Fdormer Boston Celtics player and coach Bill Russell wrote, “People in all kinds of cultures are known to ‘jump for joy’ in moments of supreme happiness. Jumping is an internationally recognized expression of joy, and basketball is a sport organized around jumping.…It's possible for a player to jump because he's happy, but it's more likely that he's happy because he's jumping. I have heard players complain about almost every detail of the game — the rules, the size or color of the ball, the shape or temperature of the dressing room — but I've never heard anybody complain about the fact that the game requires jumping.”

Scholarship about Depression-era proletarian literature has had to adapt itself to new political and social realities since 1984. With the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, literary analyses of texts written in the atmosphere of the Communist-led cultural movement may seem to lose currency; to argue for the relevancy at the close of the 20th century may seem irrelevant to postmodern aesthetics. Likewise, as Barbara Foley suggests, reading proletarian texts with their self-conscious critiques of class struggle and their formulaic and didactic plots offers little to audiences who are used to postmodern experimentation and “confessional” poetics (viii).

The short history of the Hollywood novel provides a useful index of the ways that 20th-century U.S. literature has imagined the relation of sign systems to the external reality with which they would coincide. Very early Hollywood novels like Harry Leon Wilson's Merton of the Movies (1922) found their critiques of the nascent film industry on its fictiveness and conventionality, indicting Hollywood for the falsification of reality. Literature in general and the Hollywood novel in particular would serve, by implication, to set the record straight. As modernism in its many permutations supplanted realism, however, these straightforward epistemological distinctions became increasingly blurry. Informed by the recognition of the materiality of language, modernist fiction would have a lot harder time leveling its critiques.

The wave of investigations into supposed Communist activity from the late 1940s onward by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and similar bodies depended to a large extent on the testimony of expert witnesses. These were former party members as often as not but we should bear in mind a distinction Hannah Arendt drew as early as 1953. Former Communists, she argues, have simply abandoned their commitment and withdrawn from political life whereas, for the ex-Communists,

Communism has remained the chief issue in their lives. They feel that their potential strength is much greater than their small number actually indicates because their past, on which they base present careers and ambitions, is shared by a much larger section of society. They work to persuade their former friends to join them: to make a confession, own up to a conversion, and form a solid political group.

Because flannery O'CONNOR was a Christian writer who suffered considerably from a painful and debilitating disease, died young, and left a legacy of remarkable stories and novels, critics of many persuasions have canonized her in ways few writers have been canonized. Since it is hard to argue with a saint, the vast majority of readers have capitulated to O'Connor's pronouncements on how to read those works. Several critics — myself among them — have reminded us how effectively O'Connor has set the terms of the discourse about her. Working in the modernist age, she thought herself not a modernist, but a throwback to an earlier age. Consequently, one of the more interesting, but generally ignored, questions about Flannery O'Connor is how to periodize her work. Whatever her claims, it is clear she is modernist in important ways. We see that in her use of myth, for example, and in how she uses the devices of lyrical or poetic fiction such as powerful controlling metaphors and recurrent image-motifs to knit together a form in place of traditional emplotments. In her practice, moreover, she is a modernist easily allied with New Criticism. Of O'Connor's adherence to its tenets, Frederick Crews says, “As she freely admitted, she came into her own as an artist only after undergoing a full New Critical initiation at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop under the tutelage of Paul Engle and Andrew Lytle, with Brooks and Warren's then ubiquitous Understanding Fiction providing the models” (144). Indeed, says Crews, “Even the most impressive and original of her stories adhere to the classroom formula of her day: show, don't tell; keep the narrative voice distinct from those of your characters; cultivate understatement; develop a central image or symbol to convey your theme ‘objectively’; and point everything toward one neatly sprung ironic reversal. No one ever put it all together with greater deftness” (144–45).

In gayl jones's novel Corregidora, Ursa Corregidora, the protagonist and last member of many generations of women who have suffered from a history of abusive relationships centered around the question of reproduction, rejects the written word as a corollary of a male heterosexual violence associated with slavery. Ursa, as well as her author, must then face the question of how to narrate her family's once “written” history in nonpatriarchal terms. In this sense, Jones produces what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has notably designated as the “speakerly text” in African-American tradition, in this case one “designed to represent an oral literary tradition” and to claim that tradition as female (181). Jones's text is consequently structured around a complex sexual and literary antipathy between a primarily male-gendered violence and a female-gendered orality. Throughout the text, reproductive sexuality is constructed as written, violent, patriarchal, and immutably inscribed. By contrast, Jones posits orality as an alternative to male heterosexual desire and Western writing, which are thematically (and, in the end, too univocally) characterized as abusive. The violence that had been almost incestuously handed down from the Portuguese slaver Corregidora to a succession of black men in Ursa's family is ineradicably tied to the process of reproductive sexuality and written inscription. Homosexuality, though problematized for Ursa, is nevertheless imagined as predicated on several kinds of orality, particularly oral narrative and oral sex, that might offer the possibility of nonviolent relationships and noncoercive communication; the text never fully embraces that alternative, however, leaving both Ursa and the reader caught in a kind of closed system. The orality Ursa embraces is explicitly nonreproductive in the terms of slave breeding, the condition that Ursa desperately flees but reifies, and perhaps finally transcends. This orality provides Ursa an alternative to the essentialized genital definitions of the feminine that white slavers and black husbands impose.