Cross-Cultural Reckonings

These far-reaching essays offer a serious and thought-provoking account of the complexities of cross-cultural interpretation. Bringing together such eminent voices as Bellow, Solzhenitsyn and Cather with others less well known to American readers - Russian and Canadian writers Natalya Baranskaya, Lydia Chukoskaya and Ethel Wilson, and Americans Arlene Heyman and Meridel Le Sueur - Blanche Gelfant deals with matters of weighing and judging - of ‘essaying’ in its primary meaning. The consequence is a gathering of new essayistic forms for criticism which invite, indeed demand, cross-cultural conversation; which engage matters of wide current interest; and which challenge conventional critical approaches. Cross-Cultural Reckonings holds broader implications for a range of issues in literary criticism, but perhaps most explosively for the visions and revisions invoked by shifting notions of nationality, and the unpredictable attitudes towards gender and sexual difference entertained by the field of literary criticism at large.

• Makes new, unusual, striking connections between texts (Russian, American, Canadian) and between critical practice and theory • Innovative approach to cross-cultural criticism, demonstrating and questioning how the critic’s choice of context influences the reader of texts

Introduction: on waywardness; Part I. On Breaking Up: 1. Days of reckoning in recent Russian and American novellas; Part II. On Transgressions: 2. Speaking her own piece: Emma Goldman and the discursive skeins of autobiography; Part III. On Mystery: 3. The hidden mines in Ethel Wilson’s Landscape; 4. The capalistic will.