This essay is an attempt to illuminate the problematic formation of white American manhood in the early nineteenth century by examining what is central to the self-fashioning of a middle-aged man Aylmer, a hero in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark”: anxiety, projection, and violence. Historically, “Heroic Artisan” men represented native-born white independent farmers and artisans, who emerged since the beginning of the new republic and depended on systems of patriarchy, professional expertise, and small capital. This type of manhood, however, began to be exposed to the possibility of losing its economic independence and degenerating into the working class amid the fierce competition and deepening economic disparity caused by the Market Revolution. In response to this economic crisis, the Heroic Artisans projected their fears onto women, immigrant workers, African Americans, and Native Americans and tried to climb the social ladder by excluding these sexual and racial others. Likewise, Aylmer, who has fallen behind in the market competition due to his outdated craft of alchemy and meager capital, projects his own anxiety about the fearful market onto his wife, Georgiana, and his immigrant worker employee, Aminadab. Alymer excludes and exploits them for the purpose of achieving his market success and thereby the ideal of the middle-class manhood, the “Self-made Man.” However, the tragic results of Aylmer’s last scientific experiment called “spiritualization” are his murder of his own wife and Amainadab’s final mocking laughs. In this way, Hawthorne vividly criticizes the cruel and violent desire structurally fostered by the dominant ideal of American manhood of the time, the “Self-made Man.”

This essay investigates how William Faulkner presents the olfactory experiences through which his characters recognize others as a process of othering. The stereotyped smell in his novels is revealed not as a reason for hatred but rather as a product. The “negro smell,” Faulkner frequently uses in his novels, is a part of “racial formation,” which occurs through the interactions between social structure and the significations of it in everyday lives. Southern white people in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era attempted to construct the identity of whiteness by demarcating the color bar. The “negro smell” in Light in August, Go, Down Moses, and Intruder in the Dust is a sign of the parasitical nature of “pure” whiteness, which is only possible through fabricating the identity of African Americans as a “pollutant.” The forced segregation causes shame and anxiety in Faulkner’s characters because racial formation is a fundamentally ideological process that tries to delineate a factitious demarcation. In Intruder in the Dust, Faulkner unfolds the olfactory experience around “black smells’’ into a complicated process within which we should find the “idea” about the smells of others, the “conditions” of the residential inequalities, and social practices termed “acceptance” that solidify ideologies. In some other novels and films, the stereotyped smell of others and people’s hatred of such smell provoke resistance against the discrimination within the social hierarchy. Unlike these efforts, Faulkner’s contemplations on the stereotyped smell of others help one penetrate the constructiveness of the discrimination to challenge the social hierarchy itself.

Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, a postmodern American fiction set in 2000, portrays Eric Packer’s self-destructive one-day journey across midtown Manhattan. Eric Packer, a 28-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager, is a 21st century neoliberal power elite. According to William Davies, advanced neoliberalism produces new types of power elites different from Millsian sense of those, called ‘cyborg intermediaries’: elites which operate largely within the system of codes, data, screens and prices. This paper considers Eric Packer a typical ‘cyborg intermediary’ and concentrates on analyzing how he exemplifies the negative effects of the neoliberal system as a power elite following his Joycean journey. The aim of this study is threefold: First, I present a critical review of neoliberalism to understand Cosmopolis from the Foucauldian perspective. Next is an exploration of two distinct neoliberal subjects in Cosmopolis; Eric Packer, the power elite and Benno Levin, the social outcast on the basis of the theoretical framework above to show the contradiction of the neoliberal government. Finally, this research illuminates Eric Packer’s yearning for existential subjectivity as a strategy of resisting the neoliberal power.

This discussion explores the value of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as literary narrative. In terms of narrative, the grand narrative of the novel embeds several small but important narratives. Pastor Mapple’s sermon on Jonah emphasizes a certain part of the Book of Jonah for the congregation. Ishmael’s view of Jonah later shifts beyond the sublime of Mapple’s religious authority towards his own personal sublime variation. Ishmael’s telling of the story of the Town-Ho, a sperm whaler, expands its constitutive uncertainty, thereby only amplifying its inherent sublime dimension. The stories of Jonah and Town-Ho expand into the novel, Moby-Dick and yield a further narrative surplus. Ishmael’s narrative accompanies not only the narrative of Jonah and Town-Ho, but also that of Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod. Ishmael’s self, fashioned with these narratives, is in the constant process of construction and deconstruction via connections and deviations among them. The initial invocation of Moby-Dick to the reader, “Call me Ishmael,” represents the dual processes of Ishmael’s ‘self-fashioning’: objectifying his own experience as well as inviting the readers to his narrative construction. As in sublime aesthetics, readers’ engagements with Ishmael’s narrative self-composition create continuous reinterpretation and surplus. Moby-Dick as Ishmael’s self-narrative provides us a model of Foucauldian “aesthetics of existence.” Ishmael became the heroic reader of the self-narrative, and accordingly the reader of the narrative has an opportunity of self-establishment as another heroic reader. The narrative aesthetics of Moby-Dick helps us, just not to discover or explore its meanings, but to initiate the meanings and values of our own reading.

Recognized as an unrestrained satire on contemporary American race relations, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout relentlessly exposes the hypocrisies of whiteness by speaking what has become unspeakable in the public discourse on race in a putatively “post-racial” America. The narrator, whose last name is Me, and is only called by the nickname Bonbon, slaughters a number of “sacred cows,” outrageously attempting to reintroduce segregation to Dickens, a lower-middle-class “farm” community on the southern fringes of Los Angeles, and making Hominy, the last surviving Little Rascal, his slave. In its willingness to commit the “crime” of “whisper[ing] ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world,” The Sellout uncomfortably displaces the pathologies of whiteness in contemporary America, one of which is the manufactured belief in a post-racial world and the refusal to speak of racism within it. In rereading Beatty’s novel with William E. Cross Jr.’s five-stage conversion model as a heuristic for engaging a supposedly post-racial age, this essay examines the development of black consciousness and self-realization in the figure of Bonbon, traversing the economical, pedagogical, epistemological, and personal. What Bonbon’s experience eventuates in is a consciousness of “Unmitigated Blackness,” which, in eluding concrete definition, entails relinquishing guilt, anger, excessive self-consciousness, and self-censorship―“not giving a fuck”―as a pragmatic social strategy. In valuing praxis and efficacy over rhetoric and ideology, the concrete encounter over abstract theorizing, this strategy, if hazily, points a way toward a reconversion of racial attitudes and posturings in a world that remains too polite, or unwilling, to speak the realities of whiteness, its veiling of systemic structures of institutionalized racism. Ultimately, it is the question of commitment Beatty asks readers to reflect on; for Bonbon, it would seem to be the necessity of inventing unsettling, humorous ways of speaking racism, while renouncing the epistemological snares of white politeness and white innocence. The Sellout, in the final analysis, constitutes a caustically humorous reconversion therapy for readers, black and white, as Beatty whispers into the readers’ ears: “’cause right now, massa, you ain’t seeing the plantation for the niggers.”

This paper argues that The Curse of Caste and Iola Leroy appropriates a marriage plot of ’women’s novel’ to mediate the citizenship of Black women in the 19th century. Considering marriage had been denied to the enslaved Black and interracial marriage was illegal, marriage in both novels illustrates that it constructs the boundary of citizens by allocating civil rights and privileges. As a literary convention, the marriage plot between a mulatta and a White man expresses and practices Black citizenship. Iola―refusing to marry a White man―marries a mulatto while Claire remains unknown to marry a White man. They not only problematize the citizenship of wives who are supposed to be the dependents of their husbands but also explore the citizenship of Black women. Mulatta daughters who refuse to pass for White and claim the place to work and live as Black women narrate the possibility to disrupt the separate spheres, to reform the private sphere, and to enter the society as Black women citizens.