I welcome Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post-1945 US Literary Studies” as an important, timely provocation that urges us to continue placing the approaches, methodologies, and interpretative frameworks…
Contemporaries Essays
Social Movements, Institutions, and Multiethnic Literatures of the US
Jeffrey’s Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” inspired an immediate and excited response, especially from scholars who ensconce themselves thoroughly in the often-forgotten literary histories of social movements. What has emerged in this…
“What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway”: On Activism and Post-45 Literature
In 1989, black feminist literary critic Barbara Christian published an essay called “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of…
Left Lineages of Post-45 Literature
Jeffrey Lawrence’s proposal for movements-based study of post-1945 US literature is most welcome. Numerous writers and artists were involved with or influenced by social movements across the twentieth century. Indeed,…
Inner Weather
In Lawrence’s expertly subtle and fearlessly ambitious essay, he draws from two traditions of social movement analysis. The first is sociological and it identifies the “new ways of thinking about…
Social Movements, Literature and the Specters of Empire
Jeffrey Lawrence’s bravura essay “Mobilizing Literature” earned my immediate sympathy in its opening diagnosis of a certain — one may say dominant — methodological binary.1 Lawrence lucidly identifies the dominance…
Introduction
Rarely does the publication of a peer-reviewed essay generate the excitement that accompanied Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” in the Fall 2024 issue of ELH. Lawrence aims for an ambitious intervention…
Mapping the Territory
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it took a scholar of Latin American literature to see what was missing in the study of its US equivalent. Although Jeffrey Lawrence rightly…
Carrots & Little Sweet Peas
In early 2020, awash in the emotional lows of the early pandemic, the three of us decided to cope with the uncertain, monotonous days by starting a long-distance “TV club.”…
Hotness at the End of the World
We are not over Nora Durst. But watching just the pilot of The Leftovers, you wouldn’t get it. When the show starts, Nora is the poster child for the collective…