Among the numerous accolades and awards garnered by viet thanh nguyen's debut novel, the sympathizer (2015), the one receiving the least attention from academic critics will probably be the Edgar Award, bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. After all, The Sympathizer boasts aesthetic achievements that far exceed the generic confines of a conventional mystery novel. Also, even in the age of cultural studies, when the divide between the popular and the elite is supposed to have all but disappeared, literary scholars, if they are honest with themselves, still hang on to the notion that there is a qualitative difference, or a hierarchy, separating literary fiction from crime fiction, the highbrow from the lowbrow. It may be true that we no longer live at a time when an eminent critic like Edmund Wilson would attack mystery novels by asserting, as he did in 1945, partly in response to Agatha Christie's popular mystery novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that “with so many fine books to read …; there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish” (qtd. in Bradford 117). And there is more than half a century separating us from the era when Ross Macdonald, one of the most accomplished practitioners of the mystery genre as well as a trained literary scholar, lamented in his 1954 lecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he had received a doctoral degree in English, that “[t]hough it is one of the dominant literary forms of our age, the mystery has received very little study” (11). Even after Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida enshrined Edgar Allan Poe's detective short story “The Purloined Letter” as a darling of poststructuralist analysis, most literary scholars worth their salt would continue to regard crime fiction as a subpar genre, something that, as Macdonald said, is reserved for their leisure hours, akin to crossword puzzles in a newspaper (11). Or, as Wilson put it, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” (qtd. in Bradford 117).

In 1995 I Taught a Course in New Zealand Literature at Tokyo University. The Students Were Attentive, and Curious About New Zealand, but they found my Kiwi English hard to follow, being accustomed to American or British varieties. I wondered about their seeming tolerance recently while teaching a similar course to undergraduates back home, at Victoria University, in Wellington, when one of the Maori students complimented a Pākehā (New Zealand European) colleague for her Maori pronunciation. Like most Pākehā, I have a rudimentary grasp of Māori, enough to be familiar with the words and phrases that have entered everyday speech and those in the poetry and fiction I teach. But I cannot conduct a conversation in Māori or read a Māori text, and I am as embarrassed by the irritation that my pronunciation of te reo (the Māori language) causes Māori speakers as I was by the difficulty my rising terminals and strange accent posed for competent English speakers in Japan.

Some readers prefer an earlier translation in which they encounter a source text, particularly a canonized work, over later versions of the same text. The decisive encounter is so compelling as to establish an enduring attachment that entails denigration or outright rejection of later versions. Insofar as the attachment suggests obsessiveness, it can be called a fixation. The readers’ responses share features that transcend membership in specific linguistic communities and cultural institutions: they value a high degree of readability, which is construed as an indication of greater equivalence to the source text. Here the readers reveal their assumption of an instrumental model—that is, an understanding of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning, or effect. The fixation can be illuminated by considering the intersubjective relations in which the preferred translation is first encountered. Cases recorded or represented in literary texts enable a more incisive account of the conditions that shape the reader's experience: John Keats's poem “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” (1816) and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin (1957). These texts disclose an identity-forming process that can be deepened with Jacques Lacan's concept of the “object a.” The instrumentalism that underpins the fixation deserves consideration because it would in effect deny or stop cultural change, innovative interpretation, the very practice of translation.

I'm gratified that the most widely circulated journal in literary studies has solicited the skill and attention of nine such erudite interlocutors, including both critics and creators, to formally respond to my book Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. It's also a bit of a surprise, albeit a pleasing one, since Why Comics? is my first single-authored book not aimed at the readership of PMLA.

This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.

This essay explores things in translation, examining what translation does to things and what happens to things in their trajectory in translation. Although translation scholars have posed useful questions about how to translate realia, I take a different approach here. When objects circulate among different groups of people, they are transformed in defiance of their material stability. The linguistic analysis of translations may allow us to observe from a unique perspective not only what kind of force things have at different times in different societies but also how the materially stable objects can actually be different things in different translation scenes. Translations of material objects offer, then, a charged locus of study, generating special, valuable knowledge about cultural contact and transfer, as well as about cross-cultural and transethnic misunderstandings. The essay focuses on three case studies from English retranslations of the landmark nineteenth-century Brazilian novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by J. M. Machado de Assis, as well as retranslations of biblical Hebrew narratives. By contextualizing particular linguistic references to clothing and artifacts, I demonstrate that translation imbues these ostensibly stable material objects with new cultural significances and valuations: language effectively remakes them.

It has already become a critical commonplace to begin a discussion of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) by invoking its powerful opening declaration:

Reviews of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) regularly cite the vietnamese-french-american protagonist's self-characterization: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” (1). A less-cited version of the same characterization appears later in the novel: “I am a lie, a keeper, a book. No! I am a fly, a creeper, a gook. No! I am—I am—I am—” (325). Nguyen's unnamed narrator, a Northern Vietnamese spy with Southern sympathies, has exploited, betrayed, and even murdered his own. If the above statements are any indication, this Cold War history of slippery allegiances takes an existential toll. But the second statement adds a layer of intrigue. With rhyme, anaphora, and considerable theatrical aplomb, it transmutes ethnic duplicity into literary figuration and casts the narrator as another murderer with a fancy prose style. Murder and style, though, are not Nguyen's only connection to Vladimir Nabokov, whom Mark McGurl takes as iconic of the “codification and intensification of modernist reflexivity in the form of … ‘metafiction’” (9). Like Lolita and much of Nabokov's other fiction, The Sympathizer and many of Nguyen's writings hold up that special mirror of “modernist reflexivity.” For Nguyen, however, the chance to wield this mirror comes with the added responsibility of being a Vietnamese American author writing about Vietnamese America. Hence, if Nabokov's iction delivered “an elaborately performative ‘I am’” that enabled his “programmatic self-establishment” (10), Nguyen's equally performative “I am” instantiates not only an authorial program but also a political program of ethnic representation.

ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE HAUNTS THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, OUR MENTAL MAPS OF SHRINKING RAINFORESTS MATCHED BY images of melting icecaps and dying polar bear cubs. As the thawing tundra releases an amplifying store of methane, the goal of Bill McKibben's 350.org, to reduce carbon in the earth's atmosphere to 350 parts per million, seems wildly optimistic.1 So, too, does much of the discourse of sustainability. How can humans depend on the biosphere's capacity to regenerate, having already destroyed entire ecosystems and caused countless extinctions and continuing to do so at an accelerating rate? Isn't it already too late? What tends to get lost in the linked discourses of climate change and sustainability is the rising seawater—salt water, the stuff that covers seventy percent of the planet's surface. If the ocean, as Christopher Connery claims, “has long functioned as Western capitalism's primary myth element” (686), then literary scholarship engaged with the discourse of sustainability should reexamine narratives of oceanic catastrophe.