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho first learns about racism by observing the way his friends discriminate against a Japanese boy named Thomas. Midway through John Okada’s No-No Boy, a young Japanese American veteran named Kenji realizes that instead of finding ways to unite to achieve common goals, America’s minority cultures continually find ways to discriminate against one another and even against their own members:

Kenji tries to find a “pattern” that can be “studied” so that “answers” can be “deduced,” but all he is able to conclude is that “the world was full of hatred.” What he does not manage to articulate is the fact that the disunity of America’s marginalized cultures, evident in these three novels, is no accident.

MARGARET WALKER’S JUBILEE

Margaret Walker’s original claim to fame was as the first African American woman to win the Yale Younger Poets prize, for For My People in 1942. Much later, after a career as a professor at Jackson State University in Mississippi (Walker, with Ernest Gaines, is one of the few major African American writers to make her career in the South), she published Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1980), a controversial, very unsympathetic biography of Richard Wright, who was a former friend of hers. Her most durable reputation, however, is for Jubilee (1966), a thoroughly researched novel about slavery and Reconstruction, partly based on the recollections of her own maternal great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown.

Tangled feelings are rife in Jubilee. The protagonist, Vyry, is the daughter of her master, John Morris Dutton, of Dawson, Georgia, and his slave Sis Hetta, who later dies in childbirth bearing another of Dutton’s children. Dutton maintains a relationship of false heartiness and cheer with Jake, Hetta’s husband, who is not fond of Vyry. After Hetta’s death, Vyry is sent to the Big House, both to learn to cook under the tutelage of Aunt Sally and to serve as a playmate for her half sister, Lillian. Dutton is a feckless and irresponsible man who does not acknowledge Vyry, although finally he seems to be less the villainous tyrant than a bluff, rather foolish squire. In fact, because he is more interested in state politics, he does not even pay close attention to the workings of his plantation.

As the introduction to this volume makes clear, the task of the current Cambridge History of American Literature differs significantly from that of its predecessors. Rather than seeking to identify, consolidate, and canonize an American literary tradition, this history arises from a cultural moment marked not by consensus but “dissensus.” Its task, therefore, is to “redraw the boundaries of the field” of American literary scholarship, opening up the canon to expansion and redefinition by acknowledging that literary history must be “a multivocal, multifaceted scholarly, critical, and pedagogic enterprise” driven by “the energies of heterogeneity.” The recognition that the American literary tradition must necessarily be conceived as heterogeneous has dictated one of the ways in which this Cambridge History differs from previous efforts: namely, its inclusion of this section’s comparative approach to emergent American literatures.

When the next multivolume literary history of the United States is written sometime during the next century, it will no doubt still need to include a section or set of sections on emergent literatures, because it seems unlikely that American culture will, in the intervening years, cease to marginalize nonwhites and nonheterosexuals. What we learn from Raymond Williams’s analysis of cultural dynamics is that human culture has always been the product of conflict and has always depended for its coherence on the identification of certain peoples, ideas, and practices as Other.